Rude Girl by John Sakkis

In Rude Girl, light “scrime[s],” a girl secretly “places a button under her tongue,” and a tide is a “pseudonym” both for not speaking (right then) and for what comes after: the start of seeing “the things [in front of]” (my brackets), which in fact “were always [in front of].”  There’s an attention too, in John Sakkis’s beautiful book, to the “frequency and occurence” with which these things happened.  Are happening. Like “years or color.”  Loved these poems.  Hope you will too.

Bhanu Kapil

A three-part song for the unaccompanied and at times accompanied voice(s): “a word of it / set to walk”. Like a sailor with sharp knives for ears and a psaltery made maybe of skateboards in his head, Sakkis travels across time, space, meaning, rule, principle, mode, listening acutely and carving away all excess: “Whenever particles spoken / into my nerves / I hear outer voices/ and Love” –He brings us to hear it too: “peeling away hunger.” Rather than write about it, all I want to do is quote this whole exquisite book whose “fatty sheets of rainbow” speak for themselves.

Susan Gevirtz

I read Rude Girl as a Herodotean geography in that it reports the ecological and psychosocial terrains of an “other country.” The “country” in Rude Girl, however, is a landscape of broken economies: burned houses, the 1990’s, worn out coins, the shadowy “M.” (money itself? a Langian villain? whatever—an “ox by no means”). The lyricism of this book is suspended on a threshold of surplus and excess–terms which cue the melancholy of its unique version of human loss and the fragility of whoever’s left to report. This book disturbs me—it disturbs my participation in the dissipating, breakable ecologies I participate in:  the woods, tunnels, streets; the “reified house” with its “barking economy.”

Brandon Brown

Sensual but sensible, the thoughtful lyrics of Rude Girl maintain, explore and suspend meaning. They don’t describe but combine — well, okay, sometimes they describe. “the house is like business/and doesn’t sing/ the air is women.” Everyday life and the sublime appear “walking hand in hand.” These poems are surreal, cerebral and celebratory. They sing and swoon. Read them and weep!

Laura Moriarty 

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Author of the chapbooks: Gary Gygax (Cy Gist Press), Rude Girl (Duration Press), The Moveable Ones (Transmission Press) and Coast (Dusie). Translated Siarita Kouka’s sequence Benthos (Silas Press). With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multimedia artist/poet Demothenes Agrafiotis, their translation of Agrafiotis’s Chinese Notebook forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse (2010) as well as Maribor from The Post-Apollo Press (2010). He works for Small Press Distribution and blogs at www.bothbothseries.blogspot.com

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