You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Art. The publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry in 1960, as well as the Vancouver and Berkeley poetry conferences, sparked a poetic renaissance. It was an era rich in exploration and innovation that articulated a new relationship between form and content. Simultaneously, American artists began working with the book as a creative medium that rivaled the European tradition of the early twentieth century. This book is the first collection of interviews with some of the pioneers working at the intersection of the artists book and experimental writing that continues to this day. Includes interviews with Keith & Rosmaie Waldrop, Tom Raworth, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Loney, Mary Laird, Jonathan Greene, Alastair Johnston, Johanna Drucker, Phil Gallo, Steve Clay, Charles Alexander, Annabel Lee, Inge Bruggeman, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis, Aaron Cohick, and Scott Pierce. Co-published with Cuneiform Press.
A lost gem of permutational conceptualism from a key figure in artist's book culture, available again Known internationally as one of Mexico's most important conceptual artists, Ulises Carrión (1941-89) played a decisive role in defining and conceptualizing the genre of the artists' book through his manifesto, "The New Art of Making Books" (1975), which he wrote soon after the 1972 publication of SONNET(S) and his move from Mexico City to Amsterdam, where he opened the legendary bookshop gallery, Other Books and So, the first space dedicated exclusively to artists' publications and an important precursor to such artists' book hubs as Printed Matter. One of Carrión's earliest "bookworks," SONNET(S) represents a landmark shift in the artist's output from poetry to artists' books. Here, Carrión takes a single poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti through 50 typographic and procedural permutations. This republication is supplemented by new essays on Carrión's bookworks by contemporary artists, writers, and scholars from Mexico, Europe and the US.
Envisioned in the form of a scrapbook, Ventrakl folds poetry, prose, biography, translation practices, and photographic imagery into an innovative collaboration with the 19th/early 20th century Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl. Like Jack Spicer's After Lorca, translation is the central mode of composition in this book, and it is also the book's central theme, which Hawkey explores in a surprising array of different genres and modes of writing. What evolves is a candid and deeply felt portrait of two authors--one at the beginning of the 20th century, the other at the beginning of the 21st century, one living and one dead--wrestling with fundamental concerns: how we read texts and images, how we are influenced and authored by other writers, and how the practice of translation--including mistranslation--is a way to ornament and enrich the space between literature and life. "Ventrakl will speak resonantly to anyone who has fallen for the work of someonelong dead and wants desperately to reach out both to it and to its creator." --Laird Hunt, Bookforum
Poetry. LOWLY is part invocation, part invitation. The poems in this debut collection consider death, rebirth, and love, while exploring the symbols that make life bearable. Here, ancient mythology and philosophy are examined through contemporary situations, brought forth by a voice that oscillates between humorous and plaintive tones--"I invent stories. Out of other stories. I can only repeat what I have heard. // A scruple is the enemy of a moment." LOWLY is a restorative work with rhythmic lines that will resonate with the reader long after the book is closed. "Alan Felsenthal's LOWLY is quietly oracular. With feeling and purpose, these poems move through precise intensities of thought to lay bare an integrated sense of a possible world. With such paradoxes and subtleties, we might call Felsenthal a new Metaphysical Poet."--Susan Howe "The poems disrupt without feeling artificial. They manage an opacity in background only, as the language is clear and careful...LOWLY is a collection of mysteries, each one more confounding and comforting than the last." --Daniel Moysaenko
Apart grew out of Taylor's memories of visiting her family in South Africa as a child and her later curiosity about her (white) mother's involvement in early anti-apartheid women's groups. Mixing narrative prose, poems, social and political theory, and found texts culled from years of visiting South African archives and libraries, Apart navigates the difficult landscapes of history, shame, privilege, and grief. "Everything begins as duality (the personal and the historical, ideas of white and ideas of black), and becomes more--even hopelessly--complex...It is not so much that everything is dual, but as Taylor eventually notes, a 'jammed hinge.' Everything remains, as the title has it, apart. In exploring the unresolvable, everything becomes a part." -Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Ploughshares
Drama. Dance. Performance Studies. East Asia Studies. Transcribed by Moe Yamamoto and translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu. Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, whose choreography required dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Though influenced by Western artists and writers the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II. In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. COSTUME EN FACE is the first publication of one of Hijikata's notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata's process of composition."
Poetry. Women's Studies. UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY builds upon impossible imagined intimacies, relishing the pleasure of slow, attentive learning. In an unfolding of rhythms, repetitions, and distended narratives it envisions a space of play and ecstatic influence, drawing characters such as Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer and Maya Deren into dialogues and visions that articulate the tension between embodiment and voice, identification and materiality. These narratives push towards a unified dispersal, a complex act of exultant feminine chaos, letting slip the boundaries between what is animal, what is describable, and what can be made to appear. "UTOPIA PIPE DREAM MEMORY is a plethora of wo...
Poetry. Ben Fama's FANTASY operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama's language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one's own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism. "How did Fama invent a tone so perfect and icy, so equal to our times?" Wayne Koestenbaum "Sometimes something gets written and it surprises you, though it feels famili...
Poetry. "So much in g-point almanac: id est (9.22-12.21) is ventured; so much here is profound. Kevin Varrone meets, dares, slips past what is assumed to be reality; language, volant, 'fails, too,' leaving us with 'what's beyond the said thing.' His poetry shivers with hairline fractures, the same as the cities he describes, with familiarities folded into oddnesses. Over and over, he moves us to spaces where we find ourselves surprised that we are so moved. 'How to put it all in,' he asks, 'the hollow earth, three cities, one sheet of paper?' But he does"--Marcella Durand. Varrone is co-founder of Beautiful Swimmer Press. He teaches at Temple University and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. This is his first full-length collection.
A bold, pioneering, "free-souled" and long-rare classic of concrete poetry, available for the first time in 50 years Originally published by Doubleday and Company in 1970, N.H. Pritchard's The Matrixwas one of a tiny handful of books of concrete poetry published in America by a major publishing house. Sadly, the book was given little support and was not promoted, and it has long been out of print. However, it remains a cherished item for fans of poetry due to its unique composition, and difficult but rewarding poetics. Forcing the reader to straddle the line between reading and viewing, the book features visual poems that predate the experiments of the Language poets, including words that are exploded into their individual letters, and columns of text that ride the edge of the page. Praised as a "FREE souled" work by Allen Ginsberg, The Matrixfeels as fresh and necessary today as when it was first published. This new facsimile edition, copublished by Primary Information and Ugly Duckling Presse, makes the book available to a new generation of readers.