Left Having
by Jesse Seldess
Kenning Editions, 2011
112 pages / $14.95  Buy from Kenning Editions or SPD Books

Jesse Seldess’s work asks for time. It doesn’t demand time, it just gently requests it. A space to sit with it, a time to read it aloud, to perform it yourself in your own voice and body.

In his two books—Who Opens and Left Having (both from Kenning Editions)—Seldess writes short echoing, transmogrifying lines, separated often by large spaces on the page. The poetry is formed out of these minimal bits and their steady repetition: lines that subtly alter as they repeat in various forms over the course of the pages.

Previous to seeing his books, I’d heard Seldess reading his poetry in a recording on Pennsound. I was blown away by the slowness, the paused rhythm, the continual stops. It felt daring to stand up and read in this glacial way, and yet his voice was so unassuming about his slowness. At the end of one reading, he says, “Thanks for your patience.” It’s an endearing experimentalism, an quietly apologetic foray into a different kind of poem. I like the playful timidity of his work, his awareness of the space it takes up in the world. An antithesis of (and antidote to) avant-garde bravado.

In all of Seldess’s work is an attention to the spaces between: “Incompletely binding // Little things / With.” This hanging preposition signals the silence that often serves as a super-structure for his work. In his readings, Seldess carefully matches the length of his silences to the size of the spaces between lines and stanzas on the page.

This very concrete relationship between page and performance appears to be one of Seldess’s central concerns: from 2000 until 2012, Seldess published antennae, a journal of experimental writing and language-based music and performance scores. (Issues 1-7 are available as free pdf downloads. Issues 9-12 are available for purchase. Issue 8 seems to be in limbo.) When work is so intensely aural, the page begins to function as a score for performance.

In one of his readings on Pennsound, Seldess says of his first book, Who Opens: “all the pieces in the mansucript in some way are concerned with the issues and dynamics of formation, sort of an awe, wonder, and appreciation of it, and at the same time a fear and skepticism of it, ranging through that spectrum.” I felt this powerfully in both of the books: an attention to how words build or fail to build, to how the mind is able or unable to form something out of words.

Some of the poems in Seldess’s first book emerged out of his work in social services with the elderly, specifically with those affected by dementia and Alzheimers. This awareness of the mind and its failures is powerfully present: all the time thinking about contact: “To be close // Near that mouth / From here instance.”

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It’s No Good: poems / essays / actions

Kirill Medvedev was born in Moscow in 1975.  In addition to writing, he has translated, written critical essays on contemporary Russian literature and politics and their “bloody crossroads”, run his own bare bone publishing house, and organized opposition against Putin.

His first book of poems, Vse Plokho (Everything’s Bad or It’s No Good) appeared in 2000; his second book Vtorzhenie (Incursion) combined poetry and essays on subjects ranging from 9/11 to the vocabulary of pornography.  Soon, thereafter, fed up with Moscow’s intellectuals acquiescence with Putin’s stabilization (or, as he might say, pacification), he went into “internal exile”—renouncing all contacts with literary life, whether publishing, readings, or roundtables or even claiming copyright for his writings.  While continuing to post his poems and essays on his website and Facebook page, he has channeled his considerable energy into publishing (mainly canonical leftist criticisms of capitalism, well known in the West but not in Russia), political activity as part of the small socialist movement Forwards (Vpered) and taking to the streets to challenge Putin’s regime together with a few supporters holding handmade signs.

In It’s No Good, Keith Gessen brings together a representative sample of Medvedev’s diverse ouvre. Selections of poems from his two collections and later works as well as of his essays are preceded by Gessen’s extensive introduction to Medvedev, the poet and, equally importantly, Medvedev the critic of literature, the literary establishment, and Russia’s stunted politics.  We learn how Gessen discovered Medvedev’s poetry and political writing and how it downed on him that Medvedev had very important things to say to him and to his New York friends who were trying to confront the inequities of capitalism in their own backyard.  The collection, an obvious labor of love, works effectively at many levels and will surely widen the circle of Medvedev’s admirers in this country.  Would it be wishful thinking that it will also, as if by ricochet, do it for Medvedev in Russia?

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My Pet Serial Killer
by Michael Seidlinger
Enigmatic Ink, 2013
316 pages / $13.99 buy from Amazon
Rating: 8.8

My Pet Serial Killer is an honest look at relationships. Yes it may be surprising that it took a main character that disembowels unsuspecting women to explore the power dynamic that exists between any two people in a relationship. That’s just how Seidlinger operates. Seidlinger is the sickest of the fucks. Few can compare. What’s doubly refreshing, though, is exactly what is left in and out of the book. Occasional gory details make their way through the passages (how a person tastes like cinnamon, etc.) but the main focus is the relationship between the killer (Victor) and the observer (Claire). READ MORE >