Snowflake / different streets
by Eileen Myles
Wave Books, Forthcoming April 2012
232 pages / $20  Pre-order from Wave Books

Eileen Myles’ poetry actively, consciously pursues the tangential thought. In her new dual collection of poems, Snowflake and Different Streets, the text glides into the tangent like she has no sense of return, like she’s just floating.

There is confidence behind the lack of linearity and I follow it happily because the text seems to already know that the tangential thought might just be the more exciting thought or as Eileen Myles might say, “the peach of it.”

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Perfect Lives
by Robert Ashley
Dalkey Archive Press, 2011 (Reprint)
240 pages / $13.95  Buy from Amazon, Dalkey Archive

Premiering on television in 1984 and first published in book form in 1991, Perfect Lives is several texts at once: a comic opera libretto, a novel about a temporary bank heist, a blurb-billed epic poem ranging through small town Midwestern vernacular and Eastern metaphysics, and a kind of textual final resting place for the titular performance in the form of notes, a preface, a synopsis, some notation from the score, and an edited conversation with writer, composer and director Ashley during which he explains the genesis and outcome of the project. (Ashley: “I had this practice: I’d go into a room, close the door, and start singing.”) It’s a good thing that the book is several texts, because while it’s a success as an engaging epic (experimental) poem, it would be a stretch to call it a novel and as a libretto it leaves you having missed out on the three-hour television program that it became with no idea of what it sounded like unless you’re familiar with Ashley’s work and no idea what it looked like except for a still of the production on the cover of the book and a frontispiece featuring Ashley himself playing narrator. Ultimately the loss of context doesn’t make the text suffer because as a set of eight experimental poems obliquely describing a bank heist and an elopement among more metaphysical things it wins at being an engrossing read and at capturing small town Midwestern vernacular and widescreen philosophy in very crisp but entertainingly malformed ways.

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Heavy Feather Review
Volume One, Issue One
January 2012
Buy Kindle for $3.75

Whenever Janice Lee emails me with a chance to review something for HTMLGIANT, I always respond too late. Which means I never get what I want to read to review. I was late responding to Janice’s email about reviewing Eileen Myles’ new book. I was late responding to Janice’s email about reviewing Brian Evenson’s new book, too.

Of course, I was quick enough to get Heavy Feather Review to review. At first, I resisted reading the stuff in it. I thought maybe I could write a review without reading the stuff in Heavy Feather Review. I’m glad I didn’t do that.

If you don’t already know, Heavy Feather Review (Volume 1, Issue 1—hereafter, HFR) is produced by four people: Nathan Floom, Jason Teal, Jason Carnahan, and Kyle Bialko. After reading HFR I’m not sure what the general aesthetic of the journal is. It seems like everything goes. There is a tendency towards the absurd. And moments of really wonderful writing. There are a lot of writers in HFR. Some with whom you may be familiar, some not. I wish I could say more about HFR in general but I can’t think of anything. I hear it’s available on Amazon or something. If you can’t find it there, or don’t want to pay for it, email me. I have an electronic review copy so I can give it to you for free.

There are thirty-seven writers in the first issue of Heavy Feather Review. I like that. I wish there were more.

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Ireland’s Bird Life: A World of Beauty
Edited by Matt Murphy and Susan Murphy
Text by Richard Lansdown
Images by Richard Mills
Sherkin Island Marine Station Publications, 1994
160 pages  /  Abe Books

There is a twitcher out on the seafront.

The seafront must be a few miles long altogether – stretching from the oil refinery past the power-station all the way to the saltwater lake, and then the woods. Some days the twitcher will be outside our house where the waders dabble in the mud for lugworm and shellfish. Other days he’ll be down by the saltwater lake where the wigeons and shovelers compete for stale breadcrumbs.

My boyfriend thinks there are a couple of different twitchers, but I know there’s just the one.

He is a little kingfisher of a man with long beak and speckled brow, and when he perches on the folding-stool with his face fastened into a pair of binoculars, his elbows jut out at each side like a stubby wingspan. Although it’s hard to tell through all his cold weather clothes-wear, I guess he is about seventy.

I am certainly interested in nature but it’s other people that interest me the most.

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In Defense of Monsters
by BJ Hollars
Origami Zoo Press
52 pages / $8  Buy from Origami Zoo Press

Most people have little room for magic or legend in their lives. Folks spend most of their formative years cultivating a certain amount of cynicism towards legend and work incessantly towards creating a sense of control over themselves and the world at large. To be human is to conquer – whether physically or mentally.

We keep doing our work, spend inordinate amounts of time “surfing” the web (surfing itself invoking an image of an uncontrollable wave, that of information, tamed by man) and we watch television where we have 24-hour news coverage and programs that reflect our tastes. (Although it can be argued the practice of watching television is, in its own way, an acceptance of a mythology in itself. The very idea of personal choice in the current media system is false. A great infographic from designers Frugal Dad suggests, at the very least, we should reconsider what we’re watching as personal choice.)

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Lucid Membrane
by Tantra Bensko
Night Publishing, 2011
180 pages / $24.99  Buy from Amazon

The Cabinet of What You Don’t See
by Tantra Bensko
ISMs Press, 2011
40 pages  / $5.00  Buy from ISMs Press

“Awake from dream, the truth is known: —awake from waking, the Truth is—The Unknown.” – Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

In the delicate balance of dream and reality lies the annihilation of illusion. Tantra Bensko’s sensual unveiling relates to the intelligence of crystals. She is adept at the unknown: dreams, twilight language where thought relates to the imaginal, emblematic of the seer’s paranoid awareness and lucid view. The lucid aesthetic is kaleidoscopic and freewheeling in its engagement with metaphysical realities that extend far beyond the realm of fiction and delve into the heart of energy, and the imagination itself. Cosmic and personal, the molecular weight of the hermetic text manifests itself through capricious and fanciful dreams through Bensko’s steady and remarkable vision. These stories are inextricably tied to alternate dimensions and mental travel, skirting at the edges of the astral plane, and Bensko desires the astral form here—in life, so that great fruits may come. Bensko writes, “I wish the people I’m living with, on my own invisible frequency, could understand that I am weaving myself through their cells, through their dreams, their breath, their love.” It is with sweetness and an alien lucidity that these stories exist. Like the labyrinthine explorations of Borges—echoes from the invisible drift into the unaware oceans with mysterious interpretations of shape and tone, stained with colored language. In Bensko’s stories ethereal waves skim over the astral surface between the world’s heart and all that bleeds. Emanations of some imperceptible astral dust covers all things, in the shimmering shadows of formless force – giving it shape, with lucidity and spirit. Like shadows – like a mirror – space, sound and color interact and create a dynamic that denies any nostalgia for conventional structures through a manifestation of the unseen.

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If I Falter at the Gallows
by Edward Mullany
Publishing Genius Press, October 2011
84 pages / $10  Buy from Publishing Genius

Once on Facebook a friend shared the shortest horror story in the world. Just like Facebook, this story involves the awkwardness of when too many people exist in your situation. Maybe let’s say “involves” in the same way somebody says “Hey, Ed, get over here, what do you think?” And Ed tries to say “No, no, I don’t want to get involved.” In any event, the shortest horror story in the world, supposedly, was written by Frederic Brown: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” Note there’s no “then” before “there.” The world is basically the intrusion of the world. This presents the endless and (sure) terrifying awkwardness of simultaneity, which causes me to say I actually think Ed should get involved, if we’re talking terror, and by Ed we’re talking Edward Mullany, author of If I Falter at the Gallows, a book of barely unchoked poems, arrangements of scene and confession that scalpel the world like a goth kid who grew up to be a jeweler.

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The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
by Shannon Cain
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
160 pages / $24.95  Buy from Amazon

Stories in Shannon Cain’s The Necessity of Certain Behaviors pair exhibitionist events and their three-ring tableaus with characters who typify “marginal,” yet who nonetheless surprisingly assert not only their outsider status, often in correlation with their sexualities, but also their complexities—a young lesbian ventures to the set of The Price is Right to meet her father, Bob Barker, only to find not parental but sexual identities challenged; a mayor’s wife endures the scandalizing of her sexuality after she is caught masturbating in the YMCA’s shower room, only to find that her new relegation to sexual deviant has allowed her singular insight into victims of the myriad sexual minefields in her community—the cumulative effect of these stories also achieves a reversal: common notions of taboo or freakishness gain warmth and humanity, while the normative culture unveils its crippling deformities. Cultural critique couldn’t have a more compelling and sophisticated face. In an era often favoring equivocation as a substitute for vision, this collection is clear: take a stand, make it compassionate. Others agree, of interest to note: American Literary Review, American Short Fiction, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, Southwards, Tin House, The O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

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Invitation to a Voyage
by François Emmanuel
Translated by Justin Vicari
Dalkey Archive Press, 2012
112 pages  /  $12.95    Buy from Dalkey Archive, Amazon

Sometimes, writing is so baldly pretentious and pointedly wackadoo that readers assume, without really feeling much of anything, that it must be ‘experimental’ or ‘poetic.’ This implies that the author—that brave, eccentric fellow!—is ‘more alive’ than the rest of us, more attuned to some numinous kernel of ecstasy and desire. The rest of us, meanwhile, are consigned to wallow in the general generic muck.

Such is the wager of François Emmanuel’s Invitation to a Voyage, a short collection just out from the wonderful folks at Dalkey Archive: that the reader, confronted with the interior monologs, the surrealist quirks and all the other one-time experiments of modern lit, will fault themselves for not quite ‘getting it.’

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IQ84
by Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 2011.
944 pages / $30.50  Buy from Amazon

One

Please do not read this or any other review if you intend to read IQ84. A Murakami novel is best read without knowledge of its plot.

Few books are about life itself.

Part of the reason we live is to see what happens next. Will we go to college? Go on a road trip? Whom will we marry? When? Will we have children? Will we move? Will we get that job? Meet eyes with a girl who reminds us of someone we once knew? What will we have for dinner?

IQ84 is alive with its own life. Start from the beginning and see what happens next. The less you know, the more fun the discovery will be. All you need to know is this:
The book takes place in Tokyo. There are two main characters, Tengo and Aomame. You must bring to this book your own preconceptions about everything—God, existence, love, morality—not mine or anyone else’s. Your reading will be your own.

Your wrists may hurt as you read—the novel is almost 1000 pages. It’s a heavy tome because it’s a whole universe. The pain in your wrists will be worth the wormhole.

Now get out of here.

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Rumble Seat
by Jeffrey Hecker
San Francisco Bay Press, 2011
78 pages / $14.99  Buy from Amazon or San Francisco Bay Press

“If I die during a crossword puzzle, I am allowed to finish.” So nearly concludes Rumble Seat, a Cretan-cum-Cracker Jack maze of delights presided over by the shade (elms over David Lynchian suburbia, not ghost) of Frank O’Hara. What happens when boy-next-door niceness merges with a rapier wit? You can’t ask David Foster Wallace anymore, but Jeffrey Hecker’s debut volume is a thoroughly selcouth exploration into the question.  It’s a world where down-to-the-last-dime travelers can choose between “Basilica donation or acetaminophen, but largesse and simony lose by a Samson pubic strand”; where toothless soothsayers skulk around local churches, warning children that “dying during worship causes souls to suck through aperture.”  We may be any number of places with Hecker: at a beef recall (as opposed to a southern-style pig pickin); with a transmogrified Sally Field with her “hair departed in buffalo tufts/intentions and glands in the wrong places/pituitaries topped off by kidneys”, bloodshot eyes leading the children of lost Roanoke colonists astray…but mostly at home, where strangeness, like charity, begins.
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Mouth: Eats Color
Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals
by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa
Factorial Press, 2011
90 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon

Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color is enthusiastic. It’s enthusiastic about the plural nature of meaning, about disavowing loyalty to any single language, about the act of translation as a kind of breakage. Her own poetry which often has the quality of being exuberant but measured, folds into this new book of translations as if she is having a conversation with not only Chika Sagawa but the work itself as a separately conscious entity. Or perhaps more accurately the book is in the act of collapsing several conversations, continually re-engaging the same subject on various planes.

The collection tests the flexibility of language and Sawako Nakayasu isn’t particularly gentle about it. But being gentle is for writing tributes and Mouth: Eats Color is more of an elongation, a circular extension of the text.  And while she’s very polite, there’s muscle behind the way she translates, assembles, dissembles, resembles. “Promenade,” a poem repeatedly translated in Mouth: Eats Color changes its first line from “Seasons change their gloves” to “Season bag” to “Seasonal gloves” to “Seasons change their gloves,” every variation slipping easily into the next until they stop reading like re-translations of the same poem so much as chorus.  The flow between her poems and Chika Sagawa’s poems offers up questions of where translation ends and collaboration begins, or if the act of translation is even possible—posits that even if content were able to sync perfectly between two completely different languages it might not survive the desire to insert authorial perspective. The collection asks that the reader consider the point when a translation deviates from the original just enough to become an entirely new work and offers up no answers except to say that the authenticity of a poem never mattered in the first place.

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Mercury
by Ariana Reines
Fence Books, 2011
128 pages  / $16.95  Buy From Fence

Three falls ago, I was in one of my first legit poetry workshops (that particular workshop during which I realized that poetry was going to be one of those things that would be part of my life for forever, like Lyme Disease or an eating disorder) and I was freaking out about being a girl and wanting to write a particular kind of poem and feeling that I wasn’t allowed to do so. My professor, who was/is this very wise man, a carpenter as well as a poet and probably a prophet of some kind, told me I might be interested in reading Ariana Reines. Since I was at the time a very eager and diligent student I went to my room and read every one of her poems I could find online, and as it was right before Christmas I sent my mom the following e-mail that night:

Because my mother has always bought me any book I have asked for without question, I did get these books for Christmas and I spent all of winter break that year reading them and re-reading them. Since then, because of a lot of happy cosmic circumstances, I’ve had the chance to read her work in graduate classes, write about it, see Ariana read it, and talk to her about it. What follows is a rendition of Facebook messages and e-mails between Ariana and me about her new book, Mercury, which was just released by Fence Books and can be purchased here.

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Stranger In Town
by Cedar Sigo
City Lights Books, 2010
100 pages / $13.95  Buy from City Lights

“One must keep holy the edges of fragments.” That line appears twice in Cedar Sigo’s second collection of poems, Stranger in Town, and brings to my mind the kabbalistic notion of the shattered vessels. In the beginning, according to Kabbalah, was a divine light so potent that it shattered the vessels in which it was contained, scattering sparks and shards throughout all of creation. Mankind was charged with the task of recovering the fragments and restoring the vessels.

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We Are Pharaoh
by Robert Fernandez
Canarium Books, 2011
136 pages / $14  Buy from SPD

We Are Pharaoh is Robert Fernandez’s first collection of poems, published in 2011 with Canarium Books. In this collection, we find ourselves located in a lush and tropical landscape; however, this landscape becomes quickly complicated by a fragmented lyric that ensnares all that crosses its path. While Fernandez’s poems are entangled in broad themes such as the lyric, human history, art, and the Sublime, the poems of this collection are primarily concerned with the cyclical and conflicted nature of upheaval. Although it seems impossible for one collection of poems to effectively reconcile so many disparate and limitless themes, Fernandez succeeds in creating a sense of cohesion. There is an inexplicable awe and certain joy that radiates from We Are Pharaoh as Fernandez tasks us with the challenge of tracing and teasing apart his root-like lyric—“A tangling of fruits and vases” where “the shade is verboten.” In this act of tracing, and “if [we] were to succeed,” we may discover what truths may lie “in blinding sunlight” above the foundation of this collection (84).

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