Janice Lee is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), and most recently, The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), a collection of essays. She is Editor of the #RECURRENT Series, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor of Entropy, Editor at SUBLEVEL, and CEO/Founder of POTG Design. She currently lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
The most recent issue of Antennae 12 is out, and will be the journal’s last issue. Antennae has consistently been one of my favorite literary journals out there, thanks to Jesse Seldess for his fabulous editorial work. I’ve been introduced to the work of many new writers in its pages over the years and am really glad for its existence.
antennae 12 (the last issue)
January 2012
$10
Lee Gough
Andrew Zawacki
Cupola Bobber
Ray DiPalma
Kristen Gleason
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Joshua Ware
Andrew Durbin
Matha Oatis
Janice Lee & Laura Vena
Cover by
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Don’t let the cats fool you, João Guimarães Rosa is the man. The man like Mann or Proust or Melville or Faulkner or Borges or Calvino or Joyce…Only, you may have never been made aware of the fact. Don’t feel bad, you’re not alone. As a matter of fact: you’re right at home in the United States of America if you’ve never heard of João Guimarães Rosa.
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.