Deformation Zone: On Translation is the latest installment in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, which is edited by Anna Moschovakis, and which has already distinguished itself as one of the more adventuresome and aesthetically exciting projects in American publishing. (Other titles in the series include Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl, Jon Cotner’s and Andy Fitch’s Ten Walks/Two Talks, and Laura Nash’s Brownfields.)

Deformation Zone might also be considered the latest installment in the intertwined multi-platform and multi-genre project that the careers of Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson have become. Both writers seem to have long ago eschewed any of the preexisting boxes into which literary artists typically confine themselves. Their work routinely crosses the borders that perhaps artificially have separated the practice of poetry, fiction, the personal essay, the scholarly essay, the Internet post, the stage play, the translation READ MORE >

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I am drowning in books. I  want these books to be read. If you are interested in any of these titles, I will send them to you (one per person). If you write a review of the book, I will publish it on the PANK blog. Some of these have been lightly used but the pages aren’t sticky or anything. If you want a book, claim it in the comments AND e-mail me your mailing address (roxane at htmlgiant.com) and I will get it out to you sometime this week. Seriously, though, email me your address. I can’t track you down.  Enjoy! (These books can only be shipped within the United States unless you want to pay for shipping. Sorry!)

ALL GONE. MORE SOON.

Cream of Kohlrabi by Floyd Skloot

Nothing Can Make Me Do This by David Huddle

The Postmortal by Drew Magary

Umberto Umberto Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto by Gianni Rodari

LA Is the Capital of Kansas by Richard Meltzer

Luminarium by Alex Shakar

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other by Stephanie Johnson

Traffic With Macbeth by Larissa Szporluk

Mama’s Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan

The Best Of (What’s Left of Heaven) by Mairéad Byrne

She’d Waited Millennia by Lizzie Hutton

A Man of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed by JA Tyler

The Hieroglyphics by Michael Stewart

The Nostalgia Echo by Mickey Hess

The Harbor by Ernest Poole

The Girl With the Crooked Nose by Ted Botha

Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner

Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Pocket Kings by Ted Heller

Dead Man Upright by Derek Raymond

The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

Until the Next Time by Kevin Fox

Dogma by Lars Iyer (2)

Radio Iris by Anne Marie Kinney

Red Weather by Pauls Toutonghi

Livability by Jon Raymond

Walking With the Comrades by Arundhati Roy

God’s Hotel by Victoria Sweet

Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw

The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker

A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost

Consider this provocative statement from a recent post over at Montevidayo entitled “The Inhuman Art of Dying vs. Poetry’s Grief Police” by Lucas de Lima, “…by writing, we lose control of our narratives, and inevitably end up thwarting not just our intentions for a poem, but also the way we conceive of ourselves and our bodies as bounded, autonomous entities shaped through free will.”

…by writing, we lose control…

Like Brownian Motion: the presumably random drift of particles, which is, of course, among the simplest of the probabilistic processes, and thus serves as a limit of both simpler and more complicated stochastic processes, writing being one we might never have thought to correlate.

Which is to say, what may begin determined becomes random. A transformation. Or, perhaps, determination and control are always an illusion anyway…?

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Dark Matter is a publication made up of poems and songs from other places on the internet.

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You missed the live reading. Excerpts were spoken from:

Partyknife by Dan Magers
The No Hellos Diet by Sam Pink
Meat Heart by Melissa Broder
Skin Horse by Olivia Cronk
A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon by CAConrad
Crunk Juice by Steve Roggenbuck
Autoportrait by Edouard Leve
Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen
Percussion Grenade by Joyelle McSweeney
The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese
Sister Stop Breathing by Chiara Barzini
Transfer Fat by Aase Berg

1) On August 17, 1991, in CMT studios in Culver City, California, Kurt Cobain was, or at least affectedly, seen deep in the throes of executing a dissonant power chord. The video was lit as a Caravaggio painting, the dirty yellow umbers of indoor light shutting off the blue sky. A spotlight reflecting off the drum kit acts as fire, the incipient spark of a generation. The casting call summoned extras aged 18 – 25 years old dressed in “high-school persona i.e., preppy, punk, nerd, jock…,” the abbreviated, yet sadly accurate, ethos of our youth. The basketball hoop, perennial throughout the entire video, seemed both detached and stately as a crucifix. It represented the high school stadium, that place of mutual assembly, of cheerleaders and meanness, the constellation of gum hidden under bleachers. If the reader will bear with me, he and she will accept that everyone who entered CMT studios that day a little before 11:30 am was — besides one-or-two effectively null Asians (in our forthcoming yet apparent context) — white, which is less of a problem than a benign concession to the binary of race. It was simply time for white kids to freak out, and that’s okay. I’m glad I was there. 2) In 1994, following the controversial publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which linked race to inherent qualities or even dispositions, a tenured anthropologist at U.C. Berkeley offered Michael Jordan as an example of a black person’s inherent talent, perhaps even genius, in physical ability — in this case jumping with inhuman ability — whose allusions to intellectual deficiency were sad yet subliminal. The book was quickly both dismissed and heralded by the suspecting parties. What concerns me here, though, is not race and a fractured America, of white and black boys and their respective thwarted fates proposed by dreams, but the delusional colorless hope shared by both: to see a pedestrian God so close yet so far from the net, frozen in the grace of their flourish, arms doing perfectly what needed to be done for their followers. The heavy wane of disappearing youth as a chord which drones for a long time afterwards, decades even. Two points stuffed by a weightless man, a marbled pose chiseled by spectacle, a stadium of held breath, high past a line from which others could only dare throw.

When I was a kid, my mother assigned homework to my brothers and I in addition to any homework we may have been assigned in school. My mother’s homework was generally more of a priority. Some of her assignments came from Little Professor workbooks but most of her assignments came from the Encyclopedia Britannica, which she made us read, a lot. I have, in my lifetime, read the entire compendium. I know things.

My mother would give us a page range and we’d read and write little reports on what we learned. Other times we had to do assignments that reflected critical thinking—comparing and contrasting different topics, creating new entries or using existing entries as the starting point for a story or article of some kind. At times, I did not understand why we were being forced to read that stupid thing, but I know now—my mother wanted, in her way, for us to understand that knowledge is important, that knowledge is a tool for better thinking.

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