Sniffingly we are nearing the end of STARK WEEK, as we round the corner into the last book, Self Help Poems, with the fantastic Amy Lawless onboard to epically investigate. Don’t put your boots away yet because there is more to come, including prophecy, art talk, videos, and contests!

I have asked myself many times why actor Mickey Rourke is so appealing and attractive to me. Over time he has aged, yet he still manages to allow us, the consumers, access to another human place and plane. Sampson Starkweather doesn’t use the words “appealing” or “attractive,” but he writes on how Rourke’s “therapist told him he was in a hopeless situation, but he still had hope. All humans aspire to the condition of Mickey Rourke” (255). Here on the ninth page of Self Help Poems in The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, hope emerges, which makes sense because man is a social animal—we are each other’s only chance of salvation.

Mickey Rourke is not tricky; he is wise—body-wise. In the film The Wrestler, viewers followed him into an oblivion, a place we all go (some of us more quickly than others). Some of us are tiptoeing as slowly as possible toward death with our many fish oil supplements, mountain poses, punitive juice cleanses, hand sanitizers, Deepak Chopra books, or prayers. Some of us are in a speeding car wearing no sunscreen, driving as far away from prostate checks as possible, pumping the speedometer far right with a recklessness our mothers should never know exists. We are each Mickey Rourke jumping off the rope toward our own single finality. READ MORE >

Wolf and Pilot
by Farrah Field
Four Way Books, Oct. 2012
72 pages / $15.95  Buy from Four Way Books or Amazon

The art museum in my hometown of Knoxville has a collection of Narcissa Thorne dioramas, miniature rooms of various fashion and purpose, similar to doll houses. There is a Victorian parlor, a Spanish foyer, a frontier kitchen, all meticulously detailed and like the collection room itself, mostly devoid of people. Each illuminated box presents a stage where any number of actions can take place. The rooms rely on the many arrangements of our imagination—who sat in the armchair, who leaned on the mantelpiece—all the possible scenarios laid out and invisible like precious crime scenes. Yet despite the dramatic combinations an empty stage can offer it’s still bound by purpose: the kitchen is where you cook, the bedroom is where you sleep, and the armchair is where you left it. In the opening poem of Wolf and Pilot—not coincidently inspired by one of Thorne’s rooms—Farrah Field writes:

The poems in Field’s second collection both accept and challenge this mystery. They investigate the nature of absence, the human need to satiate a vacuum, and the gnarled process of memory and apprehension. Centered around four missing sisters, their witch-mother, their beloved teacher and the detective enlisted to find them, Wolf and Pilot is a novella-in-verse which defies its own narrative boundaries.

Echoing Pirandello’s Six Characters, the speakers in Field’s poems are inextricable from the theater of their lives. As per the demands of the story they follow a certain direction, confined to prescribed roles (“What are you supposed to do besides what you have to?”), but this doesn’t stop them from confronting—sometimes bravely, sometimes with caution—their psychological limitations (“We’ll never say this: we want to hang/a sheet from a tree and project movies”). There are moments when the characters are brimming with awareness, their ambitions and failures on display. “You think I’d know what to do,” the detective says, “because I agreed to take care of them.”

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Treatise on Elegant Living
by Honoré de Balzac, Translated by Napoleon Jeffries
Wakefield Press, March 2010
112 pp. / $12.95 Buy from Wakefield Press

Wakefield Press describes themselves, on their website, as “an independent American publisher devoted to the translation of overlooked gems and literary oddities in small, affordable, yet elegant paperback editions.” The fact that they are a publisher dedicated specifically to translated “buried” texts, so to speak, has kept them on my horizon since their launch in 2010. As the press has developed, they’ve continued to release incredibly interesting (and, as is their goal, elegant) books by many authors and writers that populate the literary landscape that I prefer to frequent. Paul Scheerbart, who I learned of as a devotée to “glass architecture” in my readings on the architecture of the fantastique, has had two books released by the press, many (often absent) key players of French literature have books on the press (Marcel Schwob, Georges Perec & Rene Daumal to name a few), and even the authors I hadn’t formerly heard of seem tailored to my taste. As such, I thought it would be a brilliantly rewarding project to review every title the press has released.

Earlier in the year I reviewed their release of Rene Daumal’s Pataphysical Essays, and my enjoyment of everything about the book (from its content to its translation to the materiality of the book itself) lead me to consider the project. I had encountered the concept of reviewing an entire press’s output before, I think initially in JA Tyler’s review of Calamari Press’s output on BigOther. While I love Calamari press, their output spans, at this point, much wider than Wakefield Press, whose number of titles seemed both manageable and limited enough that I would enjoy the entire project. I had no interest in launching into the project & losing steam half-way through, as I knew that would be disappointing both on a personal level, and also probably a disappointment to the press. With these considerations in mind, I decided to dive in.

As I am a fan of chronology, I’ve decided to approach the Press’s released chronologically. This would serve to give structure to the project, and also provide me with a path through the meta-textual elements of the press itself, as they grew from a press having only published two books (their launch), into having published 10 books at this point, with more titles on the horizon. So without further adieu, I’d like to present the launch title of Wakefield Press (while I think it was released in tangent with Pierre Louys’s The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners for Use in Educational Establishments, Treatise… is granted number “1” in the press’s subdivision of “Wakefield Handbooks”).

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