BLACK OCEAN | WELCOME TO OUR FLOATING PALACE
We hope you've been following along with Black Ocean's Song of the Week residency on Coldfront. This week Rauan Klassnik (The Moon's Jaw, Holy Land) talks about "The Teacher" by Big Country, and catch up on past weeks with Joe Hall (The Devotional Poems, Pigafetta Is My Wife), Zach Savich (forthcoming!), Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Swamp Isthmus), and Joshua Harmon (Scape).
Stay tuned to the blog/Facebook/Twitter for future posts!
Two poems from The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert (Black Ocean, forthcoming 2013) are featured on They Will Sew the Blue Sail. Get a taste of what's to come here!
We are thrilled to announce that Fjords Vol. 1 by Zachary Schomburg (Black Ocean 2012) has been slected for the 2013 Oregon Book Award: Stafford Hall Award for Poetry. View the full list of winners HERE!
In selecting Fjords Vol. 1, Judge Mary Jo Bang remarked:
Perhaps it’s the odd deadpan-earnest tone the speaker uses to address those large lyric subjects—love, death, and the changing of seasons (which is, yes, simply death by another name)—that makes these small prose poems so distinctive, and so convincing. Who would say “From the very beginning, I knew exactly what would kill me” if he or she didn’t mean for such a statement, which openly flaunts its implausibility, to speak figuratively about something much larger than itself. Each of these poems is more than the language with which it’s been constructed. Each is a seedling that is meant to become a full-fledged allegory not on the page, but in the reader’s imagination. Schomburg intuitively knows exactly how much, and how little, it takes to conjure a sense of the ever-puzzling world. He leaves it to the reader to make use of the material he provides. I for one delight in that freedom.
Haven't read Fjords Vol. 1 yet? Visit the catalog page here.
Both this and next week's micro reviews are more micro than usual, and extra special. Janaka and Minetta each read close to thirty books in thirty days as part of the National Poetry Month festivities. This week, Minetta shares her top three reads and a line about each.
Emmanuel Hocquard The Invention of Glass
If you ever have any desire to understand the poetic tradition post Romanticism then you know a thing or two about reflection and know a thing or two about self-reflection in the poem and know a thing or two about how mind blowing the mirror (here glass and its invention) can be to your poet heart. This translation is important and should not be missed.
Ben Lerner Mean Free Path
Mean Free Path is smarter than me and my own walk-a-bouts. This doesn't mean I wouldn't fire walk with it if it proposed we do.
Lily Ladewig The Silhouettes
This books offers silhouettes of brevity brought to the windy paths of the New York style observation: everything I adore about honesty buckled up, gagged, and given mere moments breath.
—A Minetta Gould
Check back tomorrow for something of a slightly different flavor from Brandon Shimoda.
This time of year, whether you're writing a letter to Santa, sending (or receiving) one of those catch-all family newsletters, or mailing out holiday cards, one thing is clear--'tis the season for letters. Perhaps you'd like to catch up on a little bookish correspondence, and in that case, let this book recommended by our poetry editor Carrie Olivia Adams be your guide.
Though not a poetry book per se, this collection of love letters between Bachmann and Celan is as intense, beautiful, and lyrical as any of the poems that either Bachmann or Celan produced. The letters themselves incorporate some of their poems and many thoughts on their work, which makes this book both a wonderful source of insight into their writings as well as a fraught and powerful look at love in a Europe repairing and healing from World War II and the holocaust.
A. Minetta Gould shared a trio of books with you earlier this month, so today we're giving you a peek at what you can look forward to from Ms. Gould in the new year. Over on Publishing Genius, AMG's got a chapbook forthcoming called Arousing Notoriety and something so awesome at Spooky Girlfriend Press it defies description.
We've posted quite a few chapbooks lately with plans to share some more. What are your favorite chapbooks?
Some days you just want to read a chapbook. Lucky for you, Brandon Shimoda, whose book The Girl Without Arms is forthcoming from Black Ocean, has just the chapbook you need: Phil Cordelli's Book of Numbers Book of Letters (Agnes Fox Press).
Years from now ... after poetry has quit the world of money and influence ... after art has dispensed entirely with any cares for the mainstream (consumers, commuters, homeowners, husbands, voters, committee members, academics, etc.) ... after 99% of what we have come to accept as good and important has rotted out of the atmosphere ... people will begin unearthing the relics of the life and work of Phil Cordelli -- a poet, artist and farmer, born in the twentieth century, active across the first half of the twenty-first, and currently living in western Massachusetts. Among the innumerable home recordings, painted films, letterpressed pieces of garbage, book-length collages, scarified vinyl, copyright violations and field guides that form Cordelli's art, will be Book of Numbers / Book of Letters, published in 2010 by Agnes Fox. It might be the notes of a filmmaker, or the films of a scavenging note-taker. It might be the pin-hole paintings of a shut-in, or text installations assembled by an entire community. It might be the liner notes of a clairvoyant country musician, or the transcripts of an early morning conversation between a lone individual and his generously overwhelming environment. Undoubtedly it will continue to be all of these things. Numbers / Letters is a humble part of what I take to be a growing and indispensable compost and, after all, the "years from now" aforementioned are these ...
You can begin the excavation now just by clicking the link above.
Today Zachary Schomburg puts on the man suit to deliver his recommendation: Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey (Ugly Duckling Presse).
Reading this book is like smearing dead leaves onto my wet face so that it makes a paste, like a pastey mask before bedtime. It confuses me. I mean, I'm perplexed, stunned. I mean, all the words seem impossible. Remember what David Cameron did to Baudelaire? Christian Hawkey is one of our most fascinating poets, heaving George Trakl's dead body up into the dead trees.
If you haven't, be sure to check out Zachary's books Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit, both available on Black Ocean's website.
Rauan Klassnik knows what's holy. Which is why you should believe him when he says to buy Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press). And if you don't believe him, believe Joe Hall because he recommends it too.
Rauan says:
This book made me and my writing feel like Klingons. It's beautiful. Exciting. And it made me ashamed.
Don't shame yourself. Check it out! Let Joe Hall destroy any lasting doubts you might have:
Partly because Dorothea Lasky's Black Life is already starting to reach some kind of shout out tipping point and partly because it deserves your attention just as much, I'm going with The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. In the rowdy, field of book length proems(?) / genreless expulsions / whatever, it's a stand-out, a thing of its own. Linked prose--propose a narrative and revise it twice, evoking and jarring sympathy--swinging between pure joy of language invention and staggering sadness--
"What will we do? she asked, burping a miracle with her soggy hands."
& unflinching, visceral in its investigation into dynamics of relationships, how one exerts force on, revises, mutilates, remakes etc, others self-conceptions, body, self-composure, chronology, etc. in the laboratory of the house and stage of public.
I read it in a day.
Rauan is the author of Holy Land which you can find here on our website. Joe Hall is the author of Pigafetta Is My Wife, also available on our website or sneaking up on the tails of wayward tabby cats.
This love doesn't stop--the words of these two Black Ocean baddies will last us through the weekend, but check back Monday if you care at all what Zachary Schomburg has to offer us (and I know you do).
A. Minetta Gould's second recommendation for all of you in cyberland is Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat and Other Poems (Fence).
Check in tomorrow for AMG's final holiday pick.Kunin's Sore Throat straight up changed my life and I haven't gone a day since reading it without thinking about what he's doing and how mind-blowing it is. These poems are the fucking werido walking around your neighborhood you know you want to be friends with.
Corless-Smith is the what's what of Poets (that's right, capital P on that Poet) working in English today. If you think you can write poems before experiencing Corless-Smith's thriving lyric first you're wrong: you can't. You may not be able to afterward either. Be warned.
