Microreview Tuesday?


Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing
Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney
Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2009
$5.00

Sometimes it’s fun to read a book of poems that’s been written collaboratively and wonder, line by line (or however), who’s written what.  But sometimes that can drive me a little crazy, and it’s better for me to forget all that and read like it’s any other book.  Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing, a chapbook by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney, is not any other book, and every way I read it I enjoy where it takes me.

I’m hooked before I even get past the first two lines:  “With this dead, damp leaf / I thee wed.”  A lot of the lines have question marks in them.  Here are two of those lines, followed by a parenthetical that seems like some sort of definitive answer to something--while the answer itself blows me away:

    That “making is thinking”--can it be true?

    Function perfectly married to form? (It had to be shiny, it had to be this
        gleaming blue.)

Much of the book has a playful quality to it, which I love; one of the poems is titled “13 FACTS ABOUT COCKS.”  But here’s a line I really like because it starts out being playful but ends up being playful and profound:  “The drums--in the signature time signature of her brutish suitor--insisted If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.”

“The best kind of sad” can be knowing you’re getting to the end of a book.  But at the end of this one I also feel reassured--by the writing, and by what the writing has done for me:  “All this has been yours / since the day you were born & even before.” [Erwin Ponce]


Black Ocean on tour this weekend!

11/6 Friday: Janaka Stucky & Johannes Goransson at the EARSHOT Reading Series in Brooklyn.

11/7 Saturday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at the Yes, Reading! series in Albany.

11/8 Sunday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at Paige Ackerson-Kiely's house in Vermont. Don't you wish you were invited?

11/9 Monday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at the Slope Editions Reading Series in Turner Falls, MA.

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Janaka Stucky is practicing the perfection of effort while working on silent relationships with knives, whiskey and pugilism. He is also the Publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome. Some of his poems have appeared in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. His chapbook, “Your Name Is The Only Freedom,” is available from Brave Men Press.

Johannes Göransson was born in Sweden, but has lived around the US for several years. He is the author of: Dear Ra (Starcherone, 2008), Pilot (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books, 2007)—and the chapbook Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2008). He is also the translator of: Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonsson, Gingerbread Monuments by Victor Johansson & Klara Kallstrom, Remainland: Selected Poems by Aase Berg and Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes.

 

Chris Tonelli is the author of four chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, The Trees Around, is forthcoming from Birds, LLC. Chris co-curates The So and So Series and teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison.

Scary, No Scary Halloween Sale

Good Morning Guys & Ghouls,

Black Ocean is offering a very special Halloween Sale this week! From 12:00 am on 10/30 to 11:59 pm on 11/1 any purchases of Zachary Schomburg’s limited edition hardcover Scary, No Scary from our website will receive any other book in our catalog for free. Simply specify which title you’d like in the notes during PayPal checkout and we’ll include it at no extra charge.

Each hardcover edition of Scary, No Scary comes signed and numbered by Schomburg himself, and includes a limited edition letter pressed mini-broadside from Brave Men Press. This package was created in a limited quantity of 200 and only about half of them remain.

As always, every order receives free shipping from our website. Thanks for your time and enjoy your Halloween!

 

Microreview Monday!


Put Your Head in My Lap
Claudia Smith
Future Tense Press, 2009
$5.00

Swiss artist Urs Fischer says “art works best in people’s memories” by which he means “it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall.” Fischer is talking about visual art, but, in the case of Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap, at least, the same could apply to literature. The 16 short short stories in this 41-page chapbook are compelling and immersive when you’re in the act of reading them, but they get even better when you’ve finished and moved onto recalling them.

This may be because the stories operate like memories, sharp and edgy on some points, like when the narrator of one recalls, “The air smelled of clean laundry and coffee. It smelled so good,” but also blurred and dreamy at other points and seeming altered by the process of recollection as when another protagonist says, “Four years ago, my son wore mittens with elastic at the wrists, so he wouldn’t scratch his face. He looked like a little lobster […] His eyes were a still sky on a rainy day.”

Small details make the stories feel lifelike, inhabited, and even well-documented as if they could almost be nonfiction, like when a protagonist says of a rough time in her life, “I shopped from a list. I made pretzel Jell-O. My grandmother had made it; I Googled the recipe.”  

The final paragraph of the book depicts the speaker of the last story this way: “She is remembering, holding her face up to the flakes the way she’d read about and seen in Christmas movies. It happened, it happened, she’ll say and you can’t take it back.” These stories feel, in the best sense, like they are true things, like they are things that happened. [Kathleen Rooney]

 

 

Microreview Monday!


Glory Hole/The Hot Tub
Dan Hoy & Jon Leon
Mal-o-Mar Editions, 2009
$15.00

Glory Hole/The Hot Tub, by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. The narrator of Glory Hole “heart[s] synthetics / of all kinds,” “tell[s] the sky / to suck the fat one“, and “drive[s] like an asshole because it’s the truth.” The Hot Tub is a collection of prose poems about “How we are decaying as we party hard.” Poetry has made the narrator so rich and famous “helicopters buzz above my head and paparazzi disappear among telephone poles” as he rides his bicycle in Versace pajamas, drinks, does copious amounts of drugs and has lots of sex.

Kind of ridiculous. Totally brilliant. [Justin Marks]
 

Microreview Monday


The Essential Numbers 1991 – 2008
Gordon Massman
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009
$15.00

 Gordon Massman will “die for a cause.” He is the “King of rodents roaches and duikers.” Massman is “God and me, I punch, you fucker.” Gordon is “In the penis colony,” he is a “testimony of the best pig in the sty.” Gordon Massman is a “Vulgar poet, disgusting egotist, porn purveyor, fixator / on genitals,” and his Numbers are absolutely essential. Massman’s poems burn like pure grain in the mouth and nonetheless “It is unimportant to me whether anyone reads these poems . . . I have noticed the world is full of cowards.” Read, you pithy coward—read. [Auguster P. Hideousness]

Microreview Monday!!!

Tuned Droves
Eric Baus
Octopus Books, 2009
$12.00

Eric Baus’s buzz is the kind that jars the latent sounds of life. The experience of reading Tuned Droves begins as if you’re standing a few feet from a bee hive and proceeds to curl up right inside of it, close as possible to the bees, the tiny hairs on the bees, the little lungs of the bees: “Wake up a little more, Ding. Be still, and hear a bee breathing.” [Dara Cerv]

 

 


A Million in Prizes
Justin Marks
New Issues, 2009
$15.00

Justin Marks’s A Million in Prizes communicates with us on the terms we know but cannot speak ourselves. He plucks so clearly from the life that floats perpetually in front of him. The small things are the biggest, the common the extraordinary: “The fact that....there / are no root canals expected makes me smile with all of my soul. / My love is strong and will float atop my chest forevermore.” [Dara Cerv]

More totes excellent crit on Scape!

From the review: "Even as the book focuses on the capacities of language—whether in its musicality or in its capability to represent—Harmon’s 'I' is no mere cipher. Personality shines through: Harmon’s novelistic instincts proclaim themselves through tone of voice, humor, and a tinge of insecurity. We may even find this 'I' endearing, as when the speaker proclaims that his 'is a drive-by melancholy,' or when he notes that he wants 'less a sense of space than to exert a reason for my arm’s reach.' One feels for this speaker even as we keep in mind that 'he' is, in this case, two letters—h, e—in the field of language. 'And fuck this conversation with the natural: I can’t outlast the outdoors,' the poet writes, as if to simultaneously undercut and reinforce his project. 'I’m raising a pennant for a brittle self.'”

You can read the full review by Andy Frazee at The Quarterly Conversation.

 

Scape gets a scholarly treatment

From the review: "The more time you spend with Scape, the more time you want to spend with it. It’s not the most inviting book on first approach (though Black Ocean’s design is up to its usual high standards), but it rewards re-reading. As in the New England woods, you feel lost at first, then fascinated."

You can read the full review by John Cotter at Open Letters Monthly.

 

Microreview Monday

Poemland

Chelsey Minnis

Wave Books, 2009

$14.00

 

If you agree with Aristotle when he writes in the Poetics that “the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” and that such mastery is “a sign of genius,” then you might also agree that Chelsey Minnis is a brilliant mastermind.

 

In her mirthful and melancholy fourth book Poemland, she writes, “The past should go away but it never does... / And it is like a swimming pool at the foot of the stairs...” and that “This is a poem because it squeezes you... / It is a shimmer like flushing sequins down the toilet...” and that “This is like getting hit with a folding chair / And being held by your braids...” and that’s just within the first three pages.

 

Good metaphors operate by violating logic—they assert as true things that are obviously false or impossible—but they do so in a way that ends up making perfect sense. “When I try to write a poem it seems reasonable...” Minnis writes, “But it can never be reasonable...” In this regard, Poemland operates like one big self-aware metaphor, intelligently trying and failing to say what poetry is or isn’t.

 

The book is liberal in its employment of references to the 70s, its use of exclamation points, and its descriptions of preposterously appealing outfits including a “warm vanilla satin necktie,” “a swirl of sequins around a groin,” and “a dress called ‘the flaming rosebud’.” Even as Minnis jokily undercuts her own efforts, she succeeds in making her points and making wonderful poems. Pretty and sharp, polished and wild, reading this book is “like searching the toile pattern for a milkmaid with a shotgun.” And finding her. And being well-pleased. [Kathleen Rooney]

 

SCARY, NO SCARY now available in paperback!!!

My fellow Americans, in these economic times, when it is so easy to say "scary," you should say, "no scary." Go to SPD, Amazon, or stay right here (if you are a fan of free shipping) and exercise your patriotism. You will be rewarded with new limbs, jaguars, and a parade. This is my word to you.

 

Praise for The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg:

 

“Zachary Schomburg may be one of the sincerest surrealists around.”—Publishers Weekly

 

“Delightfully bewildering. . . . the dark undercurrent that fuels this collection never extinguishes the glow of its playfulness.”—Bookslut

 

“Like Tate, Schomburg records a twisted, neighborly hope, or, like Edson, violent, dreary complications of the everyday.”—Jacket



Microreview Monday

Jambandbootleg

Paul Siegell

A-Head Publishing, 2009

$12.00

 

Like his dazzling debut Poemergency Room, Paul Siegell’s second collection jambandbootleg buzzes with exuberance so huge the book can barely contain it. From the blurb by his dad—“What a rush!” to the “(((Whooo’s got my publisher?)))” where most would put “acknowledgments” to the “SETLIST” instead of a “Table of Contents,” Siegell’s book embodies the non-stop sensory overload of a super-fun show.

 

Like the bands he idolizes—Phish, the Disco Biscuits—Siegell’s poetry has an improvisational quality, but not an optional one; there are surprises, certainly, but so too is there skillful decision-making at work; he is causing effects to happen for a reason. Or as he puts it in “SET III” “for Dionysus speaks: / Apollo descends w/ boundaries.”

 

In “Meet Me at Will Call” he writes:

 

I. Today

I was told

over the phone

that I sounded

“happy”

 

And he sounds that way over the page, too, which makes this book refreshing, a romp—a cover-to-cover experience of Dionysian excess, ecstasy, and escape. In poems that take concert-going as their well-spring, Siegell carries on the visionary tradition of Ginsberg and Blake. [Kathleen Rooney]

 

"Scary, No Scary" East Coast Tour Dates

August 15 - So and So Reading Series @ 8:00
w/ Jim Goar and Emily Kendal Frey.
8 E. Hargett Street / Raleigh, NC

August 16 - Cheryl's Gone Reading Series @ 6:00
w/ Joe Hall and Emily Kendal Frey
Big Bear Café / 1700 1st St NW / Washington, DC

August 18 - New Philadelphia Poets Reading Series @ 6:30
w/ Emily Kendal Frey
Fergie's Pub / 1214 Sansom St. / Philadelphia, PA.

August 20 - St. Marks Bookshop Reading Series @ 7:30
w/ Gary Lutz and Jim Krusoe
Solas Bar / 232 E. 9th Street / New York, NY.

August 21 - UnNameable Books @ 8:00
600 Vanderbilt Ave / Brooklyn, NY

August 22 - Stain Reading Series @ 7:00
w/ Emily Kendal Frey, Phil Memmer, Jeni Olin,
JodiAnn Stevenson, and Janaka Stucky
Goodbye Blue Monday / 1087 Braodway / Brooklyn, NY.

August 26 - Deep Moat Reading Series @ 7:00
w/ Emily Kendal Frey and Mark Leidner
Pierre Menard Gallery / 10 Arrow St. / Cambridge, MA

Only 100 Copies Left!

Dear Lovers of Life,

The limited edition hard cover of Zachary Schomburg's new "Scary, No Scary" (with the special letterpressed mini broadside from Brave Men Press) will start shipping in just a couple of weeks! There are now only 100 copies left of this extraordinary little package. Trust me: these items are beautiful and you will cherish them until you die. They will also probably be worth a lot of money someday; much more than the $30 you paid to add them to your special library.

There are only 200 of these babies that will be in existence, and half of them have already been adopted. Act now or regret it forever...and ever.

http://www.blackocean.org/scary-no-scary

Love,

Janaka

Early Morning Micros

Oneiromance

Kathleen Rooney

Switchback Books, 2008

$14

 

Kathleen Rooney's Oneiromance echoes Lincoln's sentiment of Niagra Falls -- "Never dried, never froze, never slept, never rested --" It is an epithalamion full of life and movement, enjoyable niblets -- "nunfits," "Bluestocking scholars" -- and enjoyable lines -- "We wish on a fishbone, though fish don't / have wishdones ..." "The room & his trusty sidekick the groom," "Lawn mowers / moan like the ghosts of generals./ Cicadas drone like the ghosts of American-/made cars," "Legends ionize the air," and "Rosa rugosa creeps from the pergola / to the groom's throat." [Evan Fleischer]

 

 

 

 

 

Cancer Mon Amour

Kathrin Schaeppi

Winterling Press/Dusie Chap Kollektiv, 2009

 

All gasp and tension, any moment something could happen. Something bad. To be “scaaared” - oh soscared. Cancer Mon Amour moves like its cover image says it will: “REPEAT” “STOP”. Back into treatment. Memory. Remembering Mother’s treatment. Inescapable mortality. Is there “any god in this”? These pulsing prose poems of helping a friend through illness - of “volatile amour” - are urgent in their telling. i love i love i love notarikons punctuate the chap as abbreviations of our complicated relationships with our own humanness and with each other. With much love, Schaeppi has used her words to “sew pearls onto branches.” [Cara Benson]

 

Microreview Monday...Late Night


City of Moths
Sampson Starkweather
Rope-a-Dope Press, 2008
$10.00

“This is one of those stories with a boy and a girl. Spark, chasm, spark.” Starkweather’s prose poems suggest epistolary but whom is he writing to? A girl? Us? Himself? None of the above or all of the above? So goes the machinations of Starkweather’s mind, eschewing straightforward logic, the narrative of these poems accumulate and blur, while the language vacillates between coo and rage. “In war, when enemies speak different languages it is said to make the killing easier, as for love...” Or to read City of Moths is to know everything and nothing all at once. [Steven Karl]






The Marble Palace
J. Mae Barizo
Fields Press, 2008
$10.00

“In the dream the season./ Water on the lash then further down./ We kept hinged for the most part in an uneasy/ crowd. Blue undiluted, no leaf cover.” The opening stanzas of Barizo’s second chapbook finds the poet fragmenting her finely attuned sense of lyric so she can arrange, rearrange, or derange the world one segment at a time. These poems give you the expanse of the sky and the hairline fracture of the ice. “The citizens here are like watermarks, I said./ A stain or/ leaving no trace of it./ Which are you./ Pick one.” [Steven Karl]

Microreview Monday...on Monday! Finally.

Dead Letters
Alan May
BlazeVOX, 2008
$16

Situated between abjection and negation, May’s playful minimalism explores disquieting gaps and valences in a de-centered Southern landscape, revealing various forms of poetic/cultural dementia; there’s Oedipal drama, abcedariums, a parrot named Absalom, the blank stare of aporia, whimsy as heart punch, and well, angel pee. The poems are narrative and nonsensical, but the language that remains gleefully unassimilated into larger conceptual/formal armatures glowers most insistently: "The verse consumed behemoth / as tilted the metropolis"; "By beyond deserve never mind / Me molecule Genghis Khan." Illustrations by Tom Wegrzynowski and May himself add additional doses of creepy pleasure. [Tim Earley]








Whim Man Mammon
Abraham Smith
Action Books, 2007
$12

Whim Man Mammom reveals Abraham Smith (an unearthly virtuoso of a reader) as magisterial scarecrow, addled charmer, divinator of pine and snout, anti-bowdlerizer, chirruper of harvest desire, infinitely fiddle tongued, carnal fish burglar rent with high lonesome chilblains, ravine-nerved, gasoline holy, wrought from crow caul and rakish angles, monstrous harmonica, taut and jittery in wave after wave of amens, snake-bit heaver, iridescent arsonist, stammering and coyote hopeful, Kandinsky in Wisconsin, amnesia porn flee on the leg of night, apparational folk singer in a blaze of bootlegged days, or, more simply, his is the ontology of the sacred juke. [Tim Earley]

 

 

Microreview Monday...on Tuesday. Again.


Areas of Fog
Joseph Massey
Shearsman, 2009
$16.00

Massey's first proper collection bundles work from his brilliant chapbooks with new poems. Casting a transparent eyeball on Humboldt County, California, his style vibrates with tones of Niedecker, Schuyler, and a 21st-century American Basho. Such short, haiku-esque poems can go very wrong very quickly, but Massey makes it seem easy as breathing. Not simply "nature poems," these exacting observations of the physical world -- "moonlight a bat bats / above the / shattered plum blossoms" -- fulfill Emerson's charge of having “no covenants but proximities” in a most sublime manner. [Michael Schiavo]






Land of Amnesia
Joseph Bathanti
Press 53
$12

In Land of Amnesia, Joseph Bathanti moves from Anson County dialect to biological specificity to spiritual erudition with grit and grace. The “Christ-haunted landscape" of this collection has a Catholic sensibility, seeing saints and monks among rural North Carolinians, the sacred in the profane. Bathanti’s poems are heartbreaking and profound, the language and observations nuanced and complex, as he engages with and honors the terrible and the beautiful in our everyday lives. [Debra Kaufman]