break it down book-release-party-style for three fantastic poet-editors

Brenda Iijima, Mark Lamoureux & Morgan Lucas Schuldt

Saturday, December 15th, 8 PM
Unnameable Books
456 Bergen Street, Brooklyn

Morgan Lucas Schuldt
author of
Verge Free Verse Editions (2007)
& editor of
Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry

Brenda Iijima
author of
Animate, Inanimate Aims Litmus Press (2007)
& editor of
Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs

Mark Lamoureux
author of
Astrometry Organon Spuyten Duyvil (forthcoming)
& editor of
Cy Gist Press

Hosted by The Burning Chair Readings & Cannibal Books.
BYOB. We will bring some, too.

Friday, November 30th ~ Maureen Alsop & Jean Valentine ~ NYC

The Burning Chair Readings
can’t believe it’s

Maureen Alsop & Jean Valentine

Friday, November 30th, 8PM
Jimmy’s No.43 Stage
43 East 7th Street
Between 2nd& 3rd
New York City

Maureen Alsop’s recent poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including: Barrow Street, Typo, Margie, Columbia : A Journal of Literature and Art and Texas Review. Her poetry was three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the 2006 recipient of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Eleventh Muse 2006 poetry prize. Her first full collection of poetry Apparition Wren is available through Main Street Rag. ~ Two poems in Typo 10.

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Author of eight additional books, Valentine has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence College, NYU, and the 92nd St. Y, among other places. ~ Jean Valentine.com featuring audio recordings of poems from Door in the Mountain.

typomag.com/burningchair
jimmysno43.com

Pushcart Nominations

Maureen Alsop
“Looking at John Rabboné’s Painting: ‘Notes from the Blue Terrace’ Circa 1927”

Andrea Baker
“Proposal” [“Each/point was almost a center”]

Lily Brown
“To a Tree”

Marvyn Petrucci
“Monk at Lennie’s”

Brandon Shimoda
from O Bon

Tony Tost
for Elephant and Obelisk

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Lily Brown & Elizabeth Robinson

Friday, November 16th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street

Paige Ackerson-Kiely was born in October of 1975 at the behest of her parents in Biddeford, Maine. Her first book, In No One's Land won the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She currently resides in Vermont, where she is employed selling wine, and is at work on a second manuscript of poems entitled My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer, and a novel about infanticide.

Lily Brown holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College and currently lives in San Francisco. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Typo, Octopus, Fence, Cannibal, Tarpaulin Sky, Handsome and Coconut. Octopus Books published her chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, in early 2007.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press) and Apostrophe (Apogee Press). The Orphan and its Relations is forthcoming from Fence Books in 2008. Robinson co-edits EtherDome Press and Instance Books and lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Unnameable Cannibal Kitchen

Kitchen Press & Cannibal Books
invite you to eat from the chopping block
w/

Erin Elizabeth Burke Run Down the Emphasis (Kitchen)
Thibault Raoult I’ll Say I’m Only Visiting (Cannibal)
Mathias Svalina Why I Am White (Kitchen)

Friday, November 2nd, 8 PM
Unnameable Books
456 Bergen Street
btwn. 5th & Flatbush

Refreshments served, but you may also BYOB.
Kitchen Press and Cannibal Books products will be available for consumption.
Unnameable Books carries an excellent selection of poetry from independent presses.
This event is free for all.

unnameablebooks.net
kitchenpresschapbooks.blogspot.com
flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com

Fri 10/12 w/ Joseph Bradshaw & Ken Rumble @ The Fall Café

The Burning Chair Readings
believe that anything is possible w/

Joseph Bradshaw & Ken Rumble

Friday, October 12th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street

Joseph Bradshaw was born in Caldwell, Idaho, and grew up up and down the west coast. From 2002 to 2006 he co-edited FO(A)RM Magazine and co-curated the Spare Room reading series in Portland. A chapbook, The Way Birds Become, was recently published by Weather Press. His poetry and reviews can be found in current or forthcoming issues of Cannibal, Cultural Society, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Mirage #4 / Period(ical), and elsewhere. He currently lives in Iowa City, that hotbed of literary puke.

Ken Rumble is the author of Key Bridge (Carolina Wren Press, 2007) and marketing director of the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. He is currently working on a book with his father about the earth's atmosphere & Antarctica. His poems have been published in Parakeet, Cutbank, Fascicle, Typo, Octopus, XConnect, Coconut, and others.

Dorothea Lasky & Laura Solomon @ Jimmy's No. 43 Stage

The Burning Chair Readings
invite you to spend some time w/

Dorothea Lasky & Laura Solomon

Friday, September 28th, 8PM
Jimmy’s No.43 Stage
43 East 7th Street
Between 2nd& 3rd
New York City

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first full-length collection, AWE (Wave Books), will be out in the fall of 2007. She is the author of three chapbooks: The Hatmaker's Wife (Braincase Press, 2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Crowd, 6x6, Boston Review, Delmar, Phoebe, Filter, Knock, Drill, Lungfull!, and Carve, among others. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where studies education at the University of Pennsylvania and co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series, along with the poet Michael Carr. She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University.

Laura Solomon was born in 1976 and grew up in the deep South. She studied Political Science and Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, and later Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her first book Bivouac was published by Slope Editions in 2002. Other publications include a chapbook, Letters by which Sisters Will Know Brothers (Katalanché Press 2005), and Haiku des Pierres / Haiku of Stones by Jaques Poullaouec, a translation from the French with Sika Fakambi (Apogée Press, 2006). Her second book of poetry Blue and Red Things has just been released by Ugly Duckling Presse. Currently she lives in Philadelphia where she works as a tutor and researcher for an adult literacy intervention program.

Goldstein & Turovskaya 9/14 The Fall Cafe

The Burning Chair Readings
invite you to choke out the last few breaths of summer w/

David Goldstein & Genya Turovskaya

Friday, September 14th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street
FREE

David B. Goldstein is the author of a chapbook, Been Raw Diction (Dusie), and his poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Jubilat, Typo, Epoch, Alice Blue Review, and Pinstripe Fedora. He recently joined the faculty of York University in Toronto, where he teaches Renaissance literature, creative writing, and food studies.

Genya Turovskaya is the author of the chapbook The Tides, recently published by Octopus Books. Her poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, jubilat, Landfall, A Public Space and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, and is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Walk Like the Burning Chair Walks

The Burning Chair Readings
invite you to never be sad
w/

Frank Sherlock & David Shapiro

(Philly Style meets New York School)

celebrating the recent release of David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems (1965-2006)
& the debut of Frank Sherlock’s Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show

Friday, August 31st, 8PM
Jimmy’s No.43 Stage
43 East 7th Street
Between 2nd& 3rd
New York City

($5 donation suggested but not required)

David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) emerged from Overlook Press in 2007. In addition to his many books, Shapiro has published art criticism and poetry in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Artforum. He has received a fellowship from the National endowment for the Arts, the Zabel Prize for Experimental Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a nomination for a National Book Award in 1971. He has edited volumes of aesthetics, translated Alberti’s poems about Picasso, collaborated with Rudy Burckhardt on three films, and had a play produced at the Kitchen, co-authored with Stephen Paul Miller, called “Harrisburg Mon Amour or Two Boys on a Bus.” A professional violinist in his youth, he now writes in Riverdale, New York, where he lives with his wife Lindsay.

Frank Sherlock is the author of Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show (Night Flag Press), Spring Diet of Flowers at Night (Mooncalf Press), ISO (furniture press) and 13 (Ixnay Press). Past collaborations include work with CAConrad, Jennifer Coleman, and sound artist Alex Welsh. Publication of his most recent collaborative poem with Brett Evans, entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual is forthcoming in the near future.

Michael Robins & Dara Wier @ The Fall Cafe

The Burning Chair Readings
don’t want you to let summer go without a fight,
so come out and hear fighting words from

Michael Robins & Dara Wier

Friday, August 7:30 PM
@ The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll

Born in Portland, Oregon, Michael Robins is the author of The Next Settlement (University of North Texas Press, 2007), which was selected for the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. He holds degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, LUNA, Third Coast and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia College. - Three poems in Typo

Dara Wier's books include Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books 2006); Reverse Rapture (Verse Press 2005); Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon U. Press, 2001). A limited edition, (X in Fix), a selection of 5 longer poems, including a section from Reverse Rapture, is printed in RainTaxi’s Brainstorm series. Recent poems can be found in American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Volt, Massachusetts Review, The Melic, The Canary, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, slope, Hollins Critic, Seattle Review, Turnrow, Hunger Mountain, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Octopus, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Court Green and Gulf Coast. She works as a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, Reverse Rapture has been recently awarded The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives 2006 book of the year prize. - “Blue Oxen”

The Burning Chair Readings Fall 2007

@ The Fall Café, Fridays 7:30 PM
August 17^th - Michael Robins & Dara Wier
September 14^th - David Goldstein & Genya Turovskaya
October 12^th - Joseph Bradshaw & Ken Rumble
November 16^th - Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Lily Brown & Elizabeth Robinson

@ Jimmy’s No. 43 Stage, 8 PM
August 31^st - Frank Sherlock & David Shapiro
September 28^th - Dorothea Lasky & Laura Solomon
October 26^th - Cynthia Cruz & Karla Kelsey
November 30^th - Maureen Alsop & Jean Valentine

The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll

Jimmy’s No.43 Stage
43 East 7^th Street
between 2^nd & 3^rd Avenues
NYC

The Burning Chair Readings
contact: Matthew Henriksen
matt AT typomag DOT com

Born in Portland, Oregon, Michael Robins is the author of The Next Settlement (University of North Texas Press, 2007), which was selected for the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. He holds degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, LUNA, Third Coast and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago and teaches at Columbia College. - "My Life as an Edge of the Lawless Frontier" in Typo 6 - Two poems in Octopus

Dara Wier's books include Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books 2006); Reverse Rapture (Verse Press 2005); Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon U. Press, 2001). A limited edition, (X in Fix), a selection of 5 longer poems, including a section from Reverse Rapture, is printed in RainTaxi’s Brainstorm series. Recent poems can be found in American Poetry Review, New American Writing, Volt, Massachusetts Review, The Melic, The Canary, Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, slope, Hollins Critic, Seattle Review, Turnrow, Hunger Mountain, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Octopus, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Court Green and Gulf Coast. She works as a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, Reverse Rapture has been recently awarded The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives 2006 book of the year prize. - "Blue Oxen"

David B. Goldstein is the author of a chapbook, Been Raw Diction (Dusie), and his poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Jubilat, Typo, Epoch, Alice Blue Review, and Pinstripe Fedora. He recently joined the faculty of York University in Toronto, where he teaches Renaissance literature, creative writing, and food studies. - "Paysage" in Typo 9 - Three poems in Dusie

Genya Turovskaya is the author of the chapbook The Tides, recently published by Octopus Books. Her poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, jubilat, Landfall, A Public Space and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, and is an
editor at Ugly Duckling Presse. - "Pax"

Joseph Bradshaw was born in Caldwell, Idaho, and grew up up and down the west coast. From 2002 to 2006 he co-edited FO(A)RM Magazine and co-curated the Spare Room reading series in Portland. A chapbook, The Way Birds Become, was recently published by Weather Press. His poetry and reviews can be found in current or forthcoming issues of Cannibal, Cultural Society, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, Mirage #4 / Period(ical), and elsewhere. He currently lives in Iowa City, that hotbed of literary puke. - from The Way Birds Become

Ken Rumble is the author of Key Bridge (Carolina Wren Press, 2007) and marketing director of the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. He is currently working on a book with his father about the earth's atmosphere & Antarctica. His poems have been published in Parakeet, Cutbank, Fascicle, Typo, Octopus, XConnect, Coconut, and others. - Two poems in Typo 8

Paige Ackerson-Kiely was born in October of 1975 at the behest of her parents in Biddeford, Maine. Her first book, In No One's Land won the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She currently resides in Vermont, where she is employed selling wine, and is at work on a second manuscript of poems entitled My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer, and a novel about infanticide. - Three poems in jubilat

Lily Brown holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College and currently lives in San Francisco. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Typo, Octopus, Fence, Cannibal, Tarpaulin Sky, Handsome and Coconut. - Octopus Books published her chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, in early 2007. - "To a Tree" in Typo 9

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of 8 books of poetry, most recently Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press) and Apostrophe (Apogee Press). The Orphan and its Relations is forthcoming from Fence Books in 2008. Robinson co-edits EtherDome Press and Instance Books and lives in Boulder, Colorado. - Two poems in Rain Taxi

David Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) was released from Overlook Press in 2007. In addition to his many books, Shapiro has published art criticism and poetry in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Artforum. He has received a fellowship from the National endowment for the Arts, the Zabel Prize for Experimental Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a nomination for a National Book Award in 1971. He has edited volumes of aesthetics, translated Alberti’s poems about Picasso, collaborated with Rudy Burckhardt on three films, and had a play produced at the Kitchen called “Two Boys on the Bus.” A professional violinist in his youth, he now writes in Riverdale, New York, where he lives with his wife Lindsay. - Four poems in Lingo

Frank Sherlock is the author of Wounds in an Imaginary Nature Show (Night Flag Press), Spring Diet of Flowers at Night (Mooncalf Press), ISO (furniture press) and 13 (Ixnay Press). Past collaborations include work with CAConrad, Jennifer Coleman, and sound artist Alex Welsh. Publication of his most recent collaborative poem with Brett Evans, entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual is forthcoming in the near future. - from The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis, MO in 1978. Her first full-length collection, AWE (Wave Books), will be out in the fall of 2007. She is the author of three chapbooks: The Hatmaker's Wife (Braincase Press, 2006), Art (H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Crowd, 6x6, Boston Review, Delmar, Phoebe, Filter, Knock, Drill, Lungfull!, and Carve, among others. Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where studies education at the University of Pennsylvania and co-edits the Katalanche Press chapbook series, along with the poet Michael Carr. She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. - Eight poems in the Boston Review

Laura Solomon was born in 1976 and grew up in the deep South. She studied Political Science and Literature at the University of Georgia in Athens, and later Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her first book Bivouac was published by Slope Editions in 2002. Other publications include a chapbook, Letters by which Sisters Will Know Brothers (Katalanché Press 2005), and Haiku des Pierres / Haiku of Stones by Jaques Poullaouec, a translation from the French with Sika Fakambi (Apogée Press, 2006). Her second book of poetry Blue and Red Things has just been released by Ugly Duckling Presse. Currently she lives in Philadelphia where she works as a tutor and researcher for an adult literacy intervention program. - Five poems in Octopus

Cynthia Cruz was born in Germany and raised in Northern California. Her first book, Ruin, was published by Alice James Books in 2006. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and others, and are anthologized in Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. She is the recipient of several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in New York City. - Two poems in Perihelion

Born and raised in Southern California, Karla Kelsey holds degrees from UCLA, The Iowa Writers Workshop, and The University of Denver. Her first book, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary won the 2005 Sawtooth Poetry Prize judged by Carolyn Forché and was published in 2006 by Ahsahta Press. Her second full-length manuscript, Iteration Nets, is based in the sonnet form and is forthcoming from Ahsahta. Karla is also author of the chapbooks Little Dividing Doors in the Mind (Noemi Press, 2005) and Iterations (Pilot Press, forthcoming). Recent poems, essays, and reviews can be found in the Boston Review, Octopus, Five Fingers Review, Lit, and CAB/NET. - Four poems in the Boston Review

Maureen Alsop’s recent poems have appeared or are pending in various publications including: Barrow Street, Typo, Margie, Columbia : A Journal of Literature and Art and Texas Review. Her poetry was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the 2006 recipient of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Eleventh Muse 2006 poetry prize. Her first full collection of poetry Apparition Wren is available through Main Street Rag. - "The Naming" in Typo 9

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Author of eight additional books, Valentine has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Columbia, Sarah Lawrence College, NYU, and the 92nd St. Y, among other places. - from Door in the Mountain

Graham Foust. Necessary Stranger. Flood Editions: 2006.

Graham Foust’s third book, Necessary Stranger, is much like his previous books—minimal, stung out, and aimed at embracing whatever value he can find in the world —yet his new poems turn more than ever to thin, grim devotionals to observation. Trimmed down but not truncated or elusive, Foust seems determined, as Stevens begins The Necessary Angel, to “see the earth again.”

“Sob Poem” begins with a confessional: “Grief that we should be like this./I don’t hate you, broken gift.” The lines neither hide behind irony nor offer cathartic compensation. Though after emotional clarity, Foust is not afraid to embrace phrases with expressionist leanings. The obscurity of “Starting-to-cry’s a wire from/the mind to nowhere” results from an attempt to identify the tenuous and virtually unnamable bridge between sensory and emotive experience.

He doesn’t play around with the paradoxical circumstances of striving to put the unspeakable into words. Rather, Foust embraces the uncertainty: “The leaves are on their shadows.” In a manner similar to Blake’s flipping of reason and passion, Faust flips certainty and doubt to “see the earth again” as place were the only certainty is that knowing is tenuous. I find compensation (Emerson’s definition) in the reversal, in that adopted perspective parallel to my favorite Confucian axiom: “To know that you know what you know, and to know that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom.”

In “Panama,” Foust begins with one of Stevens’ favorite tropes: “Fruit thumps in the pointless/grass, has no hand in itself.” Foust, unlike Stevens, does not use the sensuality of the apple as a critique of religion but as an observed phenomenon elucidating the predicament of recognizing the possibility of one’s own meaninglessness.

If only I couldn’t
understand, I’d imagine
some sarcastic new Christ and say
something someone would say.

Turning the expected “could” into “couldn’t,” Foust admits that what he knows necessitates doubt far more readily than what he doesn’t know allows for faith. Although it’s not a defense of religion, “some sarcastic new Christ” critiques the abundant abuse of irony and the resulting emptiness of “some” (as opposed to Foust’s literal application of “nowhere”). Foust continually identifies suffering as the basis of experiential investigation (“Pain is okay—/it’s the practical/that murders”). Our “practical” ideologies and self-defenses inhibit our capacities for experience.

Engagement with the literal and person, however, often leaves poets susceptible to sentimental slip-ups. “Marital” begins with Foust bending ordinary language into new sound-driven resonances: “To have and have and//have and how/could you not//stop blossoming.” Riffing on “to have” is appropriate, if not predictable, but “blossoming” is an easy a word to throw in and far too symbolic to fit with Foust’s usually precise language. The poem goes on to beautifully crude statements, maybe intended to undercut the melodrama:

Some days I can’t feel
much of anything. Others
I come so
hard I think
I’ve bled.

He also says, “Our city’s a list/of its pissed-//out-of windows.” Instead of synthesizing the blossoming and the piss, nearing the end of the poems Foust reverts to symbolic purity: “You break into belief./I lie and climb into tears.” I’ll take a few bleary lines like that, though, over a book pat with ironic and imagistic evasions. Most of my favorite books read like that.

The book’s final poem, “Clouds,” offers a synthesis of sentimental daring and hardened clarity. “Such things/as laws fall on us,” the poem begins. At once Foust accepts the inevitability of “the practical/that murders” and undermines it, as an apple thumping “in the pointless/grass, has no hand in itself.” Like law and grief, though, knowing falls to us as well: “There/are nameless shapes./There are tears of understanding.” A young poet with Foust’s immense skills might smartly veer from statements leaning toward the sentimental, but Foust has brought his craft to a vision that, as Stevens charged, can “help people live their lives.”

--Matthew Henriksen

TYPO 10 COMING SOON

All-Time Chair Burners

Kazim Ali, Samuel Amadon, Kostas Anagnopolous, Stephanie Anderson, Reneé Ashley, Andrea Baker, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Zach Barocas, Jim Behrle, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Anne Boyer, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Jenna Cardinale, Adam Clay, Julia Cohen, John Coletti, Carla Conforto, Phil Cordelli, Joshua Corey, Bruce Covey, Simon DeDeo, Michelle Detorie, Timothy Donnelly, kari edwards, Jeff Encke, Graham Foust, Joanna Fuhrman, Elisa Gabbert, Lara Glenum, Johannes Göransson, Arielle Greenberg, Kate Greenstreet, Jane Gregory, Shafer Hall, Matt Hart, Matthea Harvey, Christian Hawkey, Anthony Hawley, Brian Howe, Fanny Howe, Dan Hoy, Thomas Hummel, Brenda Iijima, Kent Johnson, Erica Kaufman, Amy King, Aaron Kunin, Mark Lamoureux, Katy Lederer, Tao Lin, Brendan Lorber, Alex Lemon, Timothy Liu, Sarah Manguso, Sabrina Orah Mark, Justin Marks, Peter Markus, Joseph Massey, Aaron McCollough, Paul McCormick, Farid Matuk, Ben Mazer, Andrew Mister, Ange Mlinko, Marie Mockett, Jeff Morgan, Rachel Moritz, Valzhyna Mort, Anna Moschovakis, Gina Myers, Jess Mynes, Amanda Nadelberg, Sawako Nakayasu, Keith Newton, Eugene Ostashevsky, Juliet Patterson, Christian Peet, Arlo Quint, Thibault Raoult, Chris Salerno, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, David Shapiro, Brenda Shaughnessy, Frank Sherlock, Brandon Shimoda, Peter Shippy, Sandra Simonds, Rod Smith, Sheila Squillante, Heidi Lynn Staples, Stacy Szymaszek, Mathias Svalina, Bronwen Tate, Craig Morgan Teicher, Maureen Thorson, Chris Tonelli, Gabriella Torres, Jen Tynes, Charles Valle, G.C. Waldrep, Shanxing Wang, Africa Wayne, Karen Weiser, Joshuamarie Wilkinson, Dustin Williamson, Jonah Winter, Max Winter, Sam White, Matvei Yankelevich, Jake Adam York, & Rachel Zucker

Updated June 2007

Our Fall line up is coming soon.

Burning Chair @ Jimmy's No. 43 Stage Friday June 1st

The Burning Chair Readings
& Jimmy’s No. 43 Stage
welcome you to a night celebrating the poetry
of Kitchen Press & Cannibal Books authors

Keith Newton, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, Chris Tonelli & Dustin Williamson

Friday, June 1st, 8 PM
@ Jimmy’s No. 43
43 East 7th Street
between 2nd & 3rd Avenues

Keith Newton edits the online magazine Harp & Altar. His poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in Typo, Nebraska Review, Circumference, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.

“Materialization in a Black Sea” in Typo 9

Morgan Lucas Schuldt is the author of Verge (Parlor Press: Free Verse Editions, forthcoming, fall 2007) and Otherhow, a chapbook now out from Kitchen Press. A graduate from the University of Arizona’s MFA program, Morgan is the editor of the literary magazine CUE: A Journal of Prose Poetry. His poems have appeared mostly recently in Fence, Cannibal and Verse; online at Shampoo, Typo, and Free Verse; and in the anthologies Prose Poetry / Flash Fiction: An Anthology (2006) and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Second Floor (2007). A brief essay on the poet Larry Levis appears in A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington University Press, 2004). Morgan teaches in the English Department at the University of Arizona where he currently pursues his PhD in English Literature.

“On Seeing Leonardo’s Grotesques” in Typo 9

Otherhow from Kitchen Press

Chris Tonelli lives in Cambridge, MA where he runs The So and So Series. His poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Sawbuck, H_NGM_N, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Good Foot, Kulture Vulture, Typo, Drunken Boat, Inch, Word For/Word, Verse, RealPoetik, New York Quarterly, Sonora Review, Asheville Poetry Review, GutCult, LIT, and Redivider. His work will also be included in the anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor and Outside Voices' 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. His chapbook, WIDE TREE: Short Poems, is available from Kitchen Press.

“Aoelian Lyre” in Typo 9

Wide Tree from Kitchen Press

Dustin Williamson is the author of Heavy Panda (Goodbye Better), Cab Ass'n (Lame House), Gorilla Dust (Open 24 Hours), and Exhausted Grunts (Cannibal Books). He sometimes edits the Rust Buckle chapbook/magazine/reading series.

Three poems in Puppy Flowers 8

Two Wild and Crazy Guys

The Burning Chair Readings
would like to warn you that you never know what will happen
when you show up to hear

Zach Barocas & Shafer Hall

Friday, May 18th, 7:30 PM
at The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
between Union & President
Carroll gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street
Fabulously Free

Musician & poet Zach Barocas is the author of Among Other Things and edits The Cultural Society. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife, Kimberley Yurkiewicz.

"Leaving Cobble Hill" in Typo 9

Shafer Hall is great for the goose. He could give or take the gander. No Tell Press has just released his first full-length collection, Never Cry Woof. He is a Senior Editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, and he (sometimes) curates the Frequency Reading Series at the Four-Faced Liar, NYC.

Three poems in Unpleasant Event Schedule

How Many of You Are You by Philip Jenks

A dusi/e-chap, 2006

http://www.dusie.org/how%20many%20of%20you%20are%20you.pdf

For those familiar with Philip Jenks’ work, How Many of you Are You is both a deepening & a complicating reading experience. It is deepening in that much of Jenks’ personal cosmology is here: those who have read On the Cave You Live In or My first painting will be “The Accuser” will see/hear Jenks’ familiar blending of linguistic register, an Appalachian dialect occurring in the same utterance as high academic jargon; we also see/hear Hydra (the “many-tongued,” itself a kind of personification of Jenks’ polyglotism), as well as allusions to epilepsy. It is complicating in that here Jenks is working through his cosmology from a tightened angle: the focus is on the nexus of place, memory, autobiography, & cultural history. This nexus is itself a major thread in Jenks’ cosmology, though here it is amplified. It is thus fitting that he chose a section of Paul Blackburn’s great poem “The Net of Place” for the book’s epigraph:

When mind dies of its time
It is not the place goes away.

Yet, all that being said, the book is not only for the initiated—it is, like any of Jenks’ books, an entry point into a knotted, rich poetry.

How Many of You Are You is a series of poems responding to photographs taken by Jenks himself. The photographs are stark, black & white capturings of rather mundane appearing buildings, trees, street scenes, & people in Jenks’ Appalachian hometown, Morgantown, West Virginia. Two major precursors for this book that come to my mind are James Agee’s & Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, & Jonathan Williams’ Blues & Roots / Rue & Bluets. Jenks’ book falls, I think, closer to the latter: Famous Men can just as much be understood as documenting a Northern intellectual’s (Agee’s) guilt from being cut off from the itinerant poor as much as it can be understood as a documentation of the lives of the Southern poor of the Depression, while Blues & Roots is a poetic celebration of Blue Ridge Mountain culture (another part of the Appalachians), told in the language of that culture itself. In the case of How Many of You are You, though, it is not so much cultural documentation or celebration that drives the work, as much as it is an investigation of where the personal & cultural meet.

Yet there is clearly a divide between the objective, nondescript photographs, & the poems that interact with them. I am tempted to call it a counter-ekphrasis: rather than bring out what is objectively in the picture, Jenks injects a history, most often highly personal, sometimes cultural (& often simultaneously), giving the picture a new rendering, both clarifying & furthering the mystery of the quotidian thing depicted. In an untitled poem placed after a picture of a small, white church, Jenks writes:

Off on my paper route, exchanging Jesus
For Black Flag. A ridiculous attempt to
Closet the sound it then broke down when I got
Closer and heard them revelating inside.
Sunday papers I would whitely listen from
Those stairs and told my Episcopalian
Minister dad that if I went for it, it’d
be pentacostal. He shudder. Turn all pale.

The phrase “if I went for it, it’d / be pentacostal” also signals an element of Jenks’ cosmology: Hydra, that many-tongued serpent which appears in Jenks’ poems as a shape-shifting say-all, a kind of persona akin to Olson’s Maximus (—maybe a Maximus of Morgantown?). So if Jenks “went for it,” joined the revelators, it would be Hydra, who later makes an appearance in a poem after a picture of a large, ominous-looking house:

Hydra house
Hangs “T.B. Sheets”
Slate shingles influenza influential
Quaffs Maker’s Mark
Crazy John mowed the lawn.
Draw near, John will ask you
“Where’d you get those spindly legs?

Jenks’ language itself is thus Hydratic—necessarily fragmented, multifarious. The address of the poems is often simultaneously to Morgantown, to the photographs that represent the place, & to memory. Look at this section of the poem “Worker Among…Workers?” (which appears after a photograph of a man standing by a ladder, with another person off in the background):

Hi Hello to one other
Person on High Street, the center of
Downtown Morgantown. Nothing has everything
To do with the picture. Husk of building,
Empty personal rapid transit system cars that
shoot like horizontal elevators across the town,
No driver, often no passenger. Hi hello
I am nothing.

That Jenks here is focusing his & our attention on a character in the background is telling—it is much like pointing his invisible memories out, bringing them into the streetscape. Also telling is the sentence “Nothing has everything / To do with the picture:” he is giving us the personal nothing that is everything, the imbued history. At several points in the book, he melds this personal history with the history of Morgantown itself. Take these two poems, after a dismal picture of a schoolhouse:

“1930”
Black minds. A municipal undertaking
Work Progress Administration it widen
Sick White Magic. Engraved, segregated.
Second Ward (a) Negro Elementary
Also grab it known as “Annex”. Invasion.
Lady Eleanor she show up she herself
Dedicate the Segregated surgery
On the 1925 dilapidate
Dilate the pupils
“New Deal”
White Avenue.

And from “1973”:

In 1973, we debated whether
The new merry go round was
Giant tit or flying saucer.
Call it what you will
I imagined it would spin me
To somewheres bettersafer.
Mamaverse.
(What happen in the bathroom?)

Starting from the interior (“Black minds”), Jenks moves outward to the cultural, then back to the deepest interior—that questioned & perhaps questionable bathroom. All of it is, perhaps, an approach toward comprehending darkness (in several of the word’s senses). This instance of looking backward into the dark of personal & cultural memory while simultaneously looking at the present remains throughout the book. In the final poem, which is not responding to a particular photograph but, perhaps, to the entire book itself, Jenks writes:

Crushing parallax.
Place not move.

Here Jenks is giving us his paradox: that he is rooted in both the past & the present, making an attempt to effect the present place with memories of its past. This is the parallax of the work itself, which occurs when the moving mind embodied in these poems clash with these utterly still photographs. It is also our challenge: to enter into that both still & convulsive place Jenks’ mind has accrued, gathered, inscribed, & given.

--Review by Joseph Bradshaw

Ian Randall Wilson. Theme of the Parabola. (2005)

Hollyridge Press http://members.aol.com/hollyridgepress/

P. O. Box 2872

Venice, CA 90294

38 pp. $10.

We have to take Ian Randall Wilson at his word when he says things like “I’m here to document the normal” as he does in the poem “I Gloss the History of the Human Tongue” though these poems all seem to organize themselves in a technicolor war against the quotidian. And I think we can believe Wilson when he says, very delicately, “Let us listen to the voice of the instant” as he does in “Learning from Lumpiness” though the voice in these poems is a wildly ranging voice, reaching its big hairy human arms far back into the past and pushing their way into the future.

I think we take Ian Randall Wilson at his word because there is such confidence and fluency in his voice, in the active consciousness that springs to life in each of these poems. His word, finally, is all we really have; it is also all that is necessary. Look at these lines from “Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Slip Covers” for example:

I imagine a weight hanging from a string.

I image the weight grows with time.

Poor string.

Only three equations are necessary for chaos

but at least four occasions are required.

This is one of them […]

Here is a controlling consciousness, a speaker, I don’t mind being controlled by. I’m glad to go where he takes me, amazed at the linguistic virtuosity that takes the verb “imagine” and translates it into a new verb “image.” I’m bursting with sympathy for a string (!) and I’m overjoyed at the transmutation from “equations” to “occasions” and the deadpan finale that serves as a springboard into the deep water. I can almost imagine that Wilson, too, was overjoyed. See, I feel an inventively provisional undercurrent to these poems. These are not poems with outlines or preconceived grand themes. These are poems that speak in “the voice of an instant,” but it is a timeless instant; these are poems of documentation, but it is proof of the human potential for constant ingenuity.

Of course, the now is a lovely and varied place, but why sing? Well, “In an absence of because\the head just path sometimes.” I think that’s the only smug answer we need. Why not sing? Why not skitter and scat our way towards some kind of understanding:

That line was what makes the next line possible

that and a vocabulary to describe

the underlying patter of life— […]

(“An Illustrated Text Aimed At Engineers”)

Whatever the understanding is, whatever the meaning behind the patter, these poems are confident that it can be talked out, that we’ll only get there by trying. The poems are fueled by the self, are indeed self-fueling, and they’re guzzling it all down quick, burning themselves up before they burn out.

--Review by Nate Pritts.

Hadara Bar-Nadav & Bronwen Tate

The Burning Chair Readings
have told once once if a thousand times
you can do what you want with yourself
but why not break it down with

Hadara Bar-Nadav & Bronwen Tate

Friday, April 20^th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street
Ruthlessly FREE

Hadara Bar-Nadav’s book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (MARGIE/IntuiT House, 2007) was chosen by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2005 MARGIE Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. Born in New York, she lives in Kansas City, MO with her husband and their standard poodle, Ella. Find out more at hadarabarnadav.com.

Bronwen Tate lives and writes happily in Brooklyn, enjoys teaching English Composition in various parts of Manhattan, yet still considers moving back to the West Coast. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and her work has appeared in Horse Less Review, How2, Word For/Word, No Tell Motel, and others. She can be found writing about the books she reads and the bread she bakes online at Bread and Jam for Frances.

Mathias Svalina

at The Brooklyn Poetry Bazaar; Galapagos Arts Space, Williamsburg; March 10th, 2007.
Photo: Matt Kime

Ben Mazer

at The Brooklyn Poetry Bazaar; Galapagos Arts Space, Williamsburg; March 10th, 2007
Photo: Matt Kime

Eugene Ostashevsky

at the Cannibal Release Party at Jimmy's No. 43 Downstairs, March 9th, 2007.
Photo: Susan Briante.

H_NGM_N Chapbook Series #6

Theory of the Walking Big Bang By Robert Krut

Much of contemporary poetry depends on subtleties so shaded and nuances so fine that the poems dwell on the tipping point of irrelevance. The minuet differences between minutia often seem to be their subject—the particular word-choice of small-talk, the specific way a bird shakes itself at the bird bath. While there may be some hidden truth in these tiniest of differences, it’s refreshing to see a writer who works, unabashedly, with the barest of contrasts. Robert Krut’s Theory of the Walking Big Bang is like an inked woodcut pressed into the whitest of paper. Krut deals not in shades and half-tones, but in the stark contrast of all or nothing.

Krut’s poetry gives substance to negative space—the absence that defines the presence. The “Big Bang” of the title implicitly nods to the nothing it rose out of, and Krut’s poems are filled with voids, holes, gaps, and margins. In his poem, “The Relativity Tree,” Krut’s speaker allows himself to see the tree as not a presence in the world but a blank suggestive outline:

Color, relative—
The tree is a negative,

frozen nuclear bomb
its bulb an umbrella.

A bomb, an umbrella—the negative space these forms create is like the frame of sky around a tree. Later in the poem, Krut’s speaker thinks “with complete lucidity:/my irises are black holes.” There is a exhilarating potentiality here—black holes have been known to give birth to universes—but there is also a troubling sense of indeterminacy.

This tension between the freedom of unassigned space and its daunting barrenness is staged most directly in “Sky.” Krut’s speaker first explains that we are zooming towards oblivion:

Friends,
I am here to tell you

there’s a pocket in space,
the abscess of a rotten tooth—

and here's the bad news—
We’re hurtling towards it.

Bleak as this is, the speaker seems invigorated by possibility. The poem closes with the speaker rallying his or her companions with an inexplicable outcome: “when we hit that black hole/let us race through…to the eyes of warm, welcoming selves from another universe.” Krut’s speakers are often charming underdog figures who thrive at the cusp of oblivion because at least there anything might happen. The void is the most level playing field.

In several other poems, Krut leaves the outreaches to muse on (of all things) spiders. But perhaps all this hangs together. Spiders do have a curious dominion over space and thin air—their webs bridge negative and positive space without favoring one or the other. At the end of “The Spider,” a mythic spider peels itself away to reveal a blue planet, perhaps our own.

The fat body, swollen oval sphere, hovers—
In a breadth, its cuticle skin
pulls back to reveal a blue, lit planet—

its legs crumbling like ash.

A world emerges from a spider, but the spider seems spent. Krut’s final success in Theory of the Walking Big Bang might indeed be a subtle one: he is able to both celebrate creation while mourning the loss of possibility that is its inevitable fallout.

--Review by Monica McFawn.

Rod Smith at the Brooklyn Poetry Bazaar, March 10th, 2007.
Panoramic image by Matt Kime.

The Burning Chair Readings Brooklyn Poetry Bazaar

Saturday, March 10th, 2007 2:30-7 PM
Galapagos Art Space 70 North 6th Street
Between Kent and Wythe Williamsburg, Brooklyn
http://www.galapagosartspace.com
$5 for twelve poets & another who sings

2:30-4:30 PM
Ben Mazer
Christian Hawkey
Matvei Yankelevich
Anna Moschovakis
Ann Lauterbach
Fanny Howe

4:30-5 PM
I Feel Tractor

5-7 PM
Farid Matuk
Susan Briante
Jess Mynes
Karen Weiser
Anselm Berrigan
Rod Smith

Contact Matthew Henriksen at matt AT typomag DOT com
We are currently seeking sponsors to help fund our traveling poets.

Fanny Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. Her recent collections of poetry include On the Ground (Graywolf, 2004), Gone (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), and The End (1992). Howe is also the author of several novels and prose collections, most recently, Radical Love (Nightboat, 2006) and The Lives of a Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (Nightboat Books, 2005). Howe was the recipient of the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems. She has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005. She has lectured in creative writing at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ann Lauterbach is the author of five collections of poetry: If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (Penguin, 2001), On a Stair (1997), And for Example (1994), Clamor (1991), Before Recollection (1987), and Many Times, but Then (1979). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation. Since 1991 she has taught at Bard College, where she is David and Ruth Schwab III Professor of Language and Literature and co-directs the Writing Division of the M.F.A. program.

Rod Smith is the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l'araignée (France), In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. His latest collection, Deed, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2007. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. Smith's work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Anthology of New (American) Poets, The Baffler, The Gertrude Stein Awards, Java, New American Writing, Open City, Poésie, Poetics Journal, Shenandoah, andThe Washington Review. He edits Aerial magazine, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. The next issue of Aerial will focus on poet Lyn Hejinian. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press.

Anselm Berrigan is the author of Some Notes on my Programming, Zero Star Hotel and Integrity and Dramatic Life, all published by Edge Books in Washington D.C. He was raised in the east village of New York City and lives there now after stints in Buffalo, NY and San Francisco, CA. He is also the author of Strangers in the Nest, published by Dolphin Press and New Lights Press of Baltimore Maryland, and In the Dream Hole, co-authored with Edmund Berrigan. Anselm is currently the director of The St. Marks Poetry project in NYC.

Edmund Berrigan is the author of Disarming Matter, co-editor of the Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, and house musician on I Feel Tractor's debut CD, Once I Had an Earthquake.

Recent poems by Susan Briante have appeared in Hot Whiskey, OPoss and effing. A co-editor of the journal Superflux, she lives in Dallas, Texas, where she works as an assistant professor of aesthetic studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of Pioneers in the Studay of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007).

Christian Hawkey is the author of The Book of Funnels (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2004), and the chapbook HourHour, which includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press, 2005). His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Conjunctions, Volt, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Crowd, and Conduit, and he has received awards from the Poetry Fund and from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, in a house that he believes was built by Walt Whitman, especially since it’s constantly falling apart.

Farid Matuk's poems have appeared most recently in Oposs, Lungfull!, PastSimple and Shampoo. His first collection, Is it the King?, was released by Effing Press in 2006. He lives in Dallas, Texas where he currently adjuncts at SMU and directs the Community and Mentorship Project for the literary non-profit, The Writer's Garret.

Ben Mazer’s poetry is published widely in international periodicals. His essay revealing a previously unknown source for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (an 1892 essay by Elisabeth Cavazza of Portland, Maine) appears in the second number of Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. He is the author of White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions) and The Big House (forthcoming).

Anna Moschovakis has been an editor and designer with Ugly Duckling Presse since 2002, helping to produce books and chapbooks by emerging writers, translations, and the poetry periodical, 6x6. Her translations of Henri Michaux, Claude Cahun, Blaise Cendrars, Théophile Gautier and others have been published by Fence, nest, and New York Review Books Classics. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Blue Book (Phylum Press, 2005) and Dependence Day Parade (Sisyphus, 2006), and her first book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, is just out this fall from Turtle Point Press. She currently teaches in the Comparative Literature Department of Queens College.

Jess Mynes is author of birds for example (CARVE Editions) and In(ex)teriors (Anchorite Press). A collaboration with Chris Rizzo, Full On Jabber, a collaboration with Aaron Tieger, Recently Clouds, and his Rothko poems are scheduled for publication this year. He is the editor for Fewer & Further Press and Asterisk. He also co-curates a local reading series, All Small Caps, in Western, MA.

Karen Weiser is the author of Heads Up Fever Pile, Eight Positive Trees (Pressed Wafer, Placefullness (Ugly Duckling Press), and Pitching Woo (CyPress, forthcoming). She lives in New York City.

Matvei Yankelevich is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-edits 6×6, a poetry periodical. He is the co-translator, with Eugene Ostashevsky, of An Invitation For Me To Think, the selected poems of Alexander Vvedensky, forthcoming from Green Integer; and of Russian Absurdism: OBERIU, an anthology forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. His own writing has appeared in various little magazines and his critical work on Russian-American poets appears on Octopus Magazine. A chapbook of his long poem, The Present Work, was published by the Los Angeles-based Palm Press in summer 2006. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York City.

Kostas Anagnopoulos & Elisa Gabbert at The Fall Cafe

The Burning Chair Readings
Say
Fool, why don’t you get down with your bad self?
and the linguistic boogie of

Kostas Anagnopoulos & Elisa Gabbert

Friday, February 16th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F or G to Carroll Street
FREE

Kostas Anagnopoulos was born and raised in Chicago. He is the editor and co-founder of Insurance Magazine and Insurance Editions. In 2003 he published his chapbook, Daydream. This spring Ugly Duckling Presse will publish his long poem, Irritant. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, and he works as a salesman.

Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College. She is a reader for Ploughshares and an editor of Absent. Recent work appears or will appear in journals including Pleiades, LIT, No Tell Motel, Kulture Vulture, RealPoetik, H_NGM_N, and Redivider, as well as the forthcoming anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. This week Kitchen Press released her chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine.

‘I Will Die Of Christina’: A Review Of Christina Davis’s Forth A Raven. Alice James Books: 2006. $14.95

Against a chronic backdrop of decay and dissolve, how do you reconcile a life actively lived, a day and night repeatedly pushed through? To this all too common existential quandary, Christina Davis, in Forth A Raven, her first collection of poems, offers readers double fisted advice. On the one hand, she stresses speech, verbal expression a way of defining the self and the surrounding world. What is named, and thereby articulated, then becomes, through the process of articulation, somehow more approachable, and therefore more manageable, if only in the life of the mind. From ‘The Primer’:

               She said, I love you.

               He said nothing.

               As if there were just one
               of each word and the one
               who used it, used it up.

               In the history of language
               the first obscenity was silence.

As one hand implies the other, the flipside of this pro-lingua logic is a recognition and near acceptance of language’s ultimate inability to capture a thing in full—its inevitable shortcomings in describing what really happens. Davis speaks to this inadequacy well in ‘The Outset’, where she writes

               Before there was a self, there were many hunches,

               many came to the cradle
               but in going began
               to define me as what-does-not-go-away.

Along with themes of defining the world and its parts by negation, & the state of language as inevitably and inescapably fragmentary, Davis stresses healthy detachment as a way of moving through the world, reminding readers, in ‘The Raven’s Book’ (pg. 31), the book’s longest poem at five-parts and five pages:

               Consider the ravens, sayeth the lord,
               for they neither sow nor reap, they keep nothing in store.

               For which god feeds them.

Just above these lines is the following passage, a further bolstering of definition by negation (mountains known as mountains via the valleys’ existence beneath them), in which Davis argues that the life of the mind—memory in all of its varied incarnations—is perhaps a more sure-footed terrain than the life we could well call the social life:

               Do you think there is such a thing as a happy memory?
               Aren’t the mountains in debt

               to the valleys? Sometimes I think only sad memories
               could truly be happy. They are final in the mind.

Any poem not only referencing a passage from the Bible, an Emily Dickinson couplet, and the life and harrowing dissolve of the poet Osip Mandelstam, but attempting to interweave meaningfully, has a great and harrowing task before itself.

In many ways, ‘The Raven’s Book’ forms the crux of Forth A Raven, in placing the raven both on the book spine and cover, and roughly at the center of the collection. Forth A Raven divines its name from Genesis 8, in which Noah sends two birds out into the world as runners to report back to him the status of the flood. The dove returns, the raven does not.

It would seem, then, that the fate of the raven is left open-ended, as are many of the poems that comprise Davis’s book. She offers readers answers to the questions she poses, knowing full well they’re only gestures, but, equally, knowing those gestures are all we’ve got to give. In this way, by acknowledging language’s shortcomings in her own poems, Davis renders herself a sort of self-conscious speaker. The effect of this rhetorical move is one part dissatisfaction, as it’s difficult not to wish the poet to overcome her—and language’s—admitted limitations. But it’s also one part deference toward Davis, and this part is the larger of the two, for her candor and subsequent tenderness in admitting these limitations, but still walking up to them and facing them vis á vis.

Forth A Raven is a collection of poems rife with questions and subsequent attempts at answering them. A quick glance at the first ten pages finds a relatively representative cross-section of the book’s pressing interrogatory theme:

               Do you love me? Will I die?

               ‘Are you sleeping? Are you beginning
               to go away?”

               Why do you say dear god,
               as if you were writing to him?

               Am I not still and hare-like?
               Don’t I give off the least reak of meat?

It is these nods at, and toward, human ephemerality and inquiry that Davis repeatedly bends. Some of her most telling moments arrive when she is offering readers an answer to the questions she’s posed, such as, and especially, in ‘The Calling’:

               We go forth in the name we lived.

               I will die of Christina.
               I was so called.

Language may not provide us with an architectural framework we would choose, as it is faulty & at most a gesture toward solidity. For all her unadorned and leaning toward simpler language, Davis sets a high bar for anyone, poet or not, who might choose to fan a set of answers before a litany of questions posed in a single 49-page book.


                                     --Review by Erin Bertram.