The Burning Chair Readings
Say Why the Hell Not
Whirligig it Like Ya Mean it w/

Dan Hoy, Justin Marks & Chris Salerno
Friday, September 29th, 7:29 PM
@ The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F or G to Carroll

Free, dude.
No outside booze, please.

Dan Hoy lives in Brooklyn and is co-editor of SOFTTARGETS. His work has appeared or is forthcoming injubilat, Octopus, H_NGM_N, Effing, the tiny, CUE: AJournal of Prose Poetry, and elsewhere. His moviecriticism and videos are available on his website,www.sinlechuga.com.

Justin Marks' poems have appeared in The LiteraryReview, MiPoesis, McSweeney's, Typo, Word for/ Word,Can We Have Our Ball Back?, and are forthcoming inH_NGM_N, Fulcrum and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthologyof Younger Poets. His chapbook, You Being You byProxy, is available on Kitchen Press. He is editor ofLIT and lives in NYC.

Christopher Salerno's first book, Whirligig, wasshortlisted for the Walt Whitman Award and wasrecently published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing House.His poems can be found in such journals as: Verse,LIT, Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Jacket,Jubilat, The Tiny, MiPOesias, New Hampshire Review,Free Verse, Forklift Ohio, Electronic Poetry Review,Barrow Street, River City, and others. Two of hisrecent poems are included in the anthology, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel and others will appearin the forthcoming Outside Voices anthology. Hecurrently teaches Poetry Writing, American Literature,and First-Year Writing at North Carolina StateUniversity in Raleigh, NC. He blogs atwww.christophersalerno.blogspot.com.

Forthcoming:

At The Fall Cafe:
October 20th Lee Ann Brown, Joanna Fuhrman, & EricaKaufman
October 29th Kazim Ali, Bruce Covey, & JulietPatterson
November 17th Julia Cohen, Mark Lamoureux, & AfricaWayne

At the Pierogi Gallery:
October 21st Adam Clay & Kate Greenstreet

Michael Sikkema. CODE OVER CODE. Lame House Press: 2006.

“One Truly Human Act” —Sikkema & Simple Wants

Despite a surface flash, a linguistic rupture that permeates some of the poems (or poetic utterances) that make up CODE OVER CODE, Sikkema's work is a profoundly human one, a searching utterance.

The book begins simply enough, with the controlling consciousness, the center of the vortex, proclaiming, “I wanted everything with you to be nicely round in a square of berry patch,/dirt and sky.” So much of what this book, finally, generates for the reader is initiated here, a revving that spans the length of the collection. Here is urge towards coupled with wariness of; there is a cynicism here that wants the “round” to exist in the “square,” that wants the impossibility of non-conformity within conformity & is still naïve enough to think that, if it can be achieved, there will be a nicety to it all. The book, then, the rest of the poems, are notes from the war, the speaker’s realization that this cannot be—implied syntactically already: I wanted…

If the world view of CODE OVER CODE is “romantic,” if it can be said to aspire to “organic unity,” the project of CODE OVER CODE, what the poems accomplish, can be said to reveal to us an interrogation of that Romantic sensibility & the fact that we live in a world that is openly antagonistic to it. Such simple & lovely & intimate whispers such as “Here is where I am looking at you/in me” have no place in the new mechanisms of poetic language, which use the gears of irony & fear & distrust to spin our selves further & further from real human connections.

Sikkema’s speaker asks “Is there one truly human act left?” The direct answer seems to be no, or at least that it is decidedly not the kind of act we want to be remembered for. Pure animal functioning does not make a human & I stand with Sikkema, chagrined & angry, baffled that we live in an age where poetry that enacts the purer functions of emotion (including, yes, love) is viewed suspiciously.

--Review by . Nate Pritts

The Burning Chair Readings
Invite you, pussycat,
To resign yourself to the luxurious pleasure
Of auricular satisfaction

w/
auricular sensations
from

Thibault Raoult, Sandra Simonds & Maureen Thorson

Friday, September 15th, 7:30 PM
@
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Between Union & President
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
F/G to Carroll Street

Of course
always
FREE & FUN

www.typomag.com/burningchair

~

Bios:

Thibault Raoult was a Dolin Scholar at the University of Chicago. One of his pieces in Octopus #4 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He co-edits Coalesce (with Adam Weg), writes songs, paints, cooks, & cleans (sometimes) in the nude (sometimes). Born in Pithiviers, France, raised in Rochester, NY, Thibault will soon move to Providence, RI.

Sandra Simonds is a Phd student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her poems have been published in the Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Barrow Street, e, Castagraf, Cannibal, California Quarterly, Ampersand, 3am and others. She edits Wildlife Poetry Magazine.

Maureen Thorson lives in Washington, D.C., where she is sometimes a lawyer. Her work has appeared in numerous tiny chapbooks, some magazines, and often in her head. She is editor, publisher, and janitor of Big Game Books, the smallest press in the world.

HELP

Hi.

I need to get in touch with these poets:

Erin Martin
Kenneth Harrison
Peter Milne
Craig Blais
Megan Mercado
Ash Smith


Please help. Email: adam (AT) adamclay.org

Best of Net Nominess 2006

Aase Berg (trans. Johannes Göransson)
from Uppland

Anne Boyer
“A Romance of Happy Workers”

Sabrina Orah Mark
“Beatrice Takes a Lover”

Karyna McGlynn
”Would You Like Me to Walk Your Baby?”

Amanda Nadelberg
“Pancrazio”

Henry Parland (trans. Johannes Göransson)
from Socks

Fall Line Up

Always Free!

The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
Fridays, 7:30 PM

August 18th______Jenna Cardinale, Michelle Detorie, & Arlo Quint
September 15th___Thibault Raoult, Sandra Simonds, & Maureen Thorson
September 22nd___Jane Gregory, Frank Sherlock, & Jake Adam York
September 29th___Dan Hoy, Justin Marks, & Chris Salerno
October 20th_____Lee Ann Brown, Joanna Fuhrman, & Erica Kaufman
November 17th ___Julia Cohen, Mark Lamoureaux, & Africa Wayne

The Fall Cafe
Sundays, 6PM

August 27th _____Reneé Ashley & Shanxing Wang
October 29th ____Kazim Ali, Bruce Covey, & Juliet Patterson

Pierogi Gallery
177 North 9th Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Saturdays, 8PM

September 23rd __Alex Lemon & Brenda Shaughnessy
October 21st ____Adam Clay & Kate Greenstreet

The Burning Chair cordially invites you to once again

Come On Get Happy!

w/
Jenna Cardinale, Michelle Detorie, & Arlo Quint

@
The Fall Café
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & Smith
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

on
Friday, August 18th
730 PM

It’ll be like we never took a vacation.
Keep an eye out, because the entire fall line up is coming soon.

Jenna Cardinale is the author of Journals (Whole Coconut, 2006). Her poems appear in recent or forthcoming issues of nthposition, Cannibal, Court Green and eratio, among others. She teaches poetry writing at Lehman College and Explorations Academy, an experimental public high school in the Bronx.

Michelle Detorie lives in Kyle, TX where she is the writer-in-residence at the Katherine Anne Porter house. Her poems have appeared in Chelsea, Verse Daily, Typo, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.

Arlo Quint is author of Days on End from Open 24 Hours press. Some of his poems have recently appeared in The Recluse and others are forthcoming in Cannibal. He lives in Brooklyn.

An open letter to Amanda Nadelberg from Andrea Baker

Re: Isa the Truck Named Isadore (Slope Editions, 2006)


Dear Amanda,

If I had your cell phone
Number I would call and tell you
How lovely your book and reading were
But actually I’m shy and would not call but
I like to think that I would and I would like to write
A review and say how good your book is which I purchased last night at
Your reading here in Brooklyn hosted by the Burning Chair Series but I don’t know if it’s
Ethical to write a review when we share a press. And I was interested in your work for a while
But when I heard you read that poem about the Fifle in American Tale and
Jews and many other poems which were very very good and so refreshing because they were
Happy and sort of hip but chipper and underscored by goodness, I brought your book home and read it this morning-
It is making me feel so good. Frank O’hara was one of the first poets I felt attached to
I loved that poem Why I Am Not a Painter when I was in high school
But I can’t really get into him anymore though I would like to but
The Frank O’hara-ness of your poems I can get into though they are Midwestern and not
At all New York
I like them so much. So thank you. Also
People should buy your book because the poems are good and fun
Individually but really super-good and super-fun when read all-together.

Roses From,
Andrea

Anne Boyer & The Pines Sunday, June 25th

The Burning Chair Readings
want you to

get auricular
w/

Anne Boyer
&
The Pines (Phil Cordelli & Brandon Shimoda)

Sunday, June 25th, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

Always, always free.

Our last reading of the season!

Contact Matthew Henriksen
917-478-5682
matt at typomag dot come


Anne Boyer was born in Kansas in 1973. She grew up in Salina, a small city in the very enter of the country, just south of the World's Largest Ball of Twine. A life-long Midwesterner, she earned degrees at Kansas State University and Wichita State University, lived for a time in Kansas City, Missouri, and now lives in central Iowa where she raises her daughter and teaches creative writing at Drake University. Her poetry and prose can be found in a variety of journals, including Typo, Cannibal, The Denver Quarterly, The Canary, and Lit. Her first book is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

Phil Cordelli and Brandon Shimoda have been collaborating on various projects since the early 1990s. Their collaborative writing has appeared under the name “The Pines” in such journals as POOL, BlazeVOX, Cannibal, and elsewhere, as well as in the ongoing book series, The Pines. Volume One: Southern California and Volume Two: Ridgefield Connecticut, were both released in 2005, with Volume Three: The Knights of Columbus following in March of 2006. Together and apart they have lived and worked in Acadia National Park, Albany, Asheville, Boston, Bronxville, Brooklyn, Capay, Chatsworth, Cottage Grove, Hopkins Village, Jersey City, Mount Vernon, Oaxaca, Overijse, Pacifica, Pleasantville, Point Arena, Ridgefield, Saratoga Springs, Studio City, Troy, Woodfin, and Yonkers, and help to edit CutBank, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Octopus Magazine. They currently live in Manhattan and Missoula, and at thepines.blogspot.com, respectively.

Harvey, Kunin & Shippy: Sunday, May 28th

There is no shaming in hearing

Matthea Harvey, Aaron Kunin & Peter Jay Shippy

Sunday, May 28th, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

The Burning Chair Blog: www:typomag.com/burningchair
Contact: Matthew Henriksen at matt at typomag dot com


Author Bios

Matthea Harvey’s books include Sad Little Breathing Machine (Greywolf Press) and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books). She serves as poetry editor of American Letters and Commentary.

Aaron Kunin is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books), a collection of small poems about shame; a novel, The Mandarin, is forthcoming in 2007. His work has appeared in The Germ, No: A Journal of the Arts, The Poker, and elsewhere. He recently moved to California, where he is an assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Peter Jay Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books will publish Alphaville, an abecedarian suite, as an e-book in 2006. About Thieves' Latin, Bin Ramke, editor of the Denver Quarterly wrote, "Shippy's strange little machines of words are all kinetic, disturbing, and weirdly graceful, unlike anything else available in American poetry. A dazzling book." Claudia Keelan called it, "... a surrealist elegy for the earth... a fierce accomplishment." His work has been published in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Fence, FIELD, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Ploughshares, among others. Shippy has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches at Emerson College and lives with his wife in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Harvey, Kunin & Shippy in NYC Sunday, May 28th

There is no shaming in hearing

Matthea Harvey, Aaron Kunin & Peter Jay Shippy

Sunday, May 28th, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

The Burning Chair Blog: www:typomag.com/burningchair
Contact: Matthew Henriksen at matt@typomag.com


Author Bios

Matthea Harvey's books include Sad Little Breathing Machine (Greywolf Press)
and Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (Alice James Books).
She serves as poetry editor of American Letters and Commentary.

Aaron Kunin is the author of Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books), a collection of
small poems about shame; a novel, The Mandarin, is forthcoming in 2007. His
work has appeared in The Germ, No: A Journal of the Arts, The Poker, and
elsewhere. He recently moved to California, where he is an assistant professor
of negative anthropology at Pomona College.

Peter Jay Shippy's first book, Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press) won the
2002 Iowa Poetry Prize. BlazeVOX Books will publish Alphaville, an abecedarian
suite, as an e-book in 2006. About Thieves' Latin, Bin Ramke, editor of the
Denver Quarterly wrote, "Shippy's strange little machines of words are all
kinetic, disturbing, and weirdly graceful, unlike anything else available in
American poetry. A dazzling book." Claudia Keelan called it, "... a surrealist
elegy for the earth... a fierce accomplishment." His work has been published
in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Fence, FIELD, The
Iowa Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency and Ploughshares, among others.
Shippy has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural
Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude
Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches at Emerson College and lives with
his wife in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Edmund Berrigan & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Come and get your heart broken
by

Edmund Berrigan & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Sunday, May 21st, 4PM
The Cloister Café
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

Please post this on yr bolg:

Anna Moschovakis is a genius.

5.12.06 ~ Moschovakis & Squillante ~ Carroll Gardens

Hear the ears of

Anna Moschovakis & Sheila Squillante


Friday, May 12th, 7:30 PM
The Fall Cafe
307 Smith Street
btwn. Union & President
F/G to Carrool Street

FREE FUN GOOD PLACE SWEET PEOPLE

Sheila in Typo 5: http://typomag.com/issue05/squillante.html
Anna in Octopus 7: http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue07/html/main.html


Contact: matt at typomag dot com or 917.478.5682

Found In Nature by Jen Tynes
horse less press 2004

In her debut book of poems, Jen Tynes summons a new structure of space and time with autonomous means: a phenomenology of tongues born from the “bare bones and thin-skinned” horse less press she co-founded herself. To enter these new and charged spaces demands surrender, a willingness to be spoken into by multiplicities; a desire to be aimed at, fired upon, breached. These poems deal a healthy crushing blow to poetry that is safe; poetry that assumes everything in this world simply corresponds. Tynes explores with scrutinizing acuity the ontological consequences for abandoning the thick skins of meaning associated with [language].

The book itself is simply constructed with hand cut pages and securely bound with red string. One should be careful not to lump the appearance of its form with the demands of immediacy. Wise things are simple; some are even bound in red string. Comprised of one poem per page in the form of paragraphs, one is elegantly vaulted into a quotidian landscape where hope is a leaky bucket, memories break the same way twigs do, and (un) certainties are always fluid. First assault:

that the photo represents our face

The complexity of the image traditionally takes precedence in all referential frames (even math needs objects to manifest itself. Nature?) However, where our beehives of meaning yield consolation, Tynes puts a dress on meaning and demands it to dance. The photograph could in fact be the image of a face, but a face is never a face. Very wise indeed.

Memory in these poems is pliable and may change momentum or direction at any moment. Perhaps this is one axiom one may lean on for a moment. Consider the randomization of experience when reading a poet that offers not only appetizers and dinner, but also a chance for you to eat you own heart for dessert. The subsequent motions of language uttering contradictions, tautologies, even truth!-are enough to send one spinning in syntactical ecstasy. Until you read that

Sometimes there is no choice, the rest of your life vibrating out of some hole.

Perhaps you shouldn’t lean on that axiom after all.

That which is, which is somehow lost in the stringent technical codes of our language is revealed in Tynes’ poems; these traversings, motions, splicings; these meanings. There are subtle gestures of reconciliation entwined in the strata crumbling before you face. Healing finds a voice in the violent sentence. Much is still hidden in the resonances here. (Yes, I am writing from there.) Like a forest, it is safe to call this multiplicity of her pen a Nature in of itself. This is a safe, predictable, and justifiable enterprise. An enterprise built on the de-centered experience. But this not the case. She does not allow us a calculus for feeling. If I tell you how these poems make me feel, that would be cheating. Or, how do you remember a dangerous flower? Remember: the finality of each poem is a continuation. In the poem there are many mansions. Consider how:

There are methods of strangulation.
Or its nearest subtitle: strange me, strange me now.

It is my suspicion that big things move underground (small presses in the shapes of horses included). Epistemology functions this way. Movements are slow, but every now an then we are reminded of its presence. Suddenly, the earth opens up and swallows a few people. These poems were forged there. De profundis. Do not expect short-term rewards for reading these poems. If you listen, they will haunt you. They will kick you, bite you, perhaps love you. They have already begun to strike at al you hold dear. If you are lucky, the earth may swallow you.




                                                    --Review by John Mulligan.

Jen Tynes. The End of Rude Handles. Red Morning Press: 2006. $12.

This Is (Never) The End


It is common knowledge that a magician, having beguiled her audience, must never produce her secrets to even the most imploring ear, even when prodded, the lucky recipient of squalid apples tossed on stage. Should she let slip her magic potion, her recipe of fashioning, her scrolled map in cipher, our magician risks mockery, or better yet, imitation of the closest degree. Jen Tynes come dangerously close, in the final pages of The End Of Rude Handles, her debut collection of poems from the newly engendered Red Morning Press. But dangerously close is not giving in, and Tynes lingers on the edge for a reason, to sustain her craze with language and its ever pushing limits. The book’s closing section cum prosaic poem cum guidebook colophon is perhaps the collection’s finest feature. In it, Tynes writes:


       I’m still new blood and I can’t tell you what I’d do in your
       shoes, but I’m trying here to manage two things: always maintain a con-
       stant and a variable, make them both get up and walk around sometimes.
       Want to have a difficult conversation with someone, ask them what they
       mean when they say traitor.


This section, ‘Ways of Contrariness’, acts as a sort of summary and explanatory note to the poems in the rest of the book. This is an odd choice, though, this explaining, since ‘Ways of Contrariness’ is perhaps the book’s most syntactically lucid ‘poem’, while the rest of the book is anything but. ‘Ways of Contrariness’ peels back the curtain on the poet’s philosophy and approach in piecing together the book, and it comments, if obscurely, on the contrariness and cryptic nature of the book’s other pages. The End Of Rude Handles is a brazen collection, progressive in its syntax and form. The very way it presents itself as a book both enacts and possibly shadows its very premise, that language is one tough cookie, and a bottomless cavern of variety. Tynes presents her readers with interactions and meditations on family, on love(r(s)), on the constant combat between and coalescing of power and vulnerability, risk and safe seclusion. And this all against a rural landscape of back yards and unending fields.

Don’t magicians, artists, and writers alike all place their work close to, if not directly upon, the apex of their passions? Here, the poet, along with Foucault and Butler, finds chronic interest, even, at times, obsession, in and of language, its scaffolding and its fleshy parts. In a poem titled fittingly ‘THE END OF RUDE HANDLES’, the poet writes ‘Your hands make / jars everywhere.’, implying that, although meaning is embedded in words (i.e. woman meaning literally ‘of man’), sometimes words mean more than they let on, as in the above reference. The End Of Rude Handles aims to do away with the handholds we think we have on language, and likewise the grip language undeniably has on us.

Tynes seems to simultaneously be in love with and abhor the very wordstuff our world—terrestrial and ethereal—comprises. At first, Tynes comes off as just another Post-Modern voice, pinning words to the page in seemly erratic fashion, all pattern and form gone missing, and thus all sense gone too. She seems to toy with language repeatedly, and baits her readers just so. But simply dismissing Tynes as another Post-Modern oddity wrongly one-ups her otherwise roundabout end—that one cannot, despite all effort, talk about language without first drawing a line where it no longer speaks of itself, but circumnavigates itself. From the page en face to ‘WHO HAS BEEN DEAF FROM BIRTH’:

                    A continuous economic pressure is between my
       skin and yours,

                                               switches its tail.



While, at times, and mostly, the poet’s use of italics and all caps proves useful and uniquely sundry:

     Pushed a chair away from the table



                                                            Democratic

                                         Victory


and

ARTICLES MADE
FROM BARK                    AND SEEDS



                                                            GOUGES AND OTHER



IMPLEMENTS SUPPLEMENT
MY HANDS


                                                                                         AROUND DINNER’S NECK BUT NOT WITHOUT







A SENSE OF HISTORY







                                                                                         WHEN YOU CALL IT DOES IT




       DROP ITS EYES


ultimately this system tires because it is so random and may or may not be a system at all. Some poems have titles, while others don’t; some poems are titled in all caps, while others aren’t. The pattern is not an easy one to follow, and my guess is Tynes knows this, and respects and feels endeared to it for this very reason. In ‘Ways of Contrariness’, she tells her readers:

                                                                                                                                                  I
      hear that some families pass their patterns down by writing them in code
      that outsiders can’t decipher. Meaning: first item on the to-do list of any
      quilter’s legacy: learn the code.

      I don’t write the way people talk; my intention is to make conversation,
            to
      make it over and over again until it figures out, fills out, shows itself.

      [. . .]

       All the italics are mine.

      [. . .]

                                                                                                            I’m partial to stealing
      the heavy, charged parts of things that wouldn’t walk off by themselves.

Tynes knows well what she’s doing, and likely that The End Of Rude Handles requires some additional work from the reader, in a way the reader may not want to dispense his or her energy. It’s not the content and message of Tynes’s poems that becomes taxing and, at times, distracting; there the book lacks nothing of ingenuity or anything novel to say. The back and forth slingshot of Tynes’s method left me wading in her wake, bobbing and groping for a handhold, though not entirely bothered by the sway.

Lines like ‘Caught in the / act of emphasizing.’, from a weighty, imagistic poem describing a pant leg soaked through with monthly blood, ‘Women as waterproof / as pails, men / as waterproof as water.’, ‘WE ADOPTED / THE INSPIRING PRINCIPLE’, and ‘No one traveling / through the country / eats at the side of the road.’, and I’ve again secured my balance, brushed my hair from my eyes, resolved to unlock this book in my hands and get to the marrow of it.

The poet’s diction and her syntax might befuddle readers, but it’s her fearless facing and exploration of life’s scarier corners that holds interest. Jen Tynes’s book sides with a version of poetry that implores readers to do more than just read. The End Of Rude Handles is a dictionary, a phone call, a bus conversation, doing back flips repeatedly. Like a ruddy wise old orangutan hanging from your kitchen light fixture, Tynes has something really good to say, if only you can decipher her.






                                                    --Review by Erin M. Bertram.

It's a Two Reading Weekend, Folks

Slope Editions: Matt Hart & Amanda Nadelberg
Friday, April 28th, 8PM
Pierogi Gallery
177 North 9th Street
Between Bedford & Driggs
L to Bedford
Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Timothy Donnelly, Sarah Manguso, & Eugene Ostashevsky
Sunday, April 30th, 4PM
238 East 9th Street
Between 2nd & 3rd Avenues
East Village, NYC

Matt Rasmussen. FINGERGUN. Kitchen Press: 2006. $5.


“Suddenly and Suddenly”: All Those Important Moments—


The delicate compression of Rasmussen’s narrative & clear-headed voice in FINGERGUN carefully & discretely amp up the emotional power of these lyrics. Here there are moments considered, juxtaposed, and then held up “against a future/that never arrives.” Rasmussen locates the power of his work

In the moment between
what happens
and what doesn’t […]

(“Suddenly, the Poem Is”)

Figuring out how this poetry works is the key to its heart, really, which is deep & complex. The work throughout this sharply designed book demonstrates a range of earnest sentiment presented as a plea. These things happened & are crucial but they just as easily could not have happened & what would have happened in place of that happening would be just as crucial. Each poem is, then, a kind of question: does what I’m feeling make sense to you? Is it ok to feel this way? Is there something else I’m missing?
“Please read this and tell me/how much it moved you” (“Titled”) is both a central question for the speaker & an ultimately unimportant one. It’s as if the sensibility here needs support & an acknowledgement of human-ness. But it is that moment of bare & open address that resonates, that purely hopeful need for connection.
A poem like “Dream after Suicide” is a good example of the shifting registers in these poems, a kind of scenic estrangement shackled to this plain spoken emotional depth. Here, the speaker deals with the image of his brother “in the refrigerator light/drinking milk that poured/out of his head.” Such a jarring juxtaposition forces the reader to reconcile the quotidian nature of the scene with the shockingly macabre figure of the brother. Except the moment is decidedly not macabre or sensational, or even especially pitiable. It’s all presented in a matter of fact tone, a diction that is equally suited for dealing with the apparition of the brother as it is the weekend sports scores. The main concern here is connection:

I wanted to put my finger
into the hole,

feel the smooth channel
he escaped through[…]
These poems show that the future never arrives because it is always becoming the present, something we can’t consider & prepare for but must live & live through.




                                                    --Review by Nate Pritts.

Chris Tonelli. Wide Tree. Kitchen Press: 2006. $5.

What seems to be the fabric that weaves itself through, and holds together Chris Tonelli’s collection of short poems, Wide Tree, quickly wears thin in subsequent reads. Most of these poems work like jokes that turn on us in the last line. They are punchy and intelligent, juvenile and unapologetic. They bravely toe that line between profoundness and shameful failure. His poem, "Think Outside the Box", for example, reads (in its entirety):

                Think inside the butthole.

But these poems only wear thin in subsequent reads because they can be read so quickly and unabashedly at first, it causes burn-out. Tonelli manages to sell these brave little poems well (he somehow writes them with a straight face) so the reader has no choice but to let go and think inside the butthole. And they work. They are funny, and oddly enough, thought-provoking. But when the reader returns to these poems, he or she must look for something new, or else the poems will fall flat and have nothing left to give.

Luckily, most of Tonelli’s poems reach through the strange humor and tug at heart-strings, evoke emotion beyond peculiarity. His best poems ("At a Theater Urinal," "Public Garden", "Nearing Summer") do this with ease and manage to create a pining (for a place in life, for guidance, for woman). In "Marxist Poem w/ Rodent," Tonelli pines for a place in life:

                When I was in NYC,
                I made a pact w/ the
                rats. I will help you
                take over, I said, if
                when you gain control
                you give me a job.

And in the very next poem, "Funeral Eve," he toasts his newly dead family with Manhattans "because I’m one step/closer now to being/king of nothing." There is nothing funny about the turn at the end of this poem. It is brief and poignant. It uses the same tools as the poems that make us laugh, which allows a sad punch-line to be all the more painful.

"Night Terror" evokes a similar emotion while pining for woman. Although Tonelli’s intentions here are likely to only drop a good Benny Goodman-esque one-liner on us, he perhaps inadvertently manages to plant a seed of emotion for later in the book, when he dims the lights and gets more serious with us:

                I had a dream that
                the train seemed
                important in passing,
                something charged.
                And I felt as if I was
                easily going to have
                sex w/ somebody
                on that train. But, as
                usual, it was someone
                on the train before.

This poem is within a group of poems that, together, holds up more thematically than emotionally. The first five poems occur on trains or have trains in them. With these, a setting was created, a metaphor that we could climb aboard. But after these five, Tonelli forgets about trains and replaces them with trees. It is at the beginning when the book reads most cohesively. The train is the same train, but the trees that replace it are very different from one another.

There are a few poems that do not belong here: "Dabbler", and the two poems titled "Poem." These three poems are absent of any thematic or emotional connection to any of the other poems. "Dabbler" is one of the poems that leans too far toward shameful failure (but it is exceptionally difficult to make a penis work well in any poem, particularly one called "Dabbler"). Also, "For Robert Creeley." Halfway down the page, it reads (in its entirety):

                I’m flying
                my poem at
                half-mast

It is not because Creeley is somehow above poems with farts and penises in them, he’s not. But Tonelli’s poems still work as jokes, regardless of how successful they are at evoking emotion. So, we’ve been falsely instructed to read the Creeley poem ironically, when it is my guess that Tonelli wants us to read it without irony (unless he is far braver than I think). The only thing holding this poem within the collection is the fact that it is very short. And brevity is not the most significant qualifier for these poems. The rest of the poems in Wide Tree are way too strong for that.


                                                    --Review by Zachary Schomburg.

Friday, April 7th ~ Howe 'n' Peet ~ The Fall Cafe

Get yrself rocked!
w/ The Burning Chair

featuring
two true rockers

Brian Howe
’n’
Christian Peet

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

Questions: Call Matt (not The Fall Café) @ 917.478.5682 or email matt @ typomag dot com
Note: Please respect our free space at The Fall Café by not bringing in outside food or drink.

Brian Howe is a writer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he carouses with the Lucifer Poetics Group. He writes about music for Pitchforkmedia.com and Paste Magazine, and his poems have appeared in various journals he's too much of a gentleman to mention by name. He's sitting on a nearly complete manuscript called F7, portions of which will appear as a chapbook called Beta Test, forthcoming from Atlanta's 3rdness Press in early 2007.

Christian Peet's chapbook, The Nines, will be published by Palm Press (www.palmpress.org) in Spring 2006. His poetry and prose appears in Bird Dog, Drunken Boat, Fence, Octopus, Parakeet, Pom2, SleepingFish, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and other great independent journals. He teaches Poetry and Creative Writing classes at Brooklyn College and at Hunter College, CUNY, and edits Tarpaulin Sky (www.tarpaulinsky.com).