Poetry. SPEED OF LIFE is a collection with a socio-political voice, including To Remain, about which Denise Levertov said the poem drives its terrible knowledge deep into our minds and hearts with hammer blows of factual repetition. The transcendence of its concluding metaphor stands firm on that unshakable foundation. And Eavan Boland comments This is a book that never swerves from its purposes and never allows the reader to. These poems are at the harsh center of things - in the urban sprawl, in the crucible of action, on the scene of the crime. The marvel is that the poet never forgets the obligations and enchantments of language, while always remembering its ethics. These are strong, memorable and also compelling poems. Edward Kleinschmidt Mayes's is the author of MAGNETISM and FIRST LANGUAGE (Juniper Prize). His poetry manuscript, WORKS AND DAYS, won the 1998 Associated Writing Programs Award and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in October.

Speed of Life

Literature & Fiction

Mayes, Edward Kleinschmidt

Poetry

Apogee Press

Poetry. In PLACING THE ACCENTS, Truong Tran makes a poetry at once gestural and minimal, sparse and rich, of my father's broken english and my vietnamese tongue/discarded resewn. As much as this book is concerned with the powers and failures of language, with the complications of negotiating a cultural netherworld born somewhere between rural Vietnam and urban America, it is also the ancient story of lost innocence and childhood, of a boy and his father, each struggling to find a true home, a true family, a true nation --Gillian Conoley. Truong Tran's wonderful book -- his poems are very much of-a-piece -- is brilliant, disarmingly honest, and deeply insightful. He has performed the marvelous: he has given us a world -- Sam Hamill.

Placing the Accents

Tran, Truong

Poetry. Cole Swensen, in this elegant suite, seems to slide a blade through the operatic repertory, not exactly a knife, more like a corkscrew, spiraling from one unpredictable scene to another. Her pitch is perfect, her tempo uncanny -- Keith Waldrop. Cole Swensen's PARK and NOON are also available from SPD.

Swensen, Cole

Poetry. This is the first full-length collection by Pattie McCarthy who co-founded and edits BeautifulSwimmer Press. "Playing inventive variations on the medieval book of hours, this marvelous collection swarms with vividly open language that suddenly gathers to moments of startling clarity. This is simply a gorgeous book --Cole Swensen. "Pattie McCarthy commands attention for her elegant sensibility, her intellectual acuity, and her discerning creation of a poetic language adequate to the complex pressures and insights she meticulously illuminates" --Rachel Blau DuPlessis. McCarthy's chapbook CHORAGUS is also available from SPD.

Bk of (H)rs

McCarthy, Pattie

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Truong Tran's work seems to me to be part of a literary undertaking that has both sociological and aesthetic implications. Along with writers like Pamela Lu and Renee Gladman, Tran is advancing the interrelated questions of narration, historiography, and identity and establishing something new in American culture as well as in American literature, DUST AND CONSCIENCE speaks of a cultural position that simultaneously and from the start resists both marginalization and assimilation. The refusal to be displaced or to be incorporated is at the heart of the genre-bending evident in the work—it explains why the writing is, and must be, simultaneously prose and poetry, story and lyric. Something extremely important is going on, something wonderful."—Lyn Hejinian

Dust and Conscience

History & Criticism

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Dhompa's potent suite of poems elucidates the humanness and adversities of the Tibetan diaspora. You enter the immigrant girl-child's bifurcated world, coming and going, language to language, culture to culture, from childhood to sexuality. A lovely explication of 'dharma—things as they are, and how precious they are, no special pleading—Anne Waldman.

Rules of the House

Dhompa, Tsering

Poetry. "Loosely based on Japanese tourist manuals from the 1930s, these minimalistdistillations are flavored with an ambient exoticism that never quite adds up to any realplace on the map; instead, they create one on the page, rooted in tight sounds andstartling juxtapositions. 'Tiny altars/salt and pepper'-- Coulton's ear and eye are deft at picking out the other within us and dazzling us with its flares" --Cole Swensen. "In passing world pictures, ephemeral images float across the horizon we know as poetry.Bridging culture and time, these poems cast a fresh and subtle light" --Elizabeth Robinson.

Passing World Pictures

Coulton, Valerie

Poetry. "GORGEOUS MORNING is an ingenious book-length prose poem sequence with one-word titles such as 'Attend,' 'Dread,' and 'Glean.' Each poem gathers a constellation of sentences phonetically or thematically suggested by that word. The method is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's 'recreation of the word' in 'Tender Buttons,' but with a richness of allusion that gives us back the world with restored freshness and attention. Alice Jones reminds us that poetry is a precise means of uncertainty, through which we renew experience without the willful attempt to clarify it. The playfulness and 'give' of the work is a great pleasure" -Paul Hoover.

Gorgeous Mourning

Jones, Alice

Poetry. "EDGE AND FOLD comes in short couplets that have the pith of aphorisms, but dismantle any expectation of closure. They push thinking over the edge into the folds of all minds. In this amazing plural space (tenuously tethered to the white of the page) subtle discriminating intelligences unfold lyric intensity into question, wonder, mystery. EDGE AND FOLD confirms Paul Hoover as one of our important poets"--Rosmarie Waldrop.

Edge and Fold

Hoover, Paul

Poetry. "DISCRETE CATEGORIES FORCED INTO COUPLING is consummate masterwork by a singuarly perceptive and articulate poet. Deceptively quiet in manner, its intimate foci and tone make clear the ground of our contemporary lives, our 'being together' despite the distances of isolating thought. I love Kathleen Fraser's extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too"—Robert Creeley. "Here is a language of poetry that recognizes, beyond its intimacies, the intellectual and elusively sensate aspects of visual and literary aesthetic connection"—Carla Harryman.

Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling

FRASER, Kathleen

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Apogee Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Apogee Press