Poetry. In the de-stabilized intersection of fashion, the war on terror, and cultural constructions of the feminine, GAZE explores the resulting tensions in a series of dichotomies central to an increasingly isolate and adversarial condition: Christianity/Islam, ancient/modern, sacred/secular, sexuality/spirituality, feminism/fundamentalism, power/resistance, self/other. Rikki Ducornet says this about these intersections in GAZE: "In these moments the world is given breath, heat, and voice. All at once it approaches, and the beloved's unfettered body is revealed as the antidote to tyranny." What we see and what we fail to see are constantly juxtaposed, exposing a flawed desire to "become." Kate Bernheimer says of GAZE, "'Too beautiful to articulate'--dressed, undressed, terrorized, and entrancing. These unveilings, these poems, how they haunt me. Riding Angela Carter on a poetry-horse, Reed hallucinates language with certain and dissolving rhythm. GAZE at them; go blind inside this mentalist's mind. Marthe Reed is unrelenting, unrelentingly kind."

Gaze

Literature & Fiction

Reed, Marthe

Poetry

Black Radish Books

Poetry. "Lamoureux's disturbing and often distinctly American landscapes explore the interface between fantasy and fatalism, magic and machine. In the tradition of Duncan and Spicer, he is a metaphysical poet for our times, when even 'the cheerleader's dreams are sinister' and 'what was once all Wagner is now/ all Duran Duran.' What a pleasure to sift through baroque layers of ornament and debris with a poet of such keen and precise intelligence--one who in dark times 'carries a dark lamp'"--Elaine Equi. "Populated with broke down carnival contraptions, abandoned amusement park rides, darkly oozing shell casings, and haunted noggins, the strangeland of SPECTRE is glazed with icy artifice in the form of twisted architectures, mutant effigies, and the creep of strange glaciers inside warped snow-dome brains.... This collection offers up a chilling calendar of sorts, each box a curio slot of new days 'like the old days, only creepier, less goddamn real'"--Juliet Cook.

Spectre

Lamoureux, Mark

Poetry. Joan Retallack writes that OCCULTATIONS enacts the "courage of paradoxical evocation." For David Buuck, such evocation helps us consider that "the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the 'surveillance-industrial complex' but also to the limitations of language's ability to fully articulate 'what work this dying is.'" In (un)mapping its state of accelerated becoming, this (collective) body asks whether it can, through radical re-narration of its (re)constitution by neo-liberal capitalism and militarism, allegorize the wider catastrophic affects these logic-systems have on an ecosystem. "Is it possible," asks Laura Elrick, "to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d?" As place, the occulted recursively struggles to perform exploratory surgery on normative valuations of its capacities, on what is taken to be possible and what is not.

Occultations

Wolach, David

Poetry. "I don't know another poet so formally daring. Rebellious curlicue and lace significant: the pages gleam with pleasure, finesse and audacious measure of human becoming. A consideration of feminine inheritance, rebirth paroled by langue, a her(o)'s journey as decadently articulated as sea-froth. Find it too pretty at your peril—you'll get pricked by the fine point on this punning"—Catherine Wagner.

Herso

Gardner, Susana

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Art. "'I love words—to me writing is drawing.' So says artist Sonja Sekula. And so it is in her hands in Kathrin Schaeppi's hands in this book in your hands. Schaeppi makes words into shapes into painting into ambiguated memoir—who is speaking?—of artist on artist. There is true pain here; attempts at survival. And there is art. This book can be read through the lens of gender: Sekula was a persecuted lesbian, an under-acknowledged female artist among the big boys. Can be read through the lens of madness. Through ekphrasis. Perhaps even through the glass of the empathic. Ultimately, though, what we have here is, well, yes, it is the presence of grace"—Cara Benson.

Sonja Sekula : Grace in a cow's EYE : a memoir

Schaeppi, Kathrin

Poetry. "In THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS, James Maughn continues his uncompromising engagement with the catechisms of martial kata and their intersection with the forms of writing. Delving deeper into the heart of his own poems, he engages the particularities of technical application—of timing and distance—that comprise his own poetic waza, or practice. By disclosing the textures and subtleties of language, even to the level of the syllable, Maughn illuminates the architecture of meaning. The result is a collection of remarkable poems that discover a boundless freedom within the structure of form. Through self imitation he has subjugated self-consciousness and achieved that most difficult of artistic feats: the revelation of a true self"—Joshua McKinney.

The Arakaki Permutations

Maughn, James

Poetry. In the age of data mining and identity theft, Dana Teen Lomax's DISCLOSURE has been called "the new memoir." Recently anthologized in Against Expression: An Anthology of Cultural Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2011), this work offers a critical interrogation of 21st century American society that will challenge and amuse. Compose solely of the found documents of everyday life, DISCLOSURE is documentary poetics as never seen before.

Disclosure

Lomax, Dana

Poetry. Composed from source text randomly selected from On the Origin of the Species and the Old Testament, INFINITE VARIATIONS seeks to puncture the political in exploring and re-imagining these seminal texts. Splicing cell structure with the numinous, it careens, stutters, and reinvents."Using phrasing and vocabulary from the Old Testament and Darwin's On the Origin of the Species as her raw material, Nelligan creates startlingly fresh structures, contemporary in their vigorous parataxis and suspension of normative logic, timeless in their explorations of origin and, ultimately, of being. But above all, there's a marvelous mix of delight and gravity in the way she wields these words, letting sound and association create bridges across epochs and disciplines. An extremely promising first book, at once intimate and immense, luminous and lively."—Cole Swensen"INFINITE VARIATIONS takes two loaded and locked works—On the Origin of the Species and the Old Testament—and uses them in allegiance to an exploration of desire. Each word is, thus, resonant, full of debate. It is a defense of evolution's role in love and about a love of evolution's variations. Throughout it is provocative in its simplicity, luminous in its word play."—Juliana Spahr

Infinite Variations

Nelligan, Marci

Poetry. "I understand Jared Hayes is conducting here a deep spelunking into connected caverns of other texts. What I don't yet quite grasp is how he's articulated all the ropes, quickdraws, carabiners, hexes, cams, and sundry poetical devices to work in such syntactically spectacular ways. 'I root up (I have brought them) landinwards, hither (I will make them resound here.)' And that's just at the first drop, barely in, still fathoms to go.... Well, some people have the ambition and guts and others just watch. I could say 'tour de force' from my spectator chair, but that wouldn't really do. So I'll say, as a first handle on it, that THE DEAD LOVE joins the masterpieces of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, and Ronald Johnson as one of the most exhilarating 'citational' explorations ever made in American poetry."—Kent Johnson

The Dead Love: Hands and More Hands Together

Hayes, Jared

Poetry. "In this collection of short poems, some only a few words, Jill Stengel has written a large book in psychological scope and emotional depth. These brief letters express thoughts, feelings and moods that come and go, repeating themselves, while no two are the same in their contexts, like days in a person's life. Reading, I found myself feeling lighter, the weight of embodiment shifted by Jill, the writer's, capacity to engage with the endlessness of ambiguity and paradox, desire and seeking."—Patricia Dienstfrey

Dear Jack

Stengel, Jill

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