A funeral in Brooklyn begins a chain of unpredictable, hallucinatory events. "It wasn't the influence of drugs. I wasn't some bumpkin who could be deranged by a little acid in my coffee . . . . This was different -- a chance to actually live a life I knew would be different every day, forever, until the end of time. Every day in itself could be the end of all previously recorded time."

Bhang,

Literature & Fiction

Ted Pelton

Poetry

BlazeVOX Books

In 1955, Charles Olson wrote two letters to the young poet Ed Dorn, later revised as A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn. I read this compilation in the late 1960s. At one point, Olson argued: PRIMARY DOCUMENTS. And to hook on here is a lifetime of assiduity. Best thing to do is to dig one thing or place or man until you yourself know more abt that than is possible to any other man. It doesn?t matter whether it?s Barbed Wire or Pemmican or Paterson or Iowa. But exhaust it. Saturate it. Beat it. And then U KNOW everything else very fast: one saturation job (it might take 14 years). And you?re in, forever. His admonition is to Dorn as a novice, and rings with a certainty that I can only partially share. But it planted a seed in me for the writing of this book. My aim is not to know more than ?is possible to any other man,? but to make use of a pluralistic approach that may result in a fuller ?reading? of comic book imaginations might yield. I don?t want to engage the comics in an ahistorical void or to strip mine them for ?poetic? materials. Among other things, I want to incorporate their imagery into poetry as a primary antecedent dimension, in effect opening a trap door in poetry?s floor onto these unbounded but evocative gestures. As a poet?s book, Superman is an attempt to reclaim the poem merged with drawing of Blake and the phanopoeia of Pound as imagistic-mythical memory in which early intimations of what we call ?muse? may be experienced. Poetry itself is questioned throughout this book: how can one make use of its strategies to engage materials that have no historical significance or penetrating language?

Dreadful Quietude: A confused saturation of Pre 9/11 America & Supermen

Gatza, Geoffrey

History & Criticism

Circular Descent

Bianchi, Raymond L.

Quinn, a sculptor literally and figuratively at the end of his rope, flees New York City for a capeside artists' colony. Fixated by trash, and reading Woolf's The Waves, Quinn trawls the streets and beaches of the little fishing village, tentatively exploring his relationship to the place, his art, his new friends, and himself. Moods of weather and landscape suffuse this sparely written tale that, like sunlight that pierces storm-clouds, illuminates exactly how much is at stake in Quinn's haunting search for the sublime.

Quinn's Passage

Ali, Kazim

Contemporary

Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets by Kent Johnson

Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets

Johnson, Kent

To Be Sung

Kelleher, Michael

Poetry. Flarf. This is the author's second book of poems, after ROUGE STATE. "Rodney Koeneke's quick-paced, often hilarious, often vulgar juxtapositions are rude to understanding but courteous as a calling card to anyone who cares about the life of language. Assembled with delight, affection, and a connoisseur's ear for the latent pleasure of babble, MUSEE MECHANIQUE is a joyous record of the words in our head, c. 2006. I love this book."--Benjamin Friedlander. "The work shows us how it is now, with the nostalgia of the muse oddified by idiosyncratic clutter from Toothy to Tooth to Asteroids. Tell yourself the kaleidoscope is real--we are not being naturalized by pedestrian thoroughfares, rather by the dreamy transmissions of "ecriture for the flaneur/ in search for sexy subforms on the Proust list."--Cynthia Sailers.

Musee Mechanique

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Koeneke, Rodney

Antiques & Collectibles

<p>In Not so Fast Robespierre, Buffalo's Johnny Appleseed of publishing lays out a public and private map of Buffalo's (and his personal) community. With his selected Western New York School and personal support system in place, he moves onto "The Book of Life", which, as always, proceeds disaster as Gatza battles through—rightly or wrongly—the "Cataclysm 535". Kevin Thurston, Performance Artist &amp; Poet; author of I’am By placing equal stress on the pleasures and duties of friendship and the threat of natural catastrophe, Not So Fast, Robespierre rescues intimacy from self-involvement and affection from affectation, reinvigorating the confessional poem. Frank O'Hara once created convivial letters out of a collaged New York City life; today, in his labyrinth of lyric, email exchanges, notes, memoir, conspiracy and history, Geoffrey Gatza has achieved the poetry of the search engine and I.M. Evan Willner, author of homemade traps for new world Brians, nominated for a Pushcart Prize How can Geoffrey Gatza fit so much love between two cardboard covers? Not So Fast Robespierre snakes us through a world of poets, neighbors, teachers and muses, all with a raw devotion we would do well to wear on our own coat sleeves. This series of remembrances does not discriminate in spreading out for us equal measures of admiration and lessons learned because, in the end, "Everyone gets a gold star and cake in the friendly garden." Amy King, author of I’m the Man Who Loves You, twice nominated for the Lambda Award and Pushcart Nominee.</p>

Not So Fast Robespierre

Geoffrey Gatza's poems go straight to the point. From one to another the plane is consistent, the tone both literate and congenial; the feeling, one of an assessment of options while moving through choice to definition, a definition-in-progress of how to be, allowing large time outs for horseplay, an inventory of asides that end up occupying large chunks of mind. The book as ethos - you can live with it -- you wish - why not?    -Bill Berkson

Secrets of My Prison House

Zero's Blooming Excursion seems a trans-bifurcation of voice, some cacophonous unity of strange symbols, visual, aural, intellectual, collaborating in the emergence of something deeply spiritual: The awakened human mind dealing with the chaos, projecting the Arabesque patterns of its own movements. If one is to be literate in the realm of Zero's merged pineal glands, one must make sense of its seams, as much a painting to make sense of (the repeated Chagall) or puzzle to construct (the chemistry and mathematics) as a poem to read, a critifiction seducing its reader into numerous re-reads, each one producing different patterns and forms of pleasure, the very embodiment of Calvino's ideal of multiplicity. Bizarro science, invisibility cloaking, numerology, Kabbala, lots of trivial news and obscure data (like patent backgrounds), all add up to a paranoid yet valid approach to the cosmos which seems to subvert or counter its own overt nihilism. Schickling's book is a brilliant success. -Chuck Richardson Zero's Blooming Excursion has "a hundred mouths," and each mouth speaks at once. With combinatory precision, Schickling brings a redactive resonance to the face of the page. Erasures zero in on what's important. Headlines, statistics, equations, weather reports, thought bubbles are more than frames. They are the forms of our common thinking. Reading Zero's Blooming Excursion is like hovering above one's own body while living; it's unsettling ecstasy. Read this book and you'll "find yourself next to yourself." -Sasha Steensen

Zero's Blooming Excursion

Schickling, Jared

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