Poetry. "Clark Coolidge's THE ACT OF PROVIDENCE is the first book since Ashbery's Flowchart to remind me of the particular pleasure reading once was. It is as if Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac danced together in the cemetery of Spoon River in the light of a projected image of Joe Brainard flickering on fleeting clouds, while teaching the intricate steps to the ghost of Maximus"--Tom Raworth.

The Act of Providence

Literature & Fiction

COOLIDGE, Clark

Poetry

Combo Books

Poetry. "If an ancient had an epileptic seizure, he was possessed by a thousand devils. When he regained consciousness, the devils were driven out by a healer. The devils had to go someplace. In this case they have gone into the poems.The poems roar or whisper balefully from the sand or from the wind, or stir unseen in the coiling silence; or fall from the heavens like crushing incubi.With their dismal fooleries they trasform our worthless days and disentagle a thousand evils, and they are indeed, incredible"-Nada Gordon. "Toward some crooked vein of empathy/ A subsong marries its twin in reply:/ Can there be a code joined to right or ruth/ Adequately, this star-freaked wide isthmus?" -from "The Lollard's Remonstrance."

A Thousand Devils

Mohammad, K. Silem

Poetry. In the early 1990s, a number of respected US literary journals published the poems of Araki Yasusada, a Japanese poet and Hiroshima survivor who turned out to have never existed. The most likely author of this "hoax" (if it even is a hoax) is probably Kent Johnson. For this book, Johnson claims that Yasusada was in fact the creation of yet a third writer who uses the pseudonym Tosa Motokiyu, and who requested (prior to dying in 1996) that his legal identity never be revealed. ALSO, WITH MY THROAT is a collection of letters, in imperfect English, that Motokiyu wrote as Yasusada. Edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez, this new book might renew some of the many polarizing responses to Yasusada's first appearance. "This is essentially a criminal act," claimed Arthur Vogelsang at the time. Carolyn Forche, on the other hand, argued that "'Yasusada's' writing is an entry into a spiritual space...It is a work of art in the largest sense."

Also, with My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English

Motokiyu, Tosa

Poetry. "Don't be fooled by the bawdy surfaces of THE ANGER SCALE. Katie Degentesh's joyous, meta-ballistic poems will guide any reader daring enough to read them in a realm where everything is turning out just like the prophets of the Bible said it would. you will be shamed by your elders and peers for not possessing this book"—Anselm Berrigan.

The Anger Scale

Degentesh, Katie

History & Criticism

Poetry. Sharon Mesmer is not only provocative, but also confrontational in her new book of poems, ANNOYING DIABETIC BITCH. The namesake poem appears first in the book and screams curses and prideful incantations regarding the diabetic condition at its audience. The book is divided into eight sections riddled with shocking images like a little white boy shooting "a rather alarming streak of pee into the nose of Jesus" while one poem asks the question "Who Put the Frog in Grandma's Shit?" With an imagination driven by a raw and bestial point of view, Mesmer aggressively takes her reader into a world in which the laws of conduct do not apply, and the reader is all the more pleased with their findings. Sharon Mesmer is "always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern"—Allen Ginsberg.

Annoying Diabetic Bitch

Mesmer, Sharon

Nonfiction. Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. THE WORLD AS PHONE BILL comprises essays in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, Charles Olsen, and Buck Rogers. Authors covered include John Cage, Hannah Weiner, Nada Gordon, Frank O'Hara, K. Silem Mohammad, Gary Sullivan, Rodney Koeneke, Mathew Timmons, and Ara Shirinyan. Topics covered include poetic inspiration, the uses of "Flarf," literary representation in an age of globalism, and the rough stance of urban poets.

The World as Phone Bill

Apps, Stan

Poetry. "To read CHOMP AWAY is to take a crash course on the notion of dread as primal poetic value, with a consciousness filter bent towards humor. Every poem contains transparent seams managing a trophy wall of tortured, ordinary, far-out-to-far-in syntaxes that Gardner deftly parodies, ultimately generating wild, empathetic voice-structures—the longer poem "Twilight System Joy Mechanics" being an especially masterful example of this—aimed at unbridled power and its supporting cast of popular deflections"—Anselm Berrigan.

Chomp Away

Gardner, Drew

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