Poetry. MEDIEVAL, the latest of Steven Farmer's five books, is his finest. The title poem is the curiously beautiful engine under the hood. Every note is tender and deviant, each fragment riveted to the next, in a score of participant fear -- mysteriously pastoral in its leaking mix of diction-landscape. This extraordinary poet presents unique dissections of the social with a lift (and laugh) to the gallows, addresses his understanders with words for loss and eyes our strobbing hearts -- Melanie Neilson. The balance and turns in these poems makes me dizzy with envy -- Ron Stillman. Steven Farmer has been writing in the California circuit for at least seventeen years. His chapbooks CORACLE and WORLD OF SHIELDS are also available from SPD.

Medieval

Literature & Fiction

Farmer, Steven

Poetry

Krupskaya

Poetry. Elizabeth Fodaski's FRACAS grabs attention, then holds, examines, and explodes the attention it attracts. This work is both elegant and playful, sardonic and amused. A din, a brawl, a noisy quarrel. It instructs, implores, and navigates a level of writerly inquiry that's a joy to encounter ... FRACAS rocks -- Jessica Grim. Liz's poems are very raw. They are the impulse to speak -- Eileen Myles. let x=o/ we still have too many constants/ see dangle, see ding./ a true strong verb/ Constant; see State./ Consternation; see Stratum./ Conspire; see Spirit./ Conspicuous; see Species./ This is a bust,/ Etymology uncertain (Etymologies).

Fracas

Fodaski, Elizabeth

Poetry. In this NUDE MEMOIR -- a roving gallery of nude torsos, nude cadaver toes, nude female lover and dead male lover, nude bride undoing God's and Duchamp's imposed abstract nakedness -- a woman is born. She is born of words formed when 'a sex (is) offered to a face.' She is terrible and she is wonderful. She is film noir married to Baroque. She is sentences, magnificance, lust. She is an edifice of loss amterializing and de-materializing on a line between poetry and prose that Laura Moriarty casts with the hand of a magician. I, too, dream of stripping bare this figure that the poet has so gorgeously decked out, to get to the heart of her namelessness. NUDE MEMOIR is an entrancing work of love, mourning, and resistance by a major poet -- Gail Scott.

Nude Memoir

Moriarty, Laura

Poetry. Laura Moriarty writes of MICROCLIMATES, "[it is] not only a great first book, it is one of the most compelling, most symptomatic books of the new century." Bay Area writer, Taylor Brady is cutting-edge: "MICROCLIMATES is a genre-bending tour de force, a textual body in which Taylor Brady pushes all the pressure points of poetry, family saga, politics, scholarly apparatus, documentary, commonplace book, musicology. And with its recasting of epistolary tropes, it's sort of a DANGEROUS LIAISONS for the thinking man or woman. Expunged from a landscape of dream, MICROCLIMATES takes 'you to/ another earth/ entirely'"-Dodie Bellamy.

Microclimates

Brady, Taylor

Poetry. LGBT Studies. One of SPD's bestselling authors, Kevin Killian's stories have had wide circulation among the avant-garde for many years. The poems in ARGENTO SERIES are loosely organized around the films of the great Italian/Brazilian filmmaker Dario Argento, whose take on the horror/thriller genre have made him arguably the most censored filmmaker in modern film history. But AIDS, and more specifically death, are as commonly the real subject of these poems, and Killian's ability to blend a light, transgressive, O'Hara-like wit with his sense of loss allows these poems to achieve something that is not mere sentimentality. For those who wonder how AIDS can be written about without indulging in cliches, Killian's book will come as a revelation and a gift.

Argento Series

Killian, Kevin

Arrival

Cox, Sarah Anne

Poetry. As a poet and a musician, New York resident Drew Gardner is admirably obsessed with "the phrase." Separating each line in SUGAR PILL with regular units of blank space, Gardner's first book turns every line into a stanza unto itself, clearly intent upon establishing a rhythm and sequencing wholly unique to itself. Outside of its fascinating form, this collection intimately examines the consequences of the scientific and corporate leviathan, and its eerie moral order: "aren't you supposed to be out killing things?//like lemmings running up a cliff//missile silos implode in North Dakota//copping the absence."

Sugar Pill

Gardner, Drew

Poetry. African American studies. "Williams' intensely moving first book bridges more gaps than many words (and careers) thrice as long: quiet humor to quiet anger; weighty concerns (cybernetics, anthropology, astronomy) to formal invention; brilliant appropriation to startling beauty; street language to a full panoply of sophisticated theory; above all between African American concerns and those of the plain vanilla majority. The reference, as craft and time demand, is ever to mother language"--Nathaniel Tarn. "Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history"--Susan Howe.

C.C.

Williams, Tyrone

Poetry. "Each of these poems attends the 'dimension in a street' and the variation found there, below the 'billboard's traffic stream' and otherwise ubiquitous capitalist referentiality"--Kristen Gallagher. "Never forgetting that hegemony is fought bloc by bloc, SKINCERITY builds a spatial and social logic dynamically scaled from the body to the global. This logic begins with the question What is to be done and moves through critique and a recombinatory poetics to ask Where is it to be done"--Jeff Derksen.

Skincerity

Elrick, Laura

Fiction. African American Studies. Straddling fiction and poetry, Renee Gladman's writing operates on the level of the sentence, constructing suprise and oblique meanings at every turn, and somehow managing the supremely difficult trick of both engaging and pushing the reader. "THE ACTIVIST begins in the middle of a revolution....There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the mids of all this, the language of news reports mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize"--Juliana Spahr.

The Activist

Gladman, Renee

Contemporary

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