Prose. Subtitled "A Detective Novel Series," ORCHID JETSAM includes two closely related mysteries, "Orchid Jetsam" and "Clear Land." In the first, San Francisco homicide detective Grace Abe - inhabited by the ghost of a U.S. Marine who had been an undercover assassin - runs as 'someone else' within her own frame in public space where people are becoming ill in crowds. The epidemic, which at first appears as much psychic as physical, is caused by hemlock spread in food and in the public transit system. Detective Abe is addicted to a drug whose effect is a clear elation as she running. Biographical information about Dee Goda is not available. However, readers of the widely admired Leslie Scalapino, may suspect that she had something to do with the writing. Of the many titles by Leslie Scalapino's available from SPD - the mostly recent are R-HU and THE PUBLIC WORLD/ SYNTATICALLY IMPERMANENCE.

Orchid Jetsam

Scalapino, Leslie

Literature & Fiction

Tuumba Press

Poetry. Collom rejects the notion that a distinction exists between the quotidian and the poetic. His poems assert that poetry is everywhere. But to find poetry everywhere means that one incessantly engages the world at the poetic level. The result is a dance between fierce notion and ceilingless song. For writers of at least three generations, Collom's poetry and poetices have set the standard for the appreciation of earthly experience in elemental, quick-tempo'd language. Contains poems chosen by: Reed Bye, Clark Coolidge, Larry Fagin, Merrill Gilfillan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jack Collom. Collom has authored 17 small press poetry books, including COLORS BORN OF SHADOW and THE TASK.

Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000

Collom, Jack

Poetry

Poetry. Across several decades, Lyn Hejinian has been constructing an exemplary and profoundly influential body of exploratory work, work of a discrepant lucidity that undermines commonplace assumptions of the permissible and the possible. Her poetry and her prose, as well as her frequent artistic collaborations, probe with incisive wit and formal invention fundamental questions of subjectivity and community, content and communication, gender and expressivity. THE BEGINNER was originally published in a limited edition in 2001 by Spectacular Books, and is now being reprinted by Tuumba Press. "I'm beginning, and thinking that I think myself launched into something, but the actual beginning has occurred long before and as a result the thought that "I'm beginning" is not a beginning but a pause, a phrase, though one incorporated into a beginning (the beginning concealed around it)."

The Beginner

Hejinian, Lyn

"Todo na koorta, espo sipito fuela laquna qui no uisi dar: Distracted puelo forta na scusi. 'Chorbs trada,' 'kobingo,' "Pressta fenna Tesserae'--ya kibsh Toufic ordinatarae. Tengo no sladin casamo. Morshada!!" (Peter Rose, film/video maker of Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time, The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The Pressures of the Text, etc., peterrosepicture.com)

Distracted

Toufic, Jalal

Literary

Literary Nonfiction. Cinema Studies. Second, Revised Edition. Offered here in Spring 2005, this new edition has new text added based on the new availability of Yasujiro Ozu's extand works. "I felt inspired to improve the description of The Only Son and deepen my thoughts about Ozu in general," write Nathaniel Dorsky in the new preface. He has been making and exhibiting films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964. For film to have a devotional quality both absolute and relative time must be active and present—not only present but functioning simultaneously and invigorating one another. Transformative film rests in the present and respects the delicate details of its own unfolding.

Devotional Cinema

Dorsky, Nathaniel

Dramas & Plays

Poetry. "Written, designed and typeset by Travis Ortiz, VARIOUSLY, NOT THEN is a confoundingly complex cross-genre work touching upon meaning, loss, memory and return. Part-prose, part-poetry, part-essay, part-aphorism, part-philosophy, part-graphic design, the writing folds in upon itself instantly twisting from one morphology to the next. Vexing and brilliantly beautiful."—John Zorn"This dazzlingly designed book opens up into a linguistic density that holds its weight in thought's recalcitrant measures, as if poetry once again had substance sufficient to hold its own against all comers and the no-shows too."—Charles Bernstein

variously, not then

Ortiz, Travis

Literary Nonfiction. Cinema Studies. Revised 3rd Edition. Devotional Cinema offers an exploration into the language of film, reprised from a lecture on religion and cinema delivered at Princeton University. The new edition includes additions and changes related to the author's understanding of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc as well as other smaller clarifications. Dorsky has been making and exhibiting films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964.

Devotional Cinema: Revised 3rd Edition

Some Ones

Hoff, Nick

Poetry. TRACE ELEMENTS is a trio of serial poems&#65533;"Double Vision," "Four in One," and "Transient Graphs"&#65533;that make up the second movement of a work called "Analog Dreams," written over the past decade. If the tone of these poems is dark, and it is, as befits our place and time, there are nonetheless glints of light throughout. What must be stressed is that these traces of hope derive from unabashed verbal invention. The mental geography these poems traverse is that of an improvisor at full song. "Imagine channeling actual bliss." As if the last best hope for a viable future were a thorough re-imagining of life in the present. "Double Vision" features sixty-four paired couplets in iambic pentameter. As the epigraph from Jacques Lacan asserts: "the function of Language is not to inform, but to evoke." What is evoked here is the liberatory potential of a relentlessly negative critique. In the gap that defines each pair of abstractions there's a mis-registration of visions. "History stockpiles these emanations / Whose half-lives measure successive events." Binaries caught in these liminal spaces are split into shards of other logics&#65533;including that which syncretizes the aesthetic and the political. Iambics, of course, are for satire; hence, they're a provocation. "Four in One" is a four-part partita in sixty-four quatrains. Its epigraph, from Jackson Mac Low, invokes "death, winter, and so on"&#65533;a dry if knowing reminder of spring's eventual return. The breaking of binaries in "Double Vision" gives way to "a utopian premise" that uses every trick in its rhetorical playbook to evade a dystopic conclusion. Whose "days consist entirely of mornings / On the spooky shoals of consciousness" details a life without thought of redemption but with undaunted hope for a habitable future, beyond the "epistemic grief" of past practices. Having established a setting and a discourse, the trio concludes with "Transient Graphs," forty-eight brief prose poems which chart the relationship between an aging poet and the stowaway who lands on his doorstep. It is not impossible that these two figures exist only in each other's imagination. As the epigraph from Spicer affirms: "The wires in the rose are beautiful." A secular reading might render this as saying that beauty resides in the structure of things or that the forms that beauty takes are structurally necessary. "This is called aesthetic distance. An exercise in mental geography." TRACE ELEMENTS is an exercise in mapping one such "mental geography." And the grail is the trail of rarely occurring elements that warrant and sustain, beyond all reason, our hopes for a habitable future. "More than once, having lost our way, we survived on grammar and duct tape."

Trace Elements

Pearson, Ted

Poetry. ARCH tracks the provisionality of shelters, bodies, and built American things by writing through one of the first Western attempts to legitimize architecture as a discipline: Vitruvius's Ten Books on Architecture. Inspired by Vitruvius's conflicted addresses to both future architects and state power, ARCH entangles the languages of education, materiality, politics, and empire to understand how construction so often entails histories of violence and displacement. More simply, ARCH sustains play with "arch," the prefix for architecture, which is also a word we use to signify cleverness and a shape that, when arrayed into a series, enables us to carry water to cities or form vaults holding open space for life to move. The range of tones on finds in ARCH are as uneven as our buildings, mixing voices both fundamental and projective, public and private, comprehensive and forlorn. These books address themselves to our contemporary constraints, imagining the ways we have and somehow continue to extend ourselves and our forms in a landscape where so many choices seem emptied out yet still worth making.

ARCH

Miller, Christopher Patrick

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