Presence: A Novel (Georgia Review Books)

Literature & Fiction

Iijima, Brenda

Literary

Georgia Review Books

Poetry. "IN A GLASS BOX is a title that might suggest poems framed, contained, andfragile. But the way they follow vowels relentlessly to revelations groundedin the five senses is so robust, no reader will mistake them for dream poemsor shadowboxes or, as is *au courant* in female experimental poetry, a wishfulfillment of poetess as princess with unicorns and tapestries. This bookis the opposite of pretty: it is sublime and fiery"--Ange Mlinko.Brenda Iijima grew up on the foot of the highest mountain in Massachusetts located in the former mill town of North Adams. From there, she went on to travel in 29 countries, living for more than six years abroad. Now she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her books of poetry include Epitome and Person (a) (Portable Press). She is also a photographer and painter.

In a Glass Box

Poetry

Pressed Wafer Press

Subsistence Equipment

Faux Press

How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress? How do poetic languages, forms, structures, syntaxes, and grammars contend or comply with the forces of environmental disaster? Can innovating languages forward the cause of living sustainably in a world of radical interconnectedness? In what ways do vectors of geography, race, gender, class, and culture intersect with the development of individual or collective ecopoetic projects?
Contributors include: Karen Leona Anderson, Jack Collom, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Laura Elrick, Brenda Iijima, Peter Larkin, Jill Magi, Tracie Morris, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Julie Patton, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Leslie Scalapino, James Sherry, Jonathan Skinner, and Tyrone Williams.
Co-published with Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs

eco language reader

Essays & Correspondence

Nightboat Books

Poetry. "Drawing the ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIM together, they settle into difference. With subtle contagion of body as structured text, titled ligatures in the midst, thick with emotional materiel, Brenda Iijima's work rhymes--off or near--sight as sound. Nature for culture, culture as nature, 'we/ can play school under a tree' or at war. Breaking and building in twitchy compression, the way Marie Menken's hand-held camera swings, framed and fabulous, this exuberant tragic book of drawings and poems will hook you"--Norma Cole. "A kind of necessity is created here for saying, rejuvenating myths, turning anger into jouissance, making thoughts a river of light...Beware: we won't be chagrined anymore; such subversion is the changing of the world"--Etel Adnan.

ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIMS

Dramas & Plays

Litmus Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In a neural rush, EARLY LINOLEUM engages the propulsive flow of contemporaneous valences—psycho- geography meets in the force-field of biopolitical conditions. Poet activists congregate on the steps of the New York Public library, there's art beneath the dirt, rock outcroppings communicate with Jacques Derrida and the transactions that make war and love collide. In this textual sensorium, connections between climate ecology and political ecology are reckoned with somatically and lyrically, locally and globally. The thinking through charged spaces within and between human animal structures, especially during states of perpetual strife, as in global climate change and war—the dissonance, air, wind flow, coagulated ideas, affective registers—frequencies diffuse or mutate, streaming from urban sites to the rural and wild. This work is a revelatory and bold response for our times.

Early Linoleum

History & Criticism

Counterpath Press

Poetry. IF NOT METAMORPHIC uses the long form, frequently in choral antiphon, to ask what kind of pressures exert change--as in the title poem, where war and human cruelty have turned even the kelp murderous--and what exactly is changed: sometimes words take on other forms before our eyes, sometimes sentences try on new endings in shameless view, and puns on popular culture poke through the deepest meditation. These poems truncate and disrupt narrative, borrowing now from the parataxis of renku, now from the verse-prose travelogue of haibun, but do not foreclose the possiblity of ephiphany; Iijima still envisions a "Great Swan" that holds within it creation and destruction: "Eureka / Or death?" The book was Peter Gizzi's selection for runner-up in the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest.

If Not Metamorphic (The New Series, 32)

Ahsahta Press

Remembering Animals chronicles the animal in all the complexity of such a categorization, revealing the ways in which bodies are marked and evaluated, used as resource, violated and occluded from history. It is a botched text―it is problematic and scarred. It hurts and registers the hurt. There is no comfort zone. These poems contort out of the marked position of human to bring an intimate awareness of our interrelational vibrancy.

Remembering Animals

A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in

Lee, Janice

Meekling Press

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