Poetry. "What has always impressed me about Martin's work is its rare attention to words as built worlds, as well as its choreopoetic virtuosity (the fact that the poems never stop moving, that the mind (perception, mindfulness, cognition) dances constantly within his lines). In Martin's work one feels as though they are reading a totally new prosody, poetry in its firstness"—Thom Donovan.

Two Books

Literature & Fiction

Martìn, C.

Poetry

Compline

Poetry. THE ORDINARY is the first full-length collection from David Brazil.

The Ordinary

Brazil, David

Poetry. LGBT Studies. "THE ANTIDOTE generates the unrest of strong political poetry. The book pricks the battle, but never tells it. Images are sensorial in the maneuver of color and form, while mottos become more violent each page, growing together with the reading towards experience and conspiratorial action. Then discourse runs over image: tension in the verse as paragraph, in the word as unstable material, in the social (dis)order. The reciprocity of touch and the choral composition; the loss of patience towards rage."—Enrique Winter

The Antidote

Frost, Jackqueline

Poetry. Art. Originally printed as an artist book by Granary Books in an edition of 40 in 2010. "THE ANIMAL IS IN THE WORLD LIKE WATER IN WATER is a collaboration of drawings by Kiki Smith and poetry by Leslie Scalapino (myself).... Kiki Smith sent me color xeroxes of a completed sequence, forty-three drawings, which she'd titled, 'Women Being Eaten by Animals.' I wrote the poem using the sense of an unalterable past occurrence: One female, apparently the same girl, is repeatedly, in very similar images as variations, bitten and clawed by a leopard-like, lion-like animal. Both person and animal have abstracted features, giving the impression of innocence or opaqueness. As in a dream of similar actions or a dream of a single, timeless action, the girl flecked with blood while being unaltered by the animal's touch, there is no representation of motion except stillness of the figures floating in space of page. Neither the girl nor the animal articulate expression, as if phenomena of feeling(s) do not exist. "The words make in an outside/space a sense of the undoing of social tyranny as undoing of any hierarchy in individuals' feelings and perception as well as in people's values (public indistinguishable from private). Without hierarchy, past-reality-future is apparently free paradise of childhood and of birds. This outside space of the word/or that is my words abuts the other visible space of 'Women being eaten by animals' (Kiki's original title). While reading as well as seeing the images (but also if only seeing the visual images?), the viewer has the experience of body and mind being separated as if that is caused by the outside world. This experience of the viewer arises from their sense, in seeing, that one is separated from the scene of the girl and the animal alone together as if making love; and a sense of separation arises from the girl and animal not mimicking expressions of experiencing sensations. The disconnect that's itself the dreamlike dialogue between 'not being experienced (by the senses)'—and separation or union (both together?) of mind/eye and body/sight—has to be first enacted by Smith's visual images, in order for the language to broach this (subject) matter at all. Is dialogue possible without language?"—Leslie Scalapino

The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water

Scalapino, Leslie

When a hip 17 year old leaves Liverpool at the height of Beatlemania to enter an Irish convent, little did she know that her life as a nun would include a unique relationship with Beatle George Harrison. Nan is a grandmother who once was this nun. As she nears death, her three grown-up granddaughters become curious about her life. Could her far-fetched tales really be true? Compline weaves together the story of the young nun in the 1960s with that of three generations of 21st-century women - their lives, their loves, their joys and sorrows. Compline dissolves boundaries of genre, time and place, between the real and the imagined. It is written to appeal to all ages. Nan's story emerges from diaries, letters, story-telling, memories, and poems. It is a blend of autobiography and fiction, but you never know which is which. Reviewers have commented that when they put Compline down they were still mulling it over afterwards. Others have said it made them laugh, it made them cry, but most of all, it entertained them.

Compline: A nun A Beatle A Life

Pagendam, Gladys

Genre Fiction