Poetry. This prose-poem sequence opens with the following sentence: "Scenes left on the cutting room floor flower into their own scenery." Such an auspiciously suggestive start functions as a distillation of the book's prismatic echo chamber, where painterly lyricism and narrative probing converge within each musically astute sentence. This is a symphony of partial happenings, ghostly movements, and investigatory ruminations, a stroll through an exhibit of painting that seem to stare back at the viewer: captivating, gorgeous, and just a little bit scary. Sara Veglahn is the author of several chapbooks, teaches prose workshops and literature seminars in Naropa's Department of Writing and Poetics and is the current Associate Editor of the DENVER QUARTERLY.

Another Random Heart

Literature & Fiction

Veglahn, Sara

Poetry

Letter Machine Editions

Poetry. Anselm Berrigan gives us a fresh dose of his discordant mind music. TO HELL WITH SLEEP was written by the poet in the first months after the birth of his daughter, mostly during brief periods of time when he was half-awake or less so, letting the poetry be unthought within its vehicle of eight seven-line slanting stanzas per session, of which there were nine. The impulse driving the writing was to let sounds-turning-toward-words follow from the intensified state of consciousness the arrival of this baby initiated. No prescience, reflection, computer tricks, formal appropriation, or plotting of any kind was used in the writing of this work. Joy, fear, humor, sound, bafflement and recognition-in-exchange-for-recognition were the instruments. Other Anselm Berrigan titles available from SPD are SOME NOTES ON MY PROGRAMMING, ZERO STAR HOTEL, and INTEGRITY & DRAMATIC LIFE.

To Hell with Sleep

Berrigan, Anselm

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu's TEXTURE NOTES presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu's writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

Texture Notes

Nakayasu, Sawako

Poetry. In IOWA, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they house: "The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats." With youthful perplexity and zeal, a humorous and caustic violence of reflection drives this meditative, unclassifiable book. The scary truth is that the foreignness of private teenage cant was always asking the right questions. Now, we just have to listen: "Is this the right one thing you haunt? Looking at this one house year after year? Yes. It must be. Not to let you move on. That was the way out."

Iowa

Nichols, Travis

Poetry. A chair by Charles and Ray Eames. A painting by Paul Klee. A sentence by Virginia Woolf. Juliana Leslie's debut collection MORE RADIANT SIGNAL broadcasts its elegant, probing lyricism here, among the panoply of those who worked to house extended thought in moments of compressed articulation. With haunting, painterly logic, Leslie's poems offer a world where the equivocal beauty of algebra and the aerodynamics of paper planes meet "a windowpane in love/ with a bright whirligig" to show that "[t]he boundary of the sky is a touchstone for enunciation." Is there such a thing as an impossible object? And if not, how is it that after reading MORE RADIANT SIGNAL it sits there perfectly in the center of the room.

More Radiant Signal

Leslie, Juliana

Poetry. Can identity be pliant and penetrable? Can the speech act be one of attention over intention, can play and fluidity open onto an ethic? THIS ISA NICE NEIGHBORHOOD, Farid Matuk's first full-length collection, says yes. Yes to the rejection of any opposition between politics and aesthetics, between rhetoric and poetics. Yes to vulnerability. Yes to a poetry willing to enact the errors, uncertainties, and tangled complexities of our political, sexual, and social lives. Testing both narrative and lyric, Matuk finds desire at the root of each, a root from which, these poems suggest, compassion and permission grow intertwined.

This Isa Nice Neighborhood

Matuk, Farid

Poetry. John Yau is the author of more than 50 books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. He lives in New York City.

Exhibits

YAU, John

Poetry. An abecedarian cento of New York School poems, this piece was first delivered in March 1996 at The Popular Culture Association Conference. As Gizzi notes: "ODE: SALUTE TO THE NEW YORK SCHOOL is a cento, a late Roman verse form made up of lines from other sources. First, I put together a chronological bibliography of over 100 books published by New York poets from 1950 to 1970. Many of these books are deeply out of print so I had to do some real digging. Then I extracted lines from each book to compose the cento. Happily, Clark Coolidge supplied lines from the books I couldn't find. The cento also works as an index to the bibliography. The combined bibliography and cento form the libretto to a musical work for the composer Richard Alan Applebaum. My intention was to make what I call a 'performing bibliography.' Since this is, in effect, what most of us do on a daily basis—referring to or performing what we've read—it seemed a useful metaphor to describe how we enact our reading practice. My idea was that a simple accompaniment to a series of bibliographic entries could generate both scholarly information and an emotive effect. I wanted to express the latent desire for lists and order, and to create a texture to accommodate the eros inherent in research. What I learned along the way is that literary movements survive primarily in the ruins of the texts they leave behind rather than in the unified literary histories that we create for them after the fact."

Ode: Salute to the New York School, 1950-1970 (A Libretto)

Gizzi, Peter

Poetry. They are marginal. They move in rivulets. They exist not only in their details. They contain their own extraordinary destiny. They live beside a family of small farmers. They are discovered and decide to emigrate. Their name is William. They are born a little girl.

Half of What They Carried Flew Away

Rexilius, Andrea

Literary Nonfiction. According to Frances Burney, "Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace." Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, GRACE PERIOD: NOTEBOOKS, 1998-2007 would like to be something more interesting.Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes.The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it.Kunin's grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.

Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007

Kunin, Aaron

History & Criticism

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