Poetry. In Keith Waldrop's THE HOUSE SEEN FROM NOWHERE, we are invited into a meditational drift that explores the 'tense emptiness' of being . The construction of all that surrounds us, the carpentry, wavers between order and the instability of order, is manifest in syntax and etymology. In this house, which is all things-body, fortress, residence, logic, language, mortality-we find mirrors, echoes, and spirits: "the figures light/delineates not/the light itself." Where we might use Zeno's Paradox to understand the relation between the knower and the known, it is in Keith's house that we find the paradox of 'empty distinctions,' a tension between asymmetrical opposites. The house exists "not to inclose but/to include//without redemption."

THE HOUSE SEEN FROM NOWHERE

Literature & Fiction

Waldrop, Keith

Poetry

Litmus Press

Poetry. Translated from the French by Norma Cole. Born into a Breton family active in the Resistance during the Second World War, Danielle Collobert moved to Paris at the age of 19. There, she took her own life in the summer of 1978. These notebooks were found in her posession at the time of her death. "Beyond everything she has discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafes where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you"--Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the postface.

Notebooks, 1956-1978

Collobert, Danielle

Poetry. "In Mark Tardi's first collection of poetry, EUCLID SHUDDERS, there is a distinct vibration between objects and their words, as though each relation were poised on the precipice of its inverse: the pause before the cataclysm. In this weighted space, potential sounds hover as a last breath between inspiration, expiration, and the anticipation of nothing: `on a bridge/ emptied with inertia//so close//canopic jars torn/ beneath"--E. Tracy Grinnell. "In his wonderfully unruly first book, Mark Tardi composes an isotopic realm of getting and letting go, a kind of chemical algebra of the alleged world as it verges into music"--Elizabeth Willis.

Euclid Shudders

Tardi, Mark

History & Criticism

Poetry. In Buddhism, a mudra is a symbolic gesture expressive of an inner state. To conceive of a single such gesture-the mudra-brings dramatic tension to the symbolizing act. Such a title is perfect for Kerri Sonnenberg's intelligent and graceful examination of world and language, from the lyrical fragments of the title section-"I'll spend some distance" and "the shapes we fail"-to the beautifully seen landscape of the collection's final lines: "turned fields without/color was night before roads." Both the fragment, with its suggestion of absence, and the oblique narrative, with its ghostly suggestion of a "whole," are means of expressing, as if for the first time, worlds we thought we knew. In The Mudra, Kerri Sonnenberg gives us worlds brilliant in their passing"-Paul Hoover.

The Mudra

Sonnenberg, Kerri

Religion & Spirituality

Poetry. Asian Studies. ANOTHER KIND OF TENDERNESS includes translations by Keith Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Stephen Thomas, Ted Deppe, Sue Ellen Thompson with Hu Qian, Wang Ping, Hil Anderson, Waverly, and Iona Crook. "Xue Di's poetry is at once fierce and tender. The poems in this collection are charged with ambient details, each one so chosen out of desire and the impossible need to articulate the beloved throughout the perceptual world. The translations are stunning. This is gorgeous work"-Peter Gizzi.

ANOTHER KIND OF TENDERNESS

Di, Xue

Japanese poetry in translation guest edited by Sawako Nakayasu

Aufgabe No. 4

Poetry. "EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS is a setting out onto crucial waters. Each word here has its own weight and position--its own vital movement between poles of loss and discovery. With our sight-lines thus widened, the observance itself becomes activated--another mode of transport. A poetry of brevity is a tough task (especially the word-as-line), but in these pages it registers as achievement"--George Albon. "Each poem is what I am looking for: a resonance with a particular location, an intelligence unafraid of its humanity, a sort of desperate adequacy with the people or objects that Szymaszek encounters"--Etel Adnan.

EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS

Stacy Szymaszek

Poetry. FRUITLANDS is the probing, intelligent debut collection of poems from this Bay Area poet. "Taking its title from the transcendentalist utopian community founded by Bronson Alcott, FRUITLANDS offers its own visionary perspective on contemporary life. In this collection, cultural work is social innovation, and Kate Colby produces and decomposes identity, history, and narrative through fully engaged aesthetic practice....Colby maps out exciting possibilities for poetry and other spaces of representation in this stunning debut"--Paul Foster Johnson. "Under pressure, under duress, being a creature of habit caught in the sudden glare of utopic wishfulness, one wakes up in Fruitlands, smuggled inside Colby's intriguing and recombinant language of surveillance, pulled into suggested routes of survival and eco-linguistic liberties in a century you suddenly desire"--Kathleen Fraser.

Fruitlands

Colby, Kate

Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. "Roberto Harrison's Daemons are loops (as in computer-generated, or installations using sound) yet his series of continuous loops does not repeat but adds: to make being 'in the wilderness full.' The first person, as if that were only an operation, merges with the author himself who's only a marker 'in the raftering circuits.' His poems replicate to invent oracles as counters to image- making."—Leslie Scalapino "Roberto Harrison's COUNTER DAEMONS offers tremendous reach, a vision of a world that has come into its own cybernetic post-surrealism without ever quite acknowledging just how nightmare tinges the dream. There's subtlety &amp; grandeur, even wry wit at the edge of the apocalypse. Read this book &amp; you will look at the world differently. And you will definitely, absolutely, positively never look at the first person singular in the same way again."—Ron Silliman

Counter Daemons

Harrison, Roberto

Poetry. Translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu, Ryoko Sekiguchi and Cole Swensen. This revolutionary volume represents the first book of its kind, a bilingual anthology dedicated to women working in modern and cross cultural poetry milieus. Published collaboratively by Belladonna Books and Litmus Press in honor of the Festival of Contemporary Japanese Women Poets with support by NYSCA.

Four from Japan: Contemporary Poetry & Essays by Women

SEKIGUCHI, Ryoko

Minashita, Kiriu

Park, Kyong-Mi

Arai, Takako

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