Books

Yogmata Keiko Aikawa

Jackson Mac Low

Written in memory of the German collagist, painter, sculptor, and writer, Kurt Schwitters (who referred to all of his works as “Merz,” a syllable taken from the advertisement for the Kommerzund Privatbank and included in all his earliest assemblages), this is a series of visually arresting verbal collages from America’s foremost experimental poet of the last 30 years. Lacing together words, word fragments, and phrases—all relating to Schwitters and his work, some computer generated—this is a landmark celebration of the Dada spirit in modern poetry. 42 Merzgedichte is yet another masterful work from the inventor of a prolific range of systematic chance operations for poetry and one of the most unique voices of modern literature.

Eirik Steinhoff

A Fiery Flying Roule: to all the inhabitants of the earth; specially the rich ones reproduces a series of pamphlets distributed during the Oakland Commune (a.k.a. Occupy Oakland) from 2 November 2011, the day of the “general strike” that shut down the Port of Oakland, to May Day 2012. These 25 front-line transmissions are chronicle-collages of poetry, prose, photographs, and diagrams that reflect and respond to actions and events as they transpired in those heated 6 months. Their name recycles the title of a pair of antinomian pamphlets circulated by the London Ranter Abiezer Coppe in 1649; the tenor of Coppe’s prophetic do-it-yourself political barnstorming is continuously operative in these latter-day missives, particularly in the irregular orthography of the proper noun by which he called his pamphlets. This color-printed archive edition of the Roules includes a 60-pp. afterword that situates the project in its historical contexts.

Dee Anna Parrish, LCSW

If a part of your life seems to make no sense, yet you can’t put the puzzle together because some of the pieces are missing, this book is for you. If you suspect that the treatment you received as a child has in some way impaired your judgment as an adult, if your current life seems to lack peace, this book is for you. This book is also for today’s children with the hope that their parents will recognize any abusive childhood treatment in their own past and finally stop the intergenerational cycle of abuse.

Dr. Gary F. Fleischman

If you have ever been treated by an acupuncturist and want to understand what it is all about, or if you are curious about whether acupuncture might work for you or someone you love, here is a straight-forward presentation of the basic facts about acupuncture in an easy-to-follow and easy-to-understand Question and Answer Format.

Acupuncture can help headaches, diabetes, strokes and seizures, menstrual problems, infertility, gallstones, respiratory ailments, emotional disturbances, AIDS, cancer and many other health problems.

Cid Corman

“His poems are what all fine poems should be: not only a delight but a solace, in the end, a source of wisdom.”- Hayden Carruth.

George Quasha

In Ainu Dreams, poet George Quasha and buun, a Japanese artist living in America, collaborate in poetically manifesting the artist’s richly articulated dream-life. These eighty-odd poems embody an ever-opening cosmos of curious image, surprising narrative, and enigmatic “teaching” in a language no one could have dreamed up alone. Structurally intriguing poems reveal the innards of the dreams themselves, yet always speak directly and readably, sometimes addressed to a second person (the poet? the reader?). The poems and even reading itself seem to be dreaming.

Jerome Rothenberg

Visionary, ethnopoetically-inspired text, combined with rich visual imagery and a unique fold-out design, make this slip of a book a true treasure.

Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha

Celebrated, controversial, influential, this highly unconventional and ground-breaking anthology of American poetry was widely read and taught throughout the 70s and early 80s. Treating the visionary and the experimental as essential American values, _America, A Prophecy_ maps diverse poetic forms and literary (and nonliterary) milieus, bringing together poets from all styles and schools, men and women equally; innovative poets (Beats, Black Mountain, etc.) academics, Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics. This pre-PC multi-cultural perspective does not push ethnic difference or sameness but explores deeply common concerns and equally valid visions. True to its Blakean title, _America, A Prophecy_ is prophetic of openness to unfamiliar voices and new paths of the poetic art up to 1973 as well as being a timeless primer of poetic possibility.

Laurie Patton

Laurie Patton’s “Poems in Biblical Time” give contemplative voice to the reading cycle of the Jewish year. Replete with ancient imagery coming alive in the language of the present, each poem weaves scripture into everyday life while refocusing a single Biblical moment. In her vision here, angels are also messengers “sent to earth with a single piece of work to accomplish.” Although we are of “so many minds” burdened with “so many tasks,” as readers we again receive messengers and the messages they bring. Recognition may come in the angelic voice, and we can meet angels and ourselves at “the tent door in the heat of the day.” Angel’s Task urges continuous awe—or “trembling.”

Angel’s Task opens Torah for us in the most beautiful and resonant way. Each poem is a gem that lets us see more deeply into a biblical text and into ourselves. Quietly, quietly, the poems reach into our “ancient brain,” touching the soul.
—Alicia Ostriker, author of The Book of Seventy,
winner of the 2009 Jewish Book Award for Poetry

What a beautiful notion Patton gives us, the illumination manifest in our own actions: “these are the lights / that hold / our backward, earthly glances / as we turn our eyes / toward heaven.”
—Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize

Angel’s Task accomplishes one of poetry’s most important tasks: to speak in a way that awakens a reader to see more clearly the complexities of her own heart and mind and the challenges and predicaments of our contemporary moment. That’s the miracle of Angel’s Task.
—Richard Chess, author of Tekiah, The Chair in the Desert, and The Third Temple

Franz Kamin

In this richly integrated collection of stories, poems, & other texts, the intermedial composer-performer Franz Kamin generates a personal mythos out of his musical, mathematical, biographical, & mystical concerns.

“Once, while I was listening to a lecture on dreams, I noticed that the girl in front of me had fallen asleep on her arms. Where was she then? It would be gentle to guess that Franz Kamin is busy exploring the geography of her elsewhere. Yet the force in his work is like that of all the other explorers, whose images become gentle and benign only in hindsight (Audubon, for instance, fleeced Keats’ brother at cards). It is transgressive, impatient of the natives, hasty, not yet polished up for presentation to the Socit’ d’Ailleurs. Here are his travel diaries, still stained with blood and lime squash.” – Robert Kelly

Jan Harrison

Arcana Mundi is a stunningly reproduced collection of works on paper by a celebrated artist living in upstate New York. Sexually charged images of dream-like “power animals” reflecting human states absorb the viewer into participation in a world of magical hazard and psychic exploration. Jan Harrison writes that her work “is concerned with the paradox of the power of nature with regard to our own sense of order and justice. Through communion with animal nature, I link instinct and intellect, showing the duality of knowledge and innocence as two sides of the psyche of the world.”

James George

Asking for the Earth was first released in 1995 after the author led the international mission to Kuwait to assess damages from Operation Desert Storm. This book is even more timely today as we face the possibility of further warfare and destruction. James George presents the convincing argument that our planet is suffering from twin crises, ecological and spiritual, with a common source in our deep separation from nature and from each other. Inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, Thomas Merton, Tibetan Buddhism, and other contemplative traditions, the author shows that to avoid disaster we must wed scientific truth to an awakening of consciousness and acceptance of responsibility.

Preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; foreword by the Secretary General of the United Nations conference on Environment and Development (the “Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro, 1992.

David Green

David Green’s novel furthers the contemporary dialogue between “deconstructionist” philosophy and “post-modern” fiction with an ingenious structure. It is difficult to tell whether a certain author of “Borgesian” fictions has invented the critic who writes about him, or if an ingenious critic has invented the author about whom he is a leading expert. Crisp critical prose alternates with lush narrative and descriptive rhetoric in this work of genuine inquiry into the relation between two styles of writing, two uses of mind, and two ways of being. Shades of Nabokov’s Pale Fire…

George Quasha in conversation with Thomas Fink

A Matrices Edition

Awareness Inside Language is the most comprehensive discussion of poet-artist George Quasha’s “axial poetics” as it plays out in his work of the past twenty years, called “preverbs,” represented in four published volumes: Verbal Paradise, Things Done for Themselves, The Daimon of the Moment, and Glossodelia Attract. In the form of an interview conducted by poet Thomas Fink, it addresses how apparently difficult poetry teaches new ways of reading and thinking.

Michael Greene

Bataille’s Wound is a fictional presentation of the thought of a central modern French thinker and novelist, showing him as a radical teacher and mentor. George Bataille was a highly controversial writer associated with the Surrealist movement and—in writing often considered by turns pornographic and brilliant—concerned with moral transgression and the authenticity of inner experience. Greene uses quotation, paraphrase, and the recreation of Bataille’s celebrated style to further the spirit of that work.

Mark Bracher

“This exemplary philosophical reading of Milton is going to make a tremendous change in Blake’s criticism. It will take a while to digest, and critics without a firm grounding in philosophy will find it difficult to follow some of the time. Yet the careful reader of Bracher, who accepts his careful definitions and consistent employment of concepts and terms, will find aspect after aspect of the poem clarified and its whole argument and message made plain…. A landmark of modern scholarship!” -David V. Erdman

“Being Form’d opens truly new perspectives upon the primal ground not only of Blake’s revolutionary imaginative vision but also upon that new apocalypse which is simultaneously a reversal of the western consciousness and a new birth of a universal vision and consciousness.” -Thomas J.J. Altizer

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, translated by David Rattray

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907-1943) is considered one of the eminent poets of the Surrealist period. The visionary, sardonic, and often outrageous poems in this bilingual edition represent the first presentation of his work in English. With René Daumal he was the founder of the literary movement and magazine “Le Grand Jeu,” the essence of which he defined as “the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness.” “The glimpse of eternity in the void,” writes Rattray in the Introduction, “was to send Daumal to Hinduism, the study of Yoga philosophy, and Sanskrit. It sent Lecomte on an exploration of what he called a ‘metaphysics of absence.’ ” Rattray, a poet acclaimed for his translations of Artaud, keeps intact the power and originality of Gilbert-Lecomte’s work.

Jackson Mac Low

“Jackson Mac Low’s marvels of verbal invention provoke nonstop streams of readerly imagination. In Bloomsday, anything can happen, and continues to.” -Charles Bernstein

Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago on September 12, 1922. He was a poet and composer, and a writer of performance pieces, essays, plays, and radio works. He was also a painter and multimedia performance artist, and often worked in collaboration with his wife, Anne Tardos. He is the author of twenty-six books, and his works have been published in many anthologies and periodicals as well as read publicly, exhibited, performed, and broadcast in North America, Europe, and New Zealand.

For more info on Mac Low’s life and work see www.jacksonmaclow.com

Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones

World renown dancer / choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane were partners in art and life from 1971 to Zane’s death in the late 80’s, sharing a home, a dance company, and a celebrated creative process. Body Against Body traces their dramatic (and often controversial) careers as they intertwine and collide in a unique choreographic collaboration that has influenced much contemporary dance by merging cultures, races, and artistic styles. The book includes Zane’s haunting photos, Jones’ visceral poetry and prose, performance scripts and scenarios, a biographical essay (with performance catalog), dance photos of the company in action, and commentaries by dancers, critics, composers, musicians, visual artists, and a range of others. Among the artists who have contributed their creative visions to these collaborations are Bill Katz, Robert Longo, Peter Gordon, Keith Harring, and Max Roach.

OUT OF PRINT

Andrea Olsen

Thirty-one days of pleasurable learning activities help readers experience their anatomy in an entirely new way. For two decades an international dancer and teacher of anatomy, Olsen now shows how attitudes about the body can affect well-being, and she demonstrates methods of bodywork to promote physical efficiency and healing. Her work with other teachers in experimental anatomy and in Authentic Movement also shows how movement is part of our physical and cultural heritage. Amusing personal stories (“body-stories”) enliven the discussion. This expanded edition includes a new preface and epilogue.

Jake Berry

Brambu Drezi is a deep reading of late twentieth-century mind. Along with Black Mountain poetry, Beat poetry is one of its antecedents, and Beat poet John Wieners might well have been prophesying this poem when he wrote, “Poetry is a trance of make-believe…a condition of gradual loss / of reality until there’s only left / this shattering of the world.” Not to know Berry’s work is to miss something essential and stunningly beautiful about the late 20th Century, what has been called a “century of horror,” yet Berry, in this great visionary work, mirrors this millennium not only as an end but a beginning.

Spencer Holst

A legendary storyteller and writer who has charmed New York audiences for decades, Holst first evolved his oeuvre in the 1950s-60s milieu of Greenwich Village, influenced as much by sophisticated poets/writers (e.g. Hart Crane, Jorge Luis Borges) as by fairy tales/tall-tales which his writings superficially resemble. Each of his sentences, paragraphs, and very, very short stories is a complete and independent act of narrative that delivers the very essence of narrative fiction. In spite of their brevity, these are works of great variety and complexity, displaying a fine intelligence and an inexhaustible capacity for verbal surprise. Holst breaks the very frame of what a story is and what language can do.

Leslie Kaplan

Originally published in France in 1987, this is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan’s haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult….Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York’s Central Park, where the child’s presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.

Kenneth Irby

Call Steps brings together three collections of a celebrated American poet, representing the years during which Irby wrote what critics consider his most powerful visionary work.

“No one I know has ever rooted down and plumbed the mystery of American places, land, name, history of our taking space, as Irby does. No one I know has so clearly articulated the living fact, that America is an intelligent thing, and that the distances between purslane and elderberry wine and the bowling alley and Silicon Valley are not inferences of a fall, but are the still arising magniloquences of the sonorous madness of the Platonists, a mystical/musical tradition so close to nonsense that it’s the only sense we dare trust. That each human being has a grasp of the sensuous, and that is empire. That each human person has a root awareness of the inadequacy of this place, and that is vision. Europe is only a song we still drift west from. No poet I know speaks that psychic geology of our westering better than Kenneth Irby.” -Robert Kelly

Erik Vatne

Cartographies of Silence comprises over one hundred untitled poem fragments – what the poet calls “unconscious interruptions” – what navigate maps of being/non-being, writing/speaking/thinking, to reveal the mind-body experience where silence meets language.

“Short words, short lines, short poems. How big they are. How Vatne manages to travel so far.” -Robert Kelly

“Something essential known here, neither said nor shown. The word for its absence is remarkably not supplied. Enough space.” -Charles Stein

Cynde Gregory

After 20 years of classroom experience with over 10,000 elementary school children, Cynde Gregory offers this comprehensive guide to the joys and skills of developing creative writing in children. Childmade provides the tools to stimulate children’s subconscious imaginations and help them channel their visions into poems and stories. At the heart of the book is a unique meditation technique designed to fill young writers with detailed visions out of which writing will easily grow. Enlivened with charming examples of children’s writing, the book speaks to parents, teachers, homeschoolers, and writers, featuring practical advice, serious literary discussion, and dozens of writing projects.

David Matlin

These poems and prose texts confront the bewilderments and emergencies of ordinary life, for which we never seem to be prepared and which leave us in danger of becoming ghosts of our own exhaustion. A stark, enraged humor gives the work a brutal yet strangely delicate physical presence. “His work is remarkable for its imagery, often startling and violent, but always vividly real.” -Helen Adams

Chris Tysh

These are poems of a rare and exquisite composure. A sonorous, achingly precise cry from the heart, an antidote to “mock the grotesque braggadocio. Chris Tysh has drawn her sword, and it is a weapon of great beauty: razor sharp and shimmering, a thing that cuts to the quick.” -Paul Auster

“The very fact that we call heraldic symbols ‘devices’ makes them vulnerable to another realm – the poetic – where prerogatives can (and, as Chris Tysh believes, should) be rethought and ultimately dispersed. Tysh’s writing doesn’t say we shouldn’t be somewhere, but it acts out a being there in a different (gorgeous and unpunishing) way.” -Lyn Hejinian

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., is the woman who has transformed the way the world thinks about death and dying. Beginning with the groundbreaking publication of the classic psychological study On Death and Dying, through her many books and her years working with terminally ill children, AIDS patients and the elderly, Kubler-Ross has brought comfort and understanding to millions coping with their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. From her work in war-ravaged Poland to her pioneering counseling of the terminally ill, to her legendary seminars on death and dying at the University of Chicago, to her eye-opening discussions with those who had been revived after death, each experience provided Kubler-Ross with a piece of the puzzle. In a culture determined to sweep death under a carpet and hide it there, Kubler-Ross consistently defied common wisdom to bring it into the light and hold it there for us to see and not be afraid.

In The Cocoon and the Butterfly, drawing on thousands of accounts of “near death experiences” that she has accumulated over the years from persons of all ages and circumstances, Dr. Ross develops the image of the butterfly’s emergence from a cocoon as a symbol for the new beginning that such experiences portend for us when we die.

Hannah Weiner

Martin Wallen, Ed.

This edition of “Ancient Mariner” makes available for the first time all the versions of the poem published over thirty years in Lyrical Ballads, Sybilline Leaves, and the 1828 Poetical Works, as well as those confined to notebooks and private copies. The juxtaposition of revisions in parallel text avoid granting privilege to any one version, making Coleridge’s changes evident in full detail. Tracing the complex history of the poem’s publication, the accompanying commentary places this edition in the context of Romantic scholarship and raises many critical issues for the understanding of Coleridge’s most widely known and studied poem. As Donald Ault comments in the Introduction, “Whereas Coleridge’s ‘Mariner’ stood out in the early 19th century as a radical impertinence, an incommensurable text that needed to be tamed, Wallen’s Mariner can celebrate its unreadable intrusion (and revision of) a critical tradition that has too easily believed that Coleridge knew what he believed.”

Rose Drachler

“Rose Drachler’s first published poems appeared when she was in her fifties. She is such a remarkable poet that it makes me wonder why all poets don’t wait until they’re fifty. Her work contains the lucid simplicity of a parable—if it’s well told—easily leads you into (and through) familiar realms only to deposit you at the edge of a great mystery. Her rigorously crafted work is layered in what is sacred and transformational. Her poetry welcomes the immediate world with wisdom and tenacity; it is a marvelous decoding of appearances that illuminates the very heart of our awareness.”
– Gregory Kolovakos (in presenting The American Book Award 1981 on behalf of The Before Columbus Foundation)

“So her book — like all poem-books since Whitman brought the message home—is the life, the song of herself created in the work. “My own,” she says, “I do not conceal/ Or deny what I am”: a Jewish woman into her late 60s: who has been (for how long?) like those secret wise men in each generation, one of the 36 poets whose work stays hidden in the world.”
– Jerome Rothenberg

LOW STOCK BUT THIS TITLE IS AVAILABLE FROM SHP DIRECTLY OR…

Dawn Nelson

The aim of this unique how-to book is to address the often unmet need of the aged, the ill, and the dying for intimate, nurturing contact. Compassionate touch, as defined by the author, is a gentle, sensitive, and non-intrusive program of massage, touch therapy, and comfort care, supported by such helping skills as active listening, reflective communication, intuitive feedback, guided relaxation, and breathing awareness. It aims to ease both physical and emotional pain, in a way that medication and medical procedures simply cannot. Written with great clarity and sensitivity, this is an ideal book for massage therapists and bodyworkers looking to expand their skills; furthermore, it is an essential reference for all caregivers and family members.

Alfred A. Tomatis

This autobiography was originally published in French (1977). The Tomatis Method, which helps develop listening and communication skills, is used in 15 different countries. Tomatis addresses his experience with some of the most difficult therapeutic and educational problems (e.g., stuttering, autism, dyslexia, balance, motor control, and integration) and shows how they are affected and controlled by the ear. His account will be welcomed by speech therapists, performing artists, educators, and psychotherapists.

“What Tomatis has done with sound and hearing is virtually a Copernican revolution.” -Jean Houston, Ph.D., author of The Possible Human

“Tomatis’ work is the long awaited foundation for what may well be the most important research in sound, learning and health.” -Don Campbell, author of Introduction to the Musical Brain and Rhythms of Learning

“In the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, Emanuel Swedenborg and Nicola Tesla, Tomatis is an irrepressible pioneer.” -Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy

Paul Celan

Translated by Susan H. Gillespie

Paul Celan, arguably among the 20th century’s most important European writers, is commonly pigeonholed as a poet of the Holocaust—a term, however, he never used. Susan Gillespsie’s Corona seeks to unwind such facile assumptions about Celan, charting a more idiosyncratic and embracing path through his large oeuvre. As Gillespie writes in her Translator’s Introduction, “The poems, taken as a whole, are invisibly interwoven in what Celan might have termed ‘constellations’ of meaning, which extend beyond individual text to create a harmonic architecture of echoes and references. We are present at the creation of a world, perhaps even a universe of meaning.” Such a totality necessarily includes not only the poet’s well-known works of memory and memorialization, as well as poems on contemporary politics, but are juxtaposed in this collection with love poems, reflections on stays in mental hospitals and the sometimes ribald comedy of life. For even as Celan’s writing is hermetic, it is also resonant with personal grief and longing, to which in varying degree Celan alludes in every poem he writes. Derived from years of study, Gillespie’s translations embody this personal dimension, facilitated by their ease of diction and attention to the “somatic” and rhetorical aspects of Celan’s verse—their sound, gait, tone, and gravity—as well as to their internal and external echoes—or what Roman Jakobson called their “poetic etymology.” Noticing this in Celan’s writing—but applicable to her translations—she writes: “Here, poetry is not what gets lost in translation, it is, itself, an act of translation—of experience and thought—into new language.”

Jake Marmer

Cosmic Diaspora is Jake Marmer’s third collection of poems. It brings together fantasy, hard-boiled sci-fi, Jewish mysticism, experimental poetics, free jazz, and dark, deadpan humor. Born in the wild steppes of Ukraine, Marmer brings his immigrant experience into a cosmic, diasporic disorientation and attempts to imagine the deep future of myth, spirit, and language. In Cosmic Diaspora, you may also find more than hints of the Talmud, Midrash, and Zohar that allude to alternative realities, some of which exist alongside our own, while others are tangled within it—or are completely unrelated, made of pure Light or pure Text.

ADVANCE PRAISE for Cosmic Diaspora

“Cosmic Diaspora is a (literally) fantastic…. what? Book of poems/literary works? Notational record of an infinite number of possible post-poetic poetry performances? Series of QR-scanned music/spoken word performance videos? A hyper-Jewish post-Jewish science fiction fragment in talmudically-zoharically-inflected verse? Or all of the above. Jake’s language is deceptively off-handed yet precise, intelligent yet casual, prophetic yet comic. The eponymously titled opening suite is wise, weird, startling, and totally worth the price of admission, and the rest of the book, wildly different section to section, equals it. Curtain up! an artist strolls center stage.”
—Norman Fischer, author of On a Train at Night and Untitled Series: Life as It Is

“Jake Marmer’s reflexive and visionary Cosmic Diaspora is a passionately rendered and timely exploration in verse of postmodern ritual and mutations. Marmer also takes a deep celebratory look into black holes, gravity, light years, and the cosmos. He also pays homage to some of his speculative heroes: Delany, Acker, Stein, and le Guin. And all the while Marmer hears the wisdom of the Talmud whispering in the background.”
—Clarence Major, author of My Amputations and Reflex and Bone Structure

“From ‘harm to harmony’ and back (and back again, in rapid, infinite oscillation), Jake Marmer’s new volume, Cosmic Diaspora, outlines, with wit and a keen sense of otherness, the existential anxiety at the heart of sentient human life—an anxiety that takes on a special poignancy in the words of geopolitically and otherwise historically traumatized diasporic poets:

you’re being disassembled
into a diaspora of atoms that know nothing
of each other’s existence
before coming together again
like water poured into a new glass
without objective guarantee
of continuity

Through a series of fanciful sci-fi vignettes, a sort of ‘calligraphy of life’s post-script,’ Cosmic Diaspora explores the concept of diaspora not merely of ‘a people,’ but the contemporary experience of boundary-dissolution and dissemination of the individual-as-alien, giving the lie to the inside/outside, them/us, self/other binary around which ‘identity’ and its discontents are constructed. This is a rich, trenchant, and thoroughly enjoyable ‘record/ in conversation with its own mutation’—after all, ‘just because you were being extrapolated/doesn’t mean you weren’t having a ball.’ Treat yourself.”
—Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry and Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries

Louise Landes Levi

Louise Landis Levi’s Crazy Louise (or la Conversazione Sacra) is a close view of sexual trauma, a reading and rewriting of the body, political and personal, in a series of poems. A deliberate departure―both from the formal construction of her previous works and from her focus on early (medieval) forms of feminine process and liberation (Sweet on My Lips, the Love Poems of Mira Bai), Levi here works close to home in a personal, often fragmented process. She details and deconstructs conventions relating to maternal instinct, hierarchical lineage and the suffering of female perceptual process within patriarchal constructs unable to recognize it. Levi writes as an “initiate,” redeeming oriental schools of “crazy” (unconventional) wisdom, or open mind, from the debilitating, socially invasive use of this same term in the occidental world. This series of untitled poems comprises writings ca.1992-2002 and serves as an introduction to the poet’s work―indeed unveiling, as the cover portrait of the author by legendary photographer Ira Cohen suggests. As Levi writes, “Ira knew how to look―he could prophesy through the lens. He knew I would one day unveil myself. Dear Reader, you certainly cannot tell a book by its cover―if you could these pages would be written in gold.”

Essential Reading for anyone who has ever loved the Grateful Dead, Crazy Wisdom Tales for Dead Heads takes aim at readers who are captivated by trickster and prankster stories with a deep resonance and the scent of enlightenment. In the tradition of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters of the 60’s, the Guide is a collection of magical, mystical, entertaining, and amusingly bizarre stories. Designed to bring forth an interactive experience for the reader, it creates a sense of being on an imaginative Trip into the hidden zones of crazy wisdom, where Startled Awareness awaits. Stories include unusual rituals, absurd prescriptions for action, and graphic illustrations. This uproarious self-help book creates its own genre – humorous, shamanic, rock-oriented, transformative fiction.

Robert Kelly

The Cruise of the Pnyx is an enigmatic and urbane work in prose, verse, and an original typographic marriage of the two. The author describes the work as “a narrative poem bearing in from the afterlife; being born is finding this island.”

Omar Perez
With an Afterword by the translator, Kristin Dykstra

In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, Cubanology streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness – scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout Cubanology blends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon.

Fall 2018

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Welcoming as the guenmai soup whose making recurs throughout this journal, Cubanology carries the flavors of zen intensives, languages, and housecleaning; Greek retsina and Dutch beer; murmured conversations with books, friends, strangers, cultures, countries, and conditions. Omar Pérez is equally home-leaver and home-maker wherever he travels. Language is his pillow; zazen his backpack; music and imagination’s freedoms his left and right shoes.”

—Jane Hirshfield

​”I’m quite taken by Cubanology, a book of the quotidian that rises to the universal. In morning we have zazen, in the afternoon we have language(s) and poetry, then later there is guenmai for 70 people (recipe included: carrots, onions, turnips, celery) but usually just for three or four or one. Are we in Amsterdam, or Athens, Munich? Yes. It is Cubanology, after all, and “He proposied realviciousization,/seated at the deskritorio” is the way poems are written when you are Omar Pérez. Part Pound, part Bolaño, add a Brechtian play, mix in some Hart Crane, spiced with Marianne Moore, Larry Eigner and Paul Hoover (Paul Hoover!), this is a global 24 hours that stretches time to eternity, consolidates place, and with a polyglot sensibility that seems bent on unifying all languages. Reading Cubanology is more like meditating than reading. Which is to say the ritual of the day. Which stays with you, and is tomorrow, the eternal day.”

—Bob Holman

“Omar Pérez’s Cubanology is a Book of Days for the new century, a clear-eyed account of his travels in Europe, in the form of journal entries, essays, poems, translations, and meditations dating from 2002-2005. “To one seeking the truth,” he writes, “I offer only this: don’t waste any time.” Hence he schools his readers in the art of making and measuring time according to the precepts of his Buddhist faith, the practice of which provides the scaffolding for this fascinating journey, which suggests that even if, as he writes, “travel intoxicates,” it also reveals the heart and soul of one of the most important artists of our time.”

—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

Namkhai Norbu

The Cycle Of Day And Night by Namkhai Norbu is a practical guide to a fundamental practice of the Dzogchen system of Tibetan Buddhism, presented in a clear and direct manner, written by an acknowledged contemporary master of this ancient tradition. Central to Dzogchen, the “Great Perfection”, is contemplation–the immediate experience of the primordial state of the individual, the unconditioned nature of the mind. This nature of the mind transcends the specific contents of mind, the incessant flow of thoughts reflecting our social, cultural, and psychological conditioning. Based on the teaching by Garab Dorje, the first human master of the Dzogchen lineage, The Cycle Of Day And Night gives a translation of the author’s Tibetan Text, together with a commentary drawn from the author’s extensive oral explanations. Actual methods are given for entering into contemplation and integrating it with our activities during the 24 hour cycle of day and night.

Elizabeth Cunningham

Always an imaginative writer, as The Return of the Goddess (1992) and The Wild Mother (1993) attest, in Daughter of the Shining Isles, Cunningham now mixes Celtic mythology with the emergent feminist tradition of the Magdalen to create a powerful, spiritually charged visionary novel. Daughter of the Shining Isles gives us a Mary Magdalen for our times: Maeve, a feisty Celt, raised by warrior witches to a life of heroism. When she arrives on a magical Druid island, she meets her cosmic twin (J)Esus of Nazareth. Together they become embroiled in an adventure of passion, betrayal, and human sacrifice. Sure to stir controversy, it brings fresh insight into the lost years of the young man called Esus, and the vital young woman who was his equal. Profoundly moving and often outrageously funny, Cunningham’s new novel is storytelling of the highest caliber. Maeve is sure to claim her place among the great literary heroines of our age.

LyaLya Herold

A book to encourage all who have suffered devastating personal losses to take the opportunity that tragedy offers for renewal. Death of Marriage, Birth of a Woman is also an informal, personal introduction to the amazing variety of self-transformative practices presently available. Its story is the autobiography of a woman who blossoms as a person after her husband of thirty-eight years abruptly leaves her for a younger woman. The book details how she fought through confusion and despair to a new life of creativity and spiritual adventure, giving warm and vivid accounts of self-transformative practices, trainings, explorations and encounters. The book is a love song to life, filled with a great deal of playfulness and humor, written to bring laughter, affirmation and hope into the hearts of those who have faced great pain.

Maurice Blanchot

This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: “A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II,” is the story of the narrator’s relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. “Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism,” writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: “Blanchot’s prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.”

Fred Dortort

This meticulous, close reading of the entire of William Blake’s great prophetic poem, “Jerusalem,” challenges almost every extant critical assumption about this poem, from the function of the figures Los and Entitharmon to the belief that in Jerusalem Blake is finally reconciled with Christianity. In the face of decades of continuing efforts to domesticate and normalize Blake’s poetry, The Dialectic of Vision seeks to reaffirm, in the strongest possible terms — its spirit, as well as its uniquely organized coherence and astonishing relevance for our time.

Rod Bull

“What was happening? Everything I tried was going wrong. I needed to start again, get my life back. Would it be possible to change the events of my life, was there some basic flaw in me? ‘There was a veiled past which I could not see, there was a door to which I had not key.’ How would it be possible?” We’ve all been there: An impasse, a crossroads, an unmarked door—or some asymmetry in the weave of life that leaves us stuck at worst, though at best in question. So too begins Rod Bull’s ribald, funny, drunken, irreverent memoir of a seemingly accidental spiritual life, with a constant refrain to “dirty work”—shoveling manure in a stable or bilge water in the belly of a ship, or cutting cane and viciously cut, the only cure to which is to urinate on yourself… Bull’s is a life of pratfalls, comic encounters (with an angry Jim Brown, the running back, in London, with sundry Tibetan Tulkus or with the tutelary heads of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Work) and hard won insights. What is of particular note is that here you read the story of no man soaring from height to golden height but an honest recounting and recollecting, blemishes and all, of a life of the spirit via serious hard traveling. Dirty Work: A Chump’s Search for Meaning is a memoir of crazy wisdom.

Alan Sondheim

This collection of writing represents, in Sondheim’s words, “a basic text for postmodern poets.”

Sondheim states, “My approach would describe something like the impossible search for the grounds of the Self in sexuality and ideology; the hysteria of the loss of speech; a work situated between poetry and theory that extends the boundaries of theory itself; ‘the poetry of deconstruction’; ‘the narrative of loss’ …”

STOCK IS LOW BUT EXISTENT… CONTACT US DIRECTLY OR…

Jalal Toufic

The author, son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, lived in Lebanon for 17 years; this extraordinary fictionalized memoir derives much of its intensity from Toufic’s exposure to three of the world’s most devastated peoples. Viewing life through the eyes of Nietzsche and Kafka, he deftly turns sitting in a cafe into an autobiographical narrative blended with philosophy and observations on cinema gleaned from his own experience as a filmmaker. The text turns on a metaphoric excavation of an always underway process or state of ‘distraction’– A state which for Toufic is not so much an attitude or level of concentration as it is an ontological modality. Insightful, funny, erotic, at times bizarre,Distracted offers an indelible vision of daily life by a man born on the twin currents of art and history.

Giuliano Dego

This extraordinary biographical novel is a faithful account of the heroic life of Dr. Max Gerson, originator of the most significant medically-based cure for cancer to emerge in modern times. Beginning in 1933, the novel details Gerson’s flight from Nazi Germany and the subsequent struggles of Andrej Markhoff (an emigre Russian aristocrat and former patient) to write the doctor’s story. Years later, Guliano Dego recovers Markoff’s papers and is at once captured by the drama of Gerson’s life. He travels to Mexico, to Gerson’s clinic in exile, where he observes the method first-hand and uncovers new and shocking facts in the plot to suppress Gerson’s work. In the novel’s gripping denouement, the author finally discovers both the fate of Andrej Markoff and the forces behind international medical collusion.

Charles Bernstein

A Matrices Edition

Homophonic translations create poems that foreground the sound of the original more than the lexical meaning: sound-alike poems or “sound writing.” This essay presents a dizzying number of examples of sound mimesis as a way to explore the poetics of sound and the politics of translation. Covering modernists (such as Pound, Bunting, and Khelbnikov) and contemporaries (such as David Melnick and Caroline Bergvall), the Bernstein also addresses homophonics in popular culture including an extended discussion of TV comedian Sid Caear’s “double talking.” The essay raises a thorny question: Are homophonic poems a form of cultural appropriation or a form of transnationalism?

Leon Hammer, M.D.

A critically acclaimed, comprehensive resource for the layperson or the professional in any of the healing arts, this book examines the natural energy functions of the human organism as a key to mental, emotional, and spiritual health. It offers new insight into disease, showing how it is not merely an invasion from the outside but rather a by-product of an organism’s unsuccessful attempt to restore its own balance. Informative case histories are included.

Eileen Stukane

Pregnant women have intense and strange dreams, some ecstatic but many anxious and frightening. They almost always keep them secret, fearing that the dreams might mean that they are bad mothers-to-be, or that they might be somehow harmful to their unborn babies. The Dream Worlds of Pregnancy brings good news for all such women. Based on meticulous research into the dream journals of hundreds of normal, expectant parents, it demonstrates how common such dreams really are and how they can be used to help smooth the path to motherhood. It gives practical help in dream interpretation so parents-to-be can use dreams to gain insight into what they are experiencing and begin bonding with their baby.

Bernadette Mayer
Edited by Michael Ruby & Sam Truitt
Bernadette Mayer is among the most influential poets of the late 20th century and to the present, with much of that interest falling to her earliest works. At the age of 15, in 1960, Mayer began writing and instantly with an incarnate directness and resource belying her youth. Over the next two decades, this precocious start would culminate in a body of writing extraordinary in its range and import. Even given that Mayer was moving in a New York milieu given to radical practice—as evidenced in the journal 0 to 9 she co-edited in the late ’60s—these books in their collective force represent an explosion of poetic forms and investigation as profound and sustained as American poetry perhaps has seen. The permutations of her poetic shapes are myriad and through it all forms the irreverent and sacred, jocular and deadly serious, erotic, rigorously fashioned and off the cuff, gentle and tough, deadpan dance of a soul on fire—a poetic intelligence and skill operating at the heights. These early books have played an oceanic role in the formation of generations of experimental poets, though in shards, as many of the books on which her reputation is based have long been out of print—and so their operative life partial. This multi-volume publication, which includes some poems that have never been published—including such early long poems as “A Moving Boat Is a Squeezed Boat: 52 Cards” and “Complete Music of Webern (A Movie)”—makes available for the first time the near totality of Mayer’s early books.

Ceremony Latin (1964) * Red Book in Three Parts * Story * The Old Style Is Finding Out Something About A Whole New Set of Possibilities * Moving * Poetry * Eruditio Ex Memoria * The Golden Book of Words

Peter Lamborn Wilson

“It is my hope that this book by Peter Lamborn Wilson will come as something of a revelation to the world of poetry: a revelation that poetry this good and good in this way can be produced in our times; good as rhythmically and sonorously exciting, expressive, intuitive, intelligent, well-measured, suitably barbaric, historically redolent, politically, metaphysically, even soteriologically astute. A revelation because we are unaccustomed to poetry that is not predominately ironical in statement, excessively self-reflective in attitude, nor committed to the demolition of its own means, that is at once so extraordinarily urbane in spirit and down-home, downright funky in expressive spontaneity, not to mention intellectually complex, with a generous salting of wit and cognitive play. All this, too, without, through naiveté, ignorance, or obtuseness, exposing itself to critical missiles poised like ICBMs to be deployed against work that attempts just what these poems actually achieve.

And I would hazard a reason why: that the stance of the poetry—and Peter Lamborn Wilson has earned his stance through decades of committed prose—that the stance of this poetry, in the complexity of its reflection, the radical specificity of its attentions, and the intensity of its care—is in every breath a committed poetry, and committed in a singular, highly individuated, unpredictable way.
The verse may take its cue from Allen Ginsberg and William Blake, but its intellectual purview shows intimacy with Kropotkin, Proudhon, Engels, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Agrippa, Erasmus Darwin, Pierre Clastres, Henry Corbin, Charles Fourier, and many others of an equally august if unconventionally referenced notoriety.

Wilson weaves a visionary poetics through an explicit politics, an explicit politics through an exuberant sense of imaginative freedom. Wilson names his political and spiritual agenda “neo-pastoralism” and mines the pastoral tradition of the venerable ancients—Theocritus, Virgil, Edmund Spencer—for material that reprises and expands themes from his previous pronunciamentos: Green Hermeticism, “Escape from the Nineteenth Century,” “The Shamanic Trace,” Pirate Utopias, Temporary Autonomous Zones, to name but a few of his titles.

The poetry is moderated by prose interludes in a variety of genres that develop thoughts in a manner appropriate to the energy of the poetry, not so much by providing conceptual bases for its contents (in a way it does that too), but by the sheer aptness of contiguity and multiplicitous resonance, worked out and placed with an intelligence whose lucidity is as disruptive as the rampant audacity of the verse.

A persistent organizing theme is the hypothesis (due to the late Pierre Clastres) that the historical arrival of “civilization” with its literacy, collectively organized agriculture, division of labor into rulers, administrators, and drones, its authoritarian religion, private property, and massive armies—in short, the advent of The State—came about through the failure of precise social formations that for tens of thousands of years had functioned to ward off and dissipate the agglomeration and centralization of political power. Modern humanity (since 4000 BCE) has invented its own ignorance of the deep human past—and called only what superceded and suppressed it—History. Wilson sets off in search of the traces of social practices now long eclipsed and finds them cannily in the most unlikely places.

The metaphysical posture is pantheism or “pagan monotheism,” aligned with anarchism. The work: to conjure an aggressive pantheism through a veil, haze, or prism of pastoral idealism—the lure of nature realized through the dangerous, bottom-feeding numinosity demonstrably intrinsic to it.

Orthodox (Abrahamic) monotheists routinely slander pantheism, averring that it entails, in practice, a slothful relaxation of the spirit and a general abnegation of conscience: if God is All, what need for moral discipline, intellectual rigor, or the restraint of native delinquency?

But if moral rigor as practiced until now proves to be the absolute repression of the divine in the world and the vassal of Statist discipline, even relaxation and license become tactics for the recovery of natural and divine values. It turns out, however, as any reader of Ec(o)logues may very well attest, that the attentions and affirmations demanded by pantheist-anarchism may prove anything but easily achieved. The affirmation of everything will test the stomach of any of us. It is the discipline and conscience of such an ontological perspective and the transgressive sacrality it entails, that there, where one cannot imagine the sacred, is precisely where one’s practice must seek it out. In that sense Ec(o)logues is itself spiritual praxis, for reader and poet alike.”

– Charles Stein

Franz Kamin

EGZ Book of Frogs was originally written by “Uncle Franz” for the child (EGZ) that lives inside his adult friend Eve Rosenthal; and was illustrated by another friend, Kathy Bourbonais. This and several other little stories were later set to music for the mime and flute team of Jane Adler and Andrew Bolotowsky. The book is available either with or without a recording (7 inch LP) of these pieces. Also available from Station Hill Press: Franz Kamin’s book Ann Margret Loves You and 12 inch LP Behavioral Drift II/ Rugugmool.

Sean Haldane

The only “how-to” book on emotional crises as distinct from long-term emotional problems, Emotional First Aid shows how to handle intense emotional episodes as well as crises between parents and children. Haldane argues that these crises must be dealt with on an individual basis if one is not to be invasive in coming to another’s aid, and that emotional first aid can help avoid the necessity for psychotherapy just as physical first aid can prevent extended medical treatment.

Mei Mei Berssenbrugge

What can one person know of another? These poems act as energy fields of images from science, philosophy, and romantic love. They evoke the spaces of the New Mexican desert, the Alaskan tundra, her Chinese home, and the interior self in relationships, as the poet makes empathy a metaphor for the space of one person inside another. The lines of verse are long, sensuous, and prose-like, following the open horizons of the West.

“Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry moves from “inner” phenomena to ones coming from the “external” world and back again with breathtaking evenness. Calmly and convincingly she leads our attention from…. confidence or passion or attention itself to ice crystals, gulls fireworks, or apple trees and to very specific qualities of perception, especially vision- most notably, those associated with the properties of light- fogginess, brightness, colors- (what a poet of light she is!)- in poetry that always speaks equally about “the world” and “herself.” She is neither “objectivist” nor “subjectivist” but a poet of the whole consciousness. A virtuoso of the long line, hers- unlike those of most other poets- are startlingly non-rhapsodic, although they are more truly emotional than those of most rhapsodists. I’ve known and loved Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry for years. It gets better all the time.” -Jackson Mac Low

Yogmata Keiko Aikawa

With meticulous attention and humor, she catalogs our human foibles in search of a happiness that, when the mind is clear, is revealed to be right here and now. Intermingled with a telling of her own miraculous journey of discovery and eventual self-realization, Yogmata-Ji explains the forms of mental entrapment by which humanity dreams away life. While clearly articulating the tenets of her own Himalayan Wisdom practice, she explains: “real yoga”; how the traditions of Jesus Christ and Buddha are synonymous with her own; the nature of true religion; what happens in the afterlife; and the wondrous efficacy of prayer. Written in a colloquial, down-to-earth, empathic style, this book is a must-read for all seeker of the truth.

Charles Stein

A Matrices Edition

The translation is accompanied by a series of interpretive essays by the translator. Stein maintains that the Parmenides text is an important poem as well as a philosophical treatise and translates it as such. His “Parmenides Project” comprises some thirty years of journal writings documenting an extended “thought experiment” in which he takes seriously Parmenides’ assertion that Being and only Being truly “is” and that all else —all thoughts, intuitions, imaginings, sensations, perceptions, myths, philosophical opinions, by the very structure of “seeming” must “seem to Be.” The author contends that this view suggests a practice of mind that corresponds to the culminating focus of many contemplative paths both East and West and is of contemporary interest because it assumes the relativism of much in present day philosophy without falling into abject nihilism.

This is the first book of an extraordinary young photographer whose extension of the frame gives the image its play in time and returns it to its connection with Event. Taking as object the experimental performances of Co-Accident, a Baltimore-based group of poets, musicians, and “theatricians” that is having its own impact on international performance art, Sue Abramson allows the photographic image to register the disciplined free behavior of people moving in light. The result is an amplification of those photographic possibilities opened up and given mastery by the late Barbara Blondeau, and shows that when the fixed image travels beyond the fixed frame it can become both abstract and cinematic. Person is objectified by multiplicity, and object is personified in the specific character of its movement. Eye and mind grow larger together as they interact at the point where hand controls lens. — George Quasha

Gisela Gamper and
Rachel Pollack

Fabrications is a series of photographs composed by Gisela Gamper accompanied by text of Rachel Pollock. In the opening, Pollock states, “Like many women artists, Gamper uses her body as a (literal) ground of being, the necessary source from which all experience must emerge. But she also absorbs experience back into her own form. Instead of exploring how the body inhabits and moves in an alien world, these photos graft the world itself directly onto the artist’s torso, at first through photomontage, and later through computer manipulation of images.”

Pollock continues, “Though the pictures veer toward abstraction they all begin in the artist’s life.”

The book ends with a quote from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche which points to a message this collection deeply invokes—“The essence of mind is in the heart.”

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Are these texts shadows of the real? Or are they only false documents? “Incunablula” and “Ong’s Hat” first appeared in the 1980s and spawned a mini-industry of conspiracy lit, several scholarly books, even a kids’ TV series (“Gakidor”), and a rock band (“Ong’s Hat”). Here are the original “legendary” texts, along with various and sundry other alternative histories, bad translations and anarchist ephemera, plus several previously unpublished works, including an entire Sci-Fi novel: Lunar Mansion or, the Whole Rabbit (based on Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, which was used to generate the plot).

A robust textual creativity resonates a region of magical transmutation, political possibility, and spiritual adventure, so that the whole collection vibrates and pulses with the flavors of the real. A “false” document would seem to involve a contradiction, since being false, it is no document at all. But documentation is no more possible than the articulation of some absolutely verifiable condition of Being itself. Peter Lamborn Wilson seems to have documented this condition with consummate probity.

—Charles Stein, author of There Where You Do Not Think to Be Thinking and transl. The Odyssey

Peter Lamborn Wilson is the very model of the outlaw scholar. Operating outside the stultifying atmosphere of academia, drawing on research and knowledge that is both wide and deep, and writing in clear and vivid prose blessedly free of jargon, Wilson charts the secret histories of this world and others.

—Rachel Pollack, writer, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the World Fantasy Award

Robert Duncan

Faust Foutu (Faust Screwed) is a satire featuring a mid-20th-century Faust as a bourgeois artist “suffering” for his art. It was first performed by poets and painters in San Francisco in 1955. The book includes drawings by the poet made to accompany the printed text.

“In the early fifties the art of painting was at the cutting edge (Clyfford Still, Pollock, Rothko) — it’s not surprising that this “screwed” Faust is a painter or that a public reading and performance of the piece should have taken place at San Francisco’s most intensely avant garde art gallery, the Six Gallery. It’s no surprise either that the actors in the presentation, seated at a long table on a little dais, should be friends, actors, experimental film-makers, poets, painters, and playwrights. Poet Jack Spicer leaned towards the audience at moments with intensity and almost boyish innocence of expression and near harshness of diction. Larry Jordan, the film-maker, had been encouraged by Duncan to just sing loudly and naturally letting his untrained voice carry Faust’s songs. Painter, and life-friend of Duncan’s, Jess Collins, spoke his lines with immense clarity and irony. The play was being tested on the ear, there was no acting-out as Duncan did in his solo performances, this was to be heard—and, listen, it’s still sounding.” -Michael McClure

Robert Duncan’s “comic masque” Faust Foutu was first performed in 1955 and published in a small edition in 1960 with drawings by the poet, reproduced here in a trade edition.

Returning from India in 1983, haunted by geometric relationships between economies and persons, by images of new ways of being alive that he had seen, Robert Kelly began this long poem. The Persian Gulf, the oil wars we inhabit, transgression and invasion, are motives as the text tries to escape the false comforts of continuity and reach the space that opens between words.

Nina Bouraoui grew up in a liberal university milieu, completely unlike the one she describes in Forbidden Vision. Because of the strength of her memories, both good and bad, of her years spent in Algeria, and her own Algerian roots, she wanted her first novel to be about that country. Eager to portray Algerian society and character as she describes them — “boiling,” “dangerous,” “exciting”

Rosmarie Waldrop

Just as the discovery of America in the fifteenth century forever altered the way Europeans viewed the world, so too did the theories of relativity and quantum physics radically alter the twentieth-century vision of the universe. Both encounters with otherness, on both a global and personal level, form the crux of Rosmarie Waldrop’s extraordinary novel. The story roams the political worlds of old Mexico and Washington, D.C., and goes on to fuse the two great perceptual revolutions of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries—so that it is Columbus, in her fiction, who discovers the unpredicted particles of the new quantum physics. Waldrop’s brilliant narrative shifts from stream of consciousness to first-person narration to poetry, in a unique meditation on love and politics, conquest and tolerance, and the effects of change.

Edmond Jabes,
Pierre Joris (trans.)

The fate of the individual among disintegrating tradition is a major theme of Edmund Jabes. In this book of literary and philosophical conversations, France’s leading Jewish writer adds an intimate, personal dimension to his formidable 40-year career. Compelling in its inquiry into the fate of reading and writing in our time, it is also profoundly ambiguous, open to a multiplicity of possible readings. This work offers insight of a new kind into this major writer’s growing canon in English—thoughts on his own works combine with stories of his youth in Egypt, his exile in 1956, other writers and artists, the Kabbalah, and projections for a postmodern world.

Kyoko Hayashi and Eiko Otake, Translator

FROM TRINITY TO TRINITY recounts the pilgrimage of Japanese atomic-bomb survivor Kyoko Hayashi to the Trinity Site in northern New Mexico, where the world’s first atomic bomb test was conducted. Her journey takes her into unfamiliar terrain, both past and present, as she not only confronts American attitudes, disconcertingly detached from the suffering of nuclear destruction, but discovers as well a profound kinship with desert plants and animals, the bomb’s “first victims.” Translator Eiko Otake, a renowned artist in dance (Eiko & Koma), offers further insight into Hayashi’s life and work, illuminating how her identity as “outsider” helped shape her vision. Together author and translator present one woman’s transformation from victim to witness, a portrait of endurance as a power of “being” against all odds.

George Quasha and Charles Stein

This essay, discussing a two-part installation at Galerie des Archives in Paris by the internationally celebrated artist, Gary Hill, explores the enigmatic nature of the work of art as an object and of objects in general, as such issues pertain to Hill’s work and these installations in particular. The text is by two well-known poet/artists who have a long history of association and collaboration with Gary Hill. This book is handsomely illustrated with photographs of the installation and other relevant works by Hill and is presented in a bilingual, French-English edition.

Excerpts from the text:

“There are works of art that require initiation. This does not mean that they require explanation, special consensus, or any other prescriptive bearing. It does mean that one must discover an _appropriate mode of entry_ which is more than informational. This can involve radical reorientation, as in the case of _HanD HearD_, which directly (but non-coercively) introduces us to the posture of awareness appropriate to our participation in the piece.”

“Considering more particularly the piece _HanD HearD_, we discover that its way of being a text imposes nothing on the mind, yet it offers an _image_ (a hand in front of a person’s face) as a possible _posture_ of awareness. And because the “text” has no “content” other than this posture, it grants the participant _direct access_ from the beginning.”

Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis, trans.

“When we come to write the history of criticism for the 1940 to 1980 period, it will be found that Blanchot, together with Sartre, made French “discourse” possible, both in its relentlessness and its acuity….This selection…is exemplary for its clearly translated and well-chosen excerpts from Blanchot’s many influential books. Reading him now, and in this form, I feel once more the excitement of discovering Blanchot in the 1950s…”-Geoffrey Hartman

This compilation of teachings presents the oral wisdom of Kalu Rinpoche, revered worldwide as a teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism. Here are his views on the mastery on the three yanas, the vows of Refuge and Bodhisattva, and the true nature of the mind. Also included are techniques for stepping beyond the Four Veils of Obscuration and Emotional Subjectivity onto the Five Paths that culminate in the liberation of mahamudra, plus a thorough introduction to the visualization techniques of yidam practice, a detailed commentary on the Chenrezig sadhana, and an extensive explanation of the Bardos of Death and Dying. Leavened with humor and fresh insight, this first English translation is an excellent resource for the novice and experienced student alike.

OUT OF PRINT

This text is a psychotypographic romance caught listening to the voices inside the voice from which it issues. It mates willingly with its Reader, releases quickness & lightness in the marriage of syntax, then returns to the underground where Lily & Hands receive their power to discourse.

George Quasha

If William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” are poetry, then George Quasha’s preverbs are like a close cousin. Its core question is: can poetry say the unsayable? Preverbs wonder: what is poetry? A well established poetic tradition both modern and post-modern—some call it experimental—starts its poetics with: poetry is not what you think it is. Its work is journeying inside language, as if passing through a distant country or else another reality. It conveys news of alternate dimensions showing through in the here-and-now, embedded inside our everyday thoughts and speaking.

In this comforting and deeply thoughtful book, the author offers a series of simple grief rituals, among them the venting of feelings, letter writing, affirmations, exercises to act out negative emotions as well as forgiveness, fantasies, meditations, and more. Adult children of alcoholics, victims of incest and assault, and those who have ended a relationship, lived through a natural disaster, wrecked a car, or suffered any kind of loss, will find that these rituals move them beyond loss to forgiveness, gratitude and a new sense of life.

Don Byrd

This book is a guide book to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, seven long solos in a jam session with the dead, an answer to the four great philosophic questions of Immanuel Kant, the song of a barbaric horde, an eavesdropping at the borders of contemporary history, an account of an apocalyptic disco….And the presiding beings are Beethoven, Napoleon, Sousa, Frank Woolworth, Buddy Bolden, Charlie Parker, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. You are invited to participate. R.S.V.P.

“This powerful act of language is at once a celebration and a moan of dismay. Its theme is the advent of the “Information Society,” and its roots are in both the Western Intellectual traditions and American forms of life. The poem’s seven sections are devoted repsectively to the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, marking the strange persistence of ancient categories of the enigmatic and awesome in the contemporary world.

The accident of the centenary of the founding of the F.W. Woolworth chain provides both the poem’s formal occasion and a “principle” for organizing its detail—a delirious proliferation of artifacts – useful and absurd – arbitrary, fanciful and pragmatic in their arrangement.” – Charles Stein

Kathy Acker

This book begins when a young boy, Pip, learns he has come into great expectations. What these expectations actually are, or the change from the total disparity between Pip’s ideas of ‘expectations’ and what is real to Pip’s learning to feel, is the narrative of this plagiarized Bildungsroman.

Thus Great Expectations is both the story of a young boy’s introduction to the world and a profound examination of moral values. Written at a time when Acker’s relationship with society is in question, texts given by the society—Dickens, Proust, Flaubert, Reage, Victoria Holt, Keats—appear both as they were written and in a new and interrogative light. The whole culture is brought into question.

Out of the agony of the author’s total disenchantment, or plagiarism, appears beauty: given text is laid on given text; language is no longer used to control but to be; the reader touches language rather than is controlled by it; meaning changes to tapestry. This book is totally sensuous.

This book is “the most completely unified work of art Acker has yet produced. One that by its formal concentration and its unified shape at every depth of reading fulfills the sort of demands that Sterne or Canetti makes of the novelist.” – Alain Robbe-Grillet

Rosmarie Waldrop

Writing from America to her sister in Germany, the protagonist of this shattering first novel reconstructs the life of her parents—in the author’s words, “just those ‘ordinary people’ who helped Hitler rise.” Unflinching in her appraisal, she imagines how her father’s latent anti-Semitism was triggered by his wife’s affair with a Jew, who was later sent to a concentration camp. The tone darkens as the narrator realizes that she and her sisters are living out variants of their mother’s sexual model.

“Wonderfully, relentlessly absorbing, Hanky’s several overlapping tales leave one marvelling at the beauty, economy and humor with which Waldrop interweaves the complex tensions of Hitler’s Germany in a family drama of repeated infidelity. Delightfully rich and bawdy and as strong-willed as its characters.” -Lydia Davis

“Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” -Angela Carter

“Stein is a poet with all the means of his craft at hand. Seldom confessional, the work overhears and remembers the mumbled self-awarenesses of dream, and sets them in form. I find him one of the smartest men of his generation, and one of its most exemplary poets.” – Robert Kelly

“Charles Stein belongs to a school of visionaries headed by Parmenides. These texts recall us to a work in which philosophy and poetry equally serve the quest for the knowledge our enlightenment requires. Here is thought that sings. This book should be read once for the pleasure, then it will repay prolonged and serious study.” – Don Byrd

Healing Fiction — meaning both “fiction that heals” and “the process of healing the fiction itself” — is a radical revision of the act of therapy. One of the most influential psychological writers of our time, Hillman conceives and practices therapy as an imaginative art, intimately bound with poetics — the making with words, fictioning. To heal the symptom, he argues, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself. Three essays “revision” the work of Freud, Jung and Adler through the role of fiction in their thought and practice.

By sharing several stories about people whose rich inner lives belie their outer circumstances and appearance, Dr. Ross opens unexpected vistas on the nature of the human soul and the power of personal truth to inspire and heal.

KUBLER-ROSS IN PERSON is a series based on public lectures or talks to the medical community by the world-renowned medical doctor, psychiatrist, and thanatologist, Elisabeth Kubler Ross. The four titles in this series are: _Healing in Our Time_, _The Cocoon and the Butterfly_, _The Meaning of Suffering_, and _Say Yes To It_. You meet Dr. Ross at her most personable, engaging and passionate.

Dr. Kubler-Ross is the author of _On Death and Dying_, _AIDS_, _On Children and Death_, and _Death is of Vital Importance_.

Keith Waldrop

Vivid elements evoke remembered scenes or imagined constructions from history, dream or chance. Unlikely characters show up. A 15th century Dutch painter walks the streets of Providence; a young girl goes to sleep in a dark room; Charlemagne appears in a mythic terrain of sheer language. This is a distinctive poet’s prose, precise and congenial, capturing improbable moments and spinning the mind into new realms of possibility.

Heide Hatry
The art of the human image arose millennia ago as a way beyond impermanence and, especially, to keep the dead among us. The pictorial object “the icon” often carried a charge as ritual or ceremonial artifact and, indeed, as a thing with a certain power. The artist Heide Hatry has extended this tradition by creating realistic portraits made out of the actual ashes of the departed person portrayed. Are the results reminiscent of ancient sacred and secular traditions and their complex, even mysterious function to, say, calm, enrich or transform our experience? Icons in Ash includes seventeen of Hatry’s portraits and twenty-seven contemporary writers who explore this phenomenon in original and engaging meditations on death, the dead body, art, relics, psychology, philosophy, religion, mourning, evolution, transformation, and immortality. Contributors include, among others, Hans Belting, Mark Dery, Eleanor Heartney, Siri Hustvedt, Jonas Mekas, Rick Moody, Mark Pachter, Steven Pinker, Wolf Singer, Luisa Valenzuela, and Peter Weibel.

Michael Perlman

Fifty-one years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima Forever explores why and how sharing in the sorrows of others is a key to our own survival, the ecologically sound way of discovering a more humane future, and the only way to avoid the nightmare of history’s repetition. In the twelve eloquent chapters of this extended essay, Michael Perlman explores key images and texts associated with the first atomic bombings, most notably John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Perlman shows that without the ability to allow a place within ourselves for those outside our own group—other human beings and, finally, all that comprises our planet’s ecology—Hiroshima and Nagasaki will repeat themselves many times over. Hiroshima Forever: The Ecology of Mourning speaks not just to ecologists, peace-activists and explorers of psyche and spirit, but to anyone who can’t get out of their minds the hope that we might still be able to work together for a better future.

“Stein has found a channel to his own imagination. When his mind is moving and seizing the gorgeous or gritty images as they wind upward in the spine or shiver from the brain, he carries the reader effortlessly into his discoveries.” – Bill Zavatsky

Chris Tysh

Hotel des Archives is a trilogy of books consisting of verse recastings from the French novels of Beckett, Genet and Duras. Synchronous with postmodernism’s aesthetics of appropriation, détournement, sampling and other intertextual strategies, the project operates a double shift of genre and language, since she moves from the original French and from prose to lyric. These transcreations, as Tysh has been calling them, allow her to forsake the traditional mode of self-expression in favor of one that “translates” other cultural materials, creating an artistic network beyond boundaries and temporalities.

In Molloy, the Flip Side, she uses the French language in which Samuel Beckett wrote his novel Molloy to guide her into finding a contemporary American vernacular through which the hapless narrator speaks. Her three-line stanza formation compresses Beckett’s diegetic universe, sparse as it is, and allows her to link the two texts through the projection of a new, speaking subject — a funny, witty, old and disabled bum, going slowly nowhere.

In Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic, Jean Genet’s 1943 disturbing elegy for social heterogeneity, she attempts to find a poetic equivalent with which to evoke Divine, Mignon-Dainty-Feet, and the young assassin, Our Lady, three saintly figures in a forbidden realm of the senses. The seven-line stanzas of my Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic are spacious enough to accommodate the narrative arc, while foregrounding their lyrical impact.

Her third transcreation flows from the novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein by Marguerite Duras, the celebrated author of the Hiroshima Mon Amour screenplay and winner of the Goncourt Prize for The Lover. In this type of relational poetics, she strives to maintain the narrative spaces and affects, while finding a new set of porous networks – lyrical trajectories that pass through various signposts of the text.

Fall 2018

ADVANCE PRAISE

Chris Tysh reads in, around, and through Molloy in this ingenious transformation of Beckett’s French prose into compulsively vernacular English tercets. The narrative echoes in Molloy: The Flip Side make for an unsettling familiarity, spiked with the verbal equivalent of dark chocolate and homemade rum.
—Charles Bernstein

Like Genet, Tysh is something of a snake charmer—or the snake itself?—lyricism unfolding kaleidoscopically, extending emotions and meanings, fastening this mouse/reader to the spot.
—Robert Glück

Chris Tysh’s gorgeous transcreation of Marguerite Duras’s haunted and haunting early novel draws out the lyricism of the text’s emotional algebra almost in the way one might draw poison from a wound. In Tysh’s condensed explorations of betrayal, voyeurism, and imitative desire, one finds a further textual ravishment—a lushly articulated response to Duras’s original that captures both the calculated and explosive qualities of its cry.
—Elizabeth Willis

Laurie Patton

House Crossing is a book of 32 poems about where we live or, more properly, dwell, with each poem entitled by a different attribute of domestic architecture as it is commonly known: Copula, eaves, attic, beams, etc. Such might lend itself to description, but–reminiscent in part of Ronald Johnson’s oeuvre (The Foundations, The Spires, and The Ramparts)–in the vision of poet and scholar Laurie Patton each component becomes alive to an actuality beyond physical construct: The poetics of how we hold our ground, even if it is in flux–or as she writes, “A river runs… below the house.” The instigation for this poetic cycle is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, with this collection a homage to that classic phenomenological analysis. As she writes in her introduction, House Crosing arose as “a straightforward observation about the endurance of Bachelard’s work: if a poetics is good enough, and I believe Bachelard’s is, then it does not only comment on poetry, but can give rise to poetry as well.” What Patton gives rise to is in part an opportunity for us each to live more evocatively in our days and nights in each our own place, building a being, as “Noah’s ark stands / at the end of our hallway.”

Spring 2018

Dee Ann Parrish

The message of this clear and sympathetic book is that dysfunctional relationships—characterized by predictable patterns of vicious circles – can be healed. Reassuring case histories, drawn from the author’s own therapeutic practice, demonstrate why relationships disintegrate, and show how they can be made whole again. Here are proven techniques designed to short-circuit destructive habits. Readers will learn to use “diffusers” to keep conflicts from escalating, to gauge levels of emotional intimacy and identify barriers to closeness, to examine their own levels of communication and quality in listening, to use “I” statements to identify problematic issues, and uncover inter-generational patterns of dysfunction. For anyone seeking to improve a relationship or reconnect with a partner -with or without the aid of a therapist – this is essential reading.

Jacqui Bishop and
Mary Grunte

OUT OF PRINT

Janice Krasnow

And now to a book that exhorts us to turn off our televisions … Practical and witty, written with a light touch but always deeply felt, Janice Krasnow’s remarkable little book lays out a series of specific steps to help readers make meaningful connections with other human beings. The book combines invaluable suggestions and insights (“give up the comparison mode for good”; “life is disturbing, and it should be”) with a series of specific exercises that lead to genuine communication and interaction. These include temporary withdrawal from the media and a program to break through the conversational cliches that allow us to maintain a destructive distance. With a list of things not to say (from “You look good!” to “Take care of yourself!”) to suggestions for getting along with people you know well (but ought to know better), this is a social survival guide for the 21st century.

Jacqui Bishop and
Mary Grunte

OUT OF PRINT

This modern transformation of the Rumpelstiltskin tale is written as the autobiography of a mysteriously deformed girl, who runs away from her village to become the apprentice and successor to the “Wise Woman of the Western Woods” while the beautiful girl with whom she grew up becomes Queen. A successful blend of magical realism and psychological wisdom.
With the “magical realism” of her two critically acclaimed novels (The Return of the Goddess and The Wild Mother), Elizabeth Cunningham once again brings the great archetypes into our lives — here it

Benjamin Colodzin, M.D.

This practical manual by an experienced trauma therapist offers a wide variety of therapeutic methods for dealing with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder as well easy to understand explanations for why post-traumatic symptoms occur.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder may afflict not just war veterans but anyone who has suffered a severe physical or emotional assault. This sane and practical manual by an experienced trauma therapist offers a wide variety of therapeutic methods as well as easy-to-understand explanations for why post-traumatic symptoms occur. Dr. Colodzin’s view is that most post-traumatic symptoms were once in fact adaptive reactions to the situations in which they developed, but are no longer appropriate to a changed, live situation.

The book is for individuals suffering from Post-traumatic Stress, their friends, families, and therapists. It offers techniques to help overcome its often paralyzing effects: from anxiety, depression, and rage to flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, and substance abuse.

Linda Crane (1945-2000) was a poet, naturalist, shamanic practitioner, and Zen Buddhist. She was born in Winchester, grew up in Duxbury, and spent most of her adult life in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She published two books of poetry (as Linda Parker) during her lifetime: _Graphite_ (Tansy Press 1980) and _Seabirds_ (Fathom Press 1980). She shared her work generously, often typing up fresh copies of poems to give to friends, and was well known throughout the Cape Ann area for both her poetry readings and her shamanic practice. In the late 1990s she wrote and gave public performances of two operas: _Spring_ and _Anacaona_, singing her own compositions. She left a group of manuscripts prepared for publication at her death. _How Wild?_, subtitled in manuscript _She Speaks for Herself_, is the first of these to be published by her estate.

If I Am A Musical Thinker is a statement of the aesthetic, social, and spiritual credo of the influential American composer and writer Benjamin Boretz. Boretz proposes that artistic expression answers primal human needs for experiencing identity through articulation in artistic media; and further, that theoretical reflection is — constructively or deconstructively.

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Edmond Jabes and
Keith Waldrop, Transl.

This book is the first bilingual selection from the poetic works of Edmund Jabes, long acknowledged for the mastery of his work in the unique prose genre invented by him. “Jabes lives in the French language as if it were the Sea,” writes Robert Duncan in the afterword, a truth accessible here both in the French originals and Keith Waldrop’s extraordinary translations, drawn from Jabes’ earliest and most recent poems. “Poetry was Jabes’ proving ground,” writes Paul Auster in the Introduction, “and as a careful reader of Keith Waldrop’s translations will observe, the styles and themes that characterize The Book of Questions and The Book of Resemblances were already being explored by Jabes in the poems he wrote as a young man. One finds the same economy of reference, the same passionate lyricism, the same tendency toward aphorism, and the same preoccupation with the act of writing itself. Even the theme of exile, which plays such a vital part in the later prose books, is already present in these early poems: ‘Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.’” It is impressive to see how much the whole oeuvre of Jabes stands as a continuity and a completion from its first moments to these very recent poems, an inquiry into the nature of writing and being.

M.C. Richards

M.C. Richards’ CENTERING, published 25 years ago, went on to sell 120,000 copies and became a classic on the melding of spirit and art and the discovery of the self through creativity. This is the first major collection of her richly imagistic poetry which combines previous work with new poems written in the past decade. Richards here inquires about the essence and power of the imagination, and advocates viewing the world in images that “make us whole.” “The world will change,” she says, “when we imagine it differently,” This new book includes eight color paintings by Thomas Buechner, with the poems they inspired.

In these journals, writer and performer Stephen Clorfeine brings an experienced eye and heart-felt insight to daily life in Nepal, which reveals the rich complexity of its people and culture. Here is a place where ordinary reality is interlaced with peaceful and wrathful deities, with sacred caves, and with the mingled devotion of Hindu and Buddhist traditions. In the Valley of the Gods reflects the mindfulness, immediacy and compassion of the author.

Tomer Inbar

In the World Enormous is engaged in transition, conversation and what transforms. Focused on a time beginning shortly before the death of Tomer Inbar’s mother and ending after the birth of his twin daughters, these poems constitute a speaking out of and about passing and starting, in plangent energy and restless balances finding words simultaneous to a human intimacy and intensity. In part informed by his study of early Japanese literature, Inbar is open to these poems being read with a loose internal movement and multi-directionality—though within a totality presence inscribes and fi nds in you. Inbar writes, “I fi nd comfort in being present as things move. With sibilance. On their own volition. Taking the qualities of their construction along.” These poems moreover seem to compel us to think an impossible thought.

ADVANCE PRAISE

Tomer Inbar’s meditative, complex work reminds the reader of Hopkins’s “inscapes” and “instresses”—profound encounters, fruits of intense moments of observation, and an enviable musical ear. I am particularly drawn to Inbar’s unusual, even innovative, usage of parentheses throughout this collection. On the one hand, it is what Olson meant by the poet’s ability to “record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.” Moreover, Inbar uses parentheses to draw out the polyphony, worlds-within-worlds, commentary-upon-commentary, workings of the restless mind, as in, memorably: “Taking sticks to the mortuary: wild / Iris (bunches (of fresh tea (mint &) / marjoram (be discreet (she said) I / have neither their leisure nor / cadence) to arrive (in her state) momentarily.”
—Jake Marmer

Like the poetry of A.R. Ammons, David Ignatow, George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff, Tomer Inbar’s poems attend to reality’s finest internal and external details. Artifacts of a nimble mind, these poems delight and enlighten. They have the capacity to stun the reader into a heightened state of wakefulness to become partners to the poet’s reality, living on the perpetual edge of witnessing abundance.
—Jerry Mirskin

Tomer Inbar moves in careful relation to the enormous world, as if every word is a pearl of great price and the words exchanged between people are the greatest of all. These are poems that move between minds and reveal the deeper structures of thought and emotion that glide beneath the surface. Many of these poems are about human connection, and Inbar is an acute observer of the deeper ways that language opens fields of meaning between us … the beauty of a child’s mind, and all of the spaces that exist between thoughts, sounds, animals, museums, and the words we pass between each other.
—Kristin Prevallet

Indian Summer is a collection of 26 full-color photographs, paired with the views of eight Native American authors, capturing remote and powerful American landscapes. The authors include Ohiyesa, Brave Buffalo, Standing Bear, Shooter, Chased-by-Bears, Zitkala-Sa, Crowfoot, and Seattle. Both the photographs and the Native voices make a positive statement about the importance of loving and respecting the land. Standing Bear speaks for many Americans when he says, “From Wakan Tanka there came a a great underlying life force that flowed in and through all things….Thus all things were kindled and brought together by the same Great Mystery.”

The photographs by Ms Wyckoff represent more than 30 years of photographing nature throughout the United States. They have appeared in gallery exhibitions, as cover and internal art in various publications, and are owned by numerous private collectors.

Intimate relationship can be the source of great joy and the cause of deep suffering. It offers a unique opportunity to see oneself reflected in the other, for better or worse. When intimate partners manage this process in a mutually supportive and loving way, it is a pathway both to individual growth and healing, and to the rich, mature bond we call “enduring relationship.” This book reveals the underlying principles of enduring relationship, and serves as a guide to becoming skilled in its ways. Read it alone, and it will change how you relate to others. Read it out loud with your partner, and – chapter by chapter – it will revolutionize your relationship.

Cheryl Pallant

Engaging a rhythmic propulsion similar to that of the poet’s first book, Into Stillness offers a compelling meditation on the sacredness of the body in the shadow of atrocity. Her kinetic poetry swirls historical fragments with dream, memory, flesh, violence, human and ecstasy. With the flow of prose and the luminous interruptivity of poetry, Into Stillness explores the tension between self and other, existence and death, the word and its silence. The prose-like poems erupt from an innate yet unexplainable knowledge, surprising linguistically with their twists of meaning, landing in unexpected shapes and senses.

“Into Stillness is a death-defying act of language and imagination. An audacious, fluid living thing.” – Carole Maso

“Cheryl Pallant’s poems are remarkably attuned to the ever-changing relationship between language and the human body. She doesn’t describe experience so much as activate it, make it move as we move, close to others or away, close to ourselves or anguished by the gap between our desires and what we’ll let ourselves know of them. The poems of Into Stillness are explorations, not explanations, they are poems of process, of switching, of defeat and the return from defeat, of dissolution and the determination, always, to stand where it’s necessary to stand.” – Mark Wallace

Anne Gorrick & Sam Truitt, Editors

In|Filtration is an anthology of contemporary Hudson Valley poetry that in one sense or another is innovative. The poets’ work is sometimes formally original and other times innovative in the use of more familiar poetic forms: old bottle/new wine; new bottle/old wine; and, quite often, new bottle/new wine. Much of the poetry here is directly or indirectly in conversation with national and international movements directed toward more exploratory uses of the medium—work that goes beyond the explorer’s map into uncharted territories, places where the map tatters in the explorer’s pocket and another world begins. Like explorers the editors have sought to map the contemporary currents of radical poetics in the Hudson Valley. There is truly an enormous wealth of poetic activity in the region, and of course such an exploration cannot be comprehensive Themselves poets, the editors present what they take to be the salient characteristic of the region in their essay “A Hudson Valley Salt Line” at the end of the anthology, pointing to the geological, human and cultural histories of the Hudson Valley as they dovetail with its poetries. They also provide their rationale for the title In|Filtration with particular reference to the Hudson River’s salt line, which becomes the essay’s key trope.

Nor Hall

This book is described by Nor Hall as “a praise-piece to duplicitous metal-artful and harrowing-and to its handlers.” Part One, “Irons in the Fire,” is a prose character sketch of iron and iron workers, “the people who work iron and can’t keep their hands off it.” These are strangely passionate people (the real “Iron Johns” and “Janes”!) with “a compulsion to adore that binds them in an essential community of iron men and ferrous women.” Offering a history, mythology, and psychology of the element iron, both alchemical and industrial, this work is a major addition to the tradition of non-dogmatic psychological commentary on myth that includes Jung, Bachelard, and James Hillman, to which Hall adds a profoundly feminist dimension.

Author of the classic feminist work The Moon and the Virgin, Nor Hall writes her own visionary, erotic, psychotherapy as a mythopoetics. In this new work she draws new meaning from world mythology, particularly Yoruban Vodoun, and the Greek myths surrounding Vulcan (Hephaestus). Her psychological insight and literary flare illuminate a subject that, though rarely discussed, lies at the root of industrial modernity and its connection with contemporary art and imagination. Part Two, an extended poetic work called “The End of the Iron Age,” is “one woman’s love song & fear song: an epic ode to matters of a lifetime out of which iron’s images extrude.” Borrowing a structural principle from W. C. Williams’ Paterson, yet ground breaking in its own right, it takes the poetic impulse back to its epic roots, speaking beyond literature as such, straight to the human psyche at large.

“Everything Nor Hall touches turns to gold.” – Norman O. Brown

“Real & profound, “aroused by metal,” there is always a woman in the fire!” – Anne Waldman

“Nor Hall has culled new flowers from old vines. The myths and their figures are familiar—but her way of being with her symbols is fresh, bold, and especially sensitive.” – James Hillman

Maria Negroni

Islandia tells us of a race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas. Islandia also tells us of the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author’s own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled—in present-day New York City. These two tellings approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition.

Possibly the most famous and widely used resource in therapeutic bodywork, this beautifully written, detailed and readdition includes advances in neurophysiology and physics, recoer-friendly picture of how and why the body responds to touch is both scientifically reliable and inspiring. Furthering the presentation of recent research in biochemistry, cell biology and energy medicine in the Second Edition, this new and greatly expanded enfiguring knowledge of mind and body, from microgenesis to quantum consciousness. A rare book, required reading for national massage therapy certification, that also serves the general reader. this beautifully written, detailed and reader-friendly picture of how and why the body responds to touch is both scientifically reliable and inspiring. Furthering the presentation of recent research in biochemistry, cell biology and energy medicine in the Second Edition, this new and greatly expanded edition includes advances in neurophysiology and physics, reconfiguring knowledge of mind and body, from microgenesis to quantum consciousness. A rare book, required reading for national massage therapy certification, that also serves the general reader.

“For the deer and the grasses I have written this book, so that we may again be At One with them.” Thus writes Tamarack Song, in this extraordinary, practical guide to native lifeways- the essential wisdom connecting all native peoples. The book speaks to readers of every background who seek a connection with their essential self- that person, deep within each of us “who dances to the Drum around the ritual Fire, who knows healing lore from times when plants spoke, who yearns for the peace and Blessings of walking again in the Balance of Our Earth.” In clear but evocative language, the author shares his unique message: that the lifeways of all Native peoples are essentially one, sharing not just the same ceremonies and life transitions, but the same spirit and reverence for life; and that all of us, regardless of ethnic background or religious upbringing, are essentially Native people. The book begins by demonstrating how native lifeways- the ways of the Guardian Warrior, the caretaking of children, the reverence for elders (“Keepers of the Ancestral Voice”)- are intrinsic to the human experience. Drawing on a series of native traditions, from fasting and feasting- to dreams and the receiving of visions, the book shows the reader how to bring to life intuitive, sensory, and spiritual powers long-hidden.

Alison Armstrong

“Know me come eat with me” wrote James Joyce, and this book is the guide he might have written. The Joyce of Cooking aims to delight and amuse anyone who loves good food, drink, and conviviality. It’s all here in this Ulysses for your kitchen; authentically honest Celtic fare as well as imaginative Continental extensions, even vegetarian and fruitarian fantasies equal to the Joycean dream. This literary cookbook makes for a delicious reading even for a non-chef, and a suitable condiment for the more voracious Joyce reader. As for “Irish Gastronomology”- devotees of food, drink, Joyce, and all things Celtic will relish the fruits of the author’s hearty research.

Alison Armstrong

“Know me come eat with me” wrote James Joyce, and this book is the guide he might have written. The Joyce of Cooking aims to delight and amuse anyone who loves good food, drink, and conviviality. It’s all here in this Ulysses for your kitchen; authentically honest Celtic fare as well as imaginative Continental extensions, even vegetarian and fruitarian fantasies equal to the Joycean dream. This literary cookbook makes for a delicious reading even for a non-chef, and a suitable condiment for the more voracious Joyce reader. As for “Irish Gastronomology”- devotees of food, drink, Joyce, and all things Celtic will relish the fruits of the author’s hearty research.

Kundalini and the Art of Being is the soulful memoir of a young man’s profound experience of unanticipated kundalini awakening. It details both the events leading up to his life-changing spiritual experience, and how he learned to cope with its bewildering and multi-dimensional aftereffects. Part spiritual adventure story, part wandering travelogue, Morris relates both his inner and outer struggles and adventures as he criss-crosses the western United States traveling to Rainbow Gatherings and music festivals, backpacking alone in the wilderness, and visiting assorted communal settings. Unknowingly, he follows the path of Chris McCandless, subject of the book Into the Wild, as he hitchhikes the same stretch of highway through Canada and Alaska taken by McCandless just a few months earlier to a different fate. Documenting the challenges faced by many young people in today’s world, this book is both a gripping adventure tale, and a wise and genuine account of one such person’s process of spiritual awakening and discovery.

This large format book presents forty-five dramatic, sumptuous, and empathetic black-&-white photographs, printed in duotone, with a succinct and poignant text by the photographer. The text tells the story of how, following a diagnosis of an incurable disease, the Italian-born author/photographer, then living in New York, undertakes a search for healing and spiritual transformation. This culminates in a Lakota Sioux Healing Ceremony and Vision Quest at the Pine Hill Reservation in South Dakota. While staying at the reservation, the author comes to know the Lakota people and love their spirit. The photographs were made during this time of personal crisis and spiritual awakening, and this book is dedicated to the Lakota people in appreciation of their warmth and wisdom.

James George

In his long life as naval historian, ambassador, environmentalist and author, James George has known a number of remarkable people and has lived in some of the world’s most interesting countries. The Dalai Lama calls him “my old friend.” Chogyam Trungpa called him “a wise and benevolent man, an ideal statesman.” He is credited with having helped to avert a war between India and Pakistan in 1971. Later, in the International Whaling Commission, he played a leading role in saving several species of whales from extinction. And now he shares what he can of his practice of the Gurdjieff way towards awakening to the present moment that has been the inner thread of his life for five decades—the awareness of the consciousness that is omnipresent and universal. However, most of this book is not about the Gurdjieff way but about what it means to be a real human being today, in the light of the latest science and of traditional teachings. He is the author of Asking for the Earth: Waking Up to the Spiritual/Ecological Crisis (1995), and The Little Green Book on Awakening (2008).

Frances Phipps

A guided reading of Finnegan’s Wake, with 135 illustrations, showing the book’s simple and elegant pattern inspired in Joyce by two visionary cosmologies: the poetic Prophecies of William Blake and the Egyptian Myth of Osiris.

In this book Frances Phipps has marshalled an impressive array of primary and scholarly/critical resources that provide exciting, often eccentric, but always illuminating perspectives on the complex relations between Blake and Joyce. Recognizing both the limitations and the possibilities of typography and visual illustrations, Phipps has converted these dimensions of conventional bookmaking into a veritable kaleidoscope of Egyptian iconography, explanatory diagrams, and imaginative juxtapositions of texts in an unprecedented book form, whose appearance should be seen as a major publishing event.” -Donald Ault, author of Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton and Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning Blake’s THE FOUR ZOAS

“Through her ingenious explication and illustration of the cosmologies of William Blake and the Osiris myth of ancient Egypt, Frances Phipps reveals the formal mysteries of Joyce’s great dreambook as being founded in the notion of Contraries. She states that, while Finnegan’s Wake does not copy Blake, it establishes Joyce’s own “myth of the history of the world as representing a battle of contraries in which he used the Egyptian religion….” Whereas the Egyptians had Osiris and Blake had Albion, Joyce had the Irish mythological giant Finn and his mundane form of Tim Finnegan. And whereas the contraries of Night and Day, Darkness and Light, are necessarily embattled in Egyptian and Blakean systems, Joyce also historicized this perpetual cosmic strife in terms of the Battle of Contrarf, with Danes versus Celts, the result of which was Dublin, his micro-cosm.

For this newly explicated approach to the structure of Finnegan’s Wake, Phipp’s study deserves to have its place on the shelf of every serious Joycean alongside such classic commentaries as those of Clive Hart and Adaline Glasheen.” -Alison Armstrong, Irish Literary Supplement, Author of The Joyce of Cooking and co-editor of James Joyce Broadsheet and I.L.S.

Frank Samperi is that rare poet for whom an encompassing vision gives source and authority to an ongoing life work. Book after book unfolds, precise and on-center, as though it had been there, in careful plan, from the beginning. And yet it is open, with inspired oversteppings of known boundaries. “Its difficulty,” writes Cid Corman, “is the difficulty of human being in the light of divinity.”

_Letargo_ is the last book of an extended volume called

Clayton Eshelman is the author of numerous books including Indiana, Altars, The Gull Wall, and What She Means. Formerly editor of Caterpillar, he has translated extensively from Spanish and French and is co-recipient of the 1979 National Book Award for translation.

_The Lich Gate_ is a book of violent and percussive verse that drives the examination of bodily and mythic experience through the heart of its own impasse.

The included poem, “Lich Gate” begins

Waiting, the dead rests in the waiting gate.
The gate waits for the preacher
to come up and what

shape of the bell shrine
I sat in a dead man waiting
for what touch of
understanding rayed back across Kyoto
back across ocean to wonder
my mother father
grey, moving to barbecue 1962,
I say in the lich gate a belless shrine,
corpseless, bunched up on a crossbeam waiting.

Andy Mister

Liner Notes is a semi-narrative prose poem, a meditation on alienation and pop culture. Beginning with the Beach Boy’s unfinished masterpiece “Smile”, Mister describes a world populated by ghosts. Adrift on a sea of drug use, boredom and popular entertainment, Mister traces his relationship to the obsessive collection of ephemera and the coterminous feelings of isolation and loss. Like an iPod on shuffle, lyrical descriptions of urban landscapes and memories of failed relationships mix with song lyrics and deadpan anecdotes of death, failure. In the end a life, like the book itself, is assembled from the detritus of pop culture. As he writes, “Each billboard is a monument to our ability to believe in anything, at least for a moment. Then it’s gone.” But belief’s shadow remains, amid the news of a world shot full of holes, which Liner Notes’ hauntings seem to delineate like the chalk figure at the center of every homicide scene we’ve ever imagined ourselves appearing within… “There’ll probably be some music there, lining your eyelids.”

I love the blunt care for real time, with all its gaps & noises & bends, Andy Mister takes in the searching, powerful scroll of paragraphs that make up Liner Notes. Working through the implied vision of an undecided note taker prone to stark assertions and excavating insights to perception, Mister puts songs at the heart of his relationship to language & digs away at the disappearances they reflect in their, and his, histories. “The world becomes boring when you brush away the detritus” says the same mind that listens to own its aloneness, & desires, evenly, “to dissolve each distance in distance”. —Anselm Berrigan

Andy Mister’s loving and disturbing “notes” create a complex harmony (sympathy) between public noise and private revelation. In the midst of Liner Notes we read: “Childhood is a song I can barely remember the words to. They only come back to me when I am thinking of something else.” that something else is at the heart of this compelling and magical book. Listen! —Peter Gizzi

Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” comes immediately to mind, but Liner Notes has more in common with David Markson’s late books or with Frank O’Hara’s “Hatred” than with any pop song. What’s most evident, though, is that Andy Mister cares for his readers by caring about his subject. He’s your friend, and he’s alive. —Graham Foust

I had forgotten with what feverishness I used to study the back jackets of my LPs. Was I seeking to understand my desire? The sadness of desolate beauty? The sensitive youth’s love affair with death? It’s all here—as breathless and disarmingly self-conscious as the sweetest parking-lot kiss. I love this book. —Jennifer Moxley

Huffington Post Review by Seth Abramson

Fanzine review and interview

Volta Pick by Eli Noah Gordon

Boston Review appearance of Liner Notes

Sink Review of Liner NotesFall 2013 

As we confront the challenges of climate change, author James George calls us to wake up and stop our careless treatment of our planet before it’s too late. At the same time, he shares his own practice towards waking up – the practice of Presence, known to all spiritual paths, and simply and eloquently presented in this book.

From The Little Green Book…

“To become aware of the omnipresence of Consciousness may be the next great leap in human evolution and the foundation of the new paradigm in which both science and spirituality can find common ground. For consciousness is the field that connects – not separates – everything with everything, at all levels, and everything with the All, in one Wholeness.”

Advance Praise:

“The ecological revolution needed for a sustainable society will involve our technologies and institutions, of course, but it must also involve a radical shift in our relationship with ourselves, with each other, with other species and with the planet as a whole, in short a revolution of consciousness. This book is highly recommended.” – Ravi Ravindra, author of Science and Spirit

“What is needed above all, James George writes, is a radical awakening of our consciousness, a transformation of what we have mistakenly called human nature. This book eloquently cries out to the world for a radical blending of environmental sensibility and spiritual insight. – Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul

“The Honorable James George has put into his thoughtful and timely book a lifetime of wisdom and helpful insights as to what human beings can and must do in the face of the plundering and polluting of the planet by our species.” – Dr. Brent Blackwelder, President, Friends of the Earth

Fictional “spiritual autobiography,” Arthurian fantasy, and compendium of instruction in mystical and magical practices, _Looking For Arthur_ presents, in a contemporary setting, the entire scope of materials surrounding the legend of King Arthur. By turns reverent and impious, earnest and witty, metaphysical and lighthearted, the book is set in present-day Glastonbury amidst a hub-bub of occultists, mystics, and tourists swarming about the ruins of this ancient site of Arthurian lore. We follow the narrator as he is inducted into the living myth of King Arthur, the energies of the sacred landscape, the “secret history” of the earth, and the role of angels, gnomes, and ascended masters in the redemption of human culture, while we experience a completely unexpected side to this once and future myth.

Yogmata Keiko Aikawa

The Siddha master Yogmata-Ji teaches us that through the practices of the Himalayan Wisdom Tradition we may not just attain true and lasting happiness and success in this life but ultimately dissolve into the very heart of love. She carries us through her own journey to realization by way of the eight stages of Samadhi (“ultimate consciousness”), evolved over five-thousand years of experimentation. These meditation forms are designed to remove all existential weights and, integrating with the wave pattern of creation, allow us to become as radiant as the sun—the Anugraha (“divine grace”). In this illustrated, practical introduction and guide to our true nature, Yogmata-Ji addresses, among other eternal human questions, how our minds work, our individual and collective purpose on Earth, and the origin of suffering. Written in a clear, down-to-earth, and inspiring style, this book illuminates the nature of our primordial wisdom and is essential reading for all who seek its manifestation.

This widely acclaimed, brilliantly written book can alter both how we think about love and sex and what we do in intimate practice. The focus is neither on manipulative technique nor personal history, but on the process of energy itself. It provides exercises to be experienced alone or with a partner and offers insight into how to move energy, collect it, heighten it, and share it. This expanded edition adds new exercises, reader testimonials, and a chapter on working with the energy of feeling through Movement, Breath, and Sound.

Bradford Keeney

What are the top ten reasons to buy Bradford Keeney’s radically funny book about the king of late-night comedy? A slew of hysterical interactive videotape exercises (lining up the local lawnmowers to watch the show, then sending a tape of the event to Dave), cut-and-paste activities (Dave’s head on famous men), a Lunacy Gift Certificate, an airlift of comic books as a foreign-policy tool, a letter-writing campaign to get Dave appointed ambassador to a foreign country, a list of places in your home to stash the message “Letter Man is here,” the suggestion that Letterman is a friendly alien sent here to warn us of the dangers of a surfeit of seriousness, wonderfully zany illustrations, and at least two tips that will forever change the way you look at Letterman, television … and life. From chapters on “Living with the David Letterman Show,” “Around the World with David Letterman,” and “Exercises for Developing a Letterman State of Mind”—to a collection of stories that plumb the show’s hidden meanings, this ultimate Letterman book is written with the inspired goofiness of a … well, David Letterman.

Laura Chester

Recommended by Andrew Weil in Natural Health, Natural Medicine, this book gives a moving account of the author’s successful struggle with “incurable” SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus), affecting mostly women. Ms. Chester shares the personal discoveries behind her recovery, and a meditation on what it means for a body to be “attacking itself.” This enlarged edition updates her story and includes a foreword by the best-selling authority on immune-system disease: the author of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Dr. Jesse Stoff.

“Laura Chester has written a moving and significant book. On one level, she discusses her personal odyssey through the realm of a serious and inexplicable disease – its history, current cultural status, biology, symbolism, and the doctors of all persuasions who attempt to cure it. On another level, she speaks to the esoteric level of the disease, discussing the initiation into a deeper level of self and a journey through the unconscious and archetypal aspects of nature. On this level, she is an artist more than a patient, an individual who has the power to effect her cure…”- Richard Grossinger, author of Planet Medicine,

Michael Zinn

OUT OF PRINT

Maurice Blanchot

Jacques Derrida writes of this book that it is “a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad…la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad….La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely ‘to have a vision’ in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight….The story obscures the sun…with a blinding light.” – Jacques Derrida (in Deconstruction and Criticism)

This fascinating psychological portrait, strikingly different from the one given in the Autobiography, is of a man who was abused by both his parents, who never shook off the conflicts of his troubled youth, and whose internalized messages of racial ambivalence continued to plague him throughout his brilliant career. As no other book has done, Malcolm traces the entire life of this heroic figure, from his birth in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, his youthful struggles with deprivation and drug addiction, his life-threatening prison experience and conversion to Islam, through his emergence as a Muslim leader and spokesman for a restless America, and finally to his death by assassination. Exhaustively researched, this first comprehensive biography of Malcolm X is based on the oral and written accounts of over 400 people who knew him, as well as government files and Malcolm’s letters.

Bruce Perry’s book paints a rich, full, and fair portrait of the man… What it gives us is not a diminished Malcolm, for his heroism, his brilliance, his charm, his wit, his necessity have never been as sympathetically or absorbingly rendered. – The Los Angeles Times

Bruce McClelland

By the author of The Dracula Poems, this cycle continues McClelland’s involvement with archetypal motifs, this time centered specifically on the Indo-Germnic tales collected by the Grimms. Each concerns a tale or folk-mythic theme, some more available than others, & each intentionally avoids mere retelling, but chooses rather to articulate the salient dynamics of the particular story. The cycle means as well to get past the trap of interpretation—as the Prelude says, “these stories are not therapies”—for to interpret, in this case, is to deny the activity of the imagination looking at its own history. The result is an arrangement of lyric poems, each capable of standing alone, yet together forming a reasonable narrative of that process known as individuation, with the Wolf doing the talking.

Michael Ruby

In Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices, the poet Michael Ruby records three strands of our most elusive experiences: The involuntary memories of bygone times and places that day and night flash across our minds; the mysterious inner voices heard in the last seconds before sleep; and the imaginary experiences called dreams, most of which we forget on waking. Fleeting Memories and the hypnagogic Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, the first and third books of this trilogy, are among the first literary forays into two unsounded terrains of consciousness; while the second book, the hyperrealist Dreams of the 1990s, joins the dream books of such French writers as Leiris and Perec, and the Americans Kerouac and Burroughs. Taken together, Ruby’s trilogy is a unique fusion of personal history, fiction and poetry that not only rescues unplumbed psychic experience, but also exults in the laughter, terror and baffling innuendos of unbidden utterance. With an uncanny ability to elicit our own most elusive moments of consciousness, this book is an instigation and guidebook for readers in their own explorations of the psyche.

The Mirror is a concise and straightforward introduction to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Dzogchen, “The Great Perfection,” by one of the most famous and widely respected masters of the tradition and author of many important works, several of which are now in English translation. To insure the survival of Dzogchen outside of Tibet, this precious and long-secret teaching has in recent years been taught openly by great masters cast abroad by the Tibetan diaspora. In The Mirror, Norbu Rinpoche presents the quintessence of this most sophisticated and refined, yet pristinely simple and direct path to spiritual attainment.

Thomas Dugan

Trager Mentastics helped people of all ages achieve greater flexibility, coordination, and balance, as well as the lightness of being its author calls “agelessness.” Now this expanded edition, with all-new photos and additional movements, introduces this profoundly simple system of dancelike movements for the body and mind to all those looking not just to extend life but to reduce aging itself. The method is also known to help victims of polio, muscular dystrophy, respiratory problems, MS, lower back pain, and chronic aches and pains.

Jack Liskin

Moving Medicine is an exuberant story of the inspired life of a major innovator on bodywork and health, Dr. Milton Trager: his journey from muscle-happy beach acrobat, boxer, dancer and local Miami celebrity, through the discovery of his healing gift, to his stature today as the internationally recognized genius of a major bodywork system based on “freedom and lightness” of body and mind. Along the way we learn of his successes in rehabilitating “hopeless” cases ( such as polio, MS, and osteoarthritis), his founding of an institute that has taught thousands who have brought benefit to many more thousands, and his discovery of a remarkably easy and straightforward approach to movement reeducation. In addition to telling his life story, Moving Medicine presents a detailed account of Dr. Trager’s work and serves as a complement to his own book, Movement as a Way to Agelessness (the new edition of Trager Mentastics, Station Hill). Milton Trager’s work will benefit anyone wishing to lead a healthier and more dynamic life.”-Deepak Chopra