Books

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