New & Forthcoming

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?

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.

Vyt Bakaitis

Vyt Bakaitis, poet and eminent translator from the Lithuanian, has gathered here poems from the past decade. This new collection, Refuge & Occasion, pursues several strands that ultimately braid together with characteristic freedom of shape and music whereby the requirements of the utterance design its flow. He writes: “Strange all I found and still carry/ what I remember left me to wonder.” Elegies and lyrics of erotic loss, tensely noted and feelingly unwound form one strand. The poet turns his eye and heart to cruder disappointments of the current political moment in several longer poems that aggressively explore the failures of human action and illusory consolation. “What’s real is the fact” the poet wryly notes. There are also several poems to honor significant occasions of being moved and sustained by art along with a number of outright odes to his muses. The charged enigma that winds through all of the poems, however, is the tension of enduring spiritual stasis and uncertainty. “Let’s pull out some maps. There are none” is where the poet starts. The mystery of life’s refusals is countered by a profound sense of the flow willing “times curvature to catch” both in memory and in ecstatic instances that “the wild wave struck … young as the storming moment.”

Mikhail Horowitz

Over the course of his seventy years, Mikhail Horowitz reports being an English Romantic poet of the early 19th century, a Chinese hermit poet of the Tang Dynasty, a neo-Beat jazz poet of the Third Millennium, a proto-Surrealist and Oulipo poet of Paris between the wars, and a postmodern poet and spoken word performer in an increasingly medieval America. This volume offers a generous selection of his various avatars, featuring poems and prose pieces that are bracing, ludic, and often madly obsessive.

Franz Kamin

This collection incorporates Franz Kamin’s two main previous books—Ann Margret Loves You and Other Psychotopological Diversions (1980) and Scribble Death (1986)—plus his posthumous writing originally collected as Tales From The Theory of Angels. He links the scribbling of children, artists, and dreamers with the hopes and terrors of obsession and delirium. Through all of this one may almost detect a somber chuckling from the authorial domain.

Sam Truitt

Tokyoatoto is made of and from a hand-written book composed by the poet Sam Truitt in the course of a 2019 Tokyo sojourn. The writing includes, among other elements, descriptions, impressions, insights into Japanese life and culture and the concrete exigencies of negotiating a foreign land. This last aspect is somewhat complicated by the fact Truitt lived in Tokyo for four years from the age of three and that Japanese was very close to his first language. Moreover the culture of Japan was also close to his first, so that this influence acts as a palimpsest backfield to the writing as the author both seeks and betimes touches traces of its influence. Tokyoatoto‘s structure is unique in that Truitt seeks to foreground that movement toward originality by reproducing in facsimile the pages of the hand-written book, with their transcriptions appearing on opposite pages. An engaging, thoughtful and sometimes profound glimpse into contemporary life in Tokyo from a perspective of complicated naivety, Tokyoatoto is a fast, entertaining poetic flight full of pratfalls, missed connections, slips and surrenders in which, as the author writes on a Tokyo subway passage, “one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.”

ADVANCE PRAISE for Tokyoatoto

“Sam Truitt has added a wonderful new innovative example of one of my favorite genres—travel poetry. By way of two ‘T squares’ (Times and Tiananmen), on the way to Japan, he generously expands the notational into double accordion-fold expanses, condensing sound, thought, perception and time. The reader is invited into the poet’s process alternating between quicksilver caught thought to poems lifted to the next level of line-break shape and form. The notebook page determines each ‘song’s’ length, much as Kerouac does with his MEXICO CITY BLUES, each part fitting in a pocket notebook. Here Truitt scores his poems across vertical lines, creating a palimpsest that references both the verticality of written Japanese language cross-hatched with English, as well as flown-through clouds of sound gathering in storm. In this travelogue of the present moment back in time to a formative locale, what’s here now? In this delightful map of the mind moving we are given both deft improvisation and sculptural thought-song of all senses played ‘toward the most beautiful / place on earth 52 years / coming home.’”
—Lee Ann Brown, author of Philtre: Writing in the Dark 1989-2020

“Inscription and transcription, the two fundamental modes of literary composition, echo each other in this work. The texts alternate—notebook handwritten, poem typeset—calling their relationship into a dialogue. We stop seeing one as the inevitable outcome of the other. The process of writing interweaves the autographic hand and the allographic type, the individual expression and the linguistic system. Are the works ‘the same’ in each version—or does the process engage us with the impossibility of their being identical to each other. The intimacy of writing as note-taking feels palpably present. We intrude on those personal pages, even in facsimile. By contrast, the public-facing presentation of the typeset texts feels bold, exposed, declaratively blunt in its directness. Throughout, the texts themselves constantly reference lines and notations, divisions and demarcations, marking personal time and actual space across coordinates of language. Tracking, tracing, defining, delineating—all the many terms of writing activate this work and its notational transits.”
—Johanna Drucker, author of Diagrammatic Writing

“Pop testimony, an epiphany going from language to a linguistic beyond of sullen images (too good to be entropy, though), conforming the edge of a (self) reflective anthroposphere. This staccato rumination shows culture to be something less (and more) than the usual accumulation-in-progress of technical & folkloric victories. Tokyoatoto is fine funk.”
—Omar Pérez, author of Cubanology

George Quasha

“Words say too much to let you know the truth.” George Quasha’s torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. Waking from Myself is the sixth volume published of George Quasha’s “preverbs,” an invented poetic genre that’s the flipside of “proverbs”—instead of giving capsules of wisdom, they awaken language to its inevitable ambiguities in the face of complex truth-telling. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. 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?