Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 12/28/2014
In I Open Fire, translated from Polish into English, David Pol presents an ontology of war in the form of the lyric poem. “Do you hear what I’m shooting at you?” In I Open Fire, all relation is warfare. Minefields compromise movement. Intention aims. Touch burns. Sex explodes bodies. Time ticks in bomb countdowns. Sound[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/08/2015
[Given, If, Then] attempts to conceive a possibility of reading, through a set of readings: reading being understood as the relation to an Other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. As such, it[…]
Imprint: Peanut Books
Published: 12/10/2014
ACTION — as in begin, genesis, motion — is a collection of poems ultimately concerned with form, those lines drawn in the sand that give way to the profanity of the holy, the holiness of the profane. Throughout ACTION, Opal engages the constraints inherent to seemingly fixed forms. From living with rheumatoid arthritis, to feeling[…]
Published: 11/11/2014
Peter Valente’s first encounter with Sandro Penna’s poetry was while translating Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the time, Valente was reading a biography on Pasolini and learned of his close friendship with Penna. Pasolini insisted that among serious readers of poetry, Penna could not be ignored. Born in Perugia on June 12, 1906, Sandro Penna lived[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/26/2015
Read a review of Escargotesque in Digital America HERE. “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience,[…]
Imprint: eth press
Published: 04/24/2014
Manuscript Cotton Nero A.x takes its designation from the unique cataloging system of seventeenth-century British antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton’s library: busts of historical figures atop shelves provided the organizing principle, such that one found this particular codex under the bust of Roman Emperor Nero, on the top shelf, ten volumes over. (Another famous manuscript, containing Beowulf,[…]
Imprint: eth press
Published: 04/01/2014
The sestina is a form in which words repeat regularly, intricately, appearing and reappearing in new contexts with new meanings. Sam Lohmann’s Unless As Stone Is emerged from a few years of living with Dante’s sestina, “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra.” He allowed the text to appear in its own new — if irregularly[…]
Imprint: Peanut Books
Published: 02/25/2014
The Petroleum Manga, first conceived of and rendered as 10-foot banners printed on Tyvek for gallery installation is now reproduced in book form. Originally, manga was used in Japanese to refer to whimsical drawings or picture books. Long before manga was a multi-billion-dollar-a-year comic book industry, there was Hokusai’s thirteen-volume manga, depicting everything from trees[…]