You are viewing Batch 1 : updated 17 February 2009
Cara Benson ♦ Mackenzie Carignan ♦ Mark Lamoureux ♦ Catherine Wagner ♦ E. Tracy Grinnell ♦ Arielle Guy ♦ Anna Fulford ♦ Mairéad Byrne ♦ Zoë Skoulding ♦ Catherine Meng ♦ Jill Stengel ♦ Ana Bozicevic
Up by Cara Benson
Published by Mark Lamoureux
In a world in crisis P is d, and U becomes a smile upside down--yes, a frown. Or perhaps the knowing wink of a cartoon character. The cover page of “UP” designed by Mark Lamoureux is a yield sign where "UP" inverted creates cognitive dissonance. For example the cognitive dissonance of a mind understanding implications of a warming climate and yet its failure to yield.
We are introduced to the chap by Hillman’s epigraph: it is not the moment “to sing normal, comforting ditties.”
“This is what I lllook like:” writes the poet. I looks like “hair wigged wide pseudo afro spiked / sunflower consternation face center / fringe bottom of my polka dot dress waving with my wiggle hips but don’t forget my arms are / crossed.”
Arms crossed—“some of the time” because how else could I/poet/reader otherwise (re)act.
In this parallel page-world typeface disintegrates into pixel origins, letters are rubbed off the page and words get lost (poof!). And “Mama’s gonna bake” drifts off into “there, there”, where “there, there” may mean there is nothing there (to eat). And there is now with species endangered, extinct, and jungles getting lost (note: 2009 commemorates “the origin of species”).
This is a ditty, an uncomforting one, where “under foot lost.” A chap to hear and know and see and then “Get UP.”
Metaphors for Miscarriage by Mackenzie Carignan
Published by CR79 Books (Elizabeth Bryant)
Metaphor. How one thing attempts to stand for another yet never can or does or should and in the reaching for is unattainable touch. One thing creates a space around another. A scroll of words. A line of possibility. Wounds open. Gaping. Found.
“thorn
in the place you thought was safe. punctured and blew.”
Wrapped in a transparent skin. Printed on blue paper in fragile eight-point century gothic. The cover image drawn by Mackenzie's four-year-old son.
Touching and permeating.
Turning by Mark Lamoureux
Published by frolic & detour press (Bronwen Tate)
“Jewels from the skyline.”
Winter-Spring-Summer-Fall image by image “Black ink on / a black stone, // smooth & cold & / wet like a mouth” we are carried through “this polis, this people, this unmooring of a ship as will carry us to where we are going.”
In spring Lamoureux catches the “wind-swollen plastic bags” skittering across “pavement in arcs, as though alive;” in summer the shit blasted off the curb, in fall illegals waiting for some work.
“...now go to bed, / tomorrow will be / the same as today & / yesterday was.”
Articulate How by Catherine Wagner
Published by Big Game Books (Maureen Thorson)
In three poems that bookend her chap, Wagner previews “A Plan for a Romance” in progress. We are introduced to the form (= collage) and expanse (= epic romance).
“Focus on the ANSWER in / ROMANCE / or the / ROAMing / or the MAN / A form for all of them.”
It is revolution. The epic characters are Proctor and Gamble, Claris and Damaris, the agents of public relations, the security guards and everyone. Full of astute wordplays that shift and reform as verses are sliced and accurately spliced. Can’t wait for the full epic romance to appear.
Humoresque by E. Tracy Grinnell
Published by Blood Pudding Press (Juliet Cook)
Fill out the library card, attach clothes pin, read this humoresque to be not*not*one of those who knows what it is like to perish in nonsense. Formed by mood and Sappho’s-body-on-the-rocks writing (see Moreau’s rendering) that presents itself open and prone.
Spells, A Ceremony Above by Arielle Guy
Published by Sarah Anne Cox
“My tuning fork disappears into the ether.”
This text is spell and premonition, and travel with language that takes one with ceremony, and song and into “Our bed / and now you’ll be sleeping / next to me for years, / for years” (3).
“Around these openings promenades,
water curves and polishes
The full moon, rising all day,
now at night, burns the sky.” (10)
Flow, curve and curl up with these words.
Book of Silhouettes by Anna Fulford
Published by Anne Bogle
Wildly satiric scenes from the fashion industry:
“When the first designer strapped a sewing machine to his head, we all followed suit.”
“For his Winter Viking Line, he filled each model up with rage and trimmed her with a fur.”
Some text is laid out on paper in circles and rectangles like tissue-paper patterns pinned to cloth waiting to be cut out.
Book design and text are a comfortable and quirky fit.
State House Calendar by Mairéad Byrne
Published by watersign press/Calendar Girl Books (Arielle Greenberg)
“...
beacon against cartoon sky
buttercup under soft chin
conch against inky sea
coral against purple glaze
[pink against purple]
[rose against dove]
[rose against stilly light]
[something luminous against something radiant]
diffusion against saturation
stolidity against fluff
pallor against nausea
ache against unease
pain against tumult
...”
This chap is an ode to what poets can and will do to write. For thirteen months this poet recorded the changing hues of stone against sky at first glimpse of the Rhode Island State House with it’s imposing marble dome as it appeared through her car window, and sometimes sunglasses, each morning. Mairéad Byrne’s color keeping, a way of snatching time to write (while driving!), was aided by her note-taking daughters.
Hang this color-saturated calendar designed by watersign press/Calendar Girl Books on your wall.
From Here by Zoë Skoulding
Published by Ypolita Press (Carrie Hunter)
“every word / every world is / its own”
This is a psychogeographic conversation that re-imagines territories. Imagine a conversation between Simonetta Moro’s globular images and Zoë Skoulding’s poetry, for example, a street scene in pastel caught in an ocular lens:
“you walk at the edge of land traffic / turning swathes of sea / that I can’t hear from up / here where the glass holds me in / place so that I can’t fall into / violet pools under your feet or / out into flightpaths where the sky / a sudden mass of cloud holds / steady you could fall up into it”
Travel between micro and macro cosmos, image and word with this language.
Lost Workbook w/ Letters to Deer by Catherine Meng
Published by dusie press (Susana Gardner)
I hated tearing open the latch to open my hand-cut, hand-glued, hand-stapled, hand-stamped chap with its bevelled four deer. Personal and hand-handmade, mine is clad with the instructions “48. Sleeve with Elbow Puff.—“ and gives a description of how to make a puff sleeve including illustrations and patterns. Here another example of a chap where design and content fit just right since Meng’s chap is a “lost workbook” including lessons and exercises and entries in “ordinary time” and “letters to deer.”
“Write directions, recipes, and to-do lists on Post-it notes.
Mix them all up.
Write this on a Post-it note.
Stick it on your steering wheel / handle bars / forehead / man.
Wait one week.
Move on to Lesson 2.”
Tons of heart-work in Meng’s “Workbook”—inside and out. And it is well-worth breaking open the latch.
Lagniappe by Jill Stengel
Published by Nous-zot (Marthe Reed)
The cream-colored-ballet-shoe-satin cover is an invitation to “follow / my own / : / arabesque”. These words dance as meanings unfold, slip and slide “arabesque menagerie cacophonous conjugal glissando avalanche rhapsody spectacle archipelago” across the cover and through the book like a mischievous de- and recoiling snake.
Arabesque is not only posture but also ornament; curviform and interlaced design motif in arabic fashion.
“the point is not the note
the point is the doing
pointe
[plié — gran plié —
curtsy
sashay sashay
sachet
a curl a lock a key”
Lagniappe shows a love for how words relate, how they feel on the tongue, how they look next to one another on the page.
“violence / violate / viola / the relationship? / look it up. Webster’s, New Riverside, dictionary.com, / somewhere. / Hurry. while it’s still / important to you.”
And what about lagniappe pronounced lanny-yap? My Webster's is currently being used as a footrest so I look online: “It's a Louisiana French word, derived from American Spanish la ñapa, and originally meant as a gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase, such as a 13th beignet when buying a dozen.”
I let the taste of this gift-economy word--lanny-yap roll along my tongue as plié, sashay, arabesque.
Stengel writes, “the point is the doing.” So do and let.
The Stars on the 7:18 to Penn by Ana Bozicevic
Published by ellectrique press (Kathrin Schaeppi)
The stars are on the Penn, and speaking in the Penn, and outside the Penn, and are being read on the Penn. These poems fuse the global with local events through occurrences on the daily commute between Long Island and Manhattan on the 7:18 to Penn Central Station.
In the first poem a bloodthirsty hawk-chasing sparrow is introduced. In poem iv., a jewel-lover doesn’t calculate the loss of light in the mine shafts into her valuing “Something's preciousness over something else.” The seemingly harmless sparrow becomes an analogy for how humans wreak destruction in other places through naive everyday local actions and behaviours. The poet picks up on discrepancies and demands: “Now spit out those feathers—“.
As the passengers pass commutertime passing along seascape we luminously pass through states and stages of light: see-sawing spraying light, unlovable light, insufferable light, assassinated light, “BOMBS. JUST LIKE US, PASSING FOR LIGHT.
The chap design by ellectrique press plays with how the poet “mined” these moving poems. Mined in the multiple sense of the word, here "mined" meaning "taking on the responsibility for." The cover is a window looking into a train. Thereafter, each poem is framed in a window with a view out of the train. Readers become commuters unable to look out (escape through) the window without the poets words that are spread across the window glass facing, mirroring and emphasizing the encapsulated connection of "in here" with "out there," touching them. For, “at the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote.”
This is poetry written by a mind connected with the seismic. “And I won’t ever again write simply again.”