Batch 3 : last updated September 2009
Jessica Bozek ♦ Carmen Giménez Smith ♦ Kai Fierle-Hedrick ♦ Sarah Anne Cox ♦ Carrie Hunter ♦ Maureen Thorson ♦ Michelle Detorie ♦ Anna Moschovakis ♦ Michelle Noteboom ♦ Sawako Nakayasu's & Jen Hofer ♦ Jane Sprague ♦ Amanda Deutch ♦ Elizabeth Bryant ♦ Jessica Smith ♦ Anne Bogle ♦
Other People's Emergencies by Jessica Bozek
Published by Hive Press
In this poetry surreal imagery is the hinge between orientation and disorientation. Loose-leaf poetry can be ordered by color: chartreuse or moss. The four moss cards are titled “After A Disorientation.”
A moss phrase:
“Lower your laugh with sandpaper, mole the cat’s toy mouse with fish eggs. You pass tense, grow to frame.”
This poetry makes me consider the order within disorientation and the disorder within orientation. Consider “For five years, regardless of seasons, you wear the same thin lambswool sweater – in toffee & cornflower blue.” And “When you sleep, you tuck the knitting needles between your ribs.”
Meanwhile “Emergency vehicles swirl their / emergency lights on the way to other people’s / emergencies.”
Real beautiful surreal poetry.
Glitch by Carmen Giménez Smith
Produced by Eavesdrop Publications (Amanda Deutch)
This bolt-bound book has a hole cut into and through the cover that gives a glimpse into a collaged scene textured with branched veins and arteries. Opening the book you find the image is the overlay of two opaque pages. One page is a color collage of a city scene, the second of a network of branches against sky in black and white. This is the "fore"-drop for Glitch by Eavesdrop Publications. Deutch has visually translated some introductory phrases from "Glitch". Much thought has been put into design and poetry.
Giménez Smith's first poem titled "Glitch" is a collage of images and observations from life "in the guts" of a city. The second poem "Opacity" asks: "The last plant on earth: fig or fern?" In a quagmire do we grasp for knowledge (the fig) or let specialists take over marginal habitats (the fern).
"Your book says:
When imposssibly grim--
our very best urges
will remake the epoch.
We'll stagger
under our own ruthless mass.
But, as you know, all a book owns wouldn't fill your smallest coin pocket."
Later in the chap if find the phrase:
“Twelve nickles in my pocket and three with a sullen face.”
Glitches in life displayed opened up through language.
Personages by Kai Fierle-Hedrick
Published by Samar Albuhassan
How does motivation manage to survive? Fierle-Hedrick asks, through an epitaph by Louise Bourgeois.
"to make the backs
of objects speak."
Indeed what sparks the creative moment that brings forth great poetry?
"the Quarantia around
the corner forgotten: to
face forward: survive."
Curious, I look up Quarantia and find that it is a criminal court in Venice. In a sample crime presented, the hand of a woman is cut off, then her body is burned for "her violent crimes." Indeed, how does motivation manage to survive?
Super Undone Blue by Sarah Anne Cox
Published by Carmen Giménez Smith
with drawings from Paris and Phaedra Cox-Farr
A smooth mix of classic Greek and modern day inspired by a summer holiday in Greece, 2008 where “[T:]he mermaid in her orange flippers can swim a blue streak,” where “Heracles has a summerhouse on Pelion” and you are served “Pork chops from the Minotaur.” This cool blue raises “the memory of a flower / necklace and a double axe.”
The Unicorns by Carrie Hunter
by Weekend Press
Here are 43 poems, each a collection of terse statements or questions. Some statements are direct quotes, such as:
“Applications with generic
cover letters will not be considered.”
Some statements touch me:
“When loss becomes more a presence
than an absence.” (24)
Most statements send my mind spinning of in any which way:
“These are not words.” (32)
“A debauchery of snow peas.” (40)
“Presidents don’t pump their own gas.” (30)
The reading becomes experiencing associations and emotions (startle, joy, wonder). “The Unicorn” with its playful and mystical writing makes me extremely curious about the writer’s process and very sceptical about anyone purporting one “statement.”
Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor by Maureen Thorson
produced by flynpyntar press (E. Tracy Grinnell)
The intriguing cover design from “Kunstformen der Natur” (public domain) is of grasping tentacles.
“Kisses from the stevedores, kisses from the gangplank,
And for the drunken sailor,
Night’s awkward, hundred-armed embraces. “ (p. 5)
In 22 poems drenched in unbearably close perception the parameters of an I’s relationship with the drunken sailor are sighted, navigated and mapped with the expertise of a seaman.
“Do you collect ships in bottles or bottles with ships on them? (p. 13)
“On sagging timbers,
The lure of the bottle...” (p. 23)
“The sailor stands apart.
A watchman for lost hours, someone I can’t help.” (p. 5)
Ode to Industry – Michelle Detorie
Published by Playful Rectangle Press (PR)
This is writing as intense and urgent as
“scissors underneath the tight-rope” (p. 13)
“[w]here wheat and meat / grow with benevolent smiles,” (p. 19)
“Hacking animals / into celophane-wrapped cutlets" (p. 1)
when “all our hands are tied together“ (p. 13).
This is a collage of imagery that clicks like efficient machinery from image to image, only that: “Tomorrow we’ll go out looking for water / like it’s nothing but something / to do;”
And when the flowing is too “slick where pearls no longer / strung.” and “their / red feet marshed / in mud-tar” (p. 15) listen to each word as it rubs, and grinds and jars. The oil of this poetry is, the collage impaled with excruciating observation. The cold neatness of industry. The harsh coldness of efficiency: “it’s no wonder so many wash up dead.” (p. 2)
The Human Machine by Anna Moschovakis
Published by Dusie
This is a human story of Human Machine and Annabot desires (“Human Machine, will you marry me?”).
On the first page Moschovakis writes:
“This is the language of simple, obvious things
smooth intercourse
thirty chances”
The reader is given thirty enthralling and involved “chances” to “save” Anna, a blue-eyed chatbot designed to pass the Turing Test. We read this in smooth “strings” and are reminded that “downloading produces errors” .
This thrilling sci-fi prose-poetic romance (but why try to categorize it) is a mind-turning (Turing) read. I give it 30 gold stars and wonder if we/you/humans “with our distinguished humour” will pull “it” from the fire.
The Chia Letters by Michelle Noteboom
Published by Tangent Press (Kaia Sand)
“Dear Chai” each poem begins. Each poems ends with “love L”.
“I fear the time we scarcely dared speak about is upon us, you must forgive me now if I cease triggering the feedback loop” for “at the boundaries of existence our edges are worn.”
In this time after this time “we’re on the fringe of a permanent record of vanishing.”
Deja vue? Read on.
Through L.’s correspondence we become archeologists of a future time unearthing the buried and forgotten language painted on walls. The bison are fitted with backpack microprocessors which forces L. to “reevaluate any theory we’d thus far managed to erect concerning the advent of biobots as concomitant to the Nanomechanical Age (not to mention what it does to the way we look at primitive hunting techniques.”
With bravour Noteboom creates rich imagery and a vivid language that startles: “the insect like creatures plying the ephemeral and fictionless mainframe.”
OR MOUNTAINS
OR MOUNTAINS
by Sawako Nakayasu's & Jen Hofer
Published by Dusie
Jen Hofer & Sawako Nakayasu's contribution to Dusie’s year 3 kollektiv can be found here:
http://www.smallanimalproject.com/text/mountains/
Below the cover “Map”, a poem in itself, I click on identical phrases to move to slightly unidentical poems.
Under “ENFORCEMENTS ABOUND”
“perched upon
the bench you found this: a lark, slippage, a current of another
more feathery storm system, blustery air disturbed by words
of an unstable stable. they are fed exquisite heapings of phoneme-clouds
which have their own ether, an ethic of Yes Please not subsumed”
I salvage phrases tucked below while digging randomly through mountains and mountains with my mouse taking a non-linear path.
“IN SOME OFT-PREDICATED CORNER”
“though our entanglements might be the best thing about us
until you count the
smaller mountains
overwhelmingly high
and horizonless, boundless
incidents of color”
This dusie contribution brings forward the collaborative in this year’s collective project. Though I’m not sure whose words are whose or how these mountains evolved I thoroughly enjoy the present of being able to click in.
Apache Roadkill by Jane Sprague
Published by weekend press
“Denny was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam or no...”
“...everyday for weeks what she remembered
war war war”
“the history of forgetting the thing”
“....so ducked by joblessness and come back warped and wounded and how to reinsert yourself into the everyone who onlywants to look the other way fromw ho you are and what you come from.”
“the things you carry
weighty”
Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems B.O.S.S. by Amanda Deutch
Published by prolepsis press (Mackenzie Carignan)
Box of Sky: Skeleton Poems B.O.S.S. by Amanda Deutch
Produced by prolepsis press (Mackenzie Carignan)
Loose leaved poems collected in a transparent sky blue box, i.e. “a box of sky.” What/who leaves imprints on poems?
“All this came from me
looking for the bathroom
in a bone museum” (p. 5)
Consider that we are “the same” as “we have the same exquisite skeleton.” Deutch arranges poems around our skeletons “that can dance or crumble.” (p. 19)
“Allow me to sit here in the short span of species between dinosaurs and whatever comes next” (p. 14)
“To depict different surfaces convincingly, truthfully / one must apply courage / thickly or sparingly as needed. (p. 7)
Fluorescence Buzz by Elizabeth Bryant
Published by Hex Press
I remove the chap from a transparent envelope to better admire the gilt-flowered wrapping that dresses this booklet which allows blue slippage, a fronticepiece offset. There is delicacy in how the inner and outer covers don’t assemble, in how they willfully do not align, in how carefully this hand-made object protects its contents.
Two poems per page—“The gaps must stand for themselves.” (II.)
“the size of bird tears, one by one / into the dim gape. A slow / phillip plip-ip plip / sound as each seed fell...” (V.)
“You might notice me then, / Gun in hand, nicking your / jewels, shooting your / disbelief. Leaving you / alive.” (XXII.)
What the Fortune-Teller Said by Jessica Smith
Published by a+bend press (Jill Stengel)
Each card carries the same intriguing red print pattern image. On the face, poems are numbered up to twelve. Fortunes/misfortunes turning up randomly. This is a deck of poems. This is poem tarot that holds and unfolds wisdoms about rings. Metal bands, saturn rings, a diamond set in “a giant white...wail /gold band.”
“ownership and love are different,” says one card.