(made)
“the locus of agency is always an assemblage” —Jane Bennett It’s been 468 years since the publication of Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, and just over 400 years since Galileo first observed that Jupiter had its own moons. These two discoveries not…
Whorled
Allegedly, the earliest forms of writing were actuarial: lists, of inventory, accounts, transactions, rules, laws. If so, the lists should be as familiar to us as any form of text could be. And they are, of course, but that doesn’t prohibit them from being strange…
Some Math
There were a few years in the mid-nineties when it looked like the poets gathering in New York might fuse a thousand disparate styles and beliefs and wishes into a single beam of classical beauty, rude comedy and what can only be called zen clarity…
Inheritance: Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene and Cyrus Console’s The Odicy
The space where authorial subjectivity and issues of social consciousness collide continues to be fraught—particularly when this space occupies the experimental sector of the poetic landscape. Take two of the strongest contemporary trends, documentary poetics and Conceptual Writing, both of which occupy strong positions on…
Panda
Like any good conceptual work, the description of Panda (KFP) by Chris Alexander can be taken at its website-word: Two and a half years in the making, this book-length poem assembles thousands of fan responses, brief summaries and descriptions of the title character from DreamWorks…
Amnesiac
…I am a word full of E’s —a cool porcelain bell, a spore, a briny rusted lock, a passing scab, an errant cell turning. —“self portrait (with vial & corn tash)” How can one respond to the trauma of global violence? Written against the backdrop…
Lifer
The less I think I know about a poet, the better the chance I’ll take to the book, as long as I can work out what I’m looking at and sail between oh that and I don’t get it. (Sometimes I like the comforts of…
Whismy :: Horror :: Prudence
Click HERE for a PDF review of 3 Nightboat books: The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky lucky coat anywhere by Michael Burkard Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin
Kenning Editions: Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot and Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt
Two new releases by Chicago-based Kenning Editions take on ambience as a central motif. Pamela Lu’s Ambient Parking Lot documents the various transformations of a fictitious music group that creates demos out of parking lot sounds, while Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt is touted…
P.O.T.I.C.H.E. or Poetry Of The Immanent Corpus Hers Eternal
Click HERE for a PDF review of P.O.T.I.C.H.E.
Saint Erasure
Despite currents of panic and loss flowing through Saint Erasure, this book manifests quietly. It has the feeling of speech performed by a solitary speaker in an abandoned picnic shelter overlooking the sea. If you have driven any stretch of U.S. coastal highway you know…
Thread by Michael Palmer (New Directions, 2011) and American Fanatics by Dorothy Barresi (Pitt Poetry Series, 2010)
Testing. Palmer Barresi review, Akron to Woodstock to Ossining, April 2011. Michael Palmer’s new book Thread like all of his books since the three book cycle collected in Codes Appearing (Notes, First Figure, Sun) attempts to do for paraphrasable meaning what he did in those…