Molloy: The Flip Side by Chris Tysh Now Available!

Molloy: The Flip Side transcreates the first half of Beckett's 1951 French novel, narrated by its eponymous anti-hero who is slowly going nowhere. The hobo lyrics of Tysh's book-length poem open up the unendurable abyss of being, yet zing with vernacular and zany humor: "Gotta check out soon/ Be done with dying," Molloy says, but there's a few things he must do first. And so begins the uncanny journey in this poetic B-side of Beckett's masterpiece.

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Chris Tysh reads in, around, and through Molloy in this ingenious transformation of Beckett’s French prose into compulsively vernacular English tercets. The narrative echoes in Molloy: The Flip Side make for an unsettling familiarity, spiked with the verbal equivalent of dark chocolate and homemade rum.

— Charles Bernstein

In Molloy: The Flip Side, Chris Tysh transcreates— rather than translates—the Beckett classic into a Matthew O'Connor-cum-Tiresias rant. "Has a leak in his tank/Button missing a hole/In his wig, you feel me?" The indeterminate narrator of Tysh's formal tercets replicates the dialectics of gender, the Oedipal complex ("The thing is Mother and I — /My shitty start — are so old now/ We're like two sere fucks on a rail") and, more generally, the problem of desire and knowledge vis-à-vis the world. That's a heady set of balls to keep up in the air, but Tysh's nimble enjambments and seamless heteroglossia (existential angst dukes it out with post-trip-hop surliness) keep things moving, propelling this mock-epic to its jocular, inconclusive, stop.

—Tyrone Williams

Chris Tysh is the author of several collections of poetry and drama, including, most recently, Night Scales: A Fable For Klara K. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Kresge Foundation, she lives in Detroit and teaches at Wayne State University. Molloy: The Flip Side is the first volume of her three-part project, Hotel des Archives, inspired by French novels of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 110 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-112-2

$16

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The Jointure by Clayton Eshleman Now Available!

 
Coming through a projection pole into the full tribal assembly of self-savagery, Clayton Eshleman activates in The Jointure a brilliant "I-beam" that illuminates the stack of androcentric figures through which his opus is staked to man's collective psychic force. Eshleman’s primordial intention in The Jointure is contact with the ancestral realm. Among totems honored are Yorunomado, the daemon of Eshleman's first breakthrough poem written in Kyoto, and Xochipilli, the Aztec prince of hallucinogenic plants. Painstakingly refined in The Jointure are the precise pivot points through which these perpetrators of soul must come and go in order to realize the fate, form, and integrity of a lifetime given to the imagination. With each refinement, Eshleman's status as the quintessential poet of visionary germination becomes more and more certain. Marking the clearest distillation of this poetic fact to date, The Jointure reveals Eshleman at the peak of his generative powers.

—Kenneth Warren

“What does it mean to see with the eyes of the soul?” In The Jointure, Clayton Eshleman offers an answer to this question in language of visionary symbolic consciousness. Intimate and expansive, psychological and anthropological data germinates this fecundating exploration and extrapolation of inner wilderness and the essence of imagination. Paleolithic, Bronze Age, Maya, Aztec, and Asmat myths and images compact Xochipilli and Coatlicue with Bud Powell, Gilgamesh, and concrete memories of an Indianapolis upbringing and an American life. In The Jointure, “memory is fracture” – the depths of horror enshroud the horror of depths – but imagination is revealed as the “keelson of paradise.” Transcultural, transhistorical and contemporary, personal and political, this is a poetry of encounter and recognition unlike any other being written by an American today. As inclusive as this writing is, it is also absolutely singular.

—Stuart Kendall

Clayton Eshleman’s most recent publications include The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo (University of California Press, 2007), The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black Widow Press, 2008), Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010), Solar Throat Slashed (a translation of Aimé Césaire’s Soleil cou coupé, with A. James Arnold, Wesleyan University Press, 2011), An Anatomy of the Night (BlazeVOX Press, 2011), and Endure (a selected translations of Bei Dao, with Lucas Klein, Black Widow Press, 2011). Eshleman is the first poet to realize a huge, researched, and imaginative project, in prose and poetry, on Ice Age cave art: Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). He was also the founder and editor of Caterpillar magazine (1967-1973) and Sulfur magazine (1981-2000). He continues to live with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 42 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-109-2
$12

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a dictionary in the subjunctive by damian weber Now Available!

 
In his new book, Damian Weber, one of Buffalo’s best-loved poet, publisher, singer and songwriter offers a magnificent display of minimalism. Fully illustrated, these short poems start as dictionary definitions that evolve into love poems, which in turn develop into poems detailing the pain of miscommunication that harbors within a relationship between two people. A tender look at existence cultivates in this dictionary between the image and the short moving poems. This book is a real treasure in its brevity and ability to pinpoint the exact moments of love, life, distraction and protraction. This is a wonderful little book.

damian weber is a member of house press a collective of poets who met in buffalo the weirdest town.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 54 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-107-8

$12

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The Moon and Other Inventions by Kristina Marie Darling Now Available!

In The Moon and Other Inventions, Kristina Marie Darling has constructed a one-sixteenth scale palace of enchanted footnotes. She writes, “Behind a little door the mechanism was turning and turning.” So too do the parts of this book turn and turn: readers will find themselves inside of a dream that is also a three- (or four- or five-) dimensional space. Emily Dickinson opens a door to find Alice Liddell, who opens a door to find Lorine Niedecker. Who could resist such knobs and dials and keys?

—Angela Sorby, author of Bird Skin Coat

Darling creates a lattice of explicitly feminine apperception around the works of Joseph Cornell. The result is a haunting parascription, of a piece with Cornell's metaphysical idiom while substantially Othering any sustained encounter with his work.

—G.C. Waldrep, author of Goldbeater's Skin

The fine poems of Kristina Marie Darling embrace the complexities of telemetry: how to read the stars and the heart, peregrinations, P and R waves, a universe implied. Underneath the text, underneath narrative, Darling calculates what matters, and the matter of a woman endeavoring to build a perfect, delicate machine. Would that be a poem? A telescope? A metaphor? All of the above.

—Alan Michael Parker, author of Long Division

In this age of hyperlinkages, the footnote has acquired a nostalgic sheen, similar to that of the optical instruments and gears that populate The Moon and Other Inventions. Joining a group of contemporary works that investigate the lyric and narrative potentials of the footnote, this sequence adds the thrill of ekphrasis to a suggestive paratextual zone.

—Jena Osman, author of The Network

The Moon & Other Inventions takes us back in time and into a parallel universe whose stars are footnotes, though they don't seek to validate so much as subvert our common authorities. Kristina Marie Darling knows that time is close to the divine, and likely beyond divinity's reach: [t]he clock within this cathedral recorded the movements of minor stars. But from its interior a series of unfamiliar notes emerged, that ominous ringing. She knows that science gets curious, too: [o]ne of the lesser known experiments, in which scientists were fascinated with the involuntary movements of the female heart. She knows that the mechanical doesn't separate us from the natural as did the emperor's nightingale--the phonograph, with its projection of unusual bird calls, was regarded as an evil device--but brings us closer--"I had wanted to preserve the measurements, their pristine order. Each of the charts was a tiny mirror held to the sun's oblique orbit." In this impressionistic steampunk elegy to Caroline Herschel and all the Alice girls, we might oscillate unchecked between the story-rich points of heaven's dome.

—Danielle Pafunda, author of My Zorba

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of a forthcoming anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Moria Books, 2012). She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Ragdale Foundation, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. Her poems and essays appear in The Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Third Coast, and Verse Daily. A graduate of Washington University and the University of Missouri, Kristina is currently working toward a Ph.D. in Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 66 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-104-7

$12

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The Epic of Hell Freeze (What Stays the News) by Richard K. Ostrander Now Available!

The Epic of Hell Freeze is a lush crosscurrent of peculiarly fine poetry. Here poems are as playful as they are crucial, whimsical and heartbreaking in a wide drifting landscape. Moving with a purpose, language circles and embodies in a ceaseless spirit in a work of great beauty and force, of intelligence and stark humility. These poems make rites of passage actual through poems that speak a primary language. Ostrander speaks a primary language. He is inventing a world—and this beautiful book enacts a patient intelligence and exemplifies physical grace. In these lines you will hear fullness of representation, and a luminous consciousness. This is a book of desire and transcendence, obsessed by, and never afraid of, its mysteries that turns toward those mysteries with language both base and grand. Ostrander is the best kind of poet: one in love with language and life. This is a wonderful, relevant book of poetry.

—Geoffrey Gatza

The poems in Richard K. Ostrander's The Epic of Hell Freeze (What Stays the News) shift from allusion (Andromeda, Abraham, Sisyphus) to illusion: "He walks through walls/ On the other side of silver." Ostrander's attention to "language's legerdemain" ties seemingly unrelated poems to each other like knotted scarves pulled from a magician's sleeve, using alliteration—"And a single sentence,/ Tautness of telephone lines"—as well as slant rhyme—"Flies, happy in their bottles/ Freer than fish/ that fly/ Melody or malady/ I don't know which"—and clichés twisted into new configurations—"There's a sty in the sky,/ Here's a shoulder to fry on." The poems take the reader into Bosnia and Afghanistan where "Tomorrow is the tail fin/ Of a rocket reaching down" and back to the U.S. where "Everyone turned to the sports page, feeling/ As if somehow something had been accomplished." What a journey into the world of words and war!

—Beth Copeland

Richard K. Ostrander currently resides within the Carolinas and the interstitial spaces of thought and desire. On most Sunday evenings, he can be found co-hosting Java Expressions, the local open mic at the Coffee Scene in Fayetteville, NC. No more data is required other than the work herein which is more than mere biography. Though some say it is about death, it is life. It is what stays the news

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-078-1
$16

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