Haecceities Has Arrived!

I am very excited to report that Haecceities is finally in the world thanks to our friends at Cuneiform Press! I began these poems way back in 2003 shortly after leaving the Bay Area for Buffalo, so this book represents seven long years of very slow writing!

I was honored to earn a blurb from Leslie Scalapino, who writes of the book:

"In Haecceities, Michael Cross has made an interim language, his invention a relation between the words—as if this unknown relation or 'noumenon' is 'a hide enthinned' of futuristic Elizabethan single words each at once tactile, optical, aural simultaneously traces and events of reinterpreted future-present spurred in 'the many hundred wing-lit hives."

And here's a pretty amazing short video of CA Conrad and Brenda Iijima performing a ritual upon receiving the book:



It's available now (though I don't think it's officially listed as available) at SPD here. You can also get copies from me directly, especially if you're interested in writing a review (and I always throw in bonus material!). I would be honored if you chose to read it this fall (and I would be doubly honored if you chose to review it or teach it or recommend it to a friend or library!).

Here are some poems from the sequence "Pax" to whet your appetite:

decas a hand in matte-batting bound in the mouth
worth numerically five, say throat, palate, tongue, worth teeth
not so a lictor rides whips from the skin folds in similar case
swathed hands haven't mass, haven't maw-meats
should mouth exclude sate from the forearm in teeth
pigs fixed by mouth, ham of hand, fingers of foot

*

cleave as stone drawn straw
oppugn gable ends, ends poist, laid upon a finger
slough off directional stress
shew light, allemande, courante,
light sarabande, gigue, light
light chaconne, transom, kodachrome
the life of my life bound in a bale of life

*

dreamt of his blood in the mouth of his brother
like gum-props one jaw for the sky, slavering gape
the lower bone scrapes off ground, salivates
slaughter-gaut, yawned with the arm's mouth
two-youth's white with milk-cured wool
so that laughing there will seem too few when the wolf comes
browstress the wide island meadow
bound by the entrails of son