Strong Beats

Etel Adnan's The Ninth Page

Now that Etel Adnan's show is down at CCA (finished June 29th), does anyone know what happens to the additional copies of the "catalog," Adnan's collected journalism from Beirut? The writing here perfectly compliments her poetry, and I would happily distribute these to poets myself if there are extra copies. If someone knows, would you fill me in?

Romulan Soup Woman

This new Damn the Caesars (or I guess "Damn the Caesars Suspended") is a fucking nutso commentary on science fiction, poetry and labor called Romulan Soup Woman. I include some of the comics from the issue above to give you a sense of what you're working with! Editor Rich Owens calls it "passing remarks, communiques, lineated critiques, speculative commentaries and inter-ludic disquisitions on science fiction, the culture industry, thermonuklearen terrors and crustaceous justitia" featuring a ton of heads including Jo Crot, Benjamin Friedlander, Anne Boyer, Verity Spott, Joe Luna, Amiri Baraka, and tons of others. This is the kind of journal you've absolutely got to see for yourself; I couldn't begin to do it justice. Pick one up here.

Compline Book Launch

Help us celebrate the arrival of three new Compline titles (David Brazil's The Ordinary, Jackqueline Frost's The Antidote, and The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water, a collaboration by Leslie Scalapino and Kiki Smith) with a reading at the Green Arcade this Saturday, July 20th. Brazil and Frost will read from their books, and all three titles will be on hand for purchase.

Here are the pertinent details:
Brazil/Frost
The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
Sat. July 20th, 7pm

Jackqueline Frost's You Have the Eyes of a Martyr

In celebration of the arrival of The Antidote, I thought to mention that Jack's follow-up chapbook (which she's described as a sequel or afterward to The Antidote) is now available from new-to-me O'Clock Press. These folks (Kit Schulter and others?) are printing really cool work by a bunch of poets who are also totally new to me (which is exciting!). Buy The Antidote, have your mind blown, and then read this and have your mind blown all over again! Essential if you care about the new guard (and you should)...

David Brazil's The Ordinary

To say that David Brazil's The Ordinary is "long in the making," or "highly anticipated," or "essential" is to do little justice to how important and rabidly anticipated this book really is. Brazil's presence in the Bay Area poetry scene is felt everywhere, and this book will further solidify his role as innovator and soothsayer. Which is why it's my great pleasure to announce that The Ordinary has arrived! There is no question that you need this book (really), and I can assure you that it will sell out faster than one might think. Make it happen NOW!

You can order your copy from Small Press Distribution,or you can order directly from me (which will likely be faster) here with FREE SHIPPING.

Learn more about David's work here, or read the blurb below for the short story:

David Brazil was born in New York and lives in California.  His publications include The Ordinary (Compline), The Book Called Spring (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), Spy Wednesday (TAXT), Meet Me Beneath the War Angels (OMG!), Orphica (Lew Gallery), Aevum (Vigilance Society), Mass of the Phoenix : A Mina Loy Portal (Trafficker) and To Romans (Compline).  With Kevin Killian, he edited the Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater : 1945 - 1985.

Along with his partner Sara Larsen, David produced over sixty issues of the xerox periodical TRY!, featuring the work of dozens of contemporary writers.  Part of the editorial collective which produced the daily Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette during Occupy Oakland, he now works with the Bay Area Public School to promote free & radical education.  He makes his living as a bookseller.

Jackqueline Frost's The Antidote

I am very pleased to announce that Jackqueline Frost's The Antidote has finally arrived! Poet Enrique Winter writes of the book, "THE ANTIDOTE generates the unrest of strong political poetry. The book pricks the battle, but never tells it. Images are sensorial in the maneuver of color and form, while mottos become more violent each page, growing together with the reading towards experience and conspiratorial action. Then discourse runs over image: tension in the verse as paragraph, in the word as unstable material, in the social (dis)order. The reciprocity of touch and the choral composition; the loss of patience towards rage." For real, though.

You can order the book from SPD directly here or from me (which might be faster) WITH FREE SHIPPING here.

If Jackqueline's work is new to you, cruise over to Compline's website to learn more about it here.

And here's a little blurb to get you started:

Jackqueline Frost was born and raised in the Deep South, and lives in Oakland, California. She is the author of The Antidote (Compline), as well as three chapbooks: You Have the Eyes of a Martyr (O’Clock Press), The Soft Appeal (Nous-Zot Press), and When We Say Brutal (Berkeley Neo-Baroque). Her poetry and essays have appeared, or are forthcoming in Rethinking Marxism, Lana Turner, The Death and Life of American Cities, What is Called Violence, Steamer (Australia), The Depressive Position (UK), and LIES: a journal of materialist feminism. With Zoe Tuck, Jackqueline curated the East Bay reading series Condensery in 2010-2011. Currently, she is part of the Tsega Center Collective, a group of women, queers, and trans folks, working to open a feminist community and organizing space. She collects wages as an oyster-shucker and a research assistant in antique literatures.

Crane Giamo's Lumen

Another Crane Giamo joint (co-publisher of Delete Press w/ Jared Schickling (and Brad Vogler?)) just out on his own Pocalypstic. This book is really incredible to behold in person: really fucking impeccably produced, highlighting Crane's penchant for streaks and explosions of color and palimpsests of image and text. Crane's printing straddles the divide between poetry chapbook and "print," so his books sometimes feel like autonomous serial broadsides bound together. More than most printers these days, Crane (along with folks like Aaron Cohick at Newlights) is really investigating what poetry books are through a constructivist process: building and layering (or inversely subtracting and deconstructing) one page at a time. Get everything you can from him as quickly as it's listed, as he prints in small runs, and his books are gone before you know it. And I've found that he sometimes doesn't list one-off broadsides and other ephemera at his website, so ask him what he has in the stacks...If you don't know Crane's work, and you're one of the few people who cares about the art of the small press and its essential role in pushing poetry composition further, you MUST start collecting these books...

Brenda Iijima's going blooming, falling blooming

Brenda Iijima's new chapbook, going blooming, falling blooming, is out now on Delete Press. This book is INCREDIBLE. Don't sleep.

Coming Soon!

The Antidote is coming in just a few days! Preorders go out by the end of the week...

The Animal at SPD

Leslie Scalapino & Kiki Smith's collaboration, The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water, is now available from our friends at Small Press Distribution! Pick it up here...

Chris Dunsmore, stopping place (edition of 85, 2012)

John Thorp, Stitch and hem and line and flight (edition of 50, 2013)

I was pleased and honored to receive these two incredible books from Chris Dunsmore and John Thorp, both of whom are poets currently living in Salt Lake City and both are (or were?) in the joint book arts / poetry MFA program at U. of Utah. These books are really something to behold in person. They make me want to return to the drawing board and simply start over. There's something about SLC that inspires these really sophisticated and minimalist approaches to design that are way more pleasing than most of the maximalist approaches of contemporary presses: deeply tactile, super intentional design ideas (that perfectly compliment the text). Someone is doing something right out there...If there's interest, I might be able to convince them to send some out...

Yes...

this is the cover, the actual bound-on-the-book-cover, of David Brazil's The Ordinary. I share it with you now to convey the news that Brazil and fellow Compline author Sara Larsen will be heading east, a week from today, to celebrate freedom in NYC. Both are reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn (600 Vanderbilt Ave.) on Friday, July 5th at 7pm. If you're in the area, you don't want to miss this...

Coming Soon!

I should have copies of the next two Compline long-players, David Brazil's The Ordinary and Jackqueline Frost's The Antidote, in hand in about two weeks time (maybe even by the end of next week, if all goes well!). I'll package and mail preorders the moment the books arrive (promise!) to ensure that preorders land first! Once the preorders are officially in the world, on doorsteps and in homes, we'll begin the official "launch" with a reading at the Green Arcade on Saturday, July 20th, featuring Brazil and Frost, live and direct (with copies of the new Compline projects, including the Scalapino/Smith, on hand!). The books will land at Small Press Distribution shortly thereafter (though you'll get them from me faster!).

Leslie Scalapino & Kiki Smith | The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water

Originally published by Granary Books in 2010 (in an edition of 45 very expensive copies), Compline is pleased to announce the trade edition publication of The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water.

Leslie Scalapino wrote of the collaboration, in her short essay “The Division Between Fact and Experience” (included as an afterward in the Compline edition of the book), “The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water is a collaboration of drawings by Kiki Smith and poetry by Leslie Scalapino (myself)…. Kiki Smith sent me color Xeroxes of a completed sequence, forty-three drawings, which she’d titled, Women Being Eaten by Animals. I wrote the poem using the sense of an unalterable past occurrence: One female, apparently the same girl, is repeatedly, in very similar images as variations, bitten and clawed by a leopard-like, lion-like animal. Both person and animal have abstracted features, giving the impression of innocence or opaqueness. As in a dream of similar actions or a dream of a single, timeless action, the girl flecked with blood while being unaltered by the animal’s touch, there is no representation of motion except stillness of the figures floating in space of page. Neither the girl nor the animal articulate expression, as if phenomena of feeling(s) do not exist...

'The word' in its outside/space refers to and makes a sense of the undoing of social tyranny as undoing of any hierarchy in individuals’ feelings and perception as well as in people’s values (public indistinguishable from private). Without hierarchy, past-reality-future is apparently free paradise of childhood and of birds. This outside space of the word/or that is my words abuts the other visible space of ‘Women being eaten by animals’ (that original title of the visual images denied, however, by the fact that the female figure appears to be almost a child). The visual scene itself is denied by 'not experiencing.' The viewer (while reading beside seeing the images, but also if only seeing the visual images?), has the experience of body and mind being separated as if that is caused by the outside world. This experience of the viewer arises from their sense, in seeing, that one is separated from the scene of the girl and the animal alone together as if making love (and a sense of separation arises from the girl and animal not mimicking expressions of experiencing sensations). The disconnect/that’s itself the dialogue between ‘not being experienced (by the senses)’—and separation or union of mind/eye and body/sight—has to be first enacted by Smith’s visual images, in order for the language to broach this (subject) matter at all. Is dialogue possible without language?”

Leslie Scalapino (July 25, 1944 - May 28, 2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, and essays. She taught writing for nearly 25 years at various institutions around the country and was the publisher of O Books, which she founded in 1986. Her most recent books are The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (The Post-Apollo Press, 2010), Flow-Winged Crocodile & A Pair/Actions Are Erased/Appear (Chax Press, 2010), Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books, 2010), How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (Litmus Press, 2011) and The Animal is in the World Like Water in Water (Compline, 2013).

Kiki Smith was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in New Jersey. She has exhibited her work since the 1980s, when she was a member of COLAB, an influential artists’ collective in New York City. Her work is represented in museums throughout Europe and the United States. A major retrospective of her prints, “Prints, Books and Things,” took place at the Museum of Modern Art, 2003. The Walker Art Museum organized a major survey retrospective of her oeuvre in 2006. Smith lives and works in New York City.

To purchase a copy, CLICK HERE!

Coming Soon (Finally!)

New Albion Books

I'm always super impressed by Brian Teare's ability to make his Albion Books look so sophisticated and handsome with so little material in the shop to work with. Here he's printing on furniture, and the texture is totally incredible. This do-si-do book object features two chapbooks in two signatures by two different authors, Elementary Rituals by Rachel Moritz and Dirge by Juliet Patterson, and while I know very little about either author, I've come to implicitly trust Teare's curation (the sign, to me, of a successful press), so I'll be reading this one carefully over the next few days. This is the first in Albion's fifth series of books, followed soon by chapbooks by Frank Sherlock, Jean Valentine, and CAConrad, all of which should arrive by the end of the year. I'll keep you posted, but, for now, go here.

Burns' Night Heard || Robert Grenier

I was super pleased to find one of these in the flesh at Jeff Maser's shop the other day (there are a few left if you're interested...). Published by Tansy Press in April of 1982 (printed by John Moritz? w/ the help of Lee Chapman?), the back blurb reads: Robert Grenier wrote of this piece as "...a sort of visitation by 'Burns' /the spirit of the work so heard through poems read aloud in the Scots on the night of his birth etc. -started me off happily reading R.B. beyond anthologies for the first time. Much more to be said there, but as you like it, space this out."

SUPPORT CJ MARTIN & HIS FAMILY!

My very good friend and comrade, CJ Martin, who is also one of my favorite poets in the world, just experienced an incomprehensibly tragic loss. His father Tommy (left) and grandmother Ann were victims of a tornado in Texas on May 15th, and his mother, Betsy Davis (right) was just released from ICU. Betsy's injuries are serious, and to make a tragic situation worse, she does not have medical insurance.

There are currently three ways to support Chris and his family:

1. I plan to donate 100% of the proceeds from Chris's mind-shattering Compline full-length, Two Books, to Betsy's recovery fund. If you haven't engaged with this crucial book, buy it now and support Chris while you're at it. If you already have a copy, and you know how important it is, please consider purchasing a copy for a friend or colleague to support Betsy. Make it happen here.

2. You may also choose to donate to an online fundraising effort in Betsy's name here.

3. Finally, the poet Ash Smith is producing a limited edition chapbook of brand new work from a wide variety of poets that should be available soon. When it's ready, I'll certainly promote it here.

Please take a moment to support this family!

Promises, Promises