Posts Tagged ‘Octopus Books’

Gifts for Poets and Poetry Lovers

Friday, December 9th, 2011

It’s that time of year again! Here are some suggestions that might make the perfect gift for those that love poetry!

How about a gift subscription to jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, or Fence?

Many presses offer 1 and 2 year subscriptions such as Litmus Press, $75 gets you or your loved one everything they publish in 2012-13 including their journal, Aufgabe.

$75 also gets a year worth of books from the fine folks over at Wave Books.

Nothing says Merry Christmas more than a two year gift subscription to Octopus Books! For $64 you get 6 full-lengths and around 4 chapbooks with free shipping.  The list includes  with Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees, Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal, Brandon Downing’s AT ME, and a reprint of CD Wright’s 40 Watts. And then 4 more books: Chris DeWeese’s The Black Forest and Jenny Zhang’s Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Ben Mirov’s Hider Roser.

For only $50 you get all of this from Black Ocean: Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012), Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012), Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012),The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)

No Tell Books has a deal where you can get any two of their titles for $20. Some of their authors include Bruce Covey, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, and Lea Graham.

Yes Yes Books offers both print and e-book subscriptions. When you subscribe, Heavy Petting by Gregory Sherl and Panic Attack, USA by Nate Slawson will be immediately mailed to you. On February 14th, 2012 they’ll send you I Don’t Mind if You’re Feeling Alone by Thomas Patrick Levy.

Ahsahta Press has a three different gifts packages (ranging from $65-35) including books by Kate Greenstreet and Karla Kelsey.

Dancing Girl Press has a (chap)book bundle of 5 for $25.

Projective Industries publishes hand-bound chapbooks. You can get four for $20 (while supplies last).

How about Fact-Simile’s Trading Cards including poets such as Bhanu Kapil, CA Conrad, and Joanne Kyger.

If you find yourself in Brooklyn or Manhattan, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop is offering free door-to-door delivery on their bicycles (weather permitting).  Not only is that green, but you can support multiple presses and hand-select you’re own gift packages!

Likewise, if you find yourself in Northampton you’d be remiss not to stop into Flying Object or shop from them online!

While “best” has always been an arguable term, if you need more suggestions of what people have been reading/raving about take a look at Third Factory/Notes of Poetry and No Tells.

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Heather Christle and Jennifer Tamayo at Stain of Poetry

Friday, November 25th, 2011

On  Friday, November 18th, 2011 Brooklyn’s Stain of Poetry Reading Series hosted their season finale.  The readers included Heather Christle (pictured), Paul Siegell, Jennifer Tamayo, Karen Weiser and Jared White.

Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm and The Trees Trees (Octopus Books, 2009/2011) and the chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books). Her third book What Is Amazing is forthcoming in 2012. Here’s Christle’s set-list which consisted mostly of poems from The Trees The Trees:

“You Are My Guest”

“Je M’appelle Ivan” (video)

“My Enemy”

“Poem Ending With Some Advice” (video)

“Inside Terminal E”

“Plus One”

“Happy Birthday To Me”

“Life Vest”

“Trying to Return The Sun” (vide0)

Jennifer Tamayo read from her debut book, Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes which was selected by Cathy Park Hong as the winner of the 2010 Gatewood Prize and published by Switchback Books. Tamayo read:

“(A moment, Your mother)

an excerpt from “(Put a dress, Address on it)”

“All hail clitoris”

” (   , ”

an excerpt beginning “Mother, bodies are places…”

“I Imagine the World Before Me….”

 

video by Hitomi Yoshio

-steven karl

 


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Browning & Svalina at The Poetry Project

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Brett Price curated what many referred to as a homecoming for Sommer Browning and Mathias Svalina on Friday, March 11 at The Poetry Project.

While living in Brooklyn, Browning was an integral part of the poetry world by curating and hosting Pete’s Candy Store, serving as one of the poetry editors for The Portable Boog City Reader and an editor (along with Tony Mancus) of Flying Guillotine Press, which she still edits.

During Svalina’s tenure in Brooklyn, he co-curated Yardmeter Editions Reading Series, served as poetry editor for Boog City and co-edited (with Zach Schomburg) Octopus Books and magazine. He still edits both. Since Svalina’s departure, this was his first return to New York, and Browning’s second. Attendees brought wine and beer, and even a bottle of absinthe made an appearance, with Brandon Downing working the sugar spoon to perfection.

A little after 10:30, the lights dimmed and the readings began.  Below are the set-lists for Browning and then Svalina.

Sommer Browning took the stage and distributed postcards which contain a cartoon drawing of a person playing  guitar. She said the card was her first poem, titled, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s what followed:

1. Sideshow
2. Death Defying
3. When Christopher Died
4. Either Way I’m Celebrating
5. It Isn’t Dead Just Different
6. the comic on page 88 of her book, Either Way I’m Celebrating
7. I’m Sorry I Ate That (title of another comic from the book)
8. Acts of Misinterpreted Surrender
9. A Kind of Chosen Birthday with No Known Pianist
10. The Movies
11. Alive with a finger (comic)
12. Still life
13. The Opposite of Love
14.The Meat from the Dream the Heart Knows
15. Feel Better

At this point Browning attempted to leave the stage, but the audience wasn’t having it and begged for an encore. She read two more poems.

1. “Notes About Art Pepper”
2. “Officer and Gentleman”

After a brief intermission, Svalina took the stage and read poems from his book, destruction myth, as well as a series of new poems about spells. He opened his reading by reading a poem for and by Bill Cassidy who passed away earlier in the year.  More on Cassidy here and here. Here’s the rest of Svalina’s set-list:

1. “Creation Myth”
2. -first line, “In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird”
3. ” ” -first line, “In the beginning there was a book”
4. ” ” -first line, ” He set the first fire as a joke”
5. ” ” -first line, ” In the beginning there was a pen that drew itself into existence & then drew all the”
6. A Spell Against a Dropping of Things
7. A Spell Against Distances
8. A Spell Against Sickness

from “Creation Myth”

1. first line, ” In the beginning there was a big puddle of honey”
2. Sickness is my Meat
3. first line, “In the beginning I was a little thing in the center of a star.”
4. A Spell Against Unlocked Door
5. A Spell Against Human Fraility
6. The Hypothesis of Death
7. first line, “In the beginning the registar”
8. first line, ” In the beginning everything I said exploded.”
9. first line, “My mother & father are both chemists.”
10. A Spell Against Ownership
11. Destruction Myth

*

-steven karl

photos & video Hitomi Yoshio

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One Neither One

Friday, September 11th, 2009

by Shane McCrae
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Steven Karl

8_5

“One of us had to save the other one”

mccrae coverThroughout the years poets have written about identity and its intersection with race. Many volumes of poetry and anthologies seek to demonstrate or recapitulate either the hyphenated-American or immigrant experience. Nella Larsen, who wrote the novels Quicksand and Passing, is perhaps the most famous writer who had attempted to tackle something even more complicated: the “bi-racial”* or multi-ethnic experience.  In 2006 it was reported that there is a minimum of 6.1 million U.S. citizens who identify their ethnicity as bi- or multi, yet comparatively little has been explored in the landscape of poetry.  Shane McCrae’s chapbook, One Neither One, sets out to give a voice to this other other.

McCrae wisely uses surrealism to obtain intensity and reveal poignancy. His chapbook contains seven poems. The first, titled “That’s Entertainment,” deals directly with the concept of white half vs. black half:

White half the white half    mule the black half black   /   But more
pleasing to either eye more hav-
ing neither but the black half eye    more hav-  /  ing neither
which which half

McCrae sets-up a lexical, almost Dr. Suessian employment of language by the sly use of repetition which seeks to both hammer in the words and to force the reader to re-examine each word in relation to the other.  When McCrae writes, “which which,” I think first which white, which black, but then when I reread “which which” it becomes an impatient question or demand.  The following five poems are titled “Mulatto.”  Instead of simply using people, McCrae utilizes the animal image (mule, horse, donkey) in “Mulatto,” thereby achieving the surrealistic trick of making anew a topic which has been a long historical abhorrent in American history and blurring the distinction between animal and human. 

The first “Mulatto” poem begins, “Half-donkey and half-human being    half-horse/”; the second “Mulatto” poem explores the old adage of one drop will do you, “Not even half three-eighths one drop of blood/ Is blood is blood is blood my blood is not/ My mother’s blood my body in her body/”. Anyone who has lived the experience of being bi- or multi-ethnic will easily tell you that the “one drop” does not allow you belong to one side or the other, in fact, this mixed identity often finds you neither accepted by the white or the black community.  The fourth “Mulatto” poem deals with this by recalling an experience where a black girl is being sexualized by white boys—she exists in their eyes not as a black person, but first and foremost as an object of sex:  “The white boys licked her breast    it was a game / It had a name and that is how I knew / It was a game.”  The white boys are in the position of power, so they have the ability to name and then to define the game.  The speaker of the poem decides he wants to be in on the game:

I got in line    and all the white boys saw

There was a nigger in the line    a mule
But none of them could tell    and the one black girl
Called me a nigger made   the white boys laugh
One of us had to save the other one

The last poem in One Neither One is entitled “Ghost,” and it deals with fragmentary ideas of self and memory, that other hiding, ghosting inside and caught in this in-betweeness.  One Neither One excels not only for its subject but also for McCrae’s poetics: his inventive use of line breaks, how he works the space on the page, and the ability to effectively incorporate surrealism.  My only disappointment with this chapbook is that it feels too brief and left me wanting to read more.

* I used “bi-racial” in this review because it is a term common to readers, but decided to put it in quotes since race itself is a construct and politically speaking, some of us chose not to empower the word and its antiquated definition.

*

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Tuned Droves

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

by Eric Baus
Octopus Books 2009
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

6_5stars_6

“Is there a second singer?”

baus coverDroves fill Yankee Stadium and offer their own witnessing abilities to the ubermensch of a caped, steroided maniac.  Droves also disfigure harmonies on their accumulating lawn mowers, in their exhausting automobiles. Droves squeak their wet boots in and out of every subway car.  Deep inside the liver of this mass of beings in motion, there is a churning to tune, to bring the blur into focus.  And, oddly enough, a mason uses a “drove chisel” for dressing up the tops of stones and rocks toward a more “approximately true surface.”  So says the dictionary.
 
Eric Baus’s new book reminds one of the really droning portions of non-narrative films like The Man With the Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi, and it is not even in the same league with Baraka, but it is large-to-miniscule in its scope.  Most actualized objects (even spasms) in the book seem to be relegated to Baus’s world of “whatever there is” or “It”.  In fact, the “It” may appear more than any character (if you can call them that); a weighty pronoun use  bases itself on the shoulders of weak characters sometimes called “the woman” or “a man.”  Actual names or more direct placements may assist the direction of what otherwise makes most of the poems stand still, not knowing which is Eighth Avenue and which is 8 Ave. 

There are eight sections of the book, which also contain individual poems, although, that too is difficult to discern.  Perhaps that is the point of Tuned Droves though—to produce an ineffability of distinguishing what from whom, and in that, a globalized (not like capitalism, like nebula) correlation is made.
 
A constant confusion makes use of itself as to what actually constitutes a Baus poem.  Readers will most likely feel their limbs shaken in a plastic bag and their boredom washed in birdbath water.  Make no mistake—this is sentence salad.  A few, core, indefinable concepts (tree, boy, sun, bus) make a strained bone-growth to try and connect the entire universe.  Though, if Baus is at least attempting to “tune” the “drove,” he is failing at bringing a blur into perfect pitch and tonal focus.  The narrative (sometimes in prose block, even) smudgings act more like ink blot tests than lessons on humanity’s place and purpose in a swirling vast unbounded immensity of language:

 “The letter said the letter was looking for another address.” 

Or, “A tree did nothing today.” 

It would be proper to place these phrasings inside of entire quotations of whole poems, but that is impossible as these sentences and statements could be placed into any other poem in the book. 

A strength of the book is the overarching, mystical power of the mother figure that shadows and shines from the first poem (“The Sudden Sun”) on.  She walks boys to water, gives birth, processes birth, names children, forms flowers, and folds “her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a sentence.”  Baus definitely has a muscle for the unique imperative.  However, he takes it way too far and carries it on longer than he should.  He does not just climb the mountain, he goes around the range.  Look, here, at the last line of the whole book, from “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”:  “Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening for.”  He should have cut off the statement at “snow.”

The collection’s strongest poem, clearly, is “Inside Any Good Song Someone is Lost”:

There is a splash.  There is another splash.  There is another.  There is a man a man two women a boy and a boy.  Something else.  Someone else.  I can’t see past the wheat and birds I can’t see.  There is a singer.  Is there a second singer?  There is.  That is, you can record yourself from the center of a parade.  The clouds are large.  You are little and the clouds are so large.

Baus is impersonating Gertrude Stein, but his version of Tender Buttons would be a nameless, faceless, Sunday comic strip that the entire reading family could absorb over a bowl of Trix.  Oddly enough, Baus also writes, “It is unlikely it is precise.”  While poetry is not a chef’s meticulousness or a chemist’s exactitude, tuning the masses is, and should be.

*

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Undersleep

Monday, November 10th, 2008

by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

7

Refigures

doxsee coverMany of the poems from Julie Doxsee’s Undersleep feel like descendants of early Robert Creeley poems, especially those from Words. The torque one feels moving from line to line is very much like the experience of reading a Graham Foust poem. The density of other poems and the way individual words seem packed full of content, bear similarities to the work of Rae Armantrout. For the most part, however, Doxsee’s poems are exotic and lack strong comparison. Perhaps their most unique characteristic is their obtrusiveness, which derives from predecessors while simultaneously creating an architecture all its own. Take the poem “Ice Shapes,” which contains many of the idiosyncrasies that can be found throughout Undersleep:

 A mercury spill
 follows you, spelling
 between figure 8s:

 the large cloud
 fell from the wall
 with sugar-water before

 leaping to the magnet
 wall. A curl of my
 pillow-head-you

 goes upsidedown
 with a vase of orchids
 as the evening

 new pulls a flood
 of ink from every
 pen on earth.

“Ice Shapes,” like many of Doxsee’s poems, seems to exist in a realm where imaginative language flirts with physicality. The “mercury spill” in the opening line of “Ice Shapes” creates an unfamiliar context. The inclusion of the nonspecific “you” in the second line abruptly brings the poem back into focus by forcing the reader to consider itself within the zone of this bizarre circumstance. This conflation of poem-world and reader-world allows the “Ice Shapes” to unravel in a way that is wholly mysterious, as the “mercury spill” proceeds to write “between figure 8s.” Much like the “mercury spill,” these lines have an affronting quality built upon an internal logic which is both impressive and opaque. The “figure 8s” might be taken for infinity symbols and/or a type of knot; but what matters more is that their presence is integral to the construction of the poem. The “mercury spill” that precedes them and the strange procession of objects that follow seem welded together. Each one is a keystone.

The lines that follow are similarly confounding: a cloud falls from a wall with sugar water “before leaping to the magnet / wall,” “… as the evening / new pulls a flood / of ink from every / pen on earth.” While one could easily take on the task of ascribing meaning into each moment in the poem, the integrity and significance of Doxsee’s poems comes from their sculptural qualities. Each poem in Undersleep affects the space around it; the space on the page, perhaps even the reader’s space, the brainspace one uses to conceive the more chimerical compositions of poetry. Many of the poems in Undersleep function like sculptures in a gallery; they force an observer to navigate through and reconsider the space they inhabit. This is an array of poems that touch you in unique, troubling and frequently pleasurable ways.

*

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