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Upcoming titles:
The Ballads Of RASP/ELEKTRA, companion plays by Josepha Gutelius
Opening The Seals, poems by Robert Kelly, winter 2007
The President In Her Towers, a novel by Tom Whalen
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Rafts
by Simon Perchik
Rafts is another entry in the extraordinary lyric opus composed by Simon Perchik over the last five decades or so. Its poems of loss and learning, of mythic truths at the brink of the grave, where a reclaimed animism gives voice to stones and seas, to lonely stars and lowly bathroom faucets, make heavy narrative demands. But they gift the reader with fluent elisions into Nietzsche’s Dionysiac woods: “You can tell this sink lost interest/ though hour after hour you hum/ another love song.”
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An Exchange of Letters
by Tom Whalen
The nineteen movements of An Exchange of Letters behave like a variety of birds rehearsed to hum the same symphony. Levels of reality are exchanged, shuffled, made to dance, fuse, vanish. In the post-apocalyptic landscape of "After the Rain", “Children congregate around the puddles and point to the reflection of the planes crashing at the water's edges.” The eponymous "Jorinda and Joringel" (from the tale by the Brothers Grimm) appear trapped forever in their past, but the generative nature of the form of their discourse resists despair. The Review of Contemporary Fiction calls Tom Whalen’s work “thickly lyrical and meditative, interrogating the relation of language to things, of books to life.” His sixth work of fiction, An Exchange of Letters, is no exception, with his organic approach to the subconscious kindling a light in the darkness of mere being.
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May Day
by Robert Kelly
May Day continues Kelly’s search for meaning, with poems born of a spiritual need and a perennial relationship with language which Jung describes as
“…a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and, by carrying it aloft, assumes a visible shape.” The poems of May Day speak like sirens, both types, and are wrought from song and warning.
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This Brevity
by Gianmarc Manzione
This Brevity, Gianmarc Manzione's debut collection of poetry, bares a concentration of everyday occurrences, that "continual fever of circumstance / no one knows the end of", and questions each end with an honesty so vivacious that even death becomes an opportunity for the heart to revisit its losses. With discipline and ardor, his interrogations discover possibilities that assemble themselves into moments where loss, desire, and understanding, like Ashbery's trees, surprise us with a meaning that is at once calculated and unhinged.
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