“We’re in a helicopter flying through language storms over a landscape that is spook smoke in a valley, playing with the camera zoom, station static in the headphones. The pilot knows the secret economy of a hot service wash. Disaster and love are an animated gif on his mobius watchband. The landscape arranges its chuckle. A fast read to return to.” – Tom Raworth
Out now from Contraband Books.
The new ebook from Argotist Ebooks is Commentaries on Bob Cobbing by Lawrence Upton. Available free here:
Great writer, great press, out now.
2nd edition now available from Stranger Press.
Other Room reader Nick Thurston has two new projects: Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right, “a collection of poems about computational capitalism, each of which was written by an underpaid worker subcontracted through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk service”, and Pretty Brutal Library, “a temporary public reference library, produced as an artwork in the format of a solo gallery show”, opening in at & Model gallery in Leeds on 25th July.
Many Reality Street titles at discount at their page via this LINK
Out now on Erbacce Press.
The excellent Lucy Harvest Clarke’s third book, Baba, out now from blart books.
Hit the LINK to do the thing
Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe, by Rosa van Hensbergen, is now available from Critical Documents for £4/€6/$9.
http://plantarchy.us/somenewgrowth.html
*
A string made function unchanges
by damp. It hears the train, but staid,
all knockerless. Tendrils aim at something,
gather meld. The red light losing it rinses out
pimps with wet art, renovating in staged
ridicule, to throw an ‘if’ post
hoc. Another stumped cough and pass on.
In sixteen seven-line stanzas, Rosa van Hensbergen’s Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe records the author’s introduction to life in Yokohama, Japan, where she travelled on a Harper-Wood Studentship to research and practice the art of Butoh. The poem inhabits those memories of the city’s professional sex life that were bombed out by a recent surge of gentrification, whitewashed like the skin of a Butoh dancer. “Wounds raw | but invisible.” Austere and voluptuous, Some New Growth is a poem drained of persona. Contradiction whips its tail as a typo amidst linguistic exactitude, as select prescriptions of starvation amidst a surplus of food. Social phantoms are painted into life and ordered to perform their way into unlit dead-ends through a coded language both private and historical.
The author writes: “Some New Growth was composed in November 2011, in a Koganecho room of a metre by a metre.[1] Its light was blinking red. At some point during composition, atmospheric pressure burst the bulb and turned the room into an installation. Red lights rinsed for Yokohama biennale. Dirts that got turned out that day breed themselves upon this sheet, in a Koganecho room squared twice over to sixteen stanzas.”
Some New Growth at the Temple or Lobe is Rosa van Hensbergen’s third book, following Inebriate Debris (Punch Press, 2011) and Buildings, a collaboration with John DeWitt (Tipped Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Snow, Hi Zero, Veer About, Half Circle, Anything, Anymore, Anywhere, and Friends.
Sarah Crewe’s poems are deliberately resistant. flick/invicta raises the question: does a poetry which comes from outside, or which challenges, dominant ideology also need to come outside of normal syntax, to exceed normal registers? Does poetry need to challenge our modes of interpretation before it challenges anything else? Some of the poems in the pamphlet become so obfuscated as to resemble catalogues of private obsessions, and seem like the “secret code” mentioned in ‘bridge’. Others are, in context, remarkably conventional. But the best are hair-raising and subversive, breaking language up to “bring the vowels back” and “prise consonants/apart”.
Other Room reader Sarah Crewe’s flick/invicta reviewed by Charles Whalley at Sabotage.
New from Other Room reader Neil Addison.
I Think We Should Both Start Seeing Other Worlds: A Tranche Of Short Fictions Built To Order In The Name Of Rice & Beans
Sordid heteros, moon faced egotists, murderous fruit fights, promotional apes, and poetry testing kits. Also includes the truncated soap opera, Ruby Island (or what happens when an enclave of celebrities – including P Diddy, Dan Brown, David Hasselhoff, Jamiroquai, Martin Tyler, The Singer from Nickelback, The Singer from McFly, The Singer from Dollar, and the drummer from T’Pau – are forced to look the gift economy in the face (and believe me, dear readers, it sure isn’t pretty).
A new chapbook by Connie Scozzaro is emerging into the world totally unlike the hierophant retreating from his terrifying breakfast meeting with a bear princess. Contrapposto Action Queen is an organic lyric movement towards a smackdown of the unwitting social damage of roleplay, is tender and funny, and resonates with a voice entirely its own. These poems make no sacrifices for their wieldy topics of domesticity, love, and labour, all cast among a troupe of creeps, lovers, mothers, mermaids, Dante & Beatrice, cops, cornflakes, muses, Rousseau, and the EDL. More details at the Bad Press site.
New e-book from Mark Cobley’s The Red Ceilings Press.
zimZalla object 019 is Shrewsbury by Matt Dalby, a non-verbal, synethesiac comic. For more details, including how to buy, visit the zimZalla site.
©_© Press would like to announce the publication of the second issue of NO PRIZES, featuring: Anonymous, Bonney, Brasch (trans. Jeschke), Curran, De’Ath, Fuller, Jarvis, Manson, Prynne, Robertson, Seita. 60pp. http://cucpress.tumblr.com/
£5 : $8 : €6
Like This Press is delighted to announce the publication of three new titles: Blart & Kid by Andy Spragg, Neurotrash by James Russell, and When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker by Robert Graham.
All titles can be purchased direct from Like This Press here:
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/andyspragg
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/jamesrussell
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/robertgraham
Blart & Kid is a book-in-a-box comprising 1 x poetry pamphlet, 1 x photo book and 3 x postcards by Natalie Orme.
‘To Blart & Kid is a stop-start pile-up of angelically goofball, loosely metrical verse and a sharp chart of repetitive fear; a proprioceptive documentary-tale of an outrage only sometimes felt among the meek in a time of “well-pulped vocations and lost confidence”. Here between the clouds of overseer and overseen, Spragg shows you what’s yours and what’s not, and in the process enacts a kind of ontological crisis that is already blithely churned up by a cement-mixer, or “located in the foot-well of a minicab.’ – Amy De’Ath
‘To Blart and Kid sets itself the task of pushing a poetics of suburbia beyond a glib, broadsheet-endorsed clutch of epiphanies about the so-called ‘magic of the everyday’. The writing here edges into this territory, surveying the abandoned quarries, feeling out rents in the chainlink, sniffing ‘mildewed wood and/ stink leather’, but gradually enacts a landgrab, asserting itself over GCSE-syllabus verse via a frenetically inventive formal approach. Sure, there are rainswept cadences your average Faber wannabe would die for, but these are interspersed with notes of satirical belligerence which evoke nothing so much as Dada’s little-known Leatherhead branch. ‘Dozing and touching periphery’, Andy Spragg’s idiomatic cartography of the stockbroker belt is a remarkable phenomenological outing, in both senses of that word.’ – Joe Kennedy
Neurotrash seeks to to attend away from the popular neuroscience that envelops us, nodding to it in a distracted manner. The idea that the brain sciences will dissolve deep mysteries is beyond parody and eventually it will go away. Meanwhile, we have the more serious and joyful business of poetry itself, which is capable of capturing the various nature of life and the way language can play in the deep waters.
When You Were a Mod I Was a Rocker is Like This Press’ first fiction title: a book-in-a-box comprising 7 individually bound short stories and 1 collection of flash fiction, with original illustrations by Hannah
Dickinson.
All enquiries to: nikolai@likethispress.co.uk
The Paper Nautilus Magazine is seeking for contributions for a dual-translation issue featuring translations of contemporary or recent experimental women’s poetry in any foreign language. Please get in touch with proposals, submissions and suggestions of poets or translators for consideration by June 15th. The publication date is expected to be early Autumn. More about previous issues and the magazine here.
Tuesday 4 June 2013 at 7:30pm, to launch By the North Sea. An anthology of Suffolk poetry.
Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH.
This collection of essays on twentieth-century poetry and poetics is written from a wide-ranging perspective, working analytically and comparatively with literature, music, video, film, architecture and performance art.
Bringing together readings of Virgil Thomson, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Louis Feuillade, Rosmarie Waldrop, Frank Zappa, Bill Viola and Pierre Alechinsky, this book attempts to delineate the possibility of a truly transversal poetics, one which creates a space for a reconsideration of contemporary poetics while navigating the complex interactions between the theory and practice.
Now available from Litteraria Pragensia.
otherroom.org 