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GIZEM OKULU– TOO SLICED FOR LANDING
Published January 2017
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Gizem Okulu’s first book is a sequence of 31 poems which, in broken and extended lines, explore the terrifying possibility of lack of speech, of blocked communication: a poetry written between languages and countries which both bridges and attests to the gap, the chasm that “opens / up / isolated / and / frightened”. These are poems haunted by political catastrophe: poems about wandering, fleeing, fogs and rivers, conditions of exile and danger, marked at times by flashes of biting humour and throughout by intense commitment.
“I do not belong here nor there I say but here I want to make you a house from the memories of every woman you ever had before like the resistance of senses meeting for one last time in the mirror we slept between the rivers and smokes in earthquake lights all day and night in the cities against the sun.”
Gizem Okulu is a poet who has published poems in Datableed, Intercapillary Space, &c. and is studying for a Ph.D at Royal Holloway. She lives in London.
38 pp, card covers (red), side stapled.
Errata. [11] For ‘Anotolia’ read ‘Anatolia’.
[29] For ‘women’ read ‘woman’.
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STUART CALTON – WIMPY AND ANDRÉ
Published January 2017
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A poem in ten sections, setting forth the interrelations between protagonists Wimpy, Climpy, Sandy and André, in a potentially infinite selection of mixed scenarios. Amongst other sounds, the poem includes the sounds of a car alarm, the thin barking of a radically rationalised trick poultice, a shout, a voice, silence, static, galloping and The Lark Ascending played triple-speed nine octaves up like rain on a steel bin-lid over a rave synth line. You need to read it.
“Just too big. Firstly way too big. And then just right.”
Stuart Calton is the author of the following books: Blepharospasms (2016), Live at Late Dilated Ileum (2015), The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet (2013), Three Reveries (2010), The Corn Mother (2006), The Bench Graft (2004), United Snap Up (2004), and Sheep Walk Cut (2003). As a musician, he is the incomparable dictophonist TFH Drenching.
34 pp, card covers (pink), side-stapled.
Listen! to Stuart reading a footnote to the book (“In the air above the abyss…” — The First Manifesto of Inter-Subjective Bureaucratic Pointillism, an unintegrated footnote to Wimpy & André (Calton, S. (2016). Wimpy & André. Cambridge: Materials Press). Your foot.): HERE.
Read! a review of Live at Late Dilated Ileum: HERE.
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CHRISTINA CHALMERS – WILLINGNESS
Published January 2017
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A collection of work written between 2013 and 2015, this is Christina Chalmers’ second book, and her first since Work Songs (2013). Divided into three sections, and containing poems such as ‘The International’, ‘The Arms Left Over’ and ‘Dragonfly Abattoir’.
“My German is
bad. My bed is a beautiful green lido. I drink
to municipal menthol. I grow more
sad.”
Christina Chalmers was born in Edinburgh, studied in Cambridge, lived in London, and has recently relocated to New York. Her poetry has been published widely in such on- and off-line venues as:Datableed, Materials, Sundial, and Rivet.
38pp, covers in gold paper, side stapled.
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NAOMI WEBER – VERY LONELY ANIMALS
Published November 2016
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Naomi Weber’s lyric sequence Very Lonely Animals sprawls across its pages in slabs of delicate observation, working through the condition of innerness and outerness, fragmentation and totality. The locations of these poem are wide open, seas and coasts, rooms in which people nestle and seek protection, but from which they pereptually seem to be on the verge of leaving: the line ripens in sounds unfolding within and across the break, lulling or obscuring.
This is poetry that sings it own song, almost to itself, from just off-centre.
“This world we love and keep our love in keeps
Tearing our hands
The shreds around nails dragging behind
Looking around for gazes to meet
Digging bone to neighbourly flesh
God help me I am trying to be kind
But what other worlds have you given us
To serve, says a secret prayer”
Naomi Weber is a poet who has published poems in Datableed, No Money, &c. She has another new book forthcoming from Tim Thornton and Verity Spott’s The Winter Olympics Press.
14pp, card covers (purple), side-stapled.
otherroom.org 