New MATERIALS Books: Okulu // Calton // Chalmers // Weber

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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 IleumHERE.

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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.

Linda Kemp’s Lease Prise Redux

64 poems of fourteen (!) lines each. Such as: ‘Homelessness | spiders out | the majority of participants | O curb! O vultures! | freedom is mad inside’. Or: ‘the IMF walks the streets at night | if to suck on children’.

‘a cumulative impact which slowly seeps in, like a kaleidoscope of slow-moving debt, arrears and social smallness’. [Stuart Calton]

You can buy it here:
http://material-s.blogspot.co.uk/

Materials reading series – Danny Hayward

The thirteenth reading in the Materials Reading Series will take place on Saturday 24th October in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, English Faculty, University of Cambridge, 7 for 7.30pm. This is the launch event for DANNY HAYWARD’s book ‘Pragmatic Sanction’.

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Danny Hayward is the author of People (Mountain Press, 2013) and Two Essays: Best and Worst in Poetry / Perfect Capitalism (Veer, 2012). His essays include ‘Adventures in the Sausage Factory: A Cursory Overview of UK University Struggles, November 2010 – July 2011’ and ‘John Maynard Nothing’ in Mute (2012), and ‘The Essential Standpoint of Man: An Autopsy, in Three Parts’ in World Picture Journal (2011).

‘Pragmatic Sanction’ is A Long Dramatic Monologue about recent developments in population control and work enforcement, done up as a chase sequence involving a mysterious booming sound, a side-scrolling pig’s head, and a lucky number seven, and featuring an extended cameo by the brain structure primarily responsible for coordinating stress response in humans and other animals.

“The conclusion is theoretically wrong. But before that, in the run-up to it, on the road to hell with the first door that exits from a pipe protruding upwards in the vicinity of the third door leading onwards into a highway with a person standing in it, call it me or you.”

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Copies of the book will be on sale.

Launch event: The Paper Nautilus + Materials

Friday 6th February, Judith E Wilson Drama Studio, prompt 7.30pm start

A joint launch event for the fourth issues of The Paper Nautilus (eds. Kilbride / Van Hensbergen) and MATERIALS (eds. Jeschke / Grundy). This new issue of TPN is a translation issue, featuring translations of, among others, Clarice Lispector, Friederike Mayröcker, Sophie Podolski, Anne Portugal, Amelia Rosselli and Monique Wittig. The new issue of MATERIALS is subtitled ‘Economic Ophelia’ and features work from Rob Halpern, Kevin Killian, Nina Power, Connie Scozzaro, Cathy Wagner and others.

The night will feature performances, poetry readings, lectures and presentations in fitting and unfitting arrangements by the following:

  • Lucy Beynon
  • Eleanor Careless
  • Gareth Farmer
  • Rosa Van Hensbergen
  • Lisa Jeschke
  • Laura Kilbride
  • Hannah Proctor
  • Will Stuart
  • Marina Vishmidt
  • Naomi Weber
  • + potentially others TBC

As well as TPN and Materials 4, copies of the following new books and pamphlets from MATERIALS will be on sale:

 

  • Merry Hell by Sara Larsen
  • Watch-Fires by Tom Allen
  • A Comradeship of Heroes from Around the World
  • Lights Out to Love in HD by Rosa Van Hensbergen

http://www.thepapernautilus.co.uk/

http://material-s.blogspot.co.uk/

Materials

The eight reading in the Materials Reading series will feature readings from MEG FOULKES and STUART CALTON.

MEG FOULKES is the author of ‘Poems’ (Rank Xerox, 2004) and ‘Sylvester’s Crown and Other Poems’ (Arehouse, 2005).

“Bring on the fanfare, success / Writes poems of determined luck / So pleased, so incurably pleased / To be known still.”

STUART CALTON is the author of ‘Sheep Walk Cut’, ‘The Bench Graft’ (both Barque Press, 2004), ‘United Snap-Up’ (Fenland Hi-Brow Press, 2004), ‘The Corn Mother’ (Barque Press, 2006), and ‘Three Reveries’ (Barque Press, 2010). His most recent book is ‘The Torn Instructions for No Trebuchet’  (Barque Press, 2013), which he will read on this occasion.

“still forever I / hate this fucking system and I wanted our life / better to realize the true generality and make its / really-existing untruth external in our / particular.”

Armitage Room (FF), Queens’ College, Cambridge, Friday 7th March, 7.30 for 8pm. BYOB.

Materials

The next reading in the Materials Reading Series will take place on Thursday, 23 January, in the Armitage Room (FF) at Queens’ College, Cambridge, 7.30 for 8pm. An EXTENSIVE SOLO READING! Justin Katko will read
from Songs for One Occasion (Critical Documents, 2012), and new work. — ‘COMRADE! Before / Us! The deep time!’

Materials Reading Series: Caitlín Doherty / Frances Kruk

The third reading in the Materials Reading Series will take place on Thursday, 14 November, in the Armitage Room (FF) at Queens’ College, Cambridge, 7.30 for 8pm.

Caitlín Doherty is the author of O (Cambridge: Foule Press, 2012) and SATELLITES (Tokyo: Tipped Press, 2012) and has a book forthcoming from Critical Documents. ‘An inter-galactic stargate opens. Titan falls through it.’

Frances Kruk is the author of A Discourse on Vegetation & Motion (Cambridge: Critical Documents, 2008), DOWN YOU GO OR NÉGATION de BRUIT APRÈS DANIELLE COLLOBER (Scarborough, ME: Punch Press, 2011) and DWARF SURGE (London: yt communication, 2013). ‘he cannot have your face he / cannot have your face’