Sarah Riggs
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ENVELOPES
Poetry, 160 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-936194-10-0  original paperback $14
Publication date: September 15, 2012

Begun in the turmoil of moving house, these poems were jotted on envelopes because that was the form of paper on hand. But there was more to this choice. Oscillating between the US, France and Morocco, living on 3 continents and in 3 languages, Sarah Riggs felt the need to address her own self in order not to disperse into alternatives. But how do we address ourselves? the book asks. How many selves do we have? How do we sort what we think from what has been thought for us? Is it that our language cannot follow the mind’s rich, fluctuating process or does language outrun what the mind can seize? So that we are caught between two excesses, two ineffables?

Sarah Riggs is the author of WATERWORK (Chax), CHAIN OF MINISCULE DECISIONS IN THE FORM OF A FEELING (Reality Street), 60 TEXTOS (Ugly Duckling), and 36 BLACKBERRIES (Juge Editions). Her book of essays, WORD SIGHTINGS: POETRY AND VISUAL MEDIA IN STEVENS, BISHOP, AND O’HARA, was published by Routledge in 2002. She has translated or co-translated from the French the poets Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and, most recently, Oscarine Bosquet. A member of the bilingual poetry collective, Double Change (www.doublechange.org), and founder of the interart non-profit Tamaas (www.tamaas.org), she divides her time between the U.S. coasts and Paris, where she is a professor at NYU-in-France.

2.
P. Inman
PER SE
Poetry, 88 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13  978-1-936194-09-4  original paperback $14
Publication date: October 15, 2012

P. Inman radically fractures the conventions of language in order to build everything up again from a more elemental level. In per se, the composers Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Hans Lachenmann provide musical structure for his jazz-inflected words in motion. The book lives in the tension between the free, multidirectional movement of words and the highly orgazined macro-structures.

Peter Inman was born in 1947 and raised on Long Island. He  has worked at the Library of Congress and as a labor rep and consultant. His books have included: OCKER (Tuumba Press, 1982), RED SHIFT and CRISS CROSS (Roof Books, 1988 & 1994), VEL (O Books, 1995), AMOUNTS. TO. (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and AD FINITUM (If P Then Q, 2008).  Forthcoming in 2013 from If P Then Q, IS WRITTEN, 1976-2012.  He resides in Maryland with the poet Tina Darragh.

Inman “destablizes the polarities of form & content… By fully semanticizing the so-called nonsemantic features of langue, Inman creates a dialectic of the recuperable & the unreclaimable, where what cannot be claimed is nonetheless most manifest.”
—Charles Bernstein, ARTIFICE OF ABSORPTION

3.
Elfriede Czurda
ALMOST 1 BOOK / ALMOST 1 LIFE
Poetry,  96 pp, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13  978-1-936194-12-4
Original paperback $14
Publication date: November 15, 2012

This volume contains almost all of Elfriede Czurda’s first book (with the untranslatable title EIN GRIFF = EINGRIFF INBEGRIFFEN) and all of her second, FAST 1 LEBEN.
Elfriede Czurda comes out of the Wiener Gruppe’s experimental tradition. She is especially fond of letting repetition and permutation shift words through their whole gamut of meanings—and sometimes beyond. However, she is also not averse to thumbing her nose at any rigidities, even those of the experimental imperative. In ALMOST 1 LIFE (novella? politico-cultural satire?), the ruling avantgarde has licenced “monomania” as official language and punishes misuse by expelling the offender — into reality. Which is where Czurda positions herself. She combines exploring language with exploring the social power structures embedded in it — all with lots of fun and humor.

“Czurda makes strongly visible the fragmentary, arbitrary, non-linear… whole chains of associations flood the reader, or language itself breaks apart. [Her] powerful language is always political.”—Michael Fisch, DIE BERLINER LITERATURKRITIK

Elfriede Czurda was born in 1946 in Wels, Austria. After 25 years in Berlin and some as visiting professor in Japan. she now lives again in Vienna. Her work, which includes poetry, prose, essays and radio plays, has received numerous prizes, most recently the Austrian Würdigungspreis for Literature, 2008. Recent books are DUNKELZIFFER (2011), UNTRÜGLICHER ORTSSINN (2009), AND ICH, WEISS (2008).
Essays on her work can be found in DIE RAMPE: PORTRÄT ELFRIEDE CZURDA (2006)
Rosmarie Waldrop has translated, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht and, from the French, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard and Jacques Roubaud. Her most recent book of poetry is DRIVEN TO ABSTRACTION (New Directions, 2010). .

4.
Sébastien Smirou
MY LORENZO
translated from the French by Andrew Zawacki
Poetry, 120 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-936194-08-7  original paperback $14
Publication date: May 15, 2012

MY LORENZO is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation on the fifteenth-century Italian statesman, art patron, and poet Lorenzo de Medici. Obliquely and eccentrically narrated, it is as concerned with pysical arrangement as it is with linguistic ambiguity and matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. MY LORENZO is striking visually for its justified  stanzas and tableau-like shape. Reading the book is akin to touring the Uffizi, its Renaissance paintings hung meticulously on  the walls.
MY LORENZO combines traditional form with an unapologetically modern idiom that draws on pop culture and shuttles vertiginously between theoryspeak and speakeasy slang.
(This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE [French American Cultural Exchange]).

Sébastien Smirou is the author of three volumes of poetry. He is a psychoanalyst, with a specialization in working with troubled children, and lives in Montrouge, on the outskirts of Paris.
Andrew Zawacki is the author of three poetry books—PETALS OF ZERO PETALS OF ONE (Talisman House), ANABRANCH (Wesleyan), and BY REASON OF BREAKINGS (Georgia). Coeditor of VERSE, editor of AFTERWARDS: SLOVENIAN WRITING 1945-1995 (White Pine), he has also co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s WITHOUT ANESTHESIA (forthcoming from Persea). He teaches at the University of Georgia.

Copies are available now from: Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org  and www.burningdeck.com