From au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Tue May 7 20:26:16 1996 Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 09:07:09 -0500 From: Robert Drake To: pauls@etext.org Subject: TRee 4b: chapbooks ----------------------------------------------------------------- TTTTTTTT AA PPPP RRRR OOOO OOOO TTTTTTT T A A P P R R O O O O T T AAAAAA PPPP RRRR O O O O T T A A P R R O O O O T T A A P R R OOOO OOOO T ----------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #4.0, section b: chapbooks 2/94 ----------------------------------------------------------------- TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground, and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years, we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio- verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro- Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting is the second section of our 4th full electronic issue, containing all of the short CHAPBOOK reviews; the first section contains all of the zine reviews. We provide this information in the hope that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs. Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting-- (a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve). I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues. A cummulative, searchable, and x-referenced HyperCard version is under development--e-mail for status & availablility information. Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review material--in issue #4: features on E-Zines; "Remixsponse Categorryarray" from Sub Rosa Press; John M. Bennett as Collaborator; Jack Foley's "Adrift"; Roof Books; Audio publications; recent work by Allison Knowles; and the Global Mail MailArt Project. TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the boundries of "literature", and provide access to work that stretches those boundries.It is availablefrom: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107--$2.50 pp. Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 1994 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this introductory notice is included. Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council. Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each review: Mark Amerika, Michael Basinski, Tom Becket, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Daniel Davidson, Luigi-Bob Drake, Mark DuCharme, Bob Edwards, R. Lee Etzwiler, Mike Gill, Bob Grumman, Joel Lipman, Susan Smith Nash, Oberc, Charlotte Pressler, Andrew Russ, Nico Vassilakis, and Thomas Willoch. Additional contributors are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE. *** Many thanx to all contributors. *** ----------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPBOOKS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Ron Androla: BLUE BLUE BLUE LABOR--Translucent Tendency Press, 3226 Raspberry, Erie PA, 16508. 28 pp., $? A photocopied collection of eighteen poems from the workplace. A unique and spectacular blend of poetry and life. Subconscious gurglings and poetic rants, too acute to be beat, too elastic to be surreal, these reach out and grip the reader with a perverse cadence and sharp subjective claws. "Scum-boys mutate into silent workers. What goes/ around, comes around, that's simple human justice..../ & the crack business was more/ profitable than the shops petty shit. Poetry is a curse, a vulgar thing too, addicted to a/ language as liquid as glue, fumes of art, sniff/ bottle of Jim Beam, obsessed, alcoholic..." Androla risking chaos, sometimes succumbing to it.--rrle Glen Armstrong: TOO OLD FOR TOYS--Sideshow Press, 2951 Voorheis, Waterford MI, 48328. 24 pp., $3.50. Twenty free verse poems in a concentrated form flagrant with rust-belt rhythms and experimental touches. Armstrong batters our minds with a surreality-tainted voice. "Her story is sad, I feed it to a goat." This is enchantment for the lost ones, of the lost ones, by a lost one, suggesting patterns which pop and sizzle. "...while liberty/ lies dying at your feet, a monolith/ with a dirty syringe stuck in her arm." With lacerating explicitness Armstrong digs out pieces of the foreboding emptiness within us all, and does it in an amusing way.--rrle Rane Arroyo: COLUMBUS'S ORPHAN--JVC Books, RT. 2 Box 440C, Arcadia FL, 33821. 55 pp., $7.95. Thirty poems divided into three sections. This is Arroyo's third book. He is a Chicago-born Puerto Rican with an intense voice. His search for identity, & contemplation of heritage, endows his work with a fiery foundation of sub-cultural being. His evocative descriptions are precise and his use of Pop icons front a satirical existence. " though gunpowder residue makes us/ all darker I'm a bitter James Bond...", or "...think I'll take a bath read/ (reread) James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time/ or The Bible that I stole from a hotel/ in Cleveland." Between aggression and inhibition Rane creates metaphors of conflict & culture. "for I bark so well!/ You should hear me purr my name:/ Rane/ n/ Arroyo/ homo sapien puertorriqueo pretty/ book boy poet." You do not have to be racially impelled, or influenced, to wither in the full radiance of this voice.--rrle Charles Atkinson: THE BEST OF US ON FIRE--Wayland Press, 675 S. Sherman Dr., Denver CO, 80209. 32 pp., $4.00. These poems tell of familiar, family situations. The speaker finds inspiration and life force in being a parent and watching his child grow. He also finds challenge and discord without answers. In the first poem, "Cleansing," the father wakes knowing that his child needs to urinate. He follows a familiar path through the dark house, takes the child to the toilet, and puts the child back to bed. A later poem, "Chopping a Mother's Piano," shows how painful growth and change can be even when no wrong is committed: "Three sons and a father did it:/ they used axes and a saw/ and the youngest a small hammer./ Too many broken keys to play or sell;/ it was too heavy to haul for junk./ On a snowing night they'd agreed/ to turn it to firewood and wire;/ even she'd nodded from her chair." The reader learns as the poem goes on that the mother had taught her sons to play, but they had turned away from music and toward baseball as they grew older. In breaking the piano, they painfully break a tie with her. That says a lot about the mood of the book.--bg Lenore Balliro: RIDING BICYCLES IN THE RAIN--Alms House Press, PO Box 217, Pearl River NY, 10965. 24 pp., $5.00. This collection won the '92 Alms House Press Chapbook contest. The poems paint pictures and comment with a kind of editorial description: "In Shanghai/ morning is not itself." What's implicit is that the speaker is not herself as she wakes in a foreign place. Lots of the poem's statements are loaded like that. The word choice ethic might be described as one of "graceful surprise." Not shocking or jarring, but new and therefore evocative. Many of these poems are set in China and draw their momentum from successions of images peculiar to the place. The first and title poem shares this characteristic but differs from the rest in that it is also propelled forward by repetition and variation of words or phrases in previous lines. It's not a ranting, slam poem; the redefinition or re-examination through repetition is more reminiscent of Wallace Stevens in "Metaphors of a Magnifico" ("Twenty men crossing a bridge into a village/ are twenty men crossing twenty bridges into twenty villages..."). Balliro begins, "Riding bicycles in the rain, the rain, at night,/ the rain in Hangzhou,/ Hundreds of bikes..."--mb John M. Bennett: BLIND ON THE TEMPLE--Luna Bisonte, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 10 pp., $3.00. what's change's change JMB in the last 4 years, the text, his utterance--some snapped string and he's floating his balloon way overhead absorbing. signals. syntax. crazy headfucking. the mad dadaist basement. every poem is short, high speed footage as to emulate the film's ability to stimulate sensory nodes. perhaps he's gotten closer to actual synaptic activity. like thinking 'blind on the temple' household. like a writing so condensed the molecular adhesion gives way to form a new highly pressurized hybrid. beside his ecstatic and ready-mades is AH-- or this book begins with "DAWN" and concludes with "RELEASE" (these two use the same lines to seem (like) the same poem). thirty pieces in 5 days. a flurry of isolated focus able to crack-a-twig by staring twenty paces away. family-life. a challenge to unravel and delight to be inside of. or JMB's ace tongue cuts my neurons in half (saving the brain considerable amounts of time.--nv John M. Bennett. and Al Ackerman: WINDOW--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $1.00. Ackerman hacks Bennett under the influence of BURRITO, which Ackerman explains in marvelous calligraphy (a letter to Bennett reprinted here) could be a homemade eatable stored in the freezer or one tiny member of a friend's dream-litter of children produced by a surrogate. Bennett's oozing, body parts-strewn poems would be a tasty burrito in themselves. Ackerman's hack, "The Altereds" gets me going, makes me "start slap-slapping my ears" along with the prosody, the rhyme, the irresistible urge of mouth stiletto-heeling words.--ssn Greg Boyd: CARNIVAL APTITUDE--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa Maria CA, 93456. $9.95. "More than anything I wanted a shovel," confesses the narrator in one of Greg Boyd's prose poems. This odd desire leads him to want a rake, a push broom, a spade, a pair of shears, the narrator finally risking all for the love a bicycle pump. Such is Boyd's world, where characters are at the mercy of those secret, terrible instincts that drive us without our knowledge or consent. This unsettling world is by turns amusing and melancholic, absurd and philosophical, and always presented in prose that rolls off the tongue so pleasantly. One of the best prose poems collections in recent years.--tw Earl S. Braggs: HAT DANCER BLUE--Anhinga Press, PO Box 10595, Tallahassee FL. 59 pp., $8.00. These poems have a sense of rhythm and surprise that makes them ripe for reading out loud. They actively play with sound repetition (not structured into rhyme, though) and variations on familiar phrases. Both characteristics are evident in these lines from the title poem: "...I lean back and close my eyes// minutes before bedtime, storybook time, anytime/ is night time when you haven't seen the sky/ in over a year." Familiar phrases like "rose tinted glasses" and "give peace a chance" metamorphose as follows: "...laughing/ from too much red wine and the rose tinted lenses/ of a pair of John Lennon eyeglasses broken// because peace ain't never had a chance..." The cast of characters includes old people familiar to the speaker who give advice and have well-worn habits, as well as people who are new to him and full of mystery and danger. The poet rants with information and attitude about oppression, injustice, and pain. There's no denying the politics in this book, but to use that as a label would be to deny the wealth of music, imagery, and personality.--mg Les Bridges: READ 'EM AND WEEP--Lyndawn Corp., PO Box 1397 Cooper Station, New York NY, 10276. 24 pp., $4.00. Normally I would back off from any poetry collection that had quotes from The New York Post or The Village Voice, but Bridges captures a NYC I used to see when I live in New Jersey. These are ice-cold gritty poems that leave layers of frostbite poisoning a hundred miles beneath the skin. He grabs Manhattan by the balls, and make it piss in you face. This is good strong stuff, from a writer stained with the street.--o Julie & Robert Brown, eds.: YOUNGSTOWN POETRY--The Bacchae Press, 2032 Arthur Dr. NW, Warren OH, 44485. 64 pp., $5.00. This eclectic collection evolved out of a boisterous and well-attended reading series at the Cedar, a Youngstown Ohio bar. The Cedar reading series hosts a huge number of non-academic poets (this anthology contains work by 47) whose voices resonate in the Mohoning Valley space left behind by vanishing steel mills. It would be impossible to describe the mood, voice, or subject matter, except to say that it is genuine. The book contains love poems, adultery poems, poems about the rust belt, and poems about plants. A few photos provide a visual hint of the mood in Youngstown.--mg Lee Ann Brown: A MUSEME--Boog Literature, PO Box 221, Oceanside NY, 11572. 16 pp., $1.00(?). A museme... Amuse me? Well, yet, it's what you think--a Musewerk, each pome drawn from the names o' the Nine deities plus one for their mom, Mnenosyne. Here's the first, "Clio Loco": O Oil Loci I Loll, I coo, I Coil olio Lo, O ill ici, Coo C.O. Col. Clio." Cool, huh? Also Funny & Lovely. "Holy-moly!/ Monopoly mania."--md Edward Butscher: EROS DESCENDING--Dusty Dog, 1904-A Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301. 24 pp., $3.00. This is Butscher's second in an ongoing sequence of lyrical poetry sets. Almost like a spoken anthem he leads us to visualize experiences. "...two bodies locked in spasms/ of butterfly debris, the cheerleader/ I worshipped from sidewall eyes/ and a collapsed football star." There is a vivid and urgent potency, a suffocating possessiveness in Butscher's work; something intensely personal, a sense of being outgunned by life; inspiration from disaster, melded with erotic nervous appeal, and the collapse of dreams. "fins erect/ gills done/ tail aflame/ for an assault upon/ absence without end."--rrle Cydney Chadwick: ENEMY CLOTHING--Five Fingers Press, PO Box 15426, San Francisco CA, 94115. $9.95. Forty-four short fictions constructed with a playful, light touch. The characters are created with language as sharp and textured as a photorealistic painting so that when transformations and identity shifts occur, they startle the reader and give her a fresh perspective on the underlying essences of things and people. A woman gradually turns into a balloon, people playing the parts of cows and chickens at a first annual butter and eggs festival reveal their "cow-ness" and their "chicken-ness" to be more convincing than their humanity, a woman's clothes come alive for the ultimate "bad hair day," a conch shell picked up on the beach does not yield ocean sounds but the Panavision views of the sides of experience no one wants to see. Chadwick's fictions are irresistible.--ssn Ana Christy: CONCRETE BOLOGNA--Alpha Beat Press, 31 A. Waterloo St., New Hope PA, 18938. 80 pp., $10.00. These poems are not concentrated or dense. They describe the speaker's moments, scenes, actions, days. They'd read like fiction if there were more of a plot line. Lyn Lifshin says Christy's poetry is "fresh, energetic, open, lively..." I'd agree with all, except the "fresh"--you'll finds lots of familiar phrases, especially references to well-worn beatnik habits: "We'll get by in jeans,/ t-shirts/ and moccasins/ play dylan, read kerouac softly/ on our geranium filled porch...". One poem unfortunately ends "I'm.../ yr burp/ yr fart/ yr impotence/ yr writer's block/ yr worst nightmare!"--mg Judson Crews: AGAINST ALL WOUNDS--Trout Creek Press, 5976 Billings Rd., Parkdale OR, 97040. 26 pp., $2.50. Herein lies 23 short but exciting poems, all jampacked free verse couplets in a primal scream box. "...How persistently she has dis/ played those pock- marks on her soul/ Pock-marks, shit--they are open, puss-/ excluding lesions. In my arms, how tot-/ Ally clean... Granted/ my cock or my tongue are hardly/ The most exacting of scientific probes." Crews provides a consistent resistance to cadence with abrupt starts and stops resulting in a sequence of disclosure. His modern Pop mythos murmurs a naked vision, pointing out the decadent, the odd, the painful aspects of our society, in penetrating detail.--rrle Judson Crews: MANNEQUIN ANYMORE THAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 33 pp., $3.00. I like dirty old men who pose in front of Playboy pinup posters with that flicker in their eye. And I like Judson Crews playing the dirty old man in a cruder way than Locklin or Bukowski. There's no pretentiousness, and whatever misogyny there is seems to be neutralized by the harmlessness Crews projects. In one poem, Crews asks: "What am I looking for when I walk into/ A topless bar? Is it to see a good looking/ young woman degrade herself in front of/ My eyes?" Another poem comes out of the same turf: "If you publish these love poems, was/ Her final word, I'll sue your ass for/ defamation of character--and further-/ More, for maligning my butt." There is sex here, but it carries an inherent innocence: these are soft gentle poems, by a man remembering and touching his lost virility, by a man looking back on his youth.--o Craig Czury: OBIT HOTEL--Pine Press, Box 530 Rt. 1, Landisburg PA, 17040. I've known Craig Czury for nearly a decade, and he has never been in one place long. A traveler, his poems are hooked from his consistent ability to be in a new place. They sparkle, like a sunfish after catching in the hot sun on a stream shore-- beautiful, and then you realize the terror of the writhing fish. Czury's poems are full of doors and windows. There is always this going in and out and seeing in and out. The poems are like that: turning inside of themselves and again outside: watching and twisting both in the emotional and physical realms at the same time and then not. It is a labyrinth to live with poetry. And in this hotel along the way is a particularly memorable sequence for Franz Kline.--mb Raffael De Gruttola: MAPPLETHORPE IMPRESSIONS--Cordillera Press, 4 Marshall Rd., Natick MA, 01760. This folded sheet contains 10 haiku inspired by the much-protested Mapplethorpe photographs. As such, they are sexually graphic: "snakelike/ man eating/ his own tail" and "ringed pinkie/ finding the pee hole--/ still-life." Can't say there's too many haiku like these.--tw Raffael De Gruttola: RECYCLE/RECICLO--Cordillera Press, 4 Marshall Rd., Natick MA, 01760. In these 19 haiku printed in both English and Spanish, Raffael De Gruttola creates grim images of Latin American life. "on the ground/ where a mother weeps/ blood stains" reads one haiku. "in the hills/ behind the church/ small arms fire" reads another. De Gruttola does not raise his voice or shake his fist. Rather, he speaks quietly of disturbing events he has witnessed. His calm approach makes his poetry all the more chilling.--tw Denise Dee: SOWKINS--Union of Opposites, 636 Hyde St. #301, San Francisco CA, 94109. 106 pp., $5.00. There are writers who entertain, and writers that grab you deep in your emotional gut and bring out feelings you didn't even know you were capable of. Denise does both, and in her new book SOWKINS you get tossed into an honest portrayal of emotional threads being torn apart one string at a time, often bringing one to the brink of an abyss so dark and lonely that survival itself is questioned. There are too many stories, too many insights, too many whiplashed emotions to capture in a review. This is simply one of the best thing I have read this year, and I can say with all honesty that I am jealous of Denise' s ability to capture such intensity on the page.--o Harold Dinkel & Paul Weinman: IN THE FISHTANK--Strangulensis Research Labs, Rt. 6 Box 138, Charleston WV, 25311. 16 pp. Another of Weinman's inimitable collections, complete with bleary xerox, electric tape binding, and free-wheeling orthography. Each poem is accompanied by a collage and/or drawing. The high point of this series is "Cricket Talk," a poem with an amazing conflation of eroticism, eating crickets, and pulp sociology. Real, gritty, and irreplaceable.--jmb Ed Dorn: THE DENVER LANDING 11 AUG. 1993--Uprising Press, c/o Mark Hammer, 34 Tacoma Ave., Buffalo NY. $5.00. This handsomely done, small collection of (5) poems by Ed Dorn was published as a celebration of the poet's return to Buffalo, New York in October of this year. The poems, however, revolve around the arrival of Pope John Paul II in Denver for the International Catholic Youth Conference, which was held in that city last year. The poems are rich in sarcasm, satire, social comment and insight into the American (commercial--is there another side?) ethos. Here is a deluge of American language. The names and things of America shape the poetic landscape. Fast moving pleasurable impact. Boom.--mb David Drummond-Milne: GLASS ENIGMA--Near the Edge Editions, Via C. Battisiti 339, 55049 Viareggio, ITALY. $5.00? A delightful collection of visual poems and collages sent as mail art to Vittore Baroni between 1979 and 1981, after which the correspondence ended. Baroni provides an introduction and running commentary on the pieces, which are all quite beautiful, and display a great deal of humor.--jmb Paul Dutton: THE PLASTIC TYPEWRITER--Underwhich Editions, Box 262 Adelaide St. Station, Toronto Ontario, CANADA, M5C 2J4. 18 pp., $10.00. Although Paul Dutton finished this series of prints/smudges made from a disassembled plastic typewriter in 1977, this is the first publication of the entire work. It's a lovely sequence of visual pieces: letters pressed on broken type, lines drawn in (presumably through typewriter ribbon), smudges, fragments of rock lyrics, ribbon rubbings, fingerprints, typed text, in short, a greatly enhanced set of textual elements. Given the replacement of the typewriter by the word processor, there's a flavor of nostalgia, or perhaps metaphor (in the destruction of the typewriter) in this piece that may not have been originally considered.--ar Cliff Dweller: THIS CANDESCENT WORLD--Runaway Spoon Press, Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3. After years of reading his work it was delightful to see a full book of his poems. While poets often use the day's news to bitch away their sadness, Cliff Dweller actually uses the headlines themselves to move beyond the day to day trivialities. He sculpts narrative descriptions of scenes suspended in the untapped imagination of collective consciousness. There is a magic to these poems, a homeopathic cure for contemporary malaise. By turning the headlines into something other than, and beyond them, we are inoculated against some of the terror they often sell. They are after all only words that can be used to liberate, for the work of poetry. Cliff Dweller's work is a course in the miracle of imagination over information.--jb Earth's Daugheters: FINE CHINA: TWENTY YEARS OF EARTH'S DAUGHTERS-- PO Box 41 Central Park Station, Buffalo NY, 14214. $14.00. This anthology is a joint venture between EARTH'S DAUGHTERS, one of the longest running feminist periodicals in the country, and Springhouse Editions. It is a retrospective of the magazine, which is now in its twentieth year of publishing; Fine China selects well from the 37 issues it covers. Throughout its history E.D. has opened and revealed the many aspects, facets, the many different lives of women (working women, mothers, feminists, daughters, lesbians, brides, witches etc.). Fine China does the same. Represented are the exalted women poets of our times (Levertov, Di Prima, Olds, etc.) as well as a host of other, less well known women poets, and a few men. Comprehensive, Fine China is a map of the world of women's poetry over the last two decades, decades of awareness, struggles, war, growth, and creativity. Fine China is a coven, a bee, and a well oiled literary machine. EARTH'S DAUGHTERS was and is a developing all-female commune, and a successful publishing venture. This Fine China: it is a presence of women.--mb Harry D. Eshleman: THE COLORS IN THE SKY--Runaway Spoon Press, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. Usually documenting the experimental otherstream, occasionally Bob Grumman's Runaway Spoon delivers a gem of , by comparison, traditional work. The Colors In The Sky is one such gem. Eshleman is honest and direct, without copping an attitude, which is refreshing in itself. His poetry is drawn from daily experience, memory, and the eddies of his own thought; it is full of true characters and just plain truth. One poem, somewhat atypical for this collection, is a set of instructions for writing poems, which instructs us not to write poems about writing poems. Such dry and self-inclusive humor is not uncommon here. Eshleman is no ivory tower poet, he breathes the same air as everyone else, with the notable exception that what he lives and breathes is the raw ore from which this intelligent, incisive book was wrought.--jb Raymond Federman: CRITIFICTION: POSTMODERN ESSAYS--SUNY Press, State University Plaza, Albany NY 12246. 160 pp., $14.95. Raymond Federman is a long time practitioner and theorist of Postmodernist art and thought, whose novels include Double Or Nothing, Take It Or Leave It, and The Two-Fold Vibration. In this new book of "Postmodern Essays," Federman focuses on themes that have obsessed him throughout his long career, including Surfiction (a kind of fiction that he himself forwarded in the seventies), Imagination As Pla{y}giarism, Self-Reflexive Narrative Devices, The Mainstream Publishing Industry's Inability To Open Up New Markets That Take Advantage of The Wealth of Experimental Novels Being Written and, of course, Postmodernism (it's birth and it's death). Federman tells us toward the end of this collection that: "I am in the process of burying Postmodernism [because] Postmodernism is indeed dead, finished: on one hand because it was swallowed and digested by the economy and eventually excreted and disseminated into the culture, on the other hand because it was stifled by academic bickering and consequently turned into a futile debate." But Federman isn't crying over the Death of Postmodernism. Nor is he, like conservative critics whose names I won't utter, ready to yell "Good Riddance!" Throughout these informal, provocative essays, Federman celebrates the crazy products of Postmodern Fiction: works by such writers as Pynchon, Sukenick, Barth, Sorrentino, Gins, Abish and many others, as well as the one writer who Federman has spent his entire adult life studying and trying to make sense of: Samuel Beckett. The Ghost of Beckett and all his alter-identities (Malloy, Malone, The Unnameable) fills these pages. Federman goes so far as to say that December 22, 1989, the day Beckett died, was also the day Postmodernism died. Whatever Postmodernism is, and I guess we'll talk about it until the Next Thing works its way into the mainstream culture, anyone at all interested in getting a candid take on what it could be should check this book out.--ma Richard Foerster: PATTERNS OF DESCENT--Orchises Press, PO Box 20602, Alexandria VA, 22320. 94 pp., $12.95. In his second collection from Orchises, Richard Foerster demonstrates his mastery of elegant, formal and artfully executed verse. His poems are serious, sad and fraught with doom. They are truly moving poetic tales of passion and eros set in a tableau sometimes personal, sometimes allusive and symbolic. And while the acronym AIDS and the terminology of its ravaging plague is utterly absent, indeed expunged, from these poems, its death curtain hangs as a heavy backdrop. One finds this characteristic in the closing stanza of "In the One-Third World": "but the dream I'd inhabit forever reeks/ of gravid soil, the full scrotal blush/ of orchids, anthers tumescent with pollen,/ the wild twining embrace, bare and trembling:/ this momentary, delible earth." These are painful lines, lush with longing and dread. They move incrementally, yet fluidly, down through the design of the poem. And though, yes, death IS the final release, the muted, pervasive irony of dying from love is, in PATTERNS OF DESCENT, the authentically tragic source of distinguished poetry.--jl Jack Foley: ADRIFT--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, Berkeley CA, 94709. 78 pp., $8.95. When Jack Foley speaks, in this book, of the mind's "ability to consider absolutely anything under the sun... matched against the limitations everything in the world places on it," (his italics) he reveals perfectly, I think, his own mind's and art's size and balancedness. His works (mostly poems) mix prose, doggerel, quotations high and low, jokes, and-- most tellingly--dialogue to go, simply, everywhere--deeply everywhere.--bg Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY, 10314. 80 pp., $8.95. Boston and Frazier are longtime Science Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a hard technological edge. Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx that lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road maps that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cypher,/ its inscrutable eyes spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward Armageddon." Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively explore a terrain most poets don't even realize exists.--tw Benjamin Friedlander: ANTERIOR FUTURE--Meow Press, 334 Bryant St. #7, Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. Benjamin Friedlander edited JIMMY AND LUCY'S HOUSE OF K and DARK AGES CLASP THE DAISY ROOT. Both magazines focused on innovative, sometimes Language-centered, writing. Friedlander certainly knows modern poetry. His own poetry is sophisticated and complex; however, it is not theoretically burdened, veiled, frustratingly abstract, or hackneyed in form, content, or structure. The poems are private but also lucidly public. They have both subject and information, and they address the world beyond the conceit of much contemporary poetry. Here is the much needed poetic intelligence which forces poetry to go beyond philosophy into passion; by doing so, these poems become art.--mb G. N. Gabbard: DAILY NOUS: A RUN OF GNOMIC-STRIPS--Tin Wreath, PO Box 13401, Albany NY, 12212. $2.00(?) A six-part sequence of poems, distributed with TIN WREATH #27 (itself an excellent issue of the magazine edited by David Gonsalves). There is a free- wheeling and playful disregard for standard syntax and diction here, along with frequent allusions to Mutt (of Mutt and Jeff), ducks, and various comic and philosophical routines: "Consider the sire; ponder the dam; then/ rereflect on trainers, even though/ the semiaquackquackquatic duck/ 's egg will hatch a pretty duckling if// chewing anvils an ostrich sit the nest./ Spit on the turf, pull a cigar alight,/ four elements are enough for any body." (from "Idealism of Tuesday").--jmb Peter Ganick: AGORAPHOBIA--Drogue Press, PO Box 1157 Cooper Station, New York NY, 10276. $11.00. The poet confounds the syntax of the imagination to do more than "lay bare the device." Ganick proposes to negotiate the device, not as a matter of commerce, but as a place to run over, between, and after the linguistic obstacle course we call consciousness. It's a wild read, especially after one realizes that her mind's being hacked upon--but the beauty's this: we're being reconfigured by our own knowledge systems.--ssn Peter Ganick: LOGICAL GEOMETRIES--Runaway Spoon Press, Box 3621, Port Charlotte, FL, 33946. $3.00. A longwork, in six sections, with each section varying in style and content but consistent in approach. It reads half as spontaneous analysis, half as poetry, the final section in "couplets". A mind dance of sorts, references that imply a center that defies ordinary description. "the object, ivory and stellar where/ punch far out farm, got challenge/ whose portion? inflates concept..." is a typical example of a very atypical approach. Ganick's use of language looks like reading sounds in the mind, the way the mind "hears" the text and unwinds the fragments for meaning. By taking the "reading" this additional step he calls the organizing principal, the means by which we understand, into question--and then dances amid the confusion. Taking chances is the code of this work, shattering our illusions as we "listen".--jb Rene Gregorio: THE X POEMS--X Press, PO Box 3702, Santa Fe, NM, 87501. 16 pp., $5.45. The title refers not to Malcom, but to a generic figure, an algebraic variable looking into the stars to ask the question that will define itself. Gregorio uses "X" as a tool, placing it in situations, defining it and redefining it as a means to arrive at metaphors that serve as pieces of answers to the eternal questions. This book is full of abstract talk that comes not from sensual love or words but from the effort to speak in what one critic calls "that almost unsayable area of experience between human beings." Gregorio often seems to be trying to write poems despite words: "It is the place of stations./ The lingering between worlds./ A feast of exhausted heat./ All possessions and trappings/ elsewhere."--mg Jefferson Hansen: RED STREAMS OF GEORGE THROUGH PAGES--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. The visual component of this poem pushes the eyes and mind past what the eyes and mind want to do: that is, read it. The poem, therefore, places the mind in jeopardy. It asks what is the purpose of form. Is it for ease of just reading, or is it something else? Answer is: it is other. Here is a poetry that pushes a limit by combining a stream collage of writing with various constellations of other words knitted within its tapestry. It is a weave that occurs as it evolves and wonders always (among much else): How is writing living, how living writing is, and reading is writing and dreaming is writing also? You can't step into the same stream twice--Damn, that is refreshing!--mb A philosophical poem that swings, too--like John Dewey if he could play jazz saxophone. Lines sweep visually across the pages, broken into odd shapes and often in the middle of words. Other chunks of writing--some poetry, some quotes from granddaddies of American pragmatism like C.S. Peirce--further disrupt the flow that still, however, flows. This poetry moves, and it thinks, two activities that we don't have enough of.--mw R.D. Hanson: VERGING--Curvd H&z, 1357 Lansdowne Ave., Toronto, Ontario: CANADA, M6H 3Z9. 8 pp. A set of five poems referring to youthful excesses in a delicate, minimalist style that move toward greater complexity with each poem. An effective contrast of style and content, presented in an attractive small booklet.--jmb Steven Hartman: DING DONG DADA--Pinched Nerves, 1610 Avenue P #6B, Brooklyn NY, 11229. 8 pp., 50". Partially a poetic tribute to Dada, and partially the practice of it, Hartman provides us with a glimpse of that luminous anti-moment at the beginning of the century as we slide down the greased obelisk of its final decade. One of the purest strokes of Dada here is to have Ken DiMaggio write a "Neon Dadaist Manifesto" even though he confesses to never having met a Neon Dadaist or even being familiar with the movement. And as with earlier Dada, Hartman chooses the menial as fodder for his poetry in "Saturday Nite Dada" by bringing in John Travolta, and later the Tom Tom Club in the "Sacred Words of Dada". Hartman is practicing uninhibited imagination in a convoluted, uptight world. He turns that world inside out to reveal its secrets in an absurd levity.--jb Martin A. Hibbert and A. C. Evans: BETWEEN ALIEN WORLDS--Trombone Press, 11 Sylvan Rd., Exeter, Devon ENGLAND, EX4 6EW. Just six texts reacting off a sequence of six illustrations. But these are Hibbert's texts and Evans' illustrations. Thus we experience gnostic trance and mystical initiation as enigmatic totems grow and contract in a shifting interior landscape. "We can rewrite this text endlessly, outside of time; reconstitute the totem with marvelous mutations... We can fall, silently, or speaking in tongues, upwards towards our ecstasy." A visionary journey, combining the insights of occult teaching and the beauties of ecstatic language, to the portals between the real and the more- than-real.--tw Dick Higgins and Seng Ts'an (trans. George Brecht): AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE MOON: A COMMENTARY ON HSIN-HSIN MING-- Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor OH, 44060. 34 pp., $5.00. The Hsin-Hsin Ming consists of 73 Zen sayings by the third Chinese patriarch, Seng Ts'an. English translations are printed here with commentaries on each by Dick Higgins. The Hsin-Hsin Ming sayings are often vague, and Higgins's comments are contrastingly concrete. But not always; sometimes the comments take off from the text, point away from it, back to it, give an example, maybe contradict it. Overall? Plenty to think about.--ar Anselm Hollo & Jane Dalrymple-Hollo: WEST IS LEFT ON THE MAP--Dead Metaphor Press, PO Box 2076, Boulder CO, 80306. 32 pp., $4.95. The Unstoppable Mr. Hollo continues w/ this suite of Lyrical Abstractions, as I see it, ending Unabashed & Grinning: "...dear woman I name Dream// dear called Because/ with you, a thousand years would not be long enough." (She responds, I might add, w/ a series of striking drawings, one to each poem--breaking cubism's logic into more mysterious, interwoven figures). Of course the "west" implicated is not just geographic but, ultimately, that whole cultural monster we inherit from the ancients; "Odyss on the old plate/ looked so comfortable in his body old enough/ to fit a few words together." Not merely erudite--as if that weren't enough--but Space Age Anselm, looking into the kiln of stars: "wee terrible human race/ soon to go down or else into space." Agh, take comfort in this Marriage of Heart & Head, rare for poetry: "...who wasn't really a misanthrope/ merely defined/ anthropos/ very strictly." (Did I forget to mention Wit?) There's even a great p>an to the Mail--& what poet hasn't wanted to write something like that?--md David B. Hopes: THE PENITENT MADGALENE--Franciscan University Press, Steubenville OH, 43952. 28 pp., $5.00. This is Hopes' return to poetry after several years abstinence, with a voice consistent with that of his previous works: declarative, confident, sensual, charismatic. It's a handsome book with clean design, though typos plague the pages. Nevertheless, the strong voice goes right for the big topics: poems tell that life itself is the greatest thrill God gives us; death is a part of that cycle and so is also thrilling; those of us who are blessed with this awareness will declare the news to others not out of obligation but because the inherent joy makes declaration irresistible; and no amount of glorification suffices to give thanks for it. If this sound too joyous or nice for you, don't be fooled: there's nothing naive or cute. The declarations are earned with blood.--mg Allan Horrocks: HIGH PLASTICITY--846 Thomas St., State College PA, 16803. 16 pp., $1.00. An interesting story about an ill- conceived vending machine (the Vend-U-Tensil) that dispensed sporks. Slices of surreal humor, bits about James Dean and political assassination. The story is told in pages; some pages have more text than others, but the text is expanded or shrunk to fit the page, giving each one approximately equal weight--one instance where the variation in fonts serves a useful purpose.--ar Ann Imperato: SHE'S A MOVING WEAPON--Andromeda Press, PO Box 423592, San Francisco CA, 94102. 28 pp., $3.00. There's a feminist edge to these poems, mixed with anger and understanding, which can be a dangerous combination. In "Blond-Wig Warrior" we get the blood and perfume and efficiency of a street corner whore turned into a moving weapon. "His Arm" captures a misspelled lover's name in a tattoo based on the love of pain rather than the love of another person; "Dirty Knees" kicks male sexists in their vital organs; "Penetration" grabs the physical joy of sex and leaves you feeling turned inside out... and on & on. In "These Birds," Ann starts out with "They say the San Francisco Tenderloin/ is the armpit of 'Frisco/ But I say it's the mouth"-- no apologies, nor forgiveness, you know right up front where she's coming from.-o Ayn Imperato, ed: PSYCHE SUBVERSION--Andromeda Press, PO Box 423592, San Francisco CA, 94102. 124 pp., $8.00. This collection captures some of the Bay area's best hard-edged writers. We get Peter Plate's political view of the world, complete with authoritarian cops, neglected and tossed to the side individuals, and that slowly seeping anger that threatens to tear the walls apart. Wend O'Matic throws some gut poems at us that leave the solar plexus gasping for a taste of air. Jerme Spew, Bucky Sinister, David McCord, and many other writers make an appearance, with insightful bitter tales of life.--o Darius James: NEGROPHOBIA: AN URBAN PARABLE--St. Martin's Press,. 175 Fifth Ave. Rm. 1715, New York NY, 10010. 192 pp., $8.95. Reading Darius James' first novel, NEGROPHOBIA, is really a blast as he takes us on cinematic joyride through the nightmarish vision of one Bubbles Brazil, a beautiful adolescent cocktease whose schizophrenic aversion to people of color causes her to hallucinate a virtual reality populated with grotesquely distorted characters like Uncle H. Rap Remus, whose goal is to exterminate the entire white race. James' biting sarcasm and in-your-face poetic intensity reminds one of some strange with a hilarious encore by the cryonically revitalized Walt Disney who is portrayed here as the racist-par-excellence whose monologue unravels such verbal gems as "I wished upon a star---That one day this nation would rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'Hang the nigger and burn the Jew!'" If you've got the kind of dark soul that enjoys going into the mercurial depths of the American imagination, then you'll want to read this book ASAP.--ma Sibyl James: THE ADVENTURES OF STOUT MAMA--Papier-Mache Press, 795 Via Manzana, Watsonville CA, 95076. 131 pp., $14.00. Stout Mama is unrepentant--she worries about her weight, won't quit smoking , adores Che Guevara and Mick Jagger, is fiercely independent but broods routinely about how others perceive her. She is a woman who'll give up nothing she loves. She's tastefully reckless, self-knowing without being self-centered, literary but no dweeb, sassy and direct. Stout Mama's adventures are composed in short sketches--tight prose at once worldly and lighthearted, filled with the gestures of America and its cultural iconography: partial recognition and romantic fantasy on the rush hour freeway, WD-40, that "fine line between sexist macho and the mockery of sexist macho," high school sex education lectures, the foibles of teaching English in foreign countries. The charm of the well-writ anecdote is ever-present, and as you read these short tales you'll chuckle gleefully and reach for the phone to pass the word along.--jl James Johnson: SAY and INDEx--3350 13th St., Boulder CO, 80304. $4.50 @. These are two small, well-produced artist's books. INDEX consists of the alphabet, one letter per page, accompanied by an image which is not orthographically related to the letter, such as a skull with "K" or a fencing tool with "J". SAY is another alphabet, only this time the letters are spelled phonetically (in the artist's own quirky typeface), as in "ESS" for "S."--jmb Todd Katinski: SEPTIC STICK--PO Box 4301, Seattle WA, 98104. 28 pp., $5.00. A first chapbook for this word-slinger, and it is full of learned despair, Gothic shadows, and imaginative connections; assertions of truth, erotic silences, and cultural criticism in the form of free verse. A total of 29 poems with titles like "Whoreific," "Bad Acid or Good Poetry," & "My Brain Tasted Like Hell So I Spat It Out." Katinski is an iconoclast and his cold critical eye give his voice a Beat snap. "Sometimes objects/ Sometimes silence/ Sometimes our own drunken mumble/ but most of the time the immeasurable/ space between the bodies in bed/ makes one think of a sniper's bullet..." This is the voice of a dark abiding presence, an outlaw intellect, which lives in the deep recesses of all of us.--rrle Richard Kostelanetz: WORDWORKS--BOA Editions, 740 University Ave., Rochester NY, 14607. 206 pp., $12.50. Richard Kostelanetz's achievement as a visual poet, long suspect because of the unevenness of the compositions with which he's flooded every market he could get into, is here displayed condensed to its impressive best--as when the letters "SLE" cross the bottom of, and leave, a page that the letters "EEP" cross the top of, going in the opposite direction, upside-down. Simple-seeming, no doubt, but how could anything be more illuminating about the off-the-page world we sleep into, and weightlessly, loftily, magically, dream back from?--bg Sparrow 13 LaughingWand: QUEEN OF SHADE--Zeitgeist Press, 500 Ygnacio Valley Rd. Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA, 94596. 20 pp, $3.00. These are poems about drugs and alcohol, sex, and life on the street. The language and rhythm are that of off-hand, every- day speech tightened up a little to maintain momentum. Repeated phrases often predicate the rhythm, as in: "maybe tonight ill burn that candle/ maybe tonight ill drive that nail/ maybe when you hear me pound it in/ youll shut up..." (from "the edge that parts our breath"). Punctuation and capitalization are absent, which sometimes makes reading difficult. A kind of hip, street rhythm laced with refrains would make this fun to read over bongos.--mg Lyn Lifshin: HE WANTS HIS MEAT IN THE WOMAN WHO'S DEAD--Homemade Ice Cream Press, PO Box 470186, Fort Worth TX, 76147. 10 pp., $2.00. A photocopied collection of thirty-one free verse poems by this prolific poet, with exceptional artwork by Dan Nielson. For all of her poetry Lyn Lifshin remains an enigma; it is hard not to read a touch of confession, as well as deep empathy into her work. Here she provides a nightmarish and turbulent reflection of our terror as it exists amid cold-blooded monsters disguised as humans. Necrophilia, abuse, pedophilia, mobsters, murder, dismemberment are all included and every bright, red drop stimulates the reader's mind with startling images. In one poem she confides "I ran away/ skipped school/ got gang raped." In another, she pounds us with a horror of childhood sexual abuse: "I had/ pneumonia/ from swallowing/ my father's/ semen..." This is a critique of our times, broken and blackened. Lifshin doesn't shy away from the shocking--she frags us.--rrle Jon Longhi: ZUCCHINI AND OTHER STORIES--Manic D Press, PO Box 410804, San Francisco CA, 94141. 16 pp., $3.00. Longhi has the tactics and strategy of a hit-and-run driver: fuck 'em up and leave 'em for dead. He takes on circus clowns, anarchist skatepunks, redneck rodeo heavens, foursomes before the days of AIDS, and whatever else captures his angry fancy. These are nonapologetic bursts that make up a modern street battered Spoon River anthology. If you want to have your senses kicked against a wall, and feel the coldness of that wall as you slowly slide to the floor, capture this, and Longhi's Bricks & Anchors, before the lights begin to dim.--o Malok: GOD'S BOOK--Found Street, 14492 Ontario Cir., Westminster CA, 92683. 8 pp., $1.00. Fascinatingly non-representational, absurd, illuminating, crazy/wise ink-drawings of "God's Ear," "God's Face," "God's Grimace," "God's Hemp," "God's Rush, " and "God's Rectum."--bg Marcelijus Martinaitis: THE BALLADS OF KIKUTIS (translated from the Lithuanian by Laima Sruoginis)--Mr. Cogito (Vol. IX, # 1, 1993), PO Box 66124, Portland OR, 97266. $3.75, These poems are all focused on one "Kukutis," who is a quasi-mythical person representing a broad sense of cultural identity that is often described as missing or ineffable. Given Lithuania's recent history, the political/social resonance of this is clear and is at times quite explicit. Most of these poems, however, are also filled with a surrealistic beauty: "All these years I haven't eaten anything--/ the mine explosions scattered my insides/ all over the branches/ and made a mouth harmonica out of my teeth" (from "Kukutis' Application to Receive Temporary Relief Aid"). The book is introduced by the author. It is a pleasure to encounter this work, and in a translation that reads well in English.--jmb Michael McClure, REBEL LIONS--New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York NY, 10011. $10.95. In his introduction, McClure defines a rebel lion as "a spirit in revolt against his or her own custom and habit." And throughout the book one senses, hears, witnesses a breakthrough of the imagination into flesh as spirit as flesh as... the ubiquity of mammal consciousness at war with itself or anything that might inhibit the moment of liberation. In the opening pages we hear the "the beat of hammers," "the hollow dragging of a crowbar," but "These cannot disperse the memory of the striding/ of a jaguar..." The soul of the living creature moving in physical time and space refuses to be overwhelmed by the objects that clang and clutter our lives. These are poems to be sung, bodied forth--chants to invoke the deepest resonance of our biology and the universe as organism unbounded. Many years ago McClure, with Ginsberg and the others, took the stage one night in San Francisco and resurrected poetry from its bookish grave, gave it voices, bodies--restored it as the singing of our species. Rebel Lions suggest McClure is as vital , and as important, a singer of that song as anyone alive.--jb David McCord: THE WORLD OWES ME LUNCH--PO Box 1352, Berkeley CA, 94701. 62 pp., $5.00. The standout in this collection is a tale about a man who ends up crucified in a construction site, and the detective who is sent to investigate. It's urban angst, a resurrection story and a mystery with more questions than answers. McCord has a Ray Bradbury approach to modern alienation, and knows how to make the most of a bad situation by tossing you into the center of the action, as he slips out the door.--o Jay Meek & F. D. Reeve, eds.: AFTER THE STORM--Maisonneuve Press, PO Box 2980, Washington DC, 20013. 121 pp., $10.95. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it--and sadly, the memory of Desert Storm seems to fade from our collective psychic landscape. This anthology attempts to capture and reflect on the lessons the Gulf War--much as did Belinda Subraman's The Gulf War: Many Perspectives collection, and Leslie Scalapino's O 3 anthology [see reviews in TRR #1 & #3]. The names here include many of American poetry's "big guns"--Robert Bly, Amy Clampitt, Jayne Cortez, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Stafford... But the tone tends toward the strident, occasionally as shrill as an air-raid siren-- impassioned but unlistenable, and ultimately less human than work in the aforementioned, lesser-known volumes. Political poetry, with the balance leaning heavy towards the politics.--lbd D.P. Milliken: OR #159--PO Box 868, Amherst MA, 01004. Or is a series of artist books produced for years by D. P. Milliken, each one different and each one a delight in it's own way. Many include material the editor has received in the mail. No. 159 has a series of drawings and anomalous words, each accompanied by a little list. I don't know if these books are for sale, but they certainly are a treasure.--jmb Todd Moore: I WANT A POEM TO BE HARD LIKE A BULLET--Homemade Ice Cream Press, PO Box 470186, Fort Worth TX, 76147. 10 pp. $2.00. An 8 1/2" X 11" photocopied collection of twenty-one violent poems which the poet defines as "reality-based poetry." Artwork by Robert W. Howington, mostly minimalist stick figures, and newspaper clippings of violence. These poems are alive with crisis; "am i wrong/ or is that/ blood whistling/ out of the holes/ in his throat." Moore is definitely intense and his short free verse poems are full of biting savagery, furious razor slices of shock, and ghastly everyday images. This is a verbal binge of vigorous fear twisted from the bowels of assault: "those days we'd shoot at whatever moved..."--rrle Gale Nelson: THE MYSTIC CIPHER--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 24 pp., $4.00. These are cerebral, Language-style poems that often contain a cool, ethereal beauty: "Best tray of almonds resides more in heat than/ light. A capsule decoded fatherly. Symptoms/ of blue light cannot flare in sandalwood" ("Ode"). Some of the lexical choices have a quality of having been made randomly, and then carefully arranged into standard syntactical and discursive patterns. There is one sequence where texts alternate with bureaucratic documents arranged into "Poems"--these seem included either for their contrast to or similarity with Nelson's own text, and the ambiguity is most intriguing.--jmb Dan Nielsen: INSINCERE FLATTERY & THINLY VEILED SARCASM--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00. Nielsen is back in full force, armed to the teeth, and ready to attack with small bursts of brutal honesty. This collection includes a great poem about amnesia, only upon examination the individual turns out to "not have a name and/ nothing has ever happened to you." In "Now What?" we get a Catholic tale of an oversexed 14 year-old who prays to "the blessed virgin" and ends up fucking her in his dreams. The best line in this book, filled with great one-liners, is: "i said, 'our bed/ is like a rock/ in the middle/ of the ocean.' and she said, 'well,/ let's get a new one.'"--o Kurt Nimmo: CRIMINAL CLASS--Translucent Tendency Press, 3226 Raspberry, Eire, PA, 16508. 12 pp., $1.00. The first paragraph of this story leads the reader to think it's going to be another one of those stories about a writer trying to write a story. Luckily, it ends up being about job security and tension between the moneyed, ruling class and the poor class of service workers who feel lucky to have joys but are always worried that by next week they may be unemployed. The politics is about as overt as it can be without being an essay.--mg Kurt Nimmo: FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd., #86, Canton MI, 48188. 42 pp., $4.95. Nimmo always grabs my attention, and in this collection he starts with an essay about the death of Samuel Beckett, leaps into a great NO BUDWEISER IN THE LESBIAN ART COLONY bar story, and then talks about being alienated from poets and poetry. I happen to agree with what he has to say in both the stories and essays in this collection; and I think that Nimmo's willingness to put his balls on the cutting board of political incorrectness shows a decisiveness many writers lack. Nimmo knows what he thinks, and let's you have it point blank.--o Kurt Nimmo: SUSAN ATKINS--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd., #86, Canton MI, 48188. 64 pp., $5.00. Kurt Nimmo is one of those people you would rather not have live next door, but you'd be damned sure to put him at the top of your mailing list. He captures the joy of ugliness, the thrill of existentialism and the sensationalism of commercial pop culture in clean easy sweeps of words. In SUSAN ATKINS we read about his lusting loins for a touch of Susan, even thought we all know that Susan is Charlie Manson's girl and Kurt doesn't have a chance in hell. Page after page of lust and infatuation follow, and the only relief comes at the end of the book, when there are no more words. But by then, you have an infatuation for Susan as well. This is a book to hide from your kids; read it a second time and try to decide whether or not Nimmo is putting you on, or is so goddamn serious he should be locked up right away.--o Mickey O'Connor: THE CHARLESGATE APARTMENT POEMS--The Elbow Press, PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111. 41 pp., $8.00. concise line breaks, impacted drunkenesque, and clarity of emotion bring this book here. there is no obfuscating pedantic, just a poet's talk between thwarted and requited joy. unlike so much writing today-- you are allowed entry not only into thinking, but feeling. O'Connor uses the pause of line break to attract. the title evokes place, in such a way, that you sense transformation occurred in this room, in this apartment, in everything that happened while living there.--nv Rochelle Owens: HOW MUCH PAINT DOES THE PAINTING NEED--Kulchur Foundation, , New York NY. Poetry video. An experimental art film of seething, coming-to-the-surface violence and raging, polyphonous voices. The collaged surface of images and rich, color-saturated shots of artists speaking and repeating Owens' poetry from behind veils or screens of rain-splattered glass or meshes of ropes suggest new ways of reading Owens' poetry. One motif predominates: a strong, white-robed Native American woman striding through tall green marsh grass. This image connects the visceral with the earth, and suggests that colonized or exterminated peoples (or genders) still live in the core of the cultural imagination.--ssn John Perlman: ANACOUSTIC--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. Wind, water, ocean provide restless motion and the fluid in which to suspend lyrical contemplations. "Full Moon" is almost incantatory with its internal rhythms, alliteration and assonance: "how the vast mad multiples / of nightmare gather to a perfect / pitiless radiance."--ssn Dan Raphael: THE BONES BEGIN TO SING--Twenty-Six Books, 6735 SE 78th, Portland OR, 97206. 26 pp., $3.00. i am strapped in--my head inside a helmet of darkness. this book is a viewing screen. there is an onslaught of image. almost every poem is an attack on the senses--color, light, sound, juxtaposed realities. each piece wants to scar the reader, to render reader... with jarring, shaking, followed by flowing reveries, and always raph>lite humor. these are updated surrealist ingredients. an american surreal poet that enjoys--instead of the anguish.--nv David Thomas Roberts: THE EXECUTION--Pinelands Press, PO Box 5243, Kreole Station, Moss Point MS, 39562. $3.00. Surrealist poetry that captures the defiant flavor of the American South. "Rail to ravine goes my scrubby feast/ On a rasher of hills-guts hung with/ Junk" begins one poem. It's like listening to a drunken good old boy shout out his life of hallucinatory splendor: "House of Baroque eroticism wrapped in vermilion thunder/ House of Gothic orgasm and Ozark rapture/ House of the diapason blasting planets in my girl's rosy fundament/ HOWDY HOWDY HOWDY!!!"--tw Joe Ross: AN AMERICAN VOYAGE--Sun & Moon Press, 6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA, 90036. 95 pp., $9.95. The gorgeous reproduction of Thomas Cole's "The Voyage of Life: Manhood" on the cover lets the reader know right away that this work connects with all the writers who pushed themselves to try to define America in poetic terms. Echoes of 19th-century transcendentalism resound in the circular structures of "A Still Prayer." The epic structure of Ross's journey resonates with Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Hart Crane's "The Bridge," Jean Toomer's "Blue Meridian," Gertrude Stein's "The Making of Americans." However, Ross takes the reader down interior channels previously unexplored and in the process, we create a new frontier forged of our own minds.--ssn Timothy Russell: ADVERSARIA--TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern Univ. Press, Evanston IL, 60208. 87 pp. James Wright's imprint is noticeable throughout this prize-winning collection. Readers appreciative of plain-spoken poems which articulate the lives and localities of the Ohio River Valley will discover in Timothy Russell a narrative poet closely attuned to the daily and seasonal details of place. The Wright lineage is unmistakable in such lines as "Tonight I briefly thought I might explode/ In blossom..." ("In Vivo") and "What you do here for entertainment is/ you visit the bus station early/ to get the Wheeling paper and to see/ the latest Little Egypt dressed..." ("In Otium"). Indeed, that line of work extending from Williams' dicta about pursuing the American idiom is the resonant sounding board spuming and snarling in Russell's work. Both Williams and Wright are admirable forefathers, and Russell has learned their lessons well. His writing is clear and uncrowded, populous with citizens, sensitive to the ironic juxtaposing of beauty and decay, unafraid to leap ascendent or plunge into the grotty scuzz of the mundane ("...next week/ another gang of hoodlums/ will again be gouging the shiniest cars/ in the neighborhood..." (In Novus Ordo"). Adversaria is a classy addition to the Rust Belt strain of the American Grain.-jl Dennis Salen: THIS IS NOT SURREALISM--1996 Grandview, Seattle CA, 93995. 29 pp., $5.95. Salen's seventh chapbook contains 11 thematic sharp-edged poems, each a correlated study of a specific surrealist, or a surrealist's work. Utilizing 2 & 3 line stanzas of free verse in a minimalistic pseudo-Haiku twist, Salen has trapped an epiphany between the frightening pace of his drumbeat cadences. There is something very primal here. "He laughs brokenly/ His tongue catches/ and sticks/ the blue syllables/ fall to the floor/ and shatter/ diamonds/ hours/ precious light" Though not pure surrealism, the association is there through the theme and surprise. There is the primary delight of the French Symbolists underlying this work, a journey to a land of dream-like machinations. "Coincidence squared/ equals/ d vu."--rrle Michael Scalzi: A WHETORICAL APOLCALYPSE--846 Thomas St., State College PA, 16803. 13 pp., $1.00. A short story on the dangers of remembering too much of oneself, and of diving too far into mysticism. If everything is one, then is there anything other than yourself? A very interesting exploration of the extreme (psychotic?) ramifications of P.D. Ouspensky/Gurdjieff mysticism.--ar Spencer Selby:, SOUND OFF--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105. 64 pp., $7.95. A nicely produced perfect-bound volume of poems, each of which is a meditation on poetry (or language) and knowing, and how they might relate, processes that are essentially elusive and unknowable, a fact of which the text is aware: "It seems you are lost in a jungle/ displayed through every sign of life that// you can't get your hands on, closing in/ then falling back when probability says// it just wants a good honest watershed/ with which to ride things out." (from "No Way") Selby has pulled off a difficult feat here: the poems contain an intelligent discussion of issues that are abstract and ineffable, and yet they achieve a great lyric beauty at the same time: "Timebound secrets fall inside each new departure// moving smartly down the current drive. Dark/ lines stand at every turn, with not a word to waste/ before the trail you're making eats you alive." (from "The Circuit")--jmb Musing-turned-pure-feeling in poems about the way, in life, that "Puzzles break and break down/ like rivers you forget in the rain." Sundry brilliances of wording, as in the preceding quotation when the meaning of "break" abruptly shifts from "coming apart" to "come suddenly into being or notice." Equally brilliant abrupt fusions of the conceptual with the sensual--as when, in the same passage, certain minor puzzles in the over-puzzle that is existence are compared to rivers blinking out of notice in the higher, grander body of water (& noise) that rain is.--bg Jack Skelley: GOD RAISED MY DUMMY--Found Street, 14492 Ontario Cir., Westminster CA, 92683. 16 pp., $1.00. Number 7 in the Found Street series, consisting of two poems by Jack Skelley. One seems merely to literally (and fondly) describe a woman's ability to make salad, but slowly, subtly, becomes a high-rite celebration of everything she is; the other is equally playfully/ardently in love with the same woman.--bg Arnold Skemer: C--Phrygian Press, 58-09 205th St., Bayside NY, 11364. 54 pp., $6.00. Unfashionable (that's a compliment). This narrative plays with point of view: "You" to "he" to "I" to "he" to "you" again; and the structure is a circular movement framing the narrator's oscillations: in/out/in/out... I intend this sexual pun: the self-exiled narrator, alone in his Adirondack Mountains cabin, oscillates between megalomaniac self-aggrandizement and utter self-loathing, between displays of rarefied intellectuality and displays of brutal violence, between absorption into the blood-pulse of animal nature and frozen estrangement from everything material. All this rendered in an abstract, high- styled Modernist prose; a full treatment of the alienated male narcissist of the post World War I avant-garde. The narrative, however, gives a linear progress of events which may undercut its form: the narrator cooks stew, drinks vodka, kills squirrels, takes a shit. One-way transformations of the material foregrounded by the cyclical, oscillating narrative structures which try, ineffectually, to deny them. Despite this, the work has some distinct limitations, and is, I think, largely blind to them. But these limitations, though very much of this work's time and place, are not of its writer's or readers' time and place. This seems like a deliberate choice on Skemer's part, which does create some interest in the work, for me.--cp Amy Sparks: QUEEN OF CUPS--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 44107. 36 pp., $5.00. For a woman who's won quite a few rough & tumble Poetry Slams, Amy Sparks writes a surprisingly quiet and introspective poetry filled with delicate imagery. Her subjects, however, are often less than delicate. From her "Brownsville, Texas": "A woman wakes before dawn hearing a coarse wind blowing through her womb. The sun stuns the pavement. The river takes its trash, tail between legs, to the sea." Among the best work here is "Histories," a set of prose poems about a trip through Europe. Here Sparks builds dreamy scenarios with simple declarative sentences. From "Malaga": "Lie and listen to a language you cannot speak. The stories are intricate and loud. They mean nothing. Your tongue is unmoved. But your ears are wound tight as metal coils." Fine work.--tw Jerme Spew: INTO THE BADLANDS--Synthetic Productions, PO Box 3506, Oakland CA, 94609. 32 pp., $4.00. Jerme Spew is part of the San Francisco publishing group that put the likes of Henry Rollins to shame. These people (the Manic D, Andromeda, and Synthetic Productions crews) network well, and carry an edge that most publishers are afraid to touch for fear of getting injured. In this collection we catch Spew's observations of a world that should have been knocked out of orbit 100 years ago, but continues on in a low budget sci-fi b-flick reality. We get tales of jail stints, self-administered abortions, spoken word performances where the audience attacks the speaker, vivid descriptions of the urinals in the Asby BART station, and a hundred other evils people lock their doors to hide from. This isn't easy writing to take, but it is necessary, because the world is not, in fact, a pretty place, and closing your eyes won't make it go away.--o Thomas Lowe Taylor: DAS MARCHEN--Anabasis, PO Box 8766, Portland OR, 97207. $4.00. A meditation on memory and sense of self, and on the relationship of language to consciousness of same; a kind of act-of-writing on the idea of the author's autobiography and what it might mean to write one. The text consists of a few long sparsely punctuated prose passages: "...And heavier hours claim your time as passage and remote, another nice day spent in front of what was once behind or maybe just left out to air and into the recollection of names, a day and its blue messages, marking yellow and orange as afterthoughts and as association where they are, and there is where they were, that's simple enough to be less than speech in the silence of the afternoon..." This writing has the quality of a chanted sutra, in which the narrative content of the words is only as important as their symbolic representation of a desired state of mind. The text is preceded and followed by highly perceptive essays by Susan Smith Nash, which form both a personal and intellectual frame for Taylor's work.--jmb Thomas Lowe Taylor: THE ONE, THE SAME, & THE OTHER--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. $8.00(?). Co-produced with Spectacular Diseases in London. A highly subjective "Poetics" which could be described as a series of meditations on the idea of metaphor, that is, on how processes, acts, and things are all inter-related. The "poetics" comes in as an on-going discussion of the problems language creates in perceiving this unity of the world, while at the same time being essential to its perception: "The actualities of movement reflected in the visual isolation of speech, as connectedness interpenetrates with the thing in its location of variable presence. Beyond the diagrams of possibility, the styles and postures of being elongate through plasticity (variation) into arrangements of the one." Or, as Taylor puts it in the introduction: "So making love is analogous for something else, and that is what this is all about." This is fascinating reading. Includes a bibliography.--jmb Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: IGNE--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. A series of 20 short poems, mostly alternating very short with longer lines, using words and word fragments from a variety of languages (I've identified English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Greek). Often the result is a kind of multi-linguistic haiku, but breaking down the conventional patterns of haiku-thought or perception as well as successfully challenging the notion that a single language (at a time) is necessary for coherent poetic discourse: "Luce in arte/ Err/ We affects/ Will pais paizon young idiot." (from "igne 18") This work clearly demonstrates that poetry need not be confined to a particular cultural or literary context to be successful, and that poetic thought occurs in a consciousness of language as a generic category and not simply as a particular culturally-bound construct.--jmb Poetry of extreme invention, the song of a mind able to hear music from many spheres simultaneously. Language here serves that open interior melody--mind occupied with the frontiers of inspired intelligence. Bits of words, sentences, languages, physical apparitions intermingle in a mathematics that delivers a new series of interpretations with each pass. This is a poetry of ultimate mystery, an honest confrontation of reality without the safety of the filters we usually project. Its size is perfect for slipping in your pocket so you can dip into it for a taste of infinity--to remind you that the world we live in is by consensus- -to remind us of the cracks in its construction.--jb Larry Tomoyasu: RADIO ELECTRONICS, Found Street--14492 Ontario Cir., Westminster CA, 92683. 16 pp., $1.00. Larry Tomoyasu specializes in interestingly unsettling combinations (but not collages) of texts and visual images. In Radio Electronics, a sequence of such works, he uses a typed narrative, cursive annotations about the devil as "a non-existent radio station," and (slightly distorted, over-exposed, out-of-context) snapshots of people and places to explore dream-reality versus waking reality.--bg Wilber Topsail: THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF PANTYHOSE AND THE POEMS OF MIDDLE AGE--Erstwhile Press, 2116 Spring Hill Dr., South Bend IN, 46628. 76 pp., $7.95. The title provides apt description of the mood and content of these poems which, as the back cover blurb states, are "flashbacks of a chaotic internal revolution called Growing Up Male." The poems are driven by frustration and fascination with the sexuality of an aging man and his observations on consumer- and youth-oriented society. Content and language are often sensual. A few of the poems rhyme, but the rhyme is never overbearing. "Fashion" is on of the shortest poems and is somewhat representative: "I used to make/ love more often/ than I wore a tie." Even though you probably won't think about them much afterward, these poems are accessible, relevant to other people, and fun to read.--mg Bill Tuttle: EPISTOLARY: FIRST SERIES--Meow Press, 334 Bryant St. #7, Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. A series of letters written during phases of the moon, haunted by its always partial light. Quietly jagged and intense. The pain of this book is the knowledge that the other we address is always the terror of our own imagination, that there may be finally no one to hear us. The hope of this book is that our fragments remain a source of wonder.--mw Without sentimentality the poetry in this book conveys, via a form of epistle, a subtle beauty and human delicacy. This is not the tired narrative of frank encounter. This poetry is Language based in its theory. In these poems there are cracks in the opaque use of language. It is the sheer within the poetry which allows the sensual facet of language a presence. There is a voice in the sound of words.--mb Thomas Vaultonburg: CONCAVE BUDDHA--Press of the Third Mind, 65 E. Scott St., Chicago, IL, 60601. 58 pp., $5.95. Chicago isn't a pretty town. People get tossed against walls, robbed at gun point, bashed in so many ways it's amazing that so many can survive. But Vaultonburg captures this wilderness in cat fights, Auschiwitz Ribs, umbilical cord nooses, schizophrenic paranoias, sex-filled jazz hallucinations, and so many other bitter ugly dreams that you want to stop, turn the world off, and hang your head in silence.--o Mark Wallace: COMPLICATIONS FROM STANDING IN A CIRCLE--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 14222. 70 pp., $5.95. Mark Wallace writes out of the specifics of this place and time, "dishrags," "parking lots," and "fat mad cats." But this is a critical poetics of the everyday. The signifying practices which might have been used behind the scenes to construct the poet's authentic voice and experience are instead foregrounded and questioned in Wallace's poetry. So his poetics remains committed to the ordinary while denying it its ideologically privileged status of "real life." This is a position very difficult to negotiate: the reified notions of "authenticity" and "real life" are so dominant in the US--and so commercially useful, too--that few poets of the ordinary avoid them, while poets who try to reject this ideology may substitute a practice so deliberately artificial and restricted that it ends up affirming "real life" after all. Wallace's negotiations employ Language writing practices; in particular, he is interested in sound as a material property of language. Sound associations and chime-rhymes often carry on the forward movement of his lines, derailing referentiality; the sounds do not fit the sense but undermine it. I also find a strong poetic persona in these lines, but not as a "voice"; instead, the persona draws its strength from its submergence and dispersal in the social matrix of language.--cp Ben Watson: 28 SILVERFISH MACRONIX, OUT TO LUNCH--Equipage, c/o Rod Mengham, Jesus College, Cambridge, ENGLAND, CB5 8BL. $5.00? Twenty-eight poems of varying lengths, including drawings and graphics. The poems move in a kind of intense paranoic surrealism, with a sarcastic slant in the word-play they delight in. This is lively work, and I hope to see more from Watson: "...the fishnets/ stop at the white flesh, and it sure/ looks good on you. toblerone faucet/ by the nursery chaperone, belted/ kids breaking wind like a cat bush" (from "2").--jmb Don Webb: THE SEVENTH DAY AND AFTER--Wordcraft of Oregon, PO Box 3235, La Grande OR, 97850. 78 pp., $7.95. Don Webb is one of those rare writers who can leap tall genres in a single bound. Whereas most avant-writers avoid genre-writing like the plague, Webb absorbs them into his Central Processing Unit and encodes them with his ultra-wry wit and open imagination. The result is a cross between J.G. Ballard, Steve Katz, H.P. Lovecraft and Misha. This new collection of fictions, The Seventh Day and After, features some of Webb's weirdest stories yet. Of special notice is the story "Protocols of Captain Whizzo," where Webb satirizes the stereotypes of children's TV programming to the point of Ubu Roi-like absurdity. Accompanying the text are odd illustrations by Roman Scott.--ma Paul Weinman & Wendy Duke: ALLY ALLY HOME FREE--Dumpster Press, PO Box 80044, Akron OH, 44308. $2.00. The statement that poetry and politics don't mix is too general to be true or false; but that's what you'll find yourself trying to decide as you read this. The poems often name large concepts, such as the American Dream, to plainly state that poverty sucks and the poor stay poor while the rich get richer.--mg James Welsh: AUTO-DA-FE--Wray, PO Box 91052, Cleveland OH, 44101. $2.00. This artifact is a bag full of ashes from a collection of doomed manuscripts submitted to the furnace. With some interesting quotes on fire and burning. Perhaps this is the book to accompany the Haters' "Fire" or "Oxygen Is Flammable". A worthwhile artifact.--ar Rupert Wondolowski: SHINY PENCILS--Shattered Wig Prods, 2407 Maryland Ave. Apt. #1, Baltimore MD, 21218. 30 pp., $3.00. A new collection in which Wondolowski continues to develop his unique visceral surrealism: the poems are intense, playful, melancholic, sardonic, and intelligent: "Your bunghole with chives would be a treat and a surprise as the buildings crumble like teeth. A tropical winter with leaders brain dead, the monkey pulls the blind man on a blood spattered sled." (from "Shiny Pencils") These excellent poems vary from the long and expansive to the short and allusive, and are accompanied by surrealist comic-like drawings by Mok Hossfeld.--jmb This adorable bright-yellow chapbook should be made into a film by Cronenberg or Lynch, or a billboard for Casa de Rachmaninoff Music Box and Nose- piercing Boutique. I blushed when I read the words: "I saw you outside the convenience store and you looked so beautiful." Wondolowski is lyric and personal. And still, he knows how to motivate the soft-machine scientist in me with such works as "researchers are growing hair in a test tube" and "that night we played the mole game (for China and Clover)." Ghastly but deliciously hairball.--ssn Jeff Zenick: MODERN HISTORICALITY #1--PO Box 877, Tallahassee FL, 32302. 32 pp. Down-home drawings and prose from a journal Jeff kept of a jaunt through Florida that he made in 1991--walking and by bicycle. His drawings are cleanly craftsmanlike, flavorful and absolutely authentic renditions of such subjects as a chick feed factory; one Hardee's interior, and another Hardee's exterior; an Eckerd's up against a Publix; people enjoying a seafood festival. His writing is similarly appealing.--bg Jeff Zenik: MUCK DUCK--PO Box 877, Tallahassee FL, 32302. 32 pp. A comic book about aliens who try to capture a dorky earthling during his exciting morning having breakfast (and taking a leak) at a diner and then buying a soda at a liquor store. The story is enjoyable enough but Jeff's drawing here seems awkward.--bg ----------------------------------------------------------------- End TapRoot Reviews Issue #4.0, section b: Chaps. 2/94 -----------------------------------------------------------------