From au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Tue May 7 20:26:29 1996 Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 09:33:51 -0500 From: Robert Drake To: pauls@etext.org Subject: TRee #5b: 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 #5.0, section b: chaps 8/94 ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 first section of our 5th full electronic issue, containing most of the short Chapbook reviews; the second section contains most 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. Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review material--in issue #5: features on the Argentinian experimental poetry movement _Paralengua_; the LA micropress Found Street; the Russian transfuturist artists Rea Nickonova & Serge Segay; recent French writing-in-translation, the new magazine _Apex of the M_; plus features on work by Nathaniel Mackey, Bill Luoma, and Ivan Arguelles. 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, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Steve Fried, Chris Funkhouser, Jessica Grimm, Bob Grumman, Roger Kyle-Keith, Joel Lipman, Stephen-Paul Martin, Susan Smith Nash, Kurt Nimmo, Oberc, Charlotte Pressler, Dan Raphael, Andrew Russ, Mark Wallace, Don Webb, Mark Weber, and Thomas Willoch. Additional contributors are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE. *** Many thanx to all of our contributors. *** ----------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Akhter Ahsen, ed.: NEW SURREALISM: THE LIBERATION OF IMAGES IN CONSCIOUSNESS--Brandon House, PO Box 240, Bronx NY, 10471. 538 pp., $25.00. Ahsen maintains that Surrealism is an enervated methodology of literary and artistic transgressions. It needs rejuvenation, a megashot of adrenaline in the buttocks, and the editor supplies this via his own field of clinical psychotherapy. In true Andre Breton fashion he proclaims it in a manifesto. The late J.H. Matthews, world authority on Surrealism reacts to Ahsen's ideas. Can science come to the aid of art? We know what C.P. Snow said about the two cultures. Supporting documentation, including case histories, reflect the supposed efficacy of Ahsen's new engine of revitalization.--as Ron Androla: PERFECTLY SANE LIKE EXCESSIVE INEBRIATION-- Translucent Tendency Press, 3226 Raspberry Avenue, Erie PA, 16508. 12 pp., $2.00. This collection of fuck poems would make a politically correct feminist cringe, because it captures the male side of copulation in all it's chauvinistic glory, both the glorious and brutal sides of it. Ron rips into the violence, the physical cramming, the pushing and shoving and taking and physical side of an act so romanticized that the sweat is forgotten. But Androla's war goes beyond lovers--and tears into factory politics, drunken pissed off dreams, and the world of working class heroes who got no place else to go.--o Ron Androla: THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS--Smiling Dog Press, 987 Fritz Rd., Maple City MI, 49664. 5 pp., $2.00? A prose poem, in seventeen parts, by Erie, Pennsylvania poet Ron Androla. Small town angst surfaces here; the poet is unemployed, he admits his sympathy for the president because we live in "the strangest exploding times ever dreamed in history," and arrives at the decision to "fit into society by smiling alot." He understands and inwardly shudders at the slow economic and political decomposition all around--and vents poetically tinged diatribes against the media and government on his attic-room word-processor. Sexually, this long poem is pure Androla--due to an S/M allusion involving Hillary Clinton, a literary magazine in California strenuously rejected MEDITATIONS before this SMILING DOG publication. Dean Creighton's letterpress edition is tastefully rendered with a linoleum print cover in three colors.--kn Androla goes Eastern Philosophy in these short meditations based on the tales of philosophers like Lao Tzu. There are 17 bursts of wisdom, seemingly inspired more by drug abuse and whisky than spiritual enlightenment, with deep lines like "2. chain- smoke. smoke another bowl. gulp more coffee. consider tolerable alcoholism" and "12. avoid the kissing wife, pull away from her sad, shivering hug. make her slap yr face & curse yr very existence."--o Bud Bracken: CIRCUS THRU THE FOG--Poetry Harbor, 1028 E. 6th St., Duluth MN, 55805. 28 pp., $3.95. Pat McKinnon of POETRY MOTEL once claimed that Bud Bracken was the actually the editor, because Bud hated poetry--if Bud liked a poem, it got into the mag, because there had to be something there that was special. Bud's poetry kicks ass, and you'd never know he hated the stuff by the clean crisp lines in this chap. These are vicious poems, filled with love, hate, and a strange emptiness that makes you want to hide in the shadows even where there are no threats on the street. They tell me poetry is supposed to rearrange the universe and make us look at things in a different light. I don't know what light Bud is using, but it sure as hell is powerful in all its subtleties.--o Dennis Barone: THE MASQUE RESUMED--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $2.00. Three short pieces of nearverse that collage images, ideas, situations and parts of speech with great dexterity. In and out of story, in and out of sensation, in and out of reflection, in and out of in and out... & sundry blossomings like "Was not a husband informed tonight to seclude the heart of shuddered property?"--bg Michael Basinski: WORMS--Veighsmere Series, 411 Parkside Ave., Buffalo NY, 14216. 4 pp., $1.00. Four sets of appropriately- mismated fragments of (my guess is) zoology texts, scholarly discussions of mythology, and who-knows-what that turns the human condition from it's worm-lowest shudderings up to where its "brightness sanctuaries" are into multiply-meaningful poetry. --bg E. R. Baxter III: LOOKING FOR NIAGARA--Slipstream, Box 2071, Niagara Falls NY, 14301. 120 pp., $10.00. This is a marvelous book of a man and a city (Niagara Falls, USA) and a river: The Niagara, which leads to that which is also marvelous: Niagara Falls (the natural wonder). This is a poetry where all history is contemporaneous with the poet and the poet's life--his history, his changes and he moves in a man's time and the river moves in geographic time and here then is this mill town, tourist town, paradise lost--well you have poetry. Frankly written, clear thought through the fog and rain, dreams and facts, youth and age. An exploration in the wonder of the self as a place. Collage-- bric-a-brac beauty of a store with endless merchandise of memory and fact--Baxter III--it is how to see--read a life.--mb E. R. Baxter III: WHAT I WANT--Slipstream, Box 2071, Niagara Falls NY, 14301. This item is a one poem chapbook printed as a supplement to SLIPSTREAM Issue #13. WHAT I WANT is an eight page wide ranging poem of parallel construction in which Baxter reveals the pantheon of his desires. He discloses the variables that compose a poet's existence. He wants to smoke a lot of cigarettes, have frequent sex with multiple partners, and he wants the animals to talk. The poem proclaims and documents the value of the individual in a complex world, without sexual fear, with a sensitivity to nature, with the despair that cigarettes are unhealthy, and with the generosity that thanks the human world for its support. Baxter ends his poem from the heart of his soul. He writes thank you. When was the last time anyone said that to you?! "Thank you. Thank you."--mb Guy R. Beining: DAMN THE EVENING GARDEN--MindWare, 310-762 Upper James St., Hamilton Ontario, CANADA, L9C 3A2. 28 pp., $8.00. Twenty-six haiku-like three-line poems, each beginning with, and illustrated by, a different letter of the alphabet (in proper alphabetical order). The illustrations are splotch, expressive, and apt; the poems sexedly Bible-based, e.g.: "Damn the EVEning garden/ it catches/ ALL the hOles."--bg Dodie Bellamy: ANSWER--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 14213. 16 pp., $4.00. This installment of The letters of Mina Harker actually includes a letter from Bob Gluck to Dodie Bellamy, a letter to Mina (Dodie) from Cassandra (Ron Day), and the letter in answer, from Mina to Cassandra. In her answer, Mina works in, around, through, and ultimately in spite of the request which Bob has asked of Dodie: to write "5-10 observations of aspects of having a woman's body." Mina's response is alternately playful, exasperated, pissed off, and ultimately takes off in its own direction--a thinking, a sexy and fabulous world embedded in a letter. Bellamy's writing sparks and whines, glides, pulls you up short, engages in bouts of the limbo beneath inhumanely low bars. This little book is a great introduction to the wonders of Bellamy's work.--jg John Bennett: THE NEW WORLD ORDER--The Smith, 69 Joralemon St., Brooklyn NY, 11220. 85 pp., $10.95. John Bennett (not to be confused w/ John M. Bennett) is a small press survivor, though I'm not sure if he would agree with my assessment. THE NEW WORLD ORDER, with all quirkiness of style and subject, is a paean to the fine art of survival in modern America. There are 25 short pieces here; they encompass varied subjects--alcoholism, mental decay, Vietnam, childhood trauma--and the message is unmistakable: one must bounce back, hold tight, weather the odds and survive. "Each day," Bennett writes, "I rise up from the world of dream into illusion... and ask myself: what next? Receiving no answer, I set about the all-important task of recreating myself." From this departure, Bennett transmutes into the various personalities of this book. Not surprisingly, John Bennett wrote a book entitled SURVIVAL SONGS, which appeared in two self-published mimeograph volumes. Bennett is a literary dynamo, an avowed outlaw on the fringes of literary convention. This book sharpens and hones his alienated, rough-and-tumble vision of a chaotic world "that embraces insanity like a succubus, living on the brink is what sanity is all about: torque resistance, crystallized perception full of sunlight and terror."--kn John M. Bennett: BLANKSMANSHIP--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 24 pp./90 min., Book $5.00; tape $6.00; both for $10.00. For years Bennett's two word instruction-poem "Be Blank" has been drifting through the otherstream, on stickers, postcards, magazines. And though this sense of the non-projecting mind pervades all of his poetry, in BLANKSMANSHIP he manifests it more masterfully than usual. And to have the poems on the page and literally in our ears via audio tape is sheer delight. The individual poems are longer than usual for Bennett, allowing us to experience deeper revelries of body and soul, mind and matter, convulsing to be; each piece ending with five words or combinations of words that can be associated freely with one another, with the poem, with the book as a whole or all of the above, or perhaps best, being blank, to simply let them be what they will at each hearing/reading. For instance these five at the end of "Number Wing": Downflight hurricane wet land urinating hive The general body of the poems heard as well as read surge and flow with moments of epiphany and entropy--the two finally the same. So much of Bennett's poetry is dependent on individual perception, even differing states of mind in a single individual can produce wildly different reactions. Bennett is a man possessed of reality triple intensified. These poems have an otherness, to be sure, but that otherness is intimate, as close as our thoughts and viscera. Side Two of the tape is a classic performance of the same piece with James Weise. This is prime Bennett, put on the headphones, open the book, and strap yourself in; you'll be ripped apart and love every minute. --jb John M. Bennett: BOOK CLASSIFICATION--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 5 pp., $1.00. Five Bennett poems with an etiquette book pictured on the cover, and again on the inside of the cover--but with fish skeletons diving into it. The poetry, as usual, is out of "the kitchen drawer where's burning limits snore."--bg John M. Bennett: REVERSION: PILES OF THAT--Luna Bisonte, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus, OH, 43214. 252 pp., $30. 00. Gahhhhh! Well over 400 poems by the renowned spitter, teeming with Bennettisms like: "Where the why whys! Where the pause lie!" from "Why Whines"; and "So I langoured, breathed a wall" from "A Glance Back Cast." Results a mutter-to-utter maxitrosity by a poet who more and more seems to be the Jackson Pollock of contemporary poetry--because of his disorienting originality; crudity; size and plain old self-publishing Americanness.--bg John M. Bennett & Johnny Brewton: DRY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $2.00, (coproduced w/ Pneumatic Press, PO Box 170011, San Francisco CA, 94117) Graphic images, mostly of watering cans, by Brewton; poems by Bennett. Like many of Bennett's poems, these have anti-titles, uppercase & catty-corner to their main titles. A mere eccentricity 'til you start thinking about it, about text sandwiched between titles, titles clashing or harmonizing; or is the anti-title the first half of an inevitable next poem's title? Bennett keeps on makin' you work.--bg John M. Bennett & others: MISCELLANY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 1 pg. @, SASE. An assortment of some twenty 4" x 4" cards, each with a poem or other artwork on it, mostly collaborations between Bennett and people like Serge Segay; also some intriguing drawings by John's sons, Also and Ben. Seeing what Bennett's poetry inspires from others made me flash on the possibility of one of these dimension X aliens who abducts neurotic human women while being, himself, abducted by some alien from dimension Z... if you see what I mean.--bg Gina Bergamino & tolek: TWO SIDES--xib publications, PO Box 262112, San Diego CA, 92126. 12 pp., $2.00. None of the poems in this slim chappie are credited, so it's difficult to tell who wrote what. Yeah the similarity between Bergamino's and tolek's styles is intriguing. In some instances, gender references give away the author. Overall, though, these poems are very similar, and in many ways typical work of the authors. Not for the kiddies; some naughty sex and adult subject matter.--rkk Jake Berry: BRAMBU DREZI--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. 70 pp., $10.00. For several years I have been reading (and seeing: some have major visual components) these pieces in magazines and anthologies, and while they never fail to intrigue as separate works, the effect of encountering them all together intensifies (and clarifies and enriches) the experience exponentially. The texts are connected and/or contrapuntal, and at times they are graphically absorbed into the texts that follow, or are even obliterated by them. There are sheets of words, slabs of anaphor, paralinguistic passages (like the title itself), words scattered in graphic formulae, and almost purely visual sections. The whole represents an inherently impossible but at the same time inherently necessary voyage of total consciousness beyond language within the context of language (or symbolic representation), from the opening "legion swollen faces drift through sentient blue- orange empty space..." to the closing "I vanish and everything is everything/ is everything/ like nothing idiot singing." The concerns of this vast, almost musically constructed work, are consciousness and language as its vehicle, a universe structured as a somewhat destructive (or dynamic) conflict of under- and over-realities (which perhaps, the work suggests, derives from the mind's struggling to perceive), and an evolutionary but a the same time circular process of psychic or mythic history. This is not "literature" as "good writing" but literature as an attempt to know (control) what might be. It has, however, passages of such intensely charged writing that, as a reader, one is compelled to engage with and grow from Berry's work. A major work, only glanced at here, which will become essential reading. Includes an introduction by Jack Foley that provides a useful contextualization of Berry's work in the spectrum of American Poetry.--jmb Terence Bishop: HEADS I LOSE, TALES I LOSE--ATH Press, 2177 Steward Dr., Hatfield PA, 19440. 32 pp., $2.00. Bishop seems to thrive on existential angst--predicting the worst will happen, knowing it won't, and feeling like he's come out on top--which breeds a strange hopeless optimism that shows up in his work. In the short story "Scene From Hollywood Apartment No. 425," for example, a couple is flirting, but not really caring if they fuck or not, and when they don't there's no disappointment either way. It doesn't matter what they do. "The Birth of Lonely Man" chronicles some easily recognized drinking habits: going to a bar because of boredom, being bored at the bar, hitting a liquor store, then going home to drink alone. While this collection includes a lot of poems, the fiction is clearly Bishop's strong point--the three stories are easily worth the price of the chap. --o David Bromige: A CAST OF TENS--Avec Books, PO Box 1059, Penngrove CA, 94951. 96 pp., $9.50. David Bromige's A CAST OF TENS is a series of musings and reflections upon the full range of human experience. In his exact adherence to a form (ten-line sections usually broken into a few stanzas) and an inner form (phrases or sentences start with a capital letter, ending at the next capital) Bromige inserts as much variation and insight, where other writers may have found only restriction. A very "human" text, A CAST OF TENS proceeds in its unique voice with a quiet intensity never losing sight of its goal.--jg Bromige is a master at probing the irreducibilities of symbolic logic, and his playful yet outrageous equivalencies explode the neat, cut-and-dried tautologies of Wittgenstein: "The old man is 112 pages long / and so is the sea / They are deeply symbolic (psychotic)." Bromige's structures are sinuous and mathematic, and they evoke the tonal colors of Schoenberg, Satie, or Cage, successfully evading what Bromige has characterized as iambic pentameter's "echoic invasions."--ssn David Castleman: I STAMMER IT TO ANGELS--Dusty Dog, 1904-A Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301. 31 pp., $5.95. Part fiction, part essay, part autobiography. Heck, it's actually one long philosophical discourse! No, really, it's a story. No action to speak of, minimal dialogue, lots of third-person commentary and observation. And none of that pop psychology junk, either. Real thinking-man stuff spun out over the course of a story which pretty much is background to the thought process. For the literate crowd with time enough to actually read, not skim.--rkk Alan Catlin: IN THE UNDERGROUND--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234,. 28 pp., $1.00. A gripping albeit conventional story about paranoia and futility in an urban subway. Can't think of anything else to say about it.--bg Leonard Cirino: POEMS OF THE ROYAL CONCUBINE LI XI--JVC Books, Rt. 2 Box 440C, Arcadia FL, 33821. 40 p., $4.95. The soft fragrance of the boudoir, the coiled tension of expectation, the moist honey of lubrication, the softness of yielding flesh, the gentle descent into rapture, the intimations of release, the swelling force, the soft fleeting bursts into the perfect world and then... the end. Youth, decline and final decrepitude of an imperial concubine. Hot sex in the beginning, resignation in the middle, wisdom at the end. Not just another chapbook about a poet humping his girlfriend. Cirinao has taste, discretion, and a full view of life.--as Brian Clark: APOCALYPSE TAO--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234. 16 pp., $1.00. Jump-cut prose partly unsparing revealing autobiography (in part about the author's bisexuality), with references to some pol named Bill here & there, and all kinds of other ravings that include neat words like "befinneginning."--bg William Clark: UNTITLED--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave., Allston MA, 02134. 10 pp., $2.50. (#2 in the Primal Publishing Singles Club). Clark's stories of drug disintegration in the wilds of western Pennsylvania reminded me of a ride I got hitching through that state in 1973--half a dozen hours drinking in pool halls, doing tranquilizers the driver had to combat schizophrenia, and wondering if I'd ever see the interstate again. The country people I met that night were every bit as fucking crazy as any inner city hoodlums I ever ran into on the street. This story of the rape of a handicapped girl brings to light such an unsettling anger and confusion that it made me want to write Clark a blank check for the rest of his published work.--o Norma Cole: MARS--Listening Chamber, 2420 Acton St., Berkeley CA, 94702. 114 pp. Norma Cole's writing is complicated, beautiful, straight to the heart and always about the mind. What the mind does. This book, in 6 sections, is about living, dying, loving-- having lost, having done all those things, and its proof is its presence. The writing, often intricate, and moving from one form to another, conveys a thinking that is convoluted and deeply personal. And because the writing is so felt, the reader insists that the "sense" comes through, grants that it does, and moves on with the work. There is a pain in writing, or perhaps it's that all writing is a moving beyond tragedy. Cole, in this book, shows us that. A gorgeous cover collage by Jess makes this one of the most beautiful books, inside and out, that I've seen in awhile. --jg Norma Cole's MARS is a witness to the event, a coiled serpent ready to strike, danger under the surface of the words she propels. At differing times full of wisdom, a careful observer with a plain-speaking mode of address, or an abstracted voice (many voices here). MARS shows Cole's interest in critical theory as it informs a thread that increases the dimensional thrust accompanying concepts, every word mattering.--pg John Robert Columbo, ed.: WORDS IN SMALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MINIATURE LITERARY COMPOSITIONS--Cacanadadada Press, 3350 W. 21st. Ave., Vancouver B.C., Canada, V6S 1G7. 96 pp. Make it small and do it in 50 words or less. The microtext for your delectation. Most of the sources are SF, but all bear the requisite hermetic compactness. A commentary follows each selection. This is truly the age of the sound byte--will it become the age of the lit byte? As technology causes attention spans to drop, such concision will be a useful skill in the grim determinisms of literary Darwinsm. --as Edmund Conti: EDDIES--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. By playing with words, inverted them, turning syntax and insight inside out, Conti opens a new way of seeing. These tiny poems are self-referential often, but the in-joke is in our minds and we find ourselves joining the play and reinvestigating the possibilities of language, poetry, and thought. For instance, a poem titled "Embellishment" reads, in full, "To be/ Ornate to be". Or the poem "Wry": "I drink/ therefore I am/ what I drink." Even the title of the book could be construed as a pun on the poet's name. The poems are accompanied by equally playful line drawings that have some revelations of their own. This is a good book to have around when friends drop in, certain to stimulate inventive dialog.--jb Marc Cooper, Hannah Holm, Barbara Pillsbury & The Zapistas: THE ZAPISTAS, STARTING FROM CHIAPAS--Open Magazine, PO Box 2726, Westfield, NJ, 07091. $4.00. (#30 in the Open Pamphlet Series) On January 1st of this year the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, consisting primarily of Mayan Tzetal indians, declared war against the Mexican government and took control of the city of San Cristobal. The various dominant news organizations presented this as just another guerrilla insurgence, a five minute story for a few days, then forgotten amidst the pig circus malaise of Washington, DC. But there was more to the story than that, and this pamphlet fills in the pieces. For the most part it amounts to a group descended from the indigenous peoples of the area that have organized themselves to demand justice and genuine democratic reform. Included here is the story of their struggle, as well as documents from the Zapatistas themselves. The fact that the revolt began just as NAFTA took effect and that the Mexican government was willing to negotiate testifies to the power of their organization. Is this the beginning of a broader revolt? Like the rest of the Open Magazine series, this is vital countermedia, an antidote to the usual information tripe.--jb Judson Crews: HENRY MILLER AND MY BIG SUR DAYS--Vergin Press, PO Box 370322, El Paso TX, 79937. 47 pp., $5.95. This memoir's just a slice from the long and complex life of Judson Crews. Yes, he talks about Henry Miller--and Anais Nin and lots of other "well known" folks. The core of this stream-of-consciousness autobio bit (reportedly culled from more than 10,000 pages of notes and journals) is a year he spent at Big Sur, often in the company of Henry Miller. An intimate look at Miller & surrounding people, the times, and Judson's own state of mind. But it's not plodding, introspective stuff--as Belinda Subraman says in her forward, unlike "Anais Nin's... artfully, self-conscious diaries" this is "candid, thoughtful... a perspective on Henry Miller and the Big Sur days that would be quite different from any others."--rkk Judson Crews: MANNEQUIN ANYMORE THAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 34 pp., $5.00 Judson is one of those dirty old men I'd love to bring to a family reunion, knowing he'd get me written out of so many wills, and would leave such a trail of gossip and stories, that while I'd never inherit a fortune, I'd certainly be a part of family history. In this collection we get that lusting action again, tales of Buddha and Casteneda, scents of strong feminine feet, topless bars, being a charter member of N.O.W., reverences to Henry Miller, bouts of masturbation, and freshened Scotch & Seltzers at 3:00 in the morning. These are the stores my uncles used to tell when they were drunk, the stories my grandfather wanted to forget as he tried to claw his way to heaven.--o Elanor Earl Crockett: WI, GEE, IT MUS BE CRAZY LIKE A DOG (pts. 3 & 4)--Bonton Books, 1500 Eastside Dr. #219, Austin TX, 78704. 24 pp. + cassette. Elanor Earl Crockett is a poet and performance poet from Austin whose taped productions show an amazing liveliness and variety of voices. This compilation includes work from a period of several years and would serve as an excellent introduction to her work. On the tape, the poems are performed against a variety of noise an/or music backgrounds, although the sound and voice are often deliberately at the same level, so that neither is dominant. It is fortunate that the tape is accompanied by a booklet of the texts, which stand alone very strongly as poems on the printed page. The poems take a great variety of approaches, from first-person narration to word and/or dialect play, to anaphoric or conceptual structures, to an almost Language-like allusiveness in a piece called "Phrases," a collaboration with "SW": which to choose aerobic animals will see light pocket manufacturers trapped in the gravel mica glinting from this vantage the trajectory silence tears the evening until at night and drive right into the ocean The productions values of this work are simple (reduced typescript, etc.) but the content is strong, polished, and unique. --jmb Doris Cross: REWORKS 1968-1953--Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Box 2065, Santa Fe NM, 87504-2065. 62 pp, $15.00. The full-color cover reproduction of one of Cross's dictionary-page treatments alone is worth ten times the price of this catalog of an 1993 Santa Fe exhibition of her work--at least to those interested in visual poetry, for she was one of the century's masters of the genre. But the volume also contains numerous other excellent reproductions of her works as well as an excellent introduction to it, and her, by Jim Edwards, and a wonderfully poem-filled appreciation by Gerald Burns.--bg Robin Crozier & John M. Bennett: HAW RAG--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214. 8 pp., $1.00. Bizarre combinations of scrawled phrases, clip-outs, Chinese (or Chinese- like) charactry, and on each page but the first word, "REALLY," in triplicate, vertically, somewhere on the page with a large bold "J", "R", or "B" in front of it. Sorta like some kind of rhythm section to help us keep our bearings from movement to movement, I guess.--bg Richard Currey, CROSSING OVER: THE VIETNAM STORIES--Clark City Press, PO Box 1358, 109 Callender St., Livingston MT, 59057. $11.00. CROSSING OVER painfully returned me to those calamitous years, now a full generation past, with all the accuracies of a participant's historical memory. "Rose-stained bodies dumped in the chopper's gut." Poetically-bonded, gritty, vivid details with tersely understated emotion, thus might one characterize these articulate wartime vignettes. Currey is humanely aware, collagistic, and associative. His tour as a Navy medic provided the insight for these understated & exceptionally tight narratives. His skills as a writer, honed in writing two solidly crafted earlier books about Vietnam, allow this book of fewer than 40 text pages to vibrate with the hideous corpses and limbs, the "legs that were not legs... that were glutinous mire, that were ooze." A resurrection of "every drowning ghost and airborne soul." A field notebook--beautiful and dreadful.--jl Joel Dailey: DOPPLER EFFECTS--Shockbox Press, PO Box 7226, Nashua NH, 03060. 20 pp., $2.00 (?). Dead cats, car sex, seductive Cheryl Dreams stories, and other weird juvenilia fill this booklet. I don't know, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but this seemed light weight. I tried to give it a handful of chances, but everytime I had to let it drop.--o Gary David: A LOG OF DEADWOOD--North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327, Berkeley, CA, 94701. 144 pp., $9.95. Labeled a postmodern epic of the South Dakota Gold Rush. Gary David's work does attempt to deconstruct a period of history limited to an active linear journal-like format whereby most conventions are broken down & accented with images from The Wizard of Oz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Old American West; utilizing Viking fury, Jungian Symbolism, Sioux Legends, & even a touch of hard science. Actually 49 presences, each a poem, each a day in the journal of Deadwood 1876. From "Day 25": "...spear-shaker, you're gonna cry/ 96 tears!" Or, from "Day 48": "I feel my days/ over the mirror of its pages.//...white stone black stone/make.// Gung ho & hard on/ rising red, but on the run."--rrle Jeff Derksen: DWELL--Talonbooks, 201-1019 East Cordova, Vancouver BC, V6A 1M8. 98 pp., $9.95. Derksen scrutinizes all; the pieces in this book are the ongoing critique of living the life he lives--the culture, the politics; nothing escapes, nothing devolves into sentimentality, everything receives a keen, if sometimes merely whispered, analysis. It is observation with edge, with keen insight, with a fair amount of cynicism, and a pleasing, sometimes brilliant, play on language. The pieces in the book vary interestingly both formally, and in what they take on. "Hold on to your bag, Betty" is a wonderful, resonant and sometimes lush "report" from foreign lands; "Temp Corp", the final piece in the book, is spare but emotionally packed, held very close to the line of breaking, tracing a kind of emotional pain that only loss engenders. A wonderful book from this up n' coming Canadian writer.--jg Paul Dilsaver: A CURE FOR OPTIMISM: POEMS--Sky and Sage Books, PO Box 3606, Rapid City SD. 72 pp. And I thought that I was a pessimist! The language of ultimate despair. Dark laughter drawn from a sadness, a jaded contempt for homo sapiens and "the blinding terrors of consciousness." Praying for amnesia and oblivion. Extraordinary world weariness and misanthropy--as John Dollis: BL( )NK SPACE--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. Dollis writes poetry that appears abstract and elusive on the surface but is rich in the depths. He is dealing with the fundamental means by which we arrive at a sense of ourselves, define ourselves, and communicate this sense to the world at large. But rather than taking shelter in pure philosophy he incorporates elements of the everyday, giving his work a connectedness that normally is missing from such studied introspection. He introduces an idea then detaches from it, moves around it, rediscovers it evolving into the fibers of his own intelligence, a fascinating process to observe and participate in.--jb Larry Eigner: WINDOWS/WALLS/YARD/WAYS--Black Sparrow Press, 24 Tenth St., Santa Rosa CA, 95401. 192 pp., $13.00(cloth). Eigner has been the inspiration for many poets who have read him, and read by many where he lives in the Bay Area, but he has never received the audience he deserves. He is simply one of the finest poets of a generation that included Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and James Broughton, not to mention the Beat Poets. This volume, which covers the period 1959-1992, presents a large enough selection that someone, having never read Eigner, would come away with a good understanding of his work, not to mention a change in his or her way of looking at things. There is an almost Eastern sense of awareness in Eigner's poetry, a stillness in the imagery, so quiet & yet so intense. You can see the images in your mind's eye so clearly that when you move into an odd turn of phrase you move through it and are changed almost without your noticing it. The poem "July 22 87": water splashes At the surface and hits you whatever things may be or have been But there is no way to do justice to Eigner's poetry in a short review, or in a long one. If you like poetry of any kind, from traditional to wildly experimental, you will be changed by reading this book. Very highly recommended.--jb Endwar: FOUR WINDOWS, ONE FRAME--Institutional Projects, PO Box 10973, State College PA , 16805. 12 pp.+tapes, $20.00. The box this material comes in describes the audio tapes included as "four antitapes (total time 2 seconds)." It's all in the packaging and labeling. Yes, very Cagean, but no minor imitation--in fact, about as appealing an extension of the genre as I've come across. --bg Endwar: UNTITLED--Institutional Projects, PO Box 10973, State College PA , 16805. 6 pp., $1.00. A scrap of found poetry and three business cards with little 2-part conceptual poems on them, in two cases on both sides. Extremely clever, like the card with "Bill of Sale" on one side and "Bill of Rights" on the other. Fascination equation when you think about it.--bg Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine WI, 53402. 20 pp., $2.00. You get the impression, on first reading these poems, that Michael Estabrook is a novelist-- not long ago, in a letter, Estabrook told me he'd tried to write a novel, but he wasn't entirely satisfied with the result. So, I imagine, he let the poetry take over. STRIPPED & SHIVERING consists of 19 short poems, each poem a personality sketch. Estabrook's lines are sharp, his words well chosen. Too many poets make us plow through line after line, serving up too much verbiage in the fat. Estabrook's poems are small, one-takes, well-crafted arrows. They instruct, without didacticism, about the hard knocks of life.--kn Terry Everton: MANNEQUIN DREAMS ROTTING THERE IN MUGSWEAT AND SUDS--Borderline Press, PO Box 741178, Arvada CO, 80006. 24 pp., $2.00. Jesus, with an opening poem like "mannequin dreams rotting there in mugsweat and suds" where a drunk in a bar has a tooth fall out, a woman buys it for five bucks, and when the man asks her what she's going to do with it she says: "I'm building/ myself a man/ one piece at a time"--I'd say, it's a winner. Everton tosses the reader into a world filled with competitive hookers, incompetent fabulous boyfriends who can't even kill their cheating old ladys without goofing it up, bar farts, out of control fires, german shepherds slaughtered for stealing chickens, and rats fighting in alleys for the scraps left by drunks--action among scavengers, and hard gritty survival tales of the down and out.--o Lawerence Ferlinghetti: THESE ARE MY RIVERS New & Selected Poems 1955-1993--New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York NY, 10011. 320 pp., $22.95. Any library of 20th century poetry would have to include the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is a connector between contemporary and modern. Engaged in the events of his age, moving through the world igniting sparks, illuminations--not unlike the imagists in form, or the troubadors in romance, but completely, purely Ferlighetti. There is no mistaking his voice, a classic sensibility writing the poetry of a world spinning sensless in dissolution. His poetry is real and direct, in ordinary tongue, but rarely resigned, never hopeless. At the end of "Assassination Raga," in part a commemoration of the Kennedy assassinations, after facing the cold reality of bitter death he says, "There is no god but Life" and leaves us with "People with roses/ behind the barricades!" The poems are his own selection from his books, and includes an excellent selection of new work. Ferlinghetti has certainly been a poet of our times, but has also certainly written in eternity, suspending the events and his own flesh and blood soul there, illuminations of the world.--jb Huck Finch: PROGRESS--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234. 18 pp., $1.00. Striking photograph-sequence in shades of day-glo green of some unidentifiable road-killed animal's week-by-week decomposition. With texts. Also a cover photo of the author kissing a deer head at a roadkill art show at the University of South Florida... for which action he was promptly ushered out.--bg Charles Henri Ford: OM KRISHNA I--Bogg Publications, 422 N. Cleveland St., Arlington VA, 22201. 20 pp., SASE (large). This book, offered in Bogg's free-for-postage series, was published in 1979 by Cherry Valley Editions. Charles Henri Ford was one of the "founders of the New York school" of poetry, but this book is not a very good primer on that genre. OM KRISHNA I is an uncomfortable mix of '50s styles, '60s subjects, and '70s me- generation attitude. The book (mostly one long poem) combines beat, subconscious stream-of-consciousness, flower-power pop philosophy... a dash of Eastern mysticism and a fistful of pop literary references. But it's not a savory stew. Ford published his first volume of verse in 1938, but OM KRISHNA I sounds hippy- dippy and temporal, a detour by a graying poet into the love-beads scene.--rkk Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Cocker, PO Box 640543, San Francisco CA, 94164. 44 pp., $5.95. The roles of critic and poet are merged in a poetic space that engenders a work which expands the tradition of Shelley's "A Defense of Poetry" and counters the smug extremes of T. S. Eliot. Foster's preface, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With Politics" is a refreshing reaction to critics who suggest that their reductions of meaning- generation processes in the poem are more important that the poem itself. This is a welcome diatribe--we're getting used to seeing Language poets people-pulped by Tiannamen Square vintage critical tanks who have little or no love for the poetry itself, they only want to smash the work into their own agendas. Foster's poetry resists critical appropriation by refusing to confine itself to a single form or prosodic arrangement. This is negative capability taken to a new level & it feels good--like flight-simulating G- forces in a jet built for oblivion.--ssn 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 cipher,/ 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 Celestine Frost: AN IMAGINED EXPERIENCE OVER THE ENTRANCE--Dusty Dog, 1904-A Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301. 55 pp., $5.95. This chapbook is a nice surprise--Celestine Frost's crafting is a real find. It's exquisite work, dense and enveloping with a strong, assured narration. Celestine is adept at both metaphoric work and down-to-earth storylines--and manages to toss off lines like "O it had come to the morning/ of the drug bitter end// with that quality/ of a private bath" without being cliched or sophomoric. There's only one literary price to pay for Celestine's imagery... the reader needs to take a breather every dozen pages or so.--rkk Peter Ganick: NEWS ON SKIS--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA, 94924. 61 pp., $8.00. In three parts; the first a wonderful play on UPPER and lower case, a rant that becomes a mesmerizing cadenced song; the second a visually compelling array of geometric stanzas--an interesting tension created by the sense that the language/content is there solely to fill out the (literal) form; and the third, an Epilogue, is a series of ellipses, dash, and period-ridden stanzas and lines. This book offers a pleasing variety, in form, shape, and tone. The back cover blurbs are the most loudly ironic I've come across--text is layered over other text so that a sort of ulterior alphabet is formed--no word recognizable, but the sentiment is clear. A fun book.--jg Bob Grumman: EXCERPT FROM RABBIT STEW--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 Bernadette Lane, Sarasota FL, 34234. 15 pp. Perhaps one would have waited for the complete work to appear before attempting a review, but this little tidbit of a longer piece is too tempting to let pass. It consists of a dialogue between Ned and Fred (other characters intrude later) who refer to various incidents of incest, necrophlia, and murder, all in a rather absurdist, offhand manner. One wants to read more of this!--jmb A portion of one of Grumman's plays, somewhere beyond Surrealism or the antics of the Cabaret Voltaire. For the space of a few lines the dialog is odd, but logical, then complications arise, sometimes by intellectual extension of the dialog, sometimes by poetic flight, and we tremble joyously as our nerves are ripped out by these wicked imaginative turns. There are problems with wheelbarrow theft, and beaten mothers, a man named Wally drug around with a rope, and other things that begin to make strange sense. Personas shift and veer into one another, characters pontificate and confess. But through what could be agony a sense of joy is dancing and the plays begins to reveal itself in the mind of the beholder. This is a delight to read and it would be better still to see the whole play performed.--jb Mark Hammer: IRIS--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth Ave., Buffalo NY, 14213. 12 pp., $3.00. A series of quite, precise lyrics each with the title "iris" and dedicated to poets like John Weiners and John Clarke. The poems often recall the crafted devotions of some of Robin Blaser's work, another poet who is quoted significantly in the book. But these poems work best because the accuracy of their own insights is not overwhelmed by the writer's obvious admiration for this illustrious and varied influences--despite those influences (and very unlike a lot of recent poetry that seems to try to imitate greatness) the carefully sharp vision here is clearly Hammer's own.--mw Keith Higginbotham: GLOOMY NEW LIFE--Burning Llama Press, 100 Courtland Dr., Columbia SC, 29223. 8 pp., SASE? Dopey pix sprinkled with word and phrases in various typographies that warp together a droll story that begins, "I grew up/ fucked in/ What the Seventies did to/ gender, with boys/ and girls dancing in separate/ rotes of pain/ Clamped to their/ unsensuous/ slang/ of denial."--bg A small booklet of collaged found texts and images with a definite, if elliptical, autobiographical narrative structure. Childhood, sexuality, class, history: a rich mixture of topics roiling about in a visually stimulating and humorous format.--jmb Lita Hornick & Poet Friends: GREAT QUEENS WHO LOVED POETRY: TO ELIZABETH & ELANOR--Giorno Poetry Systems, 222 Bowery, New York NY, 10012. 74 pp. A professionally produced perfect-bound book with color illustrations, consisting of poetry by Lita Hornick in collaboration with a variety of poets, mostly from NY, such as Jeff Wright, Alice Notley, John Giorno, Ron Padgett, Rochelle Owens, George Economou, Bob Rosenthal, Paul Violi, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, among others. The poems are generally in a conversational first-person voice, and have a consistency of tone that is a bit surprising considering that Hornick's collaborators are such a variety of differing and strong poets. This suggest that hers in the dominant voice in these exchanges. The volume also includes reproductions of artwork from her collection, a "credo," and an essay, "Why I Love Gay Men." An entertaining book focusing on a unique and intriguing personality.--jmb Tom House: NAZIS & NOSE JOBS--Tom House, PO Box 120661, Nashville TN, 37212. 12 pp., $3.00. House has never been one to shy away from trouble, and his strong political (if not necessarily "politically correct") stances have always been clear. This time House attacks media manipulation, government seduction, planetary self-destruction, fuckin' the flag in the name of punk, politics and pornography, televised evangelists, and a hundred other things that piss him off so much that even the anarchists are afraid to take him on. This is hard core, without pretense or plastic presentation.--o William Howe: TRIPFLEA--Tailspin Press, 418 Richmond, #2,, Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. This is the first "book" from a brand new press. Tailspin's project will be to challenge the notion of what a book is, that is the form of a book itself. Tailspin will produce concrete chapbooks. This first offering by William Howe arrives in an envelope and appears to be ordinary until one opens the "book." The pages not only turn towards the right but alternate pages turn towards the left. It is as if two books collided. This allows the free floating text on the alternate pages to reform endlessly. There is no narrative poetry enclosed. Words are grouped in clusters and as the pages combine and recombine there is a fluctuating constellation or word units. Here is a map of words that leads to the imagination.--mb The first in a new series of chapbooks devoted to exploring the physical possibilities of the chapbook format. The pages of this book are folded over each other, so that opening the book is like opening a series of doors, each of which changes the layout of the words in front of the reader. The words themselves are angry stutters of pun-filled language ("sometimes i change my/ mem(shoes) ory" arranged in striking visual fragments; the eye roves around the surface of the pages instead of reading from top to bottom. The constantly changing field of words resists all attempts at unity, a visual tripflea in a long dark night of the soul.--mw TRIPFLEA's readers can't escape their responsibility for the order of the text they read -- but this is hardly a solemn responsibility. Howe separates and isolates letters, words, phrases, and spreads these fragments across the page; deformations, klang associations, and polyglot puns yield the "well puteed achaeans," the "wallaby wannabe," the "meatbook," and "laus methedrine hydrochloride." This is the sort of book that will make me think of Raymond Queneau's permutational sonnet sequence Cent mille milliards de poe`mes, but there's a difference in Howe's work. The mathematician Queneau's work is generated from the formal structures of the sonnet, while the reader, who would need a minimum of 190,258,751 years to read through the complete sequence, is in effect made redundant. Once the permutational principle is grasped, everything of importance has been grasped. Howe, on the other hand, leaves much less room for textual permutations (his unit is the whole page, while Queneau's was the line). What's foregrounded, instead, is the reader's work with the text Howe, as "simulated authorial figure," has put together. But Howe (unlike Queneau) is very present in this book; the reader will have to struggle with him in order to redirect the text. And just as that struggle reaches its peak, the text itself will jump many times its height into the air and land where you didn't expect it to. Future concrete chapbooks from tailspin press will include work by Ken Sherwood (of RIF/T) and Michael Basinski.--cp Robert Howington: SPIKED SLURPEE--UBP, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 76147. 21 pp., $2.00. Howington writes like Mickey Spillane on acid, with short short stories that carry all the black and white film noir he can muster. This short collection was a fun read--car jackings, bowel movements revenged by vicious kids in Texas, wet dreams of Madonna, bad ass wannabes, killers passing the time in bars, dog murderers, rapes, uzis, and other tales so weird I'm glad Howington lives 1000 miles away from Chicago. These stories remind me of early Bukowski--fun and playful and so mean they make the kids in horror flicks look innocent.--o Nine short stories, most under 1,000 words. His themes are influenced by the crime genre, a combination of Todd Moore and Charles Bukowski. In "Old-Fashion Grilled Pound Cake," a man is shot to death outside a bar and Howington's protagonist offers the killer the last of his beer. A woman witnesses murder in "The Long Cool Drag"; she calmly remarks how it reminds her of "Miami Vice." There are guns everywhere, especially in Texas--maybe too many. I read along, patiently waiting for the author to change gears, take me somewhere else. But he keeps on, driving home one violent scene after another. Robert W. Howington knows how to write--I just wish he'd write about something more than murder in American streets.--kn Robert W, Howington and C.F. Roberts: FUCK YOU!--Wormfeast Press, PO Box 519, Westminster MD, 21158. 18 pp., $3.00. The shock value of this chapbook would undoubtedly outrage Miss Manners. There are images of murder, torture, flatulation, animal copulation, vomit, and kinky sex. Robert W. Howington is described as "poet, nut, admirer of serial killers & Bukowski," and C.F. Roberts is "sickly, sweet, painful, vampires and goblins." Now that we have parameters, let me go on to say Howington throws in crude stick-cartoons of oral sex. I don't know why. Truly representative of the shock poetry underground, the kind of stuff that you never show to children, and which raises the hackles of born-again Christians and the prosecutor's office alike.--kn Don A. Hoyt: A NEW KERYGMA--Bootleg Press, PO Box 158, Uniondale NY, 11553. 24 pp. Don Hoyt is a classic poet--that is, he takes a single emotion, event or scene and draws it out through vivid and complex language. Lots of similes and metaphors and that sort of poetry stuff. Traditional work where the term "craftsmanship" can still be applied. It's not the sort of poetry a person zips through like a comic book, but the type that should be enjoyed over a cup of hot java, a box of bon-bons and a snowy day outside. >From philosophy to satire, Hoyt covers the gamut in these 15 poems.--rkk Albert Huffstickler: CITY OF THE RAIN--Press of Circumstance, 312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751. 36 pp., $6.00. This collection of poetry started badly for me; with a rhymey ballad about the absence of a "place to ease your pain/ in the City of the Rain." The next poem concerned a rain that made the poet want to scream (his description) because it "was my loneliness and disenchantment." But then came some highly effective barroom slices of life in the bitter-sweet Bukowski mode that redeemed the book.--bg Albert Huffstickler: THE DARK FLOWER--Press of Circumstance, 312 East 43rd Street #103, Austin, Texas, 78751. 8 pp. Small but precious, easy to slip into your pocket when you are headed somewhere and might get caught without something to read, the subway, the restroom at work, behind the dumpster while the crack heads shoot it out, or anywhere. Beautiful purple cover with the poet's own artwork, and one long poem inside. "They found her sleeping/on a large stone, curled up/child like, face soft."--rrle G. Huth: DBQPPRODBOOQPDB #9--dbqp, 875 Central Parkway, Schenectady NY, 12309. 4 pp., SASE. Actually this publisher's catalog, but well worth sending for, filled as it is with Joyceanated locutions such as "contradionary," "eternaphemera," and "stamge speace." Includes a number of Larry Tomoyasu's thought-whirring illuscriptations; and presents through its list of dbqp "merchandise" a rich survey of what's going on at the most inventive margins of poetry.--bg Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 44107. 28 pp., $10.00. Geoff's takeoff on a child's alphabet primer is full of little delights. Instead of words beginning with the letter, the letter itself is depicted: A and a caption is added: An A Then usually another frame or two is added to playfully comment on the one above: An with caption: A An Lots of surprises as a fairly rigid form is bent and played with in 26 different ways.--ar Ruth Jespersen: THE BLINK OF AN EYE--7030 Evergreen Woods Trl., Apt. B-136, Spring Hill FL, 34608. 438 pp., $29.95. Originally published by Mother of Ashes Press--publisher Joe Singer is gone, but we can't let this book die! Ruth Jespersen has acquired the copies from Joe's estate. This is one of the strangest novels I have ever read. It's as if Anais Nin's love of self-display were mixed with Djuana Barnes' peculiar gentlemen callers and Ivy Compton-Burnett's conversational monomanias. Jespersen is extremely funny, idiosyncratic and bizarre. This is a novel that hinges on her fascinating and quirky self. It's the kind of work that could, and should, have a cult following. A feminist work in a sense, about a woman with an offbeat but healthy mind, always being her own inimitable self.--as Andrew Joron & Robert Frazier: INVISIBLE MACHINES--Jazz Police Books, PO Box 3235, Lagrande OR, 97850. 60 pp., $9.00. Science Fiction poetry spanning thirteen years of collaborative writing. It highlights the difference between SF and other genres of writing--the intensely shared, interactive, collaborative elements of SF, since we all have a stake in the Future and a soul in the Other. In his introduction, Andrew Joron sums it up well: "SF is, in fact, a dialogical genre, one in which texts are written in direct response to other texts, in which meanings are produced and sustained by community effort... I believe the cross-pollinating spirit of SF can be authentically transferred to the writing of poetry." Illustrated with strange photos by noted surrealist Thomas Wiloch.--dw Karl Kempton: RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH and RUNE 7: POEM, A MAPPING--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00@. With Kempton a typewriter is not a machine, but a ritual device with which he articulates his magic. He has, over the years, created a metalanguage, unique to himself, instantly recognizable. In RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH we see figures, at times human-like and sometimes something other. But these images are organic, full of living creatures speaking to us through their form. In RUNE 7: POEM, A MAPPING we begin with "poem" typed in block letters then follow a metamorphosis and charting of the word and resonances surrounding it. These two new books testify to the power of Kepmton's continuing exploration in mythic fields of poetic intelligence.--jb Elayne Keratsis: JACK AND MISS CRACK--Firestarter Films and Press, 802 Euclid Ave. #102, Miami Beach, FL, 33139. 82 pp., $11.00. Elayne is a princess of Pop illusion, with a smooth flowing voice, and a sharp but mournful chorus which exerts an ironic presence; dramatic, flirtful, bittersweet songs conducted with vamp/camp wit. There is a dark side to her elastic alcoholic visions-- Elayne is one bitchy, funk-driven, charming, dynamic word-slave. Her incendiary neo-beat talent makes poetry and short stories fun again. --rrle Arthur Winfield Knight: COWBOY POEMS--Potpourri Publishing Company, PO Box 8278, Prairie Village, Kansas, 66208. 54 pp., $3.50. Fifty-two poems, more or less traditional free verse, all centering on various 19th century outlaws and their family and friends. Jesse James, Cole Younger, Belle Starr, Doc Holiday, Kid Curry, Black Bart, and Geronimo are just a few . Knight has extended the outlaw metaphor to include very human thoughts and acts, utilizing empathy and understanding to create remarkable personalities which makes them more hero and less villain in the eyes of the reader. Like these words from Cole Younger: "...but I'm not sorry about riding/ with Frank and Jesse./ I'm not sorry about anything." or these words from Calamity Jane: "'I'm just ahead of my time./ In another fifty years/ all women will be doin' it." This is a fine collection for fans of the Old West, outlaws, or revisioned details.--rrle Michael Kriesel: LONG DARK--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 44 pp., $4.00(?). Kriesel mixes modern mythology (Kryptonite, Cthulu, Bill Bixby, Dr. Doom) with his post-Navy experiences in the long poem LONG DARK. Alienation and disorientation is captured in lines like: "My lst week in the graveyard/ and we're in this metal shed/ where all the people who die/ over winter get stored because/ the ground's too hard to dig," and "I've always been attracted/ to the wives of friends./ Perhaps because we have/ so much in common," and "You were 2 hours of the/ best foreplay I ever had". There are explosions of honesty, confusion, and anger. There is fruitless lust, and endless pointless jobs. There is the America we live in today, undressed, and without illusions.--o T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 24 pp., $3.00. Seventeen poems from Cleveland's T. L. Kryss. "There will be no academic squabbles about authorship or emotional influences on this work," remarks Steven Ferguson in his introduction to this small chapbook. Indeed, Kryss takes us to Treblinka, Cleveland's lower east side, and even out toward the edge of the solar system. His poetry is tight, concise, and unique in voice. Tom Kryss--along with d.a. levy, William Wantling, and Charles Bukowski--remains an icon of America's largely disregarded underground literary tradition. STRANGE ATTRACTIONS, in addition to Tom's poems, is host to several drawings by Harland Ristau, Dan Nielsen, Hilary Krzywkowski, and T. L. and Carolyn Kryss.--kn Janet Kuypers: LOOKING THROUGH THEIR WINDOWS--Scars Publications, 5310 North Magnolia, Chicago IL. 20 pp. I like Janet Kuypers' poems, even if she occasionally dwells on the emotional consequences of death and pan too much. Even so, for a poet under 30, her mastery of the simple word is exceptional. Too many poets, when they attempt a change of persona (especially in the first person voice), the result is often flat, unbelievable, too forced. Not so with Kuypers. In the poem "Private Lives III, the elevated train", she takes us for a ride with morning commute yuppies on a crowded train to work. Suddenly the poet's disgust for these middle-class workers surfaces; when she observes a woman decked out in a full-length fur coat, her reaction becomes the urge to spill coffee on the woman. "I'll bet they don't even know what the animals they killed for this looked like," she writes. Most of the other poems here are good, though Kuypers' emotionality can become intense, if not bewildering.--kn Lauren Leja: untitled--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave., Allston MA, 02134. 10 pp., $2.50. (#l in the Primal Publishing Singles Club) Leja writes long spontaneous stream of consciousness lines, and they always carry an edge. The first story in this chap, HISTORY, crawls into the drunken confessional of a woman just picked up by some guy who carries more luggage than most tourists. The story QUICKSAND carries another self destructive woman into the gutter... and i start to wonder why the women in these stories keep walking into stupid fucked up situations, as if they'd all just stepped off the bus from the suburbs. And it is probably that element, that lack of street sense and survival instincts, that makes these stories so fascinating. The only complaint I have is that $2.50 is a lot of money for ten 5" x 5" pages.--o Lyn Lifshin & Gina Bergamino: WHITE HORSE CAFE--Mulberry Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 24 pp., $1.00. WHITE HORSE CAFE is not co-written but divided in two sections; the first by Lifshin and the latter half by Bergamino. As usual, Lifshin's poems come wham-wham-wham in a torrent of words and visual stimuli. This time she's talking love (or as close to it as Lyn ever gets in her poetry!). Gina, too, talks about men lost and found. The connector? Not a WHITE HORSE CAFE per se, but a definite sense of place--bolting the feelings to a specific locale.--rkk Gerald Locklin: WOMAN TROUBLE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 867, Desert Hot Springs CA, 92240. 20 pp., $4.95. Locklin's character here, a womanizing educator, looks for love in all the wrong places. Even so, as a married man, he is in search of "something closer to a regular family, a regular marriage," while simultaneously looking for sex on the side. The main character, Jimmy, "cannot afford a nervous breakdown," so he drinks, only to end up in dread of what Hemingway called "The Fear," which the rest of us call delirium tremens. He warns friends and associates not to "take my drinking as an example or as anything manly or romantic." Various women, as if sensing his perpetual horniness, tease but do not bed him. In the end, frustrated, he masturbates while remembering an affair he had with a "very anal erotic young lady." Locklin, as always, knows instinctively how to shape and steer good fiction, especially dialogue. He is a master humorist, though I'm sure all of this would be lost on the hardboiled feminist who'd likely find Gerald's fiction sexist. The rest of us can laugh at the absurdity of Jimmy's chaotic existence.--kn Colleen Lookingbill: INCOGNITA--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San Francisco CA, 94159. 61 pp., $8.00. Most of the work in this book is in prose form, and explores some of the more interesting corners of what prose can do. The sentences, while often employing normative grammar and syntax, take a turn. Descriptiveness is upended. "Fate with unkissed lips allowing the wick to ignite a vigilant ear, mixing things up seemingly indestructible after midnight at such an hour an entrancing tableau." Run-on sentences at their very best. The words seem to expand and contract to fit the space of their thoughts. This is a solid and interesting book, well worth reading.--jg Damian Lopes: 2 SLIDES OF A--Fingerprinting Inkoperated, PO Box 657 Station P, Toronto Ontario, CANADA, M5S 2Y4. 2 "pp." A work of visual or concrete poetry presented as two 35mm transparencies glass-mounted in plastic settings. The slides, negative and positive images of a designed letter A, should be superimposed any way one wishes and projected simultaneously. Bound in an attractive printed small case rather like a matchbook cover. A unique and intriguing production.--jmb Catherine Lynn: THE SNAKE PIT--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine WI, 53402. 34 pp., $3.00. Every once in a while I read something that seems so brutally honest it almost makes me shy. The poems in this collection approach that emotional state. "Relapse" captures a nervous breakdown with a panic reaction that left me rubber legged, "Doctor Bastard" takes on a sadistic therapist who thinks he's an exorcist, "Getting Your Money's Worth" captures stealing food while in a hospital. These are real poems, honest poems, full of life and weird worlds and therapy.--o Elizabeth MacKiernan: ANCESTORS MAYBE--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove Ave., Providence RI, 02906. 160 pp., $8.00. Imbued by the odd charm that invariably derives from a wacky family, three sisters exert themselves to the highest perfection of their eccentricities. Understated and delicate humor of the kind that our British cousins so pride themselves on possessing. Those who delight in little vignettes and the featherlike touch will be enchanted by it.--as Stephen-Paul Martin: FEAR & PHILOSOPHY--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105. 124 pp., $8.95. The best collection of meta-fictions I've EVER read. Its peak is a sur-novella in the form of an essay--or; better, notes toward an essay, a definitive essay--about Superman (and Lois, Jimmy and Perry), whose reality (or, mare exactly, equivalence to my and your reality) the text's very intelligent narrator takes for granted; and expects us to as well. The result is hilarious satire, caustic porn, philosophical fun, poetic brilliance, mad sanity--and a text for all-time.--bg As we are daily deluged by infotainment and disinformation the world narrows to the parameters of the delugion. We notice nagging anxieties but are unable to notice anything physical that might explain them. Exhausted, we relax further into the media haze, only to become more anxious. Such is "civilization" as we slide screaming through the final decade of the millenium. In these stories, which often read like prose poems wired for speed, Martin utilizes the very elements of our anxiety to shatter the illusion in the mirror and release us into the world beyond our collective dream. He demonstrates through a crucible of topical paradox how the individual is continually undermined and buried beneath a sea of consumerism until nothing remains but a hollow hunger for gleaming new objects suspended before us, we become the "hungry ghosts" of Tibetan mythology. But Martin takes this a step further, bringing into question the very assumptions on which civilization is founded. How much of what we call reality is based on these assumptions? In the final section "Double Identity", which is one long derangement of the Superman story, we confront the essence of this conflict, "But in fact it was a fake George Reeves who killed himself in Hollywood Hills. The real George Reeves got caught on the silver screen, became pure seeming, became what he had to become, became pure cytoplasmic screaming." So much of what we identify as ourselves, as what we are willing to defend to the death, is nothing more than "pure seeming", the narrow mythos of a dwindling cultural apparatus. Driving to the dark heart of our psychology, Martin reminds where true freedom lies, or at the very least offers us the opportunity of finding it for ourselves.--jb Greg Matherly: SHACKLED IN 3-D--The Useless Press, PO Box 413, Bristol TN, 37621. 28 pp., $3.00. The opening poem, "Better Belief," captures homelessness with a bite that leaves scars: "A cynic. A bastard./ A parody of our times./ I love you all...". "Falling Together Again" reminds me of the kind of relationships that make talk show audiences cringe with fear--an on again, off again neurotic messes that go in circles, carrying love in fucked- up cycles of despair. "Just Breathing" disputes suicide, casting it against the living dead. And that's only the first page in this chap..--o Lisa McLaughlin: THE BODY'S EXECUTIONER--tel-let, 1818 Phillips Pl., Charleston IL, 61920. 16 pp., $2.00?? Short prose vignettes in various shades of surrealism. In one, McLaughlin beautifully works Everywoman's coming-of-age depths and derangements out of the following passage from a Natural History article on a contemporary religious sect: "Young Hutterite girls often create a secret world confined to a locked chest. Here are found bits of the temporal world... cosmetics... and suntan lotion."--bg Douglas Messerli: ALONG WITHOUT--Littoral Books, 6026 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. 90 pp., $11.95. Intertextualities of death and its multiple others--this is a "Masque of the Red Death" played out in a large British manor house. Plague narrative weaves disparate parts together: narratives by Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett, others; photo stills from Claude Ricochet's underground film, SANS LONGTEMPS; voices intoning poetry of ruptured self. Messerli's poems grip the sweat that pours down in the middle of a back that has been long broken by the horrific thought that even what we envision as heaven is lined with gargoyles. Fears, contagions, contaminations mark the relationships: "Blood, blood only/ binds us to the loving/ lived in the pact of acting." Artaud's THEATRE OF CRUELTY is a linguistic shadow behind every eye.--ssn Thom Metzger: THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING--Autonomedia, 55 South 11th St., PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station, Brooklyn NY, 11211. 188 pp., $6.00. Occasional flashes of what might be termed Maldororean rhetorical landscapes that give way to a generalized irrational spewing. Rants and post-gnostic disgust! Anarchist tirades! To my rational mind it seems imprecation for the sake of imprecation. Is the irrationality to a higher purposes? That's difficult to say.--as Effie Mihopoulos: LANGUID LOVE LYRICS--Salome/Ommation Press, 5548 N. Sawyer, Chicago, IL, 60625. 70 pp., $ 8.00. Languid, yes sometimes, but always soft, flowing, lyrical. Beautiful without the edge, the hard-driving refrains which made her earlier book "The Moon Cycle" a gift. Here Effie lets us see another side, a magical, moody side applied to loves of all kinds, with exacting allusions to Sirens, Medea, Diana, Satyrs, Salome, Angels, George Sand, the sun, the army, and even a foot fetish. Her poetry is infused with imagery, energy, and an impressive boldness: "The sky is a brass drum that gleams/ pound on it/ you will hurt your hands..."--rrle Christine Monhollen: RAZOR MOON--Triage Press, PO Box 1166, Sterling Heights MI, 48311. $7.95. The majority of the poems in this collection locate themselves in the grasp of Eros. As the poet notes, "The flesh speaks." Throughout there is a joining in the act of love and made as a purled poem fabric from the intimacy between a woman and a man. The center of the poetry is the heart beneath the mesh of nature within the body self of the "I". The heart is a sexual thing. And fleeting as is the apex of love there is then loss, losing, separation, and the anticipation of and finally the reunion, union, reunion. And so there is the notion of death then in all of this life which makes this poetry, "the combination becomes a whole."--mb Todd Moore: ARMED & DANGEROUS--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00. Todd Moore shoots from the hip, would never consider taking prisoners, and leaves a trail of blood and guts, bullets and broken knives, wherever he chooses to go. In this collection, with great illustrations by Dan Nielsen, Todd rips into the masses with all of the fury and hate and survival instincts he can pull out of his gut. In the love poem, "brenda dreams," we get lines like: "...all/ roads lead to/ her father/ who talks to/ his shotgun/ before the/ shooting the/ wound in/ frank's back/ is a door/ brenda puts/ her face/ inside she/ can feel his/ blood going/ w/her tongue". And that is just a quick sampling of the turmoil that follows in the other 23 poems in this collection.--o Todd Moore: THE LAST GOOD THING--Bull Thistle Press, PO Box 184, Jamaica VT, 05343. 24 pp., $9.50. In this new collection Todd's words ring as loud as ever, while the chapbook itself is a thing of beauty--hand sewn binding, wrap-around cover, handset type so perfect and on the mark that if feels like a collector's item you'd want to pass on to your grandchildren--that is, until you start reading about blood and guts and lust, suicides and murders, alcoholic psychosis, brass knuckles and blackjacks, and generally a world you would most like to hide from your children if you had half a chance. This is pure hardcore violence and libido schizophrenia, and some of the best work I've read since, well, Todd's last book.--o Todd Moore & Gina Bergamino: AMERICAN CANNIBAL--Mulberry Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 20 pp., $1.00. Poems in your face, straight as a razor and right out of the blood-drenched reality of the daily news. Todd Moore, known for his multi-volume long poem on John Dillinger (which has been abandoned midstream by yet another publisher--this time Primal Publishing, two books into it, folded...), is also a master of the minimal shock poem, a no- bullshit arena where death, torture, and humiliation lurk behind drab midwestern facades. Gina Bergamino recreates Jack the Ripper, a modern-day reincarnation of the original who serves blood to unsuspecting guests in beer. In "Schizophrenic Baby", she details insanity; her protagonist smells quinine in the shower, envisions "a choir of angels" hovering over her in the hospital, and dwells on the abortions she endured before marriage. Much of the poetry here is impulsive, not unlike violence and insanity itself. AMERICAN CANNIBAL is stark realism. Not for the weak of stomach.--kn Gustave Morin: RUSTED CHILDHOOD MEMOIRS--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. According to the introduction this book is the result of Morin's destroying some of his early poems. I did not read any of those early poems so I cannot testify to their value, or lack thereof, but their destruction has produced an astonishing volume of vizlature. The pages are starkly original and beautifully organic, as if an alien from some other world had collected scraps from our world and assembled a series of language maps accessible only by intuition. They also function as a series of paintings consisting of letters, pen and ink scribbling and drawing, xerox images and fingerprints. Moving images in collision at the crossroad of millenniums, rusted childhood memoirs is hauntingly, wonderfully weird.--jb Sheila E. Murphy: TOMMY AND NEIL--Sun/Gemini Press, PO Box 42170, Phoenix AZ, 85733. 90 pp., $12.95 paper/$20 hardcover. A book of poetry with an unusual premise: each section consisting of 36 poems written to one of the poet's brothers, on the occasion of each's 36th birthday. The volume is professionally produced, bound in signatures with color covers, and wider than tall to allow ample space for some of the poems' long lines. The poetry is personal and intimate, addressing the issues of a particular family and particular relationships, but there is nothing maudlin about the writing, and it contains none of the usual cliches of "confessional" discourse. The language of these poems moves seamlessly between what Janet Grey, in a comment on the cover, calls the "pre-grammatical" and the "narrative"--this is a major factor in creating the sense of intense but relaxed caring and attention directed both at the subject/objects of the writing (the poet's brothers), and at the act and process of writing itself. The book is a treasure; accessible and elusive, personal and universal, innovative and immersed in the most traditional of the functions of poetry: to illuminate living.--jmb Susan Smith Nash: LIQUID BABYLON--Potes & Poets, 181 Edgemont Ave., Elmwood CT, 06110. 54 pp. A remarkable sequence of poems bound together by a posture of oblique autobiography, which goes far beyond being merely confessional. These poems shift back and forth between the first and third person, and between levels of involvement in the events, situations, and states-of-mind that serve as context for what is at hear a movement toward cohesiveness within a process of change and loss, of knowing and feeling. A poem from the series "Water Shard Night" illustrates some of these qualities: "Unblemished by cigarette or exudate of denial--I am/ paid to sing like this, every note reminds me I've lost you;/ under paralleled spaces in our roaming, desiring gasps/ phrasing not music pearls beryls sapphires agates/ mistures of unprecious to inlay ceremonial life-in-/ wartime--your eyes flutter down drinking wines." Apparently an hors-de-commerce limited edition--it is to be hoped that the publisher will make more than 42 copies of this excellent book available.--jmb Susan Smith Nash: MY LOVE IS APOCALYPSE AND RHINESTONE: THE LETTERS OF MARILYN MONROE--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 40 pp., $4.00. The usual issues revolving around MM are raised here (person vs. icon, ideas of the feminine, the manipulated and/or manipulating doll, etc.). But along with the standard themes of the grotesqueness and destructiveness of mass image-making is an entirely different process, a use of the topic of MM to create a fuller consciousness of self and self-in- its-history and culture that has a positive and life-affirming quality about it. The poems vary a great deal in their techniques and dictions, going from a discursive series of "Letters" in MM's voice, to the illusive, collage-style stanzas of "Pyroman Norway Air Till God Passengers Flying": "my skull will infer like fish-- probable molting w/ syntax / wrinkling little or now dorso- ventrally crushed, preserve/ tunnel for dreams or lipstick or abdomen-flexured sex-/ restrict virtual, applaud--Pava Temple leaning vertical / all Guatemala "you look everything" real forebears..." This book is not simply another spin of the Monroe prayer- wheel, but an investigation into how that wheel continues to exist, and how it connects to the world we inhabit. Whether you're interested in MM or not, this book is well worth reading and pondering over. It concludes with an essay by Thomas Lowe Taylor on Nash's poetics, which is a useful and enthusiastic take on what she does here.--jmb Susan Smith Nash: PORNOGRAPHY--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., Mentor OH, 44060. 28 pp., $4.00. PORNOGRAPHY is like a slightly wild trip out west, where you're not too sure of the terrain, not too sure of the condition of your trip at all, but there you are. America does you, or you do America. Nash takes us along. Photos provide travelogue "action" at a similar remove. Interesting, provocative, worth a look. We all get to be voyeurs in this one.--jg Dan Nielsen: INSINCERE FLATTERY & THINLY VEILED SARCASM--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402. 16 pp., $2.00. This wonderful little chap with its 15 poem by the Wisconsin's voracious, wildman poet-artist-publisher Dan Nielsen is provocative, thrilling, head-wrenching, and almost as much fun as a bucket of psychotropics. Most of these have previously appeared in publications like TIGHT, PEARL, BOUILLABAISSE, IN YOUR FACE, etc. His poetry is startling, tight, compressed, etched in absurd realism, bulging with comic relief, or sardonic sadness. Nielson has a butcher's-eye for splintered cultural bones, and he is serving up a soup of choice social satire, laced with bizarre line art by Greg Evanson. Damn nice.--rrle Dan Nielsen: YOU'RE OUT OF MY MIND, BUT SO AM I--Fell Swoop, 3003 Ponce De Leon St., New Orleans LA, 70119. 16 pp., $3.00. Dan Nielsen is a natural master of the tongue-in-cheek poem. He is minimalistic, drives for the point, and his lines are unadorned, straight-forward. The absurdity of childhood and sexual relations predominate here. In "And It Paid Off" he writes: "I remember/ my father/ asking me// what I was doing/ to prepare/ for the future// 'I'm hallucinating,/ dad." When the poet attempts to instruct his son how to recognize a crazy person--describing the way they look and act--the son wants to know if his father is crazy. In the short story "Joe Got Hard", Nielsen introduces a character stoned on acid who attempts to have sex with a fat woman; the situation quickly deteriorates when the woman's biker husband arrives. Much like a real LSD trip, the short story is surreal and disconnected from reality. Nielsen's absurdist observations are a welcome digression from a large body of poetry that is too serious, academic, or often incomprehensible. In addition to his poems, there are drawings and collages, all of which are unmistakably Nielsenesque.--kn Kurt Nimmo: SUNFLOWERS OF VAN GOGH--Undulating Bedsheets Productions, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025. 18 pp., $1.75. Nimmo writes with a precision you wish those engineers who design jets that explode had. When a writer puts you into situations you aren't familiar with, you need to trust their abilities to get you out--Nimmo carries that authority, that illusion of competency you need when the air under your plane just isn't enough. In this three story sampling we get meditations in both poetic and essay formatted hysteria--the residue of Vietnam on modern life. Nimmo is Camus tossed into a suburban Detroit trailer park; these stories leave you with that dry heaving madness comes from surviving way too long.--o Mark Nowak, ed.: ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN IDEOPHONICS--227 Montrose Place, Apt. C., St. Paul MN. 92 pp. An assemblage of all kinds of texts about the arts but most about "Ethnopoetics & the Poet as Other," the title of the first selection, which is by Jerome Rothenberg. Among the many other highlights: an essay by John Olson on the value of sound for transforming words from denotations to things, and a discussion of H.D. and Robert Duncan regarding "the poetics of non-market values" by Greg Hewitt.--bg Mario Rene Padilla: REACHING BACK FOR THE NEVER ENDING--Red Dancefloor Press, PO Box 7392, Van Nuys CA, 91409-7392. 86 pp., $9.95. "I am the author of my own memories, a child of his own making," states Padilla in his prologue, and this collection of twenty-five urgent, moving poems reaches out with a semi-lyrical free verse style which startles and slides, prods and evokes with Mayan beasts and cello notes, the legend of the Nagual, and the decapitated body found in a wrecked car thirteen years after the accident. Yes, this is a hodgepodge of versatile occurrences and manic voices. "I feel the slow coming to an end/ like unwinding wire from a wire roll/ or the drip buckets easy sway/ against the wind/ I feel the coming end." Padilla is a poet who deals with realistic coincidence, class-conscious images, and American myths. He overcomes time, reaches into his autobiographical self and pulls out poetry which is active and indulgent... "...like twelve against one/ just take the baseball bat I thought/ and go lecture them about 'one-on-one'/ but my son's matter-of-fact tone 'pop, they're all packing guns'"--rrle Clemente Padin & Jorge Caraballo: SOLIDARIDAD URUGUAY--Clemente Padin, Casilla Correo Central 1211, Montevideo URAGUAY. 40 pp. Documentation of articles about various mail-art and other network efforts to free Caraballo and Padn from the imprisonment they suffered at the hands of the Uruguayan military government from 1977 to 1985. Caraballo and Padn were well-known mail artists, writers, and visual poets whose case attracted a lot of attention. It is good to have this documentation, complete with reproductions of pieces of mail-art, of a grim period in this continent's recent history. Articles in Spanish or English.--jmb Mark Pawlak: SPECIAL HANDLING--Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn NY. 90 pp., 10.00. There aren't many, if any, poets writing like Mark Pawlak. His poetry has conscience. It actually deals with issues, political issues. It calls attention to the world class structure and the crushing power of wealth and privilege. I've been in dozens of conversations that revolved around the fact that poetry has almost no audience. If there were more poetry like Pawlak's than every person earning less than 50 grand a year would be all ears. Need comparisons? Like Reznikoff. Pawlak has a gift for the ironic. A fragment of his poem "Progress in Honduras": "in outlying hamlets/ where doctors had been unknown/ the stooped peasants/ lugging sacks of corn// now ease their backaches/ with aspirin at bedtime/ thanks to U.S. medics."--mb John Perlman: ANACOUSTIC--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, Morris MN, 56267. 16 pp., $2.00. This collection of poems seemed mostly discourse on discourse at first. But then it turned into "sky & all the/ unstunned stars the moon just/ fallen short of full..." and the like, to seem more communion- than discourse- centered, a notion supported by my later coming on the word "paten" ("plate; esp.: one of precious metal for the Eucharistic bread"--a word I've started seeing a lot of in poems lately).--bg John Xerxes Piche: GRUMBLEPHUCK--Love Bunni, 2622 Princeton Rd., Cleveland Hts. OH, 44118. 48 pp., $3.00(?). Apparently one of those dreaded personal zines, written by a Reverend John Xerxes, a survivor of the Subgenius hysteria that terrorized America in the 80's. There is the expected incoherent rambling; fictionalized essays; a confession of his posing as Diane in the personal ads of "Maximum Rock & Roll" magazine to solicit mail from males (in order to "relate to the female experience"); a decent essay on being disappointed by GG Allin's death; some bad porn; a funny piece on SEXUAL ATTRACTION IS NECESSARY; drug use analysis... and so on. Either the writing of an isolated psychopathic schizophrenic, or the words of a genius.--o Laurie Price: EXCEPT FOR MEMORY--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, Berkeley CA, 94709. 74 pp., $8.95. Suzanne Brooker's cover art, a collage of antique watches, brings to mind the idea of temps perdu ("lost time"), which is perhaps the emotional point of departure of this collection. "Pry" peels the dial from the hands in order to create a state of suspended animation: "The watched clock never stops/ bordering reasons held in check." Influenced by an imagist aesthetic, Price's lyric poems are highly visual, and privilege the supersaturated colors of the dream. "Sleepwalkers" is a good example: "A tangerine figure/ approaches from the curb/ lightens the street/ flooded by blues."--ssn Stephen Ratcliffe: PRIVATE--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 14213. 12 pp., $2.00. A poetics of intervention, interruption, and subtle insinuations of voice which intrude in the form of enclosed parenthetical asides and French shifts. The effect is magnificent: "to speak of returning before/ (think) objects--several/ intervals or (less)/ the knowledge of her possessions." Ratcliffe's collisions of public and private literacies create a tension between the voice and the voiced. --ssn Pam Rehm: PIECEWORK--Garlic Press, PO Box 1242, Stockbridge MA, 01262. 25 pp., $5.00. Velocities of transformation heat up as the poems refuse to back down from the place in the brain that makes connections. "Neurology: A Theory" places the limits of all figurative language, particularly metonymy, squarely in the region that attempts to fence in perception in what Sir Philip Sidney referred to as a jail-cell of flesh. Observes Rehm: "One gets stuck in, what is evidently,/ describing oneself." A subtle and intellectually engaging read.--ssn Werner Reichhold: SENSESCAPES--AHA Books, PO Box 767, Gualal CA, 95445. 62 pp., $8.00. Huge pages (17" wide, 11" high) containing twenty-eight 2-page "projects" on which gorgeous surrealistic collages (often using material from Dore) face similarly potent surrealistic texts, e.g., on that begins: "Ajax, is this the town/ that eats men and women/ copper for breakfast?// Yes, but look at the phone book,/ is it broke yet?" ready to ignite in any sympathetic aesthcipient's redeeming connectives.--bg Jeff Rentsch: THE STORY OF TWO MEN--InDigest, PO Box 480, Denville NJ, 07834. 52 pp., $1.00. The full title of this text&graphic collage novel is "the story of two men walking across the room to the sofa and what happened on the way there to change both their lives." What happened is violent, and told a micro-second at a time in understated, flat sentences and surrealistic graphics that work as well together for the full course of the narrative as any I've ever come across.--bg Joan Retallack: ERRATA 5UITE--Edge Books, PO Box 25642, Washington DC, 20007. 64 pp., $8.00. This book is a series of five-line take-offs on (from) errata slips. Retallack starts with a correction explaining a correction, saying what the prescribed fix is ("read poisonous snake not snack")--and from there she goes somewhere else altogether. These pieces are full of lingual shorthand, anachronisms, bits of foreign words, roots of words. The whole is an astonishing, melodic, humorous song. While any traditional "sense" is denied, the pieces begin to take on a wonderful logic of their own, flowing. In an odd way ERRATA 5UITE in its core of misreadings, misspellings, and alternate meanings, presents us with just the required poetry corrective. We get it right this time.--jg ERRATA 5UITE lets the error stray in a fluid movement among the "zero sum ergo blather" of systematic thought. Error, corrected, leads to the progress of knowledge? The "allreasonable dog stranded on causal plane", "apostrophe's tragik musico philosophicus" will "read land and math for lang and myth," "for the undeniable is all they seek"--"God upon His solemn Review finds not one Erratum in the Book of Nature whole as writ." But "she la cantatrice whenas she goes without a trace" sics Derrida on this (philosophy is a boys' club if there ever was one)--"she read I now (know) this Kant bee rite"--read "cum for sum (ma) la logical." Or so would go one of many possible wanderings through this suite. Another would start with the delightful "conversations of the (alphabetized) philosophers" Retallack makes, in conversation herself with Richard Rorty's way of reading philosophy playfully.--cp Joan Retallack: ICARUS FFFFFALLING--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 14213. 16 pp. ICARUS FFFFFALLING collaborates with Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and with Retallack's students at Bard College "who when asked to go out and photograph Icarus falling found him everywhere." Icarus: boy wonder who won't follow Daddy's advice and stick to the middle way; son who by sacrificing himself covers up his father's jealousy and murder (look up the myth of Daedalus and Talos); Leonardo/Daedalus the artist building machines of destruction; "Dead-o-Lust founder of Socrates circular line"--but this is too simple a reading already. Make it messier: "a boy rejoicing in bold flight deserts his leader why this desire for open sky in species w/out wings"--not easy to refuse this. And question poetry itself: "have you noticed that poetry was one of the noble gases ripening the pomegranate never a cantaloupe or banana"--the "noble gases" are those that don't mix with others in chemical compounds. They remain pure--"and the grief remains buried in the obscurity of the Latin" as if it were one of Gibbon's chastely quoted Roman obscenities--"dis pathetic Roman tic nihil est how to: have hi-flyin ideas under fallen yellow arches." The theme of the pharmakos runs through all the myths of Daedalus and his kin; drug, poison, healing medicine, and also scapegoat, the pharmakos in ancient Greek ritual was thrown over a cliff into the sea, but provided with wings that might break his fall and let him live, though in perpetual exile. Take note: Retallack's not dealing here (or elsewhere) in the sort of cozily Jungian archetypes this might suggest; the languages she weaves together are as complex as the twenty-five or so centuries of painful aspiration and destruction she has gathered in this short poem.--cp Elliot Richman: THE WORLD DANCER--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa Maria CA, 93456. 110 pp., $9.95. Richman's many voices--dark eroticist, Vietnam testifier, visceral viewer of art and the adumbrations of irony--come scattershot from his small press exposures and in more unified rushes from chapbooks like "Fucking in Stupid Hope: Love Poems for the Death of the '80's" (Slipstream: Niagra Falls 1989). But not 'til THE WORLD DANCER from Asylum Arts, a press committed to risky material, do we get Richman whole. Unlike some fragments, he's no hellbent macho cynical kicker against the pricks, but a compassionate comprehender of, though never apologist for, human inconsistency. His vision--less the self annihilating gaze of Van Gogh or Hemingway, who become his croney-doppelgangers in these poems, and more the consummate witness to edges of art, love and loneliness-- is more like the swordlike zen brushwork he honors and emulates: ...My features are painted on that octopus in the print by Hokusai, tentacles wrapped 'round Katrina's naked body, my giant head fused between her thighs, enormous black pupils scanning her skin as she swoons in pleasure, holding tightly to one of my suckered arms, the cruelty gone from her features, so lost in sex. (from "The Portrait of a Poet") Here's complex, violent art coming into a maturity that will take us to new places, and help make sense of some of the hardest old ones.--sf Steve Richmond: MY WIFE--Deadtree Press, PO Box 81305, Lincoln NE, 68501. 20 pp., $6.00. Infectious, self-reflective, easy-going plainstyle poems, like the "gagaku" in which the author admits he'd like best-sellerdom but decides, "fuck it/ (instead of writing a hot novel) I'll stick here/ in the/ short devastating poem/ the demon poem/ the mad poem/ the sick poem// where I'm/ comfortable."--bg Sheryl Robbins: OR, THE WHALE--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth Ave., Buffalo NY, 14213. The title is half of MOBY-DICK, OR, THE WHALE--and the half that is this collection of poems is the feminine. Yes, women voyage also. That dark stuff of guilt and 19th century creeping American protestant gloom isn't here. The puns and metaphors, the images within the poetry, and the titles of the poems are carved from Melville's novel. Sure that provides the book with a spine, but rather than darkness and death within this poetry there is at each vertebrate a love and a light, some white magic, an irresistible intoxicating ring of bone Isis white.--mb Thaddeus Rutkowski: SUPER NATURE--Power Trio Press, PO Box 187 Cooper Station, New York NY, 10278. 16 pp., $1.00. Unlike many "performance" poems, these stand up powerfully on the page, as in: "Walk to the water circle,/ dive to the bottom/ and nail your question/ to the dragon's door" (from "Mother's Advice"). Poetry-slam winner, art-history scholar, forbidden fantasizer Rutkowski has packed arresting lines, inspired graphic design, and innovative weirdness into these 4x4 pages. These 14 brief poems each slice a heretofore wholly unsuspected microsection from the murky interface of consciousness and world, like "a test pattern from the right half/ of a hare's brain" ("Half a Thought"), or suddenly shift the disturbingly untoward into sharpest focus: "a tiger pouncing on a zoo-booster/ a wife shaving her housekeeper's head/ a kidnapper guarding his capturing box" ("Assault With a Deadly Plotline"). Finally, having read, we can "Skim some rain./ Whirl in surf./ Dream of hair" ("-plasm").--sf Leslie Scalapino: OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE LONGING FROM TAKING PLACE--Roof Books, c/o Segue Foundation, 303 East 8th St., New York NY, 10009. 82 pp., $9.95. Scalapino's critical writings might already be familiar to readers of poetics journals; this anthology includes pieces on H.D., Robert Grenier, Danielle Collobert, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, and others. There is also a selection from THE FRONT MATTER, DEAD SOULS, political writings she began during the last presidential election. (She calls this "a serial novel to be published in the newspaper," though the newspapers she submitted it to refused to run it.) Scalapino practices the poetics of language writers, who insist that the division of labor between poet and critic be done away with. It is what I might call, borrowing one of her lines, the "putting of thought to thought"--but as something done, an action, not a view from above, or a statement of logically prior conditions. Criticism that co-exists with the writings it is "about" (and "about" here becomes a kind of adjacency to or perambulation of the writings) will problematize its own form, as Scalapino says: "The form of rigor itself has to undercut its concept." Here, her stated aim is to "allow the shapes of the structures of the texts being considered to emerge." But there is a characteristic Scalapino line as well, and its structure, familiar to her readers since "That They Were at the Beach," may at times overlay the structures of the texts she is writing about; this at least was my own feeling about her Collobert piece. But not always; her writings on Grenier are "within the way his text sees." And then there's the lines from "The Front Matter"--"Our vice president tries to turn us against the 'cultural elite.' Here, the cultural elite are simply people who can read at all." It seems her remarks have not lost their topicality.--cp Spencer Selby: SOUND OFF--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105. 64 pp., $7.95. A collection of poems illuminated by ironic double entendre: "sound off" as protest literature by poets voicing their rage at toxic-waste dump Americana, or, equally, as a state of being akin to watching t.v. with the volume turned down. The condition of language echoes the condition of our world: "Extensive straightforward meaning/ goes funny before it's written / in the face of impending disaster." Because linear forms of writing and thinking yield nothing but distorted copies of what has come before, Selby advocates a poetic language informed by experience: "Walk the path and live for knowledge/ that's exasperated by what you see."--ssn Tim Shepherd: DEAD ROSES FROM A FRIEND--Drew Blood Press Ltd., 3410 First St, Riverside CA, 92501. 21 pp., $2.00. This chapbook, first published in 1990, was perhaps a pioneer of the sadly growing list of "AIDS memorial" chapbooks. As such, it doesn't have a lot of lilting language, melodious rhymings or crafted imagery. It does have anger, profanity, and a wrenching, tangible sense of loss and bitterness. Some of Shepherd's poems come off as hopelessly melancholy; others unnecessarily foul- mouthed; and some as on-target with a profound sense of grief. Not overly poetic; but undeniable work for those interested in a reality dose of what a real AIDS death means to those left behind.--rkk Bill Shields & Elliot Richman: DISPATCHES: FROM VIETNAM TO THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS--Boog Literature, PO Box 221, Oceanside NY, 11572. 16 pp., $3.00. War poems from a coupla folks who know war, and poetry, first hand. Richman's war takes place in Iraq, and draws us into the interment of Iraqi soldiers being buried alive, while Shields talks about the distancing of killers from their victims through modern warfare techniques. These words crawl into you, and leave you shaking, scared, and pissed off. The realities of slaughter on these scales makes you wonder if hope will ever be an option again.--o Florentin Smarandache: ANTHOLOGY OF THE PARADOXIST LITERARY MOVEMENT--Ophyr University Press, PO Box 42561, Phoenix AZ, 85085. 174 pp., $17.95. More of a chrestomanthy than an anthology, since the genius of Smarandache is predominant through out. After reading his NON POEMS last year I thought Paradoxism an interesting development, though I would have had difficulty defining it. Here are manifestos, stridency and curious writings, but also gnawing doubts that arise when one suspects a tincture of hucksterism. When something new and different comes out of thewilds of Romania I am curious and ready to give it credence, but I am beginning to wonder if Paradoxism is all that it purports to be.--as Charles Smith: ALIEN LOVE POEMS--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402. 12 pp., $ 2.00. Black, samurai-swift imagination and humor as hard as a jackhammer's heart, Smith captures candid incidents from youth to present with images which could have been reflected from a fun-house mirror. "It's my turn to wear the dog collar.// I mount you, oh so slowly/ I am slashing my wrists/ the blood mixing with your hair..." Here is rage, pathological enough to be trivial, trivial enough to be cool and seductive. There is a spontaneous, unmediated emotion here, a delicious sexual darkness. Suicide, sadomasochism, punk bravura, child abuse, academic failure, self-depreciation, spouse abuse, drunken sex, miscued allegories, old age dread and drawings by Dan Nielsen. How can it get any better than this?--rrle David H. Stone: SPECULAR SHARDS--O!! Zone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX , 77057. 76 pp., $10.00. Clipped, usually anecdotal free verse, freshened here & there with puns and pun-couples--like "sir spent"/ "sir spit" in a poem about Adam and Eve. Several strong poems about the work-a-day world, and (mordantly) funny ones about law and politics.--bg SuZi: CARNIVAL IN THE AGE OF KALI--Ourobourous Press, PO Box 533613, Orlando FL, 32853. 9 pp., $1.50. SuZi knows the street from experience. Though she's in New Orleans now, she definitely left her mark on Chicago. She's still tough as nails, but there's a fragile sensitivity beneath the tough veneer. These poems bring the street into your head, with lines like: 'Hey sister/ didja dig them bad-bootied bands?/ the sister on the tuba from Saint Mary's and/ the covetous lovey dove eye action from the marine/corp?", and: "the earhole of damnation/ and she was held more than a/ day after/ the judge said go/lost in some sheriff scuffle shuffle." Although this is a short collection of SuZi's work, it's strong powerful writing in a voice so unique... let's just say she's good. Damn good!--o Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: EKPHRASIS--Pygmy Forest Press, PO Box 591, Albion CA, 95410. $5.00. The title, referring to a test that is its own explainaint, is in one sense an apt description of these self-referential poems, but in another sense they are not, since they often have a haiku-like ellusiveness/allusiveness, the meaning-ripples spreading out in all directions so they "mean" everything and nothing, The irony in that title is functional, and is part and parcel of the beauty of these works: EKPHRASIS No. 16 Mechanic a Spit o' Ecstatic re Lease Javeliner Crested Quiver a Gog stride The collection consists of 15 poems, in a nicely produced booklet. These pieces have an intimate and enigmatic quality that keeps this reader going back to them.--jmb At the crossroads between intelligence and intuition, where the mind grasps to contain experience but does not have the logic or syntax, and the entire being is filled with sensation and strange knowing, the creative impulse rises. We are taught very early, though usually not directly, to ignore such impulses and direct attention toward a knowable object. St. Thomasino understands that to allow the creative impulse to culminate in action is a means of expanding the field of perspective and thereby knowledge in its deepest sense, of insight. These selections from his Ekphrasis series are brilliant examples of that understanding, and like all great poetry are doorways to that deeper knowledge. The words seem to rise from that critical moment, they are utterances of the voice and mind in awe of direct experience of unlimited sensation. Sometimes the words fall into a phrase that seems to make logical sense, that relates something specifically, sometimes not. It doesn't matter. It is the impulse, the life shining through these poems that's important. Certainly, an exhaustive analysis would reveal a variety of interpretations, but something would still be missing. Ordinary syntax cannot contain their light. From "EKPHRASIS No.11": Inter Missive Juncture Unthinkable Scenes Dovetail A Ha a ha --jb A selection of St. Thomasino's ongoing series of state-of- the-art language-centered poems full of locutions like "Will o' sea" and "Out'r quart'r lo!" Consequently, one seems in tho ages of discovery at once: Columbus's, Drake's & Cook's; and ours.--bg Michelle M. Tokarczyk: THE HOUSE I'M RUNNING FROM--West End Press, PO Box 27334, Albuquerque NM, 87125. 56 pp., $6.95. This book of poetry was published a few years ago, but it demands a reading, particularly if one is interested in women and work. And the fears one encounters after living a working class life and attempting to "make it" in a profession, herein examined. What makes this poetry so exciting is its legitimacy. This is not a book by a poet that lost her diamond while riding on her third best polo pony. Oh no. But this is not the grit of a saloon either. Nothing dark here. Just the hard work of a white ethnic in working class America struggling to maintain simply a life of dignity and peace, which because of the American grind... What do you think? Can you relate? Or will you ponder a rose is a rose is a rose?--mb Cheryl A. Townsend and Paul Weinman: MY NIPPLES RISE EYES--Watson Publishing, 2774 9th St., Cuyahoga Falls OH, 44221. 20 pp. This chapbook is so steamy that I'm amazed it didn't arrive with damp pages. Townsend and Weinman trade sex-saturated poems here. Cheryl is the initiator and Paul follows suit. Each poem is short, never longer than eight or nine lines. The cover has a Blair Wilson graphic--a stylized cartoon of a woman's breasts, limber as deflated innertubes, that reach out and smack a cartoon man in the face. There's an added bonus stapled inside this chapbook; WHITE BOY CUMS 2, with a suggestive, as-always pornographic John Howard drawing. Even though I enjoy the rat-a- tat-tat minimalism of both Townsend and Weinman, the continual sex dulls after awhile. I begin to look for new poetical vistas. Cheryl Townsend is the Anais Nin of the small press poetry scene. Even so, she is at her best when she digresses from the fuck-fest and writes about other subjects. A good example of this is her small chapbook MOTHER TENDED BAR, which is truly remarkable in its emotional and descriptive intensity.--kn Cheryl Townsend: VESTIBLES--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 10 pp., $2.00(?). Cheryl is the publisher of IMPETUS, and her poetry carries a seductive touch that could make you fall in love with a stranger. While Cheryl still carries that sexual lust and subtle confusion between people who don't know how to relate to each other, her words get cleaner and so crisp you often feel like her poems are dried flowers waiting to break in the wind. In lines like: "I could smell the anticipation/ when we met on Tuesday for lunch" and "Snuggling into a dream/ that lasted well into Monday" you catch a glimpse into a world filled with sensual confusion. Cheryl is one of the few women poets covering this turf, in poems that work and convey the inside story.--o Paul Trachtenberg: BEN'S EXIT--Beach & Company, Cherry Hill Editions, PO Box 303, Cherry Hill NY, 13320. 123 pp., $7.00. When I read a book I want a total pure honesty, or hard core sensationalistic crap. This is not sensationalistic crap. It is about real life adventures, academic politics, relationships (gay, straight, and otherwise), Disneyland, the brains of serial killers, metaphysical mysticism and scientific exploration, plumbers and surfers, California earthquakes, the end of the sexual revolution, AIDS, and so many other things it's hard to make up a comprehensive list. This book made me feel ripped off, not because it was bad, but because it was so good I didn't want it to end.--o Nico Vassilakis: A NAME FOR RADIO--Electron Elbow Publications, PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111. 12 pp., $4.00. A wonderfully lyrical jump-cut mini-epic about the quest for knowledge--I think. At any rate, electro-magnetic waves play a large role in it; sound waves and water, too: "sounds are delicious, the scent of musicality of noise. we never imagine noise in water. water is large enough for thoughts to co-exist."--bg An exquisitely produced miniature book containing a single long poem, which is a meditation on the body and the mind revolving in consciousness of each other, and a meditation on meditation: "abrupt, aboutnd, ablutions, abingo, abongo/ aconga, a smooth rumination, a jolt shattering/ the nervous system, the electric formation of/ receptors singing in a naturally occurring quiet./ immediate environments the beatitude of/ neighborhood." This is lucid and evocative writing that perfectly embodies the ideas and aperceptions it speaks of.--jmb Nico Vassilakis: ARTAUD WHAT--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $3.00. One can always count on Vassilakis to stir the imagination and summon a few demons. This is a book of associations between words and images that appear in the text to be cut up, but may only be so in the mind of the poet and/or the reader. For instance, "a day spent proving/ light and she is/ another room. we say/ particulate", a schizoid dismemberment of syntax that is magically reconnected in the mind. The poems function as juicy hallucinated haikus and distorted and collaged pictures that perfectly reflect the texts, not as illustrations, but enhancements of the effect. Psychoactive.--jb Janine Pommy Vega: RED BRACELETS--Heaven Bone, PO Box 486, Chester NY, 10918. 32 pp., $5.95. Composed while traveling through Nepal, these poems function as a travelogue of the trip and of the soul. Torn between lover at home and the search the poet continues, drawing in clear direct verse the image of the world she moves through, her yearning for experience and for home. She makes it easy to feel the struggle as she feels it and by doing so allows us to some extent to gain from her experience. But RED BRACELETS is better an emotional experience than intellectual. Vega isn't trying teach us, but relate generally, from the soul. And she does this very well, coming in the final, title, poem to sing, as if in a fire of transcendence of "red bracelets/ for the mother of love."--jb Fred Voss: GOODSTONE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 14645, Long Beach CA, 90803. $15.95. I remember telling Fred about how I almost beat the shit out've some dude at my post office job and Fred wrote back suggesting I try to keep my cool. How Fred managed to keep his composure long enough at Goodstone to write this masterpiece I'll never know. Such incompetence, immaturity, idleness, lifelessness, idiocity, on-th-job drunkeness & insanity as can be witnessed in a Breughal painting. This book is about the end of the Industrial Revolution as personified by the day-to- day workings of a bomber aircraft factory--it certainly documents the coming end of the United States' long-held boast as #1 industrial nation of the world. One wonders if morale picked up at Goodstone during the "crisis" in the Persian Gulf--did this insane asylum begin to sing & dance for the rich boy's money & oil war? This book is a knife stuck in the guts, and twisted. And somehow Fred has done it all without getting caught up in the mire of hatred & spite that most of his fellow workmates have lost themselves in. Our dear Whitman would bawl his eyes out if he read this book and found out what has happened to his beloved workers of America (though I imagine every late-20th century factory in the world is like this, except maybe Japan's). Not for the patriotic or squeamish. 180 poems machined from solid steel, cool sweat & the catastrophic humorous eye of Voss. One might consider taking the train after reading this. And every time they fire up those jets, 5 blocks from here at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, I'm gonna run for cover.--mw Fred Voss & Joan Jobe Smith: THE HONEYMOON OF KING KONG--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 40 pp., $3.00. "Machinist Poet" leaps right into action with "D.H. Lawrence would've liked this man/ as much as I do, how he offs his/ blue collar when he comes home to/ drink chardonnay with me, read aloud to me, The Subterraneans until Kerouac says,/ "It was her little face I wanted to enter,"/ and then he stops reading to enter/ my face, too, with his quick tongue." In "The Eve of Destruction" the words are clean, honest: "In her kitchen/ my fiancee's daughters compare their/ 6 and 8 months along/ pregnant bellies and/ bounce them/ off each other/ again and again doing little swinging/ dance steps and giggling uncontrollably/ as I sit in the corner drinking and trying to feel/ as much/ like a bachelor/ of 37 years/ as I can." These are fine warm words by real people, people I'd love to have for neighbors.--o James L. Weil: BILL'S SHAKER CHAIR--tel-let, 1818 Phillips Pl., Charleston IL, 61920. 20 pp. Self-effacing, diffident poems dedicated to William Bronk, as this one called "Imperatives Composed for Bill's Voice": "What I write makes no/ difference. I write// indifferent to/ the difference it// does not make. It has/ nothing to do with// our undoing. There/ is nothing to do,// all done. I write. I/ love you. Love me. Write."--bg Hannah Weiner: SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL--Tender Buttons Press, 54 East Manning Street #3, Providence RI, 02906. This book continues Weiner's obsession with formally radical representations of multiple voices that has been central to her work at least since CLAIRVOYANT JOURNAL. The poems here create a broad, sweeping, and tense historical context for understanding how voices have come to her. What this book teaches us is that history--written accounts of people's lives and actions--is always about the struggle for voices. But Weiner has no sentimentality about multiplicity--the many voices of her text are framed by conditions of power, and their desire for it. In such a context, language itself is revealed as a hesitant, embattled, sometimes obscure and always resistant medium. Finally an autobiography, SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL is not a story of triumph, of social conditions overcome by a saving mastery of language. Rather, this book returns its readers to the condition of their own lives and languages, teaching us that listening is something we must learn to do in our own circumstances, however tentatively.--mw Paul Weinman: IN THE FISHTANK--Strangulensis Research Labs, Rt. 6 Box 138, Charleston WV, 25311. 16 pp., $2.00. Collages and other graphics by Harold Dinkel masterfully wrong-step Weinman's crackling plainstyle poems, one a near-perfect evocation of a nursing home in which "the here and there teeth/ pok(e) through sentences, postponing/ putting words in order until never;" but one man asks the narrator "if racial/ demographics are changing, yet."--bg Simon Wickham-Smith: FEW--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00. Consisting of three distinctly different and equally compelling experiments, FEW is a challenge to ordinary consciousness. The first section "Six Short Fictions" is a sort of elliptical, or parenthetic poetry, that dances around, or beyond, absolute meaning, excellent poetry. The second section is a long series of connective hieroglyphic-like images that develop as they proceed down and across the page, and from page to page, suggesting an investigation of how we associate meanings with lines on a page. The final section is a repeated visage which can be interpreted differently from page to page as words are added. Stimulating and provoking, FEW can be many.--jb Bob Z: YUCKY STIFF--Panic Button Press, PO Box 14318, San Francisco, 94114. 30 pp., $3.25. The author's note says this one's about "looking hard at the seamy filthy unpleasant side of life" and sure enough, it is. Words tumble over each other, slam together in a mosh pit of imagery to create a space for themselves, push thoughts and events at the reader as quickly as Husker Du (the band, not the child's game.) Repetitive, dirty, funny, and pocket-sized to boot.--rkk Mickey Z.: REMOTE CONTROL--PO Box 9103, L.I.C., NY, 11103. 26 pp., SASE? "Poems to Watch Television By," this one's in the style of Bob Z. (family resemblance?) and the form of Paul Weinman's "WhiteBoy" series. Poems for couch potatoes with short attention spans, but hoping to shake 'em out of their video- induced stupor. The final poem, "One Last Question", is representative: "So, why do you/ think they call it/ PROGRAMMING?"--lbd Nicholas Zurbrugg: THE PARAMETERS OF POSTMODERNISM--Southern Illinois University Press, PO Box 3697, Carbondale IL, 62902. 184 pp. The quintessence of Postmodernism crammed into tiny microchapters. What it is. How it manifests itself. The leitmotiv here is the "B effect" vs. the "C effect". The B effect is here defined as a needlessly catastrophic sense of critical & creative crisis propounded by such writers as Burger, Bonita- Oliver, Barthes, Baudrillard etc.; verses the C effect, a more optimistic hypothesis of postmodernist practice, which Zurbrugg associates with John Cage among others. Postmodernism posited not as a doomsday machine, a sterile lunar landscape, but rather as a source of insight into human experience, just as other literary -isms have been.--as ----------------------------------------------------------------- End of TapRoot Reviews Electronic Edition Issue #5.0, section b: chaps 8/94 -----------------------------------------------------------------