Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 366

Khaty Xiong, Poor Anima

Pattern Recognition
She babbles with sprouting fists, soundingthe language of her hands with grunts.
A flashcard is shown: it’s of ice cream on a cone.The text beneath reads “Ice Cream.”
The child motions to lick—the mouth referencing the hand
            (the hand referencing speech).
Someone said no correspondence existsbetween the structures of speech and sign.
Still, the child licks—fist clenched.
I find the subtleties to Hmong-American poet Khaty Xiong’s first poetry collection, Poor Anima (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2015) intriguing. “The first cut is traditionally the last memory,” she writes, in “Thursday,” “the thing never dreamed.” There is such a fine line between poems that occasionally appear straightforward to the point of empty, and an unbearable depth, as she composes lines that contain vast arrays of silences in short phrases. “You reach for me in the old language,” she writes, in the poem “Pavor Nocturnus,” “spreading / fingers to break the shadow, holding onto the darker throat.” The poems reference the trauma of war, Latin phrases, violence and exile, and the dislocations of language, culture and geography, as well as more mundane domestics that, in comparison, might seem a relief; and yet, even across the mundane runs a deep and dark shadow.
If one could study light in the way one might study the urgency of death, I want you to know it is unreachable. There’s a space beyond the threshold. It doesn’t know closure. Aren’t we lucky?
Still, there’s much to talk about.
I’m hoping you’ll wait for me to learn—so that you can tell me how killing has permitted you to live, embrace the conversation you started. (“Dear Father,”)
There is such a darkness that comes through this collection; a darkness, and a conversation attempting to push against such incredible silences, reaching out and beyond the darkness into an insistant questioning, and a relentless, curious optimism. In Xiong’s Poor Anima, the poems are almost muted in their expression (Elizabeth Robinson’s quote on the back cover warns: “Don’t be tricked into thinking that Xiong’s limpid language is the result of uncomplicated thinking”), walking a meditative line of questioning across an endless minefield of trauma. As she writes in the poem “Low-Grade”: “My parents’ slippage boils us down // to guesses. I can’t ask the right questions. How could I follow?” One learns to tread carefully, I suppose, or not at all. It makes me very curious to see where Xiong will end up; what will the poems eventually allow?






Arabian Princess
The spirit is dormant here. It dissolvesinto ivory, sage, and river. In English,
the body is pronounced to bray, to throwetymology the way names cannot carry persons.
Of course, it is honeybee, hibiscus, house.The anthered-tongue tucked in your throat
blisters in yellow, abides the bloom.It readies in gurgles, produces the pattern—
and still, they will say you are no flower,you don’t belong here.

The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them, eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar

At the Lunch Poems reading series we have featured up to twenty poets a year since 2012. (Though at the time of publication our Lunch Poems series continues, this anthology could only include poets who read for us in 2012-14.) Some of the poets are local and some from afar, some with their first manuscript or debut book in hand and others who have written dozens of books, some lyrical, some experimental, and none of them fitting easily into any simple category. Each poem presented here is followed by the poet’s discussion of its creation. Our goal has always been to be aesthetically ecumenical: to feature poets who are pursuing form from a variety of positions, concerns, and cultural perspectives. (Wayde Compton, “Introductions”)
The poets in this collection take us both inward, into the private joys and hurts of the individual and the family, and outward into a world of conflict and connection, a nexus of locations: past, present, the future. In concept and form, these poems investigate belonging/not belonging, and in so doing, pinpoint markers for our greatest challenge: how to live without destroying ourselves or this planet, all this taken on within the realm of that endless field, a page of words. (Renée Sarojini Saklikar, “Introductions”)
The new anthology The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them , eds. Wayde Compton & Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press/Simon Fraser University, 2015) is an intriguing array of work by predominantly western poets, all of whom have performed as part of the Simon Fraser University Lunch Poems reading series. Each contribution includes a poem as well as a short statement on the piece by the author, allowing an illumination into an element of the composition process, ranging from the structural to the biographical to the incidental. As Daniela Elza writes on her poem “getting the story/linein order”:
This poem is an excerpt from a longer sequence written to the photography exhibit Story/Line by Larry Wolfson, displayed by the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery in Vancouver (December, 2013). The four fragments here incorporate a number of the images from the exhibit. When I walked into the gallery I was doggedly followed by the grief of a separation. I was coming to the realization that my efforts to keep my family together were to no avail. I was trying to make sense of what was happening to me. The images apprehended me, leapt at me, and in that moment became vehicles for loss. They helped crystallize the conflicted feelings about where, and what, is home. For years I heard what my mind had to say, those were default thoughts of the day. Now, I wanted to learn what the heart thought. It was circling in these sensations like a puppy looking for a place to lie down. It was happy to locate itself in these images. They became containers. I kept filling them. The initial piece was written on the spot, followed by a week of intense editing. One row of words, one row of tears. Reading it in public a week later in the gallery for the art and poetry event was terrifying. Writing, for me, has always helped me make better and more compassionate sense. More importantly, it helps me reimagine new possibilities.
The anthology includes poems and corresponding statements by Jordan Abel, Joanne Arnott, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Dennis E. Bolen, George Bowering, Tim Bowling, Colin Browne, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton, Peter Culley, Jen Currin, Phinder Dulai, Daniela Elza, Mercedes Eng, Maxine Gadd, Heidi Greco, Heather Haley, Ray Hsu, Aislinn Hunter, Mariner Janes, Reg Johanson, Wanda John-Kehewin, Rahat Kurd, Sonnet L’Abbé, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Evelyn Lau, Christine Leclerc, Donato Mancini, Daphne Marlatt, Susan McCaslin, Kim Minkus, Cecily Nicholson, Billeh Nickerson, Juliane Okot Bitek, Catherine Owen, Miranda Pearson, Meredith Quartermain, Jamie Reid, Rachel Rose, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Jordan Scott, Sandy Shreve, George Stanley, Rob Taylor, Jacqueline Turner, Fred Wah, Betsy Warland, Calvin Wharton, Rita Wong, Changming Yuan, and Daniel Zomparelli. Of course, the appearances of both Peter Culley and Jamie Reid, poets who died this year, are bittersweet, but admirers of the poets and their works are allowed one more glance into their composition. Culley’s statement, for his “Five North Vancouver Trees,” originally composed for the “Moodyville” issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of such here], includes: “Coming into North Vancouver to attend an opening at Presentation House Gallery I got on the wrong blue bus and instead of travelling ten minutes from Park Royal to the gallery the bus kept going uphill for a long, dreamlike time, and the thick hedges and dim lights of those misty upper reaches stuck in my mind. North Vancouver had always been a mysterious, dark place to me, and the poem works if it gets some of that over, folding into the larger narratives of Hammertownwithout too much strain.”
The collection is intriguing in how the various statements by a group of poets that wouldn’t have much in common, but for a varying gradient of geography, begin to coalesce, overlap and echo each other. The styles and poetics might differ, but the insights and conversations have much in common, and provide valuable insights. As Jen Currin writes on her poem “The Oceans”:
This poem was written not long after Fukushima. I was thinking a lot about the people in Japan and the oceans, about radiation—how radiation knows no borders. I was thinking about communities, relationships, neighbourhoods; experiments in kindness and unkindness; about the effects of radiation on bodies, plants, water. I was thinking about English as a sort of radiation, its role in pushing forward a global capitalist ideology, and how the speaker of the poem, a teacher of English, is complicit in this, yet at the same time wishes to make connections with her students that are not based on this ideology. I was thinking of how students teach teachers, a common theme in the book School, which this poem is taken from.
The cities are Vancouver and Tokyo, but really—all cities where people struggle to live connected lives.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amanda Davidson

Amanda K. Davidson’s prose chapbooks include Arcanagrams (Little Red Leaves 2014), The Space: Fragments for a Family (Belladonna 2014), and Apprenticeship (New Herring Press 2013). She is serially publishing The Conditions of Our Togetherness, a graphic novel, online at Weird Sister Magazine. In 2014-2015, she held a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency, and in 2014 she received a NYFA Fellowship in Poetry. Visit amandakdavidson.com.

trenchart monographs hurry up please its time, eds. Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place

We started Les Figues Press in 2005 to publish the TrenchArt series. In other words, the idea of the Press was the idea of the series. Or, simply put: we wanted to publish books as a conversation or group curation. As writers, we frequently discussed our work in terms of other people’s writing, even as our individual efforts were writing into, or against, a larger social inscription or text. This larger text could be what Charles Taylor calls the “social imaginary,” defined as “the ways people imagine their social existence,” including their expectations, relationships, and the “deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23). To Taylor, the social imaginary is held together by the stuff of the imagination—images, stories, legends. If, as writers, we are making texts (poems, prose bits, novellas) in an increasingly networked world, what might our individual works, placed side-by-side, reveal about a social imaginary, which is also in/forming these individual texts? Fred Moten, in a talk at the University of Denver, refused to talk about writing “beginning,” because writing, he said (and I’m paraphrasing) is simply a way our ongoing sociality sometimes emerges. Writing, in other words, is a form of sociality. Writing never comes from one alone.
When we founded Les Figues, we (or to be exact, I) did not have this language for writing. Yet demonstrating this intuitively-held relationship between individual texts—and the larger social text—felt worthy of publishing. Vanessa Place, Pam Ore, and I had been talking about this “something” we wanted to make for a few years, and one afternoon we imagined a publication structure: TrenchArt. (Teresa Carmody, “For What Reason Is This Writing: Publisher’s Preface”)
I’m amazed by the remarkable anthology trenchart monographs hurry up please its time (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues, 2015), edited by Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, an anthology collecting nearly a decade’s worth of publications created as part of the TrenchArt series produced by Les Figues Press. As Carmody’s introduction explains, the original TrenchArt essays, grouped together to be published as short monographs, were the origins of the press itself: to present work as a conversation, and works that would have no home anywhere else. Moving beyond those first, small publications, Les Figues is a press that has evolved over the past decade-plus to be one of the leading publishers of innovative, experimental and conceptual writing in North America, producing book-length works by Jennifer Calkins, Vanessa Place, Redell Olsen, derek beaulieu, Sophie Robinson, Timothy Yu, Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, Colin Winnette, Sawako Nakayasu, Doug Nufer, Urs Allemann, Dodie Bellamy, Sandra Doller and multiple others, as well as producing another important anthology: I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (2012) [see my review of such here].
Depictions of the present are complacent; depictions of the future are implausible. For this reason, depictions are generally unimportant, unless they are made by important people like economists or real estate agents. These important people describe only the future, which they make sure is boring and plausible. A plausible future is just more of the present. The Empire never ends because the people in it are more important than the world that they deserve. Better to have a world that exists than a world that is better but might rock the boat: this is a good general view. Because if you rock the boat, the boat will take on water, and it might well sink. There are already people drowning in the bottom of the boat. Poetry succeeds as if the boat can lift off from the water and become an airy structure, with a few words surrounded by wide open space where the sun gleams off-white. This is not an important thing for the world to be able to do; it is not an important thing to be able to do with the world. Turn it into an essay where the dead things of the present are nailed to a bulletin board: that is at least a little bit useful. I’ve nailed every dead bit of my ego to this bulletin board that you have just read, and illustrated each one with a corny metaphor. Enjoy. I’ll see you in the future, or else in an extrapolative satire, or else I won’t see you. You are too important to be able to get out of this present world that wants to be with you till death. (Stan Apps, “On Unimportant Art”)
Originally solicited for publication in annual limited editions sets of four or five authors submitting an essay each, the anthology collects the entirety of the series in a single volume, with essays on writing, art and thinking by Harold Abramowitz, Danielle Adair, Stan Apps, Nuala Archer, Dodie Bellamy, Sissy Boyd, Melissa Buzzeo, Amina Cain, Jennifer Calkins, Teresa Carmody, Allison Carter, Molly Corey, Vincent Dachy, Lisa Darms, Ken Ehrlich, Alex Forman, Lily Hoang, Jen Hofer, Paul Hoover, Alta Ifland, Klaus Killisch, Alice Könitz, Myriam Moscona, Doug Nufer, Redell Olsen, Pam Ore, Renée Petropoulos, Vanessa Place, Michael du Plessis, Frances Richard, Sophie Robinson, Kim Rosenfield, Mark Rutkoski, Susan Simpson, Stephanie Taylor, Axel Thormählen, Mathew Timmons, Chris Tysh, Julie Thi Underhill, Divya Victor, Matias Vieneger and Christine Wertheim. As editor Place writes to end her introduction: “And so, the TrenchArt series followed the sound-sensical manner of Alice’s Queen of Hearts—sentence first, verdict afterwards. Which is an admirable way to run anything, especially sentences.” The pieces gathered in this anthology breathe a collective sigh in a multitude of directions, ways and purposes, each asking, why are we continuing to create in the same ways we have already done?
What of the making of things together? Collaboration. We get together to make a thing, a thing that will trigger an uncanny shift of perception in those who see it. This shift will expose a particular societal delusion so ubiquitous as to have been previously invisible. This object we imagine will perpetuate an act of radical haunting, that awakens the viewer to the world around it, but its success depends wholly on our collaborative BOO. I show up as Boris Karloff but my collaborator was hoping for a more Henry James-like spooking. Her laugh is not fiendish enough. He thinks my cape ridiculous. There is always a gap. We mind the gap fastidiously, obsessively. It is not what I had envisioned. My collaborators have deprived me of the sight I’ve grown used to. They have haunted my haunting … generously. “Have you ever really looked carefully at the thing we are making?” they ask. (Susan Simpson, “Untitled Aesthetic”)
As Place points out in her introduction, “[…] Les Figues Press was also born from a women’s art salon, Mrs. Porter’s, held most regularly from 2004 until 2013 or thereabouts. Everyone who attended presented some item for aesthetic contemplation (one’s own or another’s) during the first half of the evening; the second half was devoted to teasing out connections and distinctions between the works. To a consideration of how these scraps of writing or bits of art might tat together, not a telos, but an essay. As in essaie, as in try. Try as in trial. The trail, of course, in the TrenchArt series, was the work itself.” An anthology of this sort functions as a curated montage of divergent ideas on approaches to writing, attempting to prompt new ways of thinking about how writing is created, presented and absorbed, and there is a great deal within that can’t help but to startle the attentive reader into seeing writing in a potentially new way, whether their own, or simply writing in general. A book such as this wants to shake the complacency out of so much of what is currently being produced, disseminated and absorbed and somehow called “writing.” The possibilities are far larger than what most writing might suggest, and perhaps more (including myself) should be better at paying attention to the writers who are working to continuously push at the boundaries.
My art is guided by history: art history, social history, political history, and personal history. The historical and the personal are inextricably linked, like two sides of the same sheet of paper. My work is about how memory itself is political, and the process by which the political is transformed into memory.
I am driven by an urge to retrieve something lost or something that will soon be lost. Walter Benjamin has written about this impulse to return to the past in order to rescue it from disappearance. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History he says, “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” In uncovering the historic in my work, I don’t mean to tell the story, but rather I am interested in telling a story—something highly constructed and subjective. In rescuing and remembering the past, the work allegorically reinvents meaning—a new story is told. (Molly Corey, “Aesthetic/Politic”)
One of the more intriguing of an already-impressive gathering of exploratory pieces is Lisa Darms’ erasure essay, “½ EARTH ½ ETHER,” a piece she attempts to salvage through the process of erasure. As she writes in her “Postscript: Under Erasure” (dated 2014):
When I was asked to republish this essay, I thought of it in terms of my job as an archivist. I knew I’d probably be embarrassed by my writing, but that it would be a way to enact my belief that the highest function of the textual archive is to preserve mistakes, imperfections and failures.
And then, I re-read it.
The archive documents failure, yes. But it doesn’t have to perpetuate it. This is the voice of someone who, after three vaguely demoralizing years in a studio art graduate program, has spent a year unable to find work, reading only holocaust memoirs and back issues of Artforum. The original essay’s stylistic pomposity and its humorlessness are qualities I’ve spent the last eight years trying to purge from my writing (and life). My first inclination, when I saw this essay in proofs, was to kill it.
But instead, I decided to retun it with extensive redactions—a sort of faux-bureaucratic disavowal of the more facile ideas, and an homage to the sharpie marker sous rapture of riot grrrl zines. I’ve found that the essay now expresses its stuttering logic more accurately. Because we don’t want to stop time; we want to reanimate it.

12 or 20 (small press) questions with CJ Evans on Two Lines Press

CJ Evans is the editorial director of Two Lines Press and the author of A Penance (New Issues Press, 2012), and The Category of Outcast , selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s chapbook fellowship. The recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, he recently returned to Oakland from Aix, France.
Two Lines Press is a program of the Center for the Art of Translation, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting international literature and translation. Two Lines Press grew out of Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, a journal that has been publishing continuously for over 20 years.
1 – When did Two Lines Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?Two Lines Press ‘started’ in 2013, but we grew out of Two Lines , a journal of international literature in translation begun over 20 years ago by Olivia Sears, our founding editor. Doing books, itself, was a expansion of the original vision. When Olivia started the journal there was almost no attention paid to the contribution of translators in literature, and she wanted to highlight their work. Over the past two decades there has been a pretty strong shift (although not as far as we would like) in the attention paid to translators and international literature, and books seemed like a logical next step in the conversation for us.
3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?Small publishing is less, in my opinion, about roles and responsibilities than it is about opportunities. We are not beholden to the expectations or excuses of editors at the larger houses. We can make the decision to highlight non-traditional narratives, to publish more women, more minorities, more LGBTQ individuals without feeling it’s necessary to ‘justify’ those decisions. We can publish the books we want to publish, that fit with our ethos and where we want to drive the conversation of literature.
4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?Our goal is to publish excellent international literature and to highlight the artistry of the translator in a way that’s both sexy and unapologetic. Translations are often looked at as ‘cultural’ documents: “here, read this book by a Catalan author, you’ll learn so much about Catalonia!” We don’t care if you learn about Catalonia, we care that there’s an amazing Catalan author, an amazing translator who brought the work into English, and that it’s an exceptional book. Full stop.
5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?If there’s a “most effective” way I’d love to hear about it. We put a lot of attention into our design and marketing. We do events, we send out ARCs, we pester reviewers and target new audiences for each title. We reach out to bookstores, we tweet, we do weird promotions and send our books in for awards. We started out doing only 3 books per year because we don’t want to move onto the next title once a book is published, but to continue to nurture the audience and attention for each of our titles.
6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?Editing translations is wonderful, because I don’t have to worry about the macro-editing—the book is the book as it was written. But I love getting into the syntax, trying to tease out the tonal intention of the author and how to best bring that into English. Some books are more intensive in their edits than others, which has a lot to do with the challenges of the original language—it’s a lot more straight-forward to translate a romance language into English than, for example, Chinese, where you’re only very rarely certain of the tense of the original. I very closely scrutinize and question the choices in each book, but I also want to make sure I’m not pushing the translator to make changes they feel lack fidelity to the original.
7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?Our books are distributed through Publisher’s Group West. We don’t really have a ‘usual’ print run—runs range based on pre-sales.   11– How do you see Two Lines Press evolving?We don’t have any plans to “evolve” at this point (being pretty new) but growth, more attention, pushing the conversation are all certainly on our minds. We want to drive translated literature more into the conversation around books in this country. There’s no reason year-end lists, review outlets, etc. should be so American-centric. Awards should be more open to translated literature, there shouldn’t be one conversation about ‘books’ and another about ‘translated books’.
12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?Denise Newman, who translated Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt for us this past fall won the 2015 PEN translation award, and Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green won the CLMP Firecracker award for creative nonfiction, in a category where it was the only translated book against some real powerhouse American authors. That the small-press community and serious readers are taking note of us is really heartening, and whenever we hear that one of our books was a favorite on twitter it makes us immensely proud. Especially when it’s not ‘favorite translated book” or “favorite foreign book” but merely favorite book—that’s what we’re trying to build on and what makes us proudest.
13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?I’d point to New Directions and Grove as big influences. We want the model where we publish books that we think will have a life that will extend far beyond the 6 months they’ll be in the review cycle and build a backlist over the next 20 years that people will see have influenced the literature of the next generation.
14– How does Two Lines Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Two Lines Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?We often talk about our community. We have what we might call our ‘family’, which is translators and presses and bookstores who champion translation. Then we have the community that comes to our events—they’re some of my favorites. They have no skin in the game but just love good books and have come to trust us not to steer them wrong. Then we have the larger literary community, both here in SF and nationally (and internationally). I could name a million presses and journals, but what is most exciting and sometimes so frustrating about those communities is there’s so much passion for good work, and so much good work being done, that it can be hard to catch the ears. That’s why I think going to AWP, to PEN, to BEA, to Frankfurt, being a part of CLMP, to having coffee or lunch with people here in SF, or out in NYC when we go, or wherever we happen to be just stopping into bookstores or seeing who we can track down to meet. All our paths are heading in the same general direction, and I’ve found when we all talk, we tend to roll along a bit faster.
15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?We do. We have a launch event for the journal every spring, which covers 2 issues, and usually have a launch here in SF for at least a few of our books. This fall we’re putting together a SF, an NYC, a Berlin, and an Amsterdam launch for Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation of Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Sleep of the Righteous, and we have Toni Sala, a Catalan author whose book The Boys translated by Mara Faye Lethem we’re doing in November, coming to San Francisco as well. Mostly we really love launch events because it’s a chance to meet people. To find out from the readers what’s bringing them to the books, how they’re finding out about things, what else they’re reading, and it’s a chance to let the authors and translators speak for themselves. We also run an event series, Two Voices, here in the Bay Area, and do everything from intimate salons in our offices to larger ticketed events. It can be lonely sitting in a room editing a book then refreshing the browser to find out if that review came in. The events give us energy.
17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?We take unsolicited submissions all year round for both the journal and the press at www.twolinespress.com. We’re looking for projects where the translator has read at least one of our books and can tell me why they think this project fits in with what we do. We have a very specific editorial taste, which takes a bit of breath to describe but is crystal clear from what we’ve published. As with any press, I want the submitter to have put in at least as much attention to why they’re submitting to our press as they expect me to put into considering it.
18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.Three recents:
1)      1) The Game for Real , byRichard Weiner. The translator, Benjamin Paloff, was out here a couple of weeks ago doing a launch event for us at the amazing Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, and we were talking about who might be similar authors to Weiner. He’s somewhere in between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, with a bit of Gertrude Stein thrown in there. This is high modernism at its whimsical but difficult best. Weiner was a gay, Jewish, Czech modernist who wrote this book in the early 30s, and who has never been translated into English before. It’s heartbreaking (the main character’s name is, simply, Shame), imaginative, and sometimes devastatingly funny.2)      2) Self-Portrait in Green , by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump. This is the second NDiaye title we’ve done, both translated by Jordan. Her sentences are something to behold, they open from a single clause into long, nested, labyrinthine passages. Marie was solicited to write a memoir by a small French publishing house, and she wrote this untrustworthy exploration of a series of women in green—it’s one of the strangest and most beautiful books I’ve ever read.3)      3) Baboon, by Naja Marie Aidt, translated by Denise Newman. Aidt’s stories are explorations of how people warp when the spotlight of tragedy or stress is put on them. She started out as a poet, so the prose itself is lush and deeply vivid (in no small part because of Newman’s wonderful translation) and the stories put you, as a reader, in a place where you’re sympathizing with characters that, as you read, morph into monsters.
12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Jacob Wren, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates

If love is power, a kind of soft power, it is also true that real power, the kind that makes the job possible, can only operate in secret. When you show your hand you also weaken it. A secret, even when revealed, undermines all certainty, since there might well be more destabilizing secrets to come. I am confident. I will prevail, I know I will prevail, for if I lose their love, if the job crumbles, I have at the very least succeeded in weakening their resolve. I have created suspicions where before there was mainly trust. Then we all know what will occur. It will only take a moment before I completely disappear. (“The Infiltrator”)
Originally produced in a limited run for “Authors for Indies Day,” May 2, 2015, Jacob Wren’ssmall collection of two short stories and an essay, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy ofpirates (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2015), explores the nature and purpose of art, and a search for meaning through daily and ongoing activity. In the story, “Four Letters from an Ongoing Series,” the narrator, a writer, moves through the normal course of a series of days to return home to yet another rejection letter, and wonders exactly what the point of it all might be. The collection ends with the essay “Like a Priest Who Has Lost Faith: Notes on art, meaning, emptiness and spirituality,” that begins:
IS IT TRUE THAT TODAY, in casual conversation, artists often speak about wanting to have a career, but rarely speak about wanting to make something meaningful? Or is this casual observation only my cynicism rising to the surface? In the most general sense, the hope that art can be meaningful in people’s lives brings it very close to the spiritual, and this might be one of the many reasons the topic is often avoided. If I say I want a career (which, of course, I do as much as any artist) I might come across as ambitious, but there is also something practical and down-to-earth in my pronouncement. If I say I want to make something meaningful it is a higher style of arrogance, more old fashioned, less critical and therefore less contemporary. The desire to make something meaningful brings along with it a thousand small distastes and taboos.
Wren’s ongoing work, including the novels Unrehearsed Beauty (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1998), Families are Formed Through Copulation (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2007), Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed (Pedlar Press, 2010) and Polyamorous Love Song (BookThug, 2014), often explore how to live a meaningful and productive life, loneliness and solitude, the purpose of art, and a series of intimate human interactions, articulated both through a cynical, yet furiously optimistic, and even innocent, open gaze. Wren routinely prods at a series of very large and human questions on just how it is we should and could be moving through the world in a positive and productive way, highlighting just how complicated such uncomplicated it actually is. Listen to the narrator of the story “Four Letters from an Ongoing Series,” for example, after reading a scathing critique of a rejected manuscript:
I lie in bed filled with doubts of every kind. And yet, if I’m honest with myself, I strangely don’t doubt my work all that much. I have to write the books I have to write. If every single publisher in the world thinks they’re shit then so be it. Of course it feels bad now but I’m sure I’ve seen worse and perhaps there is even worse to come. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is being tortured and someone else is being bombed. How much do a few pages of critical words directed at me really hurt when stacked up against even a sliver of the horrors possible in the world? I’m going to keep writing books, I try to tell myself, no sure I’m still completely awake or if I’m already drifting off to sleep. And if not, maybe it’s still not too late to find some other thing to do with my life.
And for those who missed out on the short run of this title, apparently BookThug is producing more copies soon, claiming that orders keep coming in. There is still hope.

Carrie Olivia Adams, Operating Theater

[One]

When? When will I remember? Not how. But when.

At first, I will remember every day. Maybe several times a day. Tomorrow, I will say it happened yesterday. I will remember yesterday. And then the day after tomorrow and after and after. For many days, I will remember. And then there will come a time when I won’t recall immediately how long it has been. I will count in my mind and on my fingers and only then will I know. Eventually, I will forget. I will forget for a very long time. It will lie dormant. And then one day the bus will be late; I’ll catch someone’s eye; I’ll hear someone catch their breath. And I won’t know whether it really happened—that moment—or whether I had been waiting for an excuse to make it happen. But then it won’t matter. I will remember this.

I want to know how long I have to wait until I remember again.
Chicago poet, filmmaker and editor Carrie Olivia Adams’ third poetry book, after Intervening Absence (Ahsahta Press 2009) and Forty-One Jane Doe’s (book and DVD, Ahsahta 2013), is Operating Theater (Buffalo NY: Noctuary Press, 2015). In her published work to date, Adams’ work has resisted adhering to any particular structure for long (note that her previous book includes an accompanying DVD), and this new work explores both the structure of theatre, medical information and language, and implications of the body. What is interesting about the way she approaches genre and form is in the way she blends projects together into bundles, such as producing a film work to accompany a poetry collection, as opposed to stand-alone projects simply influenced by structures outside the normal bounds of her particular genre.
You can cut open my mindand see its figure traced there,the patterns of those memories, a forest.
You can cut open my chestand out of itinto those surgical lightsthe seed will grow.
It’s not as random as it might seem—
That a body becomes something to climb uponThat a body becomes something by which you date your life—
Something that you saw off, carve into, hack atwhen you need to build a fire,when you need to write it down,when you need to remember. (“III. Under Ether”)
In an interview conducted by Ryo Yamaguchi, recently posted at Michigan Quarterly Review, she describes part of the compositional process of this book, writing: “As much as I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with form (I seem incapable of just writing a poem-poem, some self-contained thing of a handful of stanzas and lines), I think I’ve always also been fascinated by the idea of the theater, not the idea of performance, which I think is the concept de rigueur, but very much the construction and conception of the theater itself.” It is as though she writes from a stage, utilizing the entire space as a singular, open-ended performance; one constructed by fragments of monologue, prose-poems and a shift of perspectives. Later in the interview, she states:
I love the idea that once upon a time people could be experts in multiple disciplines. […]
To state it simply, both poets and scientists are trying to find/make language to understand the world; taxonomy and poetry are siblings. Indeed, they are modes of inquiry, of ordering, structuring, and understanding. I, perhaps in part, gravitate towards the authority that science gives to ideas (a weight the lyric mode, which exists in worlds real and unreal, does not carry). I am attracted to logic, even the syntactic structure of proofs. And I like to find ways to balance my inclination toward intuition with reason.
To open the third section, she writes: “I wanted to give my life back, / so I decided to cut it into pieces. / For you, a limb. For you, some marrow. / Is it easier to grasp?” Operating Theater is a collage-mix of fragments, prose sections and stage direction, blending both the medical and performance space of the “theater,” and asking a series of questions from, towards and to the body. Further in the same interview, she writes:
I think I’ve been kicking at the mind/body problem for as long as I can remember. Often, it’s been about a desire to shed or lose the body. I think to some extent it’s a gendered desire. It’s this woman’s body that gets between the world and the person. It’s this body that causes, without invitation, conclusions to be drawn about its owner.  The body dictates how the body’s wearer is treated. So the speakers of many of my poems have often been trying to reject their own bodies, and yet, at the same time, the speakers are reliant on the body; it’s tactile, concrete connection to the world and what’s immediately real and present. There are no poems without the senses. For me, in the end, it’s less about a hierarchy of the mind over the body, but a constant conflict. They are enemies and best friends; they are both the mediums for taking in and making sense. And they are both where the memories are stored.
This is an expansive, intimate and entirely physical work, and one that exists equally on stage as it does within the boundaries of a printed book. “It is a burden. //// To be loved.” she writes.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Syd Staiti

Syd Staiti lives in Oakland and is author of The Undying Present (Krupskaya 2015) as well as chapbooks Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series 2014), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press 2010), and Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I feel more at ease now. I feel like I trust that I can write books. I think all my projects will have similar overall concerns but they'll look different and/or come at things from different angles.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m not so good with rules and conventions. Poetry gave me more permission to stray.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Sometimes a piece comes together quickly but usually I’m pretty slow, especially in the beginning. Once the work starts to have a character of its own the momentum builds and I'll work a little faster. I wrote The Undying Present over four years and the final version has some fragments from very early drafts. I see those fragments as the parts that helped it along to becoming what it ultimately became. Little threads that held the thing together over the years.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I can't sit down and say "now I am going to write a poem" and then write a poem. I often have to trick myself into writing if I don't have something substantial already in the works. When I have written short poems they're usually with my next project in mind, like I'm brainstorming things or using them as stepping stones toward the larger work. I think I need to feel the possibility of expansiveness. Containment is not my thing. Neither is knowing in advance what I'm going to be writing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes I really enjoy readings. I especially like reading work that isn’t totally polished/finished but isn’t brand new either. For me readings are perfect for that work in the middle, work that has started taking shape but is still in formation. I like to feel how it takes up space in a room, hear it when it's floating around outside my head.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I think the current questions vary depending who you ask. My own concerns and questions often deal with subjectivity, gender, narrative, memory, time, sociopolitical forces, struggle, individuals and collectivity, urbanism and environment, I don’t know I could probably go on.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I feel like I’m supposed to say something like public intellectual. But I think if a writer is really good at carpentry or gardening or parenting or healing, that’s great. It's all necessary. I can't see a single role applying to all, especially some kind of privileged role. Writers are just like any other group of people: many of them suck, some are alright, a few are really admirable people.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like working with editors. By the time work is in almost publishable form it can be sort of blurry. I've got all the layers of past versions ghosting the background so it's hard to see the current iteration alone. Editors are helpful because they are invested in the work being as strong as it can be, but they’re separate enough that they can sometimes see things more clearly than I can.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Someone once told me that Eileen Myles once said that if you don’t feel nervous before a reading then you’re not doing it right. You’re not risking anything.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a writing routine. I can’t write if I’m not feeling it. Most of my writing is done on weekend mornings or afternoons because that’s when I'm the most open. I have a hard time writing in the evening after the accumulation of a day. My days typically begin with me waking up pretty early to read for an hour or two or go for a run (or if I can fit in both) before work. Weekends also start with reading, then writing, if I’m feeling it. Lately I haven't been feeling it but that's because I'm not totally into a new thing yet.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Films, books, walks or a run

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have a terrible sense of smell. I don’t know.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
films primarily

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read less poetry than I used to but I still read a fair amount of poetry/creative prose. I like taking on challenging or durational reading projects like Capital and all of Proust. I read a lot, lots of nonfiction dealing with race and queer issues and gender and revolution and histories (both global & in the us) that you'd never be taught in school.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
change my name

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
occupation doesn’t mean much to me. I need a way to make money, that’s all. sometimes I dream of making money doing a thing I love but I wonder if that would make me love it less. if I wasn’t a writer I’d be a filmmaker. I have often thought over the years that I should’ve gone to film school instead.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t know, I was a pretty weird teenager. I felt out of place growing up on Long Island. I think writing helped me through that time. I didn’t think of it as something i could do in my life, or would do, as an adult. It was just something I did. In my early twenties I moved to Portland OR and was feeling like I was finding myself and was more comfortable in my surroundings but I kept writing. It wasn’t a need anymore, a way to connect to myself, it was more of a choice and an interest. I was writing a lot and reading some of my work at open mics and stuff and also obsessively reading poetry all the time so it finally clicked that I should probably try and take it seriously.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
the last great books I read were Frank Wilderson’s Incognegro and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. and I keep going back to Fred Moten’s The Feel Trio over and over. The last great films I saw were Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Zulawski’s Possession, and Innocent by Lucile Hadžihalilović.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m not sure how to talk about it at this point. too new.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Tostevin, Tucker, Czaga, Christie, Kronovet, Abel and Poe.

Anticipating the release next week of the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the sixth issue: Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel and Deborah Poe.

Interviews with contributors to the first six issues, as well, remain online: Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming seventh issue features new writing by: Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi and Suzanne Zelazo. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

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Sandra Simonds, steal it back

When my friend told me he was in love with someone else,              my thoughts turned to Greco-Roman modelsfor inspiration. Also, the letdown            of milk since the body is relentless. A troll on Twitter.It was snowing on all the arches, on the atrium, the four          chambers of a chicken’s short-lived, factory-style heart.The word “psalm” comes from the Greek word “to pluck          a lyre.” Maybe I can address you now. My husbandwill be furious. Coward. Liar. A voice says, “Alice, why did            you have another baby?” Exercise:                      reread the Ten Commandments (“Glass Box”)
I’m intrigued by the expansive surrealism in Georgia poet Sandra Simonds’ latest poetry title steal it back (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2015). The author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University, 2012) and The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Simonds described her approach to poetry in her recent “12 or 20 questions” interview, writing:
For me poetry follows the logic of music and the logic of the body. I think you have to follow your ear in order for a poem to work—you know the hidden story that can only be told through blind faith in the sound.
The structure of her poems appear constructed as a series of accumulations, built as a montage of lines, thoughts and phrases that flow like endless, rushing water. The repetitions, cadences and rhythms are quite striking in poems such as the ten-section “Glass Box,” or the fourteen-section “The Lake Ella Variations,” that includes: “Oh little green apron boy with the crappy gray eyes, let’s watch / the sunrise over Georgia. Gave poetry book I hate five stars on Goodreads; I am / such a liar! / What if I step on a syringe and get a disease? / Who’s going to give me a lot of money so I can quit my day job and write this poetry?” Alternately, the seven-page “Occupying” is a single block of text, existing without punctuation but including capitals, suggesting new phrases and/or sentences, adding to, as opposed to slowing down, the inertia of the piece: “[…] I bet she is an excellent typist I bet she is a lot of things I bet she has been to yoga today I bet she is noble I bet she speaks in hushed tones I bet she is incredible I bet she is an incredible dancer I bet she is a lot of incredible things I bet she dances every night […]”
Simonds does seem to follow and favour rhythm and repetition, allowing certain phrases to echo and repeat, using repetition not as a way to hold the poem back but to hold elements of it together and to propel it forward, composing poems across a canvas far larger than the single page.




Today I paid my landlordat the last possible minuteon the last possible dayof the month which ison the 5thday of the month.It is the 5thof November, 2012.
Poets hate their landlords.This is an imperative. It has no grammar.Maybe it has a crude grammar.I am not writing the check untilthe last possible minutein my car because I haveso much hatred in my heartfor property and landlordsbut not land or streamssince I love the Romanticssince I am also a romanticwhen I am not practicing poetrylike going to TJ Maxxand looking at my face.
I have been thinking of the body of my three-year oldand how it is so new and unstableand how I don’t want him to ever feelhappy in this world.I don’t mean it like that.I want him to feel joybut not happy in the sensethat he feels content. (“A Poem for Landlords”)
There is a fierce intelligence and swagger to Simonds’ poetry, constructed with precision and an excess of wild energy; a poetry of rants, lectures, frustration, unease and pleading, passionate gestures. “I am writing this so quickly.” she writes, near the end of the piece “A Poem for Landlords,” a poem rife with domestic specifics and a rushed, harried breath. The poem ends: “I will post this on my blog / immediately.”