Transcendental Telemarketer by Beth Copeland Now Available!

Copeland’s Transcendental Telemarketer contains beautiful lyrics of emotion and meditation, but it also contains rants against war and violence, and all the while it swings us from the U.S. to Japan to Afghanistan, from Islam to Buddhism to Christianity It’s compelling, playful, and well-crafted.

—William Allegrezza, author of Fragile Replacements

Beth Copeland’s poems are music. She combines powerful alliteration (“following blue rivers of blood/flowing back to the heart”) with unobtrusive rhyme (“silver wolves/howl, owls hoot”). Occasional use of form seems to grow from the poem. Asia influences Copeland’s writing; as in Japanese poetry, nature imagery becomes philosophy. Fresh juxtapositions “explode like poppies from the barrels of guns.” Color commands our vision: “the violet wave of light around the Japanese iris.” We hear, mystically, “the Earth’s vibrations/ converge in a single note.” Read this book several times––each visit will uncover a different layer.

––Anne-Adele Wight, author of Sidestep Catapult

Beth Copeland's Transcendental Telemarketer lifts language beyond its typical meanings, lets it "whirl like a spinning top set loose on the sidewalk," until language and meaning split - the way the "I" does in the poems -- "I break in two: one girl stays on the bed while the other one floats to the ceiling to watch." With rare prowess, Copeland crafts these poems, delivering "the equator in that Ouija world," "death" as a "potent aphrodisiac."

—Debrah Morkun, author of The Ida Pingala

Beth Copeland lived in Japan, India, and North Carolina as a child. Her book Traveling Through Glass received the 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and have received awards from Atlanta Review, North American Review, The North Carolina Poetry Society, and Peregrine. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an English instructor at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She lives in a log cabin in the country with her husband, Phil Rech.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-088-0

$16    

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Mylar by Eric Wertheimer Now Available!

 
"Mylar bears the grace and stringent inquisitiveness of Elizabeth Bishop’s North & South and Marianne Moore’s Observations. Wertheimer gives us a world as delicately confounded as the persons who live in it. The lucidity with which Mylar documents vicissitudes of weathering (“The world leaked and was confused/And large knowing birds/Came to rescue its unnerving nestedness”) is matched by a lyric voice whose meticulous fortitude assuages just enough. We are enough consoled by Wertheimer’s elegant intelligence to continue searching for what in distress we might otherwise overlook, “a burned femur buried safe/ in an old velvet bag.” It’s nearly too easy, in the manner of mylar balloons, to say these poems teach us new relations to gravity and occasion. More than this, Mylar’s tensile lines instruct in the ligatures between the earth beneath out feet and a differently unsteady horizon beyond reaching. As gifted a poet as he is a scholar, Wertheimer understands the volatility of Emersonian transcendence, the equivocal auspiciousness of “see there, it’s you too,// there’s some thing in you.” Such lines succinctly speak to the dangers and gifts of this idiosyncratic, quietly brilliant work."

—Michael Snediker, author of Bourdon and Nervous Pastoral

“Where we live, we live in cars,” Eric Wertheimer writes in Mylar, of an eerily postmodern city where “Dust storm at the mirror of stars.” Wertheimer locates us in an at-times gorgeously realized lyric moment—a perfectly rhymed couplet, for instance, or the sly grammatique of this deftly languaged poetry. The visionary range of Wertheimer’s poetic dictions across centuries is riveting, and the swerve to tender, embodied attentiveness and vulnerability so moving. Mylar is miracle.

—Cynthia Hogue, author of Or Consequence and The Incognito Body

"Eric Wertheimer’s Mylar is both a gentle and pointed guidebook on what it means to be fully human. Every poem in this book captures a moment—of isolation and the arbitrary films of thought that separate us from each other, to the lightness (and joy, and terror), when those barriers dissolve—that must be recognized, accepted, and shared. "

—Bonnie Nadzam, author of Lamb

"Eric Wertheimer's poems touch what is near and far way, the drift and distraction of everyday life that envelops and eludes us. In these poems, things as wonderful strange as mylar balloons and a rabbit tracking through time and symbols arrest and surprise us. Look: a "mountain rising suddenly in a doorframe." And there: "miniature satin hands." Life moving as slow and as fast as a sentence, poems refracting what adheres to the mind and senses: the odor of rubber, shadow on cinderblock, silver berry bark, fishtank light. There is a lot colliding in the world, making the conscience of these poems active and resigned. Allusions and keen reason, like a pair of mismatch socks, try to straighten things out - and sometimes do. There is a sky pitched by Wallace Steven, Ben Franklin holding onto his kite, Geronimo hiding in a cave, and Helen Keller, who - imagine - "might decode what is there." Might. All this happens in poems lit with sunlight in some too hot desert place, a life of cars and malls, wise daughters, strained loves, and entanglements with language that has to be nudged to be just right. It's like poetry should be in the waft of what happens. "Do you make the exceptions in your mind and, from small nearby wisdom, persist in loving error?" Wertheimer asks. Well, do you?"

—Arthur Sabatini, author of Who Walks

Eric Wertheimer lives in the desert with Mili, Dani, Aya, and Tupac, where he is Professor of English and American Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876 (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He has published his poems in a variety of journals over the past ten years. His other book projects include: Pretexts: War and Writing in the Early Republic, and Within Trauma: Politics, Poetics, Praxis.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-086-6

$16 

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Distance by Tom Clark Now Available!

For Days by Adam Strauss Now Available!

Of For Days Adam Strauss writes that these poems record “what happens when ongoingness, dailiness, is mixed with highly wrought/overdetermining elements, and hence the use (abuse?) of the pantoum, sonnets, and terza rima.” That’s a fair description, but what’s missing in that little modus operandi but present in the work itself is the music of alliteration, assonance and rhyme schemes falling apart under the pressure of faux pedestrianism. Read Days as daze, the pedestrian almost falling off the sidewalk, or stumbling over the graves of Shakespeare, Dante and Petrarch, to say nothing of Ashbery, Koch and O’Hara. Think New Formalism under deconstruction, “My Favorite Things” as revamped by Monk instead of Coltrane.

—Tyrone Williams

Formally wild, For Days is a kind of chain reaction of circulating imagery and sound, a kind of call and response inside the daily life of self and world. The book teeters on the “verbena laden verge” that’s vamped and revamped again and again. I love how Strauss messes with traditional forms until they overflow with sequins.

—Sandra Simonds

Adam Strauss’ marvelous For Days digs deeply into the organic possibilities of prescribed form. Page by page, these poems are mother and child of each other. A master of surfaces, Strauss artfully proves that poetry’s ever evolving origins comes from asking “established answers new questions/To arrive at innocent unknowing." The loving attention he pays to the surface of the already written world proves that beauty is still possible for you who “concentrate on where you’re going/In order that you might be blown away…” An impressive debut.

—Claudia Keelan

Adam Strauss has three chapbooks out: Nation-State (Blazevox); Address (Scantily Clad Press); Perhaps A Girl Elsewhere (Birds of Lace Press); in addition, he has poems which have been published in the Colorado Review, Fence, Interim, 1913: A Journal of Forms and the Parthenon West Review.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 84 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-077-4

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Byron in Baghdad by Mike Smith Now Available!

 "How is it Shelley truly did believe that Byron's Don Juan would be the great poem of its time? How is it that satire and pastiche become the most durable monuments to our romance? to our romance of ourselves and of our aspirations? With Byron in Baghdad, Mike Smith has, against all the odds and against all the currents of our present depravity, written a work of beautiful renunciation. Chaste and chastening, these poems are pure. Their urgency will only increase over time."

—Donald Revell

Rarely has formalism been as fun and purposeful as in Byron in Baghdad, Mike Smith’s third collection of poems. With astonishing wit, Smith interrogates Byron, chipmunks, a mermaid’s would-be lover, war, consumerism and its trappings, a dying neighbor, folks enjoying an afternoon in a college-town park, and Faust. “I know how this must end / but how is it going to sound…?” Smith queries in the poem “Chipmunk Burlesque,” and also throughout the entire collection. His masterful meters, internal rhymes and heroic couplets sound great; they also create multiple layers of meaning, all increasingly urgent, until we affirm with him, “Bernadette, / these are not rhetorical questions.” Indeed, Smith’s poems dive into the over-determined conditions of our cultural and social lives, even our forms of expression, even our prosodic forms. I am reminded of what happens when you flip a tapestry over and see all the connecting threads you never imagined or suspected because they are invisible on the other side. These poems invite you to pull some threads, tie new ones together. In other words, they give us new purchase on our souls and an irresistible urge to play.

—Marcela Sulak

A native of Philippi, West Virginia, Mike Smith is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Delta State
University and the author of three collections of poetry, including Multiverse (2010) also from
BlazeVOX Books. His translation of the first part of Goethe’s Faust: A Tragedy appears in 2012.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-094-1

$16

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