Vertigo Diary by Larry Sawyer Now Available!

Larry’s poetry gives me the best kind of vertigo: the kind where you’re afraid of falling, but when you do you fall into a soft, meaty, sensual, smart ravine that shakes you pretty good, but instead of killing you it turns you into a Thinking Cocktail. What a scary and fine artist Mr. Sawyer is!

—Andrei Codrescu

Larry Sawyer’s Vertigo Diary speaks from a three-fold poetics of self-consciousness, critique and humor so that we chuckle at and choke on our collective shortcomings. This book contains so many thrilling moments of high altitude lyricism that are skillfully balanced by an urbane desire to “progress beyond the / Need to fill our silences with such idiot carcasses.” In the end, Sawyer’s woozy and exquisite poems are shadow messages from the other side of ourselves, messages that unshackle language and let it loose in a dynamic field of play. When I hear these messages, I feel a rare sense of freedom; that is, “To their telegrams I respond / with a ponderous liberty.”

—Nathan Hoks

Check out the book with a large  preview of the book. 
available for sale on BlazeVOX, Amazon and on Kindle! 

Uncomfortable Clowns ms 77 by James Hart III Now Available!

 These poems by James Hart, III careen in the mind as they do down the page with an eagerness, to apprehend every given vicissitude of moment that comes their way. The tensions one finds, throughout the sequence, reflect the ever-fraught interface of inward and out, self and other, word and world.  In this theatre of operations, Hart takes big chances and, more often than not, wins the day. The reward is the readers' amazement and release.

— Bill Berkson

Check out the book with a large  preview of the book.
available for sale on BlazeVOX, Amazon and on Kindle! 

PETRARCHAN by Kristina Marie Darling reviewed on Ploughshares Magazine!!!!

Petrarchan

Posted 05 Apr 13by Andrew Ladd

This post contributed by Anne Champion.

Petrarchan
Kristina Marie Darling
BlazeVOX Books, 2013
69 pages
$16.00

Kristina Marie Darling’s accolades already include eleven books of poetry, and her newest collection, Petrarchan, keeps up with this furious creative momentum. In Darling’s past work, she has carved out a form of poetry all her own, built from fragments, definitions, and footnotes; in Petrarchan, she stays true to this legacy while also foraying into some newer territory—cryptic erasure poems and bracketed verse pilfered from Petrarch’s sonnets.

Darling’s intelligent eye often draws from the history of artistic geniuses or theorists, and this collection pays homage not only to Petrarch but to Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho. She uses writers as inspirational clay: in molding their thoughts, she titillates the reader’s imagination, forcing them to contemplate an invisible narrative hovering above the footnotes. Additionally, Darling often revisits familiar tropes: readers see images refracted through glimmering shards of shattered mirrors, broken jewelry, and lost possessions. In these shards, readers find glimpses of warped but recognizable versions of themselves. For instance:

Read the whole review here

some deer left the yard moving day by Andrew K. Peterson Now Available!

 To: “quincify.” To: “decolonize.” Andy's Peterson's some deer is dedicated to “Naropa,” the university he attended for two years. There, he drew rancid, ebullient comics and amazed us all – his “blood company” – with stand-up, improvised accounts and physical examples of a contemporary hybrid poetics. As Oscar Wilde said, “There is no such thing as spontaneity.” I always understood this to mean that the person who improvises the best [Andy Peterson] is also the person who has enough time inside them that, when prompted, it [time] can come out. By “time,” I mean that unique combination of dream-soaked inner life and scholarship that – in Peterson's work – is the capacity to move between a “lit dusk,” “its rituals,” and the “cheerful madness” that a life in community brings. The experiment is to stay alive. In the words of the author himself via Creeley [quoted] [voltage]: “Poets don’t invent the world (they live it).” They: “Forget to ask but remember to release via kisses.” And so on. I can't decide. Is this book a “waterfall” or is it a “volcano”? Or is it, as the Buddhist saying goes: “Both-both.” Both things at once.

– Bhanu Kapil

some deer left the yard moving day is a book of many different kinds of love. It is an engendering room wherein we can ask (and are asked) what it means to be human (“stripped bare, griev[ing] for the weakened white cells”). The thing that I find especially miraculous is that this book lives on in the body like herbs do after intake. I ate some stolen, large-leafed basil today and even when I am not looking directly at it anymore, even when I am not pondering it, it continues nourishing from within. This book feels very much like Naropa to me: the incense wafts forging their way up the figures sitting zazen, the chipping bricks and ivy, the turning of envy into compassionate states.

– jj hastain

Once in a while, some poems come along that exude American enthusiasm and disaster: “oi hawk-swirl, / oi pale blue / beast devour.” In these poems, Peterson rides onward, outward into horizon and hope and wreckage. Moving Day is made up of structurally juxtaposing serial movements that simultaneously project and deconstruct a poetics of American hospitality, possibility and variation. Conceptualism and sincerity, joy and grief, superimpositions of frames of architectures of sound of collage of derivation radiate imagination over repression. Some Deer is a practice of transforming calamity into a path, echoing, going, fathoming geography of unyielding historical relationship. Read these poems and make marvelous the new-old, “sunflower / your power animal.” Be complicit and harbor intricate lyric conspiracy. Follow these symbolic deer into freedom, risk, danger and dream. Watch the bright heart sparks rise. And together, with Peterson, break out into an OUT THERE, becoming, here, a place, when, now, we’re leaving again, to get to, now, here, again.

– Jared Hayes

Andrew K. Peterson’s poetry publications include karaoke lipsync opera (White Sky Press, 2012), Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVOX, 2010), bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Equinox Chapbook Contest runner up, Fact-Simile Press 2011), and two collaborative chapbooks with the word ‘here’ in the titles: Here Come the Groovies (with Joseph Cooper), and Between Here and the Telescopes (with Elizabeth Guthrie). He edits the online journal summer stock, and lives in Massachusetts.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-130-6

$16

Some Deer Left the Yard Moving Day by Andrew K. Peterson Book Preview 

Prior by James Berger Now Available!

There is an ever-present intensity to James Berger’s Prior through which the reader plummets. Full of complex and particular insight, by turns darkly comic and comically dark, these poems are as unafraid of regret and anger as they are of quick surprise and happiness. Prior testifies to what it means to be ankle deep in a new century, one marked by sound and fury and the astonishment that words still hold us fast to what is yet to come. Berger is a poet for this, our only, right now.

— Richard Deming

With Prior, Jim Berger offers up exuberantly dark and witty meditations on the past, marriage, love, maturity, projects, protecting one’s children, cultural amnesia, violence, kindness, and the impossibility of the present moment. These poems lean into the future and reach back to prior orders of suffering and loss, swinging wildly between disillusion and hope. They give us a sense of the fierceness of being alive, and the sheer gift of being able to reflect on what that means. They remind us, beautifully, of our brevity in this world.

—Joanna Klink

James Berger lives in New Haven CT. He is a Senior Lecturer at Yale–where he does not lecture. He teaches seminars on how language, in the proper solution, dissolves, or else reincorporates into unrecognizable, engulfing signals disguised as pieces of the world. He also plays euphonium and valve trombone; the slide locks his brain. He is father to two young daughters and is married to the historian, Jennifer Klein. He is author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and the forthcoming The Disarticulate: Language, Impairment, and the Narratives of Modernity (New York University Press); and is editor of Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition (Random House, 2003). You should read all his books, but especially the unwritten ones–of which this book is an inversion.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 120 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-131-3

$16

Prior by James Berger Book Preview