Circles Matter by Brian Lucas Now Available!

 A triple play. Brian Lucas— painter, poet, musician—eye, heart, mind. Written with a sense of unfolding mystery, his voice on the page is sure in its tone, the ongoing quest and questioning is awake with profound and restless detail. Out of the ballpark. I await more.

— David Meltzer

Shock is the awe of reading—“a fable folded into sea.” The elemental act of reading is physical as well as chemical, a catalyst transforming the coastline of clouds into the graceful synaesthetic prosody of Circles Matter. The circles that matter are lines of approach, the “Contents” describing 25 poems and 3 drawings, from “Awe” to “Sketch of an Eclipse.” Brian Lucas’s elegant Circles Matter moves time, in time, “Never resting as ideal state.”

—Norma Cole

The creative mind is a vast and never-still momentum of thoughts giving way to images and metaphors that, when followed, reveal paths connecting suns and cities, galaxies and cells. Brian Lucas has found a way to navigate the language of this complicated field in a way that fills the reader’s creative mind with the possibility of landscapes seen in trance-vision, or concepts like “each part is an illusion” understood as thoughts heard in rhythmic mythological time. Circles Matter, because “every brain has an inferno to occupy.”

— Kristen Prevallet

While reading Circles Matter, a mirage of lines spins around me. I feel as if plunged into a teeming interregnum, where the invisible brews and comes back to itself through “boundary-less sensations.” These Circles are made of “clues… hidden in the songs sung.” After an indeterminate duration of contact with the text, I feel as if Brian Lucas has chanted a hive of codes beckoning through “yellow” “light.”

— Will Alexander

Brian Lucas was born in Visalia, California in 1970. His previous publications include Telepathic Bones (Berkeley Neo-Baroque, 2010), Light House (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2006) and The Trustees in Spite of Themselves (Neko Buildings, 1999). He contributed drawings to Force Fields (Hooke Press, 2010), a collaboration with Andrew Joron. After several years living in Thailand, he now resides in Oakland, California where he plays in the spontaneous music ensemble Cloud Shepherd.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-093-4

$16

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grief notes: by rob mclennan Now Available!

Good grief! mclennan—in elision of subject, omission of object, in suppression of narrative—has rewritten the grammar of love. He jiggers love radically in suspended prepositions. He newly measures it in hesitations and in the innumberable small moments between comma and semi-colon. Those discretions.

—Dennis Cooley

These poems read like the score of grief, driving the song through its musical rests. What rob mclennan makes “visible by loss,” calls us to consider grief’s odd recessions, obsessions, omissions-- its “notes of replication.” Suffering echoes through its landscapes, turns of phrase and among its machinery. Its lovely, excruciating achievement roams and exceeds the pain that the “body learns only to forget.” This poetry sings the ache “further, / down/ as it is human.”

—Lea Graham

It’s not a poetry to be safely skimmed. It pivots, sidejogs readily such as “endearments, armed/like trees.” Any given word doesn’t go to expected places. It isn’t dodging from somewhere but over somewhere complex, topographically. It dekes at ground level but it runs understanding the terrain from longer vantage point as a mind at work in “turbulence, approach of water, absence/makes the heart grow//fountain/and its architecture.”

There are leaps and abrupt stops that keep the words generating understanding and multiple readings. Can a heart without a water supply be so self-resilient as to build its own infrastructure? It must, musn't it. It's refreshing to see poetry that speaks resilience rather than the romance of sudden lurch papercut endings.

Rather than a poetry that descends from a city planner worldview where everything is set in a grid, insistently rolled into a cohesive symbolic whole where meaning reigns, here’s a reflection of the way life admits boulders and pre-existing buildings. It’s not a topdown opinion, so much as a rigorous observing, working with and in non-sequiturs and uncomfortable extensions. For example in grief notes; supplement the poem moves from realizations of the general — the large scene of jackpine lakeshore, the sense of all of humanity scaled down into the natural universe (without explicitly explaining such being implied but giving reader some credit to understand) — to the specific scale of an individual life, “if people disappear/from earth// ,a lover would.” 

—Pearl Pirie

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011), 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010) and wild horses (University of Alberta, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/ garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com), as well as the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair, which he originally co-founed in fall 1994. In 2009, he edited a special Canadian poetry issue of the Swiss pdf poetry journal Dusie (dusie.org). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essay, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 82 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-066-8

$16

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Pointed Sentences by Bill Yarrow Now Available!

 Many poets could write other poets’ poems, but there’s no one anywhere who could write a Bill Yarrow poem except Bill Yarrow. With a bizarre grace that suggests a truly individual aesthetic, his poems navigate the razor’s edge between the polished and the raw. Like a Dadaist version of John Donne, Yarrow takes an axe to common poetic assumptions, yet delivers all the pleasures of poetry at its best.

—Stephen-Paul Martin, Changing the Subject

Bill Yarrow is the Sun Tzu of verbal warfare, the Machiavelli of mental strategy. “Look left,” he says, and when you look right, anticipating his move, the whiplash hits you from behind. This is a book stolen from the library of the unexpected before it burned. What is it, what is it? A bit of Nicanor Parra’s antipoetry, a bit of Vasko Popa’s thought experimentation, a bit of Celan’s surrealism, a bit of this, a bit of that. As it shifts from allegory to narrative to lyric, you come to understand that this book is not a wonderful beast (part hippopotamus, part threshing machine) but a creature whose parts and attributes are constantly shifting—wings when it needs to be an angel, webbed hands for catching baseballs. How wonderful, how fun, and how different from so many volumes of genial, accomplished, and innocuous poetry.

—Tony Barnstone, Tongue of War

Buy this book and read these poems slowly, (I advise one a day), to become acquainted with the audacity, the charm, the play, and delights in the work of a major American artist. There isn't a lazy or ordinary utterance within, but everything feels as natural as grass and sun. A truly great book of poetry. A feast.

—James Robison, The Illustrator

Bill Yarrow is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. He is also a poetry editor at THIS Literary Magazine. He is the author of two chapbooks: WRENCH (erbacce press, 2009) and FOURTEEN (Naked Mannekin, 2011). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals including Poetry International, DIAGRAM, Confrontation, BLIP, Rio Grande Review, and PANK.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 146 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-082-8

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Paris Views by Michael Joyce Now Available!

 Anyone who loves Paris will find that literarily-overdetermined city brought to new life---new and not particularly literary, for through Joyce’s sharp, quick, and cleverly amorous eye, Paris is evoked not as objet d’art, but as sloppily, raucously, lived; as an idiosyncratic confluence of specific instances that shed deep light on the way that individual perception and experience sculpt public space. Throughout, he makes the most of a delightful and visceral head-on collision of languages to construct a space between all utterance that is raw and always reaching out for its word---which, though not yet arrived, can be felt coming into being through that collision itself.

— Cole Swensen

The pleasure of slowly walking, vieux pantouflard & flâneur that I am, through a city & two languages I love is always a treat — & is positively relished when I can do it from the comfort of my Schlendrian armchair, eye-tip-toeing gently & at leisure, savoring each word & phrase of these sharp, lovely, rich poems. I’m home, here & there, in this book & in that city.

—Pierre Joris

Oui, bien sûr, la traduction entres les langues est impossible, but what happens here is better: in a language that has no word for "home," Michael Joyce tries to find out what one is by wandering the weird labyrinthine and counterintuitive transfer points (comme le Paris Métro, je pense!) entre anglais et français. Franchement, ce n'est pas "Franglish" qu'on va trouver in this book mais a different kind of synchronicity, not a mélange of languages fusing but rather a scintillating point where chaque langue existe seule et ensemble tous le deux at the same time and toujours.

—Kazim Ali

"How do you say we are longing to mean something?" With poetry that registers the migratory subject's occasional glimpse of les bonheurs in the midst of self-estrangement, each view captured "in a language we / can't understand although by now we know the words." The frissons here arise not from the fluent excursions into Franglais or their corresponding aperçus, but from the "untranslatable" difference between what we will (to) remember and what we remember, yet another trace of that inexorable "universe of silence" which, whether it "possesses us" or we it, underwrites our eloquence. There may be "no second act in heaven" or in American lives, but here, in these deeply felt and brilliantly nuanced poems, lyric splendor is making a formidable comeback.

— Joe Amato

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-089-7
$16 

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Doggerel for the Masses: A Post-Scandal BlazeVOX Booke by Kent Johnson Now Available!

These various pieces, initially published in journals by Craig Dworkin under the name of “Kent Johnson” (with exception of the tour de force Afterword, presented here for the first time), follow from his call, in the Introductory essay to Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern UP, 2010):

Signing a text that one hasn’t written will surely become less remarkable, and the next frontier of propriety will materialize when conceptual writing antagonizes the institutions of poetry by signing for others under texts that they have not written.

As such this book represents both the latest, most advanced gesture of Conceptual authorial experiment, and a fatal send-up of the actual Mr. Johnson, perhaps the most contemptible figure in contemporary American letters. If poetry has, until now, been fifty years behind Art, it is now at least fifteen minutes ahead.

—Vanessa Place

Helen Vendler recently referred (letting off not a little pent-up steam) to the “Mickey-Mouse-Ears avant-gardism of U.S. Conceptual Poetry.” Well, here’s a riposte to that, Dame Helen: Because Craig Dworkin’s Doggerel for the Masses (“by” Kent Johnson!) wears the golden helmet of Achilles, whose antennae listening-mechanisms shoot into the heavens beyond Pluto. Hold onto your Hats, Boys and Girls; it’s going to be a wild ride!

—Kenneth Goldsmith

Kent Johnson received his Master's degree from the Poetics program at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under Kenny Goldsmith. While at the University of Pennsylvania, he helped establish Jacket2 and (under the supervision of Professor Goldsmith) managed and edited the audio recordings collection at PennSound. He lives in Paris, France, and in Freeport, Illinois, where he works, during winters, for the Stephenson County Sanitation Department. Though he has published nearly thirty other books, this is his first book of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-084-2

$16

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