Compulsive Words by Michael Ruby

Compulsive Words by Michael Ruby

During automatic writing one day, Michael Ruby noticed certain words repeatedly appearing, forcing themselves on him, taking over his surrealist poem. The number of these “compulsive words” steadily increased through the years, with hundreds of separate words appearing thousands of times, but only during automatic writing, never in other writing. What are these words? Do all of us have our own secret troves of supercharged words, our own private languages, which only ever appear during surrealist writing?

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O! fragmented glories by Joshua Martin

O! fragmented glories by Joshua Martin

O! fragmented glories is a collection of linguistic collages, word collisions, non sequiturs, absurdities, and radical juxtapositions. A playful, disorienting work meant to work against the rational and the conformist, the traditional and the realistic in order to search, question, and experiment with language and the poetic form. These poems are wild, rhythmic, exploratory, and chaotic. Reveling in the glories of the fragmented and the irrational in order to have fun with language and poetry, to create new connections, to think differently, and bask in the alternative fringes of literature.

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Co-options by Jimmy Crouse

Co-options by Jimmy Crouse

Co-options explores the dichotomy between the compulsion to write in the absence of overt content and the imperative to articulate meaningful expressions. The nuanced interplay between vacuity and substance forms a thematic undercurrent, prompting readers to reflect upon the inherent tension within the creative process.

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Moon Alignment by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Susan Laura Sullivan

Moon Alignment by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Susan Laura Sullivan

Moon Alignments is the latest collaboration between Jane Joritz-Nakagawa and Susan Laura Sullivan (who did the photography and design). It is a non-mainstream take on Japanese haiga from a gendered disabled and “foreign” perspective, in a culture where what is unseen and unheard is often the most important thing. Two of the poems are responses to Tokyo poet Philip Rowland’s work in his book Before Music. 

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Puzzle No Edges by Naomi Buck Palagi

Puzzle No Edges by Naomi Buck Palagi

‘Puzzle No Edges is built upon a love of language, including Gulieupshtut, so that some poems rest in down-home slang while others require the effort of reading a familiar but decidedly foreign language. Idiomatic speech patterns swim with startling idiosyncratic phrases, allowing untutored figures to achieve clarity and brilliance. In “South Florida”, for example, the same narrator muses, "I might never of left from South Florida" and repeatedly declares they are "moving to Tuscon", yet describes with evocative clarity the way "the rain grudged the windows". Through both language and subject matter, this collection mourns, celebrates, and embodies the way reality cannot be contained. "It gets so hard in the howl", Buck Palagi affirms before observing that "a small red fox is just now giving birth". Thus she illuminates how both joy and pain kick up evidence of the soul’s quickening.” (Sheri Reda)

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Unsafe by Norman Jope

Unsafe by Norman Jope

Unsafe is a sequence of short poems, written between May and December 2020. Whilst this is not a COVID sequence per se, but something that developed organically and often unexpectedly across several notebooks, it inevitably reflects the peculiar character of that period. In particular, there are strong contrasts between the author's immediate surroundings (described early in the sequence as 'Peak Plymouth') and global heterotopias including North Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia. A dialogue between intense localism and intense globalism pervades the sequence, which is also a celebration of human freedom - and possibility - in an unprecedentedly-restrictive time.

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From Dipstick Apocalypse by Rupert M. Loydell

From Dipstick Apocalypse by Rupert M. Loydell

Tomas Tranströmer notes that 'sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years could pass in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth', an idea which underpins Rupert Loydell's poems From Dipstick Apocalypse. Here are doppelgängers, doubles, mimics, impersonators and decaying ghosts lost in a maze of poetry, allusion, puns and forgotten memories. Here is a world between others, out of sync with itself, its inhabitants desperate for oblivion and a way to escape the whirlpool of time, echoes of tomorrow, and the 'smell of sulphur and soot'.

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Soot Tear Zest by Nava Fader

Soot Tear Zest by Nava Fader

Poems beginning with a line from an uncorrected proof of Federico Garcia Lorca, Selected Verse, edited by Christopher Maurer (FSG, 1994).

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Reviews of Poetry and Prose by Jeffrey Side and Jake Berry 2007-2013

 Reviews of Poetry and Prose by Jeffrey Side and Jake Berry 2007-2013

Reviews of Carrier of the Seed, Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes and Outside Voices: An Email Correspondence. The reviewers were: Adam Fieled,  John M. Bennett, Jake Berry (for Carrier of the Seed), Pam Brown, Andrew Duncan, John Couth, Carey Scott Wilkerson and Ami Kaye.

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Random Notes of a Messenger by Mark Harlow

Random Notes of a Messenger by Mark Harlow

‘The poems in this collection were composed during my stint as a driver/courier in Seattle, giving me a way to occupy his mind during long hours alone in a car.’ (Mark Harlow)

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Limping Symmetry by Jake Reeds

Limping Symmetry by Jake Reeds

'The poems in Jake Reeds' Limping Symmetry connect music to life, not on a superficial pop culture level, but on a primal and transcendent level. Animals and nature are not the "other"; they are connected to everything we experience—but humans in their limitation often do not recognize this reality, caught up in being humans'. (Terrence Folz, author of Dead Parrots and Bunt Burke)

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Odds and Ends: Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany by Jeffrey Side

Odds and Ends: Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany by Jeffrey Side

A collection of essays, blogs, internet discussions, interviews and miscellany, from 2005-2020.

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Aphorisms of Chance by Jake Berry and Jeffrey Side

Aphorisms of Chance by Jake Berry and Jeffrey Side

'In Aphorisms of Chance, Jake Berry and Jeffrey Side give us an elegant and witty deconstruction of a venerable genre. The aphorism is generally understood as a nugget of verbal wisdom, a deliberate, condensed moment of illumination. What happens when chance comes into its composition, disarranging thought and playing with the very notion of insight? The result, ironically, is a higher wisdom: “The / bridge will carry /your / weight / but not the depths of your / gravity.” Berry and Side plunge us into those depths.' (Norman Finkelstein)

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Sounds Anglo-American Robert Vas Dias interviewed by Robert Hampson

Sounds Anglo-American Robert Vas Dias interviewed by Robert Hampson

In this interview with Robert Hampson, which focuses on his American career, Robert Vas Dias discusses his introduction to modern poetry through a reading by Langston Hughes; his early grounding in Yeats, Whitman, Pound, and Eliot; his first New York reading at the Five Spot (during a break by the Thelonious Monk Quartet); his friendship with Paul Blackburn; New York in the 1960s; his collaborations with visual artists; the founding of the Aspen Writers’ Workshop and his meetings with poets and artists including Mina Loy, Jonathan Williams, Basil Bunting, and Claes Oldenburg in Colorado; his return to New York where he joined the faculty of NYU with the poets Jackson Mac Low, Michael Heller, Clayton Eshleman and Charles Levendosky; and the organising and directing of the National Poetry Festivals (1971 and 1973) at Thomas Jefferson College in Michigan.

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Temptation in Whispers by Anthony Howell

Temptation in Whispers by Anthony Howell

'Temptation in Whispers was written at a time when I was deeply committed to the notion of “abstract poetry”. This was neither simply “sound poetry” nor “concrete poetry”. I was interested in working with limited vocabularies and permutations. In those days I was engaged in finding a way of writing in key with innovation going on in other purlieus of art – Philip Glass’s musicians had stayed in my studio on their first visit to London, and I had conducted the first British radio interview with John Ashbery. Several times I visited Clark Coolidge in New Lebanon and often hosted readings by poets associated with the New York School. My work was contemptuously dismissed by the British poetry establishment, and this manuscript proved impossible to publish.' (Anthony Howell)

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Baltimore by Eli Garry

Baltimore by Eli Garry

A novel in two parts set in Baltimore, Maryland, during The Great Depression. It focuses on two families, one rich, the other poor, and chronicles their fortunes and misfortunes up until the 1968 Chicago riots.

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The Reading of Wordsworth in the Twentieth Century by Jeffrey Side

The Reading of Wordsworth in the Twentieth Century by Jeffrey Side

It is becoming increasingly recognised that one of the most dominant aspects of Wordsworth’s influence is that which derives from the philosophical empiricism upon which part of his poetic aesthetic was based. Wordsworth used this empiricism mainly as a rationale to champion a more descriptive and discursive poetry than arguably had been formerly the case. It can be demonstrated that Wordsworth’s poetry relies too consistently upon a descriptive realist aesthetic derived from empiricist beliefs about subject/object relationships. As a result of this, it can be observed that Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice are limiting both as a rationale for the creative impulse and as a critical methodology. This book traces the development of a “Wordsworthian empiricism” that had become dominant by the end of the twentieth century. It will illustrate how the reading and criticism of Wordsworth in the twentieth century (even that which viewed him principally in transcendentalist terms) tended to foreground his empiricism resulting in its wide acceptance by many influential critics as being of value to poetic composition.

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The Great Recession by Adam Fieled

The Great Recession by Adam Fieled

The Great Recession focuses on several specific issues in poetry: the first, and most salient, is an attempt to rid the text of first person singular influences, and deliver a series of vignettes or miniaturized dramatic monologues, narrated by characters attempting to cope with the harsh, desolate landscape, the abrasions and depreciations, of the last decade to pass in the United States. This era the U. S. press often calls The Great Recession. The text should thus demonstrate a kind of cleanliness, apart from the ego concerns and obsessions of the poet at hand. The second issue is ancillary to the first: once characters are established within poems, how to make them interesting, and how to make the incidents and situations they are forced to confront emotionally and intellectually resonant on a wide basis. The third is what kind of language specifically this textual ambition calls for.

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This Transmission by Michael McNamara

This Transmission by Michael McNamara

This Transmission bewilders and enlightens, inviting unconscious recognition and reaching beyond meaning. The result is a lyricism that evokes the sound of someone talking to themselves in a mirror that isn’t there.

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Spherical by DAH

Spherical by DAH

Spherical brings together a collection of micro-metaphysical thoughts, illuminating both life and death, earth and space.

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