THE BARN PARTY No one came under leaves drenching plastic cups lit up over- passes pissing thrills a ragged border, call it Texan lace God bless this memory hole hot set top warm soaps animals out race streets closed off locked with shops so they can paste new tip cup jokes the first last days. Prepare soups in the reference section, painkiller sting … Continue reading Four Poems by Chris Hosea
Tau(gh)t for madeline I go back to that no and I sing from it. I practice epilogue: needlethreadepi- thelium. As what constitutes mean is the variance. Perhaps I fly hollow. Into some you, then. And rest. And where will the drama queen darling? My tongue is thin without your tongue to build a team on. Because we have been there, dear Ranger. Let … Continue reading Poetry by TC Tolbert
from Fieldnotes, a forensic Ethnographic frailties or the failing of fieldnotes. Trying ruminations troubling my informants: (some) other ill-powerful society. I felt a responsibility to revise “my village” and to “get it right.” They were really my best draw unveiling their secrets. The conflicted piecing of voices. Contexts. Aristocratic clans. The women “animals” admitted to quotation marks. Academic mentors stress objectivity Authoritarian regimes control … Continue reading Three Poems by Kate Eichhorn
Black-Eyed Heifer Shelly Taylor Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010 Opening myself to these poems in Shelly Taylor’s Black-Eyed Heifer, I feel the hinterland of inside. Movement into place, feeling the erasure of discrete and safe. The feeling that this work is exposed, that the land is wild, allowed fallow but alert to so much life. It feels pastoral in that one is here in this wild, … Continue reading Black-Eyed Heifer, by Shelly Taylor
EOAGH Books, 2011 ISBN 978-0-578-05882-5 Poetry / Fiction / Literature 82 Pages $17 In this poet’s novella, midtown Manhattan unrolls into a parade of grotesque but sympathetic speakers who confront us in partial narratives with no overriding story except onwardness. Poems bloom inside of prose passages which get interrupted by journalistic account related to the credit crisis and wars overseas. A series series of dramatic … Continue reading Nothing is in Here, by Andrew Levy
from: Ordeal by Bow By Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris (…) We’d wall ourselves into these beer halls — the Ya-Sin Brewery, the Peepers, Chez Abu Nuwas, the Four Arts — close by the university, or into the Eighth Wonder, a passable dive where the kemia were varied, not far from the National Library, very late after legal closing hours. Every evening the same evening… … Continue reading from: Ordeal by Bow, by Habib Tengour (translated by Pierre Joris)
BP If I set my blackberry at ‘normal’ what will I get besides a paler icon on its screen that’s silent and that seems weird who taught their students to never say weird. I’d be speechless so much of the time. In fact ‘weird’ is the mitten I keep my normal in so there. The bottom line’s gotta be class I write in this … Continue reading A Poem by Eileen Myles
THE STREET “The populist slogan ‘Save Main Street not Wall Street’ is…totally misleading…it overlooks the fact that what keeps Main Street going under Capitalism is Wall Street.” – Slavoj Zizek when people refer to The Street they only mean one street the one with the wall at the end it’s the only street left in the universe that’s real the others almost as famous one … Continue reading Three Poems by Jerome Sala
Over the last three decades art-theorists and critics have begun to pay more attention to both collaborative teams and collaboration as subjects of enquiry. Around the time this study formally began in 2003, ‘collaboration’ emerged at the forefront of artistic trends and debates: In 2003, the Chapman Brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize as a collaborative team; in 2004 Third Text dedicated an entire … Continue reading Toward a Definition of Collaboration: Collaborative Authorship in the Arts
Review by Anne Elena Eyre Testify Joseph Lease Coffee House Books, 2011 America. Where are the bodies in the streets? Surely there’s enough to protest as there was if ever before? New battles disguised behind vacant words. Words are what interconnect our consciousness through webs to known and unknown realms. Words are magic because words can manifest actions. This is recognizable in actions that necessitate … Continue reading Dream on Dreamer: Testify, by Joseph Lease
Eight Distinctions For the lucky few there is no tomorrow, only the day after You may not see it coming, only what’s here already In the class on market values, I am the one who pays attention Of the two you meet in the road, I alone tell the truth Fear they’d lived with was in their faces so you couldn’t tell them apart Remember … Continue reading Five Poems by Vyt Bakaitis
EOAGH Chapbooks Continue reading Thermae, by Christopher Schmidt
A Poem for You I wanted to write a poem so full of spirit-lite™ that my father would finally like it, that would bring him easy peace. I wanted to write a poem so wise, yet tailored for one sitting that even Mom would understand, and say: Yes, in that way women agree with each other about how their husbands are just so messy … Continue reading Two Poems by Ana Božičević
Review by Piotr Gwiazda The Iliad Book XXII: The Death of Hector by Lisa Jarnot Atticus/Finch Books, 2006 Bookthug (Toronto), 2007 It is often noted about Homer, the “compiler of the Iliad” (as George Steiner calls him), that in his portrayal of the Trojan War he remains neutral. Homer famously doesn’t take sides; there are no winners or losers among his fighting warriors. The defeated … Continue reading A Homeric Echo: Lisa Jarnot’s Iliad XXII
Review by Alyse Bensel Sherwood Forest Camille Roy Futurepoem Books, 2011 ISBN: 978-0982279854 128 pp Paperback: $16.00 Sherwood Forest, Camille Roy’s sixth poetry collection, exposes the performance of gender. Marginalized people populate their own world that sweeps across the book’s pages. These poems reenact and reconfigure social norms, disorienting yet evolving throughout the book in prose and lyric forms alike. In a preface to the … Continue reading Sherwood Forest, by Camille Roy
Let’s say that Charles Olson, who fretted about the short life-spans of his male ancestors as an indicator of his early death in “The K” (Olson, Selected 159), does not die in 1970 at the age of 59. Worn out, he goes underground and just observes the culture for a very long time. In full possession of his faculties, he turns a century old in … Continue reading Olson Meets Web 2.0
The Moms after Kristen Hatch The moms think they are prettier than other moms underdogging swings. The moms are dough- rise perky and kind of definitely smell like dominant. The moms care about unique and revolutionary folding systems, but maybe they don’t really. It only took four hours to knit this sweater, the moms say. The moms say your kid punched playground. You might … Continue reading Two Poems by Melissa DeGezelle
On the Island of Adopted Children I. Things no one talks about: Family resemblance The seashore at dusk The cost of gasoline II. A fetus Floating slick in expectation How can it know that island folk Stand three deep on the beaches Rolling “mother,” “father,” “child” around on their tongues. III. How to get there: Load your cargo Climb into your canoe Paddle … Continue reading A Poem by Sarah E. Chinn
IN THE LANGUAGE OF REAL MEN Aloha elegant gunfire men Father me online language Fuel the anagram engine Then file an analog genre Men flee eating granola A hot Reagan enema A lean fuming grantee hole Oh genteel managerial fun Anal hoagie gentlemen fur Reanimate a flung on Hegel Negate a long fern email A flannel Goethe mega ruin A naughtier fallen genome Engulf a … Continue reading A Poem by Gregory Laynor
from Index Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted – Emily Dickinson A Alba, re: aubade [NOTE] [All this, I think, in the published version]: Buster Keaton: I don’t want to be autobiographical. B. K.’s Shadow: No [TRANSCRIPTION] Along the right side of one page [PERSONAL NOTE: the edge nearest the world], a stain that erased some … Continue reading Five Poems by Andy Frazee