Hurray! It's time again for the AWP conference in Chicago, Illinois! We will not have a table again this year, but I will be wandering the halls of the Hilton and browsing the book fair looking to say hello. I'll be getting into Chicago early on Wednesday and leaving Friday evening. So please do stop me if you see me and we'll go for a coffee or tea! I'll be the tall guy wearing a sensible hat, a black topcoat with a superman pin and have an overstuffed orange side bag. Hurray!

 

We will be hosting an off-site reading, BlazeVOX and Friends, Thursday from 7 until 10PM. Read more about the reading and get directions below!

 

BlazeVOX [books] online shop

http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/

 

Take a few minutes to get into Book Fair mode and have a poke around our online shop. Buy some of the best new books published and have the books shipped right to your door! This way great poetry can be waiting for you on your return, and you'll lessen the heavy load of books you will inevitably fly home with! 

 

 

2012 books from BlazeVOX [books]

• Continental Drifts by Cheryl Pallant
• to go without blinking by Aimee Herman
• Circles Matter by Brian Lucas
• grief notes: by rob mclennan
• Pointed Sentences by Bill Yarrow 
• An Anatomy of the Night by Clayton Eshleman 
• Paris Views by Michael Joyce 
• Doggerel for the Masses: A Post-Scandal BlazeVOX Booke by Kent Johnson 
• HUMAN-CARRYING FLIGHT TECHNOLOGY by Christopher Shipman 
• Faceless Names by Anna Elena Eyre 
• Counting Sheep Till Doomsday by Carlo Matos

Revolving Door Reading Series and BlazeVox Books brings you a reading of BlazeVox & Friends! Music for the evening will be provided by FathomDJ, one of Chicago's leading female DJs with readings by Cynthia Guardado, Amanda Auchter, Vincent Celucci, Farrah Field, Geoffrey Gatza, Matt Hart, Amy King, Jeffrey Morgan, Daniel Nester, Michelle Naka Pierce, Nate Pritts, Chris Pusateri, Sarah Sarai, M Bartley Seigel, Chis Shipman, Michael Smith, Sheila Squillante, Tony Trigilio, and Jarred White.

 

Directions

Hilton-Palmer House

17 E Monroe St # 10, Chicago, IL 60603

 

 

1.         Start out going east on E Monroe St toward S Wabash Ave.

             0.05 mi

 

2.         Take the 1st right onto S Wabash Ave.

            Cvs Pharmacy is on the corner

            If you reach S Michigan Ave you've gone a little too far

             0.09 mi

          

3.         Take the 1st right onto E Adams St.

            Robert Benson School is on the corner

           If you reach E Jackson Blvd you've gone a little too far

           1.0 mi

 

4.         Merge onto I-90 W/I-94 W/Kennedy Expy W.

            If you reach S Halsted St you've gone a little too far

            1.5 mi

 

5.         Take the Augusta Blvd/Milwaukee Ave exit, EXIT 49B.

             0.3 mi

 

6.         Turn slight right onto N Milwaukee Ave.

            Sunny East Village Daycare is on the right

             If you are on W Augusta Blvd and reach N Noble St 

             you've gone a little too far

             0.5 mi

 

7.         1270 N MILWAUKEE AVE is on the left.

             Your destination is just past N Ashland Ave

             If you reach N Paulina St you've gone a little too far

8.         HURRAY!!!!

 to go without blinking by Aimee Herman Now Available! 

 

Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: "This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection." I liked that. A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that's just page one. Throw away "the color pink," writes Herman, deeper in. And: "Gender is best received in a question mark." In not with. I loved that. This is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register:" where the label was rubbed." Until there's nothing left but, as the writer says: "The most dangerous parts of me." What those "dangerous parts" become, reconfigured, mutilated and grown again, is the text of this "sore" and "feminine" book. A book in which "words" and beloveds, of various kinds: "never stop coming." What kind of cyborg is this?

 

-Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University.

 

 

 

 

 

Like tectonic plates drifting apart and colliding, Cheryl Pallant's language in Continental Drifts shatters into microcosmic worlds and re-coalesces into new contours, expressing desire afresh. The ceaseless motion of destruction and re-alignment, of fertility and quiescence, is also the engine that propels speech into meanings yet just as soon incinerates them. In Pallant's exquisitely musical streams of thought, forces in different realms coincide: "Hormones flow as insistently as magma." But such sympathetic vibrations belie a restless instability at the heart of phenomena, and Pallant's poetry shape-shifts to reveal the dialogue among energies that beget and erase. Continental Drifts simultaneously offers "a handful of earth and emptiness" and opens up within silence a rich realm whose core is "ripe beyond perishable, ache beyond blossom."

 

-Camille Martin

An Anatomy Of The Night by Clayton Eshleman is a magnificent new work by one of America's foremost poets. In thirty-one parts written between December 2010 and February 2011, Eshleman's long poem creates a choral effect that masterfully evokes fragments of candid observation shimmering in rhythmic intensity. In bold simplicities, illustrative sensibilities and lyrical integrity this work is imaginative, intimate and beautifully controlled. Hauntingly, these poems rip open the space of the long form poem and create something new and brilliant.

 

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

 

 

There is a deep sadness in Christopher Shipman that needs poems the way a carnivore needs meat. He makes poems to feed his sadness, to appease insistent hunger. He's become a skilled cook of these soul-meals.

 

-Andrei Codrescu, author of Whatever Gets You through the Night: a Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments

 

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.

 

 

 

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

 

Read this book in the dark, with a flashlight. Read this book when you are open, really open to the world, to your world, to language and rain. Anna Elena Eyre writes magnificent poems, poems that breathe and sing and imagine and paint. I am very grateful to her.

 

-Joseph Lease

Much like the "Relaxed Bared-Teeth Display" he describes in his poem of the same name, Matos's poetry kindly bites you...the reader gets playful-yet-poignant, bite-sized poetic declarations and imaginative and unforgettable landscapes of more teeth, flashcards, electric fences, court cases and death rays. Here the bizarre and everyday meet in unique combinations in a succession of wild and intriguing poems. Matos treats language refreshingly as his own Mr. Potato Head doll warning us, "That is not how you intimidate an octopus."

 

-Lina ramona Vitkauskas, author of The Range of Your Amazing Nothing

BlazeVOX12 Winter11/12

Be sure to check out our Winter issue of BlazeVOX11 and online journal of voice. And do send your submissions now for the Spring 2012 issue to this email: editor@blazevox.org. 

 http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/journal/blazevox11-winter-2011/