Some of us don’t have a problem with the Mind-Body Problem; our mental state is embodied, our body is thought. This can make for a slippery “I” but as Fridman shows us, slippery means vibrantly alive. Her traveler is the “left/self” – the self left over, non-dominant, wrong – indefatigably surveying survival, friendship, and country, questioning each: What is physical? What is ghost? These poems are gasping and smitten. —Sommer Browning

An ambling celebration of the hyperlocal, scattering interiors and exteriors on the page, allowing us to walk along. – Maryrose Larkin

I’m drawn into the concerns this work proposes: the symbiosis of living within myriad contingencies and wonders. Awesome! – Brenda Iijima

We     introduce / ourselves      + / To Planets and / to      Flowers / But      with/ ourselves / Have
     Etiquettes / Embarrassments / And     awes     – Emily Dickinson*

“Overturn memory,” proclaims a line from Carand Burnet's Henhouse. As with hens tilling soil in a garden, Burnet's poems reveal and obscure a personal history. Each poem penetrates this history in a staccato pacing, drawing up facets which seem at once domestic and mythic. From these fragments Burnet hems together an altered language playfully and deftly, a language which tells us “nature fakes lawfulness,” and “Night would consume all day if it could.” — Phil Montenegro

THE DUMBEST QUESTION EVER is a series of electronic letters (emails) which venture into a delirious bricolage of technology, sex, urban decrepitude, Goldman Sachs, race, the active lives of objects, AFRICOM, the state of American black nationalism, betrayal, the occult, friendship, and the late despot Muammar Qaddafi--all to solve the mystery of a missing phone charger.

You can contact the DQE at thedqe AT gmail DOT com.

UNREDACTED version: in a special edition of 20. $20 (shipping included) Sold Out

In Memory of B. Lee:

B Lee is the meat and gristle, the joint chew and fluid cracked loose as we jostle her about and carry
her through our line.  B. Lee the leaf-tongued, the riser, the hyphen in bracken; B. Lee the whistle-
blower, the long on alert, the lyer-awake.

Michael McClure named his favorite motorcycle after B. Lee. They were related, though neither by
blood nor era. He even painted B. Lee on his helmet.  (He never wore the helmet.)  "What if I got
in an accident? That helmet would be ruined," he once radioed every trucker in Michigan.  "What
about your bike, or your own damn skull" some worried rational trucker C.B.'d.  McClure over and
outed: "I'd die instantly, but B. Lee would continue tearing up the highway."

"To have language for a thing/ you need a tongue or a finger/ pads at least."
 
Who was B. Lee anyway? Historians, biographers, astrologers, cosmologists,
cosmetologists, stenographers, and newspaper men will likely have all kinds of opinions…You
can only know for yourself and only for a can of beans because the concrete facts of her life seem
to "glisten between the membranes/ of cause and effect." That is to say, the life of B. Lee shines at
an edge that finds us simultaneous and unknowing. We can try to sleep on the "mower blade," but
it will be a rude and terrifying awakening. It seems to me that we had best "sing a little" to embrace
her legacy as a "taller tale" that only continues to grow or "we can all just lie down in a circle around
B. Lee and surround the body." It's life or death because "in this hollow there is only one/ building
one room." I know where I'll be. She taught me that.

body puts it a/way

the body" (w)here

when she comes and half-again

to be here of us which is what you have (to

be/come responsible for giving her

a bodysome ceremony

She is a time traveler for the carnival. She keeps lists of islands in her. She is a giant. She has alpacas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBXr15K2uSc

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS 3 includes poems by: Ricardo Maldonado, Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Steven Karl, Rebecca Lehmann, Jared Schickling, Brandon Shimoda, Paula Cisewski, Jessica Richardson, Brian Teare, Jane Wong, Daniela Olszewska, Jennifer Karmin, Nate Slawson, Michelle Taransky, and Jen Tynes.

I wonder at times what a genuinely philosophical poetry might look like; I know it wouldnt look like philosophy. I suspect it might bear real resemblance to the poems that Lucy Ives is writing in Novel. Such poems accept confusion without reveling in it. Such poems trouble themselves by working toward song in the very realm where thought and perception divide and grow quarrelsome. They forsake Truth with its capital T for truthfulness: an attention to consequence, a willingness to become complicated without false reverence thereof, "the knot so language would have / mention // of what it later did." These are poems remarkably without idols; and by that I simply mean that these poems seek to "follow one's understanding rather / than resisting." It just happens to be the truthful case that one doesn't always understand ones understanding, and the pleasure of the poem is inextricable from its necessity: an accompaniment into the world that refuses to be domesticated by thought, the very world in which one loves what she loves, the very world in which one makes her home. — Dan Beachy-Quick

Stripped of adornment but not of song, Rob Ostrom's Nether and Qualms reminds us of the link between the essential and the incantatory:

Lord,            I saw
hundreds in grey     fly

from         J    's

mouth.

Are those animal technologies? Is this a Byzantine modernity? Can a voice tell us it's not here? Yes, yes, yes; relax into your discomfort. With "a single orange the only light," Ostrom hands you the oblivion you need to see. — Samuel Amadon

Had my moderation in prosperity been equal to my noble birth and fortune, I should have entered this city as your friend rather than as your captive; and you would not have disdained to receive, under a treaty of peace, a king descended from illustrious ancestors and ruling many nations. My present lot is as glorious to you as it is degrading to myself. I had men and horses, arms and wealth. What wonder if I parted with them reluctantly? If you Romans choose to lord it over the world, does it follow that the world is to accept slavery? Were I to have been at once delivered up as a prisoner, neither my fall nor your triumph would have become famous. My punishment would be followed by oblivion, whereas, if you save my life, I shall be an everlasting memorial of your clemency. — Caractacus

Much like the weather last winter when we heard simultaneously things never heard before at the same time--shouts of "mussels," "shrimp," and "watercress"--so that someone who was attentive to a particular shout at one moment would think it was winter, then spring, and then midsummer, while anyone who heard them all would think that nature had become confused and that the world would not last until Easter. — Soren Kierkegaard

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS 2 includes poems by: Jared White, Cecily Parks, Brian Foley, Phil Cordelli, Lily Brown, Alice Notley, A K Beck, Kate Schapira, Heather Palmer, Linnea Ogden, Friedrich Kerksieck, Bronwen Tate, Emily Jones, Dot Devota, Anne Shaw, John Harkey, Genevieve Kaplan, Carol Ciavonne, Justin Runge, Elisabeth Workman, Rachel Beck, Sarah Fox, Kate Thorpe, Nathan Hauke, and Kirsten Jorgenson.

Glassscape reflects quizzically upon the work of media, electronic and otherwise, its own included. Barely contained by the columnar rectitude they're given on the page, the poems accent lexical disquiet and concatenation, scatlike sonic momentum and wry, jump-cut observation. Pleasure, edification and intrigue lock arms in a heady mix of the arcane and the quotidian. — Nathaniel Mackey

Produced in collaboration with DoubleCross Press, WASHTKS includes poems by: Michael Schiavo, Patrick Masterson, Erin Lyndal Martin, Farrah Field, Paige Taggart, Eric Elshtain, Matthias Regan, Amanda Nadelberg, Adam Clay, Fred Schmalz, Andy Gricevich, Ryan Murphy, Rachel Moritz, Ben Estes, Tony Mancus, Leora Silverman Fridman, Nate Pritts, and Joseph Wood.

Opening with Derrida's neologistic and punning declaration, Behold animalogos, Mary Hickman puts the problematics of distinction at the center of this work. Her deft play among the particularities of species, even as far as (con)fusing the lines between the plant and animal worlds, has us constantly questioning the nature of being, its permanence and mutability. But more important, her work also makes us reconsider our affinities and loyalties, examine what it means to recognize (to "re-cognize") the others around us, and face the ramifications of acknowledging their otherness while maintaining a concomitant vigilance over the distances that recognition can create. Hickman has succeeded in presenting ethically crucial material in startlingly vibrant, enlivening language. — Cole Swensen

Here is a poetry of breath and breadth, crafted with honesty, clarity and grace. Here is a world sensed by more than sight, a wide-ranging sense which seeks out spaces between interior and exterior, organic and mechanical, intimate and foreign, and would be familiar to Whitman or Artaud. In the choked environment of our time, this work is porous, sustaining, vital. Drink it in. — Phil Cordelli

In "Another Limit," Linnea Ogden maps a skeptic's fugitive geography of the imagination. In poems with titles like "Submerged Lands Act," this poet continuously draws and redraws the jurisdiction of her literary consciousness, always seeking "the answer to this particular border / dispute" in poems of considerable formal grace and emotional honesty. — Srikanth Reddy

Linnea Ogden explores boundaries both thematically and in her syntax. But most amazing: she makes legal language sing. — Rosmarie Waldrop

"You are walking toward gunshots on this road," Thomas Hummel writes (or is it cites?) "while the steppe is asking for songs," and the relations within and between these two clauses—tense, uncertain, quite possibly accidental—is like that between almost any two sentences in this striking, important new work. Is "toward" in this case spatial or temporal? Does "while" mean "at the same time" or "whereas"? Hummel notes that this is a "work of collage," meaning most of its sentences originally appeared in contexts that limited their meaning. Here, unmoored, they realize their potential strangeness, and find themselves arranged by a random integer generator to take on the "arbitrary nature of the organic world." Yet what surprises the reader most about this work isn't the way it evades meaning in favor of mere being, or even the way it places gunshots where we expect songs. It is instead the fact that it captures throughout its pages the act of significance cutting through the bramble of its language, insisting itself into graspability, and against all odds. If the condition of the work is classic melancholia ("He was empty inside, and he could see no exciting project or absorbing task into which he could throw himself"), it is one of its most radical, affecting, and perfect manifestations in recent memory. — Timothy Donnelly

His poems, his music, his game, his friendships are here, suggesting that Thibault Raoult takes seriously the conflict of his roles. As a writer, he insistently remains an amateur, going beyond what he knows. El P.E. reads as a kind of radical blessing, an expressive, unconsummated poetics in which we encounter cycles of cultural narrative rendered through an incontrovertibly particular language (of tribe, an ordo vagorum). Raoult's enthusiastic attentiveness to expression, pleasure, and polysemous meanings stokes a poetry that is, always in glimpses, perversely funny, turbulent, and whammo, alive. — Forrest Gander

Noun and verb, agent and act. Constantly searching and endlessly reiterative, Samuel Amadon's Spy Poem is the "little gray man" embodied. Visible when it chooses and vanishing at will, this work is just fast enough to stay ahead of us but never risks capture. His is a poetics of clandestinity. With its beautifully staggered and seamless syllabics, the poem is a dissection of artifice within an artifice: how we shape what we leave, how we choose what we show, how we say what we say once we've made the choice to say it. Samuel Amadon is watching. Get in the car. — Thomas Hummel