#spd recommends backlist

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast yr eyes & shelves on November’s SPD Recommends *Backlist*!

Ten more titles that continue to rock our world:

1. Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D’Allesandro - Dodie Bellamy and Sam D’Allesandro

“Although Dodie was leading ‘in competition for grossout — but that’s such a yawn since being female all the cards are stacked on my side,’ in the end Sam won for shock and extremity — he died. Dodie’s last letter (1993) is a homage to him (’To look as precisely as possible at the everwavering presence…’) and a series of inventions on mortality in the time of AIDS. The prose is pitched so high it’s thrilling. The letter is a summit of writing on sex and death, a garden in which the void prospers. ‘Sam, I never dreamed that playing dead could make you feel so alive.’” —from the preface by Robert Glück

2. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan

"Sharply critical of nationalism, separatism, chauvinism of all kinds, as tendencies toward narrowness and isolation, she was too aware of democracy's failures to embrace false integrations. Her poetic sensibility was kindred to Blake's scrutiny of innocence and experience; to Whitman's vision of sexual and social breadth; to Gwendolyn Brooks' and Romare Bearden's portrayals of ordinary black people's lives; to James Baldwin's expression of the bitter contradictions within the republic." —Adrienne Rich

3. The Vineyard - Fanny Howe

"If I could talk about divinity to the boss / it would not be pretty." —Fanny Howe, from 'Servitude'

"The breath that animates Howe's poetry seems to blow, not from a contemporary world of 'materials' and 'individuals' but from one of radical mystical belief." —San Francisco Chronicle

4. Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love - Samuel R. Delany

“When you and I live so closely that touch and smell are suddenly half of what we communicate, new laws govern the interchanges as different as strong and weak particle interactions...” —Samuel R. Delany

"In HEAVENLY BREAKFAST we see the genesis of the alternative living arrangements portrayed in Delany's novel Dhalgren (1974)." —James Warner

5. The Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker

"One's first impulse, after awe, on reading THE GRANITE PAIL is a double dose of shame: shame at not being more familiar with her work; shame at ever having complained of the narrowness of one's life." —Carolyn Kizer

6. The Black Heralds - Cesar Vallejo (tr. Rebecca Seiferle)

From the publisher: Vallejo radically and fundamentally challenges the canon of Western culture as no other Latin American writer. THE BLACK HERALDS is Vallejo's first book and contains a wide range of poems, from love sonnets in which he struggles to free his erotic life from the bounds of Spanish Catholicism to the linguistically inventive sequence, "Imperial Nostalgias," where he parodies with considerable savagery the pastoral romanticism of Indian and rural life.

7. Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989 - Larry Eigner

"Live thinking—rather than 'theory'—about poetry & prose & living & dying, often starting from or turning into poetry as easily as rivers & puddles become clouds become rain....Starting from anywhere at hand (often with 'input' from 'media'), ending somewhere we're surprised to get to." —Jackson Mac Low

8. The New World Border - Guillermo Gómez-Peña

"Gómez-Peña muses, often tongue-in-cheek, on matters of race, nationality, language, and identity. With a heady mix of pop culture, provocative iconography, political satire, ethnic stereotypes, and guerrilla theory, he explores 'the territory of cultural misunderstanding.'" —The Village Voice

9. Useful Knowledge - Gertrude Stein

"USEFUL KNOWLEDGE is pleasant and therefore it is very much to be enjoyed." — Gertrude Stein in her 'Advertisement for this Book.'

10. THE PAPER CHASE - John Jay Osborne, Jr.

Robert Clark, former Dean of The Harvard Law School, has said "THE PAPER CHASE is one of the most important books ever written about legal education in the United States."

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on August’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…

1. Poems of the Black Object - Ronaldo Wilson

"[A] warning to anyone tempted to believe that in objectification lies freedom. Livid inside an apocalyptic negative capability, these poems are constructed through their maker's deconstruction, and reading, I too, felt unmade."—Claudia Keelan

2. Sherwood Forest - Camille Roy

"In its capacity to stop time, SHERWOOD FOREST opens its reader to a future made ‘suddenly visible.’ A ‘narration’ that's both ‘desire’ and what incubates it: the capacity to ‘float.’ Imagine a forest floating in the air. Camille Roy does this. She is a writer who lets her reader dream, past tree-line. Where the sentences flare and dim, like 'sexy bodies.' Like a memory of touch. Like ‘body parts’ and 'tissue' - a luminous genitalia - above a pond."—Bhanu Kapil

3. Maribor - Demosthenes Agafiotis

"MARIBOR gives us both artifact—of the ephemera of communication, institutions, power—as well as blueprint for imagining an 'alphabet of the future.' A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall."—Eleni Stecopoulos

4. Hurdis Addo - Samantha Giles

"Conceptual poetics + wed to + a dedication to social justice = a book with sharp edges and intriguing reading dynamics. Definitely recommended." — Kevin Killian

5. The Lizard Club - Steve Abbot

"Steve Abbot's THE LIZARD CLUB is funny, angry, suspenseful and totally new. It's like a Xerox of tragedy, Pandora without her box. Read it and feel your tongue growing and growing until you can flick flies out of the air."—Kevin Killian.

6. Inter Arma - Lauren Shufran

"Laura Shufran's meter-making argument stings with ludic blows bent to send the line aquiver. Weaponized with duck soup and chicken rimes (a baker's dozen haptic hexes of heptameter), INTER ARMA is the neoclassical nude formalism that the times demand. With searing wit and virtuosic élan, Shufran's epic lyrics hit homers every time."—Charles Bernstein

7. Haecceities - Michael Cross

"In HAECCEITIES, Michael Cross has made an interim language, his invention a relation between the words—as if this unknown relation or 'noumenon' is 'a hide enthinned' of futuristic Elizabethan single words each at once tactile, optical, aural simultaneously traces and events of reinterpreted future-present spurred in 'the many hundred wing-lit hives'"—Leslie Scalapino.

8. C.C. - Tyrone Williams

"Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history."—Susan Howe

9. Negativity - Jocelyn Saidenberg

"'Rejecting that which cannot be recaptured' makes negativity prelude to a form of freedom, and the psychosexual progress Saidenberg’s pilgrim traces from 'Destruction as a Cause of Becoming' to the knotty resolve of CARNAL achieves a “music of exhaust and darkening horizons” that’s entirely the poet’s own: 'Figures retie the circle, then release into shape.’” —Rodney Koeneke

10. Democracy Is Not for the People - Josef Kaplan

"This book works exactly as I expected (of course you have to use as directed). I was very happy with my purchase, and with the cop being on fire. I am not sure we should mug the wealthy, of course." —Diana Hamilton

[smallpressdistribution]

don't forget about our backlist! take a peek at this month's backlist recommends w/ United Artists Books, Coconut Books, Ricochet Editions, The Song Cave, Timeless, Infinite Light, Krupskaya, Ugly Duckling Presse, Copper Canyon Press, Counterpath Press & YesYes Books <3

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s SPD Recommends *Backlist*, ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…

1. The Black Unicorn Sings - Aja Monet Bacquie

"There are people who come into your life, who come into this world with such velocity, bravery and beauty that whole hearts are changed, the whole earth is moved. Aja Monet is one of those rare people in my world, in this world. She is a lyrical shape-shifter, an ancient infant, bravely falling up. Her search for compassion and truth is relentless and voracious. Her time here, her work, here, her life is our poem. Here."—Michaela Angela Davis

2. Compos(t) Mentis - Aaron Apps

"Knuckles digging in the knee and not knowing it, while reading! To be disturbed and to be reminded of something you never quite knew. To be reminded and made to know that memory a new way, this is the way Aaron Apps gives it. Morphine drip as the scalpel tears open the new machine. The petri dish is an appetite for the borderlands of experimentation which is now shattering. You are now under the spell, you have been since you started reading it. If poetry is a way to live then I want to live with these poems, permission without question!"—CAConrad

3. The Spring Flowers Own and the Manifestations of the Voyage - Etel Adnan

"With this book of poems Etel Adnan establishes herself as a major poet who belongs beside internationally acclaimed poets like Tranströmer, Bly, Neruda, Vallejo, and Pessoa."—Eric Sellin

4. Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression - Edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser

From the publisher: “Shadow on a Tightrope is a collection of articles, personal stories, and poems by fat women, about their lives and the fat-hating society in which they live. Topics include: exposing the myths concerning fat; what it's like to grow up fat; a description of the medical crimes committed against fat women; stories of the daily hassles, verbal and physical harassment in the lives of fat women; inaccessibility to clothing, jobs, and public places for exercise and sports; effects on the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual selves of fat women living in a society that hates them, and how they have learned to survive.”

"Will open the eyes of even the most fat-phobic. If you read nothing else, read this."—Feminist Bookstore News

5. Catacombs - Safiya Sinclair

"Sinclair's is an arresting new voice that makes us sit up and re-think. Her mythopoeic imagination thrives on startling metaphors and combinations of images. Eschewing the naturalistic and consolatory, the poetry is alive in disturbing implosions of consciousness, drawn to cataclysm and apocalypse, whether in personal or communal histories."—Eddie Baugh

6. Platform - Rodrigo Toscano

From the publisher: "Rodrigo Toscano's Platform is a political one; his writings are predicated on the political conditions of contemporary life. But his work is not (and will never be) predicted by those conditions; indeed, outwitting, unnerving, and outspeaking the forces and figures clinging to control is one of his signal artistic strategies. It would be correct to read Platform as a triumphant product of precise and complex labor (thus adding to the tradition set by Louis Zukofsky). But where the spirit of Johann Sebastian Bach informed Zukofsky's work, we would suggest that it is the spirit of the Teatro Campesino that informs Toscano's—his poems carry out brilliantly creative interventions. The work is bitingly inventive and yet delicately meticulous; outrageous, funny, anti-hypocritical, and 'unfuckingrightgaggable,' Platform is victory for the political intelligence whose exercise is now, more than ever, a human necessity."

7. The Activist - Renee Gladman

"The Activist begins in the middle of a revolution. There is a protesting group of commuters with a missing leader. There is a bridge that may or may not have been bombed. People speak in nonsense and cannot stop themselves. In the midst of all this, the language of news reporters mixes with the language of confession. The art of this beautifully written book is in how it touchingly illustrates that relations between humans and cities are linked in a more complex interface than most realize. The book is full of entrances and exits, alternate routes and incommensurate geographies. The Activist does not analyze or explain the hopeful desires of protest at the turn of the century, but it does enable us to see them differently."—Juliana Spahr

8. Four Year Old Girl - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

"Berssenbrugge has quietly written some of the most stylistically consistent and elegant poems of the last decade. Her latest volume, a related series of poems composed of her signature stretched-out lines, start from the concrete--an insect, a fish, a girl—and proceed to reveal how boundaries we think solid (of bodies, of images) are fluid and unstable...Berssenbrugge's probings yield radiant conclusions. Readers looking to be ravished by the beauty of sound and image—and willing to wrestle with some demanding philosophical conundrums—should look no further."—Publishers Weekly

9. WITHOUT A NAME - Yvonne Vera

"Vera is one of the freshest, most evocative prose writers since Ondaatje, her sophisticated lyricism offering a poised tension as it details shattered landscapes, bodies, and dreams."—Kirkus Review

10. mauve sea-orchids - Lila Zemborain, translated by Rosa Alcalá and Mónica de la Torre

"Lila Zemborain brings into relationship the viscera of the body and the spill of the universe in tense compositions that blur distinctions between lyric and prose poetry, between science and eros."—Forrest Gander

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s SPD Recommends *Backlist*, ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too...

1. ANARCH. - Frances Richard

"This collection of poems addresses the fundamental question of our time: what is it to be human? If we are strange to each other and ourselves, then how do we know it? What is strangeness if not a recognition of something we can recognize? We can no longer see the earth (especially from the sky) as unaffected by all our experiments, hurled down, trashed, in pursuit of happiness. Frances Richard goes to the material roots of our search and turns away, and takes off, after another purpose. This book has the spirit of anthropology and philosophy, and also reveals the underlying structures of these two disciplines as a problem for artists to solve. Why? Because if words go down with the rest, and lose their light, we are really finished. Richard is doing what poets are asked to be doing now."—Fanny Howe

2. THOU - Aisha Sasha John

"THOU is a pilgrimage—in which heaven is sought through earth, and relation is material. THOU is a choreography of irresolute bodies, the insistent shifting of their positions. Aisha Sasha John is a poet of centrifugal energy, of reverberant intimacy.”—Michael Nardone

3. UNDER FLAG - Myung Mi Kim

From the publisher: "In UNDER FLAG, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: ‘Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching...’.”

4. 2500 Random Things About Me Too - Matias Viegener

"An extraordinary capture of a life and a consciousness in middle age, when mortality and the grid of associations laid by one's personal history cannot be denied. Chained to the task of compiling these 'random' lists, Viegener creates a self-portrait—of the whole world!—that encompasses everything from Descartes to the grooming habits of parrots, with plenty of sex, beauty and boredom. Like Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, Viegener's journey leads nowhere except to an emptying out. Compulsively readable, the book is a brilliant achievement. I could not put it down."—Chris Kraus

5. Apart - Catherine Taylor

"Catherine Taylor's Apart offers an intimate and sweeping look at the legacy of apartheid, while performing an altogether rare balance of 'lyric seduction' against 'the ugliness of corpses.' Taylor refreshingly treats white guilt and the self-conscious recognition of privilege as starting points rather than conclusions, as she plumbs the depths of history, from which, as she reminds us, 'no one is excused.' The result is edifying, original, and critically rigorous—a poetic and political vibration between 'ecstasy, shame, ecstasy, shame.'"—Maggie Nelson

6. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers - Bhanu Kapil

From the publisher: "These short pieces reveal new ways of belonging in the world and possibilities for an art grounded in a localized cosmopolitan culture. And Bhanu Kapil writes:  ‘As if our responsibilities to each other end at the border of our / countries, or at our cities, or half-way across our cities, or at our / back doors, or at our skins. No.’”

7. The Morning News Is Exciting - Don Mee Choi

"Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative."—Craig Santos Perez

8. The Men - Lisa Robertson

"...only [Robertson's] poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture." —The Village Voice

9. Earliest Worlds - Eleni Sikelianos

"Earliest Worlds signals poetry's adventurous slide into genres usually left to their proper (read academic) spheres. Sikelianos' practice of mixing discourse and lyric blows up the disciplinary borders as effortlessly as reading a menu of options...behind its self-professed 'gluttony for words,' Earliest Worlds flaunts a sexy insouciance and an uproarious inventiveness."—Chris Tysh

10. The Arab Apocalypse - Etel Adnan

"The Arab Apocalypse is, to date, Adnan's most triumphant battle with the exactness of words." —Douglas Powell

[smallpressdistribution]

Twice a month, SPD recommends 20 new titles we just can't keep our hands/eyes off. But there are so many older gems that still make us feel the love, so we're swinging the light back each month to ten books that continue to rock our world. Maybe they'll rock yours too...Thus we bring you our first installment of SPD Recommends *Backlist*:

1. The Thorn - David Larsen

"It's an obsessive, super intelligent, highly promising work, and an often beautiful one." -Publishers Weekly

2. The Essence Of Reparations - Amiri Baraka

From the publisher: "THE ESSENCE OF REPARATIONS is Baraka's first collection of four daring essays looking at reparations for African-Americans, for the crimes of slavery, linking reparations to greater political, economic and social development, and the writer's ideas about democratic transformation in the USA."

3. Black Life - Dorothea Lasky

"Her poems are so good they make me gasp." - Robert Dewhurst

4. My Walk With Bob - Bruce Boone

Dennis Cooper calls it "a seminal and perfect work," and for Camille Roy it is "a founding document, and the brilliant record of an opening in writing."

5. Story Of The Eye - Georges Bataille

"a dirty book by an unhappy Frenchman." - John Wray

6. gowanus atropolis - Julian Talamantez Brolaski

"Julian's deviance is a hazard of poems which bend the muscle of light." - CAConrad

7. ALICE WALKER BANNED - Alice Walker

"In response to outrage from Christian conservatives, the California State Board of Education (BOE) removed in 1994 two short stories by Alice Walker from its California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) exam, which was adopted to allow children of all backgrounds a 'level playing field.' One of the stories, "Roselily," an interior monologue of a poor, Mississippi girl (an unwed mother) as she is being married and taken away to Chicago like chattel, was deemed 'anti-religious.' The other story, "Am I Blue?," is an allegory of slavery told by a narrator observing the treatment of a horse; the story's ending holds emotional associations of eating animal products with cruelty and was thus marked 'anti-meat-eating.'" -Library Journal Review

8. Drunkard Boxing - Linh Dinh

"The poems of DRUNKARD BOXING growl, astound, chill. 26 of some of the most stunning and stirring short poems I have read to date, bending form to illustrate conflict in perfectly imprecise confrontational language. Foremost, however, it is clear that the poems in DRUNKARD BOXING possess what I felt I had otherwise been missing: subject matter that is interesting, revelatory, and difficult."-Patrick Herron

9. HANNAH WEINER'S OPEN HOUSE - Hannah Weiner

"HANNAH WEINER'S OPEN HOUSE beckons us into a realm of poetry that bends consciousness in order to open the doors of perception." -  Charles Bernstein

10. Elements - Robert Glück

"Bob's fiction is actually quite friendly yet he cuts it with a knife. Bob's gift to the history of letters I think is the uncanniness of his flow. He pulls down the page like a shade, it's masterful what he does. His page is more filled with light than words, really. More filled with temperature too." —Eileen Myles

[smallpressdistribution]

Wazzzzzap internet. Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles from the 90's that continue to rock our world. boo-ya.

Scrunchies, Beverly Hills 90210, Ryan Gosling’s long hair, Xena, The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan, all those Bagel Bites commericals...just a small glimpse into humanity's greatest feats. It's not a coincidence that all these feats took place in the 90's either. That's because the 90's were great. It only makes sense that literature in the 90's was great too.

So hold tight to your Tamagotchi, Furby, or Beanie Baby collection: The 90's are back in the form of 10 awesome SPD backlist titles. These titles will leave you glowing brighter than any glow-in-the-dark star on your bedroom ceiling ever could. feat. New Star Books, Talisman House, Publishers, Kelsey Street Press, & more!

1. Debbie: An Epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997)

Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, Debbie: An Epic is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie."

2. The Tower of Babel by Jack Spicer (Talisman House, Publishers, 1994)

An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," The Tower of Babel includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.

3. Four Year Old Girl by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Kelsey Street Press, 1998)

In this extraordinary new collection of poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, writing reflects human presence in the phenomenal world. Physical sensations of experience—a horizon, moisture, a child, a piece of quartz, a loss—become objects of focus and poetic elements. Her written lines, like strings of protein, both create and destroy bonds. Reading affords moments of exquisite vulnerability in which the perceived world is suddenly exposed to the quick. The pace of everday life slips into that of a waking dream. Winner of the 1998 Western States Book Award.

4. Brooklyn Bridge by Leslie Kaplan (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1992)

This is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult. Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York's Central Park, where the child's presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.

5. WHATSAID Serif by Nathaniel Mackey (City Lights Publishers, 1998)

Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, WHATSAID Serif, is comprised of installments 16 through 35 of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in his two previous books, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.

6. Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer (United Artists Books, 1998)

"It's OK that poetry won't save us from circumstance, or pave our road to what we're tempted to call Heaven, but it doesn't matter—because reading Bernadette Mayer's poetry is where I always want to be. Here, within the playfulness of her language, is where consequences of daily living are histories of heart and mind. Poetry is in life and life is in Bernadette's poetry, and that's all the reassurance we need."—Kristin Prevallet

7. Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (Edge Books, 1999)

Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. "We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience," writes Hejinian in the introduction, "how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us." Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself.

8. Close to Me & Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere by Alice Notley (O Books, 1995)

Alice Notley's two books collected here, Close to Me & Closer...and Desamere, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She's invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind's inner sense and motion. "Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley's poems are unsettling and inspiring"––the San Francisco Chronicle. 

9. Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child by Elva Trevino Hart (Bilingual Review Press, 1999)

A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising a family in an environment that is frequently hostile to those who have little education and speak another language. Assimilation brings its own problems, as the original culture is attenuated and the quality of family relationships is comprimised, consequences that are not inevitable but are instead a series of choices made along the way. It is also the story of how the author overcame the disadvantages of this background and found herself.

10. Local History by Erica Hunt (Roof Books, 1994)

"Erica Hunt's Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip."—Harryette Mullen

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on October’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten still-so-relevant titles selected by our very own Matthew Hedley!

1. Cold Genius - Aaron Kunin

Have you heard Aaron Kunin get excited about Milton yet? In love with things that are funny because he loves them, like Milton’s bible fan fiction, or Chiquita banana, or language meaning a particular thing. Is it fair to say Kunin’s quote clusters are a joke, a reflexive reassurance, a kindness that doesn’t force words down your throat, a presentation, a kindness, so that his book feels deeply kind. I appreciate the Ben Lerner blurb – “it occurs to me often to be grateful for his work.” Because I am, also, deeply grateful. Reviewers seem to delight in calling him a genius – because it’s in the title, maybe – but this book is so much more interesting than that. He’s a genius, who cares, “genius” is really a silly thing, don’t you think? It’s a brand, maybe, or something a lover says and is misunderstood and misunderstood until he figures in a Kunin poem.

2. Trances of the Blast - Mary Ruefle

This book of Ruefle poems is an odd gem. Its title is given the lie by the duration of its gaze. A stanza for the thing, a stanza for the feeling about the thing, a stanza for life after living with the thing. Remember Inception? That movie all the memes come from? This book has all the immediacy of an explosion in that movie, as time dilates wider and wider, until we’ve forgotten we were running from an explosion in the first place. What was that movie about? Or – wait, what’s this book about? It’s not exactly still, since there’s so much life ahead to get to, and it has pace, some yearning to be turned on, left on, but its movement comes from turnabout, the unwieldy and furry shift of a person looming in the midst of a poem. 

And so I have had to deal with wild intractable people all my days and have been led astray in a world of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees where no one ever curtsies anymore or has an understudy. So I have gone up to the little room in my face, I am making something out of a jar of freckles and a jar of glue 

I hated childhood. I hate adulthood. And I love being alive.

3. Monk Eats an Afro - Yolanda Wisher

This book is embodied poetry, the talked about but rarely seen kind. It’s important that the book is anachronistic in its sensitivity – Cry of Jazz came out in 1959, Monk Eats an Afro in 2014 – but Wisher loves jazz, and is good at it. The Sonia Sanchez blurb should be a giveaway of how in scene this book is to Philadelphia, to Philly jazz, to clubs where Sonia still holds court at a central table, with similar tables around, Wisher at another, someone, maybe Dawn Evans holds down a third, there aren’t that many tables but they’re mostly full, with men and women who make Philly great. Sure, I’m being overly romantic, because this is a literal memory I have, being in that room, being in my hometown, sometimes it feels like it might disappear, also – this book is romantic. Its romance poems are downright sexy, and god, when Wisher swings into a rhyme at the end of a stanza it rings out. There’s a body at risk here, recounting personal experience with a heady sense of its own cultural touchpoints. There’s something conservative about a jazz fanatic in this day and age – to go through every day hearing what the radio does while still pulling back to Monk and fam takes work, a love of the way things were – which, in context with the rest of this list, makes a deep commentary on how conservative poetry as a whole really is. Because this book feels novel and standout amidst the others of the list for how separate its references are. No other book on this list is more than one degree of separation (in terms of debt owed) from John Ashbery, and this book might be two, and that makes all the difference. It’s not that it’s “anti-academic,” because that term posits the academy as the thing, and everything else as lying in opposition. But I remember a creative writing professor ask a creative writing graduate student what she could possibly talk to a slam poet about. Monk Eats an Afro is incommunicable with that sort of thinking. Not opposition – a powerful voice, sure in her self.

4. Stories in the Worst Way - Gary Lutz

This book makes me want to write better. Lutz’ style should be ponderous -- the whole text appears at a glance almost as marginalia, like liner notes on liner notes, but nothing is frantic. Somehow it feels calm, even, impossibly, focused. Which can be a little frustrating -- the game of the title STORIES IN THE WORST WAY always cycling through my mind as I am shocked by the talent.  Because they are really well written and make you jealous and more than a little productive. Lutz makes me write. Because he really can write, and his overcrowded margin of a text feels absolutely effortless and easy for him, which is also impossible, and also untrue, and it’s – god, it’s frustrating! But if I didn’t have this book around, what other book could I use to make myself write. I admit, I throw this book around a lot. It’s a really nice weight and size to be thrown, and then picked up, mumble a bit, read the same story again, somehow write four pages, go for a walk, turn around mid-walk, come home and read the same story, write some more. It’s a book I love and picked from thousands of titles here at SPD -- and if you can’t handle being jealous and productive, I just don’t even know you.

5. Videogames for Humans: Twine Authors in Conversation - edited by merritt kopas

This book of playthroughs, essays, contexts, games and game-ified writing is unique and complex. Twine as a digital platform stands alongside all my other distant dreams of choice mediums for preventing academia and the state from incorporating language and work into their narrative. But, unfortunately, the space remains uncurated in meaningful ways to further that vision, which, as Wikipedia will tell you (by omission or deletion mill), perpetuates the same power structures as the world outside. So: CRY$TAL WARRIOR KE$HA (made pre-$ removal) is on the sample page today (looking absolutely amazing), while the most recent review is some undergraduate freshboy’s takedown of its writing structure. Which is to say that the academy is always uncomfortably present in the history and training of creators, players, readers – and even in the essays in VIDEOGAMES FOR HUMANS. The tension in the book’s movement back and forth between Kesha and undergraduate with a grudge is what makes the book so incredibly worthwhile. Beyond just a book for digital language nerds like myself, this collection feels so important for asking questions of how to create positive art spaces. Teenaged entertainment proposes an answer, negated in the misogyny of Lil Yachty, reconstituted in the queer narratives of Twine, complicated in the reactionary nature of write-ups… How will any of us make art in a time where to be an instrument of the state is such a bald-faced violence? But magic and a joy in loving self-sabotage shows a glimmer of hope: 

“There’s this assumption that if you stray from The Scientific Method into actually caring about things like lying on the floor of your room in the middle of the afternoon with black canvas hung over the curtains to keep the sun out with a single candle burning, wearing lipstick—even though you pretty much don’t wear lipstick any other time in your life—sort of meditating and sort of tripping off sensory deprivation and sort of falling asleep, that you had better take that weird stuff just as seriously and humorously as scientists are supposed to take science. Like basically magic can’t be weird or fun or fucked up or stupid on purpose. Which is wrong!”

6. Event Factory - Renee Gladman

Event Factory – There’s a setpiece of science fiction where worldbuilding, forced to include some cultural background for the book, treats us to speculative songs and poetry that are, let’s be honest, always awful. The cantina songs, the God-Whispers of Han Qing-Jao, the water songs of the Fremen – let’s be real, these are painful moments. Even Delany – sorry. But then you have Gladman, a luminary poet, writing her Ravicka novels, and suddenly, writing becomes speculative in parsing and content. There’s all the textured concentration and phrasing her talent begets, combined with a character-driven, engaging and difficult science fiction novel. So that our transportation occurs on every level – not escapism, because the density of idea and descriptor doesn’t admit such an easy movement – as we are other before it. It’s a deeply disturbing book, to be sure. The disassociative trip of finding things already happening to yourself makes the book a Ketamine nightmare in its darkest, half-sexual, half-prone. That’s a warning, I suppose, or as much of a warning as I can give for a book I’d like you to read. It’s a book of recollections, and it often recalls the worst. Go read it.

7. In the Time of the Blue Ball - Manuela Draeger, translated by Brian Evenson

This is the only book on this list I didn’t know beforehand, but god DAMN. It reminds me of Kathryn Davis, but with a different set of idiosyncrasies. Or Monica Furlong’s deeply strange cousin. Or it’s not really like another person, but an outstanding talent all to itself that speaks in an unusual voice, with a style and focus all her own. Still, it’s hard not to try to put it in context, because I hadn’t heard of Draeger previously. Shelley Jackson wrote the back cover blurb, and if you’re not down with Shelley Jackson, there’s nothing I can say to convince you to read this.

“I’m warning you, Potemkine,” said the tiger. “Now, here we are together in too small of a space. It’d be better if you didn’t wiggle in front of me. In the darkness, I could imagine that you were running.”

“I don’t look like a wharf rat,” I said.

“When someone starts running in front of me, it’s too late for distinctions between species,” said Gershwin.

Half-accessible, half-mystic fantasy that flirts with various reading levels, IN THE TIME OF THE BLUE BALL is a gorgeous book of fiction. With thanks to Brian Evenson for a stellar translation.

8. This Lamentable City - Polina Barskova, translated by Ilya Kaminsky

He lies naked on something white, She laughs above She covers him With her pearl, her body her Star, her body her snow, her body On top of the word “strange,” On top of the word “fright.”

Barskova wanders the city and chronicles, and edits, and edits, and edits what she sees. This book is beautifully refined, calm, sure.

“In our village where small animals live slowly And humans jump on them.”

I’d like to do this little feature with only quotes, quotes and gasps afterward. The above a reaction to finding the scattered remains of snails in the lane. I hope it snows where you read this, in the evening.

9. The Feel Trio - Fred Moten

Fred Moten. Glory, Fred Moten. One of the most talented writers of a generation who makes the balance of phrasing and legibility feel effortless. Not that every line is beach-read-legible, but that his word clusters are drop-dead gorgeous, and always feel intentioned and deserved. Throughout his published works, Moten remains a cheat-sheet for debut writers – “how do I get away with putting this really fabulous but loud phrase in my writing” – but THE FEEL TRIO is a monstrosity of confidence, even for him.

           “this a service on the surface for frank wilderness and carl flippant.            my absolute beauty studies feelings in an open afterlife. I hold him            and I’ve lost and I feel it in my hands and the sharp distance of his            little bother, explosive flower of I’m not ready and don’t want to.”

10. That They Were at the Beach - Leslie Scalapino

My favorite book of poetry has somehow never been on a previous SPD Recommends Backlist. The narrator of the book fascinates me – defensive in language, insecure in relative positions, honest in gaze – in her movements between mechanism and pathos. The formalization of language, centered around the em dash – pretending to be a device of clarity – reminds me of coding languages, its Turing-complete, it’s a half step from language, but in this case not towards clarity but something else, something that masquerades as clarity but is poetry. Which isn’t an opposite of clarity, but it’s not the same thing either. I find it impossible not to copy this book’s phrasing for months after I reread it, so I’m trying to be good here. It’s the book that made me love poetry.

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on September’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…

1. You Are Not Dead - Wendy Xu

“There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible.” - Dara Wier

2. Stars of the Night Commute - Ana Božičević

“STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams.” - Annie Finch

3. Rules of the House - Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

“Dhompa's potent suite of poems elucidates the humanness and adversities of the Tibetan diaspora. You enter the immigrant girl-child's bifurcated world, coming and going, language to language, culture to culture, from childhood to sexuality. A lovely explication of 'dharma—things as they are, and how precious they are, no special pleading.” - Anne Waldman

4. King of Shadows - Aaron Shurin

“Aaron Shurin gets it so right in this collection of essays.  He slows down the heedless world and takes a good look.  Sometimes he jumps on the moment with predatory glee, other times he fashions wreaths of words with it.  I watch and admire these flights that are way over-the-top and yet scrupulous.  At some point his watchful explorations become autobiography and the whole scrupulous, over-the-top, magnificent man steps forward.” - Robert Glück

5. Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium - Jean Day

“Occasionally a book pulls me in to the exclusion of all others, demanding that I read it straight through. The sensation almost feels like a drug. I find myself looking forward to my next possible moment with the book and experience intense pangs of sadness once I’ve completed it, as though a friend has passed...Jean Day’s ENTHUSIASM: ODES & OTIUM is just such a volume. Reading it is one of those knock-down take-the-top-of-your-head-off experiences...” - Ron Silliman

6. (Soma)tic Midge - CA Conrad

“My idea for a (Soma)tic Poetics is a poetry which investigates that seemingly infinite space between body and spirit by using nearly any possible THING around or of the body to channel the body out and/or in toward spirit with deliberate and sustained concentration. My first investigation into (Soma)tic poetry is a series I am calling (SOMA)TIC MIDGE. This is a 7-poem cycle where I fully immerse myself in a single color for a day. The order of the 7-poem cycle being the natural order of color, starting with RED, then ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, PURPLE, then ending with WHITE. PURPLE being the transformative, natural pivotal color which is born ONLY WHEN the starting color RED (which is the first element of the Zodiac, Aries, or ORIGINAL FIRE) and the last color BLUE (which is the last element of the Zodiac, Pisces, or ADVANCED WATER) bleed together.” - CA Conrad

7. Thank You for the Window Office - Maged Zaher

“Maged Zaher: my favorite discovery, so far, of 2013. His poems are totally alive, funny, sharp, shapely, and never dull. A great pleasure to read this effervescent, awake book.” - Wayne Koestenbaum

8. Black Peculiar - Khadijah Queen

“In the 19th century, those unwilling to face the incongruities of a nation espousing freedom while simultaneously perpetuating terror used the phrase our peculiar institution as code for slavery. Here, with equal part precision and aplomb, humility and humor, erudition and absurdity, the work in Khadijah Queen's BLACK PECULIAR decodes, uncovers, and recasts such lexical wound dressing, exposing the abraded, scarred flesh of a consciousness both beset upon and liberated through language. Unabashedly experimental, Queen continually bends form to the breaking point, reveling in the absence of authority revealed through hybrid genre: epistolary interrogations of a prismatic self; prose poems blurring narrative and parable; a wild verse play, whose lineage encompasses everything from Ubu Roi to Dutchman to The Vagina Monologues. 'I unlocked my chorus of archetypal women from their chains,' Queen tells us. 'They rubbed their raw wrists with aloe and set to work.' Would that we could all be subjects under one whose rule is so emancipatory.” - Noah Eli Gordon

9. not so, sea - Mg Roberts

“NOT SO, SEA is a matrilineal book of jungle and seasons of wet and dry, a bloodline haunted by the legacies of imperialism and militarization. From the intersection of vivid sensory memories and the dislocations of immigration these startling poems come full of contradiction: longing, violence, sweetness, and anger. I want to praise their clipped syntax, their insistent fragment and stutter, the hesitance that happens at the edges of translation between languages, cultures. I want to praise that their vocation is neither witness nor song but rather sheer will, a steely dedication 'to the arrangement of things in historical context,' even if such an arrangement 'makes it harder to fly in some cases.' I want to praise Mg Roberts' insistence on a poetics that both maps diaspora and attempts to regather what's been scattered: 'Pages turn creating distance. I must retell myself, until I can see us in color.' This is a brave and vital book." - Brian Teare

10. All the Garbage of the World, Unite! - Kim Hyesoon

“Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!” - Aase Berg

[smallpressdistribution]

IT'S A BRAND NEW #SPDRECOMMENDS MAY THE FORCE BE ALWAYS WITH YOU

feat. Timeless, Infinite Light C&R Press The Operating System Fence / Fence Books Monster House Press Fiction Advocate Kore Press BkMk Press Future Tense Books Wave Books Ahsahta Press Plays Inverse Groundhog Poetry Press House of Nehesi Publishers Gold Line Press Airlie Press BookThug Anvil Press Tupelo Press Able Muse

++ AN ALL NEW SPD BACKLIST RECOMMENDS!! <3

[smallpressdistribution]

Feast your eyes and your shelves on July’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too… 

1. Don’t Drink Poison - Sarah Anne Wallen

“Through a sly directness that seems inspired by Williams, the New York School, Sylvia Plath, and Ariana Reines, Wallen crafts a punk female poetics located in the weird slippery surface of tone. Compressed, smart and raucous, the poems shimmer as they turn language back on its strange self.” - Karen Weiser

2. Diary of A K-Drama Villain - Min K. Kang

“Min K. Kang's The Diary of a K-Drama Villain is alive and subversive: each line undermining misperceptions of the Asian female condition with vinegary wit. Kang reclaims the lyric for the digital age; her style is the Engrish IM, the confessional missive as late night text, shredding that Anna May Wong avatar with vengeance. A startling and vibrant debut.” - Cathy Park Hong

3. Go Find Your Father | A Famous Blues - Harmony Holiday

“The voice in A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father is so absolute and addicting and completing (Holiday, you complete me!) and enduring. And yet there is a specific politics underlying the poems in this book regarding the ‘work made for hire’ clause in many recording contracts. The poems in A Famous Blues feel like direct confrontations with this fact, but that’s mainly from interspersed texts telling the story of Holiday’s father, Jimmie Holiday. This half of the book spells out the concept of inheritance in concrete and explicit terms. Literally, Holiday has been in dispute for royalties she and her mother should be earning from her father’s songwriting. And so the concept of father as artist present in Harmony Holiday’s artistic life takes on a concrete character. It’s a point which A Famous Blues takes further when it speaks to influence with a listing of artists in ‘Lament for the Brilliance of Wolves.’ And I would say it’s this conceptual interlock surrounding the idea of inheritance that allows for so much centripetal motion in the poems. They hurl themselves outward in syntax and content and sentiment and everything, please. Yet they still hold together.” - Kent Shaw, The Rumpus

4. Essay Stanzas - Thomas Meyer

“A life of such patience must have led to Thomas Meyer’s Essay Stanzas (The Song Cave, 2014). In long poems in which each stanza offers itself as a discrete meditation, Meyer creates a book in which the largest of universal truths find themselves manifest in the minutiae of daily attention. My favorite of the poems, ‘Caught Between,’ opens the collection, is an exalted catalog of the things of existence—from light to ocean to river to tree to, most movingly, the animal kingdom—one that knows no list can be complete, and highest praise of the ten-thousand things must be modest enough not to strive to compete with the world of which it sings. Meyer renews poetry’s oldest dictate, placing upon his shoulders Caedmon’s own mantle: Now must we praise. Such praise isn’t a form of faith necessarily, not a religious tenet, but a kind of light, so that song brings to the eye what all there is that can be seen.” - Dan Beachy-Quick

5. Tender Points - Amy Berkowitz

“’Trauma is nonlinear,’ writes Berkowitz. I am impressed by the sensing form she makes. That has the day in it, as well as the night. The body, that is, in variable settings, frames and weathers. The stairs that ‘climb up my arms and neck.’ The ‘I am bitterly jealous of people who can always go back to being a barista for a while.’ This book is a kind of clutching and being there for real, and that is what I like. A book. That takes up. A visceral form.” Bhanu Kapil

6. Rumored Place - Rob Halpern

“Rob Halpern implodes new narrative tenets, collapsing all views of our condition and the means to express these views into each sentence at once: learned, aroused, mournful, and full of hope. His book conveys the intolerable crush of the ongoing, the grand brawl of contending institutions and concepts hectically alive past their deaths. Meanwhile the self continually gains and loses ID. The intensity of what is said displays the extent of what can’t be said. This emptiness travels along with the story in the future perfect tense, a negative space that has not been, an arcadia that cannot have been lost, beyond knowing but not beyond needing. It is also an orifice in the mind or body where the unspeakable of history might enter and speak.” - Robert Glück

7. Neighbor - Rachel Levitsky

“Levitsky interrogates just about every nut and bolt that goes into community, civic and otherwise, and incorporates political theory gently into Neighbor, particularly Giorgio Agamben (and her sly and irresistible sense of humor certainly makes us aware of the double entendre behind The Coming Community). ‘God or the good or the place does not take place, but is the taking-place of the entities, their innermost exteriority,’ Agamben writes. The neighbor insists on the private made public, public made private, and in that movement, inflicted upon both self and other, is the taking-place, taking of place.” - Marcella Durand, Jacket2

8. The Book of Light - Lucille Clifton

“Clifton's latest collection clearly demonstrates why she was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. These poems contain all the simplicity and grace readers have come to expect from her work. The first few pages set the title in a larger perspective at the same time that they announce the book's premise: ‘woman, i am / lucille, which stands for light.’ This is a feminist version of Roots, charged with outrage at the sins done to women of previous generations. There are the typical heroes and anti-heroes: Atlas, Sisyphus, Leda, biblical women—but even these tired figures are given a new, often comic, twist: Naomi, for example, doesn't want Ruth's devotion, just to be left alone to ‘grieve in peace’; several poems are addressed to Clark Kent as the speaker comes to terms with the realization that he doesn't have the power to save her after all. And what do today's women have instead of superheroes? Jesse Helms; fathers who ‘burned us all.’ Though it is based more or less in traditional Christianity, the poetry also is concerned with how spirituality can be personal. Low key and poignant, poem after poem takes the form of a conversation, whether woman to her dead parents, Lucifer to God, or poet to reader.” - Publisher’s Weekly

9. Heath Course Pak - Tan Lin

“The book is interesting in that it’s specifically not interesting, it’s successful because of the way it fails, it succeeds so adequately at what it sets out to do that as a book it becomes a mere chore, an exercise. But the stamina required is beautiful, and Lin’s trajectory through the world of literature, as an outlier questioning things completely different than anybody else, is entirely necessary.” - Impossible Mike, HTML Giant

10. i be, but i ain’t - Aziza Barnes

“Barnes commandeers the page in her startling debut, putting into language a range of lived experiences that expose crucial gaps in language and history. These poems brim with black voices, so with some winking irony she marks the collection's five sections with quotes from Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, including his final words: ‘Let us cross over the river & rest under the shade of the trees.’ Demonstrating a firm grasp of the interplay of form and content, Barnes varies tone and structure to meet her needs. Her opening poem emulates the shape of a framed picture of Miriam Makeba used to kill a centipede in her apartment, ending with ‘a colonizer's thought’: ‘if I don't kill it now, how will I find it again?’ The collection rolls from there. With justified annoyance and amusement, Barnes expounds on sexual and racial identities, fraught social interactions, and various modes of desire. As the poems shift location (New York City, Los Angeles, Mississippi, Ghana), those issues reveal their interrelatedness even as they manifest individually.” - Publisher’s Weekly