Begun casually, the writing of Days Poem quickly grew into a daily necessity to write, even to plug onward. In this way, it... More > resembles a journal or novel, tho it claims neither genre as its own. It started with an idea of writing large and embracing extent. It settled (and unsettled) itself within the compelling philosophical argument that it is what it is. The thrill of relentlessness and perseverance pushed it until, you know, it came to an end. As the writer of these pages, I wanted to play with hobos, and bears, and Tarzan & Jane, and Walden Pond, and all the words in between. I wanted a little amazement in every day. BIO: Allen Bramhall was born by the banks of the Concord River in 1952 and has lived in Massachusetts ever since. He was educated at Franconia College and Lesley University, and in non-academic places as well. /Simple Theory / (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a life with Beth and Erin. < Less

The poetic sequence bough breaks sets out to interrogate queer motherhood, implications of gender, and the politics of... More > adoption. Traveling across terrains (New York, Bangkok, Honolulu, Tokyo) and time (from the speaker’s childhood to an imagined future that holds or does not hold an adopted child) the poem teases apart the idea of conception. Queer in content and form, this fiercely feminist yet tenderly personal poem takes on the lullaby-lyric of parenthood to lay claim, surprise, and engage.

Kazim Ali says: "In a trance-driven lineage of serious thinkers which include the likes of Myung Mi Kim, Jessica Grim, and Bruna Mori, Tamiko Beyer does not separate the experience of a gendered body from genres of thought. This writing lies down between poetry and theory and makes a bed there, a bed of textured experience and fabulous rhythms." < Less

Flux, Clot & Froth is a two-volume project comprised of a Volume 1 of poems a Volume 2 containing 2,700+ notes which source... More > the approximately 4,000 sampled texts.

On 23 Nov 08, John Bloomberg-Rissman finished transforming his crazy stacks of later 20th- and early 21st-century Anglophone literature into organized shelves. Looking at those shelves, he decided to "unpack" them through a longish poem: "Find something from the 1st book on the 1st shelf. Follow that with something from the 1st book on the 2nd shelf. Etc etc. Intersperse whatever I like from whatever source appeals to me. Intersperse a number of Autopoetic recursions. Form: hay(na)ku. I expect this to go on for several months.” Several became many, and the result is an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole. < Less

Flux, Clot & Froth is a two-volume project comprised of a Volume 1 of poems a Volume 2 containing 2,700+ notes which source... More > the approximately 4,000 sampled texts. On 23 Nov 08, John Bloomberg-Rissman finished transforming his crazy stacks of later 20th- and early 21st-century Anglophone literature into organized shelves. Looking at those shelves, he decided to "unpack" them through a longish poem: "Find something from the 1st book on the 1st shelf. Follow that with something from the 1st book on the 2nd shelf. Etc etc. Intersperse whatever I like from whatever source appeals to me. Intersperse a number of Autopoetic recursions. Form: hay(na)ku. I expect this to go on for several months.” Several became many, and the result is an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole. < Less

The hay(na)ku poem's swift popularity would not have been possible without internet-based communication. With the internet's... More > capacity for engendering collaborations, it was inevitable that a collaborative hay(na)ku project such as THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU would arise. It, of course, was fitting that THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU began with an invitation from a blog. On June 24, 2007, an invitation was posted on http://chainedhaynaku.wordpress.com/ for poets to participate in hay(na)ku collaborations. Nearly a hundred poets and artists from around the world responded, and this anthology is one result, along with friendships and much fun! < Less

ARCHIPELAGO DUST is a first book by Karen Llagas and recipient of a Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize. Llagas has... More > an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA in Economics from Ateneo de Manila. A recipient of a Hedgebrook residency and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, she works as a Tagalog interpreter & instructor, and a poet-teacher with the California Poets in the Schools. Advance words include, from Victoria Chang, "Llagas' poems reveal an introspective speaker, one who reflects on the adopted "America" around her with such thoughtfulness and grace" and, from Rick Barot, "Llagas’s lyricism gives back a complex and sensuous measure to the world she writes about, in poems that are haunted, tender, and ardent." < Less

AUTOPSY TURVY, a collaborative book of poems by father-daughter Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason. A book of "utterly... More > wishful miraculously wistful costumed poems" (Tan Lin), AUTOPSY TURVY gathers terse, springy, psychologically intense eleven-line lyrics and hay(na)ku-based pieces, a 15-poem series called "Bee" that spells out the tangles of family and finances, a surreal poetic play entitled "Invisible Surgeon," and much else. According to Denise Duhamel, Fink and Mason's "poetry. . . goes to the brink, peering off the cliff, before they pull one another back to safety." < Less

Aileen Ibardaloza’s first book is a charmer more than a disarmer of the complicated relationships between men and women,... More > mothers and daughters, or colonized and colonizer. The intensity of her voice is not unlike the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral with llantos like these: “I say it’s all right./Yes, if I ever lose my mouth,” and “My old same hides/her face behind a fan.” traje de boda belongs on any serious bookshelf of contemporary poetry.
—Nick Carbó, author of Chinese, Japanese, What are These? < Less

If anyone these days is hanging onto a notion of consistent stylistic evolution as aesthetic merit, this volume will do its... More > best to disorient them, as Young's "many mansions" feature a variety of architectural modes. Could one predict the flights of Betabet from the unified narrative of "Grafton Bridge," much less "Lizard"? "George W.'s Language Primer" and "Maxims for Tom Beckett" are both very funny poems, but their humor is achieved in extremely different ways. If someone didn't know who wrote either "The Baggage Card" or "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even," would s/he necessarily assume that the same author was responsible for both? Mark Young has the courage to be traditional, imagistically or narratively direct, discrete, serial, surreal, "experimental," and "difficult" in the same season, year, or cluster of years. The reward is ours.
--from the Introduction by Thomas Fink, Editor < Less

STAGE PRESENCE: CONVERSATIONS WITH FILIPINO AMERICAN PERFORMING ARTISTS is a historic document. Edited by Theodore S.... More > Gonzalves, a musician and assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, this collection offers essays and interviews with Filipino American performing artists. Each of the chapters features critically acclaimed and popular artists in their own right, who have also mentored hundreds of dancers, comedians, theater artists and musicians of all genres. In this rare collection, performers take time off stage to speak candidly about their creative processes, revealing personal frustrations and triumphs, while testifying to the challenges of what it could mean to be an artist of Filipino descent working and living in the United States. < Less