In a kaleidoscope of shifting voices, JAMES MAUGHN embraces world poetry in his immensely creative new collection. Maughn's poems unlock new ways for us to think about voice, poetic interactions, and... More > the structures of free verse. Each poem is written 'following' the work of another poet, either a contemporary writer or a recent translation from earlier literature. "These Peripheries" tenderly and with great skill, create a formal and nuanced conversation on contemporary poetics. Maughn's poems, traversing geographies and cultural locations, unsettle the concept of translation as a concrete, fixed mirror and opens it up, like the door of a bird cage, to immense possibilities, infinitely expanding the journey of both the new poems and the source poems. It is a stunning collection which takes a new shape every time I come to read it. —Judy Halebsky< Less
The pieces in this collection represent a selection of works written as ‘American Ghazals,’ based upon the distinctly American idiom in which the pieces have been developed. The more I... More > read the form in translation and in English, the more apparent the fit of pivotal shifts in language, thought, and content. The American ghazal offers rich practice, replete with political, social, psychological, and meditative states that redefine perceptions in a new century.—Sheila E. Murphy< Less
Javant Biarujia’s latest collection, “Resinations”, takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through, mostly, Western (pop) art, culture and politics. In sixty-four numerologically... More > significant “pantoums” (Biarujia’s idea of such at any rate), in which “all pastiche and no parono- / masia makes the past a dull Lautréamont” (“Labdanum”), he mirrors the world back at us, always startling, distinctive, original. His poetry is at times complex and multilayered, but it is always rich, witty and meaningful, what Charles Bernstein has called “quixotically alluring”, and Gig Ryan, “fun and mock bawdiness”. Or, as Biarujia himself says: “through levity to levitation.”< Less
The piece/pieces here (a single long poem, or 220 separate poems? both at once? each alternately?) sit (move) somewhere (sometime) between a series of otoacoustic emissions (hair cells in the cochlea... More > of the inner ear, moving in response to waves generated in the fluid of the ear by two frequencies simultaneously, often create a third tone) and a series of deferred actions (“our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a 'rearrangement' in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a 'retranscription',” Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, December 6, 1896). It/they wait for your inner/outer ear/voice to hear/remember/complete the next extension of their incompleteness. —Mark Cunningham< Less
Part One of Otoliths issue four contains text & visual poetry & prose by Phil Primeau, Jean Vengua, Daniel f. Bradley, Amanda Laughtland, Karin Kroetlinger, Nicholas Manning, nick-e melville,... More > Katrinka Moore, Jnana Hodson, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, The Pines, Keith Kumasen Abbott, MTC Cronin, Eileen Tabios, Kristin Hannaford, Bob Marcacci, Jeff Harrison, Vernon Frazer, John Mercuri Dooley, Ayşegül Tözeren, David Prater, Ed Higgins, Dion Farquhar, Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney, Carl Baker, Paul Siegell, J.D.Nelson, Jonathan Hayes, Martin Edmond, Suzan Sari, Samuel Wharton, Kevin Doran, Vernon Frazer & Michael Rothenberg, Caleb Puckett & Tom Beckett.< Less
This book explores influence by crossing out or responding to poets who have influenced me. The Whitman and Andrade pieces are cross-outs, and anyone familiar with the first version of... More > "Calamus" will notice that I did not respond to the entire collection. I left out pieces that I did not think would cut well for my project or pieces that have too much personal meaning for me. The response pieces to Leopardi and Neruda are probably even more telling, for in these pieces, it is sometimes difficult to see how the pieces directly relate to the original. Still, the influence is there reworked through my experience. —William Allegrezza< Less
In which we are invited to witness the protean prose of Charles Freeland as it enters and bends around our improbably porous bodies like smoke from a library fire. Until one can no longer tell where... More > one’s limbs or eyelashes begin and the author’s sentences end. If either can, in fact, be said to begin or end at all. Pick any one of Freeland’s expertly carved sonic doorknobs and turn to open. The room waiting there contains the very universe, if not the socks, you’re standing in right now. Beyond which: “The doors to the research labs fly open and when you peer inside there are still more doors and probably more doors inside those…” —Travis Macdonald< Less
Otoliths issue two, part two contains work by Karl Young, Vernon Frazer, Sandra Simonds, Nico Vassilakis & John M. Bennett, Carol Jenkins, Ira Joel Haber, Thomas Fink, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste... More > Chirot, Michael Rothenberg, Marko J. Niemi & Eileen Tabios.< Less
Part Two of Otoliths issue four contains full-colour text & visuals from Keith Kumasen Abbott, Ray Craig, Andrew Topel, Peter Ciccariello, Spencer Selby, nick-e melville, Ed Schenk, Richard... More > Kostelanetz, David-Baptiste Chirot, Alexander Jorgensen, Carol Jenkins, Nico Vassilakis, Suzan Sari & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, C. Mehrl Bennett, Ayşegül Tözeren, Mikhail Magazinnik, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen & Márton Koppány.< Less
Otoliths, issue one, part one, contains work by Michelle Greenblatt, kari edwards, Nico Vassilakis, Michael Farrell, Alex Gildzen, Michael P. Steven, Eileen Tabios, Tom Beckett, Nicholas Downing,... More > Francis Raven, Andrew Lundwall, Bob Marcacci, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, John M. Bennett, William Allegrezza, Martin Edmond, Ernesto Priego, Laurie Duggan, Jordan Stempleman, Irving Weiss, Jeff Harrison, Lars Palm, PR Primeau, Richard Lopez, Jack Kimball, CAConrad, Gregory Vincent St Thomasino, Thomas Fink, Jean Vengua & Dion Farquhar.< Less
The publishing arm of Otoliths began as print editions of the e-zine Otoliths, but has since expanded to include books & chapbooks by authors associated with the journal. It brings out both text & visual poetry by some of the most exciting writers in the contemporary scene.
Author Spotlight
