Mappemunde

Jack, a kind of taste weathervane really, predicts a front of handsome new chapbooks coming in from the northeast.

"So...you know there are people gunning for you, right?"

Who Opens
by Jesse Seldess

Available from Kenning Editions

"In Jesse Seldess' poetry, words require a certain elasticity to perform an attentive music of formation. The manner in which phrasal units arrive, depart and recombine creates a movement like a flock of birds making a wide turn--there is a harmony of every shifting participants. The "who" of Who Opens is a similarly mobile designation--it is "who you have continually overhead" and what is itself being overheard. With great compassion and precision, this book returns language to the habitat of sound from which poetry has been away far too long." - Kerri Sonnenberg

Verge
by Morgan Lucas Schuldt

available from Parlor Press

"For a book of beautiful sounds, this book knows many things. It knows that in our engagement with mortality, joy, and what we are 'merely' must win out over all of the seductive illusions. Schuldt writes his way into the poetic record through a rich lexical pond (Hopkins, Woolf, Celan). Here phonemes break to refine, twist to fly." -- Barbara Cully

Saturday, March 22 at 8 PM
The Gershwin Hotel, 7 East 27th Street, NYC

The Vernal Cabaret
Poetic Vision + Alternative Agriculture = Green Alchemy

Featuring: David Abel, Bare Hand Wolf Chokers Association, Lee Ann Brown, Scott Chaskey, Andy clausen, Brenda Coultas, Jason Eisenberg, Russ Gershon, Grant Hart, Kimberly Lyons, Edgar Oliver, Simon Pettet, Nicole Peyrafitte, Janine Pommy Vega, Eero Ruuttila, Sparrow, Steven Taylor, Laki Vazakas, and George Wallace

You are hereby invited to join George Lakoff, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin over at my new article in electronic book review:

EITHER YOU'RE WITH US AND AGAINST US
Charles Bernstein's Girly Man, 9-11, and the Brechtian Figure of the Reader

*  *  *

Duh, just noticed that my friend Dan Featherston has had a blog since January. Go visit!

This just in from Brandon Brown:

new chapbook from OMG!, that's a small press, and it's work from Brooklyn's own ERICA KAUFMAN.  The book is called CENSORY IMPULSE, and it costs only four dollars.

David Shapiro wrote a blurb for the book that's printed on a pink bookmark that comes with the book, thus, the blow is the BLURBMARK:

"As I get older I know only two things: the starless chaos within (Kafka)  and the random stars above (Proust). No moral center and thus no margin, no moral order outside or in and thus no disorder.  In the poetry of Erica Kaufman, we seem to hear the music of this random landscape with no teleology but Darwin Her humor is full of  horror at snobbism and injustice and the acceptance of the most comical social sketch.Her poems are by an adult woman who loves love without constraints, and no less believes that language is for a subversive voice, not simple structures. Who knows better that poetry is still woman in revolt?"

Please join us for the March 8 Segue Reading at Bowery Poetry Club !

MARTINE BELLEN
and
BRENDA IIJIMA

Martine Bellen is the author of Further Adventures of the Money God, The Vulnerability of Order, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, and Places People Dare Not Enter.  She is presently collaborating with the composer David Rosenboom on an opera very loosely based on The Diamond Sutra.

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Around Sea (O Books). Her manuscript, If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. She runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and designs homeopathic gardens.

Segue Reading Series
4 PM - 6 PM
Saturday March 8
@ Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, just north of Houston
$6 admission goes to the readers

March series curated by Charles Borkhuis

See the rest of the Spring 2008 Segue series here.

Finally, someone out there accurately diagnosed the problem! It feels like I've been trying to convince people about this issue for a skunk of drastic trailer parks, but alas it has fallen on deaf pockets. If the situation continues, I predict a drastic increase in the incidence of private languages nationwide.