POETRY, PROSE POETRY, CROSS-GENRE Charles Freeland eros & (fill in the blanK) 978-1-935402-73-2, $16, paper, 130 pp.
Gizelle Gajelonia thirteen ways of looKinG at thebus 978-0-9824203-2-4, $12, paper, 37 pp.
BLAZEVOX BOOKS 2009
TINFISH PRESS 2010
Poetry. “Charles Freeland dances under moonlight. The landscape for his delightfully curious insights is visual, symbolic, a work of art and an advanced warning dusted with allusion, playfulness and literary confidence. A poem in prose, an epistolary project, EROS unspools advice wise, subversive and funny; very funny. Sentences tumble, one after the other. Truth rides shotgun to contradiction. I suspect James Joyce has placed an advanced order for this book-length paragraph of lilting depth and joy, as well as Charles Bernstein, Charles Simic, Lee Ann Brown, Frank O’Hara and assorted scholastics and philosophers. Freeland is Polonius on acid. Unlike Polonius, the author is advantaged by having read the tragedy’s fifth act while simultaneously knowing pleasures of sensation and the ‘fact of the human body. Its shape like the modest ginger root.’ As only passionate careful writers can do, Freeland offers his readers—you and you and you—his brimming heart on his well-tailored sleeve. On our ‘advanced planet’ Psyche is in danger, EROS cautions—though worth much regard. How bright Freeland’s moon”—Sarah Sarai.
Poetry. Asian American Studies. In THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE BUS, Gizelle Gajelonia discovers her muse in Honolulu’s TheBus mass transit system. She takes seriously (in this seriously funny chapbook) the notion of routes—routes through Hawai’i’s history and geography, routes through American poetry, routes through languages spoken in Hawai’i. Many of the pieces parody canonical poems by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and Eric Chock. Out of her parodies come marvelous revisions. Among the figures included in Gajelonia’s revised canon are Hawai’i’s last queen, Lili’uokalani, Filipina nurses, and an honors thesis writer very like the author who dreams of Columbia University.
Barbara Claire Freeman, Ange Mlinko, Jesse Seldess an instance: three chapbooKs 978-0-9679854-8-0, $15, paper, 80 pp. INSTANCE PRESS 2010
Poetry. AN INSTANCE is the first in an occasional series from Instance Press collecting new chapbooks from multiple authors in a single volume. AN INSTANCE contains “Hotel Lazuli” by Ange Mlinko, “Which Is Exhibited” by Jesse Seldess, and “St. Ursula’s Silence” by Barbara Claire Freeman.
Allison Funk the tumblinG box 978-0-9815010-4-8, $14.95, paper, 71 pp. C&R PRESS 2009
Poetry. “In THE TUMBLING BOX, Allison Funk offers us an exquisite accomplishment: elegant, subtle poems that confront the painful and complex enormity we call love, in particular, parental love. In spite of the best of intentions, in giving birth, we give birth not only to love but to suffering; born, we are borne not only toward love but toward suffering. Rigorously and scrupulously crafted, these lyrics move us with their hard-won wisdom, awe us with their persistent lucidity, and redeem us with their enduring grace”—Eric Pankey. Elisa Gabbert the french exit 978-0-9826177-1-7, $12, paper, 69 pp. BIRDS, LLC 2010
Poetry. “What a complex and lovely book this is! Reading Elisa Gabbert’s obsessively interior, technically rigorous poems is like listening in on the thoughts of a mind so fiercely observant and subtle that I find in them always some new twist, some surprising layer I hadn’t noticed before. By turns moving and witty, sharp-eyed and impressionistic, Gabbert writes with technical sophistication and keen intelligence. This is a terrific book”—Kevin Prufer.
Cristina Garcia the lesser traGedy of death 978-1-936070-01-5, $15.95, paper, 95 pp. AKASHIC BOOKS 2010
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. In a collection of poems that is part biography, part dialogue, part history and part chorale, THE LESSER TRAGEDY OF DEATH aims to capture the ephemeral, brutal life of one unnamed “brother.” His sister’s voice provides the narrative thrust—probing, questioning, regretful—revisiting scenes from their past and arguing with her brother over the family legacy and her complicity in his demise. “Cristina Garcia has the courage to look tragedy in the eye without flinching.... In spare, luminous brushstrokes of language, Garcia paints a series of portraits, from the boy who fell off a bicycle to the desperate mugger wrestling with an old woman over her purse. The cumulative effect is haunting, yet ultimately redemptive. There is power in Garcia’s insistence that we see her brother as a human being, in all his complexity and mystery. You won’t forget these poems, or the story they tell”—Martín Espada. Christine Gelineau appetite for the diVine 978-0-912592-68-8, $15.95, paper, 108 pp. ASHLAND POETRY PRESS 2010
Poetry. “Christine Gelineau has invented a new cosmology in her fascinating, ambitious, multi-part poem, APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE. Questioning contemporary warfare and eco-destruction while praising the green fuse in all that lives, this poet interrogates, celebrates, and re-calibrates our spiritual and cultural values. Gelineau models for us a marvelously poly-voiced poetry, an associative, gently narrative puzzle which allows her to pick through scenes of destruction and illumination toward an idea of a core of holiness in our 21st-century existence. In APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, Gelineau makes time into the sublime and turns space into grace”—Molly Peacock.
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