POETRY, PROSE POETRY, CROSS-GENRE Robert Fitterman, Editor collectiVe tasK 978-0-9818970-2-8, $40, paper, 231 pp.
Elizabeth Fodaski document 978-1-931824-38-5, $13.95, paper, 78 pp.
PATRICK LOVELACE EDITIONS 2010
ROOF BOOKS 2010
Poetry. Art. Writes Robert Fitterman: “In early 2006, I invited around 20 poets and artists to participate in a collective project; 12 of those invitees took me up on this offer and saw the project through to completion. In terms of purpose, criticality, and guidelines, I tried to say as little as possible; my hope was that the collective itself would discover a purpose along the way without any initial influence. My only framework was that each participant would offer us a ‘task’ on the first day of each new month and that the participants would respond to any or all of the tasks.” Participants include: Tim Davis, Mónica de la Torre, Stacy Doris, Robert Fitterman, Sabine Herrmann, Klaus Killisch, Carol Mirakove, Yedda Morrison, Kim Rosenfield, Lisa Sanditz, Rod Smith, and Juliana Spahr.
Poetry. “In the nervy, emotionally muted, and genre foot-loose ‘post-language’ writing scene of the 1990s, Elizabeth Fodaski was a writer that many of us didn’t just ‘like,’ but absolutely revered. Always the designer & engineer of writing instances—from the bottom up (in contrast to merely elasticizing pre-existing writerly habits— à la early 2000s) Fodaski’s poetics remains a beacon for innovative ways to re-cut the problematic of representation. This much-awaited new installment to her poetic trajectory is truly a cause for celebration. DOCUMENT demonstrates that a micro-to-macro-andback scaling of social meaning is still a horizon worth exploring. Striking in this collection are the artful synchronizations of the social surround’s harder edges with ‘internal meditation’ after-image effects; many other effects abound. If the buzz today is all about ‘ re-purposing’—in technology, art, urbanization, and politics, then this is re-purposing in and of poetic thought“—Rodrigo Toscano.
Sandy Florian on wonderland & waste 978-0-9814975-1-8, $20, paper, 104 pp. SIDEBROW BOOKS 2010
Poetry. Sandy Florian’s ON WONDERLAND & WASTE is a novel in narratives bent on exposing the mind as an instrument of language “not entirely there.” Featuring full-color collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, these 12 lyrical meditations on desire, delirium, duty, and dismemberment destabilize what we can measure of the meaning underlying our experience with a visceral diction that reminds us that “the sharpest of tongues cut their own throats first.” Sandy Florian prelude to air from water 978-1-932418-35-4, $16, paper, 72 pp.
Brandel France de Bravo, Editor mexican poetry today: / Voices 978-1-84861-057-6, $22, paper, 236 pp. SHEARSMAN BOOKS 2010
Poetry. Latino/Latina Studies. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Spanish by many hands. This volume includes work by Gloria Gervitz, Elva Macías, Elsa Cross, Francisco Hernández, Antonio Deltoro, Marco Antonio Campos, José Luis Rivas, Efraín Bartolomé, Hector Carreto, Manuel Ulacia, Victor Manuel Mendiola, Silvia Tomasa Rivera, Jorge Valdés Díaz-Vélez, Pedro Serrano, Verónica Volkow, Luis Miguel Aguilar, Jennifer Clement, María Baranda, Samuel Noyola, Natalia Toledo.
ELIXIR PRESS 2010
Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER by Sandy Florian is the winner of the editor’s prize in the Tenth Annual Elixir Press Poetry Awards. It is an extraordinary collection of prose poetry that transcends both poetry and prose. Jay Snodgrass has this to say: “In PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER, Sandy Florian deftly manipulates the countries between the prose poem and the experimental lyric. Better to call this a novel in verse where the trajectory of the prose poem is punctuated with experiments in language. The literary descendant of Gertrude Stein and Baudelaire, Florian plays a bluntly meaningful and still elusive music. PRELUDE TO AIR AND WATER is a symphony in declaratives where the abstraction of a ‘Moment’ appears as a character and sets up poetic associations that are playful and sublime.” Cole Swenson says “In a careful choreography of repeatedly missed ‘moments,’ the familiar characters of Florian’s latest collection weave in and out of each other’s lives sheathed in a postmodern isolation that keeps actual contact at bay. In them, we see ourselves, misreading, misinterpreting, or just plain missing all the signs—but not without humor, and a tenderness that makes them fully human. A primer for 21st-century relations.”
Sanford Fraser tourist 978-1-935520-11-5, $14.95, paper, 80 pp. NYQ BOOKS 2009
Poetry. This book of lyrical poems by Sanford Fraser is divided into three sections: Strangers, Roles, and Connections. In the first section, the narrator and/or characters in the poems are strangers isolated from and emotionally detached from others; in the second,they play various roles in the world beyond themselves, and finally in the last section, they have connections, emotional attachments to others. Fraser’s mastery of the lyric form and plainspoken language makes the reader a tourist in their own right every time they pick up and read this jewel of a book. Tiziano Fratus creaturinG 978-1-934851-18-0, $14.95, paper, 100 pp. MARICK PRESS 2010
Poetry. Translated from the Italian by Francesco Levato. “Tiziano Fratus is a passionate poet with a clear, distinct voice and a keen awareness that history opens the door of our future. We have much to learn from these engaged and engaging poems, much for which to be genuinely grateful”—Sam Hamill.
SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION · order@spdbooks.org · edi orders via pubnet.org (san #106-6617) · 800-869-7553 · Fall 2010