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C H A R L O T T E ' S _ W A Y
Norman Fischer’s long poem takes as its place Charlotte’s Way, a house on the California coast, but mostly the poem takes things in. Fischer, a Zen priest, meditates on talk, the passing of time, the brain, catness, bills to be paid, poems, search parties, birds and myriad other subjects as they flicker in and out of thought. Terri Wada’s design emphasizes the fluidity of Fischer’s thinking; rather than turning from one page to the next, the chapbook opens out, filling both space and time.
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F A R O U T _ L I B R A R Y _ S O F T W A R E
The collaboration between Pam Brown (Australia) and Maged Zaher (Seattle) came about due to the absence of a poem. Maged sent Pam a submission to Jacket, of which Pam is associate editor. But Maged forgot to enclose the poem. In an effort to atone, Maged proposed a collaboration between them; this collaboration was to last for a year and a half and comprise the poems published in this chapbook. The collaboration is seamless; even Pam attests she could no longer tell whose writing was whose as she proof-read. Among the poems' subjects: change, constant change of jobs, friends, cities, and of course the software with which we mark time's passing.
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S O M E D A Y _ I ' L L _ B E _
Hwang
Jiwoo's poems are built of odd juxtapositions and comparisons, like a
mother's hospital crisis and “the Verona World Cup,” its happily
hopping soccer ball; “the waning day, the black cow moaning inside the
gate”; “Mormon missionaries [who] enter the subway like penguins”;
acacias waving “their white handkerchiefs.” Whatever is metaphysical in
Hwang's poems is also intensely physical, like the dingy bar alluded to
in the title. Young-Jun Lee and the late Scott Swaner have performed
deft and conversational translations of this provocative work. This book has been published with the generous assistance of the Sunshik Min Endowment for the Advancement of Korean Literature, Korea Institute, and Harvard University.
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C O R P S E _ W A T C H I N G
In Corpse Watching,
Sarith Peou offers witness to the Cambodian holocaust of the late
1970s, which he survived, in language at once dispassionate and
evocative. Upwards of a quarter of all Cambodians died between 1975 and
1979: “The river is swollen / The current is strong / Corpses float by
all day long.” As poet Ed Bok Lee writes in his forward to the book,
“Beyond telling, in total, a personal story of devastation under
Angkar, these poems serve as steadfast interpreters for a multiplicity
of voices and intensely human emotions still seeping out of that
nation’s deepest wounds.”
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L A N G U A G E _ A S _
This hand-sewn chapbook contains three parts:
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2 _ P O E M S _ B Y _ B R A D A J O (with CD)
Bradajo,
one of the pioneers of local Hawai`i literature in Pidgin (Hawaiian
Creole English), writes poems in an idiosyncratic and artful
calligraphy. His is wisdom poetry, composed of runic strings of words:
like "fo / get / dem / salf / imijes / man" or like "pooo / chooo / mai
/ neen / nooo / chrol".
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A C H I N G _ F O R _
Jacinta
Galea'i has written a 'novel' that is also a sequence of 'poems',
calling her genres into question at every turn. She has written a book
in English and Samoan, one that straddles, with equal courage and
precision, geographic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Aching for
Mango Friends offers up a part of this (as yet unpublished) novel/poem
to readers interested in experimental writing, writing from the
Pacific, and intersections between Samoa and the USA. |
W H E N _ T H E _ P L U G _
The poems in When the Plug Gets Unplugged,
by prominent Korean poet, Kim Hyesoon, are spoken by rats, rats who
forage, rats endangered by human beings, rats who listen to people die
in a collapsing department store--rats who are, in other words, the
voices of modern Seoul, or (to risk the pun) the modern soul. Kim
Hyesoon's work is only know receiving the attention it deserves in the
United States, due to the efforts of her fine translator, Don Mee Choi.
Anyone interested in poetry from Korea, or poetry written in a
distinctive voice, should read this collection.
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B R O A D S I D E get yours
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G R O W I N G _ S T I L L
"To
write so that years later you can't recall the diaristic particulars of
that day, recapture only a sense, a fractured tooth of that day."
Deborah Meadows's prose poetry meditation, Growing Still
reflects a life lived, and then reflected upon, one that exists in
inextricable detail and is then rendered as abstraction. In this
eloquent sequence of meditations Meadows reflects on time, war, work,
justice, and other issues of these days. Meadows's lyrical prose is at
once beautiful and sharp-edged.
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C O M P O S I T E _ D I P L O M A C Y
There are poems and there are poems translated into another language. Composite Diplomacy
presents us with a further possibility, presenting a poem, its
translation, as well as sentence diagrams, lexicons, and musical scores
in one package. To read this poem is also to read the poem in the
process of translation from a language built on tones to one without,
from a language in one alphabet to one with another. The result is a
forensic investigation not simply of this poem's translation, but of
the very notion of translation. Padcha Tuntha-obas offers her reader a
"wakeful poetry" that inspires such marvelous poetic interventions.
“Time that travels sings concurrently to the path of letters.“
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S U R G I C A L _ B R U - E Z
Bruits are abnormal sounds, at least for doctors. In Surgical Bru-ez,
retired surgeon turned Kauai poet Sherman Souther takes those sounds
apart and restitches them. He uses the prose poem form to meditate
variously on “the mysteries of surgeons,” dogs, landscapes, art,
ageing, sexuality, and much else. This is Souther’s first chapbook.
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P O R T R A I T S : P A R A B L E S
Click on a website about left-handedness and get pornography. Answer
the telephone to find the BTK strangler may have stolen one of your
poems. Encounter a disgraced local politician now working in scrap.
Look at photos—of Abu Ghraib, of a former child star, of an
as-yet-unadopted child. Experiences like these inspired Schultz to
write studies of [the] contemporary character.
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A _ D R A G _ Q U E E N _ N A M E D _ P I P I
A Drag Queen Named Pipi
is peopled by ghosts and other souls, from Moana (the Ocean), to an
American soldier dead in Iraq, to Sinalela, "an ex-rugy player
consigned to household duties," among many. His poems combine real and
phantasmagoric events to elucidate, among other themes, issues of
sexuality and colonialism. McMullin's poems are presented in
conversation with James Nakamura's design, featuring undersea imagery. |
R A D I A N T _ F I E L D
The lyrical prose poems in Naomi Long's Radiant Field
offer the reader geographical and spiritual visions, an unmapped desert
on which the narrator of this extended sequence walks without a map,
meets, loves, and leaves a man, discovering beauty in desolation. This
is Long's first chapbook publication.
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P O E M S _ F R O M _
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P H I L T E R
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T H E _ 6 0 s _ A N D _ 7 0 s : FROM "THE THEORY OF SUBJECTIVITY IN MOBY DICK"
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N O _ G U N S, _ N O _ D U R I A N [out of print but contained in And then Something Happened from Salt Publishing] No Guns, No Durian has been used as required reading at the University of Alabama and Notre Dame. |
C A R V E D _ W A T E R
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C L U T C H : INCLUDING HOCKEY LOVE LETTERS
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A _ P I E C E _ O F _ W O R K
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A
sequence of prose poems that engages both the language of the military
and American "diplomacy" during the Vietnam era and first attempts at
language by the poet's young son, Sangha, adopted from Cambodia.
Designed by Gaye Chan.
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H A M B U R G E R
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3 _ V I E T N A M E S E _ P O E T S [out of print but available for free] out of print but available for
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S I S T A _ T O N G U E
Sista Tongue has been used as required reading at Willamette College, the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, University of Minnesota, University of Oregon, and University of Texas.
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P H Y S I C S
Physics and 12 Scenes from 12am has been used as required reading at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa
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D E A R _ D A D
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P A C I F I C _ P O S T M O D E R N An
essay that explores the place of Tinfish in the contemporary Pacific,
as well as treating settler poetry from Australia, and tourism in
Waikiki. Far ranging, thoughtful, and formally innovative work
from an important critic of the Pacific. Pacific Postmodern has been used as required reading at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and University of California Santa Cruz
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T H I N _ P L A C E [out of print]
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S N A I L M A I L _ P O E M
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V I R T U A L _ F L E A L I T Y [out of print]
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V O I C E - O V E R S
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4- E V A Z , A N N A [out of print] 4-evaz, Anna has been used as required reading at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and University of California Santa Cruz
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