 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #12 1 5 _ C H I N E S E _ S I L E N C E S Timothy Yu writes: "These poems are part of an ongoing project called 100 Chinese Silences. They were begun in response to Billy Collins's poem 'Grave.' The speaker of the poem describes the 'one hundred kinds of silence / according to the Chinese belief,' but then admits at the end of the poem that these Chinese silences were something he had 'just made up.' I took it upon myself to write these 100 Chinese silences." Yu inhabits Collins's poems, reversing their fields, creating witty counter-poems to those of Collins, who frequently alludes very loosely (indeed) to Chinese culture. Here is wit as critique, satire as antidote to the mischief that is found in many contemporary poems (as in media responses to Jeremy Lin). click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #11 P R I N C E S S _ A B A N D O N E D Tinfish's eleventh Retro Chapbook presents three brief essays by prominent Korean feminist poet, Kim Hyesoon. These essays are about being a woman poet in a patriarchal society. But they are not about the everyday struggles of the poet; instead, they engage issues of femininity and inspiration by way of shaman songs and heroine myths. And so "it becomes possible to explain why the women-poets of South Korea enjoy overlapping the space of the real with the space of illusions." click image for more info Get both Princess Abandoned and Hyesoon's other Tinfish publication When the Plug Gets Unplugged (also translated by Don Mee Kim) for $10. Follow the purchase link to take advantage of this two-for-one deal. |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #10 T H E _ G U L A G _ A R K I P E L A G O The tenth installment of our Retro Chapbook Series presents Sean Labrador y Manzano's three sestinas, “Death to All Drug Traffickers,” “Male Order,” and “Mycorrhizal.” Manzano's imagination roams from Longinus to Marcos, baseball to Martial Law, passports to Sin, pineapples to puddles. Substitute Manzano for Ashbery in the following sentence by Joseph Conte (from Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry), and you've got the gist of his use and abuse of the sestina: “Ashbery's renovation of the sestina form is extensive and complete--he knocks layers of old thematic plaster off the brick walls of structure.” Manzano knocks off (as it were) layers of plaster to reveal a wobbling foundation of totalitarianism and diaspora. He writes that, “The roots of my 'Gulag Arkipelago' originates with how the Spanish used the Philippines as a penal colony. Similar to Australia.” click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #9 _ T H O U S A N D _ "Perhaps more than any other recent Australian poet, Michael Farrell has tested, often tauntingly, the loving struggle of meaning and chance, played out in much contemporary Australian poetry," writes Michael Brennan. But in _thou sand_, Farrell refuses to leave chance to chance, mining the meanings located in syllables, enjambed words. His method is to increase meaning through the reduction of words to their spare parts. Hence, lines like "tion from the beau:" spring into phrases, "no sa: / tis: / fac:/ tion from the beau: / ti: / ful" where syntax becomes suspenseful, the sentence an unfolding into flow from utter syn: co: pa: tion! click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #8 O N E _ P E T A L _ R O W The Anyjar of Jaimie Gusman's marvelous sequence is at once Mason jar, feeling jar, urn, tomb, sex organ, sister, foundling jar, interlocutor . . . the beauty of the jar is its openness and its promise (at least) of safety. The Anyjar provides an opticon through which the poet sees her world, ajar, even as it is also sometimes nothing: “the Anyjar is not the other half. / The Anyjar is not even part of. . . / The Anyjar is not a negative or positive of that.” Gusman's poetry is at once meditative and surreal, well-crafted and more than a little bit wild. Warning: this work contains word play! “Picking up after this thing on the couch / makes me aware of my composition”; “My hands are something like a frozen pudding pop; it's winter, unaware of time but bound by it; I am a sucker for the swirl of any claims to be distinct.” And much more!. click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #7 Y O U R S _ T R U L Y _ & _ O T H E R _ P O E M S “Drink a bellyful of cold water and you'll drown all the voices in your head,” writes Xi Chuan. Harder to quiet the voices one hears echoing from Xi's new chapbook. The poet over-hears and over-sees; these poems are shards of the zeitgeist overheard through as many walls as you can construct against your noisy neighbor's television set. The title poem reveals Xi Chuan's Whitmanian reach; turn over in your bed and he will be the presence beside you. If you want to sample the work of an important contemporary Chinese poet, this chapbook provides an excellent place to start. click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #6 L I G A T U R E _ S T R A I N Kim Koga has most likely written the chapbook on beaver birthing. Never certain if "you" are the beaver or the reader, you find yourself inside the beaver's skin, her womb, pulling at her teats. You also find yourself doused in beaver blood while taking a shower downstream. Like Kim Hyesoon (whose Tinfish chapbook, translated by Don Mee Choi, can be found here) writes about human beings by writing as rats, Koga examines the human surround by placing us in intimate contact with an animal with whom we do—and do not—identify. This is a book to be read as "echo location" or "lactation." Quirky, fertile writing. click image for more info |
|
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #5 Y E L L O W
The fifth Tinfish Retro Chapbook in a year-long series, Margaret Rhee's Yellow is at once sexy and statistical, playful and critical. There are lists and lyrics and a closing index, which points to the full range of her concerns: gender, transgender, race, sex and sexuality. While Rhee lists Audre Lorde, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Adrienne Rich under the category of "Women Warrior Poets," she might include herself among them. Yellow, despite the negative connotation of the word, is a courageous piece of writing. click image for more info |
|
แ ล้ ว_ A N D _ T H E N _ E N T W I N E
This powerful first collection by Thai American writer Jai Arun Ravine pulls itself and its readers across geographies, cultures, languages, identities, and genders in a performance of transformation. Ravine weaves Thai and English, the past and the present, the lyric and the narrative, into a hypnotizing poetic dance. Additionally, Ravine explores the documentation of identity and citizenship through re-articulating charts, pages of a child's composition book, and a birth certificate. This collection explores the seams of identity and origin and how they are painfully and beautifully entwined. click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #4 M A O ' S _ P E A R S In Kenny Tanemura's rendering of him, Mao is hardly an all-powerful leader, or icon. Instead, he walks down the street, encounters the poet in his kitchen, offers a friend romantic advice, thinks about Filipino literature, suffers from indigestion. He is muse to a poet who thinks about many of the same things, who reports on conversations with Mao as if they were as ordinary as pears. An assemblage more than an historical figure, his figure shadows everything that happens in this collection. Tanemura writes with a deft wit, in whimsical but pointed verse. click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #3 T H E _ P R I M O R D I A L _ D E N S I T Y _ P E R T U R B A T I O N This is a small book about catastrophe. Catastrophes in play are environmental, political, cultural. Vancouver poet, Stephen Collis, makes quick weaves of contemporary language—lexicons of fashion, violence, economics, media-speak, poetics, disaster. His word-sprint reveals the paradoxical richness and paucity of our lingo, rich in material, yet poverty-stricken as a solution-narrative to what ails us. A formidable poet-critic, Collis writes critical poetry about the contemporary world, pulling in with his seine everything from Tahrir Square to the Pacific plastic patch. It's quite a catch. click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #2 T O N T O ' S _ R E V E N G E Tonto's Revenge, composed of poems written by Adam Aitken during his term as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, is something of a Thai-Australian version of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poet, masquerading sometimes as Tonto, sometimes as Charlie Chan, meets a Sheriff; they face off over everything from tourism to nostalgia to departmental hiring. Along the way, the poet meets the Rabbit Lady of Honolulu, laments the death of Danno (James MacArthur of the original Hawaiʻi Five-0), and gathers in many of Honolulu's voices off buses and from the city parks burgeoning with homeless persons. "You want to shout Fuck Tourism," Aitken writes, "but that would be nostalgic." click image for more info |
Tinfish Retro Chapbook #1 S A Y _ T H R O N E The first in Tinfish's series of 12 retro chapbooks—made inexpensively and in short runs—is Say Throne, by Noʻu Revilla, who describes herself as follows, "Noʻukahauʻoli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural Studies scholarship in Oʻahu at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling. And like her kūpuna said: 'I wai noʻu.'" click image for more info Say Throne will be followed most immediately by a series of poems written by Adam Aitken while he served as UHM's Distinguished Visiting Writer this past autumn. The designer for these upcoming books is Eric Butler. Each chapbook can be purchased for a donation of $3 to Tinfish Press; you can pre-order all 12 for $36. (Of course you're also welcome to throw in a few extra dollars so that we can send out review copies and give writers more copies of their own chapbooks.) |
|
I S S U E _ 2 0 Tinfish 20 will be our last issue for at least two years; along with its editor, the journal will go on sabbatical in 2011. Unlike our previous issues, whose covers were made of recycled materials, #20 is perfect bound and relatively thick. While Tinfish does not run themed issues, #20 includes many poems on aging—on being 25, 41, 60 and older—and also on dying. Also included are an engaging mix of poems from Hawai‘i, Guam, Korea, China, and the west coast of North America. Among the poets in issue #20 are Aaron Belz, Caroline Sinavaiana, R. Zamora Linmark, Craig Santos Perez, Lehua M. Taitano, Janna Plant, Eileen Tabios, Juan Gelman, Kenny Tanemura, Linda Russo, Kai Gaspar, Joe Tsujimoto, Stephen Collis and others. This will be the last issue produced under the art direction of Gaye Chan, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude (and good fun) for her many years with Tinfish Press. click image for more info |
|
D A N D E L I O N _ C L O C K Daniel Tiffany: "Each poem in The Dandelion Clock opens with a fragment of Middle English lyric, the syntax and spelling of the original retained for its textures and overtones--that is, for its sympathetic powers. Each sampling serves then as a kind of grace note for the poem it initiates, calling forth and harmonizing with other idioms and dialects, all combining for an instant to fabricate a voice with materials retrieved from a verbal underworld. In this sense, the poems of The Dandelion Clock may be described as pocket rhapsodies. It is worth noting that the poems from which I have drawn the Middle English fragments often survived only through citation in treatises condemning their vernacular origins." Tiffany's book thus joins Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue, Lee Tonouchi's Contemplations on Pidgin Culture, and other Tinfish Press volumes in raising important issues of language use. click image for more info |
|
T H I R T E E N _ W A Y S _ O F _ L O O K I N G _ A T _ T H E _ B U S In Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus, 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 Hawaiʻi's history and geography, routes through American poetry, routes through languages spoken in Hawaiʻi. 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 Hawaiʻi's last queen, Liliʻuokalani, Filipina nurses, and an honor's thesis writer very like the author who dreams of Columbia University. click image for more info |
|
R E M E M B E R _ T O _ W A V E “Do we need our ruins visible?” asks Kaia Sand. “I carry old maps, but sometimes the space seems illegible because reclaimed wetlands and construction changed the shape of the land. I cross-check books and oral histories and photographs. I imagine.” Sand takes the reader on a guided tour of Portland, Oregon's hidden histories—those of the internment of Japanese Americans, the shunting of African Americans into the part of the city that floods. Her book is composed of essays, a poetry walk, and poems that rise out of documents like histories from a nearly-forgotten past. Sand shows us how a past can be re-visioned through research and the poetic imagination. click image for more info |
|
E U L O G I E S Elizabeth Soto's is a beautiful elegy to an artist who suffered schizophrenia, as well as an examination of mental illness and suicide. It is also a love poem. “What do I remember?” she asks; what she finds are pieces puzzled together in collage form to make, if not a whole, then an evocation of events and emotions associated with schizophrenia. “I remember he was terrified of everything,” she answers. Once a student of archeology, Soto is able to peel back layers of feeling without flinching, offering the reader a poem that works both on the page and in performance. click image for more info |