Appreciating Philip Guston

I came to Guston's work years ago through my admiration for Morton Feldman's music and reading of their childhood friendship which Feldman broke off in the '60s when Guston abandoned abstract expressionism for the "cartoony" figural work seen in these paintings. Feldman's doctrinaire attitude seems ugly and narrow minded in the face of so much beauty (not to mention irony) in Guston's late works. They look especially good seen close up in person because of their textured surfaces.

Great Poetry by Natalie Lyalin and Julia Story

I've recently been very impressed by these two writers. The books are Natalie Lyalin's Pink and Hot Pink Habitat and Julia Story's Post Moxie.

Being mostly at a loss for explaining what it is that excites me about these and others of my favorite poetry books (I'm still very new at this), I'll be brief.

Both of these women are exploring similar formal and stylistic territory so excuse me if I lump them together somewhat. Both books consist of cycles of what are basically prose poems though the emphasis is clearly on the poetry here. Both also focus quite narrowly on the personal life experiences of a female narrator, presumably the author, and do so in highly evolved personal vocabularies. There are wonderfully odd conceptual juxtapositions and subtly evocative wordplay in both. Story's Post Moxie is the more delicate and introspective of the two while Lyalin's Pink and Hot Pink Habitat is the more brash and playful. Both are stunning in the sophistication of the writing skills on display and both were revelatory to me personally as examples of what I'm finding I most enjoy in contemporary poetry.

Two More Poems

Hesitant Trees

Those trees…can you believe those trees?
How much does it cost?
What’s the kill ratio?
They grow but not if I tell them not to.
I tell them I’m leaving for Spain
Then stop for a gallon of milk (1%)
And forget all about Spain.
The trees don’t care but are hesitant now
To grow.



The Visitation

We’d known each other and kept our secrets.
After a time, they engulfed, digested and
Excreted us into the little pond down the road.
After a time, two well dressed gentlemen visited us
From the pond and we knew them but it was too late.

So Much to Look Forward To!

These are the not yet released (or re-released) books I'm most eagerly anticipating:

Reading Log

Aug 02, 2010 04:23am


Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson turned out to be a highly entertaining comedy in the dry, erudite British manner about a sociopathic mass murderer. The juxtaposition of such a depraved protagonist and the wit and humor with which he and his story are presented was different from anything I'd encountered in fiction before. Johnson pulls the trick off winningly and once again I thank Stuart Ross for directing my attention to another first rate book.


Aug 8, 2010 04:24am


Reading Stuart Ross's Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New and Selected was so much fun I deliberately limited my intake to just a little bit every day to make it last. With a sampling of his output from 1978-2003 this is a real compendium of the wide variety of methods and subject matter Ross had chosen over the course of his career to that point and I, for one, find those choices, mixing absurdity with depth of feeling and accessible language, to be exactly and satisfyingly right. These poems stimulate with their highly creative wordplay, whimsical flights of fancy and wit while at the same time not shying away from grappling with personal issues of sorrow and regret.

A terrific book then by a writer whose forthcoming publications (a novel has been announced for 2011!) I'll always eagerly seek out.

Reading Log

July 25, 2010 04:27AM


I found James Tate's collection of prose poems Return to the City of Donkeys to be perfect for dipping into desultorily as during lulls at work or whenever a few spare minutes should arise over the course of the day. Nothing earthshakingly original or profound here, just quietly well crafted light entertainments in the mild to moderately absurdist manner spiced here and there with wit and whimsy. Nice stuff.


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July 28, 2010 01:12AM


With the new English translation of Bernhard's 1967 collection, Prose, I must admit to being somewhat disappointed with the unevenness of these early stories. The best ones are the first three and my favorite of all is the opening story, "Two Tutors", which has all the hallmarks of his mature style: the obsessed narrator on the edge of insanity, the comically exaggerated language, the inexplicably weird series of events, etc. "The Cap" and "Is It a Comedy? Is It a Tragedy?" also deliver much of the searing wit I look for in Bernhard. These qualities are either absent or lack the coherence to be very effective in the remaining four stories including the long (40pg.) "The Carpenter" which ends the book. So, worth reading, but primarily for those first three.

Naked Croquet by Doug Melnyk

Canadian author Doug Melnyk's Naked Croquet is another very fine example of narrative fragmentation which fascinatingly coheres into something like the form of a novel. There definitely seems to be a distinct group of writers from north of the border practicing this technique including Lance Blomgren, Geoffrey Brown and most notably, Ken Sparling. Dating back to 1987 as it does, Naked Croquet precedes the published work of these other writers and might possibly(?) have served as their inspiration. Melnyk's book is one of the best examples of the form I've encountered so far with its continually surprising weirdnesses and its subtle profundities. I'm amazed that it seems to still be in print from Turnstone Press. Thanks to Stuart Ross for recommending this one.

Reading Log

July 15, 2010 03:57am


The prose pieces collected in Alison Bundy's Duncecap are a bit difficult to generalize about because of the various genres and styles employed. Some are brief character sketches or vignettes reminiscent of the feuilletons of Robert Walser (a point made to me by Evelyn Hampton) while others are flash or microfictions which frequently display the elusiveness of prose poems. Some, on the other hand, are full length short stories which tend toward the style of the traditional fable. The most interesting and effective pieces for me were the "Walserian" vignettes and the flash fiction pieces which are some of the best examples of their kind with engaging wit and sly conceptual disjunctions. The longer works, while entertaining and absorbing, struck me as less distinctively original creations. All in all, a very stimulating read.

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Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions initially (the first 5 or 6 stories) had me very excited by the subtly intelligent humor and the perfectly judged lapidary quality of these mostly flash sized fiction works. There are quite a few in the first third of the book that are truly outstanding (e.g., "Canary", "Mice" and "Lemmings"). Unevenness begins to affect the later pieces though one fascinatingly quirky and original longer story ("White Buffalo") also comes along toward the end. I'm quite curious about Ruocco's novella The Mothering Coven after seeing what she's capable of in this book.

Reading Log

July 6, 2010 05:06pm


James Kaelan's We're Getting On is a very absorbing novella which is quite clearly intended to pay tribute, as acolyte to master, to the work of Samuel Beckett. Readers familiar with Beckett's fiction and theater pieces will recognize multitudes of allusions, themes, images and uses of language directly referencing the older writer's oeuvre. The title itself refers to the famous final line from The Unnamable: "I can't go on, I'll go on." and the book begins with an epigraph from the same work.

Aside from its obvious function as homage, Kaelan's book is also a gripping and thought provoking story on its own. The writing is highly effective in conveying the coolly crumbling obsessions of the central character and the increasingly desperate circumstances faced by his band of followers as he proceeds to strip every last vestige of civilization from their lives in the remote, inhospitable, wilderness to which he has led them. If it doesn't completely rise above being a pastiche of its models, it nevertheless is a very satisfying two hour read.

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I finally managed to get a hold of an elusive copy of Sam Pink's first book, I am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It, and once again was laughing out loud and reading excerpts to anyone around who would listen. Yes it's totally twisted, despairingly negative and nihilistic but it's so, so funny, even eloquently and touchingly so in places, that everyone who appreciates the outer extremes of absurdity in literature must read this!

Reading Log

June 28, 2010 05:20am

Danielle Dutton's flash fiction/prose poetry collection Attempts at a Life I found to be really fascinating. Her work harkens back in interesting ways to 20th Century Modernism and engages referentially, from one piece to the next, with various writers from that era and earlier eras as well as the present, notably Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, et. al.

Some of the writing here I found quite challenging in the same way I'm baffled by a lot of modern poetry but that's OK! Much of Dutton's work here, however, is just flat out brilliant in its creative wordplay and mind wrenching conceptual juxtapositions. Good stuff!

P.S. Dutton has a short novel due out from Siglio Press Aug. 23rd called SPRAWL.


June 28, 2010 05:33am

Coming off the mystification of Mathias Svalina's The Viral Lease I jumped right back up on the horse, read his collection, Destruction Myth: Poems, and totally loved it. These prose poems are top flight expressions of wildly imagined absurdist fantasy full of wit and whimsy. Can't think of anyone (except for some stuffy inlaws) who would not be delighted by this book!

Reading Log

June 21, 2010 03:30AM


Kim Parko's collection Cure All is another genre bender--are they prose poems or flash fictions?--but one thing they definitely are is superb. The imagination at work in these pieces is in full throttle and frequently veers toward the weird and creepy in fascinating ways. Much of the imagery deals with the human body in states of disease and death or with the female organs of reproduction but these subjects are always treated in allegorical or fabulous ways with juxtapositions which continually surprise and delight. Cure All is among the very best things I've read recently and Parko is another writer whose work I'll eagerly look out for in the future.


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Chelsea Martin's collection Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is an eclectic mix of "confessional" micro-fictions, wry and frequently LOL funny reflections and observations, "subliminal" micro-texts and artwork which is highly entertaining throughout. The biting wit and edgy sarcasm on offer here at times reminded me of the stand up comedy of Sarah Silverman. Fun stuff! Check it out.


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I was pretty much completely baffled by the poem contained in Mathias Svalina's chapbook The Viral Lease notwithstanding my recent growing appreciation for the work of a number of different poets e.g., Zachary Schomburg, Myread Byrne, Ross Stuart, Linh Dinh, etc. Svalina's poem makes me realize I still have a long way to go before I'll be able to grasp much of the kind of poetry that's entirely without the familiar anchors of prose narrative. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

Reading Log

June 16, 2010 03:35AM


I read Sasha Fletcher's When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds during the interstices of a four day trip out of town which was otherwise tediously unpleasant. The fantastical flights of Fletcher's imagination proved to be a terrific intellectual playground to have fun in, enjoy oneself and forget the quotidian stresses of the real world. Recommended!


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I really liked about half the poems in Linh Dinh's Jam Alerts, was pleasantly mystified by about 30% and didn't like about 20% (primarily the Neo-Marxist oriented ones). The best poems display a very raw, often angry sensibility frequently allied to wit and humor. I was impressed by the total fearlessness of Linh's risk taking; his unconcern with possibly offending in not shying away from vulgarity and ugliness. Almost all the work here reveals a distinctively personal and edgy approach which is fascinating though not pretty. Well worth looking into.


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Read another very fun, bubblingly imaginative poetry chapbook, this one a collaboration between Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg called OK, Goodnight. I do detect a softer, gentler wordplay on offer here than in Schomburg's solo projects but I kind of expected that and the result is still very satisfying, just a bit less edge. Good stuff!

Robert Walser: Microscripts

It was a real pleasure re-entering the strange world of Robert Walser's prose pieces in the newly published Microscripts. This is a selection of English translations of the myriad strips and odd pieces of discarded paper, used envelopes, advertising flyers, etc., containing the tiny texts written in Walser's unique radically miniaturized version of German Kurrent script which were left behind after his death in 1956.

The items range from whimsical musings and observations about quotidian events that captured his fancy to short fictional narratives.

In most of these pieces the Walserian penchant for long sentences which continually veer in unpredictable twists and turns is in full flower. It's that ever surprising quality of the writing allied to a truly strange imagination that makes the reading so much fun.

This edition is very scholarly in it's documentation of the original sources including photos of each original microscript text heading the English translation of it that follows and extensive footnotes as well as reprintings of the German texts that were used for the translations at the back of the book. Also included as an Afterword is a translation of an interesting essay of appreciation of Walser by Walter Benjamin.

So, I'd say this is definitely essential for dedicated Walserians but probably not the best introduction to his work. In that category I'd recommend the novel The Robber and the collection Speaking to the Rose.

Reading Log

May 30, 2010 04:35PM

Written, according to the author, in 1967 and published in 1969, Olt by Kenneth Gangemi brings to mind the mid-60's fiction of Georges Perec (eg. A Man Asleep) and interestingly prefigures David Markson's "anti-novels" such as Wittgenstein's Mistress and Vanishing Point with their compilations of factoids. A thoroughly engaging mini-novel you can read in about an hour.

May 30, 2010 03:05AM

William Walsh's Pathologies has introduced me to yet another terrific practitioner of the wry and ironic brand of flash fiction. This is a consistently inventive and witty collection which ended all too soon. Walsh and the folks at Keyhole Press have a real winner here.

Paintings by Casebeer

Just thought I'd give a little exposure here to a painter based in Tempe, AZ just down the road from my home here in Scottsdale. My wife and I have five Casebeers hanging on our walls (none of which are pictured above) along with a small sculpture of hers in our family room. Her myspace page is here and her facebook page is here

We Were Eternal and Gigantic by Evelyn Hampton

Just finished another chapbook from Magic Helicopter Press and this one really knocked my socks off! It's Evelyn Hampton's We Were Eternal and Gigantic, a collection of stories and poems displaying some truly brilliant flights of imagination and verbal acrobatics. I found myself rereading passage after passage just to savor the highly original wordplay going on here frequently reaching the end of a poem or story with a big smile on my face wanting only to start over again. Hampton has a strikingly personal take on the absurdist/surrealist model and doesn't shy away from real emotional depth along with the wild conceptual juxtapositions. Really great stuff by a very talented young writer. Five stars.

Reading Log

May 10, 2010 05:14 AM

Just finished David Peak's The Rocket's Red Glare and was quite disappointed. It wasn't at all what I expected given the almost unanimous praise for high literary merit his previous book,Museum of Fucked, received. The new book is a Y/A fantasy/adventure novel with all the plot and character cliches associated with that genre and with no apparent pretention to any artistic quality as a work of fiction. Very light, mindless entertainment which, I suppose, is OK once in a great while. 2/5 stars.

May 23, 2010 12:05 AM

Ken Sparling's new book, Book, continues his fascinating literary project of narrative fragmentation but this time the dislocations from paragraph to paragraph of character, plot, scene, timeframe, etc., are even more profound. Consequently my disorientation, as a reader, became more pervasive in this than in Sparling's previous books. While still highly interesting at the level of individual sentences and paragraphs due to the extraordinary imagination at work, I missed the accumulating sense of familiarization with who the characters are and what's going on that's gained in reading the earlier books. The weird flights of fancy and powerful emotional content is still there but the parts didn't add up to as meaningful a whole as my favorite Sparling books: Untitled, For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers and Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt.

May 23, 2010 12:20 AM

Daniel Bailey's The Drunk Sonnets and Jimmy Chen's Typewriter are two very worthwhile chapbooks from Magic Helicopter Press. The first is a cycle of 53 sonnets on themes of social alienation and, of course, booze, done in a very lively and amusing style and read more like 1st person narrative prose poems than traditional sonnets. The second is a cycle of flash fictions on the theme of internet culture and the attendant isolation and loneliness of those consumed by it. These pieces by Chen are excellent examples of inventive imagination coupled with dry wit and biting satire. Very amusing stuff.

Reading Log

Apr 27, 2010 01:05AM

It was nice to immediately dive into Stuart Ross's poetry collection I Cut My Finger right on the heels of finishing his stories (Buying Cigarettes for the Dog). As with his prose, there's a lot to like about these poems. There is the same predilection for the surreal and absurd but much more abstracted and unrestrained. Quite a few of them left me mystified (as a lot of poetry is wont to do with me) and quite a few had me marveling delightedly at Stuart's incredible imagination and wordplay. Overall, a very worthwhile read.

Apr 30, 2010 4:36PM

There's a lot to like, as well, in Jason Heroux's poetry collection, Emergency Hallelujah. For me, it was especially nice to read an entire full length book of poems and not once be totally baffled by any of them. Heroux, like so much of my favorite writing these days, works in the surrealist/absurdist vein but with a much lighter, less aggressive approach than Schomburg or Stuart. There's less risk taking and less pushing language and syntax into rarefied territory. At times, I felt there was an over reliance on similes and recurring metaphors. But there were also a lot of deliciously imaginative formulations such as:

"The clouds overhead looked like crumpled
suicide notes."

So, quite an enjoyable book. Recommended especially for the poetically challenged such as I.

Buying Cigarettes for the Dog by Stuart Ross

I was a little surprised by the refined craftsmanship of the stories in Stuart Ross's Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. I guess I've come to expect some degree of heavy-handedness or lack of depth in fiction written in a frankly surreal/absurdist mode. Ross's examples, however, display a lot of writerly intelligence in knowing just exactly how far to push a bizarre concept to arrive at a perfectly satisfying aesthetic result. I was repeatedly impressed by the restraint and subtlety shown in dealing with totally off-the-wall characters and situations. The poetry of the language certainly enhances this perception too. In fact, I was motivated to order one of this author's poetry collections because it seemed I was getting some representation of what he could do in that arena by these prose pieces. Needless to say, this is a very worthwhile book.