Outside of a Dog

White-haired Melody, a novel by Furui Yoshikichi

2012-01-10T03:07:00.000-08:00

I am being deeply affected by this quietly but profoundly meditative narrative. Full of subtle musings and observations on themes of aging, madness and death, the book is also full of the distinctively Japanese appreciation for the myriad joys and beauties to be found in the commonplace and quotidian. It's a terrific example of how a novel about nothing can be about virtually everything.

"elegan trogon" from How's the Cows by Jess Mynes

2011-11-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

pitch a fit snow recedes
lops red carpet hickey heart
intersects forget-me-not distant body
mining emergent designs
animate trepan stare-off
written on her Chucks
superheroes loom closer
to why sea anemones wink slyly
spiky thrushes tip wishes
mapping your bending spine
when it ceases to be valuable
finish to release a grip grown suspect

How's the Cows can be purchased here

A Little Poem

2011-09-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

Factors

While tricycles of fat destroy lip parades
On the lecture circuit,
Gnomic genocidal peace laboratories
Crash the party.

Entangled tribes of infected speleologists
Convene another ecstatic remedy
Of growth and hegemony.
They allow no movement.
Our leaders have flown the coop.

J. H. Prynne's Red D Gypsum from the collection Furtherance

2011-06-29T05:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a pretty representative excerpt from the amazing Red D Gypsum----

Top-work the frame to chalk white yet against less
clear tremolo flotation, sudden demerged racing
downsize nutrient plume to risk appetite so born
at here D plate mirror swap pleas can never shine;
depleted words all light and gladed in picket fault
back flattened silently. Crimpen interfold your
spectrum yellow, taunted now slippery bright, red
gully regained through the wood rewound in felt.

Peter Seaton's The Son Master

2011-06-23T04:06:00.000-07:00

An exerpt from the long prose poem The Son Master
by Peter Seaton----

To which, to take charge, this feature could be any idea of the need for a substitute for an advantage
over the sound fracture plate extended rather than dug out, and I could use white line looks to a wall of dark
red stone. The shape of one too is so hard that to take charge we had all survived. The elastic remains in the
eyes to clear it over. This is a preposition, a possible sight of everyone's appearance without the business people
touching. Great logs of the moon used also for legs, light complicated by catastrophe instructions, to move
somewhere with a bang and a knock out of us, we know enough. Knocked flat near the conventional center,
rest and have dinner and wait all morning so it must have been the rain that fell. The machine cares, but those
two can be the same, the moon experience of space of sky throwing out dance and dance invasion.

Two Poems by Clark Coolidge (from the collection Own Face)

2011-02-21T03:10:00.000-08:00

The Icing Up It Turns To
for M.P.'s without music

When, meaning where, will the wire go down,
meaning would, beneath the portion of tree,
substitute cracking, effected by the lower
portion, mood, of the sprung cloud, signifying
an uncompleted lace or lack of power.
A lash of wisdom for the bending.

But It Says Nothing

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet
as if to say nothing moves me. Then
there is the chair. And one speaks of
the chair sitting at the table.
Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.
The object is a piece of thing before. One
shifts in a chair and opens the talk.
And the time it says nothing one moves.
The table is too long as the wall. Not
a thing but it stays and one opens
as a mouth will begin. Speaking of
the table, nothing but to avoid that
of the wall. One could return over and over
to the chair, the wall one is sitting at.
Least ways it says nothing. And the
thing is, it stays still before
speaking of. The object of nothing, even
speech.

Two Poems by Bill Berkson (from Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems)

2011-01-31T22:59:00.000-08:00

On Ice

Doors of jostled vicinity
An eager angle extending in the sky a grey chasm
Tip of island street morning wash
A waking minute pointed to end quote
Squeeze left in diamond-beaded industry
Wedgeful elaborations desist
Shut behind us without saying
White lights from the powder-keg days

If I Pray To Anyone It Is To You

If I pray to anyone it is to you.
You make a U-turn and are immediately apprehended
By the power vested in me and taken away from you
Because you are minus identity at this moment
Where you linger
In a bad frame of mind
Like some weather on earth
Perpetually stained, and it looks like home.

So borrow a shiny pen
From the highway patrol
And see the boats, instant pairs
That idle steadily
On the fortuitous tides.
A grey caulk-expanse for hammers,
As a lady takes a doughnut from a car trunk.

You never know what lands to the eye,
Seeing air stir water visibly.
But water comes to hide it.
Just a mole's margin of sand in any case.
And the nib flows.

Appreciating Philip Guston

2010-11-30T03:30:00.000-08:00

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

2010-09-13T03:10:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-31T21:28:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-08-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

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

Reading Log

2010-08-08T04:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-28T02:40:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-15T04:02:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-06T17:13:00.000-07:00

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.

___________________________________

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

2010-06-28T05:51:00.003-07:00

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

2010-06-21T03:34:00.000-07:00

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.

______________________________

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

2010-06-16T04:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-23T03:16:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-23T03:10:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-24T01:06:00.000-07:00

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.

Reading Log

2010-04-19T23:05:00.000-07:00

Apr 15, 2010 5:08PM

Walkups by Canadian author Lance Blomgren is a quite fascinating cycle of fictive fragments bringing the reader, as if through the keyhole, voyeuristically into bits of the lives of the inhabitants of apartment units scattered around Montreal. Accompanying the texts are a series of enigmatic photos of interiors which perfectly match the tone of the scenes described without in any way illustrating them. The style is reminiscent of the French New Novel c. 1960 and also reminded me very much of Mario Bellatin's novellas in his book Chinese Checkers one of which also had text with accompanying photos which I liked a lot. Walkups is well worth tracking down.

Apr 16, 2010 4:11PM

Just finished Zachary Schomburg's Scary, No Scary, his newest collection. Once again this guy's imagination tickles and delights me. There's something very refreshing, like a gust of cold, pure mountain air, in Schomburg's writing which makes me sad when I get to the end of one of his books. I'll always be on the lookout for whatever he can get into print.

Apr 19, 2010 11:09PM

I liked Mairéad Byrne's latest collection, The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven, a bit less than than the earlier Talk Poetry. Unlike the earlier book, there are a variety of different formal strategies employed and a wider scope to the thematic content which was, indeed, interesting, but I felt there was some loss of consistency in the strength and effectiveness of the poems here as compared to the more uniform and focused work in Talk Poetry. Byrne's wit and wry humor are still much in evidence in TBOWLOH and I certainly found it worth reading and look forward to more from this author.

Reading Log

2010-04-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

Apr 08, 2010 04:23PM

Zachary Schomburg's Man Suit is a collection of prose poems but, as with so many of these little small press books, such labels are misleading inasmuch as the pieces here seem to be clear examples of flash fiction. And what hyper-imaginitively surreal and LOL funny work this is! I was completely entertained, frequently amazed even, by Schomburg's off-the-wall and extremely clever whimsical flights of fancy. It's the funnest book I've read in the past year or so and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Apr 08, 2010 04:48PM

Holy Land, a prose poem collection by Rauan Klassnik is filled with disturbing imagery of war and violence juxtaposed with wildly surreal renderings of male/female couplings and the natural world. Unlike some other work labled "prose poetry", these most definitely come across as poems and very good ones indeed. I really liked Klassnik's aggressive, unflinching attitude in bringing together very sharply contrasting elements in very creatively clever ways. Bravo.

April 12, 2010 11:05PM

My first encounter with Sam Pink is his newest book, Frowns Need Friends Too, which turns out to be a poetry collection that is riotously funny and off the charts in the absurdity of its biting and caustic imagination. I was sometimes reminded of the self deprecating comedy of Emo Phillips though with Pink, self flagellation or even annihilation is more like it.

Here is perhaps my favorite line in the book (from the poem Holographic Personality Disgrace):

Some people are such assholes that saying, "Look, again, I'm sorry I cut off my thumb and glued it to your baby's head because I thought you'd like him better as a unicorn" means nothing to them."

4.5/5 stars. And I can't wait to get my back-ordered copy of I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It.

Reading Log

2010-04-05T02:15:00.000-07:00

Mar 30, 2010 05:45PM

Finished the very fun little collection of narrative fragments which comprise Notice by the Canadian writer Geoffrey Brown. I came across this title among a favorite books list by Ken Sparling here and the book itself indicates some form of involvement by Sparling in its production. There is obvious similarity with Sparling's own fragmented prose stylings and a good thing too since I love Sparling's books. The story fragments in Notice are if anything even more decontextualized than in most of Sparling's writing but still, there are connections and correspondences which, to some extent, bring things together into something (albeit remotely) like a novel. 4/5 stars.

April 5, 2010 02:19AM

Really liked Zachary C. Bush's poetry collection Angles of Disorder; he mixes wit, whimsy and verbal/formal/typographical creativity in work that is fun for someone like me who has always tended to be mystified by a lot of contemporary poetry. Most of the pieces have a narrative structure and read like wildly imaginative prose. Great stuff; highly recommended.

April 5, 2010 02:19AM

Read another book of poems (albeit prose-ish ones): Kathryn Regina's chapbook I Am In the Air Right Now. Fun and whimsy feature prominently here but with tinges of darkness around the edges. The theme of flying is carried throughout, each poem being narrated by a female who prefers to remain permanently aloft piloting her hot air balloon. Thoroughly charming.

April 5, 2010 04:45AM

Finished another poetry chapbook, The Deviants by Jack Boettcher. A few of these, especially the title poem, were beautifully strange and fascinating multi-layered little journeys. A lot of them had me scratching my head struggling toward some sort of comprehension.

Other Electricities by Ander Monson

2010-03-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Ander Monson's interconnected story collection Other Electricities, while consistently displaying prose writing of quite effective poetic intensity, was, for me, something of a slog to get through. I found the deliberate heaviness of the writing allied to the grimness of the subject matter (violent death and grieving, the cold darkness of winter in northern Michigan, and the aimless, disconnectedness of most of the characters) difficult to take. The creativity of Monson's use of language and form did keep me interested however and I don't want to leave the impression that this is anything less than first rate prose. So I do respect what he achieves here; I think it's just that at this stage in the development of my reading tastes, I've come to prefer writing with elements of whimsy and wit.

Reading Log

2010-03-22T03:50:00.000-07:00

Mar 20, 2010 11:52PM

In the short novel i poisoned you, Pablo D'Stair succeeds in very believably putting the reader in the mind of a spree killer. Subtlety and restraint are much in evidence here and the violence, when it does happen, surprises. A very effective character study.

Mar 21, 2010 3:52AM

Finished Kim Chinquee's new book, Pretty, earlier today. She demonstrates here as masterful a control of highly compressed fictive spaces as in her previous collection, Oh Baby. Definitely among the small handfull of the flash fiction/prose poem format's best practitioners along with Joseph Young and Daryl Scroggins.

Reading Log

2010-03-16T05:08:00.000-07:00

Mar 14, 2010 05:49AM

Read another Tim Hall story collection: Triumph of the Won't. This doesn't feature as much the wickedly inventive satire of One Damn Thing After Another but it does demonstrate Hall's mastery of plot and characterization in more conventional fictive modes. The sly hipness of the quasi-autobiographical narrators is basically the same in these pieces as in the later book and it's definitely very much worth reading as that one was.

Mar 16, 2010 05:12AM

I found Blake Butler's novel in stories, Scorch Atlas, less successful artistically than his other book, Ever. There are several quite brilliant sections ("The Gown From Mother's Stomach" and "The Ruined Child" for example) but there are several long stretches of writing that seemed too much to be striving to reformulate the style and ideas of the later works of Beckett (The Unnamable, How it Is and the Nohow On triolgy). Perhaps Scorch Atlas represents a young writer not yet fully emerged from the shadow of his influences though I'm just assuming the fictions in this book predate the maturer and more original work of Ever, a book that does indeed bode well for Butler's future .

Coming in May-- Robert Walser--The Microscripts

2010-03-11T02:04:00.000-08:00

This upcoming release looks very promising indeed! Here's the blurb from the New Directions website:

The Microscripts by Robert Walser (May)
Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card. Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery. each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment.

Reading Log

2010-03-11T01:57:00.000-08:00

Mar 08, 2010 02:09AM

Vera and Linus, a flash/microfiction collaboration between Jesse Ball and his wife, the Icelandic poet Thordis Bjornsdottir, was a pure pleasure to read. The stories mix the whimsy and cuteness of children's fairy tales with scenes of matter of fact sadistic mayhem in some highly creative and delightful ways. An added plus is the beautiful look and feel of the book itself. Recommended!

Mar 11, 2010 02:58AM

Just finished Owen Egerton's story collection How Best to Avoid Dying and overall enjoyed it quite a bit. Some of the pieces were somewhat forced for effect and lacking in subtlty but Egerton relies on his very well developed imagination to make up for such failings in many others of these. 3.5/5 stars

Reading Log

2010-03-07T04:32:00.000-08:00

Mar 02, 2010 04:06AM

Talk Poetry by Irish ex-pat Mairead Byrne is full of wry and cracked observations of the quotidian rather in the manner of stand-up comedy but delineated with the eye and ear of the poet. The book is great fun. P.S.--I recommend reading out loud.

Mar 03, 2010 11:43PM

Read another chapbook of finely crafted flash fiction, The Land of the Free, by Geoffrey Forsyth. Fairly mainstream in style but I like the understatement and subtlty. Well worth seeking out from the good folks at Rose Metal Press.

Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young

2010-03-03T04:07:00.000-08:00

With Joseph Young's Easter Rabbit I've learned that when a writer of fiction distills, omits and pares down his subject to the extent and in the manner of the microfictions in this collection, the mind of the reader becomes a much more active participant in the creative process. I found my imagination working to flesh out the wisps of narrative in an effort to understand what I was reading. And furthermore, I found this phenomenon to be very intellectually stimulating. Of course the similarity of what Young is doing to what a poet does is undeniable and he does it extremely well whatever label you put on it. These are highly intriguing and often strikingly beautiful miniatures. Highly recommended

Reading Log

2010-03-01T04:57:00.000-08:00

Feb 28, 2010 04:34AM

My overall reaction to Greg Gerke's story collection, There's Something Wrong With Sven, is mixed. On the one hand, there are quite a few fictions here which are completely engaging and wittily entertaining and on the other hand there are quite of few which left me disappointed or just baffled. There is certainly an eclecticism in his writing which, in itself, is not a bad thing and I don't think the variety of modes he chooses accounts for the hit and miss quality of the pieces in the book. But the best stories here (e.g., "This is Where We Keep Vivaldi's Body" and "Laws of the American Middle West") show a terrific flair for absurdist irony and satire which reminded me at times of Barthelme at his best. Gerke's efforts are not helped by an unusually large number of printing errors such as ommitted words, etc., especially noticable in the first half of the book. 3/5 stars.

March 1, 2010 05:59AM

One Damn Thing After Another by Tim Hall: wickedly funny stories here. Hall engages in some of the best absurdist satire I've read in quite a while. The writing is brash, arrogant, clever and literarily well crafted. On the edge of being 5 stars. I'll definitely be looking for more by this author.

Reading Log

2010-02-23T04:37:00.000-08:00

Feb 21, 2010 03:24PM

Just read Randall Brown's Mad to Live, the 2007-2008 Fiction Chapbook Winner from California State University, Chico's Flume Press and it's very fine writing indeed. Brown's characters are all dealing with their "issues" and several of the stories pack a real emotional wallop but there is a tinge of melodrama, a kind of overloadedness to the writing. Fortunately, this is somewhat leavened with wit and insight, and in the later pieces, with metafictional irony. Recommended.

Feb 23, 2010 05:45AM

I really liked Amelia Gray's interconnected flash fiction collection, AM/PM. Wit and whimsy combine with sensitivity and creative use of language to make for a thoroughly engaging and fun book. This is among the best of the many little flash fiction type things I've read recently.

Blake Butler's Ever

2010-02-23T04:33:00.000-08:00

Ever, by Blake Butler is a bit hard to pin a label on regarding genre; novella?, prose poem sequence?, flash fiction cycle?... But that very elusiveness reflects a pushing outward of the boundaries of what the most innovative writers are currently doing with language in the service of artistic expression. As with Gary Lutz, Butler's fiction absorbs our attention by continually amazing us with the way it beautifully dances close to the edge of incoherence without falling in. There's excitement and wonder in that balancing act when it's managed with the linguistic skill and subtle precision of a writer like Butler. Highly recommended.

Reading Log

2010-02-19T00:32:00.000-08:00

Feb 17, 2010 01:47AM

Thomas Cooper's Phantasmagoria is another very well done chapbook of flash fiction. His style tends toward the more surreal and magic realist modes and he does those very effectively.
4 out 5 stars.

Feb 19, 2010 01:30AM

Finished A Nest of Hooks by Lon Otto which consists of stories ranging in length from an average sized paragraph to one of almost novella length. The quality of the writing is very high. Otto shows great sensitivity to the subtlties of male/female relationships and the stories are expertly crafted structurally with a nice arc to the unfolding of events and often a particularly poignant or insightful ending. The 1978 publication date might account for what, for me, felt like a kind of old fashionedness to the realism on offer here but then, my reading has focused heavily on the newest crop of literary talent for quite some time now so that's not too surprising. Anyway, A Nest of Hooks is fine stuff.

from the Reading Log

2010-02-16T04:46:00.000-08:00

Now into Agota Kristof's "The Notebook" and am quite intrigued by the use of 1st person plural as the narrative voice (twin boys). The only other story I've read before employing this device was Gert Hofmann's "Our Conquest" which is a truly masterful novel also from the children's point of view. Anyway, "The Notebook" has me excited after 39 pages.

*****

Am now into the 2nd novel ("The Proof") of Agota Kristof's trilogy having finished "The Notebook". Her writing is very spare, one might say elemental as opposed to simple and I'm enjoying the effortlessness of the way it reads. The story is completely engaging and the central characters, fascinating, and I'm going through this book much faster than usual.

******

Finished "The Proof" and am still really enjoying the good old fashioned page turning drama in these books; drama of the familiar "angst and tragedy at the hands of faceless Communist apparatchiks" Eastern European variety.

*****

Now into the final novel of Kristof's trilogy: "The Third Lie", and am even more impressed with what she does here in undermining the fictive premises governing the events of the first two novels thereby forcing the reader to grapple with a classic post-modern issue: narrative reliability. Really interesting writing here.

*****

Finished the Kristof trilogy. This truly is a masterpiece.

The Joy of Angst

2010-02-16T04:31:00.000-08:00

Wilhelm Genazino's The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt was a thoroughly enjoyable read. The central character who is telling us his story teeters on the edge of insanity for most of the book while continually conveying his own absurdity in charmingly witty and amusing self analyses. There are definite echoes of the comic aspects of Kafka here and the stories of the contemporary Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad also come to mind with his protagonists who similarly obsess debilitatingly over countless existential life issues.

The writing is quite dense at times with paragraph lengths of over two pages but that shouldn't deter a prospective reader. Many are the literary delights to be had with this book.

Reading Log

2010-02-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

In his novel-in-stories, Burning Babies, Noah Cicero effectively and with a certain raw crudeness befitting the bleak brutality of the lives depicted conveys the psychology of white trash culture. The text is unfortunately undermined, to a certain extent, by the very large number of typos. Frequently whole words are left out leaving the reader to try to decipher what's missing. While annoying, the impact of the author's powerful vision of a world gone mad is not blunted. Fans of Celine would do well to check this guy out.

Just finished a very good flash fiction collection by Kristina Born, One Hour Of Television, which reminded me somewhat of some of Ken Sparling's more recent writing. Both are Canadian and it could be that Born (the younger writer--she's 22) has absorbed some of Sparling's craft into her own style. There are thematic and character interconnections throughout the tiny pieces comprising the book as, for example, a number of very funny satires on the subject of nuclear warfare. Another writer to watch for.

Reading Log

2010-02-08T03:39:00.000-08:00

Feb 03, 2010 11:07PM

Read a neat little (18 pgs.) chapbook by Matt Debenedictis, CONGRATULATIONS! There's No Last Place If Everyone Is Dead, featuring very finely chiseled sentences comprising flash fictions of a decidedly morbid edginess. Some real talent on display here, well worth reading.

Feb 08, 2010 4:42AM

Really liked Mary Miller's story collection Big World. The 14-30 yr. old female protagonists of these pieces are generally pretty screwed up from having bad parenting and/or profound tragedies to deal with and there is much escapist behavior in the form of drinking and casual sex going on but the narrative voice, which is consistent throughout, is witty, sarcastic, funny, a bit cynical but also frequently insightful making for a very engaging reading experience. The writing does raise for me the issue of whether characters who show such a lack wisdom in the poor choices they make in their daily lives can believably display the kind of wit, intelligence and insight these women do. This didn't significantly detract from my enjoyment of Miller's fiction, however, due to the charm of that very same drollery.

Reading Log

2010-02-03T01:57:00.000-08:00

Jan 29, 2010 03:23AM
Finished Kim Chinquee's Oh Baby, a collection of prose poems and flash fiction. The works here are all very beautifully crafted, lapidarian even. They are also interestingly interrelated with recurring characters and an overarching structure to the whole book. An excellent review can be found here: http://bigother.com/2010/01/28/run-run-run-run-you-better-run-all-day-and-run-all-night-on-kim-chinquee%e2%80%99s-oh-baby/#more-3856

Feb 3, 2010 02:58AM
Ken Sparling's Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt turns out to be his most purely delightful and accessible book of the three I've now read so far. It's filled with charming and/or alarming vignettes of a father's daily life taking care of his two young boys during a period of increasing conflict with his wife and captures his explosive rages and frustrations along with his love and kindness. One of the most fascinating features of the book is this central character's frequent conversations with his creator, Ken Sparling, with whom he confides his troubles and asks for advice while at other times author and character bicker and annoy each other. A very enjoyable book.

Dixon Update

2010-01-27T17:46:00.000-08:00

Fantagraphics has announced they're pushing back the release date for Stephen Dixon's book of uncollected stories to Aug. 24th from the originally scheduled May release.

Needless to say, this is very bad news.

Reading Log

2010-01-26T15:23:00.000-08:00

Jan 24, 2010

I'm very enthusiastic about Matthew Simmons' novella A Jello Horse. Very beautifully crafted sentences, insightful and sensitive, playfully creative and inventive; this is a terrific little book. Another young writer to watch!

Jan 25, 2010

Just read a fun and quirky chapbook by Aaron Burch called How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew. Written as a cycle of prose poems in the form of instructions in a "How-to" manual, the whimsical quality of these pieces reminded me of Eric Chevillard in their stretching of reality into some fascinatingly unreal shapes.

Fancy Shoes

2010-01-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

These are two works on paper panels in oil and charcoal by New York artist Ida Applebroog from a rather large series called Fancy Shoes. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Two in the Most Eagerly Awaited Catagory

2010-01-20T18:56:00.000-08:00

I am very excited about the upcoming publication of a book each by two of my all time favorite writers, Stephen Dixon (What is All This) and Thomas Bernhard (Prose). Both are due out in May.

The Dixon is a 900+ pg. tome of his previously uncollected stories and is from Fantagraphics.

The Bernhard is the first English translation of his 1967 collection of short fiction (also titled Prose) and is from Seagull Books.

Reading Log

2010-01-17T22:42:00.000-08:00

Jan 15, 2010 04:39PM

How Some People Like Their Eggs, a chapbook of flash fiction by Sean Lovelace, was very nice; smooth, breezy and lightly whimsical Lovelace's voice convey's the complete assurance of a master craftsman. I agreed with Roxane Gay over at Pank magazine (http://www.pankmagazine.com/pankblog/?p=... ) about the standout story being "I Love Bocce".

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Jan 17, 2010 11:40PM

Read another flash fiction chapbook by yet another very talented young writer, Mel Bosworth, called When the Cats Razzed the Chickens. Well crafted and mostly in a whimsical vein but at only 23 pages this book almost just whets the appetite for more from this source.

Now reading a novel by Mac Wellman: Annie Salem, an American Tale.

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Jan 22, 2010

The Mac Wellman novel, Annie Salem, was very entertaining and fun; wild flights of fantasy laced with wicked satire. I wouldn't call what Wellman does serious literature in the sense of being poetic or deep but it is extremely imaginative and witty light reading, an excellent foil for the more artsy stuff I've focused on lately.

Partial List of People to Bleach by Gary Lutz

2010-01-15T19:08:00.001-08:00

I finally got around to reading this story collection by the highly touted Gary Lutz and was dazzled by his aggressively creative verbal formulations and bizarre happenings. Not one much for subtlety is he. There is a lot of unconventional coupling going on (brother/brother, aunt/nephew, husband/boyfriend, etc.) and a lot of neologistic types of wordplay and other linguistic hi-jinx. I at times debated in my mind the possibility of this being more flashy technical brilliance and wit than real substantive literature, but it's such a lot of fun being continually amazed by what the guy will dream up next I didn't really care. So maybe best in small doses but certainly not to be missed.

The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis a novella by Mark Gluth

2010-01-12T23:54:00.000-08:00

A beautiful book, suffused with deep melancholy. The writing is extremely spare, indeed, some of the most minimalistic I've encountered (the comparison with Agota Kristoff on the back cover--especially the first part of her trilogy, The Notebook-- is apt). There is an accumulating of emotional intensity conveyed by the chains of very short, simple delarative sentences which is quite dreamily incantory, even magical.

Mark Gluth is another tremendously talented young writer on the scene belying the pessimism expressed in so many quarters about the future of American book culture.

I respectfully disagree, however, with one reviewer over on the Goodreads website who suggests this book can easily be read in an afternoon. I found the emotional buildup frequently to be too much all at once and needed to take beaks to relieve the tension and reflect on what I was reading. I think a couple of days reading time is more realistic.

Reading Log

2010-01-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Dec 25, 2009 01:27AM
Finished British poet George Granville Barker's The Dead Seagull, a fictionalized account of the beginning of his long on/off love affair with the Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart. The writing is very highly wrought, dense with symbolism and imagery from classical mythology and Barker's Roman Catholic roots. Intense, stormy, and romantic, it's simultaneously elevated and tawdry, I enjoyed it a lot. Now reading a sequence of prose poems by Daryl Scroggins: The Game of Kings.

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Dec 25, 2009 10:56PM
Really, really liked Scroggins' The Game of Kings. And the eight page interview with the author at the back of the book is just as absorbing as the fictional content. This writer from Dallas combines tremendous imagination with great subtlty and fascinating word choices and sentence structure. I don't really know what qualifies this as "prose poems" rather than just prose, perhaps it's the compression of so much being said in so few words but I admire it all the same. What a shame there is so little of Scroggins' fiction writing in print.

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Dec 28, 2009 02:54AM
Now reading Mac Wellman's story collection A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds. Wellman is far better known for his award winning plays than for his fiction writing though he also has three novels to his credit. The stories is this book display wildly antic and absurdist flights of fancy reminiscent Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke or Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. The settings are various small planetoids in the asteroid belt which are inhabited by some very peculiar human type characters who say and do some very peculiar things. Clever neologisms abound and it's all some pretty far out stuff but Wellman, for the most part, succeeds with his verbal highwire act. It's quite fun. Also reading Barthelme's Amateurs and am struck by the purely comedic aims of many of these stories as opposed to structural and linguistic experimentalism in so much of the other collections. "Some of Us Had Been Threatening" and "What to Do Next" were, I thought, especially brilliant examples from what I've read so far.

La Vache au nez subtile

2010-01-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

My all time favorite cow painting.

This one's by Jean Dubuffet from 1954.

"kennst du das land"

2010-01-10T03:54:00.000-08:00

This painting hangs on the wall facing me just above and to the right of my computer screen and consequently, I spend a lot of time communing with it. Purchased in San Antonio, TX at Anarte Gallery. The painter is Gabriela Proksch from Austria. The title is from the opening line of a poem by Goethe..."Do you know the land where the lemon trees blossom?"...

Reading Log

2010-01-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

Jan 02, 2010 05:26PM

I quite liked Jamie Iredell's Prose. Poems. A Novel . It's another of these longer fictional works composed of fragments, vignettes, etc. presented more or less randomly but which come together to form a unified whole analogous to a novel. I seem to have been gravitating more to this literary form lately and so far have been most impressed by Ken Sparling's and Daryl Scroggins' examples. The Iredell is very well done in terms of the writing; creative sentence structure, language and imagery, but I still see this much more as distinctively stylized prose than the "prose poems" referred to by most reviewers. The characters and situations in this book are somewhat offputting to me with scenes of drunken mayhem and self destructiveness .

Jan 05, 2010 05:47AM
Jeremy M. Davies' Rose Alley has impressed me with its extravagance, its exuberance, its erudition and the virtuosity of its highly elaborate language. Paul West comes to mind as does Georges Perec's Life: a User's Manual as examples of writers exploring similar stylistic paths. There's a fair amount of work involved in following Davies' oddly twisting sentences and the ideas contained therein, but the effort is amply rewarded.

Jan 06, 2010 03:53PM
I'm all excited about Shane Jones' The Failure Six because it's so much fun. Wonderfully creative writing; very dreamlike and mysterious. Jones excels at surprising the reader with just about every sentence that comes along. A terrific little book.

Jan 08, 2010 07:07AM
I don't read all that much fiction by women that focuses on specifically women's concerns but I really liked Claudia Smith's chapbook sized short story collection Put Your Head in My Lap which is primarily that kind of writing. She doesn't in any way try to dazzle with linguistic virtuosity or flights of imagination. Her stories are beautifully simple, subtle and affecting and are frequently about women coping with the after-effects of tragedy or failed relationships. But among my favorites were actually several very upbeat and life affirming narratives. Very good stuff.