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.