Summer downtime = very busy DIYers. Awesome.

Effing Press has just released Is It the King? by Farid Matuk

5 x 7.5
48 pages
saddle-stitched
cover art and design by Jared Faulkner
bound in assorted endpapers
$7.00

Get it here.







Introducing the Onion Union, a new online journal edited by Marcus McCann.

The Onion Union pledge: We recognize a liberating promise in the unmooring of poetry and economics. Poets have gained unparalleled freedom to produce their work unapologetically, free from the external pressures facing artists working in other mediums. On the internet, poets have the unprecedented ability to reproduce and distribute their own work. And, most importantly, poetry's readers have an enormous amount of choice about what they read, unfiltered by traditional industry constraints. We will sever the last ties between poetry and economics, which are imaginary rather than material anyway. We will celebrate a post-capitalist poetics. Self-publishing is a revolutionary anarchic act. The poems are free.

The first issue features poetry by Mark Young, William Piety, Sawako Nakayasu, Liam Wilkinson, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Eileen Tabios, Eric Lehman & Caleb Puckett.

Check it out.


Brian Howe's chapbook Guitar Smash is out too.

GUITAR SMASH, the debut poetry chapbook by Brian Howe.

GUITAR SMASH is what happens when you force-feed language to technology until it vomits!
It’s c r a z y …

GUITAR SMASH is available by way of purchase, trade, bully tactics, flattery, comp.
Contact Brian for details.

(By the time I got around to this announcement, copies are already scarce. But Brian notes on his blog, the chap is also available as a free PDF here.)


Logan Ryan Smith reviews Parad e R ain by Michael Koshkin

After Johnson wrote, or etched out his radi os, one might wonder why anyone else would want to do erasures ever again, as it is a capsulation of an idiosyncratic and clever idea. As well, the idea of creating poems from erasures seems almost endless--where would it ever stop? Could one create a whole literary "career" out of erasures? If not, why not? If so, how? Yet, erasures seem to be a form of translation, and also a way to create a whole new poem. And again, one might ask why someone would write another erasure from Milton's trilogy after Johnson tackled Paradise Lost. The answer to that is: Because Michael Koshkin can, and did. The differences between radi os and parad e r ain are remarkable. It's interesting to see how an erasure done in the 70s and one done in the 2000s of similar source material can be so different.

Read the rest here.

Then visit Big Game Books to get your copy.


New! Beat Roots by Anne Waldman, with illustrations by George Schneeman, from Hot Whiskey Press

Speaking of Michael Koshkin, he and his Hot Whiskey partner Jennifer Rogers have just published Beat Roots with a letterpressed cover and Japanese stab binding.

The 250 copies are going fast--the first 10 signed copies were snapped up immediately.

Click and ye shall receive.


And finally, CAConrad's Mooncalf Press offers a new chap by Frank Sherlock

Frank Sherlock's poem from the Poetry, Politics, Proximity: Third Annual Kerry Sherin Wright Prize event at Kelly Writers House on April 27 is now available in chapbook form: Spring Diet of Flowers at Night with cover art by Jonathan Allen.

There should be infinite
meaning in
the blandness of a shot
victim in an unfamiliar
neighborhood but

prospects of imagined life
are tied to clean logic

Diagetic background
music has been used to
steer me into attempting
an architectural line

Copies are available at Robin's Bookstore in Philly (108 S. 13th Street), or to order contact Mooncalf Press at CAConrad13 [at] aol [dot] com.

Juliet Patterson & Kate Greenstreet wonder what poetry can change

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes, because of the way poetry engages, incites and changes our thinking individually, I do think it can create change in the world; one person at a time. It's a very subtle and slow-growth kind of change--perhaps akin to mediation or prayer--and perhaps it's the kind of influence that is often difficult to measure or see, particularly in a capitalist society, where the measure of success or change is made in economic terms.

What did Wallace Stevens say? Something like: "Poets are the priests of the invisible." I think about this phrase a lot [ . . . ]

Read the rest.

New! Shiny new newness!

Wow, it's easy to fall behind with these announcements. But I'd hate to miss the opportunity to tell you about these recent goodies, just in case you've missed them:

Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere #2 is now available, as are back issues of Elsewhere #1.

Where Elsewhere #1 juxtaposed images and text from a sojourn in Japan, #2 combines the sights and signage of Coney Island with a poem by Nada Gordon: "All images seen on a walk up Coney Island Avenue from Brighton Beach to Kensington. 'Coney Island Avenue' by Nada Gordon, modeled on Frank O'Hara's 'Second Avenue,' [was] written from notes take on a busride going down Coney Island Avenue in the opposite direction."

The resulting jumble and tumble of images and words in Elsewhere #2--most of the images also contain words--creates a visual/verbal riot that really does capture the feeling of Coney Island, where the subway meets the sea and multiple languages and cultures and styles camp and cavort at a beachfront carnival, and the tide rolls in and out, lapping at thousands of ankles. SOAK IT UP. Frank O'Hara can certainly be heard here, but Nada's leaps are (as always) fabulous in the extreme. Across a triptych of images cropped into panels from a single view of a hat shop's roofline and facade run the lines

Welcome to the age of independence in a leopard dress
and orchid nails. Big! White! Jackie O glasses!
Kish Koosh playgroup, the bamboo veils of intemperence
flapping down with tigerish yaps over the one & only
Sahara Restaurant by the World of Doors.
1-800-Cultural Collision. [...]

You know you want one.

Here's a review by Allen Bramhall.

Here's another by Maureen Thorson.

Brian Kim Stefans has a new book out, What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers, from Factory School.

I don't have this one yet, so I can't review it, but Brian says the book was 6 years in the making and credits Tim Davis with the portrait (what better word) of this little urban flower on the cover.

What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers
Factory School. 2006. 148 pages, perfect bound, 6.5x9.
ISBN: 1-60001-048-2
$14 / $12 direct order
or via SPD

From Factory School: "Collecting poems from the past six years, What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers is Stefans' most ambitious book to date. Includes the successful chapbooks The Window Ordered to be Made, Jai lai for Autocrats and Cull. What Does It Matter?, a chapbook published in England in 2005, is a long sequence that updates Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by 100 years, several wars and with a change of neighborhood (London for Williamsburg, Brooklyn)."

BKS adds: "There are no blurbs but, uh, John Crowe Ransom says it’s good, and good for you."

Pirooz Kalayeh has a new DIY comic book too, Why Do Men Do Stupid Things for Ass (an age-old question, no?).

He promises "A Book. An Ass. A Vision. Come join the author as he deciphers the pyramids, discovers how to be an open door, and finds true love. A comic without parallel. It just might answer the question. It might even be multiorgasmic."

I guess there's only one way to test these claims for truth-in-advertising: click here.


Didi Menedez offers a calendar of her colorful poets' portraits to help keep you on schedule for 2007.

Bettie & the Poets includes the poetical visages of Amy King, April Carter-Grant, David Lehman, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Diego Quiros, Tony Tost, Robert Creeley, Charles Jensen, Dave Ruslander, Eduardo Corral, John Korn, and Charles Bukowski, and those're Bettie Page's sweetcheeks on the cover.

Available via Lulu.

AND Didi also announces Ocho #1, a new print companion to MiPOesias. Contributors include John Korn, Jenni Russell, Jack Anders, Helm Filipowitsch, Ron Androla, Pris Campbell, Laurel K. Dodge, Amy King & Tom Blessing. It's also available from Lulu.


The Cultural Society has been updated, says Joe Massey:

Check out the "texts" section for two new poems by me (riffing on paintings by Wendy Heldmann); and poems and prose from Joel Bettridge, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Philip Jenks, Burt Kimmelman, Robert Murphy, Michael Prasil, James Robinson, and Tyrone Williams. I also provided the "picks" for this update.

No, that's not everything. But--whew!--it's all I have time for this morning. Please check back later this week for more.