Attention Span – Sawako Nakayasu

Vanessa Place | Dies: A Sentence | Les Figues | Los Angeles | 2005

Epically macabre, linguistically denselight, terribly terrifically continuously archaically presently engaging—it’s not a poem, nor a novel, but a sentence, should you get one.

Rusty Morrison | The true keeps calm biding its story | Ahsahta | 2008

like the spider that travels with me back through to write poetry again stop

Rosmarie Waldrop | Curves to the Apple | New Directions | 2006

Thankful to revisit all three books of the trilogy, together now, and to be read along the brilliant continuum of excluded middles.

Steven Dolph and Brandon Holmquest, ed. | Calque 2-4 | na | 2007-2008

Calque is am ambitious journal devoted to translation, which includes interviews, reviews (by reviewers who know both languages well enough to comment on the translation), reviews on reviews (it’s often a smart but harsh attack, but does the important work of promoting extended dialogue regarding what happens to translations in the US).

Pierre Joris | A Nomad Poetics | Wesleyan | 2003

Rosmarie Waldrop has her excluded middle; Joris occupies it with his middle voice—not active nor passive, home nor away—I want to go to Pierre Joris’s future please.

Kass Fleisher | The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History | SUNY | 2004

This “native american studies” (that’s what it says on its back cover) book takes an astute and compelling stance on american-ness, history, truth, and (creative) non-fiction that parallels and intersects my current thinking-living-writing in between cultures and genres.

Dolores Dorantes, trans. Jen Hofer | sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre: A Bilingual Edition of Books Two and Three from Dolores Dorantes| Kenning Editions & Counterpath | 2007

Two books (from a lifelong project called Dolores Dorantes)—two languages—two presses—and a multiplicity of thought—tenderness in the face of massacre meet up in fragments, could only meet up as such—

Dick Higgins | foew&ombwhnw | Something Else | 1969

I love the four-column format mountains, I love the rolling hills of his essays (like Games of Art), I love the Danger Music flowers, I love the Anger Song daffodils… why “volunteer to have your spine removed” when you can be playing The Chin Game? Blessed are the clamourbound.

Susan Landers | Covers | O Books | 2007

These “cover songs” function a bit differently in literature than in those of pop music, but it does indeed give Dante’s originals (from his Inferno) a new (musical and otherwise), often fragmentary interpretation. In other words, it’s an excellent and dangerous work of translation.

Hannah Weiner | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2007

If only I had known sooner the ways in which she was engaged in art and performance, with her terrific inventiveness in the events of language in both private and public realms!

Achiote Press & Tinfish Press | Ongoing

Two excellent small presses that fantastically situate their publishing projects in the growing spaces of ethnic-minority-other-avant-gardisms. Tinfish has been at it (and on the Pacific Rim, specifically) for a long time now, and Achiote is more California-based (I think?), and is relatively new.

*

More Sawako Nakayasu here.