Attention Span 2010 – Paul Stephens

Seth Price | How to Disappear in America | Leopard | 2008

The ultimate how-to guide for the hobo Houdini in us all.  The book itself has almost disappeared from circulation—for now at least, it can be ordered online from Ooga Booga.

Robert Kelly | Fire Exit | Black Widow | 2009

R Kelly may have reached the height of his fame in the 70s; he may be reaching the height of his powers in his 70s. The strongest case yet made against flarf….

Monica de la Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008

Will the real Monica de la Torre please stand up? An important addition to the growing pantheon of conceptual writing.

Miles Champion | Eventually | The Rest Press | 2008

The cover, the endpapers, the front matter, the body, the colophon…. A true chapbook de résistance.

Stuart Bailey, ed. | Dot Dot Dot 18 & 19 | Dexter Sinister | 2009-2010

The ne plus ultra of contemporary meta-journal design. Not well enough known among poetry types, Dot Dot Dot regularly features writing by Seth Price, Angie Keefer, Liam Gillick and more. Conceptual? Relational? Quasi-conceptual? Or all of the above.

Clark Coolidge | The Act of Providence | Combo | 2010

The graphomanic master returns with a hometown epic. In the grand tradition of Maximus and Paterson—sort of.

Chris Burnett | SprawlCode: descriptions | Preacher’s Biscuit | 2006

Got forty dollars burning a hole in your pocket? You could buy one share of BP and hate yourself. Or you could procure this beautifully printed, brilliantly conceived book that somehow hasn’t yet sold out, despite having been printed in an edition of only 100 copies. Consider cornering the market. (Special shout out also to Journal of Artists’ Books 24 edited by Craig Dworkin and Kyle Schlesinger, which features a fascinating meta-road trip dialogue between Burnett and Tate Shaw.)

Reza Negarestani | Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials | re: press | 2008

Page turning theory-fiction. One part Bataille, one part Deleuze, one part Said, one part Pynchon: put them in a blender and you have an inimitably paranoid critique of the global petrocracy as seen from the perspective of the underground noosphere.

Drew Daniel | 20 Jazz Funk Greats | Continuum | 2008

A completely engrossing account of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Just the right mix of fandom and critical distance. Read it as you listen to the album—you won’t be bored.

Larry Eigner, ed. Curtis Faville and Robert Grenier | Collected Poems | Stanford | 2010

Who wants a wi-fi Kindle for $139 when you can have the four-volume Collected Poems of Larry Eigner? At $120, 3,072 poems comes out to less than four cents each. A bargain in disguise.

More Paul Stephens here. Back to directory.

Attention Span – Michael Scharf

Arun Kolatkar | Kala Ghoda Poems | Pras Prakashan | 2004

Two or three things he knows about the capital of Maharashtra.

Barbara Guest | The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest | Wesleyan | 2008

Esp. the hilarious The Countess from Minneapolis and the they-get-better-ever-year Rocks on a Platter and Miniatures.

Brandon Downing | Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics | Grievous Pictures | 2007

Isolates the individual compulsion, or drive, toward forming and maintaining identities from the inherited concepts and media through which one is forced to do it. Separates out the focal power that images draw from their original contexts, and, at 10x and 100x, sets fire to the frog, freeing princess from the chrysalis. Visual intelligence that makes gallery work (like, say, Isaac Julien’s WESTERN UNION: Small Boats) look at once commercial and provincial. A kiss like that.

C.S. Giscombe | Prairie Style | Dalkey Archive | 2008

The phenomenology of driving during adult life.

Gennady Aygi, trans. by Peter France | Field – Russia | New Directions | 2007

Tarkovsky and Sokurov track the same maternal grasses. Stripped down to the wind.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | California | 2008

“But taking as a whole the phase of the world’s history which we have reached, it has become a commonplace remark to say that we have crossed the threshold of the Apocalypse.”

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008

Lovers of late JA meanderings through pre-code detritus who look to counter other lovers’ complaints about cut & pasteability will find, here, that reading each section ‘in order’, or continuously across the breaks and gaps, makes the book lose part of its meaning. The obsessive superfineries of the arrangement, shorn against undoing, and the intricate intactness of “Lateral Argument” underscore the point perfectly: within a supersaturate, none of the pieces fit. The author also wishes to inform you that Stephane was wrong about the book/bombe; the blank page 68 is a comment on the French.

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin S Ngangom, eds. | Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast | NEHU | 2003

Revised edition due shortly from Penguin. Until then, greetings from Shillong.

Miles Champion | Eventually | The Rest | 2008

Read “Colour in Huysmans” slowly, with the right column as a kind of gloss on or completion of the left, and then see how inadequate that is.

Peter Culley | The Age of Briggs & Stratton | New Star | 2008

Plowing on Sunday. Plowing North America.

Vivek Narayanan | Mr. Subramanian | unpublished ms. | 2008

Stephen Dedalus, in Madras at 35.