Posts Tagged ‘Stan Apps’
Attention Span 2011 | Harold Abramowitz
Amanda Ackerman | The Seasons Cemented | Hex | 2010
Stan Apps | The World as Phone Bill | Combo | 2010
Cara Benson | (made) | Book Thug | 2010
Allison Carter | All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions | Insert | 2010
John Cleary, Kristine Leja, Jason Snyder, eds. | Sidebrow | http://www.sidebrow.net/2005-2011
E. Tracy Grinnell | Leukadia | Trafficker | 2010
Adriano Spatola, trans. Brendan W. Hennessey & Guy Bennett | Toward Total Poetry | Otis / Seismicity | 2008
Myriam Moscona , trans. Jen Hofer | Negro Marfil Ivory Black | Les Figues | 2011
CJ Martin | Two Books | Compline | 2011
Marosa di Giorgio, trans. Jeannine Marie Pitas | The History of Violets | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Vanessa Place | The Discourse of The Slave | Book Thug | 2010
Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues | 2010
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More Harold Abramowitz here.
Abramowitz’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Harold Abramowitz
Allison Carter | A Fixed, Formal Arrangement | Les Figues Press | 2009
Ara Shirinyan | Handsome Fish Offices | Insert Press | 2008
Carlos Blackburn | Selected Poems of Hamster | Ugly Duckling Presse | 2008
C.J. Martin | Lo, Bittern | Atticus Finch | 2008
Deborah Meadows | Goodbye Tissues | Shearsman | 2009
Dolores Dorantes | SEXOPUROSEXOVELOZ And SEPTIEMBRE | Kenning Editions-Counterpath Press | 2008
Jane Sprague, ed. | Palm Press | 2008-2009
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge Books | 2009
Kim Rosenfield | re: evolution | Les Figues Press | 2009
Kyle Schlesinger, Thom Donovan and Michael Cross, eds. | ON Contemporary Practice 1 | Cuneiform Press | 2008
Mairéad Byrne | Example As Figure | Ubu Editions – Publishing The Unpublishable | 2008
Mathew Timmons | Lip Service | Slack Buddha Press | 2009
Matthew Klane | Sons and Followers | Matthew Klane | 2009
Rosa Alcalá, Ash Smith, Sasha Steensen | UNDOCUMENTARY, Water Shed, The Future Of An Illusion | Dos Press | 2009
Stan Apps | Grover Fuel | Scantily Clad Press | 2009
Stephanie Rioux | Sticks | Mindmade Books | 2009
The Pines | “Peek thru the pines” | thepines.blogspot.com | 2008-2009
More Harold Abramowitz here.
Attention Span 2009 – Stan Apps
Harold Abramowitz | Dear Dearly Departed | Palm Press | 2008
A book about the difficulty and sadness of speaking to someone who is no longer present. Somewhere between an elegy and a guide to epistolary conventions, it contains every emotion that could possibly go in a letter: “And that was looking around. It was a very serious business and tomorrow was another day, but not a day of torment. Not a day of torment.”
Steve Aylett | Lint | Thunder’s Mouth Press | 2005
An absurdist biography of a fictional science-fiction writer (based loosely on Philip Dick). This book is very funny and written in a complexly mannered and overloaded prose that resembles poetry: “His very awareness of words’ limitations made him run around like some nutter with a blowpipe, creating a career described variously as a triumph, a benchmark for defeat, a systemized kitsch torus, hell on a stick, a ferocious bluff, the revenge of the Alexandrian library, a strange honking sound, not too shabby, glyph contraband, nutty slack, exhausting, a catalog of fevers, and ‘gear.’”
Micah Ballard | Parish Krewes | Bootstrap Press | 2009
Lyric poems about the beauty of those who are dead. A displaced erotic energy takes the shape of mysterious ritual: “the theme of death is our thiefhood.”
David Buuck | The Shunt | Palm Press | 2009
Ten years of poems charting the ups and downs of our collective crisis mentality. A poetry of puns and outrage, prying at the scab of our public discourse: “thus – this – these – / Stanzas in Medication // (spits) // whose side / effects are you / — on?”
Lawrence Giffin | Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane | Ugly Duckling Press | 2009
A prison-house of linguistic complexity. Giffin studies how consumerist discourse encloses and subordinates other discursive modes: “your comprehensiveness is undercut / by the purchasing power of others.”
Renee Gladman | To After That (Toaf) | Atelos | 2008
The story of an unfinished book, carefully chronicling the book’s drafts and why it was repeatedly dropped and abandoned. Ultimately, the book-about-the-book takes the place of the book per se. A wonderful articulation of the rhythms of a writer’s life and the sensation of nursing along an inchoate book: “it was devastating. . . to have written a book and to have lost it and to be holding it there all at once.”
Jennifer Moxley | Clampdown | Flood Editions | 2009
This poetry has the political intensity and representational clarity of mid-career Auden. Moxley uses allegorical tableau to frame her progressive critique of liberal political orthodoxy. I admire her embrace of direct statement: “I remember feeling / a hollow failure at the particularity / of these pleasures.” Or “The / private-sector mercenaries / ride roughshod over espousers / of eroded nobility as well as the / merely weak.”
Julien Poirier | Back On Rooster | Gneiss Press | 2007
A chapbook length poem, published in an edition of 52. A study of mental process, the inexorable bob-and-weave of consciousness carrying on: “it’s an accident / when it / happens I like it / it changes me / I appear”
Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren | Bruised Dick | no press | no date (probably 2007)
A polymorphously perverse collaborative collection. I think it’s sold out but hopefully will be re-released someday with the same silly picture of the two author’s faces blended on the cover. This is probably the most fun book on my list—I read it probably 20 times: “stake a claim in there / where the damp and emotional / rust builds up all disco / on your balls and ass”
Erika Staiti | Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion | no press | 2008
Just a Xeroxed booklet of very good poems. I expect these will be published in a less ephemeral form eventually. A loving study of aggression as a social dynamic. “when you’ve got nothing to give, you give someone a shiner // dot blogspot dot com”
Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni | 2008
A fascinating dislocation of the biographical impulse. Work that charts subjectivity’s accumulation and erosion: “Many things must be made new for a tonal shift to stick.”
More Stan Apps here.
Featured Title – PPL in a Depot by Gary Sullivan
Gary Sullivan | PPL in a Depot | Roof | 2008 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 3 mentions in Attention Span 2008
Gary Sullivan demonstrates that free speech is all about hurting people, wanting to hurt people, and other illusions of agency. These plays show us how much it matters by being brutally honest about how little it matters; the formal care and attention that goes into these collages weights even the lightest, most banal statements with foreboding emblematic import. (Stan Apps)
Brecht shutting cell phone to mustachio Mozart with Caucasian circle chalk. “Between the dark and the thyme soufflé … mmmm …” (Rodney Koeneke)
Also mentioned by Michael Kelleher.
Featured Title – The Middle Room by Jennifer Moxley
Jennifer Moxley | The Middle Room | Subpress | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 4 mentions in Attention Span 2008
There’s a quality to the tone of this book, as if Tolstoy were resurrected as a Valley Girl, that is truly charming. It’s also nice to be reminded that, when it comes to literature, “charming” finally does transcend all else. This book succeeds in engrossing me in the details of all sorts of things that I would have thought I had no interest in, as well as being completely (but not at all brutally) honest about the real motivations for writing poetry. (Stan Apps)
The acme of chick-lit. (John Wilkinson)
Also mentioned by Allyssa Wolf and David Dowker.
Featured Title – Annoying Diabetic Bitch by Sharon Mesmer
Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008
This book is like cherry-flavored anthrax in a Pixie Stix straw. Mesmer breaks all the rules of decorum, craft, and form—she even invents some new rules just to break them. I would like to see her and Jennifer Knox have a poetic slapdown in a big hockey arena somewhere. My guess is that it would end in a tie with the audience dead from hemorrhaging. (K. Silem Mohammad)
It’s impossible to read these poems without wanting to share the lines out loud. Silence is helpless here: even when I’m alone with this book, I break the silence, laughing. Is there anything more poignantly utopian than that? If ideology is the presence of society in our heads, then laughing out loud when we’re alone is the very summoning of that society, an involuntary assertion of communion. (Benjamin Friedlander)
Dear Poetry: Please can you be like this sometimes always? (Rodney Koeneke)
Finally a poet meaner than Lenny Bruce. For all those who have been spiritually exploited by the iconography of the Olsen twins, get this book and be healed. (Stan Apps)
Also mentioned by Rod Smith, and by Tom Devaney in his entry on Mesmer’s The Virgin Formica.
Featured Title – The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño, trans. Natasha Wimmer | The Savage Detectives | FSG | 2007 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008
The tale of two wild poet boys in an On The Road Adventure… at least that’s how the book is characterized by reviewers. It seems to me to be more about the attempt to recover the mythology of poetry and the bohemian ethic of beauty, love, and self-indulgence … remember when we were racy, spontaneous, scandalous, drunk, oversexed, high on ambition, low on productivity? Not me, I came of age in the 90s. But I remember clearly thinking that literature ended with my generation—now that’s youth! Bolaño hits it on the head (sometimes…). In my reading, however, Natasha Wimmer is the true genius here—she’s clearly an amazing writer herself, and the book reads as if it was written in English. Quite a feat, given how raunchy most of the language is. (Kristin Prevallet)
I read it too, and it’s as good as they say. The best conventional novel about avant-gardism ever! (Stan Apps)
Mentioned by Gina Myers, Allyssa Wolf, and Michael Kelleher.
Attention Span – Brad Flis
Aihwa Ong | Neoliberalism as Exception | Duke | 2006
Ong’s, if only for its wide divergence from common iterations, is a refreshing theoretical reconsideration of the concept of neoliberalism. Instead of as a quasi-form of government, Ong suggests neoliberalism ought to be thought of as a technology of governing that can be used variously by an array of acting powers. She provocatively claims that neoliberalism’s new configurations of territoriality, nationality, and identity, though motivated by market logics and self-interest, inevitably create new (hopeful) “spaces” from which populations can make claims to citizenship, human rights, benefits, and recognition previously excluded by state power. A take-to-the-beach kind of book.
Ted Greenwald | 3 | Cuneiform | 2008
Greenwald’s work tends to arrive in waves, but this past year it’s coming in torrents, with 3 being perhaps the most meaty sampling (another Cuneiform Press and a forthcoming BlazeVOX publication flank it). Three separate poems, built out of sonnets, quartets, tercets in series, each creating a centrifugal music by forging the ghosts of common speech out of the chambers of repetitive and modulating line structures. “Day in blue/ Stone in my passway/ Rehumanize/ Day in blue” This is a much more personal, reflective Greenwald then I think we’re used to. Flawless and resonant, another career achievement in his long history of chart toppers.
Stan Apps | info ration | Make Now | 2007
I fully endorse this totally awesome, gnarly, and radical poetic explosion. All the things you wanted to say about capitalism and American imperialism but were afraid to sound like Keith Olbermann. As the title suggests, Apps dismantles and re-encrusts the critical desire of contemporary infotainment mediaspeak into a stained-glass Voltron of dystopic/ utopic language. “The oppressor was inside everyone/ I was fascinated by the chance to observe.” Comes with neat Gary Sullivan cover.
John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse | Seismosis | 1913 | 2006
One of those books you keep picking up because new ideas in the interim force you back in. A text-drawing collab between these two artists, it’s the most fascinating argument for a reconsideration of Formalism in recent years, which works against the exploitable grain, from Kant to the New Critics, where the more isolated the presentation of something like ‘pure form,’ the more the mark of its contextual making breaks through. Stackhouse’s hand-drawings, frenzied and organic, are set against Keene’s amazing range of poetic forms, the latter of which concern themselves with the nature of form and abstraction, but restricted to a generally categorical palette of language itself. The result is the long creaking of history, the voice, and communal touching of art production and reception that breaks surface. “Injuring it, when I look./ What am I opening?/ Unlocking or loosing movement, the query of intent./ To enter the fail, the medium falling// in marks and strokes.”
Rob Halpern | Rumored Place | Krupskaya | 2004
Completely incredible. I almost put the book down by the end of the first section, being generally unenthused. So glad I didn’t. By the end of the second section, my understanding of and attitude toward the first completely pivoted. And then again through the next section, and then again, and again. The book roundelays the desire for collective history with a need for collective space. “Desire is a detour” A masterful display in five parts of narrative reorienting through poetic mutation to wholly gratifying effect. “These shapes in us, negating figures like ‘future findings’—tracing rents in the general intelligence.”
kari edwards | having been blue for charity | BlazeVox [books] | 2007
This is a very strong, very lush book of resistances of all sorts, and a call to question the forms of resistance as it does so. Though its wild carnival of digital and formal interference will disappoint the avant techno novaphile, edwards explicitly theorizes a retreat away from the periphery of absolute break to address the point behind the lines where recognition and resource are not guaranteed but must be recycled from this behind-space. Too much going on in this book to encapsulate here justly, but certainly a record of and sustained demand for constructive presence. Though her last book, I know I will be rereading having been blue for charity for decades more.
Dudley Randall, ed. | Black Poetry | Broadside | 1969
Its full title is Black Poetry: A Supplement, To Anthologies Which Exclude Black Poets, easily the best title of any publication of all time with the exception of Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours. 24 mostly familiar poets spanning two generations, from Hughes to Nikki Giovanni, packed into fewer than 50 pages, all post-war selections, which includes some exceptionally great poems by (then) Leroi Jones, Giovanni (at 25!), Clarence Major, Ahmed Alhamisi, & Sonia Sanchez. Malcolm X, recently assassinated, is taken up as figure and theme in much of the younger works. I’ve lately been looking for some texts with which to seriously yoke the persistent (insistent) critical hoopla around the New American Poetry Anthology, and this seems like a productive book to begin that retelling.
Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick Durgin | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning Editions | 2007
Not much to add to what oft’s been thought and mostly already been said about this needed book. A phenomenal display of Weiner’s talent and capability. Surely everyone should have read this by now, or else you’re the most unhip gluon. Major kudos to Durgin and the press.
Brian Kim Stefans | Before Starting Over | Salt | 2006
I love this book of essays, (digital) poetics, and reviews more than sin itself. A constant reference for what we need to be talking about and how we might go about it, like a poet’s little red book except kind of chunky (350p plus) and yellowish. Highlights include his letters to editors which are magically explosive given their brevity, while his spats with Silliman prove more than just entertaining, they get under the skin as nano-imperatives. Overall Stefans is furiously scooping up from the vocabulary bin new ideas, concepts, and language and presenting it, however wet and dripping with goop, in the most generous and advanceable manner. The writing is impeccable, piercing, mellifluous, without a pixel of irony. N00bs & neuro-aesthetes take note.
Lesley Yalen | This Elizabeth | minus house | 2007
“At the end, the husband is strictly scientific.// At the end, someone is mopping like a mommy.// At the end, the glaring absences are back.// The background is ground.” Yalen’s ten-part poem powerfully and uniquely scrutinizes the domestitcat(ed/ing) liberal fantasies of identity by forcing parodying and paradoxical figures upon a shallow stage. Husbands and moms, street people and lawyers, blondes and doctors all bolster the central figure, this Elizabeth, in a backward unpeeling of race and gender codes which the anti-hero of the poem, the Poet, is forced to reckon with, failingly, with all her aesthetic theory. Formally akin to Deborah Richards’ Last One Out, a solid read and an exquisite chapbook production by the press.
Martha Dandridge Custis, Lawrence Giffin (ed.) | Comment is Free, Vol. 2: Imperialism at Home | Lil Norton | 2008
This will be the book to replace Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader for decades to come. The ad copy reads like this: “Taking the government buyout of Bear Stearns, Custis deftly weaves a wondrous tapestry of the abuse of power and the potential for resistance.” The book’s contents read like this: “There is no accountability left in the ‘system’, only the rich and well connected make up the rules and we all slave to their gains.// I don’t understand why ‘we’ are at fault. ‘We’ are powerless to stop anything.” Imagine your entire collegiate graduating class invited to your house to discuss the economy. Better than the movie.
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More Brad Flis here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2010 – Nada Gordon
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Stan Apps | Universal Stories with Unknown Particulars | valeveil e-book | 2009
A work of conscience and searching thought: What does poetry do in the world? What does it do for us?
Lynn Berhrendt | petals, emblems | Lunar Chandelier | forthcoming 2010
My blurb: “The affect-drenched poems in Lynn Behrendt’s Petals/Emblems leap off beauty’s edge right on to the electrified grid of being: that difficult ‘barrage/ of having been born/ at all.’ There (here) everything’s objective correlative: love and pain ‘crave form like alms’ and surely find it, sensuous, phonic, and unsettling, ‘heavy’ with ‘gyn grief’ and ‘undaunted desire.’ ‘This ache to tell you something’ shoots the poems through with yearny rhetorical force like the ‘inward arch’ of ‘nostalgic ocean’: palpable, fluid, engulfing.”
Charles Bernstein | All the Whiskey in Heaven | Farrar | 2010
Do I even need to say why?
Brandon Brown | The Orgy | self-published | 2010
I wrote on Ululations that this book “… spreads a metaphorical net onto the orgy of late capitalism in the hyper-information age (‘this crystal mall must be destroyed’); and most compellingly, to me, it seems to refer back on itself to the orgy of writing that makes itself felt in every moment of this galvanized, kind of emo (in the best possible sense: ‘My heart struggles./ It’s big as a chard, but it never learns.’) poem.”
K. Lorraine Graham | Terminal Humming | Edge | 2009
I blurbed this one, too. [All “this shining and this _utter [!].” Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex “essay on scrounging.” It is a wonderfully violent “attempt to unleash inner badness” in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: “Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl.” Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, “kinks become beautiful and obvious,” and “language [hums] as angry form.” Read this “downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza” of a book!]
Michael Gottlieb | Memoir and Essay | Faux | 2010
A moving, witty, precise and somewhat theatricalized bildungsroman. How he got this way.
Carla Harryman | Adorno’s Noise | Essay | 2008
Like psychedelics for the intellect.
Rodney Koeneke | Etruria | manuscript
Exquisite. Someone please publish this. This is poetry exuding the most poignant possible elegance.
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2010
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING upon reading these poems. Seriously. Kasey is my idol.
Mel Nichols | Catalytic Exteriorization Phenomenon | Edge | 2009
Mindbogglingly delicate and audacious, all at once.
Lanny Quarles | chapbooks
He sent us an envelope of chapbooks which I loved. Gary squirreled them away somewhere so I can’t check titles. Endlessly inventive!
Ariana Reines |The Cow | Fence | 2006
I know I’m late to this one, but wow, The Cow. She packs a punch.
Monica de le Torre | Public Domain | Roof | 2008
It’s conceptual! It’s funny! It’s whip-smart! It’s art!
Dana Ward |Typing Wild Speech | Summer BF Press | 2010
All the outspilling radiance of life and death here, like a pop Proust or a more-beatific-than Kerouac Kerouac.
PLUS: live computer-facilitated performances of Danny Snelson (“Mabuse”) and Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford (“The Ballad of the Death of Spring”) Why limit ourselves to the page? This is a future of poetry.
More Nada Gordon here. Her Attention Span for 2005. Back to directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 6, 2010 at 10:00 am
Posted in Attention Span 2010, Commented List
Tagged with Ariana Reines, Brandon Brown, Carla Harryman, Charles Bernstein, Dana Ward, K. Lorraine Graham, K. Silem Mohammad, Lanny Quarles, Lynn Berhrendt, Mel Nichols, Michael Gottlieb, Monica del la Torre, Nada Gordon, Rodney Koeneke, Stan Apps