Cy Gist Press

2011-11-05T16:31:00.002-04:00

CGP 27: Zinc Landscape / Paisaje zinc
by Dayana Fraile, translated by Guillermo Parra (32 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd. ($9 ppd. outside of continental U.S.)

In her English debut, Venezuelan fiction writer and poet Dayana Fraile conjures an urban scenario where the self unapologetically embraces a melancholic gait. These are city poems built on a fractured diction, with lines constructed out of tin roofs, skyscrapers, knuckles and traffic. The city might be Caracas, Venezuela but it’s also a stage where the poet maps out her particular narrative of doubt, frustration and visionary fervor. The poems in Zinc Landscape employ the daily panorama as an opportunity for reinterpreting our inner world, where crickets “essay silence” and “the shadow makes body.” Thinking of Baudelaire’s relationship to Paris, Walter Benjamin wrote: “We know that, in the course of flânerie, far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape and the present moment.” These poems let us witness this interpenetration as it proceeds from tree branches to office cubicles, plazas, avenues and TV screens. Dayana Fraile’s hard poems are furnished with “the aluminum of the season.” --Guillermo Parra

Mèlancolie
por Dayana Fraile

esta tristeza se me va por las ramas
                                            se cuelga de lianas de plástico
me penetra silenciosa mientras grito

como toda bestia sagrada se adorna con cayenas
arde como un horizonte entre las manos
se unta mascarillas de pepino y miel

cerril                     montaraz
desorienta a los vecinos         lleva piedras en la boca

salvaje
villana

celebra el camino del abismo
no deja dormir
toma el agua directamente de las jarras
escucha discos de Chopin hasta bien entrada la noche

Mèlancolie
by Dayana Fraile

trans. Guillermo Parra

this sadness gets tangled in branches
                hangs from plastic vines
silently penetrates me while I scream

like all sacred beasts it adorns itself with cayennes
burns like a horizon in your palms
dabs itself with cucumber and honey masques

untamed           rough
disorients the neighbors      carries stones in its mouth

savage
villainous

celebrates the road of the abyss
leaves no room for sleep
drinks water straight from jugs
listens to Chopin records well into the night

Foreign orders click here:

2011-05-10T16:00:00.002-04:00

CGP 26: A City of Angels
by Ben Mazer (40 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $9 ppd.

A verse play in three acts by the author of Poems and January 2008. It would be fair to say that the drama takes place in an unspecified European university town with much to suggest more than tenuous comparisons to certain locales in Wales, that the play takes place in the latter 1930s, prior to the outbreak of the second world war, and that the play involves a complicated interweaving of issues concerned with identity, inheritance, and begetting. More concretely the play includes an ancient blood feud between rival clans, an ageing university president, an avant-garde theatre troupe, a pair of knitting aunts, a pair of drunken murderers, a man named Cross, a repossessed kingship, a wedding, and a great deal of lyric poetry. This is the poet's first published play (though he has been quietly writing plays for a great many years).

Praise for Ben Mazer's poetry

"Ben Mazer’s poems find aesthetic unity by arranging their emotional resonances in the themes and variations of the musical phrase, giving both voice and silence to the personal experiences that evade language. [ . . . ] Mazer’s layering of details, coupled with a tautness of form that is carefully governed by an exceptional musical ear places him among the most dynamic and original poets of his generation."
—Christopher Bock in Jacket magazine

"Ben Mazer is lyric poetry's true hero and has not compromised one iota, as his amazing works attest with their singular purity, beauty and heartbreak."

—Philip Nikolayev

"Like fragments of old photographs happened on in a drawer, Ben Mazer's poems tap enigmatic bits of the past that suddenly come to life again. To read him is to follow him along a dreamlike corridor where everything is beautiful and nothing is as it seems."
—John Ashbery

"Ben Mazer is one of the few poets of his generation to understand that only mastery of craft will bring you to the natural breath, and that to sing memorably in verse, with the body, on the line, is the only way to sound the depths of the passing moment."
—Glyn Maxwell

"I am a great admirer of Ben Mazer's poetry."

—John Kinsella

"A poet unabashedly enthralled by the past, one who has the good sense to turn his own obsessions into his poems' strength. Memory simultaneously masters Mazer and is made to speak through him."

—Patrick Morrissey in Harp & Altar

"Mazer recognises that the lyric poem is more like a movie than like other literary forms [ . . . ] By deliberately withholding information he seems, at first blush, to betray the contract between poet and reader. The illusion of lyric is of a soul being bared. In fact, Mazer is here being more honest than most about the trick of lyric, and his illicit overtness (another kind of soul-baring) gives the poem its thrill.

—Ailbhe Darcy in The Critical Flame

“Whose poems are these? It looks like the heads of a hundred people made them, yet there is no disjunction, no coil of expression, no tragic dissolution here that fails our understanding. Don Juan, at the end of his life and trapped in a mineshaft, might have called these poems up to us. We need more of these poems, quickly, and we are in a state of distinguished penury now, for only one person, Ben Mazer, can supply them, and however much he provides there will always be gasping for more.

—Stephen Sturgeon, editor of Fulcrum

Just in time for St. Valentine's Day--CGP 25: Jessica Rogers' HOT WATER

2011-02-11T14:59:00.003-05:00

CGP 25: Hot Water
by Jessica Rogers (16 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.

In 1979 the philosophers the Brothers Gibb noted that nobody gets too much love anymore. Thirty-two years later their postulation seems to hold even greater validity. Jessica Rogers tries to even the score with her expansive love poem Hot Water. Like the love-child of Walt Whitman and Joe Brainard (& they certainly would have had one), Rogers’ poem is a brazen love letter to the world, mining memory & returning with precious jewels for everyone, all of the time.

From Hot Water
by Jessica Rogers

I loved a young man

on the subway last week;

I want to describe him.

I want to say

how he reminded me

of you,

of so many other loves

(like the way Todd says

he loves the women

who jog toward him

on bridges:

as they get closer,

you can imagine

the whole thing going down.

She would look

so beautiful,

soft

in her private moments,

so that as she jogs by,

you can’t help but tear up

to be that close to her,

having already lived and died

in your racing thoughts,

and so sigh

at some memory,

and turn to look

with relief—at least

you didn’t share any names).

But then

my stranger

got off the subway

and I loathed him for it,

and missed him a little bit—

his reading a book,

shirt half tucked

(just like a real relationship,

Brooklyn-bound).

2011-01-12T10:29:00.002-05:00

CGP 24: The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky
by Phill Provance (28 pp. Saddle-Stitched. B&w illus. by Christopher Schmidt) $7 ppd.
SOLD OUT!

In his debut collection, Andalucian dog Phill Provance weds humor and pathos. The speaker of The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky is not so much an anti-hero as a secret identity viewed with precision and candor. Provance makes the quotidian magical employing only the most mundane of objects; no false bottom in his top hat and his rabbit speaks in tongues.

WHERE I DRAW THE LINE
by Phill Provance

When the last one left

a knife lay
on the kitchen table
for three days.

It was an eight-inch
chef’s knife
she’d been slicing

a Christmas orange with.
Now, I’m normally a tidy man,
but you see,

she left the day the sun
rolled out of the sky
demanding to know
who had stolen his shoes.

He beamed darkly
at the chief of police and refused
to leave the place
where the World War II
monument

had stood. So it was
three days of trying to spray
him out with fire hoses

while the children bathed
and roasted marshmallows
from the roof of Town Hall. Then,
on the third day,
the moon alighted
and admitted
to stealing the sun’s shoes.

So I went home
to find the knife
and a seed fused to
the caramelized juice.
And I decided, right then and there,

that I’d never let
another woman
cut a Christmas orange.

2010-09-17T14:51:00.000-04:00

CGP 23: Sharpsburg
by Joel Chace (24 pp. Saddle-Stitched.) $8 ppd.

In Sharpsburg, Joel Chace splits open the archive and finds the seeds of consciousness inside; contrapuntal narrative threads are woven together in an asynchronous braid for the muse of memory. History’s violence eclipsed by the violence of living and the violence of desire. Chace makes a mandala of the disparate grains of syntax, cognition.

From Sharpsburg

by Joel Chace

Your rope is our hope. He tried to explain what his mother meant, but the doctor told him to shut up; there was no way he could translate her suffering. During that hour, while bullets snipped leaves from a young locust tree growing at an edge of the hollow and powdered us with fragments, we had time to speculate on many things. Huge problems with the petard. Night started at the end of creek water. His handwriting is neat and legible, he spells accurately, his observations are hardly ever emotional, and he rarely mentions religion. I would like to think that he is part of the burial party in that photograph.

There were a great many left unburied, and where they were exposed to the sun they were as black as darkies. I will here correct an effort made on page 13. Butterfly or penguin? Manifestly, there’s a point to bad taste. She could feel it coming, so she kept her composure when—right in the middle of the viewing—he said, “What do you think’s going to happen?” He runs the place, on paper, at least. Wrenching an answer out of that set of variables. I avoid clichés like the plague. He was officially released about three weeks later, which meant that, as he says it, “I was once again, legally and technically, food for powder.”

2010-09-17T14:39:00.001-04:00

CGP 22: cock-burn
by j/j hastain (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched.) $7 ppd.

Sex lost its teeth when it became an abstraction, but in cock-burn, j/j hastain remembers that fucking has always been and will always be revolutionary. Teeth and all other parts. Here is a map in 1:1 scale, without gloss or euphemism. The oracle in the temple of the body speaks from the shadows, long absent. The news is good.

from cock-burn
by j/j hastain

   
then
later             post
come
the
rose-quiet
            the
acknowledged sub-terra bruises
                  tears that are
masticated
                         in order to verify that they
                                    can
be taken in as nourishment
this
is spiritual fusion that is so sure
            that
it turns our physiology 
                        into
an opus of awes

2010-09-17T14:30:00.008-04:00

CGP 21: Megton Gasgan Krakooom
by Paolo Javier (42 pp. Saddle-Stitched w/B&W illus.) $8 ppd.
ONLY 2 LEFT!

We deserve our monsters. We are our monsters. In Megton Gasgan Krakooom, Queens Poet Laureate Paolo Javier opens the box of the id and the planchette goes ballistic. Janus is both Jeckyl and Hyde and speaks with two mouths. Javier is a mutant toreador, daring the minotaur with verboten speech. Feed the Gorgon and you’ll notice you’re the one in the cage. With cryptozoologic fieldwork by Ernest Concepcion.

TRINYSTEASER

by Paolo Javier 

Love as a maximum ablution
No tenements. L’amourat sea
                       unwrit a diver riddle
a diver riddle
fraction lyric animé
somber, frisky, fed
supplicant chose sequence
Sarajevo’s era recalled


            Will fucking among stranger armadas question the equation
taunt port of entry
for adored id dulcinea
ocular riddles pattern importune
lair Im in rattled at two
hail circuitry!
between grand echelon laid open port west of entry
           

border to border borders sold in glove
color of rose averred, intoxicated envy at scenic rate
sex lead lantern
to know crescendo in summit question colloquy

            lair Im rattled into
rigorous voyage a picador Jihad
in total tyranny, carnage, sullied ladle deicide
what murder they’llsecond next
                                                            all gold in us
            despair, anxiety, plain entry 
            

           Saddam for Sunni ranks satyrs
magnificent diaspora of Amazons to heed us
I comfort Eros, buttons intact
lost seismic nautilus
o diem italic dads Ive bitten

                        I brag! 
              o Oracle ruins
my entire sustenance induce coma all experience
all gold in us, sanguine, solar, terrible entry synapse appear
                                    synapse
I compare a supplicant
murder, grave, pulsating
sub-prime synod atlas serbis soiled I 
    
        assume redundant agave tan
Etreus destiny Aquinas in lessons
pigeons in the circle sojourn kneeling
Christian aspersion aspersion simpering

2010-07-08T10:57:00.002-04:00

CGP 20: Feast Day Gone & Coming
by Frank Sherlock (16 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.

In his second chapbook for Cy Gist Press, Feast Day Gone & Coming, Frank Sherlock gives us a map of the heavens as revolutionary love song, replacing Andromeda & Orion with you & me. It may cost us dearly to be humanized, but Sherlock’s work is what we get for our trouble. With beautiful cover comix by James Comey.

From Feast Day Gone & Coming
by Frank Sherlock

    Each creature is secured by the sling

         of culture

    as asserted in the press materials

                    The

                    wars

                    go

                    on

            & still there is no explanation of

            the meaning of ordinary rendition

                    Of course

        there is a human cost

            How much does it cost to be humanized

2010-07-08T10:34:00.009-04:00

CGP 19: Wild Cards
by Basil King (40 pp. Saddle-Stitched w/ full-color illustrations) $8 ppd.

In Wild Cards, Basil King gives us art & history from street level. Monet, Manet, Blake and others are face-cards in his full hand & hands. King builds a Japanese Bridge between word and image in this section of his epic Learning to Draw/A History. Accompanying the text are four full-color plates of King’s own paintings from the “Blackjack” series. You’ll lose your shirt.

From Wild Cardsby Basil King

John Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in America. His father, a civil engineer and a graduate of West Point, was employed in 1842 by the Czar to build a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In Russia, Whistler learns French and studies drawing.

In 1848, John’s father, Major George Washington McNeill Whistler, dies of cholera, in Russia. Whistler’s mother brings the family back to America. Whistler is 15. The next year Whistler enrolls in West Point. He is dismissed and doesn’t graduate. When he decides to be a painter, he goes to Paris, then to London. Whistler’s mother, half-sister, and brother all move to London, and Whistler never returns to North America.

Whistler hung his hat and coat on wooden pegs. Possibly the same pegs his great-great-grandfather had used before he left England for the colonies.

Pause

“It’s always the same work that’s so hard and uncertain,” Whistler wrote Fantin LaTour. “I am so slow,” said the man who signed his paintings with a butterfly. I am so slow, lotus blossom. Amour. To know what to paint, and then to paint it.

Whistler loved Franz Hals

Loved his defiance

Alms give me Nocturne

Symphonies –

Give me The White Girl

Her tranquility

Bewitched by Butterflies

Japanese prints Degas Mallarmé

Oscar Wilde and Thomas Carlyle

Whistler was not like his friends

Not everything can go into

One painting one poem

Not everything can go into

One painting one poem

Oh! St. Luke, patron saint of painters

Whistler’s literal translations

Can be mistaken

For a mistake

Consider the originator

Whistler is an expatriate a migrant

A whistler challenging beauty

Calculates

Find the question

Before you find the answer

Not everything can go into

One painting one poem

Not everything can go into

One painting one poem

The ancient seamen believed

The ocean was flat

And if you went far enough

You would fall off the edge

So it is with a painting

Its edges are liken to a waterfall

2009-12-13T13:21:00.003-05:00

CGP 18: to know this
by Angela Veronica Wong (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched w/ Die-Cut Stars) $7 ppd.

In to know this Angela Veronica Wong maps the constellation of the body and its desires. The life of a star is the life of a person. Wong's spare, precise lines chart a firmament that is both celestial and down-to-earth.

From to know this
by Angela Veronica Wong

*
                                   to know stars die:
in wartime, countries
trade bodies for prisoners.
what is more valuable—a body
symbolic, or a body alive? would you
trade for mine would i want
to trade for yours      is it
the body or the wanting
my want of your body my want
for your body to be my body or maybe just
next to my body       animals curled
in water     this is how I wish
to be – warmth       belonging       the L next to an S
somewhere between the meeting and the knowing
the wanting and the having
like clean sheets on a bed
hints of what is to come.

2009-12-13T13:06:00.001-05:00

CGP 17: Off the Beaten Trakl
by Joel Sloman (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.

Responding to Cy Gist Press editor Mark Lamoureux's call for poets to do more translation, Joel Sloman created this homophonic, stereoscopic, phantasmagoric "translation" of the work of Austrian poet Georg Trakl. Sloman makes a sock poet of the author's solemn memory, dragging Trakl dumfounded into our contemporary world of Robin Williams films, scones and hip-hop workboots. With a fetching (pun intended) cover by Kate Ledogar. In the words of the author, "It's fucking hot, Snowy!"

Sanja
by Joel Sloman

A strange woman wearing a green sweater walks by

Open trucks with hoses guard alterations

Sonja’s legs rest on a chair, she is reviled

Cold regulates bums and hobos

I wave to the sightseers on the trolley

Sunflowers and more sunflowers are delighted

By Sonja’s white interpretation of reggae

Red snow—wondrous—bubbles

A blue clerk wears a muscle tee

Sonja’s shirt is dry cleaned, fumes

Tiers of turbans grates England

Ali’s young daughter wears a long red dress with silver sequin patterns

Sonja sips a thick mocha shake

Her son tags along after her

Her sage brow acknowledges loneliness

Her shirt is too stiff, it crackles

Extensions to her blond hair pinned

She’s disturbed, returns to England

Whatever happened to Neil Hornick?

Subterfuge of sunflowers!

The colors of blooms are already autumnal

A loitering, itinerant red wound

Jumps onto Sonja’s thigh

Yolks and whites break up, no more reggae

2009-12-13T12:44:00.002-05:00

CGP 16: Berlin Poems
by Mark Lamoureux (16 pp. Sewn Binding) $7 ppd.

2009-12-13T12:26:00.003-05:00

CGP15: Gingerbread
by Geof Huth (12 pp. Sewn Binding.) $7 ppd.

Begun in the excess of the 80’s, finished in 2008 at the gate of our present grief, Geof Huth’s fable of annihilation, Gingerbread, offers a cautionary tale for an age smothered by its own girth. Tumescent with sweet words, Huth’s nightmare of dreamy hovels rotten at the core thrusts its stake true to the right eye of our age of overcompensated executives and shriveled mortgages.

From Gingerbread
by Geof Huth

That night, they slept there beside their father,

dreaming of him (who was there), what he taught

how to bring down one tree through the forest,

without tearing down another needing

to grow; how to rip the skin from a boar;

to sing; how to make words like painted stones,

to say that “Even the white right-wrought root

wrought rot” and believe it because all things

fail, and dreaming of their stepmother, not

there (always in purple paisley, a scarf

red with lamb’s blood, her clogs of spalted wood

and toad leather, a shawl of worn boar’s hair,

a ring carved from ﬁred bone, ﬁve earrings

from the tears of turquoise swans, and, around

her lizard’s neck, dropsical, heavy, hung

a burlap asafetida bag full

with rosehip, licorice, marshmallow root,

lemonbalm, mint, and horehound powdered ﬁne

and sifting through ﬁbers with her every

movement: walking or her forearm shifting,

her spasmous body quivering awry,

a cough), and dreaming of the snow drizzling

down onto their quiet bodies, snowﬂakes

melting on their open skin or slowly

covering . . . .

Awake.

2009-12-13T12:16:00.002-05:00

CGP14: The Love of Freak Milways & Tango Wax
by Kate Schapira (20 pp. Sewn Binding) $7 ppd.

Kate Schapira gives us a gender-neutral utopian porno. Nonviolent slapstick for a new century, The Love of Freak Milways and Tango Wax’s dumpster-diving heroes eke out a breathless place amid the detritus of the disintegrating city. With something for everyone but not much of anything, Freak & Tango get off for your sins trussed high above the overpass.

Setting up

from The Love of Freak Milways and Tango Wax by Kate Schapira

Duct tape?

Check.

Tails?

Check.

Beer cups from the benefit?

Check, but next time we should use the rewashable cups.

Okay. Plastic bags?

Um—negative on the plastic bags. Any corner stores around here?

There’s the So-No-Co.

I’ll check their dumpster. Are we missing anything else? What about the feather masks?

I thought you said the rhinestone masks.

No, the feather masks to go with the tails.

Oh.

It’s okay, honey, we can go up with the rhinestone masks.

I could’ve sworn you said—

Don’t worry about it, let’s just make sure we have everything else. Burned-out glow sticks?

Check.

Extension cord?

Check.

Soldering iron?

Check.

Good. Great. Fine. I’ll go check the dumpster and meet you at the construction site in twenty minutes.

Wait, what about the mistletoe?

We decided not to use the mistletoe

2009-12-13T12:06:00.004-05:00

CGP 13: Dead-Eye Spring
by Cheryl Clark Vermeulen (24 pp. Sewn Binding. Vellum Endpapers.) $7 ppd.

Dead-Eye Spring offers a bird’s-eye view of being-in-the world. Cheryl Clark Vermeulen navigates the minefield between the self and the universe as a Kevlar-clad ballerina. Never quotidian, Vermeulen’s unheimlich observations consistently surprise and reassure. She is unafraid to tell us what we already knew but were afraid to ask. Do not fear this chapbook, fear this chapbook.

From Dead-Eye Spring
by Cheryl Clark Vermeulen

When I buy the moon

                             -shaped crystal to hang from my window
miracles happen. I’m haunted by your question.
          Do you still believe in miracles?

Roommate says, you don’t sing anymore.

I wish my shoulders
               were waves. I drink a glass of water,

translate serenity: not a tear-
                                     jerker for the blind.

2009-12-13T12:01:00.002-05:00

CGP 12: Looking For Lake Texcoco - En Busca Del Lago Texcoco
by Kevin P. Gallagher Spanish translation by Guillermo Parra (44 pp. Sewn Binding. English and Spanish Facing Pages.) $8.00 ppd.

The author says of Looking for Lake Texcoco:

“These poems are a variation sequence evoking the painting “La Cuidad de Mexico, 1949” by Juan O’Gorman, an Irish-Mexican painter who lived in Mexico (1905-1982). The painting, now at the Museo Arte de Moderno in Mexico City, is a bird’s eye view of Mexico City during its transformation into a modern city. In the foreground, two hands hold a map known as the Santa Cruz map, which represents the colonial city being built on top of the ruins of the pre-Hispanic era. In the top right of the painting two angels carry a Mexican flag bearing the legend "Viva Mexico.”

Alongside Gallagher’s English is a Spanish-language translation by Guillermo Parra, author of Caracas Notebook.

Made in Malinche
by Kevin P. Gallagher

Walk up the stairway sideways because it’s
disrespectful to back or face the gods.

Make rubble from pyramids and altars
to construct huge churches with paintings

of black faced virgins holding a child.
Open up the doors and let them back in.

The weight of it all will make you sink,
make you think about bearing arms,

make you win to lose all over again.
Have a party on a large wall or ceiling

inside a palace, then let history meet
where it will be forced to be on the same page.

When the frescoes crack like colored eggs
we will spill out to be the same as ever.

Made in Malinche
Spanish translation by Guillermo Parra

Sube las escaleras lateralmente porque es
irrespetuoso dar la espalda o la frente a los dioses.

Haz escombros de pirámides y altares
para construir inmensas iglesias con cuadros

de vírgenes negras cargando un niño.
Abre las puertas y déjalos entrar de nuevo.

El peso de todo te hundirá,
te hará pensar en llevar armas,

te hará ganar para perder otra vez.
Monta una fiesta en un gran muro o en un techo

dentro de un palacio, y deja que la historia se encuentre
donde tendrá que compartir la misma página.

Cuando las pinturas al fresco se fracturan como huevos pintados
nos regaremos para ser lo mismo de siempre.

2009-12-13T11:47:00.004-05:00

CGP 11: Gary Gygax
by John Sakkis by John Sakkis (28 pp. Saddle-stapled.) $7 ppd.

The tradition of the Bestiarum vocabulum goes back to the 12th century; the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons, that cross between improvisational theater and light bondage, goes back to the 1970’s when it was invented by this chapbook’s eponymous hero. If you grew up in the 70s or 80’s you played D&D, knew someone who played D&D, or stuffed someone into a locker who played D&D. Whatever your feelings about game, there is no question that in their earliest incarnations, its rulebooks were celebrations of bizarre language and bizarre ideas, which undoubtedly had their influence upon poets-to-be who indulged in them. In Gary Gygax, John Sakkis brings bohemia back to its roots in its parents’ basement in this monster manual of beings malevolent and benign. Like an umber hulk, this book is a strange hybrid of disparate parts—snippets of language pulled from the game, from popular culture and from Sakkis’ subconscious. Like an umber hulk, this book will hold you rapt with its four terrible eyes.

Lycanthrope
by John Sakkis

sometimes known as ratmen
this lurker
is able to take three forms
human, human-sized ratman, and giant rat

belladonna, if eaten
within the hour
will generate a powerful charm

granting slam dunk powers
a Varsity Jacket and
your own sitcom on NBC

Scott Howard in the closet
punch-drunk and groaning
undetectable in melee,

typical of the Pleistocene Epoch
a horrid carnivore
his pelt worth 5,000 gold pieces

2009-12-13T11:40:00.003-05:00

CGP 10: When You Have A Rabbit
by Landis Everson (30 pp. Saddle-Stitched.) 28 poems written afterEverything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005. Edited by Ben Mazer. $8 ppd.
SOLD OUT!

Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California. When he got to Berkeley in the late 1940s he met Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser and they called themselves The Berkeley Renaissance. Landis studied with Josephine Miles and was the editor of the Berkeley student literary magazine, Occident. Miles called Landis and his friends The Museum School of poetry. Duncan was influenced by Landis and called him The Poet King in letters to Spicer. Spicer admired the ease with which Landis wrote poetry, and wrote to Robin Blaser that Landis was a god for each member of the group. In 1951, while finishing a Master's at Columbia, Landis met John Ashbery who admired his poems and would later print selections from "The Little Ghosts I Played With" in Locus Solus. The subject of Landis's Master's thesis was an imaginary seventeenth century poet called Sir William Bargoth, for which Landis concocted both the poems and the commentary upon them. In 1955, while Karl Shapiro's teaching assistant at Berkeley, Landis had the first of six appearances in Poetry, two appearances in the mid-Fifties, followed by four appearances five decades later. In the late 1950s he was introduced to a younger generation of poets that included Joanne Kyger and John Wieners. In 1960, Landis replaced Robert Duncan as the third member of a Sunday poetry group that was run by Jack Spicer and met in Robin Blaser's apartment in San Francisco. Dictated serial poetry was the order of the day. Landis wrote the sequences "Postcard from Eden" and "The Little Ghosts I Played With," a few months too late to be considered for Don Allen's anthology The New American Poetry. Then the group stopped meeting, and Landis, who was only writing for his friends, turned to painting, and renovating houses. He didn't write anything for 43 years, during which time none of his poetry appeared in print. Then in the fall of 2003, Ben Mazer contacted Landis to inquire about Landis's poems, which Mazer planned to include in a feature on the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum. Over the next three years, the last of his life, Landis would compose over 300 poems, comprising the book Everything Preserved, which won the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, and Book of Valentines, still in manuscript form. In the spring of 2006 Landis had the first in a series of strokes, which left him incapable of writing any more poems. He took his life on November 17th, 2007.

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN
by Landis Everson

Young Goodman Brown was a window shade.
One side faced Paradise and Hell outdoors
the other furniture, food and shelter in.
But when Faith rolled him up
he saw himself no more.
A spider squeezed out the center and
threaded down. It yawned and opened
its eyes from sleep. All six legs flexed
wide, and like rust it farted spider dust,
which filled the house. We came in
with mops, hexes and vacuum cleaners,
until the house looked clean. But
how to kill a spider, which wasn’t ours?
It was masturbating like hell with every leg. Did
Young Goodman teach him that? Or Nathaniel?.

2009-12-13T11:33:00.004-05:00

CGP 9: Daybook of Perversities and Main Events
by Frank Sherlock (24 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.

2009-12-13T11:27:00.003-05:00

CGP 8: Vorticells
by Carrie Hunter (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $7 ppd.

Vorticells offers crystallized moments of cognition, Hunter’s responses to 15 San Francisco artists show us the mechanism of tranfixion in pulsing detail. Her word-maps incise ghost images right on the reader’s brain, giving us a kind of synesthetic carnival of moments and non-moments, thoughts and non-thoughts that transcends the ekphrastic continuum and forms a harmonious unit from start to finish.

XV. Accordion Accord (Carbon 9)
by Carrie Hunter

paper thistles wavering

we are guarded and uncharged

valiant whilst charred

seabodies of the cradled hymn

diamond scars and the babies dream

***
son as self as shadow as token
not knowing other really is other
cannot be formed, willed, created

we are not shadows of our selves
but selves of our shadows

come fully formed, fully othered

elegant dreams whisper to each other
wishing to be us, to uncurtain themselves

thistle glisten when unshadowed
we glisten when unshadowed

cheap satin drops down slips around
our bodies listen

2009-12-13T11:15:00.002-05:00

CGP 7: Johanna Poems
by Ben Mazer (22 pp. Saddle-Stitched)
SOLD OUT!

“Whose poems are these? It looks like the heads of a hundred people made them, yet there is no disjunction, no coil of expression, no tragic dissolution here that fails our understanding. Don Juan, at the end of his life entrapped in a mineshaft, might have called these poems up to us. We need more of these poems, quickly, and we are in a state of distinguished penury now, for only one person, Ben Mazer, can supply them, and however much he provides there will always be gasping for more.”

--Stephen Sturgeon

Indian Summer
by Ben Mazer

This forgotten weather lets me down.
The unexpected slow boat out of summer
burns with color and complete. Missing only
all the words that needed to be said
which yet they are full of mostly now,
the purpled shriveled trees, standing and waiting,
those long low roads where day and evening cross
in an admonition like a longing.

It is a cipher, nothing else will do
to still the fullness in air or cement,
black or blue in shadow, no eye hear
any sign, smiling in the sighing of sorry
flower, laughing in the corn
like fairy tales, telling us what to do.

2009-12-13T10:53:00.010-05:00

CGP 6: The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington

(or notes on the life and letters)

by Sandra Simonds (16 pp. Saddle-Stitched, B&W photographs) $7 ppd.

“These travelogues record realms and entities sprung, spit, spattered, spun from the off-kilter pottery wheel of the author’s subconscious in fully-fledged bursts — organic forms! — of visionary lyricism. Before the reader’s eyes -- and most importantly the ears — a kaleidoscopic dream world is enacted in real-time complete with “velvety mammoths,” a four day stay in a lighthouse, a maze, Mary Magdalene, dolphins, bear cubs balancing eggs on their noses, glass pineapples, and much more. Simonds crafts a world whose phantasmagoria folds over the reader like a strobe-light on Jesus Juice. She is the reincarnation of Artaud, Mina Loy, and Gilda Radner. The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington is a wild stroke of poetic power, and cooler than the Crocodile Hunter (RIP)!”

— Joseph Massey

“To traverse a barreness, this plane, tracking series of condemned, black with melancholy, all hunched and shuffling toward their end. Who knows how figures get made, but imprinted and upright, they fall in line. It’s the fate of flesh: even spirit, even the lightest wit, assumes space. They say reading happens in time, but Sandra Simonds doesn’t believe it. Her travelogues are white meanderings, inklings of worlds to come, a tiny island. This voyage of bare facts, that everything is, that wonders appear, that earth abides, quiets geography. Unpretending itinerary, all she knows is that we don’t is this.”

— R.M. Berry

Prose Poem Written at the OK Corral
by Sandra Simonds

I went to visit the amputee. He lived in a teepee made of stained glass. Precious stones lined the pathway leading up to his teepee. There were gardens in the area mostly gardens of light green moss. There was a forest of glass pineapples. I want to ask him many questions like do you take vitamins and if you do, what sort of vitamins do you take. I also want to ask him if he ever experiences the phantom limb phenomenon. When he says yes, I have a phantom limb I ask him: does it feel pain? or does it tickle the rest of your body. He said he lost his limb in the great war of 44444444444. According to the Kabbalah this was a ìno nonsenseî war. A war among wars.

When the great war of 4445454545454523243 ended many people were walking around the continent looking for their limbs. Prosthetics were invented only much earlier so he was fortunate enough not to bear the shame of a false-limb. The sham of it. He says I am an elitist and if I have lost a limb then I shall not hide from a night of googly eye stars. I lack nothing. I have all of my limbs.

He showed me his pet goat. He said the goat likes to drink saline solution and the goat chews black bubble gum. I was getting annoyed with myself. Would I ever be able to really understand the amputee in the teepee? Strange days. Strange days, friend. The moon is that dried clot of blood on a dried flower in my left pocket. Does the limb ooze cloud? I took out my ATM card because the teepee had a snack bar and I was getting hungry. Limb, llama, buccaneer, despair. a Ghastly fear!

The amputee would ask me to play a game of pick-up sticks. Notice that his left leg is missing and he wants to play only if a towel is tied around the missing limb. It's okay. I will tie the towel to the missing limb. He says please go outside the fort and pick us a few glass pears so that we can dine tonight and play our games in peace with full stomachs and I will put on some Schubert for the goat. It's the uselessness of milk, I tell you. The red breasts thrown out to Chernobyl sized skin cancer mutts.

In the months that followed the amputee disclosed the much needed information and though he had a violet temper I got all of the facts Jack. He moved into a dormitory-style ìold folksî home and he killed his pet goat in a sacrificial ritual that could only be understood in terms of biblical prophecy. I was moved to a different case. Oh my caseload is heavy! Peking duck, marbles, Joan of Arc.

2009-12-13T10:44:00.007-05:00

CGP 5: Face Time

(22 pp. Saddle-Stitched, B&W photographs, mirrored cover)
SOLD OUT!

(Please note image is a reproduction of the mirrored cover
which cannot be reproduced on the computer screen)

What do Paris Hilton, Al Pacino, Hilda Doolittle, Charlize Theron, Marcello Mastroianni and a quivering, self-eviscerated blob have in common? Find out in Face Time an anthology of poets responding to stills from films. Featuring work by:

Joe Hall, Craig Perez, Noah Falck, Phil Crippen, Matina L. Stamatakis, Francois Luong, Brian Lucas, Nicole Mauro, Jessica Smith, G.L. Ford, Mark Lamoureux, Christina Strong, Michael Carr, Sandra Simonds, John Mulrooney, Brenda Iijima and Christopher Rizzo.

Nesting Dolls
by Phil Crippen

for Paris Hilton

Faux cloisonné blushed enameled
blues and pinks stands a bunny dew.
And in that bunny dew
is a pied hide ibex of
dappled thunder grey and onyx
set with wide flat teeth in an
eggy oval.

And in that dappled ibex
sits a green thistle-perched frog
with gold scuba finned toes
even more webbed than his own
and covered in British green and toady,
with two long red stripes.

And within that British bullfrog
lay a sleeping princess in
Murakami pajamas—
the ones with multicolored monograms
in cyan, magenta, yellow
and green on a field
of asylum white—
just like her horse.

And nestled along with that
fashion-plate princess
is a little pocket watch dog
with great big long plum
and beige ears and little doggy
socks and shoes in sunny
orange and lime hues.

All of these sit unnested,
anesthetized and scattered
on the imaginary area rug
beneath the aviary bed
with loneliness so loud
you can feel the gravity

2009-12-13T10:34:00.004-05:00

CGP 4: Caracas Notebook

by Guillermo Parra (20 pp. Saddle-Stapled with Linen binding, B&W photographs)

SOLD OUT!

2009-12-13T10:24:00.008-05:00

CGP 3: Exertions

by Scott Glassman (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched)

SOLD OUT!

Scott Glassman's first chapbook offers simultaneously alien and quotidian glosses on the perils of existing alone and with others. Scott's take on the prose poem operates by way of arpeggios of contrapuntal phrases threatening to tear the form apart while giving them surprising rhythmic balance.

Ursa Major
by Scott Glassman

It is a peculiarity of man that he can only live by looking to the future— Victor Frankl

then things went south. the color photocopier legging out, its paper jam teaching epic rivers. prose-glut. metropolis. How can I get back to the first. rabbinical height. banks of this Delaware. winter. one generation— "Highs" filling the now. soundspace. Fourteen hundred miles away. next time. come noon, soon. "Less expensive". aren't (doesn't) cannot invade. inventory. numeric postulate (pod) of 2s, 0s. waxing smile. they treat papyrus with. ask the sun to count its proteins (yours). starting from the right margin, moving left, skimming driest elms, distended, infantile organism (no, wrong). that is the moon

II.

is to think beyond our means of the physical. & wasn't it. the flustered dialectic. them. "of course". it is the manner. purpose. pose. have no doubt. knowing. can stop the rain, retract it from the thinning. nervously. threading. blunted. schematic. no belief "but". or in

III.

multi-nuclear. uncareful. carefree. night-bore. as many lakes to my name as fingers. bony Prospero. shrug your waves India-ward. the tepid cell is a parsec lighter from attachments (loss). T- or S- or Z-. prefixes notwithstanding. disables you. an also-ness. seed-full. seeming unlike what the plain. unified happening. of uncommanded body

IV.

up-in-the-echo. participle-dry. past-present. plu-perfect. wit of separation. that-if you let go. record the panhandle Amazon of Spokane metaphysic. gleam-driven. weaned. from the mother of mothers & languages. excreted oils operating without censure. license. the second hand. coiling itself. watery phoneme. hour's diameter. you must be "this". expunged (explained). freezing. David. sinking as he was. taken. thirst (yours) replaced. silenced. into us

2009-12-13T10:12:00.010-05:00

CGP 2: My Spaceship

(44 pp. Saddle-Stitched B & W illus.)

My Spaceship is an anthology of visual and ekphrastic poetry based on science-fiction images. Featuring work by:

Christopher Rizzo, Garth Graeper, Catherine Meng, Steven Roberts, Suzanne Nixon, Maureen Thorson, Michael Carr,
Erica Kaufman, K. Lorraine Graham, Noah Falck, Stacy Szymaszek, Eileen Tabios, Joseph Bienvenu, Shafer Hall
William Corbett, Jill Magi, Jess Mynes, Ginger Hoffman, Tom Beckett, Scott Glassman, Jon Leon, Nathan Pritts

Alleviation

by Jon Leon

My utopian home
is located in an adirondack
priss parlor. “Quite
the contrary, Dae.”
—our oversight
The surrealist believed
life-as-a-work-of-art
was its own justification.
Now
in my place here at the
colonial site
like the Sago mine
our tubular dissonance
discharge internecine
contractors. This is a hover
bout. Pick a leading literati
deutsche crie,
for the mind is an
elaborate pistol.
Reel them in just
close enough so that
they feel the blow.

2009-12-13T10:00:00.007-05:00

CGP 1: Another Night
by Mark Lamoureux (22pp. Saddle-Stitched B&W illus.)
SOLD OUT!

The source text for these poems was stolen from Harold Brainerd Hersey’s book, Night, originally published in 1923. The poems in this volume were accompanied by illustrations in the period style (art nouveau) by Elliott Dold. I have stolen some of these, also, unaltered.

In addition to Night, Hersey also published a book of Cowboy verse, a critical analysis of pulp novels and Helpful Hints on War Risk Insurance, Etc., among others. Dold did illustrations for numerous books and pulp magazines.

I became fascinated by the obsessive vocabulary and thinly veiled sadomasochism of Hersey’s somewhat tawdry original and decided to embark upon a project of “literary conservation.” The poems here include every word and mark of punctuation found in the Hersey originals of the same name; the words themselves have been rearranged by my whim, and in accordance with subjects that differ from the originals. I see this as a way of granting the original texts renewed vigor, allowing them to continue to exist into the future. Also, in keeping with one of the favorite subjects of the original author, the process of creating these was a kind of bondage game; one must compose within the tight fetters of the original works and their own obsessions and compulsions.

NOCTURNE

by Mark Lamoureux

clasped is cool and currents
The cup

of sweet steam, the stars
are She, arched;

drunken among the dead
Will fill darkness dropping

fragrant for fingers
that mad cup again

has sunken Down in
Her strangely wet lips;

the monotonous moonlight
in her Most molten body

tasted it through Her
The trees They thirst!

he rests under her
Weaving Through the ages;

Listen to still layers
like bolts out of rock:

………

All
one in
the glisten,

idolatrous