Books

Mangled diction from the cusp of childhood. 

Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt."

Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, and performance writer who has collaborated with multiple visual artists and composers on bodies of work. Her work has been translated into several languages, including French, with her writing represented in more than 30 national and international anthologies. She has received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), the Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), the Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among additional grants and awards from the Fund for Poetry.

Harryman was a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1979-1986). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Based on John Dewey's lectures on esthetics, delivered as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932, Art as Experience has grown to be considered internationally as the most distinguished work ever written by an American on the formal structure and characteristic effects of all the arts: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.

Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place is a 117-page, one-sentence novel about the coils of language and war, unspooled in the dying breath of a pre- and post-scient World War I soldier.

John Witte of the Northwest Review calls Dies, "a marvel of sustained synergy," author Jim Krusoe describes the book as "dizzyingly complex, compound, and full of miraculous side trips as well," and novelist Doug Nufer heralds DIES as a "delightful tour de force of a hopelessly grim predicament." Place obliterates the line between victim and perpetrator, subject and object, rendering this human truth: in the death sentence of life, there is still beauty. "Roll over, dear Whitman," says Susan McCabe in her Introduction, "Here's our new original."

“In a single sentence as bloody and crazed as the history of the 20th century, Place offers up “the untamed cadence of ten thousand feet.” Caught somewhere between Beckett’s The Unnamable, Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Ann Quin’s Passages, Dies is an extravagant and ferocious book, a real and uncompromising marvel.” — Brian Evenson

“The architectonics of Dies calls upon the aural touchstones, not only of Pound, but of Dante, Rabelais (beware of a scatological extravaganza), Eliot, Whitman, Stein, the Bible, Beckett, Joyce, Remarque, even ‘the ghost of mark twain‘—a babbling horde that makes this sentence both humbling and beyond paraphrase, both mythic and contemporary.” — Susan McCabe

Introduction by Susan McCabe.

Blade Pitch Control Unit is a gathering of Sean Bonney’s work in poetry between 2000-2005. It collects together all the work from his previous pamphlets that he still feels is valid, plus a number of previously unpublished pieces.

The presentation of this work in a single volume makes clear the scope of his project as a psychogeographic/historical exploration of the possibilities of political verse that would seek to obliterate the pitfalls of simple protest or the expression of easily assimilable opinions.

The work moves from psychogeographical registerings of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs at the time of the Millennium Dome, through excavations of the ghosts of millennial heresies still present in contemporary London, and into a charting of the effects of official mendacity on the psyche of any individual citizen who knows that all private experience is collective.

The events of recent history play a major role, sometimes obliquely, sometimes less so, but Bonney refuses to allow his voice to be merely an outraged commentary on contemporary woes. Instead, he presents a poetry that makes clear that the protestor is also culpable, but equally a poetry that understands that only through a registering of this position can a way out be found.

For Bonney, a poem is typically a highly rhythmic (or arrhythmic) object that seeks through maximum density to communicate a dialectical relationship with the cosmos, and to explore the faultlines of official history and urbanism through which possibilities of liberation can be traced.