Buffalo News review of Sherry Robbins' "or, The Whale"

Sherry Robbins' new volume of poems or, The Whale (BlazeVox Books)--her long awaited "re-conception" of Melville's Moby-Dick--is a career defining work of epic scope and imagination. It's the best book of poems I've read this year. Here's the review:

ArtsBeat - Robbins' genius surfaces in "or, The Whale" - The Buffalo News <http://blogs.buffalonews.com/artsbeat/2010/08/robbins-genius-surfaces-in-or-the-whale.html>





Find out more on "or, The Whale" here http://www.blazevox.org/bk-sr.htm




Buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/Whale-Sherry-Robbins/dp/1935402323/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278457773&sr=1-1

New Releases! Secrets of My Prison House by Geoffrey Gatza

Secrets of My Prison House by Geoffrey Gatza


Geoffrey Gatza’s poems go straight to the point. From one to another the plane is consistent, the tone both literate and congenial; the feeling, one of an assessment of options while moving through choice to definition, a definition-in-progress of how to be, allowing large time outs for horseplay, an inventory of asides that end up occupying large chunks of mind. The book as ethos – you can live with it -- you wish – why not?

—Bill Berkson

Poetry expects poets to do their duty, writes Geoffrey Gatza in "Tempus Fidget". GG certainly does his duty by us, poetry readers. In so many ways. His vast publishing energy, so much to be grateful for. And in these pages you will find unmistakable evidence of a perhaps even greater benison: many terrific original works. This is one of the brightest new voices in poetry today.

Secrets of My Prison House is a consistently exciting, nervy collection of mind-moment-heart-truths that will slip inside you and unpredictably grow. A Gatza poem inscribes (as the great cover photo promises) the tears of a clown wandering in the city. Vividly and freely colored by the golden crayon of choices, the poems like a clown's tears may enter your busy day for a while and quickly enough wash away. But not from the whacky inner sanctum of feeling. And only until night falls.

Steel is heavy, steel is art.

I'd rather speak to the cat.

Yes, and yes.


—Tom Clark



Inventions. I want to say that Gatza’s poetic inventions get inside my mind and change it, “stopoped” in this uncomfortable era where elegance is mismatched with a kind of directness that zeros in and rockets. Inventions that make one think twice and look again. “Well strike me up a gum tree.”

—Hoa Nguyen

Read More Here: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ggatza.htm


Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-000-2

$16
Buy it NOW



Read a sneak peek here: http://www.scribd.com/Secrets-of-My-Prison-House-by-Geoffrey-Gatza-eBook/d/35856907

New Releases! Apparition Poems by Adam Fieled

Apparition Poems by Adam Fieled

#549


I'm conscious of freedom, how it
flares against brick, how it stirs.
Yellow backs of combatants, &
chain-gang commerce in armor,
mind-forged manacles scraped,
muscle-displays in times diaspora.
Lastly, they turn away from facts,
look instead at trunk-scissions,
leafy morasses, all over smalltown
America, steeples chased.
I'm conscious of this, of my own
yellow writing it down, seated.

Read More here : http://www.blazevox.org/bk-af2.htm


Book Information:

· Paperback: 150 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-019-4

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! or, The Whale by Sherry Robbins

or, The Whale by Sherry Robbins

“Into this first and oldest cradle / I invite you, reader.” from “The Fossil Whale” by Sherry Robbins. “me in in in / in the boat / of my body” from “The Chase – First Day” by Sherry Robbins. This is her book of poetry. I read her returning to this poetry. Sherry Robbins, ubiquitous saillore at voyage in the allegorical myth of and in her life, explores her journey, the wovenings of woman currents, root drinker and her map of heaven. She is her life of adored poetry and summoning her poetry is here a balance of all the corners. She discovers that water is where Sherry Robbins stands upon or, The Whale.

—Michael Basinski

“We’ll sail/widdershins/and keep the cauldron/hot. Blubber/and apple chowder,/a mother-daughter banquet.”

            So, in the title poem, Sherry Robbins focuses her rendering of Moby-Dick. Her female Ishmael moves counter to Melville’s as she voyages deeply: “We know almost everything/worth knowing,/for the womb/is our Yale College and our Harvard.” Facing squarely her deepest fears, Robbins probes the inland sea of her body and of her city, builds upon the mother-daughter bond, and forces life’s boundaries out. Although “Where I am/this moment/is the mystery,” she accepts that state and, contemplating Pip’s fate, offers bold advice: “Leap from the boat.” Contrary to Ahab, “That inscrutable thing/is chiefly what I love.”

            At once a tribute to Melville and a vision of woman in our world, this sublime book, or,The Whale, gives birth to Robbins’s grand hooded phantom and—although she remains always, as she begins, “all at sea”—finds a way “in this golden light,/content to be.”

—David Landrey

Read More Here: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-sr.htm

Book Information:

· Paperback: 178 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402329

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! Cracked Altimeter by Joe Milford

Cracked Altimeter by Joe Milford


Joe Milford's Cracked Altimeter is fantastic. Each line is packed with such intense vividness and rhythm. Its overwhelming. Milford's labyrinthine constructions of language tear your head off and make you taste the colors of the imagery, leaving you begging for more. One of the best books of contemporary poetry I've read in a long time.

— Connor Stratman, author of Invisible Entrances and First Testament



Here are multitudes. In Joe Milford's hell-bent Cracked Altimeter, All the names of Heaven/become a universal phonetic. I'm grateful for his effusiveness; these hexed poems dispense grace enough to make even the warped and wayward begin to see again, and to believe. And its as if T. Roethke has been invited to participate in the first decade of this century. Marking transcendence is more of a challenge than ever and also endless play and fun for Milford and his readers. No one knows I have this psychic ray gun, he writes. But of course we do. One in the holster, one in his belt, and another, just in case, under his pillow.

—Steve Langan, author of Meet Me at the Happy Bar


Read More here: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-jm.htm


· Paperback: 176 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-934289-78-5

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! Theoretical Animals by Gary J. Shipley

Theoretical Animals
Gary J. Shipley



Beggars, fortune tellers, barge captains, bloated corpses, and the ominous tolling of church bells hover anachronistically over a bleakly existential world whose once-physically-present signs have been reduced to html code, rss feeds and online ad campaigns. Such is the dark side of our celebrity technotopia explored in the densely lyrical prose comprising Gary J. Shipley's Theoretical Animals, a tour de force of historical and philosophical meditation on a world teetering at the brink of its own disappearance.

—Michael Kelleher, author of Human Scale and To Be Sung




Shipley's writing is important because itís a fearless attempt to advance the art of literature, to force us to breathe something, to drown in something, to bloody our hands. Itís an unforgettable experience.

—3:AM Magazine


Read more here: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-gs.htm

Book Information:

· Paperback: 124 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402701

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! BEAST BOOK by Michael Gessner

BEAST BOOK by Michael Gessner

“These poems are lively and smart and musical.”

—Robert Pinsky



 “Spun like fractals from the poet’s personal and cultural history; from art, science, and myth, the images of Beast Book stalk the imagination, exposing the symmetries deep within the psychogenesis  that informs us . . . . dialectic serves this collection well in its motifs— poet-anima, satyr-sylph, Apollonian-Dionysian—in the process of illuminating our understanding and in the perception of the self . . . . Gessner’s best volume, a milestone in contemporary poetry.”

—Gerald Mills



“If you think Beasts exist only in the ancient world, then open this book and meet your makers.  Mantichore, Hydra, The Lamia, and various tritons co-exist with nymphs and sylphs; appear side by side with Robert Creeley, Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, and the legendary barnacle geese of medieval naturalists.  History, Justice, Conscience Purity, Predictability are introduced by the Beast Handler.  Everything leads to ‘Care and Feeding’ in Michael Gessner’s capable hands.”

—Sue Ann Simar, Editor, 10x3

Read more here : http://www.blazevox.org/bk-mg2.htm

Book Information:

· Paperback: 104 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-002-6

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! IDIOGEST by Ed Taylor

IDIOGEST by Ed Taylor

Like gems in their deer parks and their bus scenes, the broadways and jurassics, the Edens and Manhattans, Ed Taylor's Idiogest is a work of poems that do more than just delight; his book is a new bright star, a refreshing awe of intelligence.

—Kim Chinquee

The poems are by turns melancholic and comic, performing the paradoxes and pratfalls to which we are subject. This is a viscous onslaught of imagery and emotion. A tone of quiet desperation lurks behind every question mark, every affirmation, every fragment, and every exclamation. This is wild and honest work.

           
— Geoffrey Gatza



Find out more here: http://www.blazevox.org/bk-et3.htm

Book Information:

· Paperback: 72 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-004-0

$16
Buy it NOW

New Releases! Embankments | Outtakes | Uppercuts by Richard Owens

Embankments | Outtakes | Uppercuts
by Richard Owens

Embankments | Outtakes | Uppercuts brings together three discrete constellations of divers lyric constructions that testify with alacritas to the bullbaiting, cockfighting and bear beating of the present moment. In no ways molested or prejudiced for perswuasion, the songs collected here work to ease the good weights of man and beast in their dayly common labour. Frequent to maintain. Qualefied. Trust in the vertiginous offices of their affection.









Book Information:

· Paperback: 114 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-037-8

$16
Buy it NOW

Paul Sutton: Review and Interview

Here is a review and an interview of Paul Sutton's new book Brains Scream at Night


http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/july%202010/Brains%20Scream.htm

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2010/june2010/Questions_for_Paul_Sutton.htm


BlazeVOX [books] web page:
http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ps.htm

Buy it here

The Antiracism Trainings – a New Book Review on The Scrambler

Slowly I Turn in My Ergonomic Desk Chair: The Antiracism Trainings – a Book Review

The Antiracism Trainings. by David Reich. BlazeVOX, 2010. 367 pages.

Read the Review here:
http://thescrambler.com/eng/issues/issue-41-august-2010/slowly-i-turn-in-my-ergonomic-desk-chair-the-antiracism-trainings/

Buy it here:
http://www.blazevox.org/bk-dr.htm

A Great review of Ron Burch’s Bliss Inc.

Here is a great review of Ron Burch's novel, Bliss Inc. at the Outside Writers Collective and Press. Hurray!




http://www.outsiderwriters.org/archives/6180#more-6180


Buy the book here:
http://www.blazevox.org/bk-rb.htm

David Shapiro one man show on September 15th!

Be sure to check out a show of collages by David Shapiro!!! This promises to be great! Hurray on him!

September l5
Woolworth Building at Turtle Point Press
233 Broadway
ninth floor
Room 946. 6-8 PM


Also be sure to check out our Thanksgiving Menu Poem this year featuring David as our guest of honor. This too will be great fun. This will be released on Thanksgiving Day 2010! Hurray and best as always!

Geoffrey Gatza