Susan Gevirtz : from Guide School

 

 

 

[ ]   

 

The triplets set off in opposite directions

One crowned by fire     One enthroned in water        One in a halo of air

So thread their maps
to thaumaturgic
wish

Like Strabo --a mercenary of motion

 

The triplets can’t be identical though they trick you to

start rivers
rumors       

 

a raptor

among the migrating birds

bearing GPS

the paragogues look up

so light the wick

let quandary burn in the foundry

ash chronicle

 

 

 

Nouns drop out   muscles slacken spasm        organs prolapse  tastebuds dim

Evidence collectors crowd around reading rings on fallen trees

An-archeaologic as taxonomy
skeletal locations minus viscera   

 

The wish to be disembodied is the wish to escape history

 

 

 

 

                     Memoratz

 

…this feeling that I is really the last person who reads or writes.                                  
                                                                        --Julia Drescher

 

 

Dark tourists of Bessarabia

As for access my faces
only imitation

slides on loose scree
of mirror neurons

Not theirs either
river, creek, not our portage

or your reply though I hear

 

 

Someone changed their mind

Someone said no one’s home

hung up

inverted

the letters

skeletal

of those who carry
does
recall
build
muscle
or

like a baby switched
at birth whose
faces evade
relation

just like
we nocturnal and diurnal cross
paths invisible in light and night
bear, stalker, coyote, surveyor
So

 

maintain
Days
Unstable

 

family a viscous engine oil
fluid accusation
predator tales

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Gevirtz's books of poetry include Burns (2022) Hotel abc (2016) Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (2010) Thrall (2007) Hourglass Transcripts (2001) Black Box Cutaway (1999) PROSTHESIS :: CAESAREA (1994, reissued by Little Red Leaves, 2009) Taken Place (1993)  Linen minus (1992). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (2013) and Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (1996).

 

Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. She has collaborated with many sound, visual and performance artists. In 2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. With Kouka and guest organizers Helen Dimos, Eleni Stecopoulos and others, the Symposium has met since 2004. She is based in San Francisco.

Aaron Tucker : Amarillo by Morning (for ryan fitzpatrick

from Report from the fitzpatrick Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

For Ryan Fitzpatrick, strait from the heart

 

 

It’s #True! Last weekend was one for the books!

Get ready for a good time in Kansas City

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! [heart emoji]

Celebrate #NationalGuitarDay

Tag who you’re spending #ValentinesDay with! #CrossMyHeart #PureCountry

This weekend! Who’s ready?

You can find us Beyond the Blue Neon today. Anyone up for a game of pool?

Three words: write this down

Ready to be back

Cowboy hat [checkmark emoji] Four wheeler [checkmark emoji] Dog [checkmark emoji]

Wide open spaces [checkmark emoji] Sounds like the ingredients for a perfect Texas day.

#ThrowbackThursday to roping in 2011

“There’s an old love in his heart, that he can’t lose / He’s try forgettin’, but he knows it’s no use.” #FoolHeartedMemory

A day in the studio [microphone emoji] 

“Well the truth about a mirror / is that a damn old mirror / don’t really tell the whole truth.” #Troubadour

What’s going on in your world?

She understood the assignment.

Have a blessed New Year, everyone!

When you hear those #ChristmasCookies going in the oven

“Anything can happen, so imagine it’ll never end.” #GiveItAllWeGotTonight

It’s time to celebrate our trusty steeds. Happy #NationalHorseDay!

Howdy.

 

 

 

 

Aaron Tucker is the author of two novels, three books of poetry and two film studies monographs. His latest novel, Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys (Coach House Books) was named one of the best books of 2023 so far by The Toronto Star. His doctoral dissertation “The Flexible Face: Uniting the Protocols of Facial Recognition Technologies” (March 2023), and was nominated for the York University Dissertation Prize; his graduate work at York’s Cinema and Media Arts department won the Governor General's Gold Medal. In addition, he is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto where he is recreating the history of AI in Canada as a technonational project. He grew up on the Sylix Territory in the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia, and currently lives and works in Tkaronto on the lands covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Covenant.

Jérôme Melançon : Main d’œuvre, by Lorrie Jean-Louis

Main d’œuvre, Lorrie Jean-Louis
Mémoire d’encrier, 2023

 

 

 

 

With her second collection, Main d’œuvre (Workforce, or Labour), Lorrie Jean-Louis offers a song of love and repair. The theme of the collection is ostensibly work and exploitation, especially as they are found in what we briefly called ‘essential work’ and which Jean-Louis explains is the modern equivalent of slavery, marred by lack of respect and dignity.

The poems are short, untitled, unpunctuated except for question marks, uncapitalized except for the first letter. They are sentences that do not have an ending, or have not yet found one. They strike back; they are furtive, assured gestures that unmake what forced work creates – not the labour itself, but the lack of personhood, the disposability, the destruction of bodies. It begins with a lack that cannot be filled, and an impossibility of naming this hollowness:

“The choreography / of my servitude / has no title”

“La chorégraphie / de ma servitude / n’a pas de titre” (50)

The collection refuses structure: it begins with a short preface that sets the tone and brings the necessary concreteness to balance out the airiness of her writing; it moves into a first, untitled section, which interrupted by the title “Profane” which appears alone on a page and begins the longest section of the book. “Profane” can mean both “not sacred” and “non-specialist” – that which requires and contains no specific skill, that which is available to everyone, and needed from everyone:

“I am not workforce / I am an artisan of humanity”

“je ne suis pas main-d’œuvre // je suis artisane d’humanité” (56)

In repairing, Jean-Louis in no way attempts to fix: she mends, she makes better, she helps keep people alive, she takes part in the task of living that work undermines:

“It is with stubbornness / that I cover my cracks”

“C’est d’entêtement / que je couvre ma fêlure” (94)

“What are you becoming / in this city / full of holes?”

“Que deviens-tu / dans cette ville / trouée ?” (54)

She takes on several voices, bringing in what we can assume are various speakers on the basis of conjugation and grammatical agreement. Yet she also takes on a collective voice through the indefinite character of these voices: “I write myself / in the masculine plural // I am / feminine singular” (“je m’écris / au masculin pluriel // je suis / féminin singulier,” 86).

The capitalization of the first letter of each poem only marks an arbitrary beginning, and a speaker dreams of a history without beginning or end (69). Jean-Louis’ voices are without a fixed origin, though she traces them back in their work and in the lineage to slavery:

“Africa missing / like a gaping // a vague memory / a deep notch // a song sweet / and bitter // like a belly / like a mouth // a lie / a gift // like a phantom limb”

“L’Afrique manquante / comme une béance // un souvenir vague / une entaille profonde // une chanson douce / et amère // comme un ventre / comme une bouche // un mensonge / un cadeau // comme un membre fantôme” (71)

This collection is one to dream with, to hold close, to pick up in moments of sadness and joy alike. It is a reminder of the life that runs through all work and, for most readers, through the lives of others who were only celebrated for a short while, and only so that they may be better exposed to death and further exploitation. It refuses the romanticization of the present, or of any future that might bring transformation: history will only pass through more hands – but it does, indeed, pass through them, becoming in the process of living.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.

Christopher Nelson : on Green Linden Press

 

Green Linden Press is a nonprofit poetry publisher committed to fostering excellent poetry and giving a portion of proceeds to reforestation. In collaboration with the National Forest Foundation and the Arbor Day Foundation, we have planted over 700 trees. Our publications include the Green Linden Chapbook Series, the Essential Voices Anthology Series, a broadside series, and two annual book contests: The Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for poetic innovation, and the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize, each awarding $1000 and publication.

Our recent books include Kristi Maxwell’s Goners, Pierre Alferi’s And the Street (translated by Cole Swensen), Ochre & Rust: New Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (translated by Philip Metres), Dennis Hinrichsen’s Flesh-plastique, and Hilde Domin’s selected poems, The Wandering Radiance (translated by Mark S. Burrows). In addition to our website, our books are also available through Small Press Distribution.

In February of 2024, we will publish Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, introduced by Jack Halberstam and containing work from 100 of the best living LGBTQ poets in the country. Also forthcoming in 2024 are Vivian Faith Prescott’s Fat for Our Stories, Dennis Hinrichsen’s Dominion + Selected Poems, and Lunette, a collaboration between Bruce Bond and his photographer brother, Walter Cochran-Bond.

Launched in 2008, Under a Warm Green Linden is our biannual digital poetry journal published each solstice. The title alludes to an image from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s "The Day of My Death," chosen for its balancing the terrors of being with the promise of renewal. Our winter 2023–24 issue (December 21, 2023, publication date), guest edited by Simeon Berry, includes work by Diane Seuss, Kevin Prufer, David Kirby, Maureen Seaton, Aaron Smith, and many others.

Our interview and review series, with over 100 publications, aims to deepen, illuminate, and complicate an understanding of poets’ work. (The entire progeny of the Press grew out of a few interviews with poets I put up as a blog nearly twenty years ago.) In addition to work for the digital journal, we are currently accepting submissions for our chapbook open-reading period, through March 21^st.

People often express surprise at the range of styles in our journal and catalog. Our tastes are eclectic, from visual poetry to traditional lyrics about love and death. What excites us is excellence in craft and vision. Check it out!

 

 

 

 

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and four chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. The recipient of the 2023–24 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, he is the founding editor of Under a Warm Green Linden and Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. His anthology Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora received a Midwest Book Award and was named one of the best poetry books of the year by Entropy Magazine.