forty-two: june 2005

6.29.2005 wednesday
 The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness, translated by Magnus Magnusson Who would've thought a Nobel laureate could be this funny? Lying somewhere between 'Snorri's Edda' and 'The Mouse That Roared', beautifully written and always surprising. Like most great novels, filled a lack I didn't know I had; think Kafka rewritten by Tolstoy.
-Tim
 6.21.2005 tuesday
 cool for you: a novel by Eileen Myles What do we talk about when we talk about story. Autobiographical at its most exacting, doubling the process – what the reader wants most from the author wants most from hospital records, memory. Hospital records are like memory because they spin back around.
-Jen
 6.20.2005 monday
 The Estrus Gaze(s) by Eileen Tabios A colon begins each line. The reader defines the blankness beforehand, negotiating the stink of estrus in one part and history's disconnection in the second. With a courtly nod to Jose Garcia Villa's comma poems, Eileen Tabios's poetry challenges at every turn.
-Ivy
 6.19.2005 sunday
 Monika's Chaosprotokoll by Ilse Kilic Monika’s Chaosprotokoll, Ritter Books, scratchy genius from Ilse Kilic. An operating manual full of stopsigns, aspirin and cementblocks. ‘was the word an embassy, glamrock, capital?’ In the end, we learn, the word was ‘chaos’. In english 2006. Genius from Vienna’s literary underground.
-Mark
 6.18.2005 saturday
 The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz The odd tantrums of a polish shopkeeper (and his family) bring forth the small-scale surrealism of the everyday. Oddly polite and occasionally grotesque; an apothecary of weirdo affections. Slow-going, literary and occasionally miraculous. "Precious," in the best sense of the word.
-Dan
 6.17.2005 friday
 Illness as Metphor and AIDS and its Metaphors by Susan Sontag Are we sick or are we simply gripped by an idea about personality? Tuberculosis, cancer, and AIDS all have their overlays of moral and psychological meaning, and Sontag clearly means to strip these away. She's forceful as always, though occasionally leaps extralogically.
-Erika
 6.16.2005 thursday
 Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan Teenage girl loses virginity, fixates on her father, reads Bergson, gets a nice tan and ruins many lives, including her own. Primarily known for being shocking for the 50s and by a teenager, it's still a remarkable (brief) read, funny and histrionic.
-Tim
 6.15.2005 wednesday
 The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life by Fanny Howe Although dispersed this pattern: Starts at own life, moves into word, moves into the larger liveliness. An interest in mystics that is clear-eyed, an interest in dead-on true mysticism. All about the field of the believer, essays that do not become aligned.
-Jen
 6.14.2005 tuesday
 The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos Lines spread and hanging in space— lines of this book-length are more like buckets hanging from trees, left to capture what falls and keep til you arrive. The bottoms of the buckets are accurately sieved. Oh, I see, gold. Deep ecology rush.
-Jen
 6.13.2005 monday
 belladonna by Kristy Bowen Kristy Bowen's poems have the verity of a bruise. Every poem probes the ache, tongues the exposed nerve in the gum. She names the body's fragility: sternum, wrist, throat. Stop covering up. Language is a dress that needs to be torn apart.
-Ivy
 6.12.2005 sunday
 Bad With Faces by Sean Norton First book from Red Morning Press -- both elegant and practical, in shape and language. A series of people and concepts “on retreat,” thinking about the necessity of escape. Line is as direct as possible, understands what is possible in this world.
-Jen
 6.11.2005 saturday
 Vacationland by Ander Monson Narrative current is a cold climate, losing within and out it. Interested to see how Monson’s simultaneously-released, similarly-themed fiction approaches differently. Here: approached and retreated, narrated and suspected, made light and heavy of. Every new telling breaks some thing, hardens something else.
-Jen
 6.10.2005 friday
 Nelson & the Huruburu Bird by Mairead Byrne The sense that these are lived-by, excerpts of products of daily activity that would keep going without any patronage. “Found” in literal and other ways, not journalistic but evidence of a necessary, stunning, daily exchange with words. It rains inside and out.
-Jen
 6.9.2005 thursday
 Can You Relax In My House by Michael Earl Craig The world in Craig’s head, cultivated through his voice, is one that seems to be always functioning a day earlier than your expected arrival. “We expected you tomorrow,” as if to say, you were not meant to see all of this, here…
-Brandon
 6.8.2005 wednesday
 Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland In the years since 'Generation X', Coupland, like his readers, has grown up. Accessible and fairly gripping, but far more meditative than I expected, this is a fascinating work on grief and memory. Less topical than you'd guess, but also far sweeter.
-Tim
 6.7.2005 tuesday
 A Calendar of Love and Other Stories/A Time to Keep and Other Stories/Hawkfall and Other Stories/The Sun's Net/Andrina and Other Stories/The Masked Fisherman and Other Stories/Winter Tales by George Mackay Brown Reading all of a given author's short stories at once is clearly idiotic, although it inspires one to edit a Selected Stories. At the end, hundreds of pages later, all that remains are a few repeating words: loom. bannock, sun, fishermen, croft.
-Tim
 6.6.2005 monday
 Rivers and Birds by Merrill Gilfillan A great calm attention descends on warblers, oxbows, the subterranean correspondence among lays of land and season and mind. Travel, frequent-unhurried, renders America a generous backyard: familiar, yet untapped: full of contingent forms, aromas, and very small essays. Not caused, allowed.
-Erika
 6.5.2005 sunday
 what’s wrong by ivy alvarez Something bad between Bill and Ann, beyond killing. “I used to be limber, lover.” Poems like letters written while looking each other in the eye: rhythmic and askance, the shock. “Axes might bounce off him, ringing up shocked arms.” There’s no break.
-Jen
 6.4.2005 saturday
 Eureka Slough by Joseph Massey Small, thin poems create a thick, static sensation: banana slug in damp leaves, breeze that never comes. The lost feeling between similar shapes is subtle and curious; why am I anxious over the field guide’s or guide-reader’s lack. This summer happens twice.
-Jen
 6.3.2005 friday
 hellbent by Nate Pritts Lazy Frog Press doesn’t seem to be online anymore, but Nate Pritts is; much like The Happy Seasons, hellbent’s poems are both necessarily of the page and pushing aside or through it, real living things with fingers that root, fidget, drive cars.
-Jen
 6.2.2005 thursday
 Divorce in Rhode Island by Kate Schapira Don’t know if this one is widely available, but talk to Kate. Mine had a little sticker on front that has since fallen off, and inside, an intimate and intricately organized exploration of structure, of -I feel- being pedestrian in a carspace.
-Jen
 6.1.2005 wednesday
 Head Over Heels by roxanne m carter A collection of sense-driven journal entries from 2004, arranged new year to new year. Movement in both time and space – what is the effect of reading them “backwards,” a sense of knowing. The “you” is clearly someone else and yet “you” follow.
-Jen






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