I'm proud to announce the publication of NF Huth's Radiator.
"Nancy Huth's Radiator, is a fiercely stubborn book comprised of precisely realized palimpsests and composite ghosts. Quotidian in its impetus, working out from the worries and delights of everyday life, utterly riveting in its fugue-like realizations, this volume limns a domestic metaphysics in situ which is suffused with sadness, wisdom and sense perceptions. Add to that the moments within it that one might want to dance to. I love this book. It's a sleeper bomb. It reads quietly but won't go away. It sticks with you like the tattoo you didn't know that you needed." -- Tom Beckett
"NF Huth is a dweller in language - she moves strategically forward making text Huthly hers, an architecture she invites us to inhabit. "I sniff the baseboards for a plan." Words like scrunch, clanking, hissing, pokes, pointy, clacking, stony, squint, squeak - become the small sounds made just before tectonic plates shift. (domesti)Cities made in dust, in partially seen images of the viewed lover in a steamy bathroom shower. These gossamer intangibles of dailyness finally become ours in this book. "Certainly now: this parenthetical life" becomes as important a place for our waking territories as our woken ones. This is a book to hold close. -- Anne Gorrick.
I published it because I think it's even better than the blurbs. I can't remember the last time I read something this full of heart.
NF Huth
Radiator
Laughing/Ouch/Cube/Publications
ISBN 978-0-9561919-7-7
US $16.95
UK £11
Availabe from lulu here.
SPECIAL OFFER - 15% off and free shipping if you order thru me at j[at]johnbr[dot]com - GOOD THRU OCTOBER.
STONE GIRL E-PIC
Ed Baker. 978-0-9561919-6-0 £15.95 / $24.99 525 pages
Leafe Press are excited to announce the publication of this major work by American poet and artist Ed Baker.
"Stone Girl E-Pic" is a remarkable visual and minimalist poem, in which Baker's drawings are integrated with, and indeed, form part of, the poem itself. Baker is "in that stream of & flows with" the Objectivist and the Black Mountain poets, and is part of a circle of poets that includes Cid Corman and Theodore Enslin.
"...here is work that manages to retain all the elements and yet make contemporary Vispo look very empty, leaving the reader to look for the essentials of a more tradition-based visual poetry: a minimalism that matters and the most purely 'concrete' art that ever illustrated text. Writing that cuts to the bone, iconoclastic and original, and a 'Stone Girl' art sprung out of the lines themselves. Writing and art on Baker's terms."
Conrad DiDiodato
TO ORDER (paypal): Leafe Press.Or contact me: j at johnbr dot c o m
I should also announce that two reviews of 2nd NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS appeared in
Galatea Resurrects #15 (A Poetry Engagement)
One is by Richard Lopez, and can be read here. The other's by Eileen Tabios, and can be read here.
Both are thoughtful. Actually, the whole issue of GR's worth reading, even the bits that aren't about me.
Here's the blurb for 2nd NOTICE:
The above is the cover of a brand new publication, which clearly puts paid to the Conceptual Writing/Flarf debate of this past spring, as well as the eternal ephemeral distinction between SoQ and Post-Avant. Not to mention that people can no longer say that philosophy missed its chance.
It IS NOW available from Laughing / Ouch / Cube / Publications, an occasional imprint of Leafe Press. You'll learn more about some crucial stuff, like how we kill people here in Cali, than you ever wanted to know, which is good for you, like some kind of vitamin. You'll be highly amused. $11 including shipping. WE CAN TALK TRADE AND/OR OTHER ARRANGEMENTS. Get your copy while it's red hot! Tell your friends. 11 bucks including shipping. Yow! How many times ... just eleven lousy dollars, people.
If you don't buy this your children and their children and so on down seven generations will hate your guts each time they think about much they could have made by selling it.
Order HERE.Or via me. j [at john br [dot] com.
Yesterday, Geof Huth dbqp: visualizing poetics blogged this lovely note:
John Bloomberg-Rissman's Flux, Clot & Froth is a modern-day epic, which is to say that it contains no adventures, no treks, no quests, yet mirrors the world it comes out of and all of its desires, and is huge in the way that an epic should be: inches thick when printed as a codex. The book is a memory of reading, a memory of a single synchronic slice of a civilization run through the consciousness of one poet. John has harvested whatever sequences of words interested him and he has melded these into a single frame, a giant canvas, its mirrored surface hidden from us by the deftness with which he has woven these various and dischordant texts into a single song, as if from a single source, in much the same way that a river is enriched by the tributaries feeding into it even if it seems but a single rolling force of water to our blindered eyes.
There is something hypnotic about this text to me, about the way that it fades in and out of focus, or from one focus to another, and always seeming to be just one voice, his voice, though in various states and moods, coming at us. When I dip into it, I run through fifty pages at a clip wondering how I'd made it so far, and losing grip of the story, because there is none, because there are many, because I cannot hold onto the richness of the thing, how it is bigger and brighter than all of us, and eager to exceed our grasp.
So when John asked me to design the cover of his book, I did, though slowly, and awkwardly, making more errors in the construction of this cover than in almost anything I've ever made. (And error is a cornerstone of my poetics.) In the end, I'd devised a cover where the title is almost totally obscured, as is the author's name, a cover where the text is inscrutable in many ways: thrown into brambly piles of characters, obscuring the few recognizable forms, using almost nothing but letters that don't exist, a little rongorongo for the eye. You have to read the spine for the title, since the front cover is nothing but a reproduction of the feeling I gain from reading the book.
But this poem of John's is more than the poem itself. It is also a system of recording the sources of all the texts John has snatched from the river of words he read during its construction, and that system is both ingenious and beautiful. At the bottom of every page of the poem, in light-grey is a note showing the numeric sequence of endnotes covered by that page. And if you buy volume 2 of the book, you will have the apparatus and be able to find all the sources of the poem, as well as nice little extras, like another poem. Volume 2 would be the essential disc of extras of this movie if this book were a movie, which it almost is. In this volume, you'll find an explanation of all the sources as well as the means to return to that place in the poem where any source is used. I used this to see how the words John appropriated from me were used in his text, and I was proud every time I saw what he'd done with my words.
Flux, Clot & Froth is a challenging book, but a rewarding one, a beautiful, an incantatory one. I sing its pages through my fingers to my eyes as I fall into sleep.
A couple days earlier, Alan Baker over at Litterbug posted this:
"Flux, Clot and Froth" is now avaiable in book form. This is what I said about this epic work-in-progress back in January 2010:
"My Leafe Press henchman John Bloomberg-Rissman has just completed 'Flux, Clot & Froth' (FCF) part 2 of his on-going project, of which 'No Sounds of my Own Making' was part one. FCF, published on John's blog, would run to around 800 pages in book form. The work is an exercise in sampling, that is, borrowing text from other writers - or people in general - to make a kind of boundless poetry that interfaces with all aspects of contemporary life, via the texts that document it. It's an epic project - just check out the list of names he's borrowed from - but it's at the same time a light-hearted (and affectionate) spoof of the epic works of High Modernism. The whole project is called Zeitgeist Spam. Long may it continue!"
Here's how to order a copy. I should note: buy it now while there's a discount.
MERITAGE PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT
Meritage Press is delighted to announce its latest poetry release with a SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER!
Flux, Clot & Froth, Vol. 1
Poems by John Bloomberg-Rissman
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794119-9-1
Price: $29.00
Pages: 714
Flux, Clot & Froth, Vol. 2
Apparatus to Poems in Vol. 1 by John Bloomberg-Rissman
ISBN-13: 978-0-9826493-0-5
Price: $21.00
Pages: 242
Meritage Press Book Page: http://meritagepress.com/flux-clot-froth.htm
Meritage Press is pleased to release Flux, Clot & Froth by John Bloomberg-Rissman, a two-volume project comprised of poems in Volume 1 and "Apparatus" or Notes to Poems in Volume 2. To celebrate this unique project, Meritage Press is offering a SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER with discounted pricing (see further below for details).
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: On 23 Nov 08, John Bloomberg-Rissman finished transforming his crazy stacks of later 20th- and early 21st-century Anglophone literature into organized shelves. Looking at those shelves, he decided to "unpack" them through a longish poem: "Find something from the 1st book on the 1st shelf. Follow that with something from the 1st book on the 2nd shelf. Etc etc. Intersperse whatever I like from whatever source appeals to me. Intersperse a number of Autopoetic recursions. Form: hay(na)ku. I expect this to go on for several months.” Several became many, and the result is an epic-length mixtape composed of thousands of algorithmically/intuitively-derived fully annotated oft-mangled bits of écriture/parole. Truman Capote once famously said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “This isn’t writing, it’s typing.” Had he lived he would have said of Flux, Clot & Froth, “This isn’t typing, it’s cutnpaste.” But, as Heinrich Heine (or Ferenc Molnár?) is reputed to have replied on his deathbed when asked if he wanted last rites, “Nah. Whether or not he exists, God will forgive me. It’s his job.” Volume 1 contains the poem. Volume 2 contains 2,700+ notes which source the approximately 4,000 texts Bloomberg-Rissman sampled.
ADVANCE WORDS Include:
“At the heart of infinity is the accumulative event. John Bloomberg-Rissman, poet of mixmastery, dis-complicates a vastness of textonality, meticulously cites each source, then honors the poundage of forebears by locating a fresh, consistently revealing work, flush with ripening seeds. Flux, Clot & Froth accomplishes with specificity a surprisingly large, clear, deeply felt ceremony of the new poem that gleams across patens that protect and honor poetic roots, both past and current. The poem earns traction by unearthing the connections among a dizzying array of source material to discover a transcendent work. Unhesitatingly brilliant, Flux, Clot & Froth speaks beyond itself as testament to a rigorous and unparalleled synthesis of attention and humility.”
—Sheila E. Murphy
“An extreme example of what I’ve elsewhere called “othering” or, borrowing the phrase from John Cage, “writing through,” Bloomberg-Rissman’s Flux, Clot & Froth is a 700+ page magnum opus constructed (almost) entirely from words or sounds appropriated from 1000 other writers. That this is done without any sacrifice of coherence or feeling or intelligence & in a voice that remains unified & “personal” throughout is a testament to the communal nature of language & thought of which our individualities are a crucial if sometimes questioned part. While Bloomberg-Rissman is not alone in the pursuit of such an outcome, his beautifully wrought & linked three-line stanzas & other groupings present what may well remain a milestone of a new communal poetics.”
—Jerome Rothenberg
SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER:
Both volumes of Flux, Clot & Froth are now available for a combined price of $40.00, a 20% discount from regular retail price of $50.00. As part of this offer, there will be free shipping & handling (a $7.50 value) within the United States. To order, send a check made out to "Meritage Press" to
E. Tabios / Meritage
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Rd.
St. Helena, CA 94574
This SPECIAL RELEASE OFFER will be good through Jan. 15, 2011.
For more information, including on international orders: MeritagePress@aol.com
