THE HINDRANCES OF A HOUSEHOLDER hand-colored edition
$ 50.00
CHAX PRESS announces THE HINDRANCES OF A HOUSEHOLDER, by Jennifer Bartlett
Poetry. Literature. $50.00.
The author/artist, Jennifer Bartlett, has hand-colored several copies of this book which includes a few drawings. These books are being offered to the public for $50, $35 of which goes directly to the author/artist.
Jennifer Bartlett writes, “a word here, a word there,” yet, somehow, never manages to write like anyone else. These poems concern themselves with the messiness of relationships and how those relationships operate in both real and fanciful worlds. Her poems comment on one another, on themselves, and on this fascinating character named Jennifer who weaves in and out of the poems. She writes about swimming pools, sex, neurology, the duality of names, and friendship. Along the way she offers no hindrances for the reader. Instead this book shows poems by a poet writing at her joyful, dizzy best. —Mike James, author of Crows in the Jukebox and My Favorite Houseguest
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Who Do With Words, by Tracie Morris
New, Expanded, Improved Version of this Critically Important Work.
Nonfiction/Creative Essay ISBN978-1-946104-21-2
164 pages $19.00
She is widely recognized as one of the most innovative and consequential performance poets of the last half century. A visionary, a medium, a storyteller possessed of extraordinary perlocutionary powers, capable of locating and seizing upon a listener’s every exposed nerve ending, Tracie Morris is a word magician who can make virtually every utterance into music and manifesto.
— Robin D.G. Kelley, professor of History and Black Studies at UCLA, author of several books, including Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.
With hip talk and logic, Morris lays some shine on the be in our being as Black folk, writes us a love song for our lingo and a manifesto for making it plain. She asks all of us to flip the script with finesse, to hold the bullshit of public discourse to a flame and make art from the funky embers. Finally, a philosophy we can get down to. Like a quilt full of codes to crack and spill. Like a cowrie on the divination board of Black genius.
— Yolanda Wisher, Poet, Bandleader, Curator of Spoken Word, Philadelphia Contemporary, author of Monk Eats an Afro and third poet laureate of Philadelphia
In Who Do With Words, poet, performer and critic Tracie Morris joyfully and instructively blerds out in her love letter to and lecture on Black speech acts. Riff-reading as philosophizing, she dialogues with J. L. Austin, Samuel R. Delany, and many others, dropping serious science in the process. A pocket-sized delight, and she keeps it tight!
— John Keene, Professor and Chair of African American and African Studies, Rutgers University–Newark
Chax Bundle of 13
One of the new offerings from Chax, A Bundle of Books at Significant Savings to our Great Readers
Looking to jump into Chax? Now we offer you a great way to do it. Please keep coming to our site for a new bundle or two every month.
13 books at a special discount. The average price of these books is more than $17, but here you can have all 13 for just $100 (less than $8 per book) plus shipping. This is a limited time offer that will expire at the end of February 2018. Links below lead to the regular product pages for the books, with more information about the book. But you must return here to purchase this bundle at the discounted price.
Ted Pearson, An Intermittent Music
Kit Robinson, Leaves of Class
James Sherry, Entangled Bank
Ben Hollander, The Letters of Carla
Sarah Riggs, Waterwork
Will Alexander, Inside the Earthquake Palace
Michael Gottlieb, What We Do
Gil Ott, arrive on wave
Linh Dinh, ed.and trans., The Deluge
Gaspar Orozco, Autocinema
Leonard Schwartz & Simon Carr, Salamander
Alice Notley, Reason & Other Women
Susan Thackrey, Andalusia
Rechelesse Pratticque by Karen Mac Cormack
RECHELESSE PRATTICQUE, by Karen Mac Cormack
Innovative Poetry / Visual Poetry / ISBN 978-1-946104-13-7
Karen Mac Cormack’s new work, in a large page format, explores the limits of poetry’s ability to visually stun, to go “as far as the eye can reach.”
from Queue 26:
helter skelter while you’re at it peninsula
to jeopardize out of date
adventure permanent permission
a search warrant
I’m not at home to anybody
as far as the eye can reach
relevant disturbance weigh your words carefully
phenomenon heads or tails to show someone the way
a turning point in history
everything is done on the premises
The Hero by Hélène Sanguinetti
The Hero, by Hélène Sanguinetti, translated by Ann Cefola
Poetry/French/Literature/Translation
ISBN 978-1-946104-14-4
$18.00 US
Sanguinetti takes on the archetype of the hero from every angle—at times many simultaneously—and in a language itself heroic in its leaps and shifts and its inventive riffs that tap into ambient legend, with its steaming horses, epic journeys, and, of course, battle. Volatile style, startling content, super-charged tone—Cefola captures them all in her splendidly nuanced translation, a rare case in which nothing at all is lost, and the English language gains a powerful and beautiful book.
—Cole Swensen
What’s the Title? TITLE
What’s the Title? TITLE, by Serge Gavronsky
(a poemnovel)
Fiction/Poetry/Innovative Literature
ISBN 978-1-946104-11-3
$17 (US)
The title is TITLE. What’s the title? TITLE. That means the book is the book, or “A” book, and implies that the book questions itself along the way, or perhaps just makes a lot of leaps, flops, and fade-away hook shots, though all is not in cinders. But life and words manage to burn, and if you burn too, it might be for thirst of knowledge, and you will at least have a chance to quench such thirst if you read this book, if you attempt to understand the nature of a title. You are Odysseus, and you’re trying to get home, or toward another goal, and you need a few challenges along the way; or, you’ll get them whether you need them or not.
No more silence of memory! Because you will need your memories, even as you begin to lose them. But letters hold the prospect of words, and words of sentences, sentences of paragraphs, paragraphs of chapters, and chapters of books. And what is it that a book needs? TITLE. If all the dates are her favorites, she still wants to look at a calendar, and if she misses one, or two, she needs a reminder. Or she needs to pour herself a shot of calvados. Calvados or calvary, or cavalry. Oh my avocadoes! On sunny days, he had that certitude, but Auschwitz and Dachau happened nevertheless. Half of the country was bombed out, but the afternoons kept and keep coming. And one day you will remember (or not, or who will?) that a violinist was needed for a marriage of American history to its right political place. There is no language without speech, there is no Olivetti without a green cover. Too green in the land of pairs of graphs. Life is touching each other, and may have no intertextualities. Or all may be so.
This is that book This is TITLE!
— Charles Alexander
Bundle of Fine Press
One of the new offerings from Chax, A Bundle of Books at Significant Savings to our Great Readers
Looking to jump into Chax? Now we offer you a great way to do it. Please keep coming to our site for a new bundle or two every month.
2 Deluxe Fine Press books at a special discount. The average price of these books is more than $250, but here you can have both for just $175 total, plus shipping. This is a limited time offer that will expire at the end of February 2018. Links below lead to the regular product pages for the books, with more information about the book. But you must return here to purchase this bundle at the discounted price.
- Diesel Hand, by Nico Vassilakis, all letterpress, multi-color prints, superb pattern binding.
- Deluxe Edition of The Complete Light Poems, by Jackson Mac Low, casebound with special fan binding in custom box.
(a) lullaby without any music by Jennifer Bartlett
PubDate: 12/2012
(a) lullaby without any music
Jennifer Bartlett
ISBN: 9780925904355
Price: $17.00
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 74
“These etched words take flight into the everyday of husbands and birds, crystalline reflection and self-possessed repose. Bartlett's poems sparkle with unadorned being and sardonic becoming. Till we become ourselves in their reflection, refigured as beauty.”—Charles Bernstein
“The crosshatch of love, place and domesticity. A woman wearing, then shedding, the identities of body, mother, wife, daughter, bird and lover. Jennifer Bartlett's (A) LULLABY WITHOUT ANY MUSIC proves, once again, that she is the nightingale in the city, and we are all richer for it.”—Maryrose Larkin
MANTIS, by David Dowker
MANTIS, by David Dowker
POETRY / LITERATURE $17 US / 64 pages / published 2018
ISBN 978-1-946104-10-6
The other that enters the text maintains its iridescence “through multiple woof” (and tweet or twitter) ambigrammatical basically a reading “all resin fled” this or that which verbals at the interstices ratiocinates and conjugates erasure valence emergent impetus on the verge of blur “mantid being” a gloss from the given harmonics.
To explore Mantis is to explore language as organic material in formation, information as material. The work is bit-mined, one might say, from The Maintains by Clark Coolidge, taking as rudiment processes of jazz improvisation, particularly as practiced by musicians who may take a single step, and then follow where that step leads. To follow Mantis where it leads is to enter the forest, the cavern, the word hoard, and to find oneself as “light” or “as rose,” and to cross that place into a realm of creative possibility, where the final “as if” may mean open to everything.