Autocinema by Gaspar Orozco
Autocinema by Gaspar Orozco

Poetry. ISBN 978-1-946104-00-7. 104 pages. $17 US.

Control and beauty, composition and precision: like one who looks through a pinhole camera and from that vantage notes and examines the unexpected, the near, the never seen before, Gaspar Orozco, a poet, almost an entomologist, almost a Buddhist monk, brings to the eyes, tongue and ears of the attentive reader wisps of a reality, a hyperreality, that flickers for a moment and then is gone. Poet of  lucid verse, of contrasts and tensions, Autocinema confirms his status as that rarest of rare birds, an idiosyncratic and powerful voice amidst the crowded flock of contemporary Mexican poets. —Rocío Cerón

We see movies and become them, and then they begin another, transformed existence. The art of filmmaking has engendered a counter-art of which Gaspar Orozco shows himself a master: the making of a movie by a mind become camera, deep in the realm of the unfilmable and almost unsayable. A sunken screen image—it might be from Melies or Vigo, Wong Kar-wai or Edgardo Cozarinsky—undergoes a sea-change into a spectacle for an inner screening room. —Geoffrey O’Brien

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Begin At Once by Beth Joselow
Begin At Once by Beth Joselow

“The poems in BEGIN AT ONCE are truly investigations, never simply statements of things the poet already claims to know. They wander—sometimes lightly, sometimes darkly, sometimes with a quiet but dark irony, but always generously—over all sorts of contrasting subjects with a startling insight that traces the swift and shocking changes of a life lived in a world that’s genuinely right here, right now. Beth Joselow’s poems discover, and uncover, keen truths that always surprise and unsettle and make us think again about things we believed we understood. There’s real wisdom in BEGIN AT ONCE, and the world sure does need more of that.”—Mark Wallace

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Black Valentine by David Abel
Black Valentine by David Abel

PubDate: 4/2006

Black Valentine

David Abel

ISBN: 9780925904577

Price: $10.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 32

This lovely addition to Chax Press' line of chapbooks features Portland poet David Abel's elegiac sequence on love and grief. Written in New York following the 1988 death of Robert Duncan but published in 2006, Abel's poem takes as its point of departure a line from Christopher Marlowe, who writes: “Black is the beauty of the brightest day.” From this ambiguous, mournful line, Abel fashions a beautifully spare set of poems that encompass and intertwine concerns both philosophical and quotidian, displaying both sadness and acceptance in the face of death.

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Born Two by Allison Cobb
Born Two by Allison Cobb

PubDate: 8/2004

Born Two

Allison Cobb

ISBN: 9780925904393

Price: $16.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 100

“Allison Cobb's BORN TWO brings monsters out of memory and an unexpected sweetness out of the firestorms of language. Hers is the mind of poetry, driven by history and lured by love, caught in the act of the need to know. Like a child after family secrets, Cobb turns up more truths than the ones she seems to be seeking. Childlike, too, are her characters, whose adventures carry them nearer and nearer the beautiful, erotic, and tragic world of knowledge.”—Susan Tichy

“For this new century, a poetry of minus signs. Like many of her generation, Allison Cobb's curious about the wheres, whens and whys of our predicament. Through compression, cubtraction, amputation and dispersal, she manages to scrape a hole across the ice on the windshield. BORN TWO peels away the myths of the American West to reveal the twitchy nerve beneath.”—Kevin Killian

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Busy Dying by Hilton Obenzinger
Busy Dying by Hilton Obenzinger

PubDate: 2/2008

Busy Dying

Hilton Obenzinger

ISBN: 9780925904737

Price: $19.95

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 295

At Columbia University in April 1968, Hilton Obenzinger was one of many students who dramatically occupied the president's office. For six days they protested the university's secret research to support the Vietnam War and its plans to build a gym in Morningside Park despite the opposition of Harlem. The occupation adn subsequent strike was a generational moment repeated in universities around the country and throughout the world. BUSY DYING is an autobiographical novel, a portrait of the author's Polish Jewish family, a coming of age in poetry, music, politics, and friends in New York City and Columbia, including a dangerous exodus through the Yukon to end up teaching on an Indian reservation in Northern California. All of this is comically and sometimes tragically relived as the author is inspired by a series of encounters and coincidences, including the revelations of students he teaches at Stanford today and the surprising discovery of the story behind 'Hilton Obenzinger,' a 1980s Long Island high school humor magazine.

“Hilton Obenzinger is an American original. His lost histories are acts of leger

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Chantry by Elizabeth Treadwell
Chantry by Elizabeth Treadwell

PubDate: 1/2004

Chantry

Elizabeth Treadwell

ISBN: 9780925904409

Price: $16.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 94

Chantry is song. Chantry is song that exceeds song structure in all dimensions to become invocation and enchantment. From “the vessel without a cover” to “late silhouette in / blue” it refuses to be contained, as a book wants to live outside its covers. Sing this: “linger so this grace of grace,” yet sing it so that “the door cracks in so many different directions.” It is in these cracks, these interstices, that Elizabeth Treadwell finds and makes song, and the song exceeds and excels. Wordsworth defined poetry as spontaneous overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility. Hear the overflow: “lovelove. all back-slaps and gummy smiles; free for honest mating?” and hear the invocation of a tranquility available for recollection and celebration: “inventing an alphabet / and feast their Beloved for awhile.” Throughout all, hear a language that irrepressibly invites the reader in, and creates a world worth the while, worth the song.

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Chromatic Defacement by Philip Foss
Chromatic Defacement by Philip Foss

PubDate: 1/1998

CHROMATIC DEFACEMENT

Phillip Foss

ISBN: 9780925904225

Price: $12.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 89

Phillip Foss’s CHROMATIC DEFACEMENT is a new fin de siecle theater of cruelty with the roles played by perfumes, echoes and elisions. Coquettish effluvia. Susan Howe meets Bataille and they have this child called Fetter of Nuance or, in fact, CHROMATIC DISPLACEMENT. I think I’m in love with it. – Rae Armantrout. There is the entrance of submission. The opening / is very low, or very shallow, as if its fabricator desired removal / of one’s head in entering, not concerning stature / but sensation and dialectics. (The Theater of Perfumes). Following the steps of Phillip Foss, one of Lully’s latter-day and more intrepid progeny surely, you will re-make desire. Re-make it and re-make it. Re-make it and make it last. At last. – John Taggart.

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Conflict by Norman Fischer
Conflict by Norman Fischer

PubDate: 1/2012

Conflict

Norman Fischer

ISBN: 9780925904720

Price: $17.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 84

“The conflict Norman Fischer speaks of in this poem is an inherent component of the universe. He writes of the human dilemma, the struggles of daily life, and the desire to 'hold the world in place,' showing us how not to be mired in any one spot. Freedom is won by tirelessly moving forward. The lines breathe: the poet's breath, and the complexity of his thought, visualized on the page.”—Anne Tardos

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Dark Ladies by Steve McCaffery
Dark Ladies by Steve McCaffery

Dark Ladies, by Steve McCaffery

Poetry

ISBN 978-0-9862640-4-7

246 pages

Published 2016

$22

Dark Ladies is an explosive meditation on death and laughter cast as both a Menippean masque and a user’s guide to the tragi-comic. Mixing erudition with illogicality and vaudeville vulgarity it pays homage to Shakespeare by both erasure and incorporation. Preserving the end rhymes of all 154 of his sonnets, in mirror-reverse order, and embedding stage directions from his comedic and tragic plays, it offers a grotesque repurposing of the bard’s great themes. Published to coincide with Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, written in large part during the epoch of George W. Bush and dedicated to the dead and dying on a continuing basis, it advances a truly pataphysical vision of a haunting question. If death is the real solution to life, is laughter the imaginary solution to death?

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Deaccessioned Landscapes by Jonathan Brannen
Deaccessioned Landscapes by Jonathan Brannen

The visceral and the intellectual, the fragmentary and the full, the future and memory–Jonathan Brannen interrogates opposites in these facing pairs, brilliantly illuminating the zone of language that operates between. Sharp and bright, it’s a collection that sees the world in all its detail and in vivid color; it sparks the mind.”–Cole Swensen

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Deathwatch for My Father by Hank Lazer
Deathwatch for My Father by Hank Lazer

A handsewn chapbook with letterpress cover, DEATHWATCH FOR MY FATHER is a long poem, meditation, and memorial from the poet to his dying father in which Lazer attempts to use the thing he knows, language, in order to reconcile the thing he can’t know, death: “my mind inclines / to ask and what / is it perhaps to / turn your death into / linguistic inquiry / a somewhat familiar / terrain.”

Hank Lazer has published seventeen books of poetry, including N18 (COMPLETE) (Singing Horse Press, 2012), Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009), THE NEW SPIRIT (Singing Horse Press, 2005), ELEGIES & VACATIONS (Salt Publishing, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he is Executive Director for Creative Campus and edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press.

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Don’t Forget to Breathe by Andrew Levy
Don’t Forget to Breathe by Andrew Levy

PubDate: 8/2012

Don't Forget to Breathe

Andrew Levy

ISBN: 9780925904676

Price: $16.00

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 112

“Andrew Levy's DON'T FORGET TO BREATHE is truly only figuring out how to stay free.”—Lissa Wolsak

“Somewhere in here the poet says 'you can call me Nothing / Which is something,' thereby compressing the crisis related in this book to its bluntest formulation. Who or what is the residue that causes these words to occur? What do these questions, jokes, propositions, slogans, fragments, rationalizations constitute? No answer is forthcoming: anatomies of 'absurdities / Spewing forth / From capital' disintegrate as they coalesce, disposing themselves along an eroding continuum, where each step taken is a step back to an abandoned future. Although from here it's hard to see forward, some day the sticks will dry out, giving us a chance to make a fire, in whose heat and light we'll remember DON'T FORGET TO BREATHE as a threshold.”—William Fuller

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