At Night on the Sun, by Will Alexander
Drama/Literature. ISBN 9781946104090.
As the curtain rises on Will Alexander’s adroit pan-African pageant, courtiers puzzle, stew and snipe over the central mystery of their existence—the absence of King Asoka. Where is he? Can mere ministers of war decide, or do the eerie signals demand the counsel of the Magicians? What is he doing, what does he intend? Is intention still on the table? So the old ways play themselves out, but on Asoka’s return a table of glittering galaxies play themselves out like cards from the future. Like
Lorraine Hansberry’s Black Arts Movement era masterpiece Les Blancs, Alexander’s At Night on the Sun presents a planet’s struggle for self-determination as an occasion for both joy and fear. It is a work of art for our age and for ages yet to come.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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?