the latest book from ellipsis press is by alan davies. more info plus an excerpt here.

ODES & fragments by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.

Praise for Alan Davies

The kind of skill with handling language that can’t be rushed or faked, and that I only hear in the work of writers who have really practiced for a long time.
—Craig Dworkin

Alan Davies’s poems have such great sound and are open and situated and fearless in their response to what happens internally and in the big often ugly outside. A startling writer and very precise on whatever path he sets for himself.
—Carla Harryman

Davies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene.
—Ron Silliman

Davies’s belief in radical self-reflexivity has led him, in the course of his writing career, from a virtually opaque formalism to a continuity of text and life-world that is anything but aesthetic construction.
—Barrett Watten

[Davies] has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which ‘no one is absent anymore’…. how writing and reading matters, not just for its comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking.
— Juliana Spahr

ALAN DAVIES IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE POET WHO HAS EVER HAD SEX. The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies’s work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about.
—Steve Zultanski 

read an excerpt here.

buy it directly from ellipsis press or through spd or amazon.

Norman Lock writes about The Strangers in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction:

To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled. Lim’s knowledge of economic theory, political science, art history and practice, the minutiae and mechanisms of businesses large and small is sweeping. His verbal constructions exhibit lyrical and playful strains, indignation and sensuality, and a genuinely hip, idiomatic flair. Lim’s ambition to relate “grand narratives”—to tessellate them within a mysterious, comprehensive verbal construction and, in so doing, to recreate in his fictional universe the entire world and its archetypical figures—makes his novel an uncommon artifact. The Strangers in its complex self-referential, multi-layered structure, anecdotal mass, and restless inventiveness demands and rewards more than one reading.

Read the whole review here.

convincing and moving portrayals of quiet, selfless valor told with a great textured, muscular writing:

“Towns flattened for miles, those civilians unable to flee living as troglodytes in cellars half-flooded with rain and sewage, making hopscotch forays to fund crusts or cabbage leaves in the rubbled gutters” (p. 33).

this novel on the surface is occupied primarily with two physical activities: being a sniper (during the second world war) and racing bicycles. but rose’s beautifully rendered description of these two (at times sinister) occupations make us touch our animal side — and by that we’re uncannily opened up to profound moral and philosophical quandaries.

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here’s an interview revealing, among other interesting bits, a sebald-related origin story.

pick it up at the library or through the publisher.

 over at

i’m today’s ditty provider
with one called
OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD.

different things get you: some sections romantic and conceptually smart, others filled with a carefully self-doubting and insightful political analysis. but the aspect that i most admired was an honesty and willingness for risk that’s hard to pinpoint but which was very moving.

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get it from the library or order from amazon

I reviewed five fiction titles for the latest (and sadly, the last) issue of Harp & Altar: NONE OF THIS IS REAL by Miranda Mellis; A BREATH OF LIFE by Clarice Lispector; LEAVE ME ALONE by Murong Xuecun; SCARS by Juan José Saer; and GEORGE ANDERSON by Peter Dimock.

“None of This Is Real… manages to speak precisely to that helplessness and guilt permeating the simultaneity of the climate-changed, apocalypse-always zeitgeist and the rapturous technowonderful singularity as advertised on your hand-holding device.”

Read the reviews here.

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This great issue of Harp & Altar also has: poetry and fiction by Tom Andes, Jessica Baran, Leopoldine Core, Ian Dreiblatt, Matthew Klane, Linnea Ogden, Jennifer Pilch, Michael Rerick, Jason Snyder, Donna Stonecipher, Sally Van Doren, and Tom Whalen; Jesse Lichtenstein on The Arcadia Project; Bianca Stone on Farrah Field; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Adam Stolorow.

An interview I did with Peter Dimock appears in the latest issue of Bookslut.

Peter Dimock’s latest novel George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is written as a letter to the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a lawyer who drafted and signed one of the Bush era’s infamous Torture Memos. While it’s true that a handful of soldiers who participated in the beatings, rape, vicious strappado hangings, and other savage abuses at Abu Ghraib were charged and convicted, the masterminds of the legal reasoning that allowed the torture, now euphemistically branded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” of prisoners-of-war have never been held accountable.

Dimock’s slim fiction rages against this and a host of state sins while also deftly functioning as a sorrowful, secular confession for an entitled race and class. It does this in an altogether unique style, which one reviewer described as coming from a “speaker who may be in some kind of rapture, or who is ironic, or who is mad, or who is all three.” I met the author, a long-serving editor in the New York publishing world, at a restaurant near his home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Both of your books are stylistic gambles. The purpose and direction of that style is not immediately recognizable. We don’t know why you’re making these stylistic choices. In your author’s note you write that the success of your ambition will “rest upon the reader’s response to [your] invention of a form… no matter how estranged or estranging the results may seem at first.” While writing, how aware are you of your gamble? Did it seem like a gamble? And how did you reconcile yourself to this risk?

My experience is the history I have lived through. I was born in 1950. And so I was eighteen in 1968. That’s a moment. I was draftable at the height of the Vietnam War. So I have a particular relationship to that time, like everyone who lived through that period. But I remember being overwhelmed — I still am — by the sense that we don’t have a language adequate to the history we’re actually living. I was brought up and trained — I had all the best education and the best positions from which to assume an intellectual role either as an academic or a literary critic — but always felt I never could actually assume any such role in good faith. I feel strongly that — with the exception of contemporary literature, I’m thinking of Morrison, Marquez, Pynchon, and Bishop — we have not as a culture yet truly grappled with the inadequacy of the language we have available to us for the history we are living. I think we are crippled by this lack of a language.

Read the whole interview here:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2013_03_019928.php

http://apexart.org/events/double-take-4.php

I’ll be reading on Tuesday, March 5th with John Yau, Rick Moody, Tim Davis, Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis. Please come!

 

Double Take IV

Tuesday, March 5: 7 pm

Three pairs of authors write original pieces about shared experiences.

organized by
Albert Mobilio

Featuring:
Rick Moody & Tim Davis on the dinner where they met.
John Yau & Eugene Lim on remembering the Robert Creeley memorial.
Charles Bernstein & Elizabeth Willis on the obvious.

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Watch videos from the previous Double Take program.

Charles Bernstein‘s new collection of poems, Recalculating, will be out this Spring from the University of Chicago Press, which also published hisAttack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Davis is an artist, writer, and musician. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan, Whitney, Guggenheim, Walker, Hirshhorn, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and many other museums. He is the author of My Life in Policits (Aperture), and The New Antiquity (Damiani). Having written song lyrics for years for the band Cuddle Magic, he is currently at work on his first album of original songs, which will be accompanied by a set of music videos entitled “It’s OK to Hate Yourself.” He teaches Photography at Bard College.

Eugene Lim is an editor at small for Harp & Altar and is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press. His fiction has appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly, EXPLORINGFictions, The Brooklyn Rail, sleepingfish, No Colony and elsewhere. His first novel, Fog & Car, was named a finalist in Blatt Magazine’s 2007 Novel of Novels competition. His second novel The Strangers is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Queens, NY.

Rick Moody is the author of five novels–including The Ice Story and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death—three collections of stories, a memoir entitled The Black Veil, and, most recently, a collection of essays On Celestial Music. He is a music columnist at The Rumpus, and he also plays in and writes songs for The Wingdale Community Singers. He teaches at NYU and Yale.

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism. Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets (Lavan Award), The American Poetry Review (Jerome Shestack Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Elizabeth Willis‘s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), won the PEN New England Prize for Poetry and is just out in paperback. Her other books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s,Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, andTouch Wood. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is an editor of Bookforum.

Please join us.
All events are free and open to the public.

apexart‘s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., The William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

apexart
291 Church Street, NYC, 10013
t. 212 431 5270
www.apexart.org

 

Directions: A, C, E, N, R, W, Q, J, M, Z, 6 to Canal or 1 to Franklin.

Calling all PhD students, English professors, the slackjawed, public-library-lurkers, the learned and the unlearned: here’s a high-stakes entrance examination for your exexexmatriculation. Take “The Exam” by Tom Whalen in the Brooklyn Rail.

In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” regarding the comparison of the rolling of the balls in the game of nine-pins to “rumbling peals of thunder,” why is it impossible to state definitively which comes first, the nine-pins or nature?  Offer three refutations to Sedgwick’s (“homosexual panic”) and Morrison’s (Afro-centric) remarks on “The Beast in the Jungle.”  How often did your parent(s), guardian(s), institution(s) read aloud to you before the age of five? three? one?  On a scale of one to ten, with one being “calm” and ten “psychotic,” how nervous are you?  Do you see the exam as a challenge or a threat, considering that if you do not pass, you will not be allowed to hold a teaching position in this country?  Compare your anxiety to that of two of the following: Ichabod Crane, Young Goodman Brown, the narrator of “The Black Cat.”  Hurry.  The exam has barely begun, and already you’re falling behind.  Perhaps the consequences of your failing are even more severe than you’ve imagined.

Read the rest of “The Exam” in

 .     .    .   

Tom Whalen’s novel THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is available now directly from Ellipsis Press, from Small Press Distribution, and from Amazon.

Whalen will read at Unnameable bookstore on Thursday March 21, 2013.

I’m very proud to have worked on this book, the latest Ellipsis Press title. Tom Whalen has written an incredibly beautiful and surprising novel, a sly allegory about power and bureaucracy that has a narrator with that saintly and cuckoo mix to whom Jakob von Gunten might be close cousin.

“The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence.  But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination.  To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. ” —Norman Lock

Some more info, including an excerpt, here.

Available for order from SPD or from Ellipsis Press or from Amazon.

If you’re a reviewer and want an reader’s copy, please email me at: eugene at ellipsispress.com.