Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink: Locus of the Enigmatic Polygeneration

LUCA IN ENGLISH! EXTRA! EXTRA!

The Inventor of Love & Other Writings
Translated by Julian and Laura Semilian

Black Widow Press, Boston, MA 02116
143 pp. Paper $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-9818088-7-1  

Poet Everette Maddox (1944 – 1989) is an anomaly. Everything about him seems to belong to another century.

Mallarmé lies still and beaming in his grave.

City Lights Books, citylights.com

The publication by City Lights of Homero Aridjis, translated by George McWhirter is an event. This Mexican poet is not well known in English, but his work stands with that of Octavio Paz as one of the great poetries of Mexico.

Review of Jim Chaffee's Sao Paulo Blues,
The Drill Press

Extreme Positions is Bett’s ninth book of poetry and signals a return to the social satire of High-Maintenance, Three Women, and Sass ‘n Pass.

 Charles Greenberg reflects on new books from Gloria Frym and Bernadette Mayer

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Michael X: A Life in Black & White by John L. Williams
a review in black and white by William Levy

Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink: Locus of the Enigmatic Polygeneration

...you're not supposed to have any sense of place... a sense of place orients and guides you, is like an extension of The Self into geography, your Who gets all secured in a landscape...
--Hugh Fox, Icehouse and Thirteen Keys to Talmud

Not many publishers offer an inaugural list spanning three generations (if they were rural Mormons it would be four), almost as many genders, three times as many genres, several certifiable genii, and the same number of mutually contradictory cosmologies as there are monikers on the roster.

Make that seven--

V. Ulea, Forrest Armstrong, Hugh Fox, GX Jupitter-Larsen, Duane Locke, Jase Daniels, Justin Aerni...

The first, with ease, within her polyverse,
subsumes her brethren's sixfold Weltanschauung.
A numen of topography will fix
the cosmic wants of Forrest and of Fox.
The fourth disdains all undemolished space,
yet will not see the spirit un-proudfleshed.
Bright tutelaries poetize the fifth,
affording him a broad terrestrial bent.
The final two portend a world too strange
to be encompassed by the alphabet.

The argument that to get the best and brightest one must pay exorbitant sums leads to some stunningly logical questions. Such as, Einstein didn't get paid shit, so does that mean he was not a particularly sharp tack? Worse even for such as Kurt Gödel or Elie Cartan or James Clerk Maxwell or Norbert Wiener. Think how advanced our technology could be had we but paid physicists and mathematicians sixteen figure salaries! Surely we would have found much brighter than those blighters who worked for peanuts. The fools. Perhaps we might have jumped directly to relativity, bypassing Newtonian physics entirely had we only paid someone enough in Newton's day. Or maybe if we had paid Newton more. Perhaps had we paid Einstein enough he might have produced a unified field theory.

At any rate, Bradley dumps the reader into a bar filled with ambisextrous literary star-groomers decidedly taken with Edwine's ensemble: "The sheer untutored vigor of certain presentation-selves transcends even the minimum requirements of grooming and personal hygiene." Yes, well, at least they didn't try to get him to eat cardoons a la Wolfgang Puck. "Yours, Dr. Edwine, is a naturally perfect ensemble. Unassailable from any angle, possessing amplitudes of unity and variety and radiance. And I can find absolutely nothing to change. Not so much as an orange nostril hair." This probably exhausts only a finite subset of the available directions, actually, but then just as we begin to settle along a path, maybe a geodesic even, WHAP! Bradley jerks our asses off to fucking China and the one child policy.