first thought: reader takes shot at editor, then: see exchange

Inside Nocturnal New Orleans, excerpts:

A moving epistolary family saga

COMING SOON! IN THE CORPSE! FROM HARIETTE SUROVELL! FROM NEW YORK! CONSTIPATED COLETTE: THE NEED FOR A FLUSH!

Read the notice below, direct from Hariette:
I've been out-of-town since 7/10, but I'm back in Gentrificationland. Been here lately? The hood of funky dives, cool cafes and George-Therese Dickenson's crib (did I tell you that my landlord reports that she permanently joined a nudist's colony?) now looks like Lex in the 40's or anywhere on the Upper East Side. Sky-scrapery buildings and bourgeois restaurants, all are meant to cater to NYU trustfunders and H-wood celebs in their stretch limos. Will they re-name "The Bowery" something like "Cooper Alley"? And where exactly have all the Bowery Bums gone?

June 23, 2009, From Eddie Woods:

Event:  July 1st 14.30-15.30 Homage in rue Git-le-Coeur; Harold Norse

After lunch, the Homage will rendezvous outside No. 9, rue Git-le-Coeur for the installation, in collaboration with the management of the Relais Hotel du Vieux Paris, of a "plaque commemorative" to mark the historical site of
the old Beat Hotel. There will be a small drinks reception hosted by the hotel, souvenirs of Burroughs recounted by poet Nina Zivancevic, reminiscences by the Scottish artist and former Beat Hotel resident, Elliot
Rudie, and readings in the street, including the texts of Fred de Vries’ homage to Sinclair Beiles, Max Blagg's "Three Dollar Bill," and, in memoriam for Harold Norse, "Hydra Waterfront" by Neeli Cherkovski and a special tribute from his friend Eddie Woods.

FRESH OFF THE NOW!
                
www.AmericanSideshow.org
 
Back from a long hiatus, American Sideshow is brimming with clever tips on weathering the new economic crisis (including 15 things to do with packing tape and treating a staph infection with Diet Cherry Coke).  
 
This issue features "The Drifter's Guide To Temporary Housing."  Here you'll find five-star squatting requires nothing more than a little gumption and breaking into an abandoned meat packing plant.
 
Guaranteed to make you chuckle, http://www.americansideshow.org/ has also been known to cure maladies such as restless spine syndrome and chestal mites.
 
Note: Special guest appearance by Dominic "Frank" Peroni - mob lawyer.  (Legal briefing on drifter's rights may involve "a few odd jobs" and buying Jimmy "The Chin" a panini.
 
Yours truly,
 
Diana Grove - Editor
AmericanSideshow.org
http://www.dianagrove.org/

A decadent celebrity bed, charged with a thousand and one nights times ten's nights filled with vibrant sexual action, is being auctioned off on July 4th, 2009.  The auction begins on May 15, 2009. The love-soaked queen-size mattress has seen more than was described in the more than a dozen books about this Don Juan's life. The minimum bid is $15,000, and bidders should be willing to bid without knowing the celebrity's name, who will be revealed only to the winner. A good deal of faith is involved, but the payoff goes beyond the object's value: owners of the bed will experience deep revitalization. If you would like to bid, send your inquiries to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Franklin Rosemont, surrealist revolutionary, died Sunday, April 12, at the age of 65.

Click Below to Read the Newest Reviews:

Simon Pettet: Hearth
Andrei Codrescu & Ruxandra Cesereanu: Forgiven Submarine

Click Here for a List of All Reviews

NOIR: A HISTORY OF MY BOOK REVIEWS: All around me, screaming silently à la E. Münch, the towers of unread books turned and turned toward me, a tiny man of flesh with no time on his hands or anywhere else on his body.
(read the rest of this story at bottom of reviews)

A

Uncensored Songs: A Sam Abrams Tribute, festschrift gathered by John Roche in honor of great rad friend/poet Sam Abrams. Contributors include Amiri Baraka, Tony Weinberger, and many others. We bow before Sam with delight & love.



Adriane Albertowicz, Salty and Haiku, Hawaii: from the author, somehow. One thing the Corpse is very good at, as the techne mega-gorilla keeps marching on, is paying attention to the handwritten, the smudged, the eccentrically set text. Around the mid-90s, manuscripts and books arriving in our offices, started looking mind-numbingly perfect. A nicotine-stained handwritten letter with a prison return-address got our attention a lot quicker than your pristinely spaced mss. produced by computer. The payoff was great: not only were the nonconformist mailings more reasuring (there are still humans in the world!), but the contents were better, too. It's as if the perfect machines also produced perfectly boring texts, and, by extension, turned writers into the perfectly boring people they were always meant to be (by their parents and schools). This process was rapid and we are now in an age when anyone can make a good-looking book and publish it, or, even better, just send herm URL around the world. All this is by way of introduction to two peachy fresh books of poetry written by a poet in her twenties who typed her poems, bound them in cheap cardboard, sewed them by hand, and sent them to me stll smelling of salty ocean from Hawaii. Adriane Albertowicz has an impeccable poetry pedigree, beginning in a chance encounter with the poetry of Jeffrey Miller, and being the daughter of a poet, but she has incorporated her lyric roots and is her own woman.  Salty has a crudely drawn seagull on the cover and Haiku has an acrylic hand-splashed crow on it, but beyond the lovely retro-look, her garage band performs like a master. From Haiku: "Everyday": When I walk home/ I count the crushed/ Green frogs/ Along the way. And from Salty: I dreamed//love meant/catching what goes free/The thought broke,//it frightened me awake. You can say that the verse is as raw as the production, but then you'd have to say the same about the ancient Chinese poets and many great observant Americans. There are love poems here that throb with the sentiments of nature, and one can smell the big waves.



Elisa Albo, Passage to America, march street press, greensboro, 2006, marchstreetpress.com. Cuban-born, American-raised, big heart beating (or fluttering?) over the water between Florida and the Island, this poet makes vivid her bivalval yearnings with precision and delicacy. "if I can't/ go home again to what I have never known/ with my flesh, how can I return to a place that/ lives in the liquid center of my imagination?" (Cuba: a Geobiography).



William Allegrezza, Otoliths. 8 Kennedy St, Rockhampton, QLD 4700, Australia. http://the-otolith.blogspot.com . Even if this poet didn’t use one of my lines to kick off his “otoliths,” I’d find his work as interesting as a jagged mountain range. These “otoliths” are forms with gaps, like sonnets with holes made in them by “the trickle of voices from across a field.” The word-expedition Allegrezza leads into this landscape of silences and questions is marine as well as alpine (“when tides cease/ when hands ask for life”), which is how one goes about the job these days when iffrits with bags full of commas stalk the poet through “a tracing of maps on a steel drum.” It’s good to see the page used well and to public utility.



Kostas Anagnopoulos, Various Sex Acts,  printed in Brooklyn 2008, in an edition of 500 by the author, twenty-six copies lettered A-Z and signed (we don’t have one of those). Representative of micro-press product, this is a cogent discourse by a poet who’d like to speak Greek, or maybe does or maybe “changing languages mid-sentence/ Without translation or remedy. “ (he does not)



Radu Andriescu, The Catalan Within, translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Radu Andriescu. Fayetteville: Longleaf Press. Andriescu is a poet and carpenter: “I think about happiness/ as if it were a piece of lumber.” We used to think of it as a warm gun, but those days are gone.



j. reuben appelman, make loneliness, Otis Books/ seismicity editions, The Graduate Writing Program, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, 2008 (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.). This mysterious little book sits in its plain black covers like an accordeon packed tight with oedipal explosives. A series of prose texts structured as letters and brief passaged named culled (some actually "culled" from the longer letters) add up to a powerful engine of language with a sound both familiar and unfamiliar to these ears. Here is a letter, in its entirety: "At the kitchen table are corpses, and we hear the piccolos playing. A piccolo is now in fashion and you get one free when you buy a flute. There are people who can play with their lips. I have played a keyboard before and it was like playing fangs. I have tried to tell my children this but they were hanging from the trees. They are urinating. It's day and night with them. Soon I will build my boy a house in the onion patch, and he will forgive me for my dense-starred flag. O my daughter, child of the universe, I command you to awaken from this half-burned barn, this shadow over the limitless and awesome." I don't know what they put in the water at Otis, but all their publications are first-rate work,; the names of the writers are oddly unknown to us, but they impress us as full-grown oracles and inspired language-users.

B

Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the Next Body, and A Hundred Silences, Cape Town, South Africa: Kwela Books. www.gabeba.com. This South African poet’s books are winners of the Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Poetry, which reminds the editor that he too is the winner of the GE Younger Poets Award, and leads us all to wonder something-something. Rolex also puts out a lot of dough for poets. Good. Gabeba is a sensual poet who uses blackbirds, salt, and sea waves.



Tetra Balestri, Cheap Imitations, New York: Green Zone, 66 George Street, Brooklyn, NY 11206. These are cheap imitations of many poets, including Jim Brodey, Anselm Hollo, and Anne Porter.



Gordon Ball, Scenes from East Hill Farm, Seasons with Allen Ginsberg, Coventry, England: Nr. 13 in The Beat Scene, www.beatscene.com. Gordon Ball, a good friend of Allen and eminent photographer of Allen’s circle, spent time in the poet’s putative paradise at East Hill Farm, and writes about it with warmth and humor. “”by midsummer we were surrounded by a burgeoning animal population – African geese, Muscovy ducks, Polish hens and other chickens, a jersey cow, a fast horse, milk goats, two dogs, morning doves, cats.” He was also there when Allen received the tragic call telling him that Jack Kerouac had died. Dark Music, Cityful Press, Longmont, 2006. These prose-poem like flashbacks and meditations are Gordon Ball’s language photographs. They are quick, gripping, true, earnest.



Eric Basso, Decompositions, Essays on Art & Literature, 1973-1989, and Revagations: A Book of Dreams, Volume I, 1966-1974, Raleigh: Asylum Arts, PO Box 90473, Raleigh, NC 27675. The prolific author we have happily published in past Exquisite Corpses, is what the French call an homme-de-lettres, a man of letters, a speciae of rara avis these days when writers specialise strenuously (and tediously). Among Eric Basso's meditations in "Decompositions," a title reminiscent of E.M. Cioran's "Un precis de decomposition," are considerations of Alfred Jarry, Flaubert, and Kafka. "Revagations" is a book of surreal-real dreams collected over time like water in barrels in the Sonora desert.



Ruth Behar, An Island Called Home, Returning to Jewish Cuba, photographs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. This is a lovely memoir of a search for lost roots in a country that seems at first to have erased that part of its history. Not so. Ruth Behar finds people and places that have stubbornly refused to fade away.



Bill Berkson, Fugue State, poems, Cambridge, Massachussetts: Zoland Books. Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently, poems, Woodacre, California: Owl Press, www.theowlpress.com. Sudden Address, Selected Lectures 1981-2006, SPD, Cuneiform Press, www.cuneiformpress.com. What's Your Idea of a Good Time? (with Bernadette Meyer), SPD, Tuumba Press, www.spdbooks.org . This cornucopia of Bill Berkson books came to us thanks to an appearance by the poet himself in New Orleans, thanks to Dave Brinks. Berkson gave a spectacular reading at the Gold Mine Saloon, that demonstrated a number of things: 1. the Gold Mine has created a sophisticated audience that can hear with the best of them at St. Marks' Poetry Project or at Intersection, 2. so well can this audience hear, the usually reticent poet bounced forth for an encore, like other astonished greats this year, Ron Padgett, for example, 3. there is a new way to read Berkson after hearing him. I have been a long-time reader and appreciator of the intelligence, music, care, and humor of Bill Berkson's poetry, but this reading gave me new access to his verse. There was always something of a mythical aura about Berkson, the collaborator of Frank O'Hara and one of the chiefs of the New York School whose friends included painters as well as poets. The cover of Fugue State is by Yvonne Jacquette, that of Sudden Address by Philip Guston. Sudden Address, a selection of essays on poetry and painting is a manual for hearing and seeing the works of Philip Guston, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch, among many others. Berkson's constellation of friendships led to profound and useful reflections on their work and constitute, in this book and elsewhere in his work, a solid bridge between the two arts and an enlightening guide to the New York School and, in effect, to the modern proposals of these arts in the last half of the 20th century. The delightful What's Your Idea of a Good Time? is a spacious and joyful collaboration with Bernadette Meyer on the title question. In his dedication to me, Bill asks, "Dear André, What's the worst thing you've ever done? (see p 51) Love, Bill." On p. 51, we find a number of the worst things Bill Berkson has ever done, including: "I was incredibly mean to Frank O'Hara one time: I shouted at him for liking the sound of his own voice too much." Now, anyone who's ever been told that by a dear one, has permission to smile, and that smile will get wider as the implications begin to dawn: Frank O'Hara, the poet who was all about voice is being told by his friend to pipe down. How alive is that? And how much more alive does that make Frank O'Hara, dead now four plus decades? It's not the worst thing Bill has ever done (this bit is No.2 of the worst things), but it's one with cosmic reverb. Berkson's own poetry is subtle and demonstratively abstract in the manner of, let's say, DeKooning: it has an imagistic hardness and lushness that sweeps aside whatever you might have been thinking before you got to: "as if pins were/ to be pushed dimly/ inches downward from/ a manila star." And speaking of pins, the name is Andrei, Bill, not Andrè, it's Romanian not French. That's rude, but not the worst thing I've ever done. Berkson is one of our greatest contemporaries, and shouting at him over a lost letter and a misplaced accent makes me feel great. The new way of reading Berkson's poetry that hearing him granted me, was to regain an intimacy with the work. When distance intervenes, years or miles, one tends to lose one's ear. Hearing him was a joy, and the grace of reconnecting to the page a real jolt & gift. In the mail now, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writigs 1985-2003, qua books, 2003, www.quabooks.com. Berkson wrote art criticism most of his adult life, and he is among that select circle of poet-critics, along with Frank O'Hara, Edwin Denby, John Ashbery, and Carter Ratcliff,  who have made contemporary American art both a cause and an occasion. As a cause, it was a tough sell, as the art world developed its own critical languages and the art market kept close watch over them; as an occasion, it was a much better deal, giving poets license to make language-art of their own. In the interesting preface-defense of art-critical writing, Berkson quotes Carter Ratcliff saying, "language in the vicinity of what it's talking about," and this makes reading his essays a matter of reading pleasure. As for the art, the critic ranges widely and freely, quite joyfully t first, when the pieces are about Hans Hoffman, Franz Kline, De Kooning Wayne Thiebaud, Alex Katz, or Ed Ruscha, artists accessible to the eye and generally familiar even to the occasional museum-goer; things get a bit rougher with the conceptualists and minimalists of the Eighties and Nineties, like for instance, David Ireland, to whom Berkson brings a whole philosophical arsenal in order to give him a coherence the artist neither pursues nor recognizes. These occasional pieces are quite brilliant and they shine best when the poet is on the familiar ground of his own artistic and cultural modernist education.



Florin Bican, Cantice Marlanesti, Humanitas Educational, 2007. If one read these poems in Romanian, the language they were intended to be read in, one might think them untranslateable; they rhyme, they are full of local reality and slang, and they are funny-tragic. The poet is, however, a consummate writer of English, as evidenced by his Ballad of Arabella, that we published in both languages. We hope he writes a book in American English, as musical and potent as these "uncouth songs."



Debra Di Blasi, The Jiri Chronicles and Other Fictions, FC2, University of Alabama Press. This is a multi-faceted collection of totally fun and sexy stories and art from a fertile and wild imagination. From choruses to collages, the story of Jiri resonates like a new Good Soldier Sweik.



Gunnar Björling, Du Gar de örd, translated from Swedish by Fredrik Hertzberg, Action Books, www.actionbooks.com. This Finland-Swedish modernist is a musical poet whose words look great in the original on the left-hand page, and work well with the English on the right. The term finlandsvensk is a politically charged description of the language and movement of Modernist Finns who wrote in Swedish after the first World War.



Roberto Bolano, Night in Chile, Amulet, Nazi Literature in the Americas, The Savage Detectives, Last Evenings on Earth, New York: New Directions. www.ndpublishing.com. This great Chilean novelist wrote six amazing novels before dying young. He has taken us past the lovely seduction of magical-realism into a new writerly freedom that mixes the breezy elegance of the New York School of poetry with the poetry-steeped souls of Chile and Mexico City. Buy the stuff, it gets you high.



Marlena Braester, oublier en avant/ uitarea dinainte, Bucharest: Editura Vinea, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This is a bi-lingual (French & Romanian) book of an Israeli-French-Romanian poet whose specialty is listening to silence and discerning its nuances and depths. “în inima pietrii/ cea mai densã obscuritate/ au coeur de la pierre/ la plus dense obscurité.” (At the heart of stone/ the thickest darkness.) Vinea is Romania’s foremost publisher of avantgarde and contemporary poetry. The editor, Nicolae Tzone, is himself a poet, and he takes extraordinary care with his books, which are always a visual treat.



Joe Brainard,
 The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard, Los Angeles, Siglio Press, 2008
If... by Joe Brainard, Los Angeles, Siglio Press, 2008
www.sigliopress.com

Joe Brainard was both a great artist and a great writer, a rara avis, in the best of times. His epic I Remember, is one of the literary accomplishments of the late 20th century, a long poem in which every line begins with the words “I remember,” and then goes on to recall everything that Joe Brainard’s memory was able to recall, from his earliest childhood to the moment of writing. The swift and witty practice of memory in I Remember is an exercise in truth and accuracy, a manual of American culture, pop and not, and a psychoanalytical tour-de-force directed not just at specific and personal neuroses, but at the incurable and painfully amusing maladies of a whole society. Joe Brainard, like his New York School friends and contemporaries, Kenward Elmslie, John Ashbery, Bill Berkson, Ron Padgett, and Ted Berrigan among them, managed to ride with verve the zeitgeist of an age rich in creative stimulation and ready-made for revolution. Joe was a Pop artist, in the sense that his art, like his writing, blew out the frames of genre and the conventions of the medium, and partook with pleasure and energy from the demotic. “The Nancy Book” chronicles the adventures of the comic-book character Nancy in Joe’s own world, in collaboration with Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Frank Lima, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett and James Schuyler. This beautifully produced edition comes also with essays by Ann Lauterbach and Ron Padgett. “If...” is a series of postcards presenting Nancy in a variety of “if” situations (see below). The reprinting of these extremely rare works by Joe Brainard is an event for at least two reasons: 1. “The Nancy Book” is a masterwork of collaboration from the age of collaboration between artists and writers, a practice of instantly communicable delight that occured only twice in the 20th century: the dada-surrealist age, 1915-1935, and the New York School, 1957-1973, and 2. while comix have become “acceptable” for both “high” art and commercial translation (into movies), they have never attained the freshness and impertinence of being recast for the first time with such vigurous insouciance. Joe Brainard was a genius who had the good luck of living at the right time and having genius friends. Snap up these books, people, you never know when another epoch of public misery and artistic glory will sweep us away. When it does, you’ll have guides.

C

Iulian Cãnãnãu, O istorie documentarã a SUA, Bucharest: Editura-Agatha, www.biz. It’s weird, but there are a lot of great founding texts of the U.S. that I never read until I found them in this primer for Romanian students by Professor Cãnãnãu. What I learned: natives take for granted “the making of the Americans,” as Getrude Stein put it. Don’t, natives! Use another language if you must, but read The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of the Confederacy, George Washington’s Farewell, and a few major Supreme Court decisions today! Actually, this is a bilingual book, so you can read them in the original, too.



Magda Cârneci, Dan Hayon, O colectie de mirosuri/ A Collection of Smells, Bucharest: Romanian Cultural Institute. Here is an old dream of mine realized by poet Magda Carneci, with evocative photographs by Dan Hayon. In 1989 I returned to Romania after nearly three decades in the U.S., to "cover" the "revolution" for radio and TV, but secretly hoping to smell my way back into childhood, a secret proustian project that I've had to pursue under the cover of "journalism," and in almost as much secrecy (scent is a solitary and perverse affair: you cannot sniff in company, and the very act of inhaling must be conducted with absolute concentration.) Here now is the poetic project of a keen nose. Above the entry "In smmer, Bucharest Smells Oriental," is this "A world almost begotten, almost born, yet still imprecise, hesitating, just not ready. Over which, surretitious but all-pervading, the spicy, mouth-watering flavor of mititei hovers, garlicky and meaty." Voila, the meat of the matter smoking through the shimmer of a still-tentative city and society. Poets have not always kept their eyes or their minds open, but the best among them always kept an open nose. Our first sense, close to the forest floor, the sense most refractory to language, finds here a connoisseur.



Magda Cârneci, Art et Pouvoir en Roumanie, 1945-1989, Paris: L’Harmattan, www.librairieharmattan.com. A masterful disssection of the recent corpse of communism by one of our contributors, a major Romanian poet.



Mircea Cãrtãrescu, Orbitor, aripa dreapta, Bucharest: Editura Humanitas,
www.librariilehumanitas.ro. This is the “sequel” of an immensely imaginative poetic novel that completes Cartarescu’s vision of childhood and a Bucharest that is no more. Translated, awarded, and praised in Europe and Latin America, Cãrtãrescu has only one book in English, Nostalgia, translated by Julian Semilian, and published by New Directions, www.ndpublishing.com, in 2006. There should be more, this is a world-class writer.



Mark DeCarteret, (If This Is the) New World, Greensboro, NC: www.marchstreetpress.com. The poet says “I was reading a book about fingerprints,” and one of those prints is in the Exquisite Corpse.



Norene Cashen, The Reverse is also True, Detroit: Doorjamb Press, www.doorjambpress.org. See her poetry in this issue. Or, as blurbed by editor: “Norene Cashen ‘s poems are sad and beautiful, they remind me of why I’m sometimes afraid of poetry.”



Nina Cassian, Avangarda nu moare si nu se predã, poeme si desene (antologie 1947-2007). Bucharest: Editura Vinea, with an essay by Serban Foarta, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This is the great nonagenarian Romanian poet’s own selection of her work and drawings. The title alone, “the avantgarde doesn’t die and it doesn’t surrender,” should tell you something about the fierce spirit of this much-loved poet who strode sexily and without false humility through almost the entire 20^th century.



Ruxandra Cesereanu, coma. Bucharest: Editura Vinea, 2008. I heard Ruxandra read poems from this collection in the basement of the Carturesti bookstore in Bucharest in early June 2008, and I was surprised. I don't say this lightly: there is something new about every one of her poetry books, some kind of intention of creating a whole object. In coma, she writes rough-edged love lyrics that are anything but nice, but end up both musically and visually compelling. For instance, from the suite of poems entitled suita porceasca (porcine suite), here in an approximate rendering: there is also the chunk of meat filled with dark force/ this is the hulking girl with horse-giraffe hips/ she only talks with the big sex of the devil-man/ talks/ mumbles/ gurgles/ glues herself/ blinks..., you get (some of) the picture. There are some carnally tender moments in this porcine suite, too, and it was all made triply surreal by her soft but forceful reading in the vaulted basement where she arrived late from Rio de Janeiro via Paris. Later, we had dinner with Ioana Avadani and Laura at a Romanian restaurant called "Carul cu Tei," and then she took a late-night train to Cluj. Poet on the move, look out!



Ruxandra Cesereanu, Crusader-Woman, poems translated by Adam J. Sorkin with the poet, containing "Letter to American Poets," written directly in English. Introduction by Andrei Codrescu, Afterword by Calin-Andrei-Mihailescu. Boston: Black Widow Press. www.blackwidowpress.com . The first major collection in English by this formidable Romanian poet. To quote from my introduction: "Ruxandra Cesereanu begins her journey at the ur-ground of poetry, the beginning of the begots: 'You are there, and I here.' This is from her Letter to American Poets, written directly in English. 'You are there, and I here' is the first and last human utterance and the first and last line of poetry ever written. The Chinese poets applaud. Ruxandra’s Here is Cluj, Romania, a medieval city where frozen stone knights stand and lie with Gothic stoicism in cathedrals, watching history coagulate, disintegrate, evanesce, and start again. Among them is a Woman Crusader whose story the poet has elicited from dream and chronicle in a conversation that traverses the entirety of her flesh and blood.



Ruxandra Cesereanu, Venetia cu vene violete, Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia. Romania’s foremost “delirionist” (a movement she invented in hommage to psychedelics) writes hallucinatory love letters from her favorite city. Venice has already appeared and will continue to make appearances in her poetry and stories, and in here it’s a particularly violent Venice: “Capul ti l-as taia cind ai muri/ ca dar pentru dragostea mea naluca.” (I’d cut off your head when you die/ as a gift for my crazed love.) That is quite believable and I, editor of Exquisite Corpse, know wherefore I speak: I wrote “Submarinul Iertat” (The Forgiven Submarin), an epic-lyric poem in collaboration with Ruxandra, and many were the times when my head was near-rolling. Luckily, we conducted our collaboration by e-mail. After its limited edition by Editura Brumar (www.brumar.ro) in Bucharest in 2008, it will be published by Black Widow Press in the U.S. in my translation in 2009. Head-spinningly frigging incestuous.



Ruxandra Cesereanu, Nasterea Dorintelor Lichide, Bucharest: Editura Cartea Romaneasca, www.cartearomaneasca.ro. This is a book about desire and the body, written for the purposes of both arousing and chastising, a kind of S&M manual by a masterful but perverse poet who uses words as if they were actual skin cells or sperms. The last section of the book classifies types of men, as a kind of feminist response to her contemporary, poet Mircea Cartarescu, who wrote a hugely successful book called, “Why We Love Women.” Cesereanu’s men are drawn rather broadly (haha!), but they do resemble, uncomfortably, some real local dudes who are gunning for her in the newspapers.



Dumitru Chioaru, clipe fosforescente, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Limes. This Transylvanian poet from Sibiu is the editor of “Euphorion,” a literary monthly, and an infinitely patient man: “I never hurried destiny – woe is me!/ but at my back someone is collecting traces like sudden mushrooms.” We also know who that is, which is why we don’t turn around.



Petru Cimpoesu, Noua proze vechi. Fictiuni Ilicite, Bucharest: Editura Polirom, 2008. If you were wondering where all the intelligent and funny story-tellers went after Milan Kun

Dear Andrei

Just saw your name on Jayne Lyn'sotes page also sent to me of her fine poem about NY NY.

Everyone still talks about the great show you did at JazzMouth Fest in 2007.

Billy collins did it last year and we all had a great time.

I'll be gong back for fifth year and Mose Allison and Bob Durough will also be there, two GREAT musicians.

Been working like mad.