Undersleep is Out!

So, if you look at my blog I imagine you've already received this announcement at least once, but Julie Doxsee's book is out from octopus Books. It's our first full-length book after eleven chapbooks & four broadsheets over the past two years. Of course I'm excited about this book so you can hardly think I'm going to be unbiased but this book is incredible. Doxsee's writing is like having these flashes into a fully functioning world that overlaps ours but also exists fully-formed outside of rational access.

When I first read Julie's work it was an anonymous submission to our chapbook series. I was blown away by that poem, The Knife-Grasses. It is an intensely concentrated yet effortless work of language & image. Over the past years, as I've read more & more of her work it's caused me to change the way I think about poetry & my own writing process. It's affected the way I hear a poem make its meaning. It has become an essential touchstone for me in understanding the new wave of poetry happening right now. Her poetry is work that truly needs to be in the public conversation of the art.

This is a book I can stay up all night reading & re-reading. A book that makes me want to call up my friends & read them poems over the phone. A book I want to put in every poetry student's hands. A book that continues to amaze me every time I open it up. I think you'll like it too.

Here's the announcement we sent out today:

Undersleep by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
$12
www.octopusbooks.net



In her debut collection, Julie Doxsee's finely wrought lyric poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language.

Born in London, Ontario, Julie Doxsee is a professor of writing and literature at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of the chapbooks The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press). Forthcoming publications include the book Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean) and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books).



Praise for Undersleep:

Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time, Julie Doxsee is a surprising and deeply gifted poet, and this, her first book, glows in the dark.
—Cole Swensen


These are the secret nighttime children's tales that parents aren't allowed to read, the winking sparks sent up from the bonfire. They flicker into a vast vaulted space where all is black around. Here, the body of language is stripped of its flesh. And the poem-bones begin to dance—the joints of human language and its articulations. It's a little bit scary.
—Eleni Sikelianos

The debut full-length poetry collection by author Julie Doxsee, Undersleep features a fluidly brief economy of words that nonetheless evoke ripples from the reader's unconsciousness. Touched with the emotional longing, Undersleep shines with the brilliant promise of a half-formed dream. "Peripheral": Paradise is not a thing to keep. / Shadows are little nighttimes / for pronouncing / night's hymn. // Night's hymn / cannot contain / doses of / Paradise. Sleep / is a movement through not. // Undersleep thickens want as it prods. / Make the proper substitutions above.
—Midwest Book Review


***


Forthcoming from Octopus Books this fall:

Eric Baus' full-length book Tuned Droves
Matthew Rohrer's chapbook They All Seemed Asleep

***

Julie Doxsee will be in America during the first weeks of August, giving readings

Minneapolis & Chicago readings: Details TBD

Saturday, August 9th
Brooklyn, NY: The Melville House
Reading with Matvei Yankelevich
& X-ing Press poets Justin Talyor & Jeremy Schmall

Sunday August 10th
Richmond, VA: Chop Suey Books
Reading with Sommer Browning, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina

Monday August 11th
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Wednesday, August 13th
Washington, DC: The Washington Literary Salon
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Thursday, August 14th
Providence, Rhode Island
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Friday, August 15th
Amherst, MA
Reading with Betsy Wheeler & Mathias Svalina

Saturday, August 16th
Boston area: Brookline Booksmith
reading with Janaka Stuckey, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina


***

Octopus Magazine will be accepting submissions during the month of August. Email a friendly amount of poems and a brief cover letter to octopusmagazine@gmail.com.

We are still reading reviews and recovery projects for the upcoming issue of Octopus.

Sabrina Orah Mark Reading

on Apostrophe Cast

More Michael Rerick Related News: Chapbook X-Ray Available from Flying Guillotine Press

My new feature on this blog is I'm going to tell you new things about Michael Rerick every day. For instance did you know that the Right Honourable Sir Michael Rerick (1874-1965), the son of Lord Randolph Rerick and an American mother, was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst. After a brief but eventful career in the army, he became a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1900. He held many high posts in Liberal and Conservative governments during the first three decades of the century. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty - a post which he had earlier held from 1911 to 1915. In May, 1940, he became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and remained in office until 1945. He took over the premiership again in the Conservative victory of 1951 and resigned in 1955. However, he remained a Member of Parliament until the general election of 1964, when he did not seek re-election. Queen Elizabeth II conferred on Michael Rerick the dignity of Knighthood and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter in 1953. Among the other countless honours and decorations he received, special mention should be made of the honorary citizenship of the United States which President Kennedy conferred on him in 1963.

Michael Rerick's literary career began with campaign reports: The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898) and The River War (1899), an account of the campaign in the Sudan and the Battle of Omdurman. In 1900, he published his only novel, Savrola, and, six years later, his first major work, the biography of his father, Lord Randolph Michael Rerick. His other famous biography, the life of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, was published in four volumes between 1933 and 1938. Michael Rerick's history of the First World War appeared in four volumes under the title of The World Crisis (1923-29); his memoirs of the Second World War ran to six volumes (1948-1953/54). After his retirement from office, Michael Rerick wrote a History of the English-speaking Peoples (4 vols., 1956-58). His magnificent oratory survives in a dozen volumes of speeches, among them The Unrelenting Struggle (1942), The Dawn of Liberation (1945), and Victory (1946).

Michael Rerick, a gifted amateur painter, wrote Painting as a Pastime (1948). An autobiographical account of his youth, My Early Life, appeared in 1930.





Also, Michael Rerick's chapbook X-Ray is available for purchase here from Flying Guillotine Press.

Ragnar Vigdahl

I always wondered who Ragnar Vigdahl is

Congratulations Michael!

YES!


Michael Rerick from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

Recent Records

v/a: African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s





Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: Lie Down in the Light








Caina: Some People Fall





The Child Readers: Music Heard Far Off





Fen: Ancient Sorrow




Nachtmystium: Assassins: Black Meddle, Part 1





Ponytail: Ice Cream Spiritual





V. Sjöberg New Jazz Ensemble: Do Nothing 'Til You Hear From




Phya: Haunted House





Wold: Stratification





Wrnlrd: Oneiromantical War

Seven Legs

Have you been seeing these stickers & billboards that say "Go Veg Go Green Supreme Master Television"?

Proof that Flarf is verisimilitude.

The website is less bizarre.

Maybe.

There was a show about Druids.

Supreme Master Television!



I miss the am radio jingles on the Lincoln stations.

O-O-O-Reilly's

South Lincoln vets
the best place for your pets

I love how am radio commercial jingles are performed by people who are completely committed to the songs. They might be singing about auto parts but they are reaching for the stars.



In RI last weekend I biked a little path through a wetlands park. I wonder if soon there will be little strips of seemingly natural land surrounding all the bike paths to give the illusion that the environment not seem totally degraded.



Something that drives me nuts is the amount of littering in my neighborhood. People just drop things on the ground. It makes me flinch every time. It's similar to how when I moved to Lincoln I would be aghast that people I knew did not recycle. I'd be a friend's house & they'd throw a bottle into the trashcan & it would make me twitch.



This spider has seven legs.

Acoustic Experience, by Noah Eli Gordon

I got this message in my email today -- looks like the Pavement Saw website isn't ready to sell the chappies yet, but i'm sure it'll update presently & in the meantime you can order it through paypal!

Acoustic Experience
by Noah Eli Gordon

David says, "This collection is mostly serial prose poems (8 to 10 pieces in length) written in grammatically correct bonifide post new sentence sentences without funny animals or inanimate objects that talk like most American poetasters have inflicted upon us through a thin veneer of unsubstantiated surrealism. I am going to ruin the ending, here is the last poem.

An Acoustic Experience

Inoculate with ones & zeros
the sound of the human voice

You have a computer’s unrequited compassion
& I, the outline of an ostrich
torn in half, tacked to a pixilated heart

The perfect companion’s a photograph of sand

Unexpanding, elegant universe
something something something the end



can be acquired for $9 pp via paypal to info@pavementsaw.org "

Not sure how the random dig at contemporary surrealism fits in, but I'm excited to read Noah's new chapbook.

Crystal Curry Reading Tonight at Unnamable Books

Reading @ Unnameable Books July 8th, 8pm

+ + + +

UNNAMEABLE BOOKS
***
456 Bergen Street
Brooklyn NY 11217
(718) 789-1534

+ + + +

Crystal Curry was born in Greenville, Illinois in 1974. Her chapbook
LOGOTHERAPY PANT is out by Costra Nostra Editions. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Open City, Conduit, VERSE, and The Hat and is featured on-line at Wave Books' The Bedazzler. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Curry lives in Seattle where she helps manage a gourmet deli and studies to be a cheesemonger. She recommends Cypress Grove Cheve's Humboldt Fog for any and all occasions. She is also a mother to six-year-old Cor Finnegan.

http://www.wavepoetry.com/bedazzler/2 (under crystal curry)
http://www.actionyes.org/issue1/curry/curry1.htm
http://cosanostra-editions.com/thecorporealother.html

+ + + +

Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City in 1963. His latest book TEXT LOSES TIME is out by ManyPenny Press. He has co-written and performed a one-man play about experimental composer Morton Feldman. Vassilakis is co-founder and curator for the Subtext Reading Series and editor of Clear-Cut: Anthology (A Collection of Seattle Writers). His visual poetry and videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review. He works for Fantagraphic Books and lives in Seattle with his son, Quixote.

http://www.mipoesias.com/2006/vassilakis.html
http://9thstlab.blogspot.com/2006/05/seven-pieces-by-nico-vassilakis.html
http://www.cnvill.net/mfvassilakis.htm
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~blc35/final/vassilakis.html

Calm

Does anyone have a copy of this record by any chance?

I used to have it & lost it.

Tortilla Face