including an erasure of cole swensen' american hybrid introduction & a preface thing.... tons of blurbs!from 2009!!!!
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for example
KENNETH GOLDSMITH
K. Silem Mohammad is the Andy Warhol of contemporary poetry, acutely scraping the bottom of the cultural barrel with such prescience, precision, and sensitivity that we are forced to reevaluate the nature of the language engulfing us. Our first impulse is to flee, to deny its worth, to turn away from it, to write it off as a big joke; but as with Warhol's car crashes or electric chairs, we are equally entranced, entertained, and repulsed: we can't stop looking. This is important and beautiful work, but not in the way we've come to expect. It's a double-edged sword that Mohammad is holding against our necks, forcing us to look at ourselves in the blade's reflection with equal doses of swooning narcissism and white-knuckled fear.
In NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, NOTES is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary.
As he once asked, at the blog of the Poetry Foun¬da¬tion (though with what seems in ret¬ro¬spect a disin¬gen¬u¬ous banal¬ity), “Nearly one hun¬dred years after Duchamp, why hasn’t appro¬pri¬a¬tion become a valid, sus¬tained[,] or even tested lit¬er¬ary prac¬tice?” Here now, Kent John¬son wagers the query with a vengeance, brazenly upping the ante of Uncre¬ative dialec¬tic by throw¬ing down before us a ready¬made ges¬ture that is noth¬ing but dizzy¬ing in the syn¬the¬sis of its con¬cep¬tion: a fla¬grant appro¬pri¬a¬tion of a Con¬cep¬tual work’s Author¬ship and Copy¬right, cat¬e¬gories which them¬selves had been branded into this same text, in fla¬grant appro¬pri¬a¬tion by another K (yes, me), in first, anti¬thet¬i¬cal instance. Thus, here at Boring Ranch, in gamble with a gambol, he claims all the cow chips, one could say, with the sear¬ing, aster¬isked irony of a double-K smok¬ing iron. His Day emerges hot and bright from the dead-dark of an inno¬cent pre-dawn, a sort of authen¬tic After¬life that rises from the “orig¬i¬nal” sim¬u¬lacral body in which it had lain (latent and expec¬tant). As in the best of Sher¬rie Levine, but more rad¬i¬cally still, it sum¬mons us, now, that we might think harder in its sudden light. Indeed, Kent Johnson’s Day stands as the first Con¬cep¬tual ges¬ture of its kind in the his¬tory of Amer¬i¬can poetry: An open, lit¬eral theft of an entire “book,” exhib¬ited with¬out shame, as a new and strange Work of Art in our Museum of Modern Poetry. I can only tip my hat.
JOHANNES GÖRANSSON
John Woods' THE COMPLETE COLLECTION brings the small-town America of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio into conversation with Italo Calvino's fake travelogue, Invisible Cities, and that book's dreamish vision of Imperial China. Like Calvino's novel, the book evokes a kind of nearly Renaissance-like iconographic worldview of Memory and the Imagination, but one channeled through the disposable world of American children's toys and comic books. The flat voice is disconcertingly balanced between farce, comedy and deadly seriousness.
DANIEL HANDLER
When I finished reading SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS I had to go to lunch with people in a restaurant with enormous beverages and misnamed sandwiches. I kept tapping my hand on the table and I didn't listen to anything anybody said. All I wanted to do was go home to read and write the kind of poetry Ellen Kennedy writes, declarative and nervous and wild and free. This is the sort of thing you want. This is the sort of book you should buy and you should buy it now instead of having lunch with those `friends.'
H.L. HIX
We have confessional poets, who write about themselves; nature poets, who write about place; experimental poets, who write about language. And we have F. Daniel Rzicznek, who finds 'many centers to the world,' whose DIVINATION MACHINE resists simplification into any one category. Rzicznek is a poet for whom 'Everything / is a piece of the vision.'
Poets have ever sought a seamless integration of art and life: think of Keats's 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' or Yeats's 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' In Bruce Bond's PEAL, as in the work of his best predecessors, 'it is impossible to know / where music ends, the world begins.'