What's on My Nightstand

What’s on my nightstand? I wanted to share some new titles that I’ve been reading, with some commentary. 

I’ve been waiting 10 years for Genya Turovskaya’s first full length book, The Breathing Body of this Thought (Black Square Editions, 2019), since I first heard her read her work in 2008. “I need your attention / for the pleasure inside me to buck up like the colt.” Turovskaya’s poems glide from observation to insight and candor. She often holds her subject matter at a distance, that we may get close as she steps away. Readers will find themselves velcro’d to the imagery and language. From “The Listening Machine”: 

The mind is physical, says the Listening Machine.
The machine is physical.
The wet physical wind bends
                  the reeds of the physical field.
We are two bodies thinking together, this thought,
      the breathing body of this thought.
Call it the control tower beaming through the dark, the shadow
with opposable thumbs thrown in the resinous glow
of the painted cave, call it “the source,” an idea,
                     the idea that keeps—tenaciously—persisting,
making unreasonable demands

Rachelle Rahmé’s Count Thereof Upon the Other's Limbs (72 Press, 2019), with artwork by Jennifer Shear, just out from boutique press Cixous 72, is unlike most new poetry I see. Rahmé’s background in experimental film and philosophy inform the diction in this muscular and sometimes abstract collection, which vaults through a contemporary psychospace of the laborer in the urban space. In Rahmé’s lines, language itself becomes sculptural and sometimes romantic. From a poem called “Arbiter”:

Appetite, the will to consume
a thesis declaration should unveil itself threefold:
in part a book proposal
in part an application to mentorship
and lastly the expression of a sustained interest–
the first in a series of revisions on a supposed succubae: obsession
 
your plastic qualities: mannerisms, pace, size and markings, individuate and incrementalize
modern or participatory cynic
grotesque or absolute devaluator
addict or universal symptom, event horizon of urge waterbug on your back, you thrash
 
absurd or sometimes excuse for contact
and leave no fingerprints to trace
so still have venetian blinds
hanging scarred lines by sunlit burns
the brittle unfurled truth of commonwealth

Bay area poet Zoe Brezsny is one of my favorite authors-to-watch. This year the Oakland-based press Land and Sea released her book Earthwork. Brezsny’s aesthetic topography are the megafauna on the beaches that may interrupt a wet dream: 

“Light Beams for the Sky of a Transfer Corridor”
                             After Cedar Sigo
 
Everyone is dying to vacation
How to live in wonder
without thinking of someplace else
A forest bath dappled with light
A youtube music channel
called extreme private eros
Another word for celestial
or transcendent
Stars in the universe, relaxing screensaver
You’ll be famous for loving me
I’ll be famous for loving you
The most feared song explained
Bowing low before an iridescent yellow
Arriving home
She feels a short period of euphoria
after running on the treadmill
then drinking a tall glass of cool
not cold water

New publisher Blush just released a juicy bundle of chapbooks, including both first publications and some other veterans (check out Sampson Starkweather and Jamie Townsend). The ones I’ve been reading are first chapbooks by two “emerging” writers: Touchscreen Poems by Jeesoo Lee and Isn’t this Nice by Courtney Bush. From Jeesoo Lee’s poem “From This Point on the Bridge”:

seeing the sun
make the water
sparkle makes
me thirsty
happy that
the world
touches itself

Elaine Kahn’s highly anticipated second full length book, Romance or The End (Soft Skull, 2020), is a chapter book of poems tearing open the incomprehensible acts that decenter our sense of self, one section at a time. There’s an introduction, and other chapter titles include “The Long Month,” “Love’s Commercial,” “I Lose Hope”:

ROMANCE or THE END

This is a book about love.

And it is a book about lies.

Love can be a lie, but it is also always true.

This is is a book about truth.

This is a book about story.

There is no such thing as a true story and so there are no stories in this book.

Without a story, there is separation.

This is a book about separation.

Everything is a story. Even the truth.

There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love.

I published Rachel Rabbit White’s new book, Porn Carnival (Wonder, 2019), which comes out December 1st, so it’s definitely on my night stand. This is a formidable debut; similar to Elaine Kahn’s investigation of romance, Rachel Rabbit White navigates her own complicated relationships to love and labor, with a good humored playfulness that splashes the page with short poems from time to time:

POETRY IS SO LESBIAN 

Sappho made a spell 
last forever