We’re too busy suppressing our AWP jealousy to actually read this week. Are you at AWP? Having a panic attack about which tables to visit at the book fair? (Let’s be honest, I don’t feel that bad for you.) Or are you, like me, pining miles away, wishing you were there? Either way, here’s a list of fantastic presses and literary organizations to check out, whether it be at the AWP Book Fair or on the good ol’ interwebs. Nerd on, dear literary friends!
Birds, LLC
I found out about Birds, LLC, when I read poet and Birds editor Matt Rasmussen’s book of poems, Black Aperture (my review here). An independent poetry press, Rasmussen runs Birds, LLC with four other editors and even more staff members between Austin, Minneapolis, New York, and Raleigh. They recently announced their newest title, DEAD HORSE by Niina Pollari (mesmerizing cover art pictured here).
A Strange Object
A small, very new publisher of “surprising, heartbreaking” fiction, A Strange Object likes to push its readers off the safe-reading ledge with big-impact stories. While they haven’t published a whole lot yet, I’m interested to see where they go.
Dancing Girl Press
I discovered this press when a friend and mentor of mine had her book published here. They have an exquisite chapbook series that focuses on women poets and artists. They also specialize in book arts and paper goods in addition to publishing great work. I’m sure their AWP table will have plenty to drool over!
Flying Object Press
A publisher of fiction and poetry, in addition to an art organization, Flying Object boasts an ambitious mission to “provide a range of resources, opportunities and education to writers, artists, musicians, and publishers both locally and nationwide.” They achieve this through a studio/lab storefront, performances, readings, workshops, exhibits, and more, all the while publishing via their press and literary magazine.
Black Ocean Press
We’ve reviewed multiple books from this publisher (here and here), and also interviewed their poetry editor, Carrie Olivia Adams (here). They describe their editorial vision as combining their various influences with “a radical social perspective on the nature of art and humanity.” They also throw a helluva party, concert, and exhibition in addition to publishing thought-provoking work. Worth a stop!
Which organizations and publishers are you most excited about? If you’re at AWP, are there new publishers/orgs that you haven’t encountered before?
Dark Matter by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Görannson (Black Ocean, 2013)
John Cage said “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry.” I think this quote, like Cage’s work, can be bent and reshaped in different ways and never quite mean the same thing. As I read Aase Berg’s Dark Matter I kept thinking of Cage’s quote because I’m not sure I know what Berg is saying, but she’s saying it, and there’s no doubt in my mind that it is poetry.
Dark Matter is a sprawling and ambitious collection of text—sometimes lineated, just as often not—that mutates and evolves just as it breaks down and disintegrates. Berg looks closely at the minutiae of matter and cellular life in order to demonstrate how the world around us functions as a massive single organism. The closer she looks, however, the more is missing from the fabric of reality and Berg begins to explore the negative space, the dark matter of existence, teasing out new connections and hallucinations, so that even reality itself is surreal.
Late in the book, there is a poem called “Immaterial” that begins:
Matter lives.
Matter is pure evil.
Matter compact and resistant.
Throughout the book, matter is dark, strange, and dangerous. Matter shifts and changes, boundaries blur between real and unreal. “Now the matter writhes in unthinkable lines.” Even the English and Swedish texts on facing pages seem to blend together. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up reading the same thing twice, but only understanding it once. Yet, somehow, Berg still has “a trust in matter.” A whole section of the book is titled, “Bordercuts.”
There and here borders cut between different ways of being a life form. I, with my silhouette: without becoming a tree I dare to rest here beneath the tree.
Images of touch and tactility abound, but what surfaces Berg finds in her explorations are “fragile grainboundaryskin[s]” and even “continental plates topple and are cleft.” The surfaces remain, but they have moved.
As Berg looks closely at the fabric of reality she finds that “there are no shadows between the things, there are holes. There are no things next to each other stacked in clean rows.” Berg zooms in so close that she bursts through to the other side of reality where “planets drift in a stressed twitches across the sky” [sic]. “From this exact view, in this exact light,” Berg writes,
I can see
the strata of air, strata of oxygen and helium overlap—
weave—break each other down.
To Berg, you can only see a thing if you look at what’s around it.
Berg finds tension in language and contradictions: “You were supposed to whisper my name by my side. I would seldom hear you. One morning I would hear you.” Johannes Görannson’s translation is alive and sensitive to Berg’s intent. In his foreword, Görannson notes Berg’s neologism “grainboundaryskin,” which comes just before her use of the standard Swedish word for reptile, which translates, literally, as crawlanimal. Görannson chooses this peculiar translation to highlight the way Berg weirds language and makes strange the familiar.
But throughout the book, there’s a sense that more has been lost in translation than might be lost in other texts. What other puns and verbal weirdness has Görannson been unable to translate due to the limitations of English? His diction is varied and expansive, and the surreal landscape Berg has created is communicated, but to what end? Görannson notes in his foreword that Dark Matter is “semi-narrative,” but though the characters—named and unnamed—move through a series of dreamscapes, it’s hard to see why the urgency, which is palpable throughout, is needed.
Of course, my own inability to understand Berg’s intent does not necessarily mean the translation has failed. Görannson is a thoughtful translator and Dark Matter is considered a masterpiece by one of Sweden’s leading contemporary poets. Berg finds surrealism by focusing on the edges of things, the places where matter meets other matter and leaves gaps. She pushes into those gaps and finds new worlds. I may not understand what she is saying, but Dark Matter is a lyrical odyssey in prose that re-situates the reader on the borders of their own thoughts.
Have you read a book that baffled you, yet kept you reading? What other authors alienate even as they draw their readers closer to the text?
Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen (Black Ocean, March 2012)
Feng Sun Chen’s first full poetry collection, Butcher’s Tree, feels like a scalpel to the brain, followed by gnashing, hungry teeth. And believe you me, pain has never felt this good.
Chen’s writing is extremely focused and intense. The poems are often violent, bodily, earthly, and full of blind… something. Rage? Release? Unquenchable appetite? The subject matter often deals with fairytales or folk tales we are all familiar with, but turns them over on themselves until almost unrecognizable. It’s a dense book, meant to be slowly digested, unlike the ferocious, hungry inhalation of the poems’ speaker. The poems carry a brutal beauty, and are grotesquely alluring as such.
The collection is split into 3 sections: Milk Vein, Wolf Teeth, and Grendel is a Woman. The first section is a nice introduction to Chen’s voice, getting us used to it through mostly third person voice. Then in Wolf Teeth, we become the target for the speaker, as he/she spews at “you” directly. Finally, the last section is one long poem, itself broken into sections. This poem I found especially intriguing, with its declarative title, which Chen immediately challenges with referring to Grendel as a he throughout. The form is varied throughout, which I appreciated, as each poem’s form felt organic unto itself.
A juicy excerpt from the first poem, “By the Dark” which sets the rest up like a poised slingshot:
One can see the other’s rage.
His rage is small but dense. It catches the wet light
by its webbed gravity.He looks up at the dark
socketed between a ring of mountains.Rage grows smaller and denser
with each point of old light.That there should be so much walking
and so much distance
even burnt comets must pass.That his shame should come so far.
That none of this could release him.
If you will indulge me one analogy further: Chen’s poems are a cleaving away of body fat from her poems to reveal a lean, bloody mass pulled taut with wiry tendons, poised to pounce on the reader.
One of my favorite poems, “Moontube,” quotes Sylvia Plath, and one of these quotes says all that need be said about Chen’s collection: “Does not my heat astound you. And my light.” Indeed.
Do you have a favorite explosive poet or author whose work floors you? How do you approach dense collections of poems or short stories?
