Whit Griffin, Pentateuch: The First Five Books
78 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-03-7
Praise for Whit Griffin:
If the Tao and The Farmers' Almanac produced an offspring it would be Whit Griffin's Pentateuch. A new poet versed in old lore, Griffin invites his readers to contemplate a world built upon the alternating currents of succinct lyric gesture and brambly verdant flora. Herein lies a gallant, quirky garden of curiosities.
Lisa Jarnot
Whit Griffin works with an alchemist's range but stays in the small hours, so one poem can whirl and whirl and so whirl you. A man of civilwarland birth, where none of the old battleground or sweet magnolia or swamp thing is lost on his vista. Count yourself lucky, it's made him some extra fine poetry.
Bob Arnold
There's a good chance these poems could change the way you look at the simplest things: 'Smooth your bed upon rising, lest / someone take possession of your imprint.' Riddle, oracle, proverb, divination; the poems remind us of so much we have forgotten and so much we never knew: 'Man can make gods by the dozen, but not a single worm.' It's as if the words were written back before the world began or were found just after the world had ended - captured now within the pages of a book that has apparently been lost for centuries - opened here in your hand: an almanac of ancient rhymes written for this damaged future. 'We're separated by / degrees of illumination and the shape of our vowels.' Old tales, told anew of magic, promise and betrayal, they remind us to respect - and therefore to remember – both the unknown and the known: 'Imagine what has been lost in the whale's song / now that our boats are no longer built of wood.' The energy their music creates demands that we question the disparity between how our days on this earth are lived and how perhaps they could be lived.
John Phillips
When a non sequitur is juxtaposed with another (seeming) non sequitur, and the two make a simple declarative statement it is time to pay attention. But when a number of them follow in a poem, and all of them mesh, that is mastery. What does one say of a great number of poems which continue this astounding process? Whit's Pentateuch is such a collection, and it is literally breath-taking. There are no 'fillers'. This is a major achievement, and it promises much more. From historical references to chance remembrances of bits from many other sources, to what the poet has invented. There are smiles, outright laughter and far deeper wisdom. This is the work of a master. Bravo, Whit!
Theodore Enslin
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Gospel Earth
Jeffery Beam, Gospel Earth
230 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-01-3 (paper) / 978-907-489-02-0 (cloth)
In its procession through indirection to attention, Gospel Earth, Jeffery Beam's big book of little poems, traces a transcendent open ecstacy & radiant physicality. Bridging aphorisitic compsure, Vedic & Zen alertness & the ecstasy of the Christian, Bhaktic, & Sufi mystics, the poems invoke earth spirits & the luminous power of the Word, breaching the divide between creation & humanity, healing the domination heating the earth & searing our moral compass. The poems animate the natural world beyond the confines of language, demonstrating once again as North Carolina's Independent Weekly stated "how large a canvas he can paint with a few deft strokes". Described by the poet as a work intended to "invigorate the startling propulsion of haiku's accessible simplicity & minimalism", Gospel Earth assembles a new Gnostic gospel, a distinct & astonishing beauty.
Praise for Jeffery Beam:
A Fast Short History of the Small Poem in the 20th Century might be this: Modernism, the luminous fragment: Post-Modernism, destablized morphemes - bringing us to the 21st Century & Jeffery Beam, a mustard seed. To him whose lines trace a world not hinted at, but fleshed out. His poems leave us fortunately told. Carved in reverse on cinnabar or jade, they could be seals. Or legends, clear, crisp stanzas to underline the eye: to open a window in the wall of a page. Mencius suggests that by nurturing what is small, & letting go of what is large, we welcome, not our loss, but our release. I seed every breeze, sings the dandelion, sings every bright syllable in this Gospel Earth.
Thomas Meyer
So minimal & so lush, all at once, their titles become them. Their beauty is about the huge pleasure of omission, & the powerful delicacy of what stays. They are quite sublime. Sacramental. A collection to keep beside a bed. Where they might seep into the sleeping head like pearls. The white page a hand, the poems, tiny snail sheels on the palm for scrutiny. Look even closer, they are even more exquisite.
Ippy Patterson
Reviews
Review by Kimberly Steele
Review by Jaimee Hills
Review by Cy Dillon
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Gospel Earth is available in both paper and cloth editions.
UK Orders (paper): £10.95 (including postage)
UK Orders (cloth): £14.95 (including postage)
US Orders (paper): $17.00 (including postage)
US Orders (cloth): $23.50 (including postage)
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Sky Brightly Picked
Jess Mynes, Sky Brightly Picked
96 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-00-6
Sky Brightly Picked is Jess Mynes's first full length collection. Rooted in the poet's responses to the work of Mark Rothko and the landscape of rural Massachusetts, these concise, witty, and deftly worked poems bring us 'other / kinds of knowing'. Possessed of a fresh and distinctive style, Jess Mynes shows in this book that he knows instinctively how to 'give a line muck / to sense about'.
As John Coletti writes:
Praise for Jess Mynes:Sky Brightly Picks accumulates. An irreducible hope for exact details. Striations of seasonal light, prismic silence. We come up everyday, down to emotional registers. Both colors made comforting unsure. Contrast and the coming thought. Life constantly and less predictable – something beautiful I made. Mind's never made so there's only that engaged totally personal Something I think Rothko intended. Gaps filled in but nevertheless Intended. Jess does that. His poetry isn't invasive, it's well-informed. Moments made externally visible. Without the voiceover. Just kind of fair. And exceptional. Nothing more than what the frame wants to be next to it, openly. Optics, Emotions, and Transfer. We all cope with the uncomfortable results of not quite working through it, but our joy in persisting exists – or never quite does – it’s something you forget in the city. More things on uneasy streets. Your conscience’s unsaid disappointments. Sleepy places of mild success. Hey we have those mornings some nights. Not sad joy nor comforting faces. But to live more deeply than contextual others. Experience is a deep thing in art we forget. Deep feeling. To rely on ability. And maybe do it sometimes.
Irrepressible, that urge to form the irreducible poem. Jess Mynes has my sympathies, my admiration.
Clark Coolidge
Reviews
Review by Christopher Rizzo
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The World Seen from the Air
Alan Baker, The World Seen from the Air
22 Pages. Printed in an edition of 200 copies.
Alan Baker lives in Nottingham where he co-edits Leafe Press and edits Litter Magazine. His previous collections include Not Bondi Beach (Leafe Press, 2002), The Strange City (Secretariat Books, 2006), and Hotel February (Bamboo Books, 2008). A translation of Yves Bonnefoy's Début et Fin de la Neige/The Beginning and End of the Snow was published by Leafe/Bamboo Books in 2007.
Sample PoemOrdering
The World Seen from the Air has now been collected in Alan Baker's Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010 (Skysill Press, 2011), though a few copies are still available. Please contact the editor if you're interested in purchasing one.
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Anxiety Chant
Aaron Tieger, Anxiety Chant
A5. 27 pages. Printed in an edition of 200 copies.
Aaron Tieger lives in Cambridge, MA, where he is co-curator of the Unaffiliated Reading Series and edits Petrichord Books. His previous publications include February (Fewer & Further Press, 2006), The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger and Secret Donut (Pressed Wafer, 2009). He has recently edited the first US edition of Richard Caddel's Uncertain Time (Pressed Wafer, 2011).
ReviewsReview by Jeffery Beam
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