Search results for ""Fence Magazine Inc, Division of Fence Books""

Prageeta Sharma writes of the experiences of a class-displaced, first-generation Hindoo Romantic, and her landscapes and language follow cannily and whimsically from that position. An exploration of the compatibility of human desire with personal ethics is at the heart of "Infamous Landscapes", whose voices work both with and against a perceived Wordsworthian innocence. In these poems, Sharma turns away from Romanticism with a certain disconcerted, feminine shame, one that finds her peering through an enculturated, gendered lens. The landscapes of these poems are urban and, "natural," in as much as Sharma's third, runs an emotional gamut from fear to fervor in a landscape both external and internal, cast in hysterics and hermeneutics. "Next, I pull down that lonely flag. Why was it waving to you?"

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The role of proper names and their power over both named and namer is a subject Sekiguchi has addressed in her critical work. Now she returns to the theme in these poetic prose blocks. Set in a Portuguese botanical garden, they reconstruct the plant, animal, and aviary worlds through the lens of language - a Wittgensteinian language that dreams of impossible precision while actually constructing a kaleidoscope that interleaves the boundaries of its subjects until the myriad forms that life can assume become a single, triumphant category.

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In French, 'il', the third person masculine singular pronoun, can also have no gender at all: il pleut means 'it's raining'. In Dominique Fourcade's "IL", 'il' means 'it' - but not exactly. Genderless, 'it' is the man-woman, the woman-man - and the place where we are each other. Rather than exploit difference, Fourcade allows the sonority of the word to generate the curious masculine-feminine dialogue we all hear within us, if listening. Full of rich permutations, the resulting poems reveal an enormous resonance within this simple word as well as a zone of peace.

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Ever idiosyncratic, "Fence" evades the tedium of the decade with this anthology, co-edited by all thirteen of Fence's editors, past and present, including founding editor Rebecca Wolff and current coeditor Charles Valle; fiction editors Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, and Lynne Tillman; poetry editors Caroline Crumpacker, Anthony Hawley, Katy Lederer, Matthew Rohrer, Christopher Stackhouse, and Max Winter; and nonfiction editors Frances Richard and Jason Zuzga.In addition to presenting a stunningly eclectic compendium of poetry, short fiction, criticism, and creative nonfiction, much of it by younger writers who appeared in "Fence" at the beginning of careers that went on to be dazzling, this volume includes reflective essays by the editors on their experiences with selected texts, with authors, with the magazine as a collective, and with their own editorial identities, and serves as an indispensable record of the inception and continuation of one of the most influential literary journals of its time.

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The experiences of motherhood are not to be met with silence and/or platitudes. This anthology brings to light the many strong, scary, gorgeous motherhood poems being written right now - poems that address the politics and difficulties and stubborn satisfactions of mothering - while it reminds us of earlier poems that opened the space in which this new work might appear. Motherhood is a universal solvent: Contributors to this anthology come from all over the aesthetic map, and from different states of childgetting - adoption, single parenthood, new mothers, mothers of adults. "Not for Mothers Only" will abolish any comfortable prejudices about what poems on motherhood can or cannot do or say.

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In his second book, Michael Earl Craig blurs the line between the documentary and imaginative impulses. The resulting poems mutilate pastoral myths - a man who has ignored horses his whole life but now wants to try touching one, or two gay donkeys and their uneventful lives on the high plains - but also pay tribute to the current-day West in which this author lives and writes. These poems sketch a slightly dented mental landscape touched by odd details and sharp mood swings, not to mention Junior Mints, Sonny Bono, and the new Pope in Prada sandals. They are superficially light and often comical, and objects frequently take center stage - a new and revered anvil, a black derby "soft as a colt's nose," a series of meticulously described wristwatches - but a social commentary unfurls. Characters in these poems bottom out now and again, dreaming of new or lost worlds, going off on rants or into deep sleeps, wanting desperately "to tell a story with the authority of mallets" but settling for "feeling like a turd washed up on the shore of a quiet lake."

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The poems in Folding Ruler Star are conceived as a value-neutral Paradise Lost. In other words, someone who is not God tells you to avoid a certain tree, and you disobey the instruction; the result is shame. Two characters agree that one of them is supposed to worship and obey the other without actually believing that the other possesses any special qualities that would enforce obedience; the first one disobeys the second one and has to be punished. A body has five parts; each part is alarmed. Descriptions of the parts set off the alarms. Affect lives in the face and is measured with a ruler. The measure is a five-syllable line arranged in three-line units. Each poem is mirrored by another poem with the same title.

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Lines of verse veer top-speed around corners, producing unexpectedly lucid interrogations: "The sun, Then, in a brief Case blown open, Appears. But who is Here to have it, 2Bang4?..." Anger is allowed in these poems, and disillusionment, and a general mistrust of 'landscape' - the natural world owned and used - all countered with the anodyne of an inebriate sensibility that loves the liquor in which it bathes, the language by which it collaborates. "I can co-locate here. I won't digress, not with these. Metal parts in the desert wind. Not with a bank of clouds. Stored on film."

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Winner of the 2005 Alberta Prize. Laura Sims's exquisite debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening. Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion by means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited to break the surface of the page. Those pre-hung doors of the native state the return to a native, pre-eminent state wholly immanent, wise and wooly.

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Unexpected in this shatteringly attached poetry is the calm speculativeness with which Josie Sigler regards and relates the objects of earthly passion. Family, beasts, sufferers distant and intimate, the earth itself, all are classified in this taxonomy of want, of tragic history and unanswered wish, and strong, strong desire. You can really feel the desire, here, for an end to suffering. That there is plenitude in language, in churchy yet aleatory rhythms of utterance, sets up a tension readers may feel in their bodies, while reading - between the truth of historical penury and the truth of reading such generosity. Two lines from Sappho and partial definitions from Wikipedia and the OED are in each poem funneled into collage, making the many names of loss.

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This is a dazzling third book from a seriously funny poet. In his third book, Ben Doller troubles the blast zone where evolution and manifest destiny collide. Working from primary sources including Captain William Dampier's pirate narratives and the Widow Ching legend (as immortalized by Borges), "Dead Ahead" develops a semi-psychological narrative along the lines of description, variation, embodiment, and pastiche/'piracy'. While Dampier is (in)famous for both his practical and linguistic piracy - stealing words into the English language such as 'barbecue' and 'avocado' - the Widow Ching famously commandeered the pirate fleet of her husband yet ultimately relinquished her power in response to nature's signs and portents. Doller sets about bringing these sources together in a 21st-century collagist text, a critique of language, naturalness, and empowerment. With meditations on common, colonizing objects - such as the porch, the column, and the city - the poems in "Dead Ahead" look straight on at the pleasures of stealing, the perils of travel, and the ends of the earth.

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From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, this collection troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life.

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"The Method" is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes at Constantinople in the second half of the tenth century. "The Method" is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former "The Method" is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting - the dismantling/reassembling and subsequent overwriting of text-thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation.The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for her own meditation on the relationships that develop between a person and her historical truth, a person and her writings. Steensen's "The Method" treads carefully in the terrain of fact that foregrounds her investigations, and emerges centuries and centuries on in the only moment that remains to us. "I thought: The Method, so happily recovered. I am the one who called us all together. I driven time. I wars and waves. I was. I go over sea-lanes rife with fish. I did not. I saw a shadow on the water. I know this situation makes a perfect poem, but I will not."

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With the kind of largesse one might expect from a young mind fueled by coffee and tobacco and bent on an exploration of consciousness, one premised on the rat's brain as a mnemonic device and a mimetic structure for that which we see and know, Christopher Janke stops at nothing, not even the end of a line of verse, in the expression of foment. Ideas, relationships, and images achieve maximum potency in these disjunctive, sequential meditations; one is tempted to invoke the name of Walt, the yawp, to describe their nearness and their mess. Wide, sympathetic, and at times goofy in the service of their largest aims, these paragraphs attempt nothing less than sufficiency. "what grand consolation, what balm, what succor, what support, what solace in the air and of the air or in the knowledge of air or in a forced confrontation with air - or in the way I feel with other legs around me on the grass in the afternoon or in the hurling towards a something unknown or in asking why a need to console."

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An exuberant skeptic, Elizabeth Marie Young writes in the infidel hope that writing itself can create worlds. These hilariously erudite prose poems are cosmologies - miniature, ever-expanding universes crammed with over-active particulars. They are interactive environments, kaleidoscopic and incorrigibly changeable, in which competing impulses toward cerebral austerity and luxuriant beauty battle it out. These poems crystallize into radiant geometries even as they threaten to self-destruct: distinctly utopian, pulsing with the defiant exuberance of drag and disco and steeped in the lemonade oceans of Charles Fourier. Antiquity lingers as a locus of incomprehensibility, startling us into novelty. Elizabeth Marie Young coins new myths, drawing in classical material only to see how it looks wrestling in the mud with surfers, yogis, and cyborgs.

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With her third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, 'diligent and strict'. A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of the body as container, while the obligation to include others in one's apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner's slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. 'Things mean, and I can't tell them not to'. What's going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites Eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy - the desire for a debased object - and the politics thereof: 'Well I expect you to go into the/fucking human tunnel/I'm going'. Here, we find a female body marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.

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With her debut collection, "Unspoiled Air", Kaisa Ullsvik Miller affirms the reader's perhaps heretofore unrecognized need for a gentle and daily massaging of profanely innocuous, even corporate language into deliverable spiritual meaning. This is a need that, once identified, becomes acute: we need to hear, for example, that "to create a deficiency or incompleteness in unique talents and abilities/increase talents available for creating together. This is a partnership. 'Ullsvik Miller's radical patience with received truism allows for these paradoxically indispensable communiques to be communicated: to provide for our needs, to protect us from dangerous destructive inconveniences we encounter - red waves - the form of feelings. We wander through our own guidance...' In this work pronouns and referential infrastructure are blurred, allowing that feeling of incompleteness that is necessary for fresh perception. Thus communal bonds are made readily available.

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This is a youthful book, as its title implies, in as much as rock n' roll belongs yet to the young. Its debut concerns are those of the youth culture in as much as when we are young we are closer to home, to origin, to the primal disjunctions supplied by our gaps/leaps in understanding. Huffman's poems enact a sweet mojo on the youthful territory of the hometown, of the high school, of the TV-watching-music-listening experience. A series of sporadically appearing poems with the title "Very Early in the Life of Jerome" acts as a placeholder in the reading mind for these territories, enacted as they are in the comfortable vernacular of immediate, casual speech: "When I am fourteen on the diving board, please start by saying I am fifteen and deny you were ever there." Other poems allow for a steeper climb on the merry-go-round of associative logic, by which we are given to understand this poet's effortless commitment to literary surfaces.

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"Swallows" draws on the various metaphorical implications of the House in its exploration of the uncanny presence and absence of self and world in poetry. From poems concerned with the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of Horace's "Sabine Villa" - a search determined to locate an actual physical site behind Horace's celebrated verse - to poems in the final section transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while understanding the necessary distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.

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This collection of poems by Elizabeth Robinson circles around and around the place of the individual in relation to an other or Other or others. If human experience is nested in relation, "the braid of bodies that engendered this self," it is also disrupted by "an intimacy that can disassemble and recreate itself" until an uneasy form of empathy emerges from the radical isolation of human introspection:I would be you, the self at a loss. The invisible hand that rests on the shoulder of its own body, guiding it. We do not know what comfort is.Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, "The Orphan and Its Relations" takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks "to bridge," as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."

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Cast as a dialogue among six interlocuters, this lyric blend of poetry and prose considers light from a variety of perspectives - philosophical, physical, ethical, and metaphorical.

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What has industrial slaughter got to do with poetry? "The Cow" performs an autopsy of the twentieth century on the bodies of ruined women, ransacking texts from the Bible to "Baudelaire" and "The Merck Veterinary Manual". It is hopeless, sexual, scarified, and alive. "No doubt about it, this is strong and original work. Scary in the best possible way." - Richard Foreman.

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