Catalog
Road Poems (broadside), tom neale, Jonathan Levenson & Jim Dalglish. 1980; 11" X 17"; black ink on cream colored card stock; illustrated. Three poems in the Whitmanesque tradition of the American open road.
Jacinda (broadside), Stephen M. Miller. 1980; 11" X 17"; black ink on cream colored card stock; illustrated. Eros and whimsy meet in six poems dedicated to the enigmatic Jacinda.
Streets and Seasons (chapbook), tom neale. 1981; 7" X 8 1/2"; 16 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-951160-00-9 (rare). Poems in communion with the natural world within the confines of life in a small midwestern city.
Flashlights (chapbook), Ingrid Swanberg. 1981; 7" X 8 1/2"; 18 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-01-7 (rare). Humorous narratives, lyrics, found poems.
A Protecting Music (chapbook), Jonathan Moore. 1981; 5 1/2" X 8 1/2"; 19 pages; saddle-stitched; ISBN 0-941160-02-5 (rare). A passionate and lyrical engagement with the dark side of the Americas; including "to d.a.levy."
"Jonathan Moore covers more territory in 18 pages. . . .than most
poets
manage in full-length books. . . We're rendered a little breathless by
the unrelenting, furious pace of these pages." --Laurel Speer
Heretics (chapbook), Peter Wild. 1981; 5 1/2" X 8 1/2"; 16 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-03-3. Deep orange cover printed with medieval woodcut depicting trial by fire.
Getting Ready for a Date (book), Peter Wild. 1984; 6" X 9"; 44 pages; perfect bound; limited, signed and numbered edition of 150; illustrated; ISBN 0-941160-09-2. Beautiful fine paper edition with blue covers printed with dark wine ink; cream inside text printed with black ink. Gift edition.
"Although central to his poems is the landscape of America's Southwest.
Peter Wild's poetry sweeps across the continent of human experience and
fantasy. . . . He writes of the most essential and basic human
conditions by using language alert to particularization and vivid in its
dreamlike quality. . . . Like a man who quietly folds back a cardboard
facade or parts gradually a heavy curtain on which is painted an
idealized landscape, Wild infuses his poems with convoluted and
unexpected images that run rampant." --Walter Freed, Dictionary
of
Literary Biography
"Whimsey and surrealism are hallmarks of his poetic voice, but
he has
prided himself on grounding his linguistic flights of fancy in ordinary
experience. . . .springboard[ing] the poems into a galaxy of disparate
nettings that enclose myth, history and fantasy in a web of lyric
drama." --Edward Butscher, Peter Wild
The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (book), Martin Espada. 1982; 8 1/2" X 11"; 30 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-07-6; photographs (rare). Original first edition of Espada's first book; includes black and white photo essay by Frank Espada.
"A lovely first book of striking poems, de autor puertorriqueno,
with
photographs by the author's father, Frank Espada. The vision here is of
urban events." -- Bilingual Review
The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber: the Poem Cycle (chapbook), Connie Fox. 1983; 7" X 8«"; 15 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-06-8. A long lyrical poem of ecstatic sexual/sensual metamorphosis through a poetic alchemy of Brazilian gemstones.
"Ms Fox. . .opens with a thickly textured poem encrusted with religious,
ethnic-ancient, and Christian motifs, a kind of stray-dog's mummy-meat
feast of lost souls waiting to be found. All focuses on Fox's chamber
bed -- splendidly arrayed for sex both kinky and metaphysical."
--Robert Peters, Small Press Review
The Tattooed Heart of the Drunken Sailor (chapbook), Ivan Arguelles. 1983; 6" X 9"; 28 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-07-6 (rare). Twenty poems by the winner of the prestigious William Carlos Williams Prize (1990). Arguelles regards Tattooed Heart as one of his best books.
"A poet of fantastically vivid imagery and great emotional force."
--Geoge Hitchcock
"If proof were needed that Surrealism is a spontaneous expression
of the
poetic mind, Arguelles would be the one to provide it. In the tradition
of the madder, darker and more mystical Surrealists like Renâ Crevel
and
Antonin Artaud, Arguelles weaves his mad web of images out of an
impossible depth." --Andrei Codrescu, The Baltimore Sun
"Arguelles works in terribilita. His images work with the underlogics
of music, setting symphonics of terror and healing in all directions at
once. He does not sentimentalize, he foments. . . .he refuses only
littleness." --Will Inmann
the shoe shine parlor poems, et al. (book), w.r. rodriguez. 1984; 6" X 9"; 48 pages; perfect bound; ISBN 0-941160-08-46. A first book of lively and inventive narrative poems celebrating the poet's Puerto Rican heritage and the South Bronx neighborhood of his youth.
"Sharp-edged poems about growing up in the South Bronx, where `night
calls the ghosts of spice/fried fish and incense/to dance out the
windows.'" --Warren Woessner, A View from the Loft
". . .twenty-six thoroughly engaging and vividly urban poems. .
. All
are clearly written to be digested by the street people rodriguez knows
the best." -- Z Miscellaneous
The Death of Jean-Paul Sartre and Other Poems (chapbook), Gerald Locklin. 1987; 5 1/2" X 8 1/2"; 32 pages; saddle stitched; ISBN 0-941160-10-6. A collection which offers Locklin at his playful, self-deprecating and witty best, with numerous jabs landed upon the liberal elite and poltically correct. Locklin's more lyrical side at times also emerges in this book.
"Locklin. . .adopts a casual, discursive manner in ranging over
West
Coast mores and urban perils; sex, fatherhood, and domestic skirmishes;
teaching, drinking and the pursuit of all the essential human appetites."
-- The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English
"I like his stuff. He swings from his heels. . . He's open and
calls
the shots. He's also funny and tells the truth."
-- Charles Bukowski
zen concrete & etc. (book), d.a.levy. Edited by Ingrid Swanberg.
1991;
8 1/2" X 11"; 268 pages; perfect bound; ISBN 0-946110-94-1; illustrated
with facsimile reproductions of levy's concrete poems and collages as
well as the original mimeo edition of the long poem Cleveland
Undercovers. This book is the definitive collection of the works of
d.a.levy, poet of major importance to American poetry and the mid-
century avant-garde. The collection focuses on levy's experimental and
lyrical poems, and presents a basic selection of his poetic works.
Includes a radio interview with levy and pieces by contemporaries D.R.
Wagner, Kent Taylor, Douglas Blazek.
"Literary biography and social document--as just these two things
zen
concrete & etc. is well worth having. But its greatest value is as
a
collection of levy's textual poetry and visio-textual art."
--Bob Grumman, Small Press Review
d.a.levy ". . . was a poet's poet, working in the tradition of
Blake,
Shelley, Thoreau or Rimbaud, that is, wherein the poet's Calling
includes a dedication to no less than a complete revolution of the
existing repressive social order. d.a.levy's life is a fire that
continues to burn on the Cuyahoga River."
-- David Dahl, Exquisite Corpse
"Levy had a remarkable karma: he saw who he was, where he was,
what his
field of activity was, and what his tools were to be. . . .His hometown
Cleveland, that he wouldn't move from. Like the Sioux warriors who tied
themselves to a spear and stuck it in the ground, never to retreat."
--Gary Snyder, The Old Ways
the bird of nothing & other poems (book), prospero saiz. 1993; 7" X 10"; 168 pages; sewn and wrapped in fine Teton "Clay" paper cover bind; illustrated; ISBN 0-941160-11-4; signed and numbered edition of fifty ISBN 0-941160-16-5. saiz' first book, gathering short and long poems, fragments, epigrams -- all rendered with an intense lyricism. Includes the classic "malinche" as well as "the book of pronouns," five introspective poems on being and existence. The 100- page title poem, "the bird of nothing" is a tour de force, in which the poet muses upon eclipse, caesura, and silence.
". . .the great eclipse is the `ECLIPSE OF THE SUN' . . .obliquely
denouncing the erasure (by deadly writing) of a whole Native American
culture, which the poem feels so movingly powerless to reinscribe. . .
the epic of American consciousness made problematical. . . .Like Leaves
of Grass and its `America,' `the bird of nothing' encompasses much more
than itself. But while the ambition of Whitman's poem was to translate
a whole nation into the whole world, Saiz' exacting poem is an American
poem that chooses to have no nation, or borders of any kind, for that
matter. . . . An exquisitely framentary meditation that self-
reflectively breaks in upon the ordered course of human life as it has
been conceived of and written down in the western tradition.
--Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos
horse (chapbook), prospero saiz. 1996; 6" X 9"; 24 pages; hand-sewn into fine Confetti "Rust" paper cover; illustrated with six original drawings based on the Lascaux cave paintings; ISBN:0-941160-12-2; signed and numbered edition of fifty ISBN 0-941160-14-9. Beautiful fine paper edition, with white inside text, deep burnt sienna cover and translucent bright white flyleaves. This collection consists of five poems, which fully demonstrate the remarkable range of saiz' style. In "the silence of lascaux" the fateful link between the horse and mankind is revealed as a wellspring of dread and art. "document" is a long poem exploring the role of the horse in the destruction of the Peoples of the Great Plains, the Spanish Conquest, the incursion in the American Southwest, and the facist bombing of the Basque town of Guernica as presented by Picasso. The last three poems, "horse," "gorge" and "rain- mare" invoke timeless and hallucinatory visions rooted in the poet's beloved Southwest.
chants of nezahualcoyotl & obsidian glyph (book), prospero saiz. 1996; 7" X 10"; 88 pages; sewn and wrapped in fine French "Whitewash" paper cover; illustrated; includes Nahuatl pronunciation key and a glossary; ISBN 0- 941160-13-0; signed and numbered edition of fifty ISBN 0-941160-13-0. The long poem "chants of nezahualcoyotl" explores the role and meaning of poetry in Aztec Mexico by focusing on the greatest of Nahuatl poets, Fasting Coyote. "Obsidian Glyph" is a collection of lyric mediations on the sacred rites and practices of the Aztecs in the time of the Fifth Sun.
". . .prospero saiz is the poet-laureate of the pre-Columbian.
. . .
Chants of Nezahualcoyotl & Obsidian Glyph is filled with a terrible
sense of regret and desperation. The old ways have been crowded out,
massacred, buried: `the basin of mexico a long time darkening/no longer
by the misty dampness of Tlaloc/but by strange clouds/I feel but do not
know/there is a burning without fire and light. . .the skin itches and
the hair turns brittle.' (p.69). . . Saiz goes beyond lamenting about
lost pre-Columbian glories into the the center of pre-Columbian
existentialism itself, the basic, fundamental sense of total
ephemeralness. He is one of the most challenging writers to appear on
the literary scene within recent memory."
--Hugh Fox
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