
From au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu Tue May  7 20:26:29 1996
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 09:33:51 -0500
From: Robert Drake <au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu>
To: pauls@etext.org
Subject: TRee #5b: chapbooks


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  Issue #5.0, section b: chaps                             8/94
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TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground, 
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years, 
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we 
began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications, primarily language-oriented.  This posting 
is the first section of our 5th full electronic issue, containing 
most of the short Chapbook reviews; the second section contains 
most of the zine reviews.  We provide this information in the hope
that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs. 
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:

                 au462@cleveland.freenet.edu 

Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting-- 
(a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve).
I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues.

Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in issue #5: features on the Argentinian experimental
poetry movement _Paralengua_; the LA micropress Found Street;
the Russian transfuturist artists Rea Nickonova & Serge Segay; 
recent French writing-in-translation, the new magazine _Apex of
the M_; plus features on work by Nathaniel Mackey, Bill Luoma, and
Ivan Arguelles.  TapRoot Reviews intends to survey the boundries 
of "literature", and provide access to work that stretches those 
boundries.It is availablefrom: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood 
OH 44107--$2.50 pp. 
Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 
1994 by Burning Press, Cleveland.  Burning Press is a non-profit 
educational corporation.  Permission granted to reproduce 
this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this 
introductory notice is included.  Burning Press is supported, in 
part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council. 

Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each 
review: Mark Amerika, Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Jake 
Berry, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Steve Fried, Chris 
Funkhouser, Jessica Grimm, Bob Grumman, Roger Kyle-Keith, Joel 
Lipman, Stephen-Paul Martin, Susan Smith Nash, Kurt Nimmo, Oberc, 
Charlotte Pressler, Dan Raphael, Andrew Russ, Mark Wallace, Don 
Webb, Mark Weber, and Thomas Willoch.  Additional contributors 
are welcome: drop an e-note or send SASE.

*** Many thanx to all of our contributors. ***


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CHAPS:
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Akhter Ahsen, ed.: NEW SURREALISM: THE LIBERATION OF IMAGES IN 
CONSCIOUSNESS--Brandon House, PO Box 240, Bronx NY, 10471.  538 
pp., $25.00.  Ahsen maintains that Surrealism is an enervated 
methodology of literary and artistic transgressions.  It needs 
rejuvenation, a megashot of adrenaline in the buttocks, and the 
editor supplies this via his own field of clinical psychotherapy.  
In true Andre Breton fashion he proclaims it in a manifesto.  The 
late J.H. Matthews, world authority on Surrealism reacts to 
Ahsen's ideas.  Can science come to the aid of art?  We know what 
C.P. Snow said about the two cultures.  Supporting documentation, 
including case histories, reflect the supposed efficacy of Ahsen's 
new engine of revitalization.--as

Ron Androla: PERFECTLY SANE LIKE EXCESSIVE INEBRIATION--
Translucent Tendency Press, 3226 Raspberry Avenue, Erie PA, 16508.  
12 pp., $2.00.  This collection of fuck poems would make a 
politically correct feminist cringe, because it captures the male 
side of copulation in all it's chauvinistic glory, both the 
glorious and brutal sides of it.  Ron rips into the violence, the 
physical cramming, the pushing and shoving and taking and physical 
side of an act so romanticized that the sweat is forgotten.  But 
Androla's war goes beyond lovers--and tears into factory politics, 
drunken pissed off dreams, and the world of working class heroes 
who got no place else to go.--o

Ron Androla: THE BOOK OF MEDITATIONS--Smiling Dog Press, 987 Fritz 
Rd., Maple City MI, 49664.  5 pp., $2.00?  A prose poem, in 
seventeen parts, by Erie, Pennsylvania poet Ron Androla.  Small 
town angst surfaces here; the poet is unemployed, he admits his 
sympathy for the president because we live in "the strangest 
exploding times ever dreamed in history," and arrives at the 
decision to "fit into society by smiling alot." He understands and 
inwardly shudders at the slow economic and political decomposition 
all around--and vents poetically tinged diatribes against the 
media and government on his attic-room word-processor.  Sexually, 
this long poem is pure Androla--due to an S/M allusion involving 
Hillary Clinton, a literary magazine in California strenuously 
rejected MEDITATIONS  before this SMILING DOG publication.  Dean 
Creighton's letterpress edition is tastefully rendered with a 
linoleum print cover in three colors.--kn
     Androla goes Eastern Philosophy in these short meditations 
based on the tales of philosophers like Lao Tzu.  There are 17 
bursts of wisdom, seemingly inspired more by drug abuse and whisky 
than spiritual enlightenment, with deep lines like "2. chain-
smoke.  smoke another bowl.  gulp more coffee.  consider tolerable 
alcoholism" and "12.  avoid the kissing wife, pull away from her 
sad, shivering hug.  make her slap yr face & curse yr very 
existence."--o

Bud Bracken: CIRCUS THRU THE FOG--Poetry Harbor, 1028 E. 6th St., 
Duluth MN, 55805.  28 pp., $3.95.  Pat McKinnon of POETRY MOTEL 
once claimed that Bud Bracken was the actually the editor, because 
Bud hated poetry--if Bud liked a poem, it got into the mag, 
because there had to be something there that was special.  Bud's 
poetry kicks ass, and you'd never know he hated the stuff by the 
clean crisp lines in this chap.  These are vicious poems, filled 
with love, hate, and a strange emptiness that makes you want to 
hide in the shadows even where there are no threats on the street.  
They tell me poetry is supposed to rearrange the universe and make 
us look at things in a different light.  I  don't know what light 
Bud is using, but it sure as hell is powerful in all its 
subtleties.--o

Dennis Barone: THE MASQUE RESUMED--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle 
Pines, Morris MN, 56267.  16 pp., $2.00.  Three short pieces of 
nearverse that collage images, ideas, situations and parts of 
speech with great dexterity.  In and out of story, in and out of 
sensation, in and out of reflection, in and out of in and out... 
& sundry blossomings like "Was not a husband informed tonight to 
seclude the heart of shuddered property?"--bg

Michael Basinski: WORMS--Veighsmere Series, 411 Parkside Ave., 
Buffalo NY, 14216.  4 pp., $1.00.  Four sets of appropriately-
mismated fragments of (my guess is) zoology texts, scholarly 
discussions of mythology, and who-knows-what that turns the human 
condition from it's worm-lowest shudderings up to where its 
"brightness   sanctuaries" are into multiply-meaningful poetry.
--bg

E. R. Baxter III: LOOKING FOR NIAGARA--Slipstream, Box 2071, 
Niagara Falls NY, 14301.  120 pp., $10.00.  This is a marvelous 
book of a man and a city (Niagara Falls, USA) and a river: The 
Niagara, which leads to that which is also marvelous: Niagara 
Falls (the natural wonder).  This is a poetry where all history is 
contemporaneous with the poet and the poet's life--his history, 
his changes and he moves in a man's time and the river moves in 
geographic time and here then is this mill town, tourist town, 
paradise lost--well you have poetry.  Frankly written, clear 
thought through the fog and rain, dreams and facts, youth and age.  
An exploration in the wonder of the self as a place.  Collage--
bric-a-brac beauty of a store with endless merchandise of memory 
and fact--Baxter III--it is how to see--read a life.--mb

E. R. Baxter III: WHAT I WANT--Slipstream, Box 2071, Niagara Falls 
NY, 14301.  This item is a one poem chapbook printed as a 
supplement to SLIPSTREAM Issue #13.  WHAT I WANT is an eight page 
wide ranging poem of parallel construction in which Baxter reveals 
the pantheon of his desires.  He discloses the variables that 
compose a poet's existence.  He wants to smoke a lot of 
cigarettes, have frequent sex with multiple partners, and he wants 
the animals to talk.  The poem proclaims and documents the value 
of the individual in a complex world, without sexual fear, with a 
sensitivity to nature, with the despair that cigarettes are 
unhealthy, and with the generosity that thanks the human world for 
its support.  Baxter ends his poem from the heart of his soul.  He 
writes thank you.  When was the last time anyone said that to 
you?! "Thank you.  Thank you."--mb

Guy R. Beining: DAMN THE EVENING GARDEN--MindWare, 310-762 Upper 
James St., Hamilton Ontario, CANADA, L9C 3A2.  28 pp., $8.00.  
Twenty-six haiku-like three-line poems, each beginning with, and 
illustrated by, a different letter of the alphabet (in proper 
alphabetical order).  The illustrations are splotch, expressive, 
and apt; the poems sexedly Bible-based, e.g.: "Damn the EVEning 
garden/ it catches/ ALL the hOles."--bg

Dodie Bellamy: ANSWER--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., Buffalo NY, 
14213.  16 pp., $4.00.  This installment of The letters of Mina 
Harker actually includes a letter from Bob Gluck to Dodie Bellamy, 
a letter to Mina (Dodie) from Cassandra (Ron Day), and the letter 
in answer, from Mina to Cassandra.  In her answer, Mina works in, 
around, through, and ultimately in spite of the request which Bob 
has asked of Dodie: to write "5-10 observations of aspects of 
having a woman's body."  Mina's response is alternately playful, 
exasperated, pissed off, and ultimately takes off in its own 
direction--a thinking, a sexy and fabulous world embedded in a 
letter.  Bellamy's writing sparks and whines, glides, pulls you up 
short, engages in bouts of the limbo beneath inhumanely low bars.  
This little book is a great introduction to the wonders of 
Bellamy's work.--jg

John Bennett: THE NEW WORLD ORDER--The Smith, 69 Joralemon St., 
Brooklyn NY, 11220.  85 pp., $10.95.  John Bennett (not to be 
confused w/ John M. Bennett) is a small press survivor, though I'm 
not sure if he would agree with my assessment.  THE NEW WORLD 
ORDER, with all quirkiness of style and subject, is a paean to the 
fine art of survival in modern America.  There are 25 short pieces 
here; they encompass varied subjects--alcoholism, mental decay, 
Vietnam, childhood trauma--and the message is unmistakable: one 
must bounce back, hold tight, weather the odds and survive.  "Each 
day," Bennett writes, "I rise up from the world of dream into 
illusion... and ask myself: what next?  Receiving no answer, I set 
about the all-important task of recreating myself."  From this 
departure, Bennett transmutes into the various personalities of 
this book.  Not surprisingly, John Bennett wrote a book entitled 
SURVIVAL SONGS, which appeared in two self-published mimeograph 
volumes.  Bennett is a literary dynamo, an avowed outlaw on the 
fringes of literary convention.  This book sharpens and hones his 
alienated, rough-and-tumble vision of a chaotic world "that 
embraces insanity like a succubus, living on the brink is what 
sanity is all about: torque resistance, crystallized perception 
full of sunlight and terror."--kn

John M. Bennett: BLANKSMANSHIP--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 Leland 
Ave., Columbus OH, 43214.  24 pp./90 min., Book $5.00; tape $6.00; 
both for $10.00.  For years Bennett's two word instruction-poem 
"Be Blank" has been drifting through the otherstream, on stickers, 
postcards, magazines.  And though this sense of the non-projecting 
mind pervades all of his poetry, in BLANKSMANSHIP he manifests it 
more masterfully than usual.  And to have the poems on the page 
and literally in our ears via audio tape is sheer delight.  The 
individual poems are longer than usual for Bennett, allowing us 
to experience deeper revelries of body and soul, mind and matter, 
convulsing to be; each piece ending with five words or 
combinations of words that can be associated freely with one 
another, with the poem, with the book as a whole or all of the 
above, or perhaps best, being blank, to simply let them be what 
they will at each hearing/reading.  For instance these five at the 
end of "Number Wing":

          Downflight  hurricane  wet  land  urinating  hive

     The general body of the poems heard as well as read surge and 
flow with moments of epiphany and entropy--the two finally the 
same.  So much of Bennett's poetry is dependent on individual 
perception, even differing states of mind in a single individual 
can produce wildly different reactions.
     Bennett is a man possessed of reality triple intensified.  
These poems have an otherness, to be sure, but that otherness is 
intimate, as close as our thoughts and viscera.  Side Two of the 
tape is a classic performance of the same piece with James Weise.  
This is prime Bennett, put on the headphones, open the book, and 
strap yourself in; you'll be ripped apart and love every minute.
--jb

John M. Bennett: BOOK CLASSIFICATION--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214.  5 pp., $1.00.  Five Bennett 
poems with an etiquette book pictured on the cover, and again on 
the inside of the cover--but with fish skeletons diving into it.  
The poetry, as usual, is out of "the kitchen drawer where's 
burning limits snore."--bg

John M. Bennett: REVERSION: PILES OF THAT--Luna Bisonte, 137 
Leland Ave., Columbus, OH, 43214.  252 pp., $30. 00.  Gahhhhh!  
Well over 400 poems by the renowned spitter, teeming with 
Bennettisms like: "Where the why whys!  Where the pause lie!" from 
"Why Whines"; and "So I langoured, breathed a wall" from "A Glance 
Back Cast."  Results a mutter-to-utter maxitrosity by a poet who 
more and more seems to be the Jackson Pollock of contemporary 
poetry--because of his disorienting originality; crudity; size and 
plain old self-publishing Americanness.--bg

John M. Bennett & Johnny Brewton: DRY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214.  8 pp., $2.00,  (coproduced w/ 
Pneumatic Press, PO Box 170011, San Francisco CA, 94117)  Graphic 
images, mostly of watering cans, by Brewton; poems by Bennett.  
Like many of Bennett's poems, these have anti-titles, uppercase & 
catty-corner to their main titles.  A mere eccentricity 'til you 
start thinking about it, about text sandwiched between titles, 
titles clashing or harmonizing; or is the anti-title the first 
half of an inevitable next poem's title?  Bennett keeps on makin' 
you work.--bg  

John M. Bennett & others: MISCELLANY--Luna Bisonte Prods, 137 
Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214.  1 pg. @, SASE.  An assortment of 
some twenty 4" x 4" cards, each with a poem or other artwork on 
it, mostly collaborations between Bennett and people like Serge 
Segay; also some intriguing drawings by John's sons, Also and Ben.  
Seeing what Bennett's poetry inspires from others made me flash on 
the possibility of one of these dimension X aliens who abducts 
neurotic human women while being, himself, abducted by some alien 
from dimension Z... if you see what I mean.--bg

Gina Bergamino & tolek: TWO SIDES--xib publications, PO Box 
262112, San Diego CA, 92126.  12 pp., $2.00.  None of the poems in 
this slim chappie are credited, so it's difficult to tell who 
wrote what.  Yeah the similarity between Bergamino's and tolek's 
styles is intriguing.  In some instances, gender references give 
away the author.  Overall, though, these poems are very similar, 
and in many ways typical work of the authors.  Not for the 
kiddies; some naughty sex and adult subject matter.--rkk

Jake Berry: BRAMBU DREZI--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port 
Charlotte FL, 33949.  70 pp., $10.00.  For several years I have 
been reading (and seeing: some have major visual components) these 
pieces in magazines and anthologies, and while they never fail to 
intrigue as separate works, the effect of encountering them all 
together intensifies (and clarifies and enriches) the experience 
exponentially.  The texts are connected and/or contrapuntal, and 
at times they are graphically absorbed into the texts that follow, 
or are even obliterated by them.  There are sheets of words, slabs 
of anaphor, paralinguistic passages (like the title itself), words 
scattered in graphic formulae, and almost purely visual sections.  
The whole represents an inherently impossible but at the same time 
inherently necessary voyage of total consciousness beyond language 
within the context of language (or symbolic representation), from 
the opening "legion swollen faces drift through sentient blue-
orange empty space..." to the closing "I vanish and everything is 
everything/ is everything/ like nothing idiot singing."  The 
concerns of this vast, almost musically constructed work, are 
consciousness and language as its vehicle, a universe structured 
as a somewhat destructive (or dynamic) conflict of under- and 
over-realities (which perhaps, the work suggests, derives from the 
mind's struggling to perceive), and an evolutionary but a the same 
time circular process of psychic or mythic history.  This is not 
"literature" as "good writing" but literature as an attempt to 
know (control) what might be.  It has, however, passages of such 
intensely charged writing that, as a reader, one is compelled to 
engage with and grow from Berry's work.  A major work, only 
glanced at here, which will become essential reading.  Includes an 
introduction by Jack Foley that provides a useful 
contextualization of Berry's work in the spectrum of American 
Poetry.--jmb

Terence Bishop: HEADS I LOSE, TALES I LOSE--ATH Press, 2177 
Steward Dr., Hatfield PA, 19440.  32 pp., $2.00.  Bishop seems to 
thrive on existential angst--predicting the worst will happen, 
knowing it won't, and feeling like he's come out on top--which 
breeds a strange hopeless optimism that shows up in his work.  In 
the short story "Scene From Hollywood Apartment No. 425," for 
example, a couple is flirting, but not really caring if they fuck 
or not, and when they don't there's no disappointment either way.  
It doesn't matter what they do.  "The Birth of Lonely Man" 
chronicles some easily recognized drinking habits: going to a bar 
because of boredom, being bored at the bar, hitting a liquor 
store, then going home to drink alone.  While this collection 
includes a lot of poems, the fiction is clearly Bishop's strong 
point--the three stories are easily worth the price of the chap.
--o

David Bromige: A CAST OF TENS--Avec Books, PO Box 1059, Penngrove 
CA, 94951.  96 pp., $9.50.  David Bromige's A CAST OF TENS is a 
series of musings and reflections upon the full range of human 
experience.  In his exact adherence to a form (ten-line sections 
usually broken into a few stanzas) and an inner form (phrases or 
sentences start with a capital letter, ending at the next capital) 
Bromige inserts as much variation and insight, where other writers 
may have found only restriction.  A very "human" text, A CAST OF 
TENS proceeds in its unique voice with a quiet intensity never 
losing sight of its goal.--jg
     Bromige is a master at probing the irreducibilities of 
symbolic logic, and his playful yet outrageous equivalencies 
explode the neat, cut-and-dried tautologies of Wittgenstein: "The 
old man is 112 pages long / and so is the sea / They are deeply 
symbolic (psychotic)."  Bromige's structures are sinuous and 
mathematic, and they evoke the tonal colors of Schoenberg, Satie, 
or Cage, successfully evading what Bromige has characterized as 
iambic pentameter's "echoic invasions."--ssn 

David Castleman: I STAMMER IT TO ANGELS--Dusty Dog, 1904-A 
Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301.  31 pp., $5.95.  Part fiction, part 
essay, part autobiography.  Heck, it's actually one long 
philosophical discourse!  No, really, it's a story.  No action to 
speak of, minimal dialogue, lots of third-person commentary and 
observation.  And none of that pop psychology junk, either.  Real 
thinking-man stuff spun out over the course of a story which 
pretty much is background to the thought process.  For the 
literate crowd with time enough to actually read, not skim.--rkk

Alan Catlin: IN THE UNDERGROUND--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 
3113 Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234,.  28 pp., $1.00.  
A gripping albeit conventional story about paranoia and futility 
in an urban subway.  Can't think of anything else to say about 
it.--bg

Leonard Cirino: POEMS OF THE ROYAL CONCUBINE LI XI--JVC Books, 
Rt. 2 Box 440C, Arcadia FL, 33821.  40 p., $4.95.  The soft 
fragrance of the boudoir, the coiled tension of expectation, 
the moist honey of lubrication, the softness of yielding flesh, 
the gentle descent into rapture, the intimations of release, the 
swelling force, the soft fleeting bursts into the perfect world 
and then...  the end.  Youth, decline and final decrepitude of an 
imperial concubine.  Hot sex in the beginning, resignation in the 
middle, wisdom at the end.  Not just another chapbook about a poet 
humping his girlfriend.  Cirinao has taste, discretion, and a full 
view of life.--as

Brian Clark: APOCALYPSE TAO--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 
Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234.  16 pp., $1.00.  Jump-cut 
prose partly unsparing revealing autobiography (in part about the 
author's bisexuality), with references to some pol named Bill here 
& there, and all kinds of other ravings that include neat words 
like "befinneginning."--bg

William Clark: UNTITLED--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave., 
Allston MA, 02134.  10 pp., $2.50.  (#2 in the Primal Publishing 
Singles Club).  Clark's stories of drug disintegration in the 
wilds of western Pennsylvania reminded me of a ride I got hitching 
through that state in 1973--half a dozen hours drinking in pool 
halls, doing tranquilizers the driver had to combat schizophrenia, 
and wondering if I'd ever see the interstate again.  The country 
people I met that night were every bit as fucking crazy as any 
inner city hoodlums I ever ran into on the street.  This story of 
the rape of a handicapped girl brings to light such an unsettling 
anger and confusion that it made me want to write Clark a blank 
check for the rest of his published work.--o

Norma Cole: MARS--Listening Chamber, 2420 Acton St., Berkeley CA, 
94702.  114 pp.  Norma Cole's writing is complicated, beautiful, 
straight to the heart and always about the mind.  What the mind 
does.  This book, in 6 sections, is about living, dying, loving--
having lost, having done all those things, and its proof is its 
presence.  The writing, often intricate, and moving from one form 
to another, conveys a thinking that is convoluted and deeply 
personal.  And because the writing is so felt, the reader insists 
that the "sense" comes through, grants that it does, and moves on 
with the work.  There is a pain in writing, or perhaps it's that 
all writing is a moving beyond tragedy.  Cole, in this book, shows 
us that.  A gorgeous cover collage by Jess makes this one of the 
most beautiful books, inside and out, that I've seen in awhile.
--jg
     Norma Cole's MARS is a witness to the event, a coiled serpent 
ready to strike, danger under the surface of the words she 
propels.  At differing times full of wisdom, a careful observer 
with a plain-speaking mode of address, or an abstracted voice 
(many voices here).  MARS shows Cole's interest in critical theory 
as it informs a thread that increases the dimensional thrust 
accompanying concepts, every word mattering.--pg

John Robert Columbo, ed.: WORDS IN SMALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF 
MINIATURE LITERARY COMPOSITIONS--Cacanadadada Press, 3350 W. 21st. 
Ave., Vancouver B.C., Canada, V6S 1G7.  96 pp.  Make it small and 
do it in 50 words or less.  The microtext for your delectation.  
Most of the sources are SF, but all bear the requisite hermetic 
compactness.  A commentary follows each selection.  This is truly 
the age of the sound byte--will it become the age of the lit byte?  
As technology causes attention spans to drop, such concision will 
be a useful skill in the grim determinisms of literary Darwinsm.
--as

Edmund Conti: EDDIES--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte 
FL, 33949.  $3.00.  By playing with words, inverted them, turning 
syntax and insight inside out, Conti opens a new way of seeing.  
These tiny poems are self-referential often, but the in-joke is in 
our minds and we find ourselves joining the play and 
reinvestigating the possibilities of language, poetry, and 
thought.  For instance, a poem titled "Embellishment" reads, in 
full, "To be/ Ornate to be".  Or the poem "Wry": "I drink/ 
therefore I am/ what I drink."  Even the title of the book could 
be construed as a pun on the poet's name.  The poems are 
accompanied by equally playful line drawings that have some 
revelations of their own.  This is a good book to have around when 
friends drop in, certain to stimulate inventive dialog.--jb

Marc Cooper, Hannah Holm, Barbara Pillsbury & The Zapistas: THE 
ZAPISTAS, STARTING FROM CHIAPAS--Open Magazine, PO Box 2726, 
Westfield, NJ, 07091.  $4.00.  (#30 in the Open Pamphlet Series)  
On January 1st of this year the Zapatista Army of National 
Liberation, consisting primarily of Mayan Tzetal indians, declared 
war against the Mexican government and took control of the city of 
San Cristobal.  The various dominant news organizations presented 
this as just another guerrilla insurgence, a five minute story for 
a few days, then forgotten amidst the pig circus malaise of 
Washington, DC.  But there was more to the story than that, and 
this pamphlet fills in the pieces.  For the most part it amounts 
to a group descended from the indigenous peoples of the area that 
have organized themselves to demand justice and genuine democratic 
reform.  Included here is the story of their struggle, as well as 
documents from the Zapatistas themselves.  The fact that the 
revolt began just as NAFTA took effect and that the Mexican 
government was willing to negotiate testifies to the power of 
their organization.  Is this the beginning of a broader revolt?
     Like the rest of the Open Magazine series, this is vital 
countermedia, an antidote to the usual information tripe.--jb

Judson Crews: HENRY MILLER AND MY BIG SUR DAYS--Vergin Press, 
PO Box 370322, El Paso TX, 79937.  47 pp., $5.95.  This memoir's 
just a slice from the long and complex life of Judson Crews.  Yes, 
he talks about Henry Miller--and Anais Nin and lots of other "well 
known" folks.  The core of this stream-of-consciousness autobio 
bit (reportedly culled from more than 10,000 pages of notes and 
journals) is a year he spent at Big Sur, often in the company of 
Henry Miller.  An intimate look at Miller & surrounding people, 
the times, and Judson's own state of mind.  But it's not plodding, 
introspective stuff--as Belinda Subraman says in her forward, 
unlike "Anais Nin's... artfully, self-conscious diaries" this is 
"candid, thoughtful... a perspective on Henry Miller and the Big 
Sur days that would be quite different from any others."--rkk

Judson Crews: MANNEQUIN ANYMORE THAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration 
Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108.  34 pp., $5.00  Judson is one of 
those dirty old men I'd love to bring to a family reunion, knowing 
he'd get me written out of so many wills, and would leave such a 
trail of gossip and stories, that while I'd never inherit a 
fortune, I'd certainly be a part of family history.  In this 
collection we get that lusting action again, tales of Buddha and 
Casteneda, scents of strong feminine feet, topless bars, being a 
charter member of N.O.W., reverences to Henry Miller, bouts of 
masturbation, and freshened Scotch & Seltzers at 3:00 in the 
morning.  These are the stores my uncles used to tell when they 
were drunk, the stories my grandfather wanted to forget as he 
tried to claw his way to heaven.--o

Elanor Earl Crockett: WI, GEE, IT MUS BE CRAZY LIKE A DOG (pts. 3 
& 4)--Bonton Books, 1500 Eastside Dr. #219, Austin TX, 78704.  
24 pp. + cassette.  Elanor Earl Crockett is a poet and performance 
poet from Austin whose taped productions show an amazing 
liveliness and variety of voices.  This compilation includes work 
from a period of several years and would serve as an excellent 
introduction to her work.  On the tape, the poems are performed 
against a variety of noise an/or music backgrounds, although the 
sound and voice are often deliberately at the same level, so that 
neither is dominant.  It is fortunate that the tape is accompanied 
by a booklet of the texts, which stand alone very strongly as 
poems on the printed page.  The poems take a great variety of 
approaches, from first-person narration to word and/or dialect 
play, to anaphoric or conceptual structures, to an almost 
Language-like allusiveness in a piece called "Phrases," a 
collaboration with "SW":

     which to choose
     aerobic animals will see light
     pocket manufacturers
     trapped in the gravel mica glinting
     from this vantage the trajectory
     silence tears the evening
     until at night and drive right into the ocean

The productions values of this work are simple (reduced 
typescript, etc.) but the content is strong, polished, and unique.
--jmb

Doris Cross: REWORKS 1968-1953--Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New 
Mexico, Box 2065, Santa Fe NM, 87504-2065.  62 pp, $15.00.  The 
full-color cover reproduction of one of Cross's dictionary-page 
treatments alone is worth ten times the price of this catalog of 
an 1993 Santa Fe exhibition of her work--at least to those 
interested in visual poetry, for she was one of the century's 
masters of the genre.  But the volume also contains numerous other 
excellent reproductions of her works as well as an excellent 
introduction to it, and her, by Jim Edwards, and a wonderfully 
poem-filled appreciation by Gerald Burns.--bg

Robin Crozier & John M. Bennett: HAW RAG--Luna Bisonte Prods, 
137 Leland Ave., Columbus OH, 43214.  8 pp., $1.00.  Bizarre 
combinations of scrawled phrases, clip-outs, Chinese (or Chinese-
like) charactry, and on each page but the first word, "REALLY," in 
triplicate, vertically, somewhere on the page with a large bold 
"J", "R", or "B" in front of it.  Sorta like some kind of rhythm 
section to help us keep our bearings from movement to movement, 
I guess.--bg

Richard Currey, CROSSING OVER: THE VIETNAM STORIES--Clark City 
Press, PO Box 1358, 109 Callender St., Livingston MT, 59057.  
$11.00.  CROSSING OVER painfully returned me to those calamitous 
years, now a full generation past, with all the accuracies of a 
participant's historical memory.  "Rose-stained bodies dumped in 
the chopper's gut."  Poetically-bonded, gritty, vivid details with 
tersely understated emotion, thus might one characterize these 
articulate wartime vignettes.
     Currey is humanely aware, collagistic, and associative.  His 
tour as a Navy medic provided the insight for these understated & 
exceptionally tight narratives.  His skills as a writer, honed in 
writing two solidly crafted earlier books about Vietnam, allow 
this book of fewer than 40 text pages to vibrate with the hideous 
corpses and limbs, the "legs that were not legs... that were 
glutinous mire, that were ooze."  A resurrection of "every 
drowning ghost and airborne soul."  A field notebook--beautiful 
and dreadful.--jl

Joel Dailey: DOPPLER EFFECTS--Shockbox Press, PO Box 7226, Nashua 
NH, 03060.  20 pp., $2.00 (?).  Dead cats, car sex, seductive 
Cheryl Dreams stories, and other weird juvenilia fill this 
booklet.  I don't know, maybe I'm getting old and jaded, but this 
seemed light weight.  I tried to give it a handful of chances, but 
everytime I had to let it drop.--o

Gary David: A LOG OF DEADWOOD--North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327, 
Berkeley, CA, 94701.  144 pp., $9.95.  Labeled a postmodern epic 
of the South Dakota Gold Rush.  Gary David's work does attempt to 
deconstruct a period of history limited to an active linear 
journal-like format whereby most conventions are broken down & 
accented with images from The Wizard of Oz, The Tibetan Book of 
the Dead, the Old American West; utilizing Viking fury, Jungian 
Symbolism, Sioux Legends, & even a touch of hard science.  
Actually 49 presences, each a poem, each a day in the journal of 
Deadwood 1876.  From "Day 25":  "...spear-shaker, you're gonna 
cry/ 96 tears!"  Or, from "Day 48": "I feel my days/ over the 
mirror of its pages.//...white stone black stone/make.// Gung ho & 
hard on/ rising red, but on the run."--rrle

Jeff Derksen: DWELL--Talonbooks, 201-1019 East Cordova, Vancouver 
BC, V6A 1M8.  98 pp., $9.95.  Derksen scrutinizes all; the pieces 
in this book are the ongoing critique of living the life he 
lives--the culture, the politics; nothing escapes, nothing 
devolves into sentimentality, everything receives a keen, if 
sometimes merely whispered, analysis.  It is observation with 
edge, with keen insight, with a fair amount of cynicism, and a 
pleasing, sometimes brilliant, play on language.  The pieces in 
the book vary interestingly both formally, and in what they take 
on.  "Hold on to your bag, Betty" is a wonderful, resonant and 
sometimes lush "report" from foreign lands; "Temp Corp", the final 
piece in the book, is spare but emotionally packed, held very 
close to the line of breaking, tracing a kind of emotional pain 
that only loss engenders.  A wonderful book from this up n' coming 
Canadian writer.--jg

Paul Dilsaver: A CURE FOR OPTIMISM: POEMS--Sky and Sage Books, 
PO Box 3606, Rapid City SD.  72 pp.  And I thought that I was a 
pessimist!  The language of ultimate despair.  Dark laughter drawn 
from a sadness, a jaded contempt for homo sapiens and "the 
blinding terrors of consciousness."  Praying for amnesia and 
oblivion.  Extraordinary world weariness and misanthropy--as

John Dollis: BL( )NK SPACE--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port 
Charlotte FL, 33949.  $5.00.  Dollis writes poetry that appears 
abstract and elusive on the surface but is rich in the depths.  
He is dealing with the fundamental means by which we arrive at a 
sense of ourselves, define ourselves, and communicate this sense 
to the world at large.  But rather than taking shelter in pure 
philosophy he incorporates elements of the everyday, giving his 
work a connectedness that normally is missing from such studied 
introspection.  He introduces an idea then detaches from it, moves 
around it, rediscovers it evolving into the fibers of his own 
intelligence, a fascinating process to observe and participate 
in.--jb

Larry Eigner: WINDOWS/WALLS/YARD/WAYS--Black Sparrow Press, 
24 Tenth St., Santa Rosa CA, 95401.  192 pp., $13.00(cloth).  
Eigner has been the inspiration for many poets who have read him, 
and read by many where he lives in the Bay Area, but he has never 
received the audience he deserves.  He is simply one of the finest 
poets of a generation that included Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, 
and James Broughton, not to mention the Beat Poets.  This volume, 
which covers the period 1959-1992, presents a large enough 
selection that someone, having never read Eigner, would come away 
with a good understanding of his work, not to mention a change in 
his or her way of looking at things.  There is an almost Eastern 
sense of awareness in Eigner's poetry, a stillness in the imagery, 
so quiet & yet so intense.  You can see the images in your mind's 
eye so clearly that when you move into an odd turn of phrase you 
move through it and are changed almost without your noticing it. 
The poem "July 22 87":

       water splashes
          At the surface
            and hits you
               whatever things
                 may be
                    or have been
     
     But there is no way to do justice to Eigner's poetry in a 
short review, or in a long one.  If you like poetry of any kind, 
from traditional to wildly experimental, you will be changed by 
reading this book.  Very highly recommended.--jb

Endwar: FOUR WINDOWS, ONE FRAME--Institutional Projects, PO Box 
10973, State College PA , 16805.  12 pp.+tapes, $20.00.  The box 
this material comes in describes the audio tapes included as "four 
antitapes (total time 2 seconds)."  It's all in the packaging and 
labeling.  Yes, very Cagean, but no minor imitation--in fact, 
about as appealing an extension of the genre as I've come across.
--bg

Endwar: UNTITLED--Institutional Projects, PO Box 10973, State 
College PA , 16805.  6 pp., $1.00.  A scrap of found poetry and 
three business cards with little 2-part conceptual poems on them, 
in two cases on both sides.  Extremely clever, like the card with 
"Bill of Sale" on one side and "Bill of Rights" on the other.  
Fascination equation when you think about it.--bg

Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William 
St., Racine WI, 53402.  20 pp., $2.00.  You get the impression, on 
first reading these poems, that Michael Estabrook is a novelist--
not long ago, in a letter, Estabrook told me he'd tried to write a 
novel, but he wasn't entirely satisfied with the result.  So, I 
imagine, he let the poetry take over.  STRIPPED & SHIVERING 
consists of 19 short poems, each poem a personality sketch.  
Estabrook's lines are sharp, his words well chosen.  Too many 
poets make us plow through line after line, serving up too much 
verbiage in the fat.  Estabrook's poems are small, one-takes, 
well-crafted arrows.  They instruct, without didacticism, about 
the hard knocks of life.--kn

Terry Everton: MANNEQUIN DREAMS ROTTING THERE IN MUGSWEAT AND 
SUDS--Borderline Press, PO Box 741178, Arvada CO, 80006.  24 pp., 
$2.00.  Jesus, with an opening poem like "mannequin dreams rotting 
there in mugsweat and suds" where a drunk in a bar has a tooth 
fall out, a woman buys it for five bucks, and when the man asks 
her what she's going to do with it she says: "I'm building/ myself 
a man/ one piece at a time"--I'd say, it's a winner.  Everton 
tosses the reader into a world filled with competitive hookers, 
incompetent fabulous boyfriends who can't even kill their cheating 
old ladys without goofing it up, bar farts, out of control fires, 
german shepherds slaughtered for stealing chickens, and rats 
fighting in alleys for the scraps left by drunks--action among 
scavengers, and hard gritty survival tales of the down and out.--o

Lawerence Ferlinghetti: THESE ARE MY RIVERS New & Selected Poems 
1955-1993--New Directions, 80 Eighth Ave., New York NY, 10011.  
320 pp., $22.95.  Any library of 20th century poetry would have to 
include the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  He is a connector 
between contemporary and modern.  Engaged in the events of his 
age, moving through the world igniting sparks, illuminations--not 
unlike the imagists in form, or the troubadors in romance, but 
completely, purely Ferlighetti.  There is no mistaking his voice, 
a classic sensibility writing the poetry of a world spinning 
sensless in dissolution.  His poetry is real and direct, in 
ordinary tongue, but rarely resigned, never hopeless.  At the end 
of "Assassination Raga," in part a commemoration of the Kennedy 
assassinations, after facing the cold reality of bitter death he 
says, "There is no god but Life" and leaves us with "People with 
roses/ behind the barricades!"  
     The poems are his own selection from his books, and includes 
an excellent selection of new work.  Ferlinghetti has certainly 
been a poet of our times, but has also certainly written in 
eternity, suspending the events and his own flesh and blood soul 
there, illuminations of the world.--jb

Huck Finch: PROGRESS--Anatomy Floaters Clearing House, 3113 
Bernadette Ln., Sarasota FL, 34234.  18 pp., $1.00.  Striking 
photograph-sequence in shades of day-glo green of some 
unidentifiable road-killed animal's week-by-week decomposition.  
With texts.  Also a cover photo of the author kissing a deer head 
at a roadkill art show at the University of South Florida... for 
which action he was promptly ushered out.--bg

Charles Henri Ford: OM KRISHNA I--Bogg Publications, 422 N. 
Cleveland St., Arlington VA, 22201.  20 pp., SASE (large).  This 
book, offered in Bogg's free-for-postage series, was published in 
1979 by Cherry Valley Editions.  Charles Henri Ford was one of the 
"founders of the New York school" of poetry, but this book is not 
a very good primer on that genre.  OM KRISHNA I is an 
uncomfortable mix of '50s styles, '60s subjects, and '70s me-
generation attitude.  The book (mostly one long poem) combines 
beat, subconscious stream-of-consciousness, flower-power pop 
philosophy... a dash of Eastern mysticism and a fistful of pop 
literary references.  But it's not a savory stew.  Ford published 
his first volume of verse in 1938, but OM KRISHNA I sounds hippy-
dippy and temporal, a detour by a graying poet into the love-beads 
scene.--rkk

Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Cocker, 
PO Box 640543, San Francisco CA, 94164.  44 pp., $5.95.  The roles 
of critic and poet are merged in a poetic space that engenders a 
work which expands the tradition of Shelley's "A Defense of 
Poetry" and counters the smug extremes of T. S. Eliot.  Foster's 
preface, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With Politics" is a refreshing 
reaction to critics who suggest that their reductions of meaning-
generation processes in the poem are more important that the poem 
itself.  This is a welcome diatribe--we're getting used to seeing 
Language poets people-pulped by Tiannamen Square vintage critical 
tanks who have little or no love for the poetry itself, they only 
want to smash the work into their own agendas.  Foster's poetry 
resists critical appropriation by refusing to confine itself to a 
single form or prosodic arrangement.  This is negative capability 
taken to a new level & it feels good--like flight-simulating G-
forces in a jet built for oblivion.--ssn

Robert Frazier & Bruce Boston: CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN 
FOREST--Horror's Head Press, 140 Dickie Ave, Staten Island NY, 
10314.  80 pp., $8.95.  Boston and Frazier are longtime Science 
Fiction poets whose work combines a surrealist sensibility with a 
hard technological edge.  Their CHRONICLES OF THE MUTANT RAIN 
FOREST invokes a jungle gone botanically mad: "It is a Sphinx that 
lifts the world upon its back and grows./ Its veins are road maps 
that lead nowhere,/ its breath a cipher,/ its inscrutable eyes 
spin mandalas that drift and blue/ shift in toward Armageddon."  
Eerie and evocative, these poems effectively explore a terrain 
most poets don't even realize exists.--tw

Celestine Frost: AN IMAGINED EXPERIENCE OVER THE ENTRANCE--Dusty 
Dog, 1904-A Gladden, Gallup NM, 87301.  55 pp., $5.95.  This 
chapbook is a nice surprise--Celestine Frost's crafting is a real 
find.  It's exquisite work, dense and enveloping with a strong, 
assured narration.  Celestine is adept at both metaphoric work and 
down-to-earth storylines--and manages to toss off lines like "O it 
had come to the morning/ of the drug bitter end// with that 
quality/ of a private bath" without being cliched or sophomoric. 
There's only one literary price to pay for Celestine's imagery... 
the reader needs to take a breather every dozen pages or so.--rkk

Peter Ganick: NEWS ON SKIS--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA, 
94924.  61 pp., $8.00.  In three parts; the first a wonderful play 
on UPPER and lower case, a rant that becomes a mesmerizing 
cadenced song; the second a visually compelling array of geometric 
stanzas--an interesting tension created by the sense that the 
language/content is there solely to fill out the (literal) form; 
and the third, an Epilogue, is a series of ellipses, dash, and 
period-ridden stanzas and lines.  This book offers a pleasing 
variety, in form, shape, and tone.  The back cover blurbs are the 
most loudly ironic I've come across--text is layered over other 
text so that a sort of ulterior alphabet is formed--no word 
recognizable, but the sentiment is clear.  A fun book.--jg

Bob Grumman: EXCERPT FROM RABBIT STEW--Anatomy Floaters Clearing 
House, 3113 Bernadette Lane, Sarasota FL, 34234.  15 pp.  Perhaps 
one would have waited for the complete work to appear before 
attempting a review, but this little tidbit of a longer piece is 
too tempting to let pass.  It consists of a dialogue between Ned 
and Fred (other characters intrude later) who refer to various 
incidents of incest, necrophlia, and murder, all in a rather 
absurdist, offhand manner.  One wants to read more of this!--jmb
     A portion of one of Grumman's plays, somewhere beyond 
Surrealism or the antics of the Cabaret Voltaire.  For the space 
of a few lines the dialog is odd, but logical, then complications 
arise, sometimes by intellectual extension of the dialog, 
sometimes by poetic flight, and we tremble joyously as our nerves 
are ripped out by these wicked imaginative turns.  There are 
problems with wheelbarrow theft, and beaten mothers, a man named 
Wally drug around with a rope, and other things that begin to make 
strange sense.  Personas shift and veer into one another, 
characters pontificate and confess.  But through what could be 
agony a sense of joy is dancing and the plays begins to reveal 
itself in the mind of the beholder.  This is a delight to read and 
it would be better still to see the whole play performed.--jb

Mark Hammer: IRIS--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth Ave., Buffalo 
NY, 14213.  12 pp., $3.00.  A series of quite, precise lyrics each 
with the title "iris" and dedicated to poets like John Weiners and 
John Clarke.  The poems often recall the crafted devotions of some 
of Robin Blaser's work, another poet who is quoted significantly 
in the book.  But these poems work best because the accuracy of 
their own insights is not overwhelmed by the writer's obvious 
admiration for this illustrious and varied influences--despite 
those influences (and very unlike a lot of recent poetry that 
seems to try to imitate greatness) the carefully sharp vision here 
is clearly Hammer's own.--mw

Keith Higginbotham: GLOOMY NEW LIFE--Burning Llama Press, 100 
Courtland Dr., Columbia SC, 29223.  8 pp., SASE?  Dopey pix 
sprinkled with word and phrases in various typographies that warp 
together a droll story that begins, "I grew up/ fucked in/ What 
the Seventies did to/ gender, with boys/ and girls dancing in 
separate/ rotes of pain/ Clamped to their/ unsensuous/ slang/ of 
denial."--bg
     A small booklet of collaged found texts and images with a 
definite, if elliptical, autobiographical narrative structure.  
Childhood, sexuality, class, history: a rich mixture of topics 
roiling about in a visually stimulating and humorous format.--jmb

Lita Hornick & Poet Friends: GREAT QUEENS WHO LOVED POETRY: TO 
ELIZABETH & ELANOR--Giorno Poetry Systems, 222 Bowery, New York 
NY, 10012.  74 pp.  A professionally produced perfect-bound book 
with color illustrations, consisting of poetry by Lita Hornick in 
collaboration with a variety of poets, mostly from NY, such as 
Jeff Wright, Alice Notley, John Giorno, Ron Padgett, Rochelle 
Owens, George Economou, Bob Rosenthal, Paul Violi, Anne Waldman, 
Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, among others.  The poems are 
generally in a conversational first-person voice, and have a 
consistency of tone that is a bit surprising considering that 
Hornick's collaborators are such a variety of differing and strong 
poets.  This suggest that hers in the dominant voice in these 
exchanges.  The volume also includes reproductions of artwork from 
her collection, a "credo," and an essay, "Why I Love Gay Men."  
An entertaining book focusing on a unique and intriguing 
personality.--jmb

Tom House: NAZIS & NOSE JOBS--Tom House, PO Box 120661, Nashville 
TN, 37212.  12 pp., $3.00.  House has never been one to shy away 
from trouble, and his strong political (if not necessarily 
"politically correct") stances have always been clear.  This time 
House attacks media manipulation, government seduction, planetary 
self-destruction, fuckin' the flag in the name of punk, politics 
and pornography, televised evangelists, and a hundred other things 
that piss him off so much that even the anarchists are afraid to 
take him on.  This is hard core, without pretense or plastic 
presentation.--o

William Howe: TRIPFLEA--Tailspin Press, 418 Richmond, #2,, Buffalo 
NY, 14222.  $5.00.  This is the first "book" from a brand new 
press.  Tailspin's project will be to challenge the notion of what 
a book is, that is the form of a book itself.  Tailspin will 
produce concrete chapbooks.  This first offering by William Howe 
arrives in an envelope and appears to be ordinary until one opens 
the "book."  The pages not only turn towards the right but 
alternate pages turn towards the left.  It is as if two books 
collided.  This allows the free floating text on the alternate 
pages to reform endlessly.  There is no narrative poetry enclosed.  
Words are grouped in clusters and as the pages combine and 
recombine there is a fluctuating constellation or word units.  
Here is a map of words that leads to the imagination.--mb
     The first in a new series of chapbooks devoted to exploring 
the physical possibilities of the chapbook format.  The pages of 
this book are folded over each other, so that opening the book is 
like opening a series of doors, each of which changes the layout 
of the words in front of the reader.  The words themselves are 
angry stutters of pun-filled language ("sometimes i        change 
my/ mem(shoes) ory" arranged in striking visual fragments; the eye 
roves around the surface of the pages instead of reading from top 
to bottom.  The constantly changing field of words resists all 
attempts at unity, a visual tripflea in a long dark night of the 
soul.--mw
     TRIPFLEA's readers can't escape their responsibility for the 
order of the text they read -- but this is hardly a solemn 
responsibility.  Howe separates and isolates letters, words, 
phrases, and spreads these fragments across the page; 
deformations, klang associations, and polyglot puns yield the 
"well puteed achaeans," the "wallaby wannabe," the "meatbook," and 
"laus methedrine hydrochloride."  This is the sort of book that 
will make me think of Raymond Queneau's permutational sonnet 
sequence Cent mille milliards de poe`mes, but there's a difference 
in Howe's work.  The mathematician Queneau's work is generated 
from the formal structures of the sonnet, while the reader, who 
would need a minimum of 190,258,751 years to read through the 
complete sequence, is in effect made redundant.  Once the 
permutational principle is grasped, everything of importance has 
been grasped.  Howe, on the other hand, leaves much less room for 
textual permutations (his unit is the whole page, while Queneau's 
was the line).  What's foregrounded, instead, is the reader's work 
with the text Howe, as "simulated authorial figure," has put 
together.  But Howe (unlike Queneau) is very present in this book; 
the reader will have to struggle with him in order to redirect the 
text. And just as that struggle reaches its peak, the text itself 
will jump many times its height into the air and land where you 
didn't expect it to.  Future concrete chapbooks from tailspin 
press will include work by Ken Sherwood (of RIF/T) and Michael 
Basinski.--cp

Robert Howington: SPIKED SLURPEE--UBP, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles 
CA, 76147.  21 pp., $2.00.  Howington writes like Mickey Spillane 
on acid, with short short stories that carry all the black and 
white film noir he can muster.  This short collection was a fun 
read--car jackings, bowel movements revenged by vicious kids in 
Texas, wet dreams of Madonna, bad ass wannabes, killers passing 
the time in bars, dog murderers, rapes, uzis, and other tales so 
weird I'm glad Howington lives 1000 miles away from Chicago.  
These stories remind me of early Bukowski--fun and playful and so 
mean they make the kids in horror flicks look innocent.--o
     Nine short stories, most under 1,000 words.  His themes are 
influenced by the crime genre, a combination of Todd Moore and 
Charles Bukowski.  In "Old-Fashion Grilled Pound Cake," a man is 
shot to death outside a bar and Howington's protagonist offers the 
killer the last of his beer.  A woman witnesses murder in "The 
Long Cool Drag"; she calmly remarks how it reminds her of "Miami 
Vice."  There are guns everywhere, especially in Texas--maybe too 
many.  I read along, patiently waiting for the author to change 
gears, take me somewhere else.  But he keeps on, driving home one 
violent scene after another.  Robert W. Howington knows how to 
write--I just wish he'd write about something more than murder in 
American streets.--kn

Robert W, Howington and C.F. Roberts: FUCK YOU!--Wormfeast Press, 
PO Box 519, Westminster MD, 21158.  18 pp., $3.00.  The shock 
value of this chapbook would undoubtedly outrage Miss Manners.  
There are images of murder, torture, flatulation, animal 
copulation, vomit, and kinky sex.  Robert W. Howington is 
described as "poet, nut, admirer of serial killers & Bukowski," 
and C.F. Roberts is "sickly, sweet, painful, vampires and 
goblins."  Now that we have parameters, let me go on to say 
Howington throws in crude stick-cartoons of oral sex.  I don't 
know why.  Truly representative of the shock poetry underground, 
the kind of stuff that you never show to children, and which 
raises the hackles of born-again Christians and the prosecutor's 
office alike.--kn

Don A. Hoyt: A NEW KERYGMA--Bootleg Press, PO Box 158, Uniondale 
NY, 11553.  24 pp.  Don Hoyt is a classic poet--that is, he takes 
a single emotion, event or scene and draws it out through vivid 
and complex language.  Lots of similes and metaphors and that sort 
of poetry stuff.  Traditional work where the term "craftsmanship" 
can still be applied.  It's not the sort of poetry a person zips 
through like a comic book, but the type that should be enjoyed 
over a cup of hot java, a box of bon-bons and a snowy day outside.  
>From philosophy to satire, Hoyt covers the gamut in these 15 
poems.--rkk

Albert Huffstickler: CITY OF THE RAIN--Press of Circumstance, 
312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751.  36 pp., $6.00.  This 
collection of poetry started badly for me; with a rhymey ballad 
about the absence of a "place to ease your pain/ in the City of 
the Rain."  The next poem concerned a rain that made the poet want 
to scream (his description) because it "was my loneliness and 
disenchantment."  But then came some highly effective barroom 
slices of life in the bitter-sweet Bukowski mode that redeemed the 
book.--bg

Albert Huffstickler: THE DARK FLOWER--Press of Circumstance, 312 
East 43rd Street #103, Austin, Texas, 78751.  8 pp.  Small but 
precious, easy to slip into your pocket when you are headed 
somewhere and might get caught without something to read, the 
subway, the restroom at work, behind the dumpster while the crack 
heads shoot it out, or anywhere.  Beautiful purple cover with the 
poet's own artwork, and one long poem inside.  "They found her 
sleeping/on a large stone, curled up/child like, face soft."--rrle

G. Huth: DBQPPRODBOOQPDB #9--dbqp, 875 Central Parkway, 
Schenectady NY, 12309.  4 pp., SASE.  Actually this publisher's 
catalog, but well worth sending for, filled as it is with 
Joyceanated locutions such as "contradionary," "eternaphemera," 
and "stamge speace."  Includes a number of Larry Tomoyasu's 
thought-whirring illuscriptations; and presents through its list 
of dbqp "merchandise" a rich survey of what's going on at the most 
inventive margins of poetry.--bg

Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 
44107.  28 pp., $10.00.  Geoff's takeoff on a child's alphabet 
primer is full of little delights.  Instead of words beginning 
with the letter, the letter itself is depicted:  
     A
and a caption is added:
     An A
Then usually another frame or two is added to playfully comment 
on the one above:
     An
with caption:
     A An
Lots of surprises as a fairly rigid form is bent and played with 
in 26 different ways.--ar

Ruth Jespersen: THE BLINK OF AN EYE--7030 Evergreen Woods Trl., 
Apt. B-136, Spring Hill FL, 34608.  438 pp., $29.95.  Originally 
published by Mother of Ashes Press--publisher Joe Singer is gone, 
but we can't let this book die!  Ruth Jespersen has acquired the 
copies from Joe's estate.  This is one of the strangest novels I 
have ever read.  It's as if Anais Nin's love of self-display were 
mixed with Djuana Barnes' peculiar gentlemen callers and Ivy 
Compton-Burnett's conversational monomanias.  Jespersen is 
extremely funny, idiosyncratic and bizarre.  This is a novel that 
hinges on her fascinating and quirky self.  It's the kind of work 
that could, and should, have a cult following.  A feminist work in 
a sense, about a woman with an offbeat but healthy mind, always 
being her own inimitable self.--as

Andrew Joron & Robert Frazier: INVISIBLE MACHINES--Jazz Police 
Books, PO Box 3235, Lagrande OR, 97850.  60 pp., $9.00.  Science 
Fiction poetry spanning thirteen years of collaborative writing.  
It highlights the difference between SF and other genres of 
writing--the intensely shared, interactive, collaborative elements 
of SF, since we all have a stake in the Future and a soul in the 
Other.  In his introduction, Andrew Joron sums it up well: "SF is, 
in fact, a dialogical genre, one in which texts are written in 
direct response to other texts, in which meanings are produced and 
sustained by community effort... I believe the cross-pollinating 
spirit of SF can be authentically transferred to the writing of 
poetry."  Illustrated with strange photos by noted surrealist 
Thomas Wiloch.--dw

Karl Kempton: RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH and RUNE 7: POEM, A 
MAPPING--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949.  
$5.00@.  With Kempton a typewriter is not a machine, but a ritual 
device with which he articulates his magic.  He has, over the 
years, created a metalanguage, unique to himself, instantly 
recognizable.  In RUNE 6: FIGURES OF SPEECH we see figures, at 
times human-like and sometimes something other.  But these images 
are organic, full of living creatures speaking to us through their 
form.  In RUNE 7: POEM, A MAPPING we begin with "poem" typed in 
block letters then follow a metamorphosis and charting of the word 
and resonances surrounding it.  These two new books testify to the 
power of Kepmton's continuing exploration in mythic fields of 
poetic intelligence.--jb

Elayne Keratsis: JACK AND MISS CRACK--Firestarter Films and Press, 
802 Euclid Ave. #102, Miami Beach, FL, 33139.  82 pp., $11.00.  
Elayne is a princess of Pop illusion, with a smooth flowing voice, 
and a sharp but mournful chorus which exerts an ironic presence; 
dramatic, flirtful, bittersweet songs conducted with vamp/camp 
wit.  There is a dark side to her elastic alcoholic visions--
Elayne is one bitchy, funk-driven, charming, dynamic word-slave.  
Her incendiary neo-beat talent makes poetry and short stories fun 
again.  --rrle

Arthur Winfield Knight: COWBOY POEMS--Potpourri Publishing 
Company, PO Box 8278, Prairie Village, Kansas, 66208.  54 pp., 
$3.50.  Fifty-two poems, more or less traditional free verse, all 
centering on various 19th century outlaws and their family and 
friends.  Jesse James, Cole Younger, Belle Starr, Doc Holiday, Kid 
Curry, Black Bart, and Geronimo are just a few .  Knight has 
extended the outlaw metaphor to include very human thoughts and 
acts, utilizing empathy and understanding to create remarkable 
personalities which makes them more hero and less villain in the 
eyes of the reader.  Like these words from Cole Younger: "...but 
I'm not sorry about riding/ with Frank and Jesse./  I'm not sorry 
about anything."  or these words from Calamity Jane: "'I'm just 
ahead of my time./ In another fifty years/ all women will be doin' 
it."  This is a fine collection for fans of the Old West, outlaws, 
or revisioned details.--rrle

Michael Kriesel: LONG DARK--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, 
Albuquerque NM, 87108.  44 pp., $4.00(?).  Kriesel mixes modern 
mythology (Kryptonite, Cthulu, Bill Bixby, Dr. Doom) with his 
post-Navy experiences in the long poem LONG DARK.  Alienation and 
disorientation is captured in lines like: "My lst week in the 
graveyard/ and we're in this metal shed/ where all the people who 
die/ over winter get stored because/ the ground's too hard to 
dig," and "I've always been attracted/ to the wives of friends./ 
Perhaps because we have/ so much in common," and "You were 2 hours 
of the/ best foreplay I ever had".  There are explosions of 
honesty, confusion, and anger.  There is fruitless lust, and 
endless pointless jobs.  There is the America we live in today, 
undressed, and without illusions.--o

T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. 
SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108.  24 pp., $3.00.  Seventeen poems from 
Cleveland's T. L. Kryss.  "There will be no academic squabbles 
about authorship or emotional influences on this work," remarks 
Steven Ferguson in his introduction to this small chapbook.  
Indeed, Kryss takes us to Treblinka, Cleveland's lower east side, 
and even out toward the edge of the solar system.  His poetry is 
tight, concise, and unique in voice.  Tom Kryss--along with d.a. 
levy, William Wantling, and Charles Bukowski--remains an icon of 
America's largely disregarded underground literary tradition. 
STRANGE ATTRACTIONS, in addition to Tom's poems, is host to 
several drawings by Harland Ristau, Dan Nielsen, Hilary 
Krzywkowski, and T. L. and Carolyn Kryss.--kn

Janet Kuypers: LOOKING THROUGH THEIR WINDOWS--Scars Publications, 
5310 North Magnolia, Chicago IL.  20 pp.  I like Janet Kuypers' 
poems, even if she occasionally dwells on the emotional 
consequences of death and pan too much.  Even so, for a poet under 
30, her mastery of the simple word is exceptional.  Too many 
poets, when they attempt a change of persona (especially in the 
first person voice), the result is often flat, unbelievable, too 
forced.  Not so with Kuypers.  In the poem "Private Lives III, the 
elevated train", she takes us for a ride with morning commute 
yuppies on a crowded train to work.  Suddenly the poet's disgust 
for these middle-class workers surfaces; when she observes a woman 
decked out in a full-length fur coat, her reaction becomes the 
urge to spill coffee on the woman.  "I'll bet they don't even know 
what the animals they killed for this looked like," she writes.  
Most of the other poems here are good, though Kuypers' 
emotionality can become intense, if not bewildering.--kn

Lauren Leja: untitled--Primal Publishing, 107 Brighton Ave., 
Allston MA, 02134.  10 pp., $2.50.  (#l in the Primal Publishing 
Singles Club)  Leja writes long spontaneous stream of 
consciousness lines, and they always carry an edge.  The first 
story in this chap, HISTORY, crawls into the drunken confessional 
of a woman just picked up by some guy who carries more luggage 
than most tourists.  The story QUICKSAND carries another self 
destructive woman into the gutter... and i start to wonder why the 
women in these stories keep walking into stupid fucked up 
situations, as if they'd all just stepped off the bus from the 
suburbs.  And it is probably that element, that lack of street 
sense and survival instincts, that makes these stories so 
fascinating.  The only complaint I have is that $2.50 is a lot 
of money for ten 5" x 5" pages.--o

Lyn Lifshin & Gina Bergamino: WHITE HORSE CAFE--Mulberry Press, 
105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554.  24 pp., $1.00.  WHITE HORSE 
CAFE is not co-written but divided in two sections; the first by 
Lifshin and the latter half by Bergamino.  As usual, Lifshin's 
poems come wham-wham-wham in a torrent of words and visual 
stimuli.  This time she's talking love (or as close to it as Lyn 
ever gets in her poetry!).  Gina, too, talks about men lost and 
found.  The connector?  Not a WHITE HORSE CAFE per se, but a 
definite sense of place--bolting the feelings to a specific 
locale.--rkk

Gerald Locklin: WOMAN TROUBLE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 867, 
Desert Hot Springs CA, 92240.  20 pp., $4.95.  Locklin's character 
here, a womanizing educator, looks for love in all the wrong 
places.  Even so, as a married man, he is in search of "something 
closer to a regular family, a regular marriage," while 
simultaneously looking for sex on the side.  The main character, 
Jimmy, "cannot afford a nervous breakdown," so he drinks, only to 
end up in dread of what Hemingway called "The Fear," which the 
rest of us call delirium tremens.  He warns friends and associates 
not to "take my drinking as an example or as anything manly or 
romantic."  Various women, as if sensing his perpetual horniness, 
tease but do not bed him.  In the end, frustrated, he masturbates 
while remembering an affair he had with a "very anal erotic young 
lady."  Locklin, as always, knows instinctively how to shape and 
steer good fiction, especially dialogue.  He is a master humorist, 
though I'm sure all of this would be lost on the hardboiled 
feminist who'd likely find Gerald's fiction sexist.  The rest of 
us can laugh at the absurdity of Jimmy's chaotic existence.--kn

Colleen Lookingbill: INCOGNITA--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San 
Francisco CA, 94159.  61 pp., $8.00.  Most of the work in this 
book is in prose form, and explores some of the more interesting 
corners of what prose can do.  The sentences, while often 
employing normative grammar and syntax, take a turn.  
Descriptiveness is upended.  "Fate with unkissed lips allowing the 
wick to ignite a vigilant ear, mixing things up seemingly 
indestructible after midnight at such an hour an entrancing 
tableau."  Run-on sentences at their very best.  The words seem to 
expand and contract to fit the space of their thoughts.  This is a 
solid and interesting book, well worth reading.--jg

Damian Lopes: 2 SLIDES OF A--Fingerprinting Inkoperated, PO Box 
657 Station P, Toronto Ontario, CANADA, M5S 2Y4.  2 "pp."  A work 
of visual or concrete poetry presented as two 35mm transparencies 
glass-mounted in plastic settings.  The slides, negative and 
positive images of a designed letter A, should be superimposed 
any way one wishes and projected simultaneously.  Bound in an 
attractive printed small case rather like a matchbook cover.  
A unique and intriguing production.--jmb

Catherine Lynn: THE SNAKE PIT--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine 
WI, 53402.  34 pp., $3.00.  Every once in a while I read something 
that seems so brutally honest it almost makes me shy.  The poems in this collection approach that emotional state.  "Relapse" 
captures a nervous breakdown with a panic reaction that left me 
rubber legged, "Doctor Bastard" takes on a sadistic therapist who 
thinks he's an exorcist, "Getting Your Money's Worth" captures 
stealing food while in a hospital.  These are real poems, honest 
poems, full of life and weird worlds and therapy.--o

Elizabeth MacKiernan: ANCESTORS MAYBE--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove 
Ave., Providence RI, 02906.  160 pp., $8.00.  Imbued by the odd 
charm that invariably derives from a wacky family, three sisters 
exert themselves to the highest perfection of their 
eccentricities.  Understated and delicate humor of the kind that 
our British cousins so pride themselves on possessing.  Those who 
delight in little vignettes and the featherlike touch will be 
enchanted by it.--as

Stephen-Paul Martin: FEAR & PHILOSOPHY--Detour Press, 1506 Grand 
Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105.  124 pp., $8.95.  The best collection 
of meta-fictions I've EVER read.  Its peak is a sur-novella in the 
form of an essay--or; better, notes toward an essay, a definitive 
essay--about Superman (and Lois, Jimmy and Perry), whose reality 
(or, mare exactly, equivalence to my and your reality) the text's 
very intelligent narrator takes for granted; and expects us to as 
well.  The result is hilarious satire, caustic porn, philosophical 
fun, poetic brilliance, mad sanity--and a text for all-time.--bg
     As we are daily deluged by infotainment and disinformation 
the world narrows to the parameters of the delugion. We notice 
nagging anxieties but are unable to notice anything physical that 
might explain them. Exhausted, we relax further into the media 
haze, only to become more anxious. Such is "civilization" as we 
slide screaming through the final decade of the millenium. In 
these stories, which often read like prose poems wired for speed, 
Martin utilizes the very elements of our anxiety to shatter the 
illusion in the mirror and release us into the world beyond our 
collective dream. He demonstrates through a crucible of topical 
paradox how the individual is continually undermined and buried 
beneath a sea of consumerism until nothing remains but a hollow 
hunger for gleaming new objects suspended before us, we become the 
"hungry ghosts" of Tibetan mythology. But Martin takes this a step 
further, bringing into question the very assumptions on which 
civilization is founded. How much of what we call reality is based 
on these assumptions? In the final section "Double Identity", 
which is one long derangement of the Superman story, we confront 
the essence of this conflict, "But in fact it was a fake George 
Reeves who killed himself in Hollywood Hills. The real George 
Reeves got caught on the silver screen, became pure seeming, 
became what he had to become, became pure cytoplasmic screaming." 
So much of what we identify as ourselves, as what we are willing to 
defend to the death, is nothing more than "pure seeming", the 
narrow mythos of a dwindling cultural apparatus. Driving to the 
dark heart of our psychology, Martin reminds where true freedom 
lies, or at the very least offers us the opportunity of finding 
it for ourselves.--jb

Greg Matherly: SHACKLED IN 3-D--The Useless Press, PO Box 413, 
Bristol TN, 37621.  28 pp., $3.00.  The opening poem, "Better 
Belief," captures homelessness with a bite that leaves scars: "A 
cynic.  A bastard./ A parody of our times./ I love you all...".  
"Falling Together Again" reminds me of the kind of relationships 
that make talk show audiences cringe with fear--an on again, off 
again neurotic messes that go in circles, carrying love in fucked-
up cycles of despair.  "Just Breathing" disputes suicide, casting 
it against the living dead.  And that's only the first page in 
this chap..--o

Lisa McLaughlin: THE BODY'S EXECUTIONER--tel-let, 1818 Phillips 
Pl., Charleston IL, 61920.  16 pp., $2.00??  Short prose vignettes 
in various shades of surrealism.  In one, McLaughlin beautifully 
works Everywoman's coming-of-age depths and derangements out of 
the following passage from a Natural History article on a 
contemporary religious sect: "Young Hutterite girls often create 
a secret world confined to a locked chest.  Here are found bits of 
the temporal world... cosmetics... and suntan lotion."--bg

Douglas Messerli: ALONG WITHOUT--Littoral Books, 6026 Wilshire 
Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036.  90 pp., $11.95.  
Intertextualities of death and its multiple others--this is a 
"Masque of the Red Death" played out in a large British manor 
house.  Plague narrative weaves disparate parts together:  
narratives by Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Bram Stoker, Samuel 
Beckett, others; photo stills from Claude Ricochet's underground 
film, SANS LONGTEMPS; voices intoning poetry of ruptured self.  
Messerli's poems grip the sweat that pours down in the middle of a 
back that has been long broken by the horrific thought that even 
what we envision as heaven is lined with gargoyles.  Fears, 
contagions, contaminations mark the relationships:  "Blood, 
blood only/ binds us to the loving/ lived in the pact of acting."  
Artaud's THEATRE OF CRUELTY is a linguistic shadow behind every 
eye.--ssn  

Thom Metzger: THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING--Autonomedia, 55 South 
11th St., PO Box 568 Williamsburg Station, Brooklyn NY, 11211.  
188 pp., $6.00.  Occasional flashes of what might be termed 
Maldororean rhetorical landscapes that give way to a generalized 
irrational spewing.  Rants and post-gnostic disgust!  Anarchist 
tirades!  To my rational mind it seems imprecation for the sake of 
imprecation.  Is the irrationality to a higher purposes?  That's 
difficult to say.--as

Effie Mihopoulos: LANGUID LOVE LYRICS--Salome/Ommation Press, 5548 
N. Sawyer, Chicago, IL, 60625.  70 pp., $ 8.00.  Languid, yes 
sometimes, but always soft, flowing, lyrical.  Beautiful without 
the edge, the hard-driving refrains which made her earlier book 
"The Moon Cycle" a gift.  Here Effie lets us see another side, a 
magical, moody side applied to loves of all kinds, with exacting 
allusions to Sirens, Medea, Diana, Satyrs, Salome, Angels, George 
Sand, the sun, the army, and even a foot fetish.   Her poetry is 
infused with imagery, energy, and an impressive boldness: "The sky 
is a brass drum that gleams/ pound on it/ you will hurt your 
hands..."--rrle

Christine Monhollen: RAZOR MOON--Triage Press, PO Box 1166, 
Sterling Heights MI, 48311.  $7.95.  The majority of the poems in 
this collection locate themselves in the grasp of Eros.  As the 
poet notes, "The flesh speaks."  Throughout there is a joining in 
the act of love and made as a purled poem fabric from the intimacy 
between a woman and a man.  The center of the poetry is the heart 
beneath the mesh of nature within the body self of the "I".  The 
heart is a sexual thing.  And fleeting as is the apex of love 
there is then loss, losing, separation, and the anticipation of 
and finally the reunion, union, reunion.  And so there is the 
notion of death then in all of this life which makes this poetry, 
"the combination becomes a whole."--mb

Todd Moore: ARMED & DANGEROUS--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine 
WI, 53402.  16 pp., $2.00.  Todd Moore shoots from the hip, would 
never consider taking prisoners, and leaves a trail of blood and 
guts, bullets and broken knives, wherever he chooses to go.  In 
this collection, with great illustrations by Dan Nielsen, Todd 
rips into the masses with all of the fury and hate and survival 
instincts he can pull out of his gut.  In the love poem, "brenda 
dreams," we get lines like: "...all/ roads lead to/ her father/ 
who talks to/ his shotgun/ before the/ shooting the/ wound in/ 
frank's back/ is a door/ brenda puts/ her face/ inside she/ can 
feel his/ blood going/ w/her tongue".  And that is just a quick 
sampling of the turmoil that follows in the other 23 poems in this 
collection.--o

Todd Moore: THE LAST GOOD THING--Bull Thistle Press, PO Box 184, 
Jamaica VT, 05343.  24 pp., $9.50.  In this new collection Todd's 
words ring as loud as ever, while  the chapbook itself is a thing 
of beauty--hand sewn binding, wrap-around cover, handset type so 
perfect and on the mark that if feels like a collector's item 
you'd want to pass on to your grandchildren--that is, until you 
start reading about blood and guts and lust, suicides and murders, 
alcoholic psychosis, brass knuckles and blackjacks, and generally 
a world you would most like to hide from your children if you had 
half a chance.  This is pure hardcore violence and libido 
schizophrenia, and some of the best work I've read since, well, 
Todd's last book.--o

Todd Moore & Gina Bergamino: AMERICAN CANNIBAL--Mulberry Press, 
105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554.  20 pp., $1.00.  Poems in 
your face, straight as a razor and right out of the blood-drenched 
reality of the daily news.  Todd Moore, known for his multi-volume 
long poem on John Dillinger (which has been abandoned midstream by 
yet another publisher--this time Primal Publishing, two books into 
it, folded...), is also a master of the minimal shock poem, a no-
bullshit arena where death, torture, and humiliation lurk behind 
drab midwestern facades.  Gina Bergamino recreates Jack the 
Ripper, a modern-day reincarnation of the original who serves 
blood to unsuspecting guests in beer.  In "Schizophrenic Baby", 
she details insanity; her protagonist smells quinine in the 
shower, envisions "a choir of angels" hovering over her in the 
hospital, and dwells on the abortions she endured before marriage.  
Much of the poetry here is impulsive, not unlike violence and 
insanity itself.  AMERICAN CANNIBAL is stark realism.  Not for 
the weak of stomach.--kn

Gustave Morin: RUSTED CHILDHOOD MEMOIRS--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 
3621, Port Charlotte FL, 33949. $5.00.  According to the 
introduction this book is the result of Morin's destroying some 
of his early poems.  I did not read any of those early poems so 
I cannot testify to their value, or lack thereof, but their 
destruction has produced an astonishing volume of vizlature.  The 
pages are starkly original and beautifully organic, as if an alien 
from some other world had collected scraps from our world and 
assembled a series of language maps accessible only by intuition.  
They also function as a series of paintings consisting of letters, 
pen and ink scribbling and drawing, xerox images and fingerprints.  
Moving images in collision at the crossroad of millenniums, rusted 
childhood memoirs is hauntingly, wonderfully weird.--jb

Sheila E. Murphy: TOMMY AND NEIL--Sun/Gemini Press, PO Box 42170, 
Phoenix AZ, 85733.  90 pp., $12.95 paper/$20 hardcover.  A book of 
poetry with an unusual premise: each section consisting of 36 
poems written to one of the poet's brothers, on the occasion of 
each's 36th birthday.  The volume is professionally produced, 
bound in signatures with color covers, and wider than tall to 
allow ample space for some of the poems' long lines.  The poetry 
is personal and intimate, addressing the issues of a particular 
family and particular relationships, but there is nothing maudlin 
about the writing, and it contains none of the usual cliches of 
"confessional" discourse.  The language of these poems moves 
seamlessly between what Janet Grey, in a comment on the cover, 
calls the "pre-grammatical" and the "narrative"--this is a major 
factor in creating the sense of intense but relaxed caring and 
attention directed both at the subject/objects of the writing (the 
poet's brothers), and at the act and process of writing itself.  
The book is a treasure; accessible and elusive, personal and 
universal, innovative and immersed in the most traditional of the 
functions of poetry: to illuminate living.--jmb

Susan Smith Nash: LIQUID BABYLON--Potes & Poets, 181 Edgemont 
Ave., Elmwood CT, 06110.  54 pp.  A remarkable sequence of poems 
bound together by a posture of oblique autobiography, which goes 
far beyond being merely confessional.  These poems shift back and 
forth between the first and third person, and between levels of 
involvement in the events, situations, and states-of-mind that 
serve as context for what is at hear a movement toward 
cohesiveness within a process of change and loss, of knowing and 
feeling.  A poem from the series "Water Shard Night" illustrates 
some of these qualities: "Unblemished by cigarette or exudate of 
denial--I am/ paid to sing like this, every note reminds me I've 
lost you;/ under paralleled spaces in our roaming, desiring gasps/ 
phrasing not music pearls beryls sapphires agates/ mistures of 
unprecious to inlay ceremonial life-in-/ wartime--your eyes 
flutter down drinking wines."  
     Apparently an hors-de-commerce limited edition--it is to be 
hoped that the publisher will make more than 42 copies of this 
excellent book available.--jmb

Susan Smith Nash: MY LOVE IS APOCALYPSE AND RHINESTONE: THE 
LETTERS OF MARILYN MONROE--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., 
Norman OK, 73072.  40 pp., $4.00.  The usual issues revolving 
around MM are raised here (person vs. icon, ideas of the feminine, 
the manipulated and/or manipulating doll, etc.).  But along with 
the standard themes of the grotesqueness and destructiveness of 
mass image-making is an entirely different process, a use of the 
topic of MM to create a fuller consciousness of self and self-in-
its-history and culture that has a positive and life-affirming 
quality about it.  The poems vary a great deal in their techniques 
and dictions, going from a discursive series of "Letters" in MM's 
voice, to the illusive, collage-style stanzas of "Pyroman Norway 
Air Till God Passengers Flying": "my skull will infer like fish--
probable molting w/ syntax / wrinkling little or now dorso-
ventrally crushed, preserve/ tunnel for dreams or lipstick or 
abdomen-flexured sex-/ restrict virtual, applaud--Pava Temple 
leaning vertical / all Guatemala "you look everything" real 
forebears..."
     This book is not simply another spin of the Monroe prayer-
wheel, but an investigation into how that wheel continues to 
exist, and how it connects to the world we inhabit.  Whether 
you're interested in MM or not, this book is well worth reading 
and pondering over.  It concludes with an essay by Thomas Lowe 
Taylor on Nash's poetics, which is a useful and enthusiastic take 
on what she does here.--jmb

Susan Smith Nash: PORNOGRAPHY--Generator Press, 8139 Midland Rd., 
Mentor  OH, 44060.  28 pp., $4.00.  PORNOGRAPHY is like a slightly 
wild trip out west, where you're not too sure of the terrain, not 
too sure of the condition of your trip at all, but there you are.  
America does you, or you do America.  Nash takes us along.  Photos 
provide travelogue "action" at a similar remove.  Interesting, 
provocative, worth a look.  We all get to be voyeurs in this 
one.--jg

Dan Nielsen: INSINCERE FLATTERY & THINLY VEILED SARCASM--BGS 
Press, 1240 William St., Racine, WI, 53402.  16 pp., $2.00.  
This wonderful little chap with its 15 poem by the Wisconsin's 
voracious, wildman poet-artist-publisher Dan Nielsen is 
provocative, thrilling, head-wrenching, and almost as much fun as 
a bucket of psychotropics. Most of these have previously appeared 
in publications like TIGHT, PEARL, BOUILLABAISSE, IN YOUR FACE, 
etc.  His poetry is startling, tight, compressed, etched in absurd 
realism, bulging with comic relief, or sardonic sadness. Nielson 
has a butcher's-eye for splintered cultural bones, and he is 
serving up a soup of choice social satire, laced with bizarre 
line art by Greg Evanson. Damn nice.--rrle

Dan Nielsen: YOU'RE OUT OF MY MIND, BUT SO AM I--Fell Swoop, 
3003 Ponce De Leon St., New Orleans LA, 70119.  16 pp., $3.00.  
Dan Nielsen is a natural master of the tongue-in-cheek poem.  
He is minimalistic, drives for the point, and his lines are 
unadorned, straight-forward.  The absurdity of childhood and 
sexual relations predominate here.  In "And It Paid Off" he 
writes: "I remember/ my father/ asking me// what I was doing/ to 
prepare/ for the future// 'I'm hallucinating,/ dad."  When the 
poet attempts to instruct his son how to recognize a crazy 
person--describing the way they look and act--the son wants to 
know if his father is crazy.  In the short story "Joe Got Hard", 
Nielsen introduces a character stoned on acid who attempts to have 
sex with a fat woman; the situation quickly deteriorates when the 
woman's biker husband arrives.  Much like a real LSD trip, the 
short story is surreal and disconnected from reality.  Nielsen's 
absurdist observations are a welcome digression from a large body 
of poetry that is too serious, academic, or often 
incomprehensible.  In addition to his poems, there are drawings 
and collages, all of which are unmistakably Nielsenesque.--kn

Kurt Nimmo: SUNFLOWERS OF VAN GOGH--Undulating Bedsheets 
Productions, PO Box 25760, Los Angeles CA, 90025.  18 pp., 
$1.75.  Nimmo writes with a precision you wish those engineers 
who design jets that explode had.  When a writer puts you into 
situations you aren't familiar with, you need to trust their 
abilities to get you out--Nimmo carries that authority, that 
illusion of competency you need when the air under your plane just 
isn't enough.  In this three story sampling we get meditations in 
both poetic and essay formatted hysteria--the residue of Vietnam 
on modern life.  Nimmo is Camus tossed into a suburban Detroit 
trailer park; these stories leave you with that dry heaving 
madness comes from surviving way too long.--o

Mark Nowak, ed.: ANTHOLOGY OF NORTH AMERICAN IDEOPHONICS--227 
Montrose Place, Apt. C., St. Paul MN.  92 pp.  An assemblage of 
all kinds of texts about the arts but most about "Ethnopoetics & 
the Poet as Other," the title of the first selection, which is by 
Jerome Rothenberg.  Among the many other highlights: an essay by 
John Olson on the value of sound for transforming words from 
denotations to things, and a discussion of H.D. and Robert Duncan 
regarding "the poetics of non-market values" by Greg Hewitt.--bg

Mario Rene Padilla: REACHING BACK FOR THE NEVER ENDING--Red 
Dancefloor Press, PO Box 7392, Van Nuys CA, 91409-7392.  86 pp., 
$9.95.  "I am the author of my own memories, a child of his own 
making," states Padilla in his prologue, and this collection of 
twenty-five urgent, moving poems reaches out with a semi-lyrical 
free verse style which startles and slides, prods and evokes with 
Mayan beasts and cello notes, the legend of the Nagual, and the 
decapitated body found in a wrecked car thirteen years after the 
accident.  Yes, this is a hodgepodge of versatile occurrences and 
manic voices.  "I feel the slow coming to an end/ like unwinding 
wire from a wire roll/ or the drip buckets easy sway/ against the 
wind/ I feel the coming end."  Padilla is a poet who deals with 
realistic coincidence, class-conscious images, and American myths.  
He overcomes time, reaches into his autobiographical self and 
pulls out poetry which is active and indulgent... "...like twelve 
against one/ just take the baseball bat I thought/ and go lecture 
them about 'one-on-one'/ but my son's matter-of-fact tone 'pop, 
they're all packing guns'"--rrle

Clemente Padin & Jorge Caraballo: SOLIDARIDAD URUGUAY--Clemente 
Padin, Casilla Correo Central 1211, Montevideo URAGUAY.  40 pp.  
Documentation of articles about various mail-art and other network 
efforts to free Caraballo and Padn from the imprisonment they 
suffered at the hands of the Uruguayan military government from 
1977 to 1985.  Caraballo and Padn were well-known mail artists, 
writers, and visual poets whose case attracted a lot of attention.  
It is good to have this documentation, complete with reproductions 
of pieces of mail-art, of a grim period in this continent's recent 
history.  Articles in Spanish or English.--jmb

Mark Pawlak: SPECIAL HANDLING--Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn NY.  
90 pp., 10.00.  There aren't many, if any, poets writing like Mark 
Pawlak.  His poetry has conscience.  It actually deals with 
issues, political issues.  It calls attention to the world class 
structure and the crushing power of wealth and privilege.  I've 
been in dozens of conversations that revolved around the fact that 
poetry has almost no audience.  If there were more poetry like 
Pawlak's than every person earning less than 50 grand a year would 
be all ears.  Need comparisons?  Like Reznikoff.  Pawlak has a 
gift for the ironic.  A fragment of his poem "Progress in 
Honduras": "in outlying hamlets/ where doctors had been unknown/ 
the stooped peasants/ lugging sacks of corn// now ease their 
backaches/ with aspirin at bedtime/ thanks to U.S. medics."--mb

John Perlman: ANACOUSTIC--Standing Stones Press, 7 Circle Pines, 
Morris MN, 56267.  16 pp., $2.00.  This collection of poems seemed 
mostly discourse on discourse at first.  But then it turned into 
"sky & all the/ unstunned stars the moon just/ fallen short of 
full..." and the like, to seem more communion- than discourse-
centered, a notion supported by my later coming on the word 
"paten" ("plate; esp.: one of precious metal for the Eucharistic 
bread"--a word I've started seeing a lot of in poems lately).--bg

John Xerxes Piche: GRUMBLEPHUCK--Love Bunni, 2622 Princeton Rd., 
Cleveland Hts. OH, 44118.  48 pp., $3.00(?).  Apparently one of 
those dreaded personal zines, written by a Reverend John Xerxes, a 
survivor of the Subgenius hysteria that terrorized America in the 
80's.  There is the expected incoherent rambling; fictionalized 
essays; a confession of his posing as Diane in the personal ads of 
"Maximum Rock & Roll" magazine to solicit mail from males (in 
order to "relate to the female experience"); a decent essay on 
being disappointed by GG Allin's death; some bad porn; a funny 
piece on SEXUAL ATTRACTION IS NECESSARY; drug use analysis... 
and so on.  Either the writing of an isolated psychopathic 
schizophrenic, or the words of a genius.--o

Laurie Price: EXCEPT FOR MEMORY--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, 
Berkeley CA, 94709.  74 pp., $8.95.  Suzanne Brooker's cover art, 
a collage of antique watches, brings to mind the idea of temps 
perdu ("lost time"), which is perhaps the emotional point of 
departure of this collection.  "Pry" peels the dial from the hands 
in order to create a state of suspended animation: "The watched 
clock never stops/ bordering reasons held in check."  Influenced 
by an imagist aesthetic, Price's lyric poems are highly visual, 
and privilege the supersaturated colors of the dream. 
"Sleepwalkers" is a good example: "A tangerine figure/ approaches 
from the curb/ lightens the street/ flooded by blues."--ssn  

Stephen Ratcliffe: PRIVATE--Leave Books, 57 Livingston St., 
Buffalo NY, 14213.  12 pp., $2.00.  A poetics of intervention, 
interruption, and subtle insinuations of voice which intrude in 
the form of enclosed parenthetical asides and French shifts.  The 
effect is magnificent: "to speak of returning before/ (think) 
objects--several/ intervals or (less)/ the knowledge of her 
possessions."  Ratcliffe's collisions of public and private 
literacies create a tension between the voice and the voiced. 
--ssn

Pam Rehm: PIECEWORK--Garlic Press, PO Box 1242, Stockbridge MA, 
01262.  25 pp., $5.00.  Velocities of transformation heat up as 
the poems refuse to back down from the place in the brain that 
makes connections.  "Neurology: A Theory" places the limits of all 
figurative language, particularly metonymy, squarely in the region 
that attempts to fence in perception in what Sir Philip Sidney 
referred to as a jail-cell of flesh.  Observes Rehm: "One gets 
stuck in, what is evidently,/ describing oneself."  A subtle and 
intellectually engaging read.--ssn

Werner Reichhold: SENSESCAPES--AHA Books, PO Box 767, Gualal CA, 
95445.  62 pp., $8.00.  Huge pages (17" wide, 11" high) containing 
twenty-eight 2-page "projects" on which gorgeous surrealistic 
collages (often using material from Dore) face similarly potent 
surrealistic texts, e.g., on that begins: "Ajax, is this the town/ 
that eats men and women/ copper for breakfast?// Yes, but look at 
the phone book,/ is it broke yet?" ready to ignite in any 
sympathetic aesthcipient's redeeming connectives.--bg

Jeff Rentsch: THE STORY OF TWO MEN--InDigest, PO Box 480, Denville 
NJ, 07834.  52 pp., $1.00.  The full title of this text&graphic 
collage novel is "the story of two men walking across the room to 
the sofa and what happened on the way there to change both their 
lives."  What happened is violent, and told a micro-second at a 
time in understated, flat sentences and surrealistic graphics that 
work as well together for the full course of the narrative as any 
I've ever come across.--bg

Joan Retallack: ERRATA 5UITE--Edge Books, PO Box 25642, Washington 
DC, 20007.  64 pp., $8.00.  This book is a series of five-line 
take-offs on (from) errata slips.  Retallack starts with a 
correction explaining a correction, saying what the prescribed fix 
is ("read poisonous snake not snack")--and from there she goes 
somewhere else altogether.  These pieces are full of lingual 
shorthand, anachronisms, bits of foreign words, roots of words.  
The whole is an astonishing, melodic, humorous song.  While any 
traditional "sense" is denied, the pieces begin to take on a 
wonderful logic of their own, flowing.  In an odd way ERRATA 5UITE 
in its core of misreadings, misspellings, and alternate meanings, 
presents us with just the required poetry corrective.  We get it 
right this time.--jg
     ERRATA 5UITE lets the error stray in a fluid movement among 
the "zero sum ergo blather" of systematic thought.  Error, 
corrected, leads to the progress of knowledge?  The "allreasonable 
dog stranded on causal plane", "apostrophe's tragik musico 
philosophicus" will "read land and math for lang and myth," "for 
the undeniable is all they seek"--"God upon His solemn Review 
finds not one Erratum in the Book of Nature whole as writ."  But 
"she la cantatrice whenas she goes without a trace" sics Derrida 
on this (philosophy is a boys' club if there ever was one)--"she 
read I now (know) this Kant bee rite"--read "cum for sum (ma) la 
logical."  Or so would go one of many possible wanderings through 
this suite.  Another would start with the delightful 
"conversations of the (alphabetized) philosophers" Retallack 
makes, in conversation herself with Richard Rorty's way of reading 
philosophy playfully.--cp

Joan Retallack: ICARUS FFFFFALLING--Leave Books, 57 Livingston 
St., Buffalo NY, 14213.  16 pp.  ICARUS FFFFFALLING collaborates 
with Ovid's METAMORPHOSES, and with Retallack's students at Bard 
College "who when asked to go out and photograph Icarus falling 
found him everywhere."  Icarus: boy wonder who won't follow 
Daddy's advice and stick to the middle way; son who by sacrificing 
himself covers up his father's jealousy and murder (look up the 
myth of Daedalus and Talos); Leonardo/Daedalus the artist building 
machines of destruction; "Dead-o-Lust founder of Socrates circular 
line"--but this is too simple a reading already.  Make it messier: 
"a boy rejoicing in bold flight deserts his leader why this desire 
for open sky in species w/out wings"--not easy to refuse this.  
And question poetry itself: "have you noticed that poetry was one 
of the noble gases ripening the pomegranate never a cantaloupe or 
banana"--the "noble gases" are those that don't mix with others in 
chemical compounds.  They remain pure--"and the grief remains 
buried in the obscurity of the Latin" as if it were one of 
Gibbon's chastely quoted Roman obscenities--"dis pathetic Roman 
tic nihil est how to: have hi-flyin ideas under fallen yellow 
arches."  The theme of the pharmakos runs through all the myths of 
Daedalus and his kin; drug, poison, healing medicine, and also 
scapegoat, the pharmakos in ancient Greek ritual was thrown over a 
cliff into the sea, but provided with wings that might break his 
fall and let him live, though in perpetual exile.  Take note: 
Retallack's not dealing here (or elsewhere) in the sort of cozily 
Jungian archetypes this might suggest; the languages she weaves 
together are as complex as the twenty-five or so centuries of 
painful aspiration and destruction she has gathered in this short 
poem.--cp

Elliot Richman: THE WORLD DANCER--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa 
Maria CA, 93456.  110 pp., $9.95.  Richman's many voices--dark 
eroticist, Vietnam testifier, visceral viewer of art and the 
adumbrations of irony--come scattershot from his small press 
exposures and in more unified rushes from chapbooks like "Fucking 
in Stupid Hope: Love Poems for the Death of the '80's" 
(Slipstream: Niagra Falls 1989).  But not 'til THE WORLD DANCER 
from Asylum Arts, a press committed to risky material, do we get 
Richman whole.  Unlike some fragments, he's no hellbent macho 
cynical kicker against the pricks, but a compassionate 
comprehender of, though never apologist for, human inconsistency.  
His vision--less the self annihilating gaze of Van Gogh or 
Hemingway, who become his croney-doppelgangers in these poems, and 
more the consummate witness to edges of art, love and loneliness--
is more like the swordlike zen brushwork he honors and emulates: 

     ...My features are painted
     on that octopus in the print by Hokusai,
     tentacles wrapped 'round Katrina's naked body,
     my giant head fused between her thighs,
     enormous black pupils scanning her skin
     as she swoons in pleasure, holding tightly
     to one of my suckered arms, the cruelty
     gone from her features, so lost in sex.
                         (from "The Portrait of a Poet")

Here's complex, violent art coming into a maturity that will take 
us to new places, and help make sense of some of the hardest old 
ones.--sf

Steve Richmond: MY WIFE--Deadtree Press, PO Box 81305, Lincoln NE, 
68501.  20 pp., $6.00.  Infectious, self-reflective, easy-going 
plainstyle poems, like the "gagaku" in which the author admits 
he'd like best-sellerdom but decides, "fuck it/ (instead of 
writing a hot novel) I'll stick here/ in the/ short devastating 
poem/ the demon poem/ the mad poem/ the sick poem// where I'm/ 
comfortable."--bg

Sheryl Robbins: OR, THE WHALE--Shuffaloff Press, 260 Plymouth 
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14213.  The title is half of MOBY-DICK, OR, 
THE WHALE--and the half that is this collection of poems is the 
feminine.  Yes, women voyage also.  That dark stuff of guilt and 
19th century creeping American protestant gloom isn't here.  The 
puns and metaphors, the images within the poetry, and the titles 
of the poems are carved from Melville's novel.  Sure that provides 
the book with a spine, but rather than darkness and death within 
this poetry there is at each vertebrate a love and a light, some 
white magic, an irresistible intoxicating ring of bone Isis 
white.--mb

Thaddeus Rutkowski: SUPER NATURE--Power Trio Press, PO Box 187 
Cooper Station, New York NY, 10278.  16 pp., $1.00.  Unlike many 
"performance" poems, these stand up powerfully on the page, as in: 
"Walk to the water circle,/ dive to the bottom/ and nail your 
question/ to the dragon's door" (from "Mother's Advice").  
Poetry-slam winner, art-history scholar, forbidden fantasizer 
Rutkowski has packed arresting lines, inspired graphic design, 
and innovative weirdness into these 4x4 pages.  These 14 brief 
poems each slice a heretofore wholly unsuspected microsection 
from the murky interface of consciousness and world, like "a 
test pattern from the right half/ of a hare's brain" ("Half a 
Thought"), or suddenly shift the disturbingly untoward into 
sharpest focus: "a tiger pouncing on a zoo-booster/ a wife shaving 
her housekeeper's head/ a kidnapper guarding his capturing box" 
("Assault With a Deadly Plotline").  Finally, having read, we can 
"Skim some rain./ Whirl in surf./ Dream of hair" ("-plasm").--sf

Leslie Scalapino: OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE LONGING FROM 
TAKING PLACE--Roof Books, c/o Segue Foundation, 303 East 8th St., 
New York NY, 10009.  82 pp., $9.95.  Scalapino's critical writings 
might already be familiar to readers of poetics journals; this 
anthology includes pieces on H.D., Robert Grenier, Danielle 
Collobert, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge, 
Lyn Hejinian, and others.  There is also a selection from THE 
FRONT MATTER, DEAD SOULS, political writings she began during the 
last presidential election.  (She calls this "a serial novel to be 
published in the newspaper," though the newspapers she submitted 
it to refused to run it.)
     Scalapino practices the poetics of language writers, who 
insist that the division of labor between poet and critic be done 
away with.  It is what I might call, borrowing one of her lines, 
the "putting of thought to thought"--but as something done, an 
action, not a view from above, or a statement of logically prior 
conditions.  Criticism that co-exists with the writings it is 
"about" (and "about" here becomes a kind of adjacency to or 
perambulation of the writings) will problematize its own form, as 
Scalapino says: "The form of rigor itself has to undercut its 
concept."  Here, her stated aim is to "allow the shapes of the 
structures of the texts being considered to emerge."  But there is 
a characteristic Scalapino line as well, and its structure, 
familiar to her readers since "That They Were at the Beach," may 
at times overlay the structures of the texts she is writing about; 
this at least was my own feeling about her Collobert piece.  But 
not always; her writings on Grenier are "within the way his text 
sees."  And then there's the lines from "The Front Matter"--"Our 
vice president tries to turn us against the 'cultural elite.'  
Here, the cultural elite are simply people who can read at all."  
It seems her remarks have not lost their topicality.--cp

Spencer Selby: SOUND OFF--Detour Press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. 
Paul MN, 55105.  64 pp., $7.95.  A collection of poems illuminated 
by ironic double entendre: "sound off" as protest literature by 
poets voicing their rage at toxic-waste dump Americana, or, 
equally, as a state of being akin to watching t.v. with the volume 
turned down.  The condition of language echoes the condition of 
our world:  "Extensive straightforward meaning/ goes funny before 
it's written / in the face of impending disaster."  Because linear 
forms of writing and thinking yield nothing but distorted copies 
of what has come before, Selby advocates a poetic language 
informed by experience:  "Walk the path and live for knowledge/ 
that's exasperated by what you see."--ssn

Tim Shepherd: DEAD ROSES FROM A FRIEND--Drew Blood Press Ltd., 
3410 First St, Riverside CA, 92501.  21 pp., $2.00.  This 
chapbook, first published in 1990, was perhaps a pioneer of the 
sadly growing list of "AIDS memorial" chapbooks.  As such, it 
doesn't have a lot of lilting language, melodious rhymings or 
crafted imagery.  It does have anger, profanity, and a wrenching, 
tangible sense of loss and bitterness.  Some of Shepherd's poems 
come off as hopelessly melancholy; others unnecessarily foul-
mouthed; and some as on-target with a profound sense of grief.  
Not overly poetic; but undeniable work for those interested in 
a reality dose of what a real AIDS death means to those left 
behind.--rkk

Bill Shields & Elliot Richman: DISPATCHES: FROM VIETNAM TO THE 
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS--Boog Literature, PO Box 221, Oceanside 
NY, 11572.  16 pp., $3.00.  War poems from a coupla folks who know 
war, and poetry, first hand.  Richman's war takes place in Iraq, 
and draws us into the interment of Iraqi soldiers being buried 
alive, while Shields talks about the distancing of killers from 
their victims through modern warfare techniques.  These words 
crawl into you, and leave you shaking, scared, and pissed off.  
The realities of slaughter on these scales makes you wonder if 
hope will ever be an option again.--o

Florentin Smarandache: ANTHOLOGY OF THE PARADOXIST LITERARY 
MOVEMENT--Ophyr University Press, PO Box 42561, Phoenix AZ, 85085.  
174 pp., $17.95.  More of a chrestomanthy than an anthology, since 
the genius of Smarandache is predominant through out.  After 
reading his NON POEMS last year I thought Paradoxism an 
interesting development, though I would have had difficulty 
defining it.  Here are manifestos, stridency and curious writings, 
but also gnawing doubts that arise when one suspects a tincture of 
hucksterism.  When something new and different comes out of 
thewilds of Romania I am curious and ready to give it credence, 
but I am beginning to wonder if Paradoxism is all that it purports 
to be.--as

Charles Smith: ALIEN LOVE POEMS--BGS Press, 1240 William St., 
Racine, WI, 53402.  12 pp., $ 2.00.  Black, samurai-swift 
imagination and humor as hard as a jackhammer's heart, Smith 
captures candid incidents from youth to present with images which 
could have been reflected from a fun-house mirror.  "It's my turn 
to wear the dog collar.// I mount you, oh so slowly/ I am slashing 
my wrists/ the blood mixing with your hair..."  Here is rage, 
pathological enough to be trivial, trivial enough to be cool and 
seductive.  There is a spontaneous, unmediated emotion here, a 
delicious sexual darkness.  Suicide, sadomasochism, punk bravura, 
child abuse, academic failure, self-depreciation, spouse abuse, 
drunken sex, miscued allegories, old age dread and drawings by Dan 
Nielsen.  How can it get any better than this?--rrle

David H. Stone: SPECULAR SHARDS--O!! Zone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., 
Houston TX , 77057.  76 pp., $10.00.  Clipped, usually anecdotal 
free verse, freshened here & there with puns and pun-couples--like 
"sir spent"/ "sir spit" in a poem about Adam and Eve.  Several 
strong poems about the work-a-day world, and (mordantly) funny 
ones about law and politics.--bg

SuZi: CARNIVAL IN THE AGE OF KALI--Ourobourous Press, PO Box 
533613, Orlando FL, 32853.  9 pp., $1.50.  SuZi knows the street 
from experience.  Though she's in New Orleans now, she definitely 
left her mark on Chicago.  She's still tough as nails, but there's 
a fragile sensitivity beneath the tough veneer.  These poems bring 
the street into your head, with lines like: 'Hey sister/ didja dig 
them bad-bootied bands?/ the sister on the tuba from Saint Mary's 
and/ the covetous lovey dove eye action from the marine/corp?", 
and: "the earhole of damnation/ and she was held more than a/ day 
after/ the judge said go/lost in some sheriff scuffle shuffle."  
Although this is a short collection of SuZi's work, it's strong 
powerful writing in a voice so unique... let's just say she's 
good.  Damn good!--o

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino: EKPHRASIS--Pygmy Forest Press, PO 
Box 591, Albion CA, 95410.  $5.00.  The title, referring to a test 
that is its own explainaint, is in one sense an apt description of 
these self-referential poems, but in another sense they are not, 
since they often have a haiku-like ellusiveness/allusiveness, the 
meaning-ripples spreading out in all directions so they "mean" 
everything and nothing,  The irony in that title is functional, 
and is part and parcel of the beauty of these works:

     EKPHRASIS No. 16

     Mechanic a
          Spit o'
     Ecstatic re
          Lease

     Javeliner
          Crested
     Quiver a 
          Gog stride 

     The collection consists of 15 poems, in a nicely produced 
booklet. These pieces have an intimate and enigmatic quality that 
keeps this reader going back to them.--jmb
     At the crossroads between intelligence and intuition, where 
the mind grasps to contain experience but does not have the logic 
or syntax, and the entire being is filled with sensation and 
strange knowing, the creative impulse rises.  We are taught very 
early, though usually not directly, to ignore such impulses and 
direct attention toward a knowable object.  St. Thomasino 
understands that to allow the creative impulse to culminate in 
action is a means of expanding the field of perspective and 
thereby knowledge in its deepest sense, of insight.  These 
selections from his Ekphrasis series are brilliant examples of 
that understanding, and like all great poetry are doorways to that 
deeper knowledge.  The words seem to rise from that critical 
moment, they are utterances of the voice and mind in awe of direct 
experience of unlimited sensation.  Sometimes the words fall into 
a phrase that seems to make logical sense, that relates something 
specifically, sometimes not.  It doesn't matter. It is the 
impulse, the life shining through these poems that's important.  
Certainly, an exhaustive analysis would reveal a variety of 
interpretations, but something would still be missing.  Ordinary 
syntax cannot contain their light.  From "EKPHRASIS No.11":

      Inter
          Missive
      Juncture
         Unthinkable

      Scenes
          Dovetail
      A
          Ha a ha

                         --jb
     A selection of St. Thomasino's ongoing series of state-of-
the-art language-centered poems full of locutions like "Will o' 
sea" and "Out'r quart'r lo!"  Consequently, one seems in tho ages 
of discovery at once: Columbus's, Drake's & Cook's; and ours.--bg

Michelle M. Tokarczyk: THE HOUSE I'M RUNNING FROM--West End Press, 
PO Box 27334, Albuquerque NM, 87125.  56 pp., $6.95.  This book of 
poetry was published a few years ago, but it demands a reading, 
particularly if one is interested in women and work.  And the 
fears one encounters after living a working class life and 
attempting to "make it" in a profession, herein examined.  What 
makes this poetry so exciting is its legitimacy.  This is not a 
book by a poet that lost her diamond while riding on her third 
best polo pony.  Oh no.  But this is not the grit of a saloon 
either.  Nothing dark here.  Just the hard work of a white ethnic 
in working class America struggling to maintain simply a life of 
dignity and peace, which because of the American grind...  What do 
you think?  Can you relate?  Or will you ponder a rose is a rose 
is a rose?--mb

Cheryl A. Townsend and Paul Weinman: MY NIPPLES RISE EYES--Watson 
Publishing, 2774 9th St., Cuyahoga Falls OH, 44221.  20 pp.  This 
chapbook is so steamy that I'm amazed it didn't arrive with damp 
pages.  Townsend and Weinman trade sex-saturated poems here.  
Cheryl is the initiator and Paul follows suit.  Each poem is 
short, never longer than eight or nine lines.  The cover has a 
Blair Wilson graphic--a stylized cartoon of a woman's breasts, 
limber as deflated innertubes, that reach out and smack a cartoon 
man in the face.  There's an added bonus stapled inside this 
chapbook; WHITE BOY CUMS 2, with a suggestive, as-always 
pornographic John Howard drawing.  Even though I enjoy the rat-a-
tat-tat minimalism of both Townsend and Weinman, the continual sex 
dulls after awhile.  I begin to look for new poetical vistas.  
Cheryl Townsend is the Anais Nin of the small press poetry scene.  
Even so, she is at her best when she digresses from the fuck-fest 
and writes about other subjects.  A good example of this is her 
small chapbook MOTHER TENDED BAR, which is truly remarkable in its 
emotional and descriptive intensity.--kn

Cheryl Townsend: VESTIBLES--East Coast Editions, 105 Betty Rd., 
East Meadow NY, 11554.  10 pp., $2.00(?).  Cheryl is the publisher 
of IMPETUS, and her poetry carries a seductive touch that could 
make you fall in love with a stranger.  While Cheryl still carries 
that sexual lust and subtle confusion between people who don't 
know how to relate to each other, her words get cleaner and so 
crisp you often feel like her poems are dried flowers waiting to 
break in the wind.  In lines like: "I could smell the 
anticipation/ when we met on Tuesday for lunch" and "Snuggling 
into a dream/ that lasted well into Monday" you catch a glimpse 
into a world filled with sensual confusion.  Cheryl is one of the 
few women poets covering this turf, in poems that work and convey 
the inside story.--o

Paul Trachtenberg: BEN'S EXIT--Beach & Company, Cherry Hill 
Editions, PO Box 303, Cherry Hill NY, 13320.  123 pp., $7.00.  
When I read a book I want a total pure honesty, or hard core 
sensationalistic crap.  This is not sensationalistic crap.  It is 
about real life adventures, academic politics, relationships (gay, 
straight, and otherwise), Disneyland, the brains of serial 
killers, metaphysical mysticism and scientific exploration, 
plumbers and surfers, California earthquakes, the end of the 
sexual revolution, AIDS, and so many other things it's hard to 
make up a comprehensive list.  This book made me feel ripped off, 
not because it was bad, but because it was so good I didn't want 
it to end.--o

Nico Vassilakis: A NAME FOR RADIO--Electron Elbow Publications, 
PO Box 21671, Seattle WA, 98111.  12 pp., $4.00.  A wonderfully 
lyrical jump-cut mini-epic about the quest for knowledge--I think.  
At any rate, electro-magnetic waves play a large role in it; sound 
waves and water, too: "sounds are delicious, the scent of 
musicality of noise.  we never imagine noise in water.  water is 
large enough for thoughts to co-exist."--bg
     An exquisitely produced miniature book containing a single 
long poem, which is a meditation on the body and the mind 
revolving in consciousness of each other, and a meditation on 
meditation: "abrupt, aboutnd, ablutions, abingo, abongo/ aconga, a 
smooth rumination, a jolt shattering/ the nervous system, the 
electric formation of/ receptors singing in a naturally occurring 
quiet./ immediate environments     the beatitude of/ neighborhood."
     This is lucid and evocative writing that perfectly embodies 
the ideas and aperceptions it speaks of.--jmb

Nico Vassilakis: ARTAUD WHAT--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port 
Charlotte FL, 33949.  $3.00.  One can always count on Vassilakis 
to stir the imagination and summon a few demons.  This is a book 
of associations between words and images that appear in the text 
to be cut up, but may only be so in the mind of the poet and/or 
the reader.  For instance, "a day spent proving/ light and she is/ 
another room. we say/ particulate", a schizoid dismemberment of 
syntax that is magically reconnected in the mind.  The poems 
function as juicy hallucinated haikus and distorted and collaged 
pictures that perfectly reflect the texts, not as illustrations, 
but enhancements of the effect.  Psychoactive.--jb

Janine Pommy Vega: RED BRACELETS--Heaven Bone, PO Box 486, Chester 
NY, 10918.  32 pp., $5.95.  Composed while traveling through 
Nepal, these poems function as a travelogue of the trip and of 
the soul.  Torn between lover at home and the search the poet 
continues, drawing in clear direct verse the image of the world 
she moves through, her yearning for experience and for home.  She 
makes it easy to feel the struggle as she feels it and by doing so 
allows us to some extent to gain from her experience.  But RED 
BRACELETS is better an emotional experience than intellectual.  
Vega isn't trying teach us, but relate generally, from the soul.  
And she does this very well, coming in the final, title, poem to 
sing, as if in a fire of transcendence of "red bracelets/ for the 
mother of love."--jb

Fred Voss: GOODSTONE--Event Horizon Press, PO Box 14645, Long 
Beach CA, 90803.  $15.95.  I remember telling Fred about how I 
almost beat the shit out've some dude at my post office job and 
Fred wrote back suggesting I try to keep my cool.  How Fred 
managed to keep his composure long enough at Goodstone to write
this masterpiece I'll never know.  Such incompetence, immaturity, 
idleness, lifelessness, idiocity, on-th-job drunkeness & insanity 
as can be witnessed in a Breughal painting.  This book is about 
the end of the Industrial Revolution as personified by the day-to-
day workings of a bomber aircraft factory--it certainly documents 
the coming end of the United States' long-held boast as #1 
industrial nation of the world.  One wonders if morale picked up 
at Goodstone during the "crisis" in the Persian Gulf--did this 
insane asylum begin to sing & dance for the rich boy's money & oil 
war?  This book is a knife stuck in the guts, and twisted.  And 
somehow Fred has done it all without getting caught up in the mire 
of hatred & spite that most of his fellow workmates have lost 
themselves in.  Our dear Whitman would bawl his eyes out if he 
read this book and found out what has happened to his beloved 
workers of America (though I imagine every late-20th century 
factory in the world is like this, except maybe Japan's).
     Not for the patriotic or squeamish.  180 poems machined from 
solid steel, cool sweat & the catastrophic humorous eye of Voss.  
One might consider taking the train after reading this.  And every 
time they fire up those jets, 5 blocks from here at Kirtland AFB, 
Albuquerque, I'm gonna run for cover.--mw

Fred Voss & Joan Jobe Smith: THE HONEYMOON OF KING KONG--Zerx 
Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108.  40 pp., 
$3.00.  "Machinist Poet" leaps right into action with "D.H. 
Lawrence would've liked this man/ as much as I do, how he offs 
his/ blue collar when he comes home to/ drink chardonnay with me, 
read aloud to me, The Subterraneans until Kerouac says,/ "It was 
her little face I wanted to enter,"/ and then he stops reading to 
enter/ my face, too, with his quick tongue."  In "The Eve of 
Destruction" the words are clean, honest: "In her kitchen/ my 
fiancee's daughters compare their/ 6 and 8 months along/ pregnant 
bellies and/ bounce them/ off each other/ again and again doing 
little swinging/ dance steps and giggling uncontrollably/ as I sit 
in the corner drinking and trying to feel/ as much/ like a 
bachelor/ of 37 years/ as I can."  These are fine warm words by 
real people, people I'd love to have for neighbors.--o

James L. Weil: BILL'S SHAKER CHAIR--tel-let, 1818 Phillips Pl., 
Charleston IL, 61920.  20 pp.  Self-effacing, diffident poems 
dedicated to William Bronk, as this one called "Imperatives 
Composed for Bill's Voice": "What I write makes no/ difference.  
I write// indifferent to/ the difference it// does not make.  
It has/ nothing to do with// our undoing.  There/ is nothing to 
do,// all done.  I write.  I/ love you.  Love me.  Write."--bg

Hannah Weiner: SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL--Tender Buttons 
Press, 54 East Manning Street #3, Providence RI, 02906.  This book 
continues Weiner's obsession with formally radical representations 
of multiple voices that has been central to her work at least 
since CLAIRVOYANT JOURNAL.  The poems here create a broad, 
sweeping, and tense historical context for understanding how 
voices have come to her.  What this book teaches us is that 
history--written accounts of people's lives and actions--is always 
about the struggle for voices.  But Weiner has no sentimentality 
about multiplicity--the many voices of her text are framed by 
conditions of power, and their desire for it.  In such a context, 
language itself is revealed as a hesitant, embattled, sometimes 
obscure and always resistant medium.  Finally an autobiography, 
SILENT TEACHERS/REMEMBERED SEQUEL is not a story of triumph, of 
social conditions overcome by a saving mastery of language.  
Rather, this book returns its readers to the condition of their 
own lives and languages, teaching us that listening is something 
we must learn to do in our own circumstances, however 
tentatively.--mw

Paul Weinman: IN THE FISHTANK--Strangulensis Research Labs, Rt. 6 
Box 138, Charleston WV, 25311.  16 pp., $2.00.  Collages and other 
graphics by Harold Dinkel masterfully wrong-step Weinman's 
crackling plainstyle poems, one a near-perfect evocation of a 
nursing home in which "the here and there teeth/ pok(e) through 
sentences, postponing/ putting words in order until never;" but 
one man asks the narrator "if racial/ demographics are changing, 
yet."--bg

Simon Wickham-Smith: FEW--Runaway Spoon, PO Box 3621, Port 
Charlotte FL, 33949.  $5.00.  Consisting of three distinctly 
different and equally compelling experiments, FEW is a challenge 
to ordinary consciousness.  The first section "Six Short Fictions" 
is a sort of elliptical, or parenthetic poetry, that dances 
around, or beyond, absolute meaning, excellent poetry.  The second 
section is a long series of connective hieroglyphic-like images 
that develop as they proceed down and across the page, and from 
page to page, suggesting an investigation of how we associate 
meanings with lines on a page.  The final section is a repeated 
visage which can be interpreted differently from page to page as 
words are added.  Stimulating and provoking, FEW can be many.--jb

Bob Z: YUCKY STIFF--Panic Button Press, PO Box 14318, San 
Francisco, 94114.  30 pp., $3.25.  The author's note says this 
one's about "looking hard at the seamy filthy unpleasant side of 
life" and sure enough, it is.  Words tumble over each other, slam 
together in a mosh pit of imagery to create a space for 
themselves, push thoughts and events at the reader as quickly as 
Husker Du (the band, not the child's game.)  Repetitive, dirty, 
funny, and pocket-sized to boot.--rkk

Mickey Z.: REMOTE CONTROL--PO Box 9103, L.I.C., NY, 11103.  
26 pp., SASE?  "Poems to Watch Television By," this one's in 
the style of Bob Z. (family resemblance?) and the form of Paul 
Weinman's "WhiteBoy" series.  Poems for couch potatoes with short 
attention spans, but hoping to shake 'em out of their video-
induced stupor.  The final poem, "One Last Question", is 
representative: "So, why do you/ think they call it/ 
PROGRAMMING?"--lbd

Nicholas Zurbrugg: THE PARAMETERS OF POSTMODERNISM--Southern 
Illinois University Press, PO Box 3697, Carbondale IL, 62902.  
184 pp.  The quintessence of Postmodernism crammed into tiny 
microchapters.  What it is.  How it manifests itself.  The 
leitmotiv here is the "B effect" vs. the "C effect".  The B effect 
is here defined as a needlessly catastrophic sense of critical & 
creative crisis propounded by such writers as Burger, Bonita-
Oliver, Barthes, Baudrillard etc.; verses the C effect, a more 
optimistic hypothesis of postmodernist practice, which Zurbrugg 
associates with John Cage among others.  Postmodernism posited not 
as a doomsday machine, a sterile lunar landscape, but rather as a 
source of insight into human experience, just as other literary 
-isms have been.--as


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  Issue #5.0, section b: chaps                             8/94  
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