World on Fire

Charles Bernstein

Nomados, 2004

World on Fire looks at the possibilities for existence in a world where billboards fill the sky and household names rain down with torrential indifference; there is no escape from this “indelible vanishing.” The trick, Charles Bernstein shows us, is to meet the inferno with exhilarating wit and verve, humorous plays on familiar phrasing, and nifty substitutions (“It’s still the same old lorry”) as we fly our spaceships along the language tracks available to us, production/ consumption’s conveyor belting our dreams of paradise. Comedy attending dark strata, refusing closure all the way, these poems are deadly serious. And linger.

Buy - World On Fire

The Irreparable

Robin Blaser

Nomados, 2003

Articulating philosophy at the core of his poetics, this poem-essay by Robin Blaser considers the work of Giorgio Agamben and others in relation to the terrifying world events of our time.

Who else but a poet, and not just any poet but Canada’s Robin Blaser, could take on that word “transcendence” and recuperate it in the moment of a civic frame, one with the capacity to restore us to the “world” restless in world, the “where is” which is where we abide. If those politicians and armies who use transcendence as motor for religious fundamentalisms would only grasp Blaser’s “transcendence,” thought in the company of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and John Berger, the irreparable of this world would be trust and habitation instead of harm.

That transcendence is here and now, is the profane world and its beauty: what a thought. Again Blaser gives courage with his language and care. Erín Moure

Buy - The Irreparable

Wanders

Nineteen poems by Robin Blaser with nineteen responses by Meredith Quartermain.

Nomados, 2002

"I like the quickness and dedicated flittingness of Meredith’s responses, so determined to alight on Robin’s syllabics. They’re stunning. A spring-coiled peck from Dickinson on the pitch-perfect cheek of Marianne Moore." Daniel Comiskey

"an amazing, even jaw dropping performance . . . . her poems absolutely stand up to the challenge of Blaser's own . . . . The sum of it is totally exhilarating" Ron Silliman

Buy - Wanders

Widows & Orphans

Nicole Markotic

Nomados, 2004

Like the printer’s term of the title, Nicole Markotic’s Widows and Orphans catapults us, in a remarkably original manner, into the act of reading . . . margins. This wise little collection offers a delightfully balanced blending of prose’s sentence and poetry’s line end, for an exceptional and unusual reading experience. Both light-hearted and grave, jazzy and rooted in a smart, recognizable trajectory, Widows, if read with both eyes, with all senses, will, with every return of the gaze, remind you that space is the place to think. Gail Scott

Markotic captures the hiatus in diction as if hiatus were language dreaming up our very world. A bedlam and snicker in post-consumed culture, where the idiom's flotsam (this western Canuck English) is her boat's one oar. Yet curiously "out of time." But no, not captures: Markotic captivates, capture-activates. Taking Wah and Hemingway and Baruch S with her, slipstream-agitate, eject from the abject, and if the ship's sinking fast, she knows it; widows and orphans are in the lifeboat already, jump in now I tell you, it's quite a ride! Erin Mouré

Buy - Widows & Orphans

hi ddevioleth i dde violet

Kathleen Fraser.

Nomados, 2003


In Kathleen Fraser's astonishing Easter poem, the very word "hidden" has lost its last letter and "violet" easily turns "violent" or "violates" decorum. Indeed, here it is Christ who is "hidde[n]," the very name having become a circle whose center is missing. And yet, in the midst of ordinary Easter Sunday activities in contemporary Rome- "coffee melt," "whine of lead pipe's morning uses" -- the miracle is that "He arose!/ He arrozzz. . ."/ "thump -- (H) / a rose. . .", a revelation greeted both reverently and with the secular jazz punctuation of "ohhh, yeahhhh..."), modulates into a kind of chorus -- (oh ah) / ye ye / ah) h) ah)a."

Fraser's linguistic play and typographical invention have never been more assured and brilliant. This is a poem to read, hear, and look at again and again: Fraser's Easter ode represents one of our most inventive poets writing at the top of her form. Marjorie Perloff
With a violence that is equal to the shattering event of the word, it charts the syllables of its own luminosity, the trace of its passage through a central and abiding darkness that is also the fractal edge of the poem, not static, but ecstatic. Patrick Pritchett

Buy - hi ddevioeth i dde violet

Good Egg Bad Seed by

Susan Holbrook

Nomados, 2004


Starting with the premise “There are two kinds of people,” Susan Holbrook drives supermarket existentialism through its own vortex and gives it a nifty orgasmic twist into hyperspace. Here’s a ping pong game you’ll never forget – where the tables keep flipping and players’ ironic bats spin the banal into deadly mischievous curves.

Buy - - Good Egg Bad Seed

Seven Glass Bowls

Daphne Marlatt

Nomados, 2003

“Home and the closeness of the beloved,” she writes. There can be no subject as important to the poet and the rest of us, and in this lovely poem, Daphne Marlatt continuously achieves her best yet “homing in.” That present participle is our sweet clue to a mystery we are encouraged to enter. Gladly. George Bowering

Buy - - Seven Glass Bowls