Showing posts with label Greg Bem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greg Bem. Show all posts

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Billy Mavreas' A MERCY OF SIGNS (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Billy Mavreas' A MERCY OF SIGNS (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
The book "reads" like a crime-scene, like post-crisis, like decay. It is small and mysterious, deceptive, riddled with complexities. Post-apocalypse or just plain storm drain, this is a book with an aesthetic that shadows and shadows well.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Stuart Kinmond and Phil Hall's Alternative Girders: a collaboration / 2014 - 2017 (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Stuart Kinmond and Phil Hall's Alternative Girders: a collaboration / 2014 - 2017 (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Reading through this book is like reading through each breath of the poets. Their language spurts out like girders, like structural supports, the innards of the book as a whole. There is a visual quality to the poem that is certified by the vispo works splicing the more conventional poems every few pages. The language is quite astute and phantasmagorical, with such intimacies that pretension need not be suspected.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez's ANGELTONGUE / LENGUA DE ÁNGEL (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Miguel E. Ortiz Rodríguez's ANGELTONGUE / LENGUA DE ÁNGEL (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
A brief book of poems that pulls from multiple literary lineages to explore conversations of humans and angels. The poems are crisp, dense, and material. Combined with frightening illustrations, they form a visceral bond with the reader and revisit ongoing questions of mortality and superhuman capabilities. Spirituality and practicality exist in harmony here.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Stuart Ross' ESPESANTES (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Stuart Ross' ESPESANTES (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Stuart Ross brings a wit and snarkiness reminiscent of mid-20th-century Latin American writing. The works are cynical and surreal, bringing out very brief and powerful images that disappear as soon as they've been established. A remarkable way to encounter this poet's unique positioning.

Sunday, September 2, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Allison Cardon's What was the sign you gave (a selection) (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Allison Cardon's What was the sign you gave (a selection) (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
This book, which pulls language and ideas from works by Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, and The Saint Joan of Arc Center, is a book of questions. It is spacey and subtle in its writing, but dense and driven in its curiosities. The dis-assemblage of the found text and found ideas by way of an almost cautious pace results in a dimming of the original ideas, either intentional or not. This dimming results, fascinatingly, in a barrier towards access and evolution of those original ideas and while the potential profound core is brilliant, the motivations are uncertain enough to be offputting and stressful.

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Aaron Tucker's Catalogue d’Oiseaux : Toronto — Mainz-Kastel (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Aaron Tucker's Catalogue d’Oiseaux : Toronto — Mainz-Kastel (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
A compelling bundle of society and social life within and nearby Canadian cities, this sequence of the ongoing project of the same title carries the subtitle Toronto < __ > Mainz-Kastel and features life within those realms. The work is on the boundary between prose and poetry, a long descriptive cataloging (as the title suggests) of what can be found within a life within a space, as connected to other spaces. Ultimately the textual component of what is a larger project leaves the reader wanting more; but there is joy here, and strong writing, and a representation both true and beautiful.

Friday, June 29, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Marthe Reed's coastal geometries (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for the late (great) Marthe Reed's coastal geometries (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
This is a fantastic book. Not knowing much about Martha Reed, I found her poems in this collection to be stunning in their precision and their evocations. The quantity is just right. The constraint around the theme is just right as well. I'm grateful for having encountered this work.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Andrew Wessels' From Being Without Substance (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Andrew Wessels' From Being Without Substance (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
A daunting microcosmic brush with the holy, this book is ambiguous, confusing, and yet manages to be inventive and disturbingly refreshing. For those who know spirit and spirituality, and those who do not, the language within the poems of Wessels will startle and put you face to face with the higher and lower powers around all of us.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Sean Braune's The Cosmos (2018)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Sean Braune's The Cosmos (2018) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
This list poem, which embodies Braune's "accelerated reading" form, is quite enjoyable and about as absurd as you'd imagine any representation of the 21st century. I look forward to seeing the larger work that Braune is working on play out into a book form. For now, I will keep this collection close to my heart--and my face--as its superficial allusions would encourage.

Monday, June 18, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Helen Hajnoczky's No Right on Red (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Helen Hajnoczky's No Right on Red (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
The five-page prose poem that fills the cover of this book may seem small, but as a single, relentless view at desperation and survival on the streets of Montreal, it works, serves its purpose, and is enthralling.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Stephen Collis’ NEW LIFE (2016)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Stephen Collis’ NEW LIFE (2016) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Stephen Collis, known for an activation of activism among and beyond the Canadian paradigm, brings forth a handful of new ideas and frames for approaching and appreciating the process of social life in the contemporary discourse/discord. Collis's poems here meet the standard and expectations of the majority of his work, but fall slightly flat in their compactness. The poems are certainly enjoyable and provocative, but fail to resonate with the louder bang+crunch of works that find appropriate space and context within a larger work. Still, as a brief glimpse, a shortened assortment, the book does stand on its own and deserves a read despite the want for it to be supplemental to a definite, greater significance (proven elsewhere and beyond by Collis himself).

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Valerie Coulton's small bed & field guide (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Valerie Coulton's small bed & field guide (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Valerie Coulton's language is shockingly clear and found within the fringes of the contemporary. From the digital landscapes to the contours of intimacy, Coulton's chronicles, appearing serial and diaristic, charm, mesmerize, and paralyze the readership. The two poems in this book, "small bed," and "field guide," read very similarly, divided into four columns upon the page-spread. The fragments (the stanzas) within each are blinks of Coulton's very personal reality. Though there is joy and pain, comfort and suffering, within these pages, the tone is fairly optimistic and reads as a sort of triumph-through-documentation. I found the book truly marvelous to read, especially displacing having never read Coulton's work before.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Alyssa Bridgman's HEDGE (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
The dynamic qualities of these poems gorge and throttle. They are filled with movement and inspection. They heave, sit ecstatically upon the waving sensations of form. Though the book contains potentially hyperbolic conceptualizing, and is weighed down by this overly visible backdrop, the book is fiery, foremost, and at once phantasmic. Violence and compassion meet into a middle space where Bridgman, early poetics clearly seasoned by craft, is able to explore the limitations of Wall and Barrier, of Hedge, through an unending associative platform a la society and economy.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Matthew Johnstone's ( kiln ) (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem is on a roll lately, it seems, providing yet another review; this time, he's posted the first review of Matthew Johnstone's ( kiln ) (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Johnstone has crafted a phantasmagoric book with (kiln ). The language moves in an out of etherea, often appearing cinematographic but then moving into something remotely personal, reflective, from within. This blend between the external and the self paints a lucid picture for the reader. Dare I say it feels representational of what the seems and fabrics of the daily reality appear to us to be?

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Elizabeth Robinson's Pattern refuses to repeat itself = is divine (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Elizabeth Robinson's Pattern refuses to repeat itself = is divine (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Asking myself, "What does it take to write a single book," and having the flood of girth, of a material depth, and holding this stereotype accountable. Reading Elizabeth Robinson's book, which is physically minimal but emotionally exquisite and sprawling. It is this type of intersection in the conversation that leads me to wonder about the arc and the grace of a poetry that is, especially in our digital present, here and now, ultimately huge. "Mottled humors release belief." This is just one of perhaps several dozen (total) lines in this book that breaks the *pattern* of the surge of the contemporary breath of poetry, a breath as robotic as invisibly undead. Robinson's life is curatorial. Her poetic vision is the concentration of the splinter, the release of the energy of focus. It is worth engaging, and understanding briefly, and longingly, into one's own perceptive strides of the meaning within fullness.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Greg Bem reviews Amanda Earl's Lady Lazarus Redux (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Amanda Earl's Lady Lazarus Redux (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.
Lady Lazarus Redux
by Amanda Earl


Occasionally books jab you in the spine and cause you to sit upright, pay attention, know that it will affect yourself as a book should always do, that it is not just noise, not just ambient, but active and effectively present. I found Earl's book to be this way, to be of fantastic import. An above-average selection of the already-fantastic above/ground press, Lady Lazarus Redux seeks rawness, transparency, and a full-on immersion into the struggles of the feminist mind and the feminist text. The book is personal, but collective. Absorptive and incapacitating. It is a serene cry out, though conceptual construction and found language, for better opportunities to know suffering and to know resolution. It will be a marvelous book to return to over time.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Greg Bem reviews Brenda Iijima's SWAMP / SWAMP (2017) and Carrie Hunter's Series out of Sequence (2017) at Yellow Rabbits

Seattle WA poet and reviewer Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first reviews of Brenda Iijima's SWAMP / SWAMP (2017) and Carrie Hunter's Series out of Sequence (2017) over at Yellow Rabbits. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here. It reads:
A mid-weekend review session: two new books by above/ground press.

“Advancing negligible inches, the reeds are porous barriers, beige poles sharp tall, we are not soldiers, this is not a battlefield at present, but was it?” In Brenda Iijima’s SWAMP SWAMP, a response to the 1971 film SWAMP by Robert Smithson, concepts of terraforming and terra-informing lead to better knowing the form of humans. Feminist, postcolonial, journalistic, what starts at the beginning of the swamp leads through it, the element of the surprise, the unexpected, and the unpredictable binding us to new relationships with knowledge, besieged by and through white settler imperialists, entire systems of militaries, and the shadows of society that rear their head through and through by a revisiting of recent and subconscious representations. Released in 2017.

“If you cannot be honest with yourself, how can you get the truth out of anyone else?” Life’s ride’s most enjoyable moments are enjoying the moments of life. Livelihood and the inclusion of experience is a theme erupting from the strands of language threaded together in Carrie Hunter’s Series out of Sequence, which collages together lines from at least a handful of contemporary and nearly-contemporary films and television shows, from Minority Report to Daredevil. The result is a book of poetry that feels as alive as the maximalist culture we live within, an ecology of its own. Here, in this anti-sequence, there is the sense of the ecological, but also the sense of the chaotic, as contexts morph and blend and merge into one another. And yet via Hunter as the peripheral artist of the craft, the language feels universal and total, allowing an experience wholly unique and of itself, but beyond itself, magnetically envisioning the limits (and limitlessness the same) of our world. Released in 2017.

Recommended listening: "Endangered Species" by Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Greg Bem reviews rob mclennan's King Kong (2016) on Goodreads

Greg Bem was good enough to post the first review of my chapbook King Kong (2016) over at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the whole review here. It reads:
This is a whacky pamphlet of poems that will leave you astounded at the canonization of North American poetry extended into such an array of strange and baffling contexts and contents. Enjoyable within the realm of quirks, King Kong reiterates the play and pride of Mclennan and his knack for the limp and romp of contemporary writ.