Showing posts with label Argos Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Argos Books. Show all posts

Saturday, October 08, 2016

Ali Power, A Poem for Record Keepers




(33)

You want a location.

But you really mean a telescope.

I hand you the champagne from no occasion.

Should I keep going?

In certain rooms we can only look ahead.

Looking ahead is fun.

When you’re delusional.

New York poet and editor Ali Power’s first full-length poetry collection is A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016), a sequence of forty-nine numbered poems cut into seven sections. Composed of seemingly disconnected lines and phrases, the poems begin to accumulate after a while, and form a series of shapes, especially through the way sections appear to have been grouped, citing connections in tone, subject or phrasing. As Stacy Szymaszek writes on the back cover, this collection emerges from a “[…] poet who maintains a history of one’s activities.” There’s a fine tradition in such a consideration, from the “I did this, I did that” poems of New York School poet Frank O’Hara, the conversational observations of Toronto’s David W. McFadden, or even the life-long expansive journal-poems of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert (as well as Szymaszek herself, of course). What intrigues about A Poem for Record Keepers is in the short-form note-taking form that the poems appear to be composed in, allowing the connections between activities and poems to occur almost naturally, providing a more subtle series of threads throughout to hold the poems together as a single unit of composition. What appears somewhat scattered and random over the first few poems begins to cohere and shape in quite lovely ways. Her notes move from history to personal observation to completely mundane observations of daily activity and pop culture, and cohere into a portrait of the narrator in all her contradictory and complex ways.

(8)

There is GPS.

There is Florida

There is pinecone.

There is trampoline.

There is olive oil.

There is getting to know you.

There is never getting to know all about you.


Saturday, February 06, 2016

Montana Ray, (guns & butter)




      (smoking)

                                                              (embarrassing) (as it is) (can’t help dragging
                           ur sexuality to breakfast) (words come out sleazy) (can’t get ur eggs
          over-easy) (w/out a snort from the proprietress) (& see how polite old men’s
        eyes pop) (as they walk by the open window) (where u
      write) (I provoke) (I endure) (it’s not my fault)
     (he’s out there                        w/ a handgun)
   (& a busy intra-                    familial torturing
  plan) (these things happen) (bc
 they’re accepted) (in this milieu)
(from middle school) (we lay
blame on spaghetti straps) (bc
men like big guns, like big tits)

New York poet, translator and scholar Montana Ray’s striking first full-length poetry collection is (guns & butter) (Argos Books, 2015), a collection of concrete poems alternating between the shape of a gun with the occasional recipe. Composing poems in the familiar shapes of a handgun, Ray’s poems write out a culture of guns and gun violence, especially one that also connects sex and male violence to gun culture, composing a direct critique of what has become entirely too prevalent in North American culture. She also utilizes an intriguing use of parenthesis, holding together her short, accumulated phrases together, almost afraid that, without being held together, they might bleed and spill out across the page. As the poem “(when u broke the protective order)” begins: “(I became a walking statistic) (walking to & fro / the precinct) (telling anyone who’d listen) (my x moved to the nabe) (from 3 states / away) (to stare me down) [.]” In an interview conducted by Emily Brandt, posted in May 2015 at Weird Sister, Ray writes:

A lot of the language is sourced, so in the first poem I wrote for the book, the lines just cohered together in the shape of the gun. I’ve said this elsewhere, but the first poem I wrote in that shape is the first poem in the book. I’d received a text from my babysitter that said, “I might be late. A gun war is on.” Or a slightly less poetic version of that sentence. And I walked out to do my laundry with Ami; and some guy on the street was like, “You can touch it,” and then when I came home—I used to live in front of a tattoo parlor, I still live in the same place but the tattoo parlor has moved, and it’s now a fancy restaurant—one of the tattoo guys there, who I had a little crush on, he’d just gotten a new tattoo on his leg that was Billy the Kid’s gun. I was like, “Do you like guns?” And he said, “I like Billy the Kid.” So basically half of the language in the poem is sourced from one day’s interactions. I was also thinking about art, how you see guns on necklaces and on bags. The appropriation of that shape is done by designers of all sorts, and I wanted to do that for poetry.

Her poems are thick with fear, frustration, determination and resolve, and she writes on pregnancy, motherhood and the body, sex and violence (and male sexual violence), domestic matters, human closeness and serial isolation, and a culture of family, neighbours and recipes, alternating between what heals and restores, and what so easily threatens to destroy. Throughout all of this, much of the book is anchored in the immediate, as she writes to open the poem “(moonchild)”: “(don’t give up on him) (take the moon) (we created it from / our sorrow) (& it hangs in there) (I lug him upstairs) (I make soup) (call the home- / opath on Thanksgiving) (the exterminator on Xmas morn.) (perform the necessary / exorcisms) [.]” Further in the same interview with Emily Brandt, they discuss the book’s alternating elements of nourishment and violence:

EB: The book felt very nourishing, like a meal, in part because of the visual elements. There’s also so much narrative and so much rich language. As a writer, you’re creating this form and moving through it so beautifully and challenging so many of our ideas of what a mother is, what a child is, what violence is, what nonviolence is, what a book of poems can do. I had a student who was wearing to school yesterday this t-shirt that had a blonde woman in her underwear pointing a gun at whoever. I said to him, “I’m kind of offended” and he said, “It’s about power though. This is about power.” So I said, “Yeah well, her mouth is open, she’s naked,” and he was like, “But she’s got some power.” So then I showed him your book and he flipped through it and read a little of it and handed it back to me and said, “Miss, it’s the same thing.” So how is this book not the same thing as his shirt? Or is it?

MR: That’s the best question I think I’ve ever been asked. I think there is probably some sort of relationship there because I feel like the book does glamorize violence. It doesn’t show you how fucking fucked up it actually is, and it can’t because it’s a representation. It’s about a play therapy kind of world. But the book isn’t really selling anything. Because it’s outside of the pop culture market, maybe it gets away with some stuff that otherwise it would be more accountable for. But I think the whole book is about that, about film. There is a poem in there about a woman—“(una pistola) (bajo el vestido)”—in front of a camera with her shirt undone holding a machine gun on an album cover, and the complexities of that situation. Because she also has a gun below her slip for at night when she’s in bed for her pinché lover, uncle, guardian. So there is this duality of a glamorous vision of a woman with a gun during the daytime on an album cover, versus the threat of actual violence and a woman using a gun as self-projection against male sexual aggression.




Monday, January 17, 2011

Argos Books: Paige Ackerson-Kiely and bianca stone

THIS LANDSCAPE OF COLTISH RECIPROCITY

Out of the glove box comes whatever snack a passenger can hand you when you’re driving. So many years spent distilling head-nods, the occasional small wave off a steering wheel, brushing against a stranger in the dairy aisle, her heat & yours. Sometimes, fleeting eye contact with a wild bird, or loving a workingman without interrupting him. It has been difficult. A jetty quelling breakers; punching someone in the face then blowing on your fist. It has been difficult. Your 3/4ths coverage, the remainder of me shrugging away. All the trinkets I gave to you hidden in your dark desk. When I come right up to the edge, like this second to last line, I always retreat. Though I love the way it feels like drowning, your mouth against my legs, moving up.

As anyone who reads this with any regularity might suspect, I’ve been a fan of Vermont poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely since the appearance of her first poetry collection, In No One’s Land (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2007), a book I carried on and off through my travels pretty much since, wearing down my copy nearly to the point of requiring a replacement. Her chapbook, This Landscape (Argos Books, 2010), a collaboration with artist Adie Russell, is part of Argos Books’ “SIDE-BY-SIDE SERIES,” meant to “create a space where contemporary poetry and art can intersect, making a third, undefined category. In viewing the work and forming a personal understanding of the resonance between language and image, the reader joins in the spirit of collaboration that makes this endeavor possible.” The collaboration exists as four images by Russell, and four prose-poems by Ackerson-Kiely, prose so tight and sharp you could bounce a quarter of it. What I’ve always admired about her poetry has been the sharp emotions, the clipped phrases and the damned strong insistence, poems that demand the reader live inside them for a while. Her bio at the end of the small collection even announces a second trade collection forthcoming, sometime this year, Misery Trail.

What I like about bianca stone’s someone else’s wedding vows (Argos Books, 2010) are the sharp turns, lines with flow made with such ease as to appear possible. Her poems have a subtle cadence that pushes, pounds, deep, and manage to repeatedly make their way into flesh. Who is this Bianca Stone? Part of the appeal of this small collection is its range, from tightly-packed pieces to a more open cadence of couplets and breath-space. Add to the mix that both small chapbooks are hand sewn with lovely letterpress covers produced at the Ugly Ducking Presse workshop in Brooklyn, New York. How can you ever resist?
Animatronic Singing Fish

The moon puts powder on its pocked face
and orbits the room.

And I think the moon says yes.

Yes, drive unto the brink
and have a beer.

But I can’t be sure.

The piano concerto from the little record player
on the floor

makes me feel
as if I am back listening

to the pathological beaver
gods slapping in the brown torrent of the creek.

And I am somewhat convinced. Though
the concerto says nothing,

and has no meaning.

When we talk of love
we think we are being talked into something.

We walk toward
a rubber fish with interest,

with envy, finding it takes in more
amphibian dust

we find we cannot bring ourselves
to be intimate with it,

when it bellows. Take me to the river.
Knock me down.