small press editions
>Retractable< by Kevin Spenst. $8
Full of energetic appropriations, juxtapositions, and recontextualizations from other writers, the Internet, and the world,
Spenst makes the language buzz, hiss, clatter, and sing. Retractable like an umbrella, a public statement, or the reclaimed wilderness of words.
The redoubtable Retractable will stop you in your (re)tracts.
An excerpt from the book, not a (direct) description of it:
"A smartly bound art book of black and white
photos. Each photo is of a brick mid-smash through an exploding window.
The
windows are in buildings on the abandoned island of Hashima in the East Japan
Sea. On the side of each brick is a word.
The entire series of one hundred
photos make a series of Basho haiku about ponds and frogs. The juxtaposition
pleases
for the most part. The enormity of effort enacts a mimetic performance
pulling a text out of the past and crashing it
through the present moment again
and again with each turn of the page."
>The Sky The< by Michael Sikkema. $8
rob mclennan wrote a review of this great chapbook by Michael Sikkema:
"There is such a fine sense of incompleteness to the poems, polished, finished poems that end before they really end…
Through twenty-seven short poems (none longer than a page),
there is a sharpness here, an energy that might even be
called restrained,
utilized in the slyest way."
See the full review here.
An excerpt: