“In Do the Monkey Norma Cole celebrates a vibrant life of the mind and body. The Olympics come up, along with other sports, and it turns out that we citizens of ordinary life are the true Olympians. This quotidian heroism is suggested by lines from “HEAVY LIFTING,” — “At eight I was brilliant with my body … For years I‘ve watched the corner for signs/These days/I stop”. These lines also bring up the signs (the sign) that seem to be the double of the monkey (signe in French) of the title. The poem “IN MEMORIAM JACQUES DERRIDA says it all: “Then his/signature will have taken place. //His signature has taken place./Monkeys—love ‘em or leave ‘em.” So we arrive at a consideration of death, time, the body, signification and patriotism, guided light-heatedly by one who has been there and back. “Before the mind catches up/the body’s been and gone” serves as the epigraph of the book and is part of “THE BODY IS SOFT.” We are reminded by this passage of how life actually works, as well as of how we think and speak about it. For the reader, in each reading, the book becomes that moment when things and language fall together with oneself. It is a great dance.”
–Laura Moriarty
LRL e-editions
ebook / paperback series from Little Red Leaves
J/J Hastain — The Yet to be Pronounced Pronouns
“If Georges Bataille were a queer living in San Francisco in 2012, this could be xem, building and dismantling gender, that is, building and dismantling form itself. j/j hastain is writing a no-holds-barred break-neck love song that conflates the meaty and the sacramental. Here is love’s avid desire for detail, and love’s sacred, impossible overflow.” —Robert Gluck [...]
Beverly Dahlen — THE FIRST THREE BOOKS
LRL e-editions is thrilled to bring Beverly Dahlen’s first three books back to print in a single volume: Out of the Third (Momo’s Press, 1974), A Letter at Easter: To George Stanley (Effie’s Press, 1976), and The Egyptian Poems (Hipparchia Press, 1983). Also included are Robert Duncan’s afterword to the Hipparchia edition, as well as [...]
Sarah Mangold — I MEANT TO BE TRANSPARENT
See Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s write up on this book at the Harriet blog. “It was more like an impressionist portrait than an identification photo” writes Sarah Mangold in this book woven through the writing of early 20th century literary innovator Dorthy Richardson and the contours of contemporary poetics. Taking her title from a line in [...]
David Brazil — ECONOMY
In David Brazil’s ECONOMY a meditation takes shape as prosody, and the material trace of that effort is everywhere in evidence. Such a scrap heap of thought in facsimile might at first be reminiscent of Francis Ponge’s notational practice in The Making of the Pré. However, in Brazil’s pré/conomics the field’s littered with home furnishings: [...]
Pattie McCarthy — L&O
In this, the fourth book from Pattie McCarthy, repetition marks the coordinates of maternity and childhood. Divided into two sections, the first “Liminal” opens between the death of a father and the speaker’s pregnancy. “…it’s easy to disappear/ completely into it. masses of flowers” McCarthy writes while rendering a figure neither wholly swallowed by grief [...]
Sarah Campbell — EVERYTHING WE COULD ASK FOR
“It’s as if a mirror came flashing up–and then off again: reflection then opacity … and then a space (depth) of desire.” –Laura Mullen (on Campbell’s The Maximum) In this second collection, Campbell’s richly minimal poems come once again, as poet Zack Finch has written, “sieved out of turbulence,” pressed to the point that each [...]
Brian Mornar — THREE AMERICAN LETTERS
“We receive, but how do we speak?” writes Brian Mornar in Three American Letters. Part poetics, part physical manifesto and essay, Mornar takes on the lyric in the gleaming line between urban and outskirts, between speech and movement, in American poetry: “…always on a string between the farm and the city finds reassurance in this [...]
Group Review of Michael Cross’s HAECCEITIES
This book contains a group review of Michael Cross’s Haecceities (Cuneiform, 2010). (Purchase a copy of Haecceities here.) The discussion was conducted via email between 9/10-2/11. Participants were David Brazil, Thom Donovan, Brenda Iijima, C.J. Martin, Kyle Schlesinger, and Jamie Townsend. Also included in this volume is Taylor Brady’s unabridged jacket copy for the book [...]
Catalog
When new titles are available for download/purchase, they will be linked in the list below. (Please use the “Our Catalog” menu at the foot of this page for individual author pages.) j/j hastain — The Yet to be Pronounced Pronouns DOWNLOAD PURCHASE Beverly Dahlen – The First Three Books [...]
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Little Red Leaves
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Mathew Timmons — Sound Noise
Sounded through a persian rug (or snagged carpet) of google searches, Mathew Timmons pries apart how we receive and process sensory information. As if search alerts themselves were as much mirror as atomized prosthesis, Timmons replicates a pattern attuned to static in the gaps — one that signals the subtle difference between Sound and Noise [...]
Gloria Frym — Any Time Soon
“In the case of Vietnam, what is a reference” writes Michael Palmer over 20 years ago in the context of a different war and different time. In Any Time Soon, Frym writes from the reality that “there is no post war” or external context from which to view our current saturation. Language occurs in the [...]
Eléna Rivera — Remembrance of Things Plastic
In Remembrance of Things Plastic, Eléna Rivera charts a path between cultural displacement and the hyper-pull of consumer images. Migrating from the strictures of girlhood (“Marooned in a room the size of a dollhouse”) through the acculturation implicit in Garbo’s eyebrows, Rivera laments the social split between self-hood and the feminine body — the insurgent [...]
Tina Darragh & Marcella Durand — Deep eco pré
Filtered through Ponge’s approximate presque, the pre of the ”Ding an sich,” this collaboration between Tina Darragh and Marcella Durand writes and rewrites the endlessly rewritten eco-/ego-poetics of our moment. All too human, these bellwethers appeal to the sentient and non-sentient, repeal the very sentences they parse into phrases, and limp toward, having lost or [...]
Divya Victor — SUTURES
“In writing that excites its forms with cultural complexity, Divya Victor challenges what otherwise goes unremarked in the regenerate exceptionalism of US American poetics. In work that pulses with playfulness and sober restraint, the hard facts of immigration and the skills required for global citizenship are ensnared in a global economy of production and consumption [...]
Norma Cole — Do the Monkey
“In Do the Monkey Norma Cole celebrates a vibrant life of the mind and body. The Olympics come up, along with other sports, and it turns out that we citizens of ordinary life are the true Olympians. This quotidian heroism is suggested by lines from “HEAVY LIFTING,” — “At eight I was brilliant with my [...]
Yedda Morrison — Darkness (Chapter 1)
In Darkness, Yedda Morrison erases—or, significantly, “whites out”—chapter 1 of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness leaving behind only the words and phrases that reference the natural world. Morrison’s aim is not to comment on the original, but to cull or reframe the remains: “luminous estuary / brooding gloom / sea.” In this brilliantly dark contribution to [...]
Purchase
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Ted Greenwald — Permenant Record
Stripped down to what sticks, the patterns that emerge from these discreet accretions are as satisfying to the ear as they are to the eye. Modular lines are the daily grind; finding their way to work and reworking their ways, potshards and particulars have an inexplicable emotional edge, an edge that has little to do [...]
J/J Hastain — The Yet to be Pronounced Pronouns
Beverly Dahlen — THE FIRST THREE BOOKS
Sarah Mangold — I MEANT TO BE TRANSPARENT
David Brazil — ECONOMY
Pattie McCarthy — L&O
Sarah Campbell — EVERYTHING WE COULD ASK FOR
Brian Mornar — THREE AMERICAN LETTERS
Group Review of Michael Cross’s HAECCEITIES
Catalog
LRL Textile Series
Little Red Leaves
Mathew Timmons — Sound Noise
Gloria Frym — Any Time Soon
Eléna Rivera — Remembrance of Things Plastic
Tina Darragh & Marcella Durand — Deep eco pré
Divya Victor — SUTURES
Norma Cole — Do the Monkey
Yedda Morrison — Darkness (Chapter 1)
Purchase
Ted Greenwald — Permenant Record
