Little Red Leaves 4 & LRL E-Chapbooks

Little Red Leaves, issue 4, is now online, with a crowd of difficult, often sonorous, varied, and socially engaged poetries.  From CJ Martin & Ash Smith:

Featured in this issue is a festschrift for John Taggart, edited by Thom Donovan and C.J. Martin, with poems from Theodore Enslin, Pam Rehm, Eléna Rivera, Joel Chace, Kevin Holden, Frank Sherlock, C.J. Martin, and Thom Donovan. Also in this section is a new long poem from John Taggart, "Kitaj Angels," as well as a selected bibliography of works by and about John Taggart, compiled by Robert J. Bertholf.

This issue also includes new video from Jesse Seldess, a pamphlet by David Brazil, and extended selections of new work from Tyrone Williams, Maryrose Larkin, and erica lewis, as well as poetry from Nathan Austin, Tamiko Beyer, Sarah Mangold, Elizabeth Zuba, Carter Smith, Carol Guess, Britta Kallevang, Rob Halpern, Kate Schapira, Lauren Ireland, Margaret Konkol, David Wolach, Anna Elena Eyre, Kate Colby, Alexander Dickow, dawn lonsinger, Richard Owens, Laura Goldstein, JenMarie Davis, and Felicia Shenker.

LRL4 sees the complete redesign of the LRL website, as well as the launch of three new books in our LRL e-editions series:

Tina Darragh's & Marcella Durand's collaboration, Deep eco pré

Divya Victor's first long player, SUTURES

Norma Cole's Do the Monkey

I've barely gotten halfway thru this large, yet intimate issue, and so far I've encountered the sublime at least three times.  If you think I'm lying, prove it!  

Of note for me thus far is a long selection of new work from Tyrone Williams, poems by Rob Halpern, Sarah Mangold, Nathan Austin, Kate Schapira, & the John Taggart festchrift edited by Martin & Thom Donovan.   I'm especially taken (so far) with Donovan's "A Devotion," a dis- and ir-rupting lyricism that decodes and recodes word and image--certainly a well-chosen piece for a Taggart festchrift.  Halpern continues to roll out bits of Music for Porn, a manuscript he's now completing after a few years of working on it.  Lyric and prose rub each other here in an almost dystopian heave; here, hope for a future where bodies are not weaponized, but loved in multitudes, where "to use" is reimagined, is the sloughing, tiring "voice" that gives and gives out, seems only needing to exist here to stutter out a reimagined present from the future's eye, a tense I very much associate with Tyrone William's prose poems--what will have been.

Speaking of Tyrone Williams, I think I have little to say right now, so filled with things I want to say.  Punning and the jagged line, the double entendre, and other language games, are put to use as log or manifest, and the litany of late capitalist, neo-liberal commercialisms, phrases and words so commodified as to be, quite literally, owned (copyrighted), become points of examinations as they are brought on board.  More on this long poem as I read it over and again.  And more soon regarding Martin and Smith's new issue--including the new e-chaps, which I'm excited to delve into.  New work from Darragh always makes my heart jump.  

For now, thanks much to the editors, and enjoy the issue.