New Titles/Works

Simone White, House Envy of All the World (Factory School)

ON: A Journal of Contemporary Practice, a truly outstanding collaboration between Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schlesinger, has just released ON 2.  I'm just tonight ordering a couple copies, so I have yet to see the whole thing.  But ON, for me, is one of the most exciting critical journals.  It features contemporary artists writing on/with/for their contemporaries, involves what Thom Donovan has referred to elsewhere as "loving" criticism, and I can say this at least: what I've read is indeed loving--not lathering--and very, very good.  I'm especially taken by C.J. Martin's critical look at the work of Rob Halpern, an essay that pivots around Rob's new Disaster Suites (Palm Press).  So, from just the small sample I've read, I'm extremely glad to have an opportunity to purchase--for such small dough--a handmade/letterpress journal (beautifully designed by two world class book artists) that's so thick with ideas, playfulness, and studied tho loving critique.  Get it here.

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Wonderful poet and damn important left political economist Jules Boykoff has an article in The Guardian.  Why Protest the Olympics?  Read here.

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Allison Cobb and Simone White have respectively released books this week, both from the (overall) awesome Factory School Heretical Text series (Boykoff, e.g., is in this year's catalogue).  Order both from SPD here.  White's book, House Envy of All the World, is her first. For those of you not in New York or on the East Coast, get to know White's work.  It's some of my new favorite poetry, and so I'm off to get this work asap.  Plus White makes a mean espresso.  Very happy for White, but more for us, as rarely have we had the chance to read White's work unless hearing it live, and yet despite the purposeful go-at-my-own paceness, there's been a great deal of buzz around White's work for some time.  

Here's a blurb on Cobb's new book, Green-Wood:

In Green-Wood, Allison Cobb wanders Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth century Green-Wood Cemetery and discovers that its 500 acres--hills and ponds, trees and graves--mirror the American landscape: a place marked by death but still pulsing with life. Through the lens of Green-Wood, the book explores the history of the American landscape, changing attitudes toward the land, and the impacts of private property, industrial poisons, and war. This is history and poetry, a testament to what survives and an elegy for what is lost--the long dead, the landscape itself, but especially those who died in the twin towers and in the United States’ ongoing wars.

Cobb is a transplant like me, having moved out here from NYC before I did, now in Portland. Been great learning the land from her, figuring out what's where. Quickly she's become a central figure in organizing and curating out here.  Congrats to both lovely human beings.