Prefab Eulogies Available Now

My book of improvisational poems/inter-poetic conversations, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses, is now available for purchase. These are some of my earliest poems, some written as early as between 2003-4, with yet several others written as late as this winter. 

You can go here, to the BlazeVox website and order directly, or you can order the book thru Amazon or SPD, both of which are linked on the BlazeVox Prefab Eulogies web page.  

Also on that page you can listen to a live recording of some of "Nothings Houses," a polyvocal work for multiple media (live voice, tape, typewriter, yellow stickies, and large film screen). A short excerpt of this multimedia work is in the new book as transliterated material.  Check out the recording here. 

Other more dubious poems, telephone calls, ritualistic behaviors transcribed, songs sent to senators/congress-people, drawings of the inside of various body parts, and some essay, follows.

This is a transitional book in many ways--though coming out now, much of it is earlier than the poetry I've published in more recent chapbooks.  Hence, the book reflects (if anything) a transition from installation and performing arts into the questions of contemporary poetry, with which I'd been engaged for those years, but which I'd only written about--until falling ill, which really meant, for me, being unable to move in ways that I'd been used to in performance and in daily life.  Of course I'm still undergoing that transformation, so this is no huge proclamation on my part, but something I've been reflecting on since last week when I got the proof in the mail.

Anyway, enjoy.

A huge thank you to poet & editor of BlazeVox [books] Goeffrey Gatza, as well as to Linh Dinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, Catherine Taylor, and everyone else who either edited, commented on, or otherwise helped get Prefab Eulogies out the door.  

And please help spread the word that Prefab Eulogies is now out!

Thanks,

Solidaridad,

David

Sacrificial Trees

                                             full book cover proof, Prefab Eulogies Vol 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox, forth. 2010)

Several projects are coming to a close, and as I now settle into teaching after a semester off, some trees are going to be sacrificed.  I'm not sorry given the tiny number of poetry / poetics books that are sold.  For instance, I expect to sell only about a million copies of Occultations, an artist book (designed by Jill Stengel & Mark Lamoureux) from Black Radish Books (Collective) that I've now got a release date for: April 1, & available thru SPD a couple weeks later, mid-April.  And given what Neo-Liberals have done to save the economy, I suspect I'll only manage to sell six hundred thousand copies of Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox).

I'm happy to find out from Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVox that the final proof is now off to the printers, which should make the book available for purchase very soon; early Spring I'd imagine, at latest.  I'm really happy with what Geoffrey did in helping design the cover--taking my crap collages and making them legible.  So, my sincerest gratitude to Geoffrey.  

And my sincerest gratitude to Linh Dinh, Amy King, Jules Boykoff, and Catherine Taylor for writing too kind blurbs for the back of the book & website.

I just found out as well that Lourdes Vazquez found a home for an essay I wrote on her work a couple years ago, now part of a book I'm slowly working on--Necrophiliology: Aesthetic Practice During the Bush Regime.  She submitted it to and got it placed in the Brazilian journal of literature Sibila, edited by Charles Bernstein and poet Regis Bonvicino (English/Portuguese/Spanish).  That's cool: I've never had to do so little (nothing) to share my work with you.

Here is the English version.

Finally, a sincere thanks to Carlos Soto-Roman (post below), for formatting and re-formatting--basically spending too much time--my poems for Elective Affinities.  I've been working my way thru the pieces.  Really digging on Frank Sherlock's long poem at moment.

Finally finally, it's been a long haul, waiting on various pieces to arrive, making sure our chapbooks are able to come out with and soon after, but the new issue of Wheelhouse is nearly ready to be uploaded by designer-editor, Eden Schulz.  Excited for this issue and for the chapbooks, work from Uche Nduka, Stan Apps, & contributions to the journal from an amazing group of folks.  

Last, finally.  The new ON: A Journal of Contemporary Practice is coming out!  I'll post on this again when it is published.  Editors Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schelsinger put out an amazing constellation of critical writings on contemporary poetries in the first issue. I've read some of the work from the new issue, and I'm certainly going to be ordering a couple copies asap.  Of course, they're beautiful art objects as well, with Cross (Atticus/Finch) and Schlesinger (Cuneiform) some of the finest book artist around.

New Work in Elective Affinities Anthology

A huge thanks to Carlos Soto-Roman, New Philadelphia Poet, and curator of the American part of the multi-national (not "multinational") rhizomatic anthology of contemporary poetry, Elective Affinities. 

He's just published a selection of my work, with work of other poets forthcoming in the next several weeks. 

So I'm very thankful to Carlos for curating this project, and for continuing to work on fixing the inevitable formatting glitches (poems as they are now - those awkward brackets & bullet points - will be fixed in the next few days, he tells me), tho if I were him I'd tell me to suck it up.  Carlos agreed to curate my poems, which nearly all playing with page and lineation, are a fucking headache for anyone to format online.  I gave Linh Dinh a major headache with some poems not long ago for his journal The Lower Half, and here again I'm probably more trouble than I'm worth.  

So too, I'm touched & honored that Thom Donovan elected to put me down as one of his contemporary affinities; I would certainly have done the same had he not beaten me to the punch.  

A very cool project, whereby poets are invited by Carlos based on their being named one of another poet's "contemporary affinities." Hence they are invited by other poets. Along with stating one's affinities (damn hard I must say, not to go on and on, and in order to stop from doing that I stuck to poets who were not yet represented and whose contact info I had, tho forgot to add Laura Elrick), one is also asked to give a short statement of one's poetics.  

Do check out the growing (weekly) anthology.  But also check out the websites of participating, thus counterpart, countries.  Some beautiful work, such as the lyrical, yet politically inflected poems from Chilean poet Ingrid Odgers Toloza, from "Codigo": 

"Animalia/...Of the sent to the sense on the tongue.../I forage/In the eye of the rotunda/I forage in these sewers and suburbs"

Excuse my shitty translation.  The poem reads beautifully in a fragmentary & dystpoian way in Spanish.  As do so many others (does anyone reading this read Italian?), so look around, come back to it and take your time--it's really a pleasure to be able to experience new writing from places other than this country, poets who you might not run into otherwise.