Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, Reviewed by Ross Brighton

Omnidawn
128 pages (5.5” x 8.5” Paper)
ISBN: 9781890650377
$15.95

Myung Mi Kim’s Penury, like much of her previous work, centres as much, if not more, on silence and the not-said. There is a poverty of language, which is worn with miss-use, like the book on the cover, the pages of which have been torn from their binding, leaving just the boards. Beckett’s Malone says “there is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle”. Yes, yet suspicion of their emptiness comes creeping in, and when they have been the tools of violence, one has difficulty forgetting Celan’s “one hundred years of death-bringing speech”.

As with Celan, Kim writes with an obsessive precision that at times verges on the violent. The silence of the copious white space is broken by speech that is quiet, yet also loud. At this limit of language the word is stretched to its breaking point.

Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country, reviewed by Min Jung Oh

Brandi Homan
Bobcat Country
Shearsman Books Ltd., 2010
79 pages, $15.00
ISBN 978-1-84861-085-9

Reviewed by Min Jung Oh

When I first picked up Brandi Homan’s second collection of poetry, Bobcat Country, I could not have been less prepared for this vital text. Its cover, smeared with a rainbow of construction-paper colors, reminded me of a first-grade classroom’s spring bulletin board. Upon closer examination, I realized that the awkward animal emerging from a rainbow sprinkled with stars is actually a collage of various everyday objects and quickly understood the cover. With her deft use of vibratory repetitions within the density of collage, Brandi Homan has brought a brilliant, crucial work to us who live within a commercialized culture.

Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009, reviewed by Ross Brighton

Bruce Russell

Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009
Clouds: Auckland 2009. 115pp. NZ$35.

Bruce Russell has been an important contributor to sound/noise internationally for the past two and a half decades, both under his own name and as a member of the Dead C and Handful of Dust. However during this time he has also been publishing widely on the theory and practice of noise/sound/music, to which the contents of this volume attest.

The book is beautifully presented in matt wine-coloured covers with French flaps, and the title and author embossed in gold both on the front and the back. I have a weakness for handsomely produced books, and this, together with my great respect for Bruce’s sonic work, meant that I had great expectations upon opening this volume. I was not disappointed and was pleasantly surprised by what I found.