Arkadii Dragomoshenko's Dust, Reviewed by John Muckle

Arkadii Dragomoshenko
Dust
Dalkey Archive Press 2008
94pp, pb, $10.95

Reviewed by John Muckle

Essays, stories, dreams, aphorisms – this book of meditations on memory and writing is a densely-woven tapestry of aperçus, story-fragments, personal and cultural narrations which begin, break off, and are – sometimes – taken up again, philosophical speculations on time and perception, and disquisitions on its own oblique but exquisitely judged cut and shuffle methods. This serpentine course – which gives Dust the feel of a book many times its length – offers, among many other things, a brief glimpse of Gertrude Stein’s theory of identity, the amazing story of Sarah Pardee Winchester’s labyrinthine Californian spirit-house, designed to appease, or elude, the ghosts of all those killed by her husband’s repeating rifles, a beautiful essay on reading Paul Bowles (these both parts of the book’s longest excursion, ‘Do Not A Gun’), and, at the heart of Dust, reflections on the two cities which govern its dream-like structure: Dragomoshenko’s native St Petersburg, a place of cafes, lovers, and birds, and New York, a workplace and sometime adoptive home, a multiplying Chinese box of a place through which he experiences America and its cultures. Here, straying from his office at NYU on Washington Square, he notices one day on a class list that Walter Benjamin is enroled as a student.

Tarpaulins, by Marcus Ted

To Whom it may Concern,

Am interested in ordering some tarpaulins and will like to know the types you do have in stock now together with the prices or you can also include your direct website where i can view all those that you have in stock.Also let me know if you do take a surcharge when accepting either master cards or visa.Hope to hear from you soon.


Regards,
Marcus Ted
tarpaulins Purchase.....

Dora Malech's Shore Ordered Ocean Reviewed By Gregory Lawless

Shore Ordered Ocean
By Dora Malech
The Waywiser Press 2009

Reviewed By Gregory Lawless

Dora Malech is a poetic contradiction of the best sort: a hyper-productive perfectionist. There’s a surplus of brilliant poems in Malech’s ninety-one-page debut, Shore Ordered Ocean, a book that showcases a rare talent. And while I hope that someday soon her work will need no introduction, I think the opening lines from “A Way” will, for the time being, provide a nice preview of Malech’s cartwheeling lyrical voice:

Amy King's Slaves to Do These Things, reviewed by Ana Božičević

Blazevox
96pp.
$16.

[Ed's note - Amy and Ana are partners, but I'm a big fan of both as people and poets, so that's trumping any pretense of objectivity. And this is an awesome book besides.]

Alone in a Crowd: A Tragicomedy of Pronouns in Slaves to Do These Things by Amy King

I am one. The first time one gives Slaves to Do These Things a read, one circles every pronoun in the manuscript. Who are these Is and wes and hes and shes, and why does one so badly care to know? One circles and wonders: they turn, a key. The book’s epigraph quotes from Baudelaire’s “Beauty,” where “all poets” shipwreck against beauty’s stony breast, “mute and noble as matter itself.” Is this book’s multiplicitous troupe of characters really an army of slave-poets doing beauty’s magnetic bidding, all punished because they made an attempt to attain it? (In this scenario, beauty is the kind of siren whose absence of voice is lure: she tempts one to imagine the words she would sing, if only she could, that poor “soul that suffered from being its body” sans merci.) Or are the pronouns of Slaves just you and me and other people-next-door in the desert of “office boxes/that cloister us apart?” America’s historical agency of slavery casts a long root-shadow across one’s conjectures. In his Coldfront Magazine review of King’s last book, I’m the Man Who Loves You, Matt Hart writes: “one such complication is in how the book’s ‘I’ and ‘you’ are constantly shifting positions, clanging and banging against one another, and at times even disappearing altogether.” In Slaves, this rhetorical tool grows out of antinarrative’s special effect into a thesis, an MO: the lyrical you and I weld into a plural us and they: and then they’re given tools. Everyone’s implicated and put to work. In a book of five Acts, one hears from soldiers, teachers, journalists, terrorists, Kerry and Miller, Claude Cahun, photographers Cindy, Nan and Diane, Miss California (“opposite marriage”), the philosopher, people of many cities, your mother. Along the way, rhetorical propaganda, decoy-definitions, and streams of Oscar-Wildish oxymorons with a laughing void at their center, attempt to explain away and divert one from what’s really happening (and what’s that?):