Start the New Year with books by
Brenda Iijima and Sawtooth winner Julie Carr
“Iijima’s eco-provocations have the lightness and gravitas of an improbably reconsecrated world glimpsed at its hectic,
interrogatively driven conception. On the edge of loss, words have taken on direct agency.” —Joan Retallack
“Plato, arguably the philosopher with the most influence on the development of Western culture, famously banished poets from
the ideal city in the name of the philosophos with a tacitly hegemonic regard for the danger posed to the State by the massive
social power of poetic eros. The title of Brenda’s Iijima’s new work, If Not Metamorphic, promises the emergence of an ‘unhindered
and spiraling’ structure that, as it turns out, recoups and transforms this marginalized power of eros. What occurs is
nothing less than the ramified beauty of the work’s own variegated measures in a ‘continuum of elaboration,’
wherein ‘Essentiality becomes / Phantasmal’ and ‘Erotic / Rebellion’ flies in the face of a Platonically underwritten
Occident that by philosophical default knows one habitually physio-psychical state, so to speak: ‘The state / Would have us /
Becoming / Bland.’ Anything but bland, Iijima’s fantastically life-affirming work asks: ‘Eureka / Or death?’
My response is to read aloud in wonder and appreciation.” —Christopher Rizzo
Buy it now!
“In this polyphonic poem the voices of care-givers, killers, and children commingle and, disturbingly, sometimes overlap. Innocence
and guilt are never far apart. ‘At the pool the boy in cammies reads an encyclopedia of weapons.’ This book has great moral
complexity, gravitas, and courage.” —Rae Armantrout, judge of the 2009 Sawtooth Poetry Prize
“‘The book about violence must be a book of quotations,’ according to Julie Carr in 100 Notes on Violence, ‘For everyone
speaks about violence.’ Few have spoken or written on the subject with the desperate accuracy and the incendiary beauty
of this disturbing, necessary book. Here, the quotations include statistics and news reports as well as the more traditional
poetic forms, all to engage finally a light like that of the sun, ‘its daily resurrection, daily assault.’ ” —Bin Ramke
Buy it now!
Ahsahta Press
MFA Program in Creative Writing
Department of English
Boise State University
1910 University Drive, Boise, ID 83725-1525
