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September publications

Invoking theorists, philosophers, and such poets as John Berryman and Lyn Hejinian, the poems of Brigitte Byrd’s Song of a Living Room ask the reader to follow a ribbon threaded among music, movies, poetics, with an unlinear sense of time. Ahsahta published her 2005 debut Fence Above the Sea. “Brigitte Byrd writes dense, lovely, provocative poems. Their prose forms and often rational diction are an entrancing shell game showing and shifting and showing again the true passion and lyricism of her work. In this way, she illuminates the eternal struggle that our minds and our bodies and our hearts are always engaged in with each other and with themselves. Song of a Living Room is a splendid collection.” —Robert Olen Butler

Kate Greenstreet releases two movies on DVD and two long poetic sequences in The Last 4 Things, a successor to her 2006 case sensitive. What happens when a person loses hope and yet still has the urge to make a photograph or draw with a stick in the dirt? Greenstreet would like you to read this book as if you had found it left behind on the empty bus seat next to you—a document not directly addressing the question “Why do we make art,” but one that notices that one does make art, despite conditions, and that one would regardless. “Reading this book is like opening a folding table after closing a door. There are two kinds of hinge, we might say. ‘This is what went on here,’ Wittgenstein said, ‘Laugh if you can.’ ‘Do a dangerous thing and you’re in danger,’ replies Greenstreet. ‘That’s how it works.’ She brings craftsmanship to reverie, turns dreaming into meaningful work. This book is a serious engagement with the grammar of our emotions.” —Thomas Basbøll

January publications

Brenda Iijima’s If Not Metamorphic uses the long form, frequently in choral antiphon, to ask what kind of pressures exert change—as in the title poem, where war and human cruelty have turned even the kelp murderous—and what exactly is changed: sometimes words take on other forms before our eyes, sometimes sentences try on new endings in shameless view, and puns on popular culture poke through the deepest meditation. The book was Peter Gizzi’s selection for runner-up in the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest. “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

The 2008 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Rae Armantrout, is Julie Carr’s provocative 100 Notes on Violence. Carr obsessively researches intimate terrorism, looking everywhere from Whitman and Dickinson to lists of phobias and weapon-store catalogs for answers. This book is a dream-document both of light and innocence—babies and the urge to protect them—and of giving in to a wrenching darkness, where despair lies in the very fact that no single factor is to blame. “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

March publications

Chora is Sandra Doller (née Miller)’s second book, after her debut Ahsahta volume Oriflamme. Her tricky, sly language comes at you sideways, full of coinages and puns, and is obsessed with lines: the highways and train tracks that cross deserts; lines from jokes and ghost stories; and lines of influence—Gertrude Stein implicitly, and H.D. explicitly. Doller is not concerned with the complete or the perfect; she shows us the torn edge of notebook paper, “the american wastrel” in a yellow dress, and characters who plead, in a reversal of Goethe’s last words, for “no more light.” “Chora plays synaesthetic musics, grows margins of vines. Doller’s lines bring forth notes, an exacting, disjunct polyphonics, new music from out ‘silence.’ A how-to book of having hands, eyes, mind, a breathing body. Read aloud, a spirit level. It makes me want to know you.”—Lee Ann Brown

In Gallowglass, which follows her Bone Pagoda, also published by Ahsahta, Susan Tichy is a poet embedded: with U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, twined together through history; in the landscape disrupted by war, perseverating on a deer killed by a mountain lion, or hearing direction in birdsong; and in the language of war: “gallowglass” is a corruption of a Gaelic word for “mercenary soldier,” and dark, ancient ballads appear like forensic evidence. Surrounded by cultural touchstones from Pythagoras to the Grateful Dead, Tichy refuses to let the reader’s gaze, or her own, turn from the violence of modern living. “Written mostly in couplets or single-line stanzas, the poems retain formal composure and imagistic clarity even as they cross, moment to moment, the permeable borders between private memory and public record, elegy and war. Unsettling both our comfort and our aesthetic expectations, Tichy superimposes Iraq and Afghanistan on Vietnam, birdsong and ballad and art on recent history. An exquisitely challenging book.”—Martha Collins

May publication

Both sensuous and sensual, These Indicium Tales continues Lance Phillips’s meditations on the body. Here, the indicia—markings or symbols—are birds, insects, and flowers, but rather than standing for the body, they stand with it in an exploration that refuses to romanticize nature. In this phenomenology of eros, where Phillips writes “I can’t think of a way of continuing which is not sexually charged,” no word is wasted. This volume is a continuation of the work begun in Corpus Socius and Cur aliquid vidi. “Phillips’ poetry takes us immediately into a carnal theater where the word and its thing stagger under the weight of their attraction for each other. . . . To read this book is to experience a series of transformations; in effect, to learn to read all over again.” —Paul Hoover