Omnidawn Publishing Blog

Our friend Andrew Wessels has reviewed Cyrus Console’s The Odicy at The Quarterly Conversation:

Cyrus Console’s The Odicy begins in a ravaged garden:

I returned, and saw that the garden
Had not moved from me but that some illness
Of the garden carried it away
From me regardless.

This ostensible return to paradise is surprising, because we realize that our fall from grace has ruined paradise itself. Console immediately counters the notion that some aspect of nature is safe from the decisions of mankind. The garden paradise myth assumes that when man is forced out, the garden remains intact, pure. This myth, though, predates the development of power plants, chemical processes that leach into waterways, and the spread of air pollution.

You can read the full review here.

And we are very pleased to announce that two of our fall books, Donald Revell’s translation of Last Verses by Jules Laforgue and Elizabeth Robinson’s Three Novels have been reviewed in Publishers Weekly!

Laforgue (1860-1887) will never command the name recognition of Baudelaire or Rimbaud, but he stands just one step below those giants in his importance to European letters: T.S. Eliot said that he found his own style through youthful devotion to the tormented Laforgue, whose self-dramatizing, sometimes self-satirizing, odes and effusions brought free verse to France.

You can read the full review of Last Verses here.

The three novels of the title are Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), and George Gissing’s Eve’s Ransom (1895): three late Victorian novels that might be said to center on women, sleuthing, and connections therein.

You can read the full review of Three Novels here.

This month we feature work from our five finalists for the 2011 Omnidawn Chapbook Competition:

Brian Foley – Totem

Hugo Garcia Manriquez – All Civilians

Nicholas Gulig – Ecotone

Megan Pruiett – The Naught Book

M.A. Vizsolyi – Notes on Melancholia

TOTEM
Brian Foley



The filled up:
middle: of species: ceasing:
to vanish: I could: theme:
into reason: for
disease:

the sound of:
my own: maim: expelled:
against the: same: baste:
but its

the shape:
you walk into: in which you
collaborate:
possible:


*

Brian Foley is the author of several chapbooks including The Constitution (Horseless Press, 2011) & Going Attractions (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming 2011). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Real Poetik, Action Yes, Leveler and elsewhere. He is a co editor at Saltgrass Journal and, with E.B. Goodale, runs Brave Men Press.

from ALL CIVILIANS
Hugo Garcia Manriquez



the propositions:


                        a garden is this, surplus within the walls



                        “the natural limits”

                        “the third world”





                        awaken and in such wilderness



                        ——————————————–

in a dream the title of a book

and the book, “Historia universal del residuo”





interiority is the translator’s proposition



                        ——————————————-



                        against            grain of voice


                        in the subject line of all future correspondence





                        degrees of need



                        —————————



                                                [notes for apprenticeship ]



                                                Hairpin for warships



                                                Morning doves



                                                Dove tail, “Drone
                                                tail”

*

Hugo Garcia Manriquez is the recipient of a 2010 Translation Grant from the Mexican National Fund for the Arts. Some of his forthcoming projects include Painting is Finite, from LRL e-editions, and Anti-Humboldt, a revision/intervention of the NAFTA document which will be published in Mexico. His translation into Spanish of W.C.W.’s poem Paterson appeared in 2009, and he is currently translating Clayton Eshleman’s book on cave painting and the Upper Paleolithic imagination, Juniper Fuse. Hugo is pursuing a doctoral degree from the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Berkeley.

LOCALITY
Nicholas Gulig

*

Nicholas Gulig is a poet from Wisconsin. Educated at the University of Montana and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg and Ruskin Art Club, awards for poetry. He has published work in numerous journals across the country, including ForkLift Ohio, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Columbia Review, Strange Machine, Corduroy Mountain, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, and the Colorado Review. A chapbook, “West of Center” is forthcoming from Camber Press. Currently, he lives in Bangkok, Thailand as a Fulbright Scholar where he is studying contemporary southeast Asian poetry.

THE HUNT
Megan Pruiett
(previously published in Minor American)

its particulars blanch the rest. hairy shoulder, liquid glance, there are mountains hunched between its ears—will you not shoot? trigger cracks, makes an observer out of thereupon.
the running gloat, wound in brown a brown a brown

*

Megan Pruiett concluded her two years as Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in July 2010, just in time for the birth of her daughter Imogen. She is the author of the chapbook To Music (EtherDome Press, 2003) and several published and unpublished poems, some of which are forthcoming in the EtherDome Anthology due out in 2012.

from NOTES ON MELANCHOLIA
M.A. Vizsolyi



[idleness]

with wine the autobiography of the pageant winner

the ghost of the bullfighter in the amphitheater with no bathroom

the angel licking the wound of the wounded horse

in the morning the man recanting his passion

the smoking liver the dried up heart the mercy of his eyes

what was it why did the fringe lose pace with the wind


*

M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poems, “The Lamp with Wings,” was selected by Ilya Kaminsky for the National Poetry Series, and is forthcoming in the September of 2011. His poems have recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in the journals Poetry International, Tuesday: An Art Project, Slice Magazine, and BOMB. He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in Brooklyn.

We are honored to announce that Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [saina] has won the 2011 Pen Center USA Literary Award for Poetry!

To read the official announcement from PEN Center USA, click here.
To read the complete list of winners and finalists for the 2011 Literary Awards, click here.

And click here to read more about [saina], or to order a copy (free shipping!).

We are very excited to announce the first features and review of Kiwao Nomura’s Spectacle & Pigsty (co-translated by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander), one of Omnidawn’s forthcoming fall titles!



















Shelf Unbound has published the poem “Barely Hinged” from Spectacle & Pigsty on page 47 of their latest issue:

now in persistent strings of rain
I’ve seen a bird fluttering gone from sight
which is to say persistently
I’ve seen a fluttering bird gone from sight
so to speak in another incantation
seen I’ve gone from sight a bird fluttering
and so it goes in vain
…

You can read the magazine here (your browser will need the Adobe Flash plugin).

TWO LINES Online, the web magazine of the Center for the Art of Translation, has published an excerpt of the book:

6 (lightly, with ceremony)

                                                                                                                        Airspace Airspace
                                                                                                                        Earthly airspace
                                                                                                                        Earthly how so
                                                                                                                        Drift through airspace
                                                                                                                        …

You can read the full feature here.

And Publishers Weekly has published a review of Spectacle & Pigsty in their August 15th issue:

“You’re the one./ Unbearably sucking air rasping and gasping… tearing open./ shrieking…. unbearably bare.” That challenge to a reader (or perhaps a ghost or a god or a marine invertebrate) might serve as well as anything else to introduce this first English version of one of Japan’s most celebrated living poets.

You can read the full review here.

We are very excited to announce the first reviews of one of our forthcoming titles, The Odicy by Cyrus Console!

Stephen Burt has published a special feature for the San Francisco Chronicle which includes a review of The Odicy:

If you want new poets who speak to [literary, cultural and social] history, who critique and confront it, then you will want Cyrus Console’s majestic, aggressive, disturbing second book, The Odicy, from the up-and-coming Richmond press Omnidawn (88 pages; $15.95). It is (as the pun in the title suggests) a broken-up, inside-out, postmodern epic journey, a fractured, frustrated attempt to discover justice, or purpose, or divinity, in our day.

You can read the full feature, which also includes reviews of new books by Joseph Massey and Collier Nogues, here.

Publishers Weekly has given The Odicy a starred review in their July 25th issue:

Very old methods and very new American speech collide, strike sparks, and end up burning brightly indeed in this shockingly memorable book-length sequence, the second volume from Console (The Archetypes).

You can read the full review here.

Omnidawn celebrates the release of our new fall books with two Bay Area reading events!

Kiwao Nomura with translator Kyoko Yoshida: Spectacle & Pigsty
Sunday, September 18th
4pm
at The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA 94117

Omnidawn will provide hors d’oeuvres, desserts, wine, and fizzy water.

Hosted by the Center for the Art of Literary Translation

*

Cyrus Console
Hillary Gravendyk
Donald Revell
Elizabeth Robinson

will read from their new books
Thursday, September 22nd
7pm
at City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway
San Francisco, CA 94133

Omnidawn will provide hors d’oeuvres, desserts, wine, and fizzy water.

*



We hope to see you there!

Our friends at Jacket2 published a review of from unincorporated territory [saina]:

In from unincorporated territory [saina], Craig Santos Perez sent me back to the period at which I realized I couldn’t be a historian, to the point where the facts evolved beyond themselves and became ambiguous notations. This isn’t a negative reflection on the book; quite the contrary. It’s a reflection on what drew me into the book in the first place: an exploration of the culture, identity, and language of the Chamorro. Santos Perez leads us all to be explorers, anthropologists, and historians. If anything, I feel vindicated.

You can read the rest of the review here.



*



Richard Silberg reviewed The Plot Genie in his “New & Noted” feature at Poetry Flash:

Gillian Conoley is the least linear of writers. That’s part of the irony, fun, the puzzle-wisdom of her new book. The Plot Genie is the first of her books with a theme, first to be ‘written through’ in that sense. It centers on, as we are led to believe, is generated by, this mysterious, lightly touched on plot genie . . .

You can read the full feature here.

from “The Woman in White”

which will be published in THREE NOVELS
coming in Fall 2011 from Omnidawn






Whence the plot’s precipice folds over, an envelope from which

more secret still,

                                    the ghost falls      Shoved



Likewise, no asylum



Treasure hidden beneath its embroidered counterpane

is a mere self






                                                and foreign, she meant: self






*






Doubling

all undone, her

                        (or her)

            white membranous rind slips

burnt away



At once the creature’s pelt embraces itself and all its kind–






                                                            The land’s grace incarcerates, redoubles itself






*






                        Down the linen burrow
and into the ether



How does the hollow of the land make full its vow

the clouds filled her mouth as she spoke:



                                                                                    no,

                                                                                                            choking



Materialized as a frail part of the body glancing backward






*






Like that from which she pushed herself,

pushed her feral likeness



                                                Transported



another death
                                    – the satin open air caught afire



              as the open shift shows the bosom,

just off-balance

                                                Cheapened fabric

ignited
by any attempt to recognize






*






The forlorn neck
turns toward
            and turns toward inkling



                                                Innocent imposture

Soft
little animal,
mild pelt it once wore
                                                Diaphanous skeleton she lifts, to ward off the several
                                                blows who

constitute world, gown, and endless downy lawn

Author Statement:

When I was a young child, my father read to me. He started with Sherlock Holmes stories and proceeded through Gogol short stories and then on through the novels of Wilkie Collins. To this day, The Woman in White remains my favorite novel. In the aftermath of my father’s death, I decided to revisit my earliest introduction (via his reading) to literature. I feel deeply attached to Collins’ novels because of the pleasure of that work that I shared with my father. It strongly influenced my own desire to become a writer. At the same time, as I reread Collins, I was struck by the role of the female characters in his novels: agents, with their own desires and worldviews, who were at the same time strangely passive as a result of the constraints on Victorian womanhood. In The Woman in White, the female protagonists are tangled in a series of relationships closely tied to the inheritance of an estate. My exploration in my own poem entitled “The Woman in White,” had to do with how this land created a sense of the pastoral and how that implicated an understanding of the feminine. Somehow, in my mind, this tied me back to my absent father, and a different legacy, that of shared language.

Author Bio:
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of eleven books of poetry (including Three Novels, from which this feature is excerpted. Three Novels is forthcoming from Omnidawn in Fall 2011). Her most recent books are The Orphan & its Relations (Fence Books) and Also Known As (Apogee Press). Robinson was educated at Bard College, Brown University, and the Pacific School of Religion. She has been a winner of the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend. The recipient of grants from the Fund for Poetry and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Robinson has also been a MacDowell Colony Fellow. Her work has been anthologized in the Best American Poetry (2002) and American Hybrid, along with many other anthologies. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, the University of Colorado, Boulder, Naropa University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edits EtherDome Chapbooks with Colleen Lookingbill and Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims.

Who: Sharon Zetter & Christine Hume

What: Studio One Reading

Where: Studio One Art Center, 365 45th St., Oakland, CA

When: Friday, June 3, 2011 (doors always open 7pm ; reading 7:30pm)

Review written by Jared Alford, Omnidawn’s Facebook Editor

This Studio One reading, both the last of the Spring and the first of the Fall, features Sharon Zetter and Christine Hume. Host Clay Banes opens with an apologetic and jesting tribute to the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s founding, which will exempt the Studio One event we might hope for come Friday, July 1st, meaning the next won’t be until August 5th, feat. Laura Sims and Claudia Keelan.

But, presently, Sharon Zetter—one of Studio One Art Center’s own employees, a co-founder of The Dacha Project, an off-grid educational homestead dedicated to creating sustainable living practices for working artists, located outside of Ithaca, New York, and a 2009 MFA graduate of St. Mary’s College of California—reads her smattering of poems concerning “How what is, and what is not” (“Gesture”). “Ruins, stains, artifacts, abandoned dystopia,” “a young man grafted terrain,” and all manner of leftovers from the “slaughter of the older culture,” span the bleak horizon issuing from her deliberate monotone.

Then Christine Hume—author of three books of poetry, most recently Shot (Counterpath, 2010), and a Coordinator of the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University—prepares her counterpart, a series of diversely styled recordings, each accompanying its own poem, while explaining how Dr. Seuss’ “Soggy Muff” line from the Too Many Daves story influences her writing, here ultimately an effort to pose sleep as “a liberation through inaction,” allowing her to set stake in “ontological fatigue” (Studio One interview). She hazards each poem against the recordings, producing an often polyvocal resonance without harmony or symmetry, perhaps instead with “an incompetence built into language, a verbal uncertainty that threatens… fluency,” as though she were “Self-Stalked“ with eerie lullabies, or exhuming herself with the rote participles of her husband-poet Jeff Clark’s “creeping going scratching.”

~~~~~~>

Self-Stalked

Christine Hume

I looked in all eight directions then spread out my tiger’s skin. Before the public mind kicked in, I surveyed an inner shore.  Its facets operated on me. I lost my lights and began my midnight thus: mental feet, mental lake, little mental pines, mental mile around the muzzle. I aimed my automatic at that outlandish organ hanging in the sky like a dazed stone. Its sea expression wet the evening; I captained the tempest there. Looking too long into the distant human pupil, I sharpened my harpoon. But my hands could not be organized. I wanted to tightrope up there on a mental binge. I reached for my quiver, my bird descended a failure one depth below time. The moment rotated, aggravated. Its color was extreme. In a heavy steel helmet, I matched that orb and tried to tackle it by a million mental muscles. The more I beat it, the more I couldn’t see it. If I could turn it open like a glass knob, feel my way into its diamond cave. If I could tongue out its creamy mouth. If I could tickle it and bounce it on my knee. If I could dress it up. If it would fist me, if I could force it. The more I battered that moon, the more I could be it.

~~~~~~~~~>

and shipped to a new address: strange,

Sharon Zetter

We forget where thought originates

after asking the question:

have we come to the lacuna?

We are unclear if we are which persons.

If a woman pares the lamb

can we be both alive and immortal?

Another re-birth for the holy.

Trace me to the vespers:

who you are and what you have seen.

Or imagine a table where barrels hang.

How the potential is

an arrival: every-angle.

If a man affix glass to stem:

any face can be a mirror.

Lean in closer—

I have something to speak

which requires your knees.

Our plans are with each other,

so we sit for the train.

Bodies anticipate

blur: a rub of cold.

Sutures.  Bait. 

Your hand shadows the kitchen,

a circle of human pain.

Stutter.  Belief.

A meadow undoes the wait.

Here: slaughter of the older culture.

Can paralysis be defeated?

Or is an Other no longer valid

or comforting in this moment.

Why wonder: what lights

can be seen by the eye

that are not moving?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>

After many years of curating the Omnidawn blog, Craig Santos Perez will be stepping down from his post as senior blog editor in order to focus on his teaching career.  He will continue to serve as Omnidawn’s media advisor, and we are grateful for all his hard work as senior blog editor and for all the insight he is sure to provide in the future.

Assuming the role of senior blog editor will be Gillian Hamel, who has been with Omnidawn in various roles since January 2010, recently including poetry editor and web publicity manager.  Welcome, Gillian!