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John M. Bennett's LAVANDERÍA NOMBRE is pamjacked with everything we've come to expect of & enjoy in his work - an erudition, his ability with words & their placement (including a remarkable skill to break them up so they break out by themselves), a recognition & appreciation of others, his prolificacy. Plus an underlying social awareness whose presence is always there; & a humor that tends to lurk throughout but sometimes will be allowed to take center stage. I'm still cracking up over "PEPPERONI BRAIN SCAN." - Mark YoungIn his most recent book, LAVANDERÍA NOMBRE (which Bennett translates as "A Laundry Called Name"), there is a poem entitled "break fast." Why is there a space in the middle of the word "breakfast." Make a break for it, and do it fast. Put an end to your refusal to eat (to consume? to possess? to process? to ruminate?) And do it at the start of your day, as a source of nutrition. Why do I need to remove the space between before attempting to assess the available or potential meanings? Are Bennett poems always primarily about reading, in the sense that reading is often if not always primarily about thinking?- Jim Leftwich

Roberto Net Carlo (Mayagüez, Puerto Rico 1954). Poeta y artista que propaga su obra extensa y alucinante como Roberto Ncar en Facebook, es un "vallejiano urbano" según Rafael Acevedo. Sobre Ncar, dice Ana Lindner: "Tratando de establecer un orden en su propio caos existencial, convida vida a esta conjunción de imagen y palabra, entre la realidad contextualizada y el lenguaje pérfido en su función expresiva: logra, así, una poética mordiente mediante la reelaboración permanente de nuevos dispositivos poéticos puestos en la escena de lo cotidiano." Una cotidianidad que incluye una visión aguda de los estragos del colonialismo en su tierra natal. Estos temas se rematan en su segundo libro en Luna Bisonte Prods, a menudo con formas de repetición y variación de frases y palabras que intensifican su visión y su experiencia honda de la vida en un mundo dominado por el posible colapso de la civilización humana. Un colapso que experimenta en el contexto muy personal e íntima de su vida en un mundo dañado por las injusticias del colonialismo, y un clima destruído por el capitalismo. Muchos de los poemas se pueden leer como partituras performativas. Y a veces hay un surrealismo que nos recuerda del gran poeta Aimé Cesaire, también caribeño. Escribe Ncar: "...la necesidad representar / el tao de la nada / la nada del tao / los tildes del caos / la delgadura de una boca que nos recuerda un girasol la / imagen de un túnel tumbado..." El libro incluye algunos poemas y formas visuales.

This unique book, written while the author and his wife have been moving around the Western USA, is full of references to place names, and flora and fauna of California, which reminds one of Californian writing of the 1960s, when poets, beats, and hippies were hanging out in places like Big Sur, Bolinas, Venice, and San Francisco. That resonance brings a level of lyricism to Leftwich's work. But his writing is very different from those halcyon days, though there is a similarity in the attention paid to common moments and things, a Zen-like attitude. But here, words are often juxtaposed with little apparent semantic relationship, making for phrases and lines that create multiple possibilities of meaning and resonance. In Part One of this book especially, each of Leftwich's "stanzas" are separate poems/ worlds/ perceptions/ and each rewards attention. They are not"thought", but mirrors of attention, blank minds open - not like the Californian 1960s at all, where such things were talked about but not manifested so much. Leftwich manifests that kind of mind, as in a classical Japanese Haiku sequence. It requires a kind of open and shifting attention of the reader, an attention that does not include any kind of searching for facile instructions about how to live. It is, rather, documentation of an acceptance and exploration of the relationship between mind and world. - John M. Bennettthis week the role of shoesimages of hats and nostrilsinsomuch as the map pagesare unreadable illegibledesemantized & repetitive

This poetry was written between July 2021 & July 2022. It has textual poems in English and/or Spanish; and many visual poems. John M. Bennett is recognized internationally as a presence in the avant garde for his unique, highly personal, and uncompromising work. INFACTURAS contains some of his most vivid and mature poetry yet. "...autopsia /de un viajito estancado enc/errado en un volver perpétuo..." , "...yr/wroteing time's straw s/inks below yr eyes I/ssaw what didn't see..."

Iván Argüelles is clearly one of the most unique and authentic poets working in English today, and I dare say one of the most authentic in any language. His uniquely identifiable voice runs throughout his work, but each of his individual books and poems has its own unique timbre, point of view, its own movement, tone, thematic center. Each work is unique. The nature of his engagement over the past 50 years or so has been far more than a desire to write "poetry", rather, poetry is the air he breathes to embody a complex psychic need, the air he needs to be in the life form and time he occupies. When you consider Iván Argüelles' work, you are not looking at a literary career, but at something basic about the being of living things in general. Proof of this is that the intense late poems in this book (Vol. Two written May 2, 2022 to Nov. 20, 2022) are stronger than ever. His work is one of our greatest treasures. -John M. Bennett

Iván Argüelles is clearly one of the most unique and authentic poets working in English today, and I dare say one of the most authentic in any language. His uniquely identifiable voice runs throughout his work, but each of his individual books and poems has its own unique timbre, point of view, its own movement, tone, thematic center. Each work is unique. The nature of his engagement over the past 50 years or so has been far more than a desire to write "poetry", rather, poetry is the air he breathes to embody a complex psychic need, the air he needs to be in the life form and time he occupies. When you consider Iván Argüelles' work, you are not looking at a literary career, but at something basic about the being of living things in general. Proof of this is that the intense late poems in this book (Vol. One written Oct.21, 2021 to May 1, 2022) are stronger than ever. His work is one of our greatest treasures. -John M. Bennett

"Throughout my life I have looked toward language for elevationand found that more potent than gravity." - Sheila E. MurphyMurphy's work has been a lifelong journey to find beauty and a kind of transcendence in life, in thought, in experience, and in language while at the same time including all the complexities, difficulties, and darkness from which any transcendence must arise. SOSTENUTO, a sequence of recent sonnets, is certainly no exception, and also has a wonderful angularity and edginess, an edginess embedded in a richness of diction and consciousness. The poems have a voice, a sensibility and a "story" or narrative current which is fully authentic. Part of that authenticity is sensed in the often cut-up (and at times surrealistic) nature of the writing, which is also amazingly smooth and flowing. There are storms, understandings and questionings running through these beautiful poems, which form true mirrors to the depths and heights of living. - John M. Bennett

John M. Bennett has perfect pitch. Drawing from classical sources and earthbound realities of the human body, Bennett illuminates miraculous and fleeting discoveries. His uncanny ability to elevate this realm of existence affirms the beauty of Bennett's work. A palpable sacredness blends with humor in this multi-lingual spree of sounds and visual poetic delights. Bennett's extensive use of the Hicucu form, invented by Jim Leftwich, is an event to celebrate. So are the tiny poems in which he dissects a word into tiny parts, each its own universe. There are some shockingly pure, beautiful, and lyrical poems dedicated to C. Mehrl Bennett which remind us that poetry is the greatest and most powerful gift. -Sheila E. Murphy

Mark Young's The Advantages of Cable focuses on unexpected losses of focus, sudden changes in focal length, and spontaneous cracks in the lens, cracks that fracture, negate or enhance our immediate experience. Our "habitat" is over-defined, and not hospitable, but these sudden tricks of light (or of mind) produce visions of flying ostriches, angry crows, and blood-drinking salamanders: moments when "everybody freezes" and starts speaking "the language of the gypsies," all the "small things" that open us up to losing "all track" of the fatal limitations of our "habitat."Reading Mark's poems is like getting stuck in the revolving door of Marshall Fields, Myer, Selfridge's, or any large department store. We suddenly realize we're stuck, recognize our situation very differently than we did ten seconds ago, and can hear each of Mark's poems as the tink of a ball peen hammer on the glass, trying to free us. - Scott MacLeod

"I am once again staggered at the unique I mean UNIQUE appearance of this absolutely multilayered masterpiece, from its ruminating typographies hand-written maps and scribblings to its simply masterful use of language, orthographic corruption phonetic decay faux archaicisms real archaicisms and just plain philological learning. I love the actual feel you present of that mysterious murky period after the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain to the coming of the Angles and Saxons, and the muttering murmurs of the Celtic indigenous folk ... all too much for the mind to take in at once. I simply have to breathe these pages to realize the enormous modernity in this ver-sion of myth and antiquities. Is this literature or a copy of literature? You have put the torch to anyone who thinks they understand poetry. This is incomprehensible quite simply put, the massive fragment of a Brain part bedlam and part ratio-cination. Seen through a glass darkly and magnified by season of tormented myr-midons trying to deconstruct whatever has ever been read before. Unlike anything in print today. Luna Bisonte Prods has to be praised for putting this massive typographical jigsaw puzzle together!"-from comments made by Iván Argüelles; though comments were made before this 2022 publication of Vol. 5, being the last volume of the First Chronicle of ARTHUR DIES, where Ygraine gives birth to Arthur in Chapter VIII of Vol.5. There are also extensive appendices in Vol.5 which summarize each volume's story line and different characters, or explain medieval terminology used in this epic poem.

Sheila Murphy writes of "The stasis I so love that tunes me to attunement," yet Murphy has always defined the tune, tuned the tune. She has, since I have known her work in the mid-1980s, been the consummate poet, a "poet's poet" because her chords, her lines, her diction, syntax, and formal perfection serve as a model, and we learn. But here, in GOLDEN MILK, she risks the untuning, the dis- or re-alignment, all the uncertainties of our world, our moment in the world. And she is very much in the world, its colors, its "woods and blooming pine," its reality and its "shadow artistry." She says we do things "within the confines of this monsoon weather" (something she well knows in her desert realm), yet she transcends weather, transcends "veritas" to move into possibility. Her sensuous clasps, kissing, and myriads of strings are well plucked here. Murphy has always been a brilliant poet and a poet of brilliance, in light and song, yet here she goes somewhere else, wings out, she flies, as she cries "fluently in your language," leaves "work in my psyche constantly undone," yet searches and finds "contingent acts of God" in the air through which she moves. She closes the book with a request that we "Stay here with me and within hearing touch that I may breathe again." Listen to her breathe. You will breathe within the whisper through this glorious and golden book, which of course can not close, rather opens towards the light. -CHARLES ALEXANDER [The following is another review] In many cases and as aided by an in-beat lyricism, the silk of Murphy's poems offers transparency through a lack of punctuation especially ending punctuations like periods. How appropriate given how she carves out new doors for readers' imaginations, e.g. "any time you walk vocabulary words down lanes the empty sidelines shepherd riverways where livestock and the sunlight chasten quietude"-as in quietude being the opposite of continued engagement with those "vocabulary words." When "vocabulary" becomes an adjective of "words," one notices how words don't need to rest in static definitions but can point to new ways to engage-a basic purpose to poetry if expanding vocabulary is a means of acquiring knowledge. These turns to re-exploring language as a haunting are illuminating, steeped as they are by experience and maturity. Murphy is incandescent through a prolonged and "effervescent fealty" to poesis that melts previously-defined words into something ineffable but sweet. -EILEEN TABIOS

For Jim Leftwich, the boundary between poetry and criticism, or more accurately, between poetry and writing about poetry, is extremely porous. This book shouldmake that very clear; in fact, here it is sometimes hard to tell whether a text is "original poetry" or his writing "about poetry". Which suggests that the distinction may not be all that important. (Another such book is one he wrote focused on my own work, or using my work as a springboard, Containers Projecting Multitudes: Expositions on the Poetry of John M. Bennett, 2019.) This is perhaps an outgrowth of his practice of making "hacks" of others' poetry and texts, which is in itself a means of entering into, and remaking aspects of, another's work, using a wide variety of processes ranging from the arbitrary and deliberate, to the improvisational and purely intuitive.What this does is to turn the process of writing about poetry on its head. Instead of applying a preordained critical method or theory to a text, Leftwich presents, as it were in "real time", an account of what it was like, of what happened, when he read the text. We thus have a narration of a real experience of reading. For me, and for many of us in this new literary avant garde, this is vastly more interesting and useful than the use of a text to support or illustrate a particular literary (or other) ideology. Leftwich's work in this regard is unique, exciting, and represents real progress in the "problem" of "how to read poetry", and of how to write it as well. -¬ John M. Bennett

Javier Robledo will never be a poète maudit; that, for sure, is far too easy to do. What is clear is that he has more than just one kind of poetic practice: a metaphysical poetry, prose poetry, visual poetry, object poetry, performative poetry... In short, he is a being engaged in implanting a lightning bolt in the hidden cavity of a sphinx, in order to illuminate the astonishing bottom of the abyss. Robledo nunca será un poeta maldito, ya sabemos que eso es fácil. En todo caso podemos afirmar que tiene más de dos poéticas: una poesía metafísica, una poesía en prosa, poesía visual, poesía objetual, poesía performática...en fin, un personaje empeñado en plantar un rayo en el hueco oculto de una esfinge, para que alumbre sorpresivamente el fondo del abismo. -Juan Ángel Italiano

From the opening poem, "...mumbling in the/attic "roof" out there, mud beyond my head...", this revised and definitive 2nd edition of John M. Bennett's classic "la M al" confirms its position as one of the poet's best works. Bennett has created a unique language to express the depth and complexity (or the complexity has created the language), of thought and emotion, or emotional thought that are the core of human experience: ..."drain" a laundry think .but think re diction think a congeries of faucets faucets like yr "running-sore" a window to a moon ."a moon all" right a tab le o yr "lips were draped... The language swarms, swells and ebbs, shatters and recoheres, turns and returns, in patterns that resonate with all the currents, hidden and visible, of the self or selves that inhabit us. An essential book that fully realizes the possibilities of language to contain and know what is.

One stanza from "nths client satyr" will arouse your curiosity: glean porcelain dna column nascent du- rable infinity largesse plotted random selenium gaffer ply sift hemp shellac but- tress caveat sine qua nodular foible ren-

Poetry. "FIAT LUX is Ivan Arguelles' Odyssey through all human history and literature, as well as through the kaleidoscope of his own life memories... Portions of FIAT LUX soar as high as any American poetry since Pound's Pisan Cantos."--Fred Bauman "FIAT LUX is most of all about language, the great gibberishes out of which creation and languages come, and the Law of Time..."--Sharon Doubiago "One can read in FIAT LUX an epic poem as it might be dreamed; or perhaps the dream of a culture in which the epic consciousness has been repressed, yet endlessly renews just beneath the skin of thought, in endless metamorphosis, pursuing mortal pleasure... In this world where Chronos is playful, Freud has shacked up in Pythia, one reads our culture's fevered dreams as oracles and symptoms. These prophetic anxieties are a babel of stories, of voices, of worlds, they are the fragments of languages, scattered like shattered beer bottles or amphorae along the highway."--Olchar E. Lindsann

Poetry. Art. ALPHABETAP is a lively visual collaboration using intense graphics, colors, text, book design, and collage to create a unique and compelling artists' book that is playfully based on the alphabet. The authors are masters in the fields of visual poetry and the book arts, and this collaboration is a treat for the eye and mind.