This book is on my press. I tend to write notes on books from my press because I often read those books. Reading Butcher’s Tree, it seems like Feng Chen can do just about anything (I mean in poems). While it would be easy to… Read More
All posts tagged “Black Ocean”
NOTES: WITH DEER by Aase Berg trans by Johannes Goransson (Black Ocean, 2008)
The excellent thing about this book is that it’s gothic, overwrought, and ridiculous (decadent? Baroque?) cover to cover. These prose poems don’t live in a hum-drum world that’s sometimes, melodramatically, punctured by the weird and/or horrible. They completely occupy an inverted world where things without shape or skin… Read More
NOTES: Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik (Black Ocean Press, 2008)
So, yes, I know Rauan, and yes these notes are completely biased: Some of the best prose poems I’ve read in a long time. Visceral and, eschewing abstraction or self-reflexiveness, unrelenting. These aren’t lazily surreal prose poems, where a normal situation slowly starts getting, inevitably,… Read More