----------------------------------------------------------------- TTTTTTTT AA PPPP RRRR OOOO OOOO TTTTTTT T A A P P R R O O O O T T AAAAAA PPPP RRRR O O O O T T A A P R R O O O O T T A A P R R OOOO OOOO T ----------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #3.0, section b 9/93 ----------------------------------------------------------------- TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground, and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years, we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio- verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro- Press" publications, primarily language-oriented. This posting is the second section of our 3rd full electronic issue, containing all of the short CHAPBOOK reviews; the first section contains all of the Tzine reviews. We provide this information in the hope that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs. Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at: au462@cleveland.freenet.edu Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting-- (a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve). I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues. A cummulative, searchable, and x-referenced HyperCard version is under development--e-mail for status & availablility information. Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review material--in this issue, reviews & articles by John Byrum, Dick Higgins, geof huth, Mike Basinski, Tom Willoch--as well as a variety of poetry prose & grafix. It is available from: Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107--$2.50 pp. Both the print & electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 1993 by Burning Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit educational corporation. Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this introductory notice is included. Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds from the Ohio Arts Council. Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each review: Michael Basinski, Tom Becket, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Jeff Conant, Daniel Davidson, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Bob Grumman, Susan Smith Nash, Charlotte Pressler, Larry Smith, John Stickney, Thomas Willoch, & Ron Zack. *** Many thanx to all contributors. *** ----------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPBOOKS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Etel Adnan: OF CITIES & WOMEN (LETTERS TO FAWWAZ)--Post-Apollo Press, 35 Marie St., Sausalito CA, 94965. 114 pp., $11.00. Fiction in the form of an epistolary novel that converges with women's studies. A woman, Etel, writes letters to deal with the agonies of loss and life during wartime. In it, the problems of Arab women (and all women) are probed gently, fairly, but with unflinching honesty. Adnan refuses to endorse reactionary stances of tit-for-tat hate discourse. She remains level-headed and articulate. In attempting to explain the motives behind war and the overwhelming destruction of Beirut, Adnan makes insightful observations on the relation of culture and gender roles.--ssn Dennis Barone: WAVES OF ICE, WAVES OF RUMOR--Zasterle Press, Apdo 167 La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, SPAIN. 34 pp., $8.00. A response/call to Desnos, Prvert, and the Great French Song heart of the mind and eye, a sculptural lozenge of words after Arp quiet as the silence after a rock fall resting isn't inattentive, but creates a slope a flask to continue with after everything has preceded.--daniel davidson Michael Basinski: CNYTTAN--Meow Press, 334 Bryant #7, Buffalo NY, 14222. 16 pp. Purely textual, and literary, multi-interpretable collages concerned with Artemis, snakes, something "good against meancholik," modern zoology, fairy tale transformations, and other items too numerous to mention--all of them, for me, flowing implicitly or explicitly towards various kinds of re-births. Along the way this masterful infra-verbal poem: WIT WAT ICH TCH HER which beautifully expresses a becoming so gradually full as to be tactile.--bg Batworth: BETTER COMING UP--Shattered Wig, 523 E. 38th St., Baltimore, MD, 21218. 28 pp., $2.00. Batworth knows how to confuse, rip apart, reassemble, and leave the adrenaline still running in your system even though the accident is a long time over. You get the crashing metal of cars, with words like: "God is lice-infested," "The sun does in fact/ shine out of his asshole," and conclusions that scream: "Swinging like a fine hearse/ squeeling like a flock of reeds." I don't know, maybe I got some kind of disorder, but this high speed energetic swinging word- play catches me off guard, and makes me want to hear more so I can re-establish my equilibrium. When he screams "Soups for creeps, soups for creeps..." in "Information Feeds On Me" I want to sit down, stand up, touch my toes, count to ten, then pick up this chap again. There is the schizophrenic wordplay, combined with quick jerks to reality, and I want to stop that crazy fucker on the street and say, yeah, I understand, but you got to make more sense! You got to make more sense! These are either the words of a madman, or a person so gone that the occasional glimpse into reality is quickly lost and they don't even realize they were on the right road for once. When Batworth tells me: "Everybody in the real world was in what/ I would call a weird mood. People trued/ patty-cake with feet. Others walked side/ ways for fun. Still others thought ord-/inary life was tv but they didn't know/ how to live it. Some wrote books in what/ they thought was their free time, but we/ know better than that." I get scared. He knows more than I do about the things that scare me. He knows something that I don't, and I don't feel comfortable letting a madman have the advantage.--oberc Guy Beining: 100 HAIKU SELECTED FROM A DECADE--O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057. 24 pp., $6.50. Just the full-color cover glossy of a Beining collage of astronaut, bird, Ancient Greece and who knows what else makes this thin volume worth its price; but the haiku, seldom at all eccentric, are very fine, too. Examples: "A butcher senses/ the wisdom/ of bones"; and "Silence of window/ in chatter of/ snowfall".--bg Gina Bergamino: ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE HE'S IN MY--The New Press, 53-35 Hollis Court Blvd., Flushing, NY, 11365. 24 pp., $3.00. Gina is a poet's poet, and she crafts her poems not around the survival instincts of poverty stricken writers, but rather around the poetry itself. She is a crafts-person, and these poems capture insightful touches that caress the words instead of smashing them into your face. In "5 a.m. dream" we get lines like: "the man/ with fat hands/ is breaking through/ the kitchen door/ & I squoosh/ his fingers/ squeeze them/ dig my nails/ into his" combined with: "my father calls/ a family meeting/he's unhappy/ that I want/ to be a writer". She rips thoughts out of the air, tosses them against other disjointed feelings, and leaves one disturbed with the kind of nightmares only a lover can wake you from. At the same time there is an innocence and observation that captures those "little things" in a brand new light. In "Unemployment Dream": "You're in the Sunvet mall/ with your brother trying/ to decide on strange flavors/ of icecream..." while "your father is buying lumber/ inside Rickles. Sweating, he/ pushes dolly...", then: "when he sees you he is happy/ and his eyes well up./ You want to give him/ ham & beans."--oberc Lynne Beyer: THE FUTURE COMES--Pinched Nerves Press, 1610 Ave. P. #6B, Brooklyn NY, 11229. 8 pp., $1.00? Five poems by a woman who is described to the fore as "currently looking forward." Lots of very intelligently dopey fun with words, as in "Stoop'" which ends with "the action of activity,/ beast or burden, stoop to concur, it becomes you." Lyrical at points, too, as in the description of "yellow flowers,/ capable of full expansion,/ (that) absorbed the sadness, their/ real origin," from "Krishnamurti's Journal."--bg David Bromige: TINY COURTS IN A WORLD WITHOUT SCALE--Brick Books, Box 38, Station B, London Ontario, CANADA, N6A 4V3. 60 pp., $9.95. These are poems of address and comment in the tradition of Jonathan Williams, Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn. Irony is marked form the start as operative exchange value: "'Irony' i read/ but is said 'Money'." What I especially value in Bromige's work is his ability to transform the materials of everyday life into stunning reverse-image admonitions, as in-- The referents' lair for george Bowering Carter was talking to the shah about a country which had blossomed forth under enlightened leadership About then i found what i was looking for The weather and the sports report Attention to the details of how language gets figured is everywhere evident. "Nothing happens that is not the mind/to us, this side of Ouch."--tb Lee Ann Brown: CRUSH--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 20 pp., $2.00. Crush is a way of knowing] It is the only way of knowing It is a good way of knowing. It *is* a good way of knowing. This book is a fine and finished dissertation on a lovely theme--the crush, love's exciting sweet moment: "Wilderness in domesticity." Just so sexy discrete simple sentences and questions posed in the neutered affirmative carry the reader over 13 sections of a poem "with tenderness and dancing." Enticing, brave, and familiar in its language--"She is direct with a rhythm"--CRUSH is a gift.--jc Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin: ON THE PUMICE OF MORONS--The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great Barrington MA, 01230. 20 pp., $5.00. "A Rock Crystal, A Roach, A Tree of Heaven/ Hosiery to spectroheliographs long since departed..." Continuing Fagin and Coolidge's collaborative work this poem maps out a personified landscape of habitat making up an inhabited interconnectedness, the personalities of Taxis and Soho breaking in like fetishes for a worn-down system keep your shirt off your back if it bites you take this with you when you go shopping.--dd Tina Darragh: ADV. FANS--THE 1968 SERIES--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 12 pp., $4.00. An Academic LANGUAGE- type exercise introduced by brief texts on child abuse and language. The body of the book consists of eight visually manipulated entries from the Oxford English Dictionary, with footnotes.--jmb Daniel Davidson: PRODUCT--e.g. press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul MN, 55105. 44 pp., $6.00. PRODUCT is a prose format poem based on notes taken at various shopping-centers and malls. It is a work intricately concerned with the ways in which advertising and marketing create an object-centered push-pull nexus of desire. "Development centers on the table, the item that you see. You come here to be what you want." The particular brilliance of the book is in the manner in which it both critiques our possessions and shows how we are possessed. "HAVE, A WAY of life." This is a good book to read in conjunction with Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T [see review in this issue], or anything by that French theorist Jean Blowdryer. I recommend it.--tb Kevin Davies: PAUSE BUTTON--Tsunami Editions, 1727 William St., Vancouver BC CANADA, V5L 2R5. 78 pp., $15.00. Hyper knowledge from the cutting wit of INFORMATION herds of sentences and fragments of the urban coast if you are what you read, then you wrote this text what if you live here in another place so that the view from there is here? chew on this: only you can arm the homeless.--dd Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William St., Racine WI, 53402. 20 pp., $3.00? These are a series of poetic sketches (with drawings by Dan Nielsen) of various characters Estabrook has been thrust against. When he talks about "Joe Sold," we get a heavy drinking womanizer who's still going strong at 70. "John" is "irascible/ rude/ married/ nearing 40 yet/ he got the most/ beautiful/ woman in/ the building". "A Friend" admits that she is in AA, and is surprised when no one seems to be shocked at the news. There is even a short poem about "Patti", the author's wife, setting her angry frustrated unemployed eyes on Estabrook after finding no good jobs in the newspaper ads. These are fine thumbnail sketches that capture people in short glimpses of reality. The saddest thing in this collection was when I got to the end, and wanted to read more. --oberc A. C. Evans: CHIMERA OBSCURA--Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE. $7.00. "Dark hyacinth crystals/ flutter behind my eyes" A. C. Evans reports in one poem from his new collection. This visionary quality is manifest throughout CHIMERA OBSCURA, which is divided into three parts: the first deals with the contemporary world of urban England; the second with personal transformation and initiation; the third with what Evans calls "The White Earth," a kind of spiritual void or hereafter of light and emptiness. In poem after poem, Evans merges the literary, the esoteric and a tad of science fiction into a sensory apparatus for picking up hidden messages from other worlds--worlds which may only be inside of us.--tw Huck Finch: EASTER PROUDNESS--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271, Sarasota FL, 34231. 16 pp., SASE. A tiny chapbook of prose that begins: "Manure the planet with a finger-smudge of swarming crusty foxes", and boils through defecation, bad sex, and the like with surrealistic verve and unshutteringly bold imagery.--bg Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Coker Press, PO Box 64053, San Francisco CA, 94164. 44 pp., $5.95. A collection of short poems and poetic essays, bringing the personal and the literary into conjunction in a deliberate and effective way. Beginning with an essay, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With Politics" (the thesis being, I think, that poetry "precedes intention, choice, and dialogue"), the book moves into poems set in Turkey, Egypt, and Paris, transcriptions from the Spanish of Lorca and the Armenian of Zahrad, sustained references to Rimbaud and Mallarme, and the poetic territory set forth explicitly by Duncan and Spicer. The poems unabashedly take part in history, ringing with voices, but not neglecting the personal or the present tense.--jc Peter Ganick: CODE ZERO--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. 21 pp., $4.00. Taking part in the tactics of Language poetry, where words "mean" in all directions, like ballbearings ricocheting in empty rooms (& what room is ever "empty"?). CODE ZERO is a collection of short lyric poems-- "baffled by whom"--where the author's presence retreats behind fragments of sentences adding up to nothing, and something. From "Decision to Action": reveals a motion as subjectless improves a communications tenfold honed in at a reason nearly active CODE ZERO is discrete and funny, elusive as music on holiday.--jc Michael Gottlieb: NEW YORK--The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great Barrington MA, 01230. 93 pp., $10.00. "This is not your city./ You mean the Queen really is in the pay of the Tri-Lateral Commission?" Made of two long poems, "The Great Pavement" and "The Ulterior Parkways" fragments of a long bus ride through the inside of an executive suite memoria producing an uneasy acculturation canisters of metastasis never forgetting any conversation slips of advertising slogans scraped from the asphalt diary.--dd Dennison W. Griffith & George Myers Jr.: JUMP HOPE--Cumberland, 7652 Sawmill Rd., Suite 194, Dublin OH, 43017. 38 pp., $10.00. A slickly produced collaboration between painter Griffith and journalist/writer Myers. Griffith's paintings, mostly faces with occasional words, are reproduced in full color, and according to a brief note, inspired Myers to "get at the story behind them". That story is presented in the form of a woman's diary, which touches on her daily life, her family, making art, and broader issues such as gender roles and racism. The text does not attempt to "explain" the paintings, nor vice-versa, but both retain an intriguing ambiguity in themselves and in relation to each other. An elegant collaboration--jmb Jefferson Hansen: GODS TO THE ELBOWS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 10 pp. Repetition and incantation on "mitigate" and "unmitigate" create a screen of sound in the heart of this chapbook. Visual arrangements tempt the reader to read out of sequence, and to form and re-form the text. Disjunctive syntax suggests language's potential to transmute and transform. --ssn Martin A. Hibbert: CONCENTRATED GROUND--Stride Publications, 11 Sylvan Rd., Exeter, Devon, ENGLAND, EX4 6EW. #7. Combining elements of anthropology, ritual, film, folklore, cut-up and surrealism, Hibbert's poems are uniquely his own both in style and concerns. He doesn't so much communicate with the reader as create a linguistic-psychological structure into which the reader is invited. In this space, a symbolic merging of time and person takes place, although the poet and reader are "Miles apart/ in our musty caves/ raising our private shadows." At a time when too many poets speak only of small, personal matters, Hibbert produces expansive, challenging poems.--tw Jeffrey Hillard: RIVER DWELLERS--Cincinnati Writers' Project, Box 29920, Cincinnati, OH, 45229. 66 pp., $6.95. Subtitled "Poems on the Settling of the Ohio River;" this set of thirteen poems takes us back in time, before urban sprawl and industrial necessity filled to crushing the Ohio Valley. Presented in chronological order, from 1751 to 1862, and thick with lore and legend--there is a richness of detail in these historically-centered free verse poems. Of Marietta in 1788, Hilliard says: "The air has grown rife with coal-fire aroma,/ roasting buffalo, venison, a pike five feet long,/ enough of dinner to include the whole town."--rle Susan Howe: THE NONCONFORMIST'S MEMORIAL--New Directions, 80 8th Ave., New York NY, 10011. 192 pp., 19.95. "20.15 Jesus saith unto her, Woman,/ why weepest thou? whom seekest/ thou?" Two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion", reads meta-history and micro-associations in a production of folds and followings Melville never had a closer reader falling under the pages echoes the entire impossibility of finality these cracks create a present between histories.--dd Albert Huffstickler: THE SMELL OF THINGS--Press of Circumstance, 312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751. 14 pp., $3.00. The very prolific Huffsticker has brought together this small collection of poems on the theme of smells. He peels the skin off reality, revealing something naked and elemental to each of us. These poems reach inside the reader to fondle suppressed feelings, relics of our prehistoric days, remnants of our animalistic tendencies. For example, in "Beginning" he uses memories to point out that "...bad odors/ are learned. She just smelled personal when I drew/ my finger out. There's more. I learned her/ one item at a time while she watched me..." The book is full of olfactory wisdom: in "Retrieval," he writes "...I think/ you could die from lack of/ smell..."; in "Lie Detector," Huffstickler points out that "Truth has/ its own odor." There is an entire poem about the smell of shit, and another that mourns the smell covered up by air fresheners and deodorants. In that poem, "Cover and Concealment: Anxiety in the New Age," the speaker predicts a time when everyone will smell the same: And when that day comes, everyone will be so hungry for variety That it will generate a whole new business: bootleg smells, obtainable only at your friendly Neighborhood Nose Dive. The core of the philosophy expressed in these poems is stated in a piece called "The Smell of Love:" The eye is easily deluded. Ears even more so. Taste can be disguised. Touch sometimes lies. But the nose seeks truth always and abides with it. --ronald zack Albert Huffstickler: TWILIGHT ON TRINITY--Lilliput Review, 207 S. Millviale Ave., #3, Pittsburgh, PA, 15224. 8 pp., $1.00. One long poem in a tiny booklet that captures the narrator's voice speaking across the miles to and about his long-lost love--while outside, it rains on Trinity Street, "that borderland between/ the affluent and the/ fallen." Nice and moody and ending as "the named and the nameless/ walk side by side/ in the slow fall." Modest production of a personal poem with a subdued emotional tone.--tw Ge(of) Huth: O--dbqp press, 317 Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY, 12306,. SASE. G. Huth and I have long been friends & admirers. Nonetheless, this... object befuddles me. It consists of a yarn- bound booklet/envelope/? of light-green paper whose corners are folded and secured in four different ways (e.g., one with a paper clip). On the outside is printed a large "O" whose hole is tilted. Fascinating, but... --bg Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 44107. 28 pp., $10.00. A coffee-table-size handbound paperback with thick light-brown pages and the handsomest of typography; a fitting showcase for 26 charmingly elegant treatments of the letters of the alphabet, one at a time in sequence, by G. Huth. One page should give you the flavor: it contains two large W's, one fashioned conventionally of two intertwined V's, the other of two contiguous U's. The first is labeled "Double U," the second "Double V."--bg Lisa Jarnot: THE FALL OF ORPHEUS--Shuffaloff Books, 415 Norwood Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. $5.00. This is Lisa Jarnot's first chapbook, part of Suffaloff's Local Habitation Series (includes Creeley, John Clarke, etc.). She is a young poet whose promise has arrived. Her images and juxtapositioning of language merge the mythical with the common. In epistolary form Lisa intercepts poetry, reveals a journey marked by signposts recognizable to both the senses and the spirit. The poems offer a desire seeking, searching for poetry, which is parallel to her anchored poetic. There is no conflict, no barrier. Poetry here is simply all the fact. Her opening: "i'm not in jail anymore,/ i'm on a greyhound to memphis."--mb Norman Jope: IN THE ABSENCE OF A SUMMIT--Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE. 64 pp., $7.00. Editor of the literary magazine MEMES, Norman Jope creates brief texts which explore time and identity in a mystical, lyrical language. In "Preparations for an Exit," a woman claims the night piece by piece, until "by her quiet courage, the edge invades the centre... and all things widen." Jope is a poet of the place where the personal reaches beyond itself to those common terrains, be they historical or metaphysical, we all share. His language is a cross between the literary and the folkloric, expressing quiet truths and observations calmly and with an assured ease. Ultimately, the question of what remains behind after death, how much of our words and thoughts continue in time, is at the heart of these musings; "Something of me shall remain--but I shall not choose its face."--tw Andrew Joron: SCIENCE FICTION--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, Berkeley CA, 94709. 69 pp., $8.95. The poems in this well- produced, perfect-bound volume achieve a remarkable synthesis of visionary clarity and thoughtfulness that moves them far beyond what is usually described as "speculative" poetry. Using topics and themes from science and fantastic fiction, Joron creates a highly visual surrealism made coherent in each poem by a consistent point of view and/or developing process of consciousness. His language is clean, allusive, and contains nothing extraneous. Do not miss it: Men banished from sleep wander through the night-market Qrummage among Marvelous toys: aphrodisiac Cures; a thigh-bone Strung & tuned To the frequency of a quasar Little dolls with removeable parts Packets of hair, & coinages Of skin (from "Voiceprints")--jmb Dimitris Karageourgiou, ed.: GILDZEN AT 50: A CELEBRATION--Toucan Press, 1129 Morris Rd., Kent OH, 44240. 188 pp., $10.00. A one- man poetry conglomerate at Kent State University--where he serves as poet, archivist, editor and critic--Alex Gildzen is here honored on his fiftieth birthday with a tribute volume containing a complete bibliography of his writings, of works about him, and of his many letters. Also included are tributes from a number of poets and writers, photographs of Gildzen, and examples of some of his own works. A touching thank you to a man whose enthusiasm for poetry shines through.--tw Vampyre Mike Kassel: WILD KINGDOM--Zeitgeist Press, 500 Ygnacio Valley Rd. Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA, 94596. 26 pp., $3.00. The wildman is back again, with a new collection that tries to scar your retinas when you're not looking. He captures the inner-city madness in WILD KINGDOM, and leaves you sitting there breathless, recovering from an act of random love that proved to be too intense. He screams about "Yuppies whose wine cellars are worth more/ than the gross national product of Africa,/ who can't drive and talk on the phone at the same time/ and insist on doing both at 60 miles an hour./ The secretaries who dream of marrying them/ and probably deserve to." He screams about "Bike messengers burning in a never ending/ adrenalin crazed fit,/ filthy hummingbirds moving/ fifty times as fast as the world around them/ in a never ending race to/ overtake a shrinking paycheck/ and an expanding rent bill/ until they spontaneously combust and blow up/ on the hood of your car." And this is just the beginning, the wildman keeps on going, pushing you further into his reality until you are so overwhelmed all you can do is sit knowing if you ever stand up again there's a possibility that you might die. I am impressed by Kassell's work. He knows his turf, when he gets cut up he doesn't care who he splatters the blood on--he splatters you every time you leap into another line, and leaves you showing off the psychological scars once you've completed another round. This is what it is all about.--oberc David C Kopaska-Merkel: A ROUND WHITE HOLE--dbqp press, 317 Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY, 12306. 16 pp., $2.00. Just 13 one-page poems by the editor of DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES with a nice range of form and content. All not news but history too, like the following haiku: deep sky meadow /the snout of broken dreams/ a moss-ridden brick Also, an infra-verbal gem called "Phore," that on the surface is just a list of seven words or phrases with spaces in them where the syllable "phore" has been removed... but in the full thought is an amazing deepening out of biology ("chromatophore" and "spermatophore") to the investigation of anomalies ("phoretean" or "Fortean," itself anomalous!) and beyond.--bg T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 28 pp., $5.00? These are soft, gentle poems that capture nature and hard work in modern parables filled with insight. The strange thing is these poems captured my attention in the same way Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did the first time I opened up a book of their ideas. They are quiet, subtle observations, and while I often thrive on the masochistic bombardment of hysteria, there are times I need to take a rest and really try to understand what all the weirdness is all about. This is good place to be when I am in that mood, and actually believe that there are possible solutions to the madness that surrounds me.--oberc Anna Leonessa: JOURNAL ENTRIES, ACAPULCO '93--O!!Zone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057. 24 pp., $6.50. A stylish, 26-copy, never-to-be-reprinted collectors edition. Poems and photographs complementing the relationship described in Laura RyderUs Exchanging Gifts (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). Strictly speaking, not out of the scene TRR is mostly about [what "scene" is that?--ed.], but as a side-product of the magazine O!!ZONE, worth a mention here, I think.--bg Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: OUTTAKES / CEREMONIES ABOARD THE DRUNKEN BOAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 28 pp., $5.00? I don't think there is a poet worth his grain of salt that doesn't know about Locklin. In this split- format chap Locklin captures new turf, talking about the paranoia he got while driving on the other side of the road on British soil, catching a French woman breaking into the men's room because she has to piss and the lines are shorter in that arena, and a strange attack of anxiety cured by his daughter while his wife doesn't really give a shit. These are the human touches that make Locklin more than human, and every time I see or read about a new collection of his work I want to know what he's been doing, because he has a way of bringing me right there. Mark Weber, on the other hand, has a different style of observation, and he captures things from an angle that is every bit as powerful as Locklin's, only with a meaner edge. When Weber screams: "do not go gentle into that Brautigan night/ rage! rage! as if your penis was on fire/ yelling at God the ultimate liar" I know just as clearly, as I do when I read Locklin, what is going on in his head. He has brilliant observations into talk show participants and the people who manipulate them, KKK members who make statements that leave one with no choice but to decide they are fucking blinder than we all thought, and he lets us know, in the midst of the confusion reality splashes in our faces, that he (and I) love the comforts of drinking and letting this world just happen as it is going to anyway. Gerald and Mark are both keen observers of the world we have been tossed into, and both of them let you know, point blank, what is going on in their heads. If you want brutal honesty, words that hit the mark, and people who know how to say the things that they have seen, this is a good place to wrap your fingers.--oberc Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FATHER / THE DAYS OF WINE AND REMEGEL--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108. 26 pp., $5.00? Locklin captures a world that many poets have yet to imagine. In this collection we watch him go back to his hometown for the first time in 25 years for his oldest son's wedding. Locklin captures the awkwardness of a history once lived, a first wife and family awkwardness, and that strange existential sadness you're left with when memories mix with a changed world that no longer works with the way things once were. Weber tells tales of desperation: looking for a job you know you're going to hate, not going to college because school didn't capture the knowledge he was looking for, and getting fired again from a job where the boss was the kind of guy who'd masturbate while making an obscene phone call. These folks know the real world, but don't buy into the illusions that most people need for their psychological survival. They drink, they survive, they write and let you know what they're seeing happen all around them. We talk about the edge, but they dance on the razor.--oberc Stephen-Paul Martin: THE GOTHIC TWILIGHT--Asylum Arts, PO Box 6203, Santa Maria, CA, 93456. 92 pp., $8.95. Fiction is often a series of distorting mirrors in which we see exaggerated versions of ourselves, and thereby see ourselves in a fresh way. Stephen- Paul Martin creates fictional mirrors which reveal self and society. His narrative is minimal; his prose crackles; progression from one scene to the next is nonlogical; and old bourgeois bugaboos like consistent characters are courageously dispensed with. And the funhouse mirrors of his fiction show amusing, gruesome pictures which seem to be our own faces.--tw Gustave Morin: INFORMATION: THE COMPLETE DOSSIER; DOG GRUEL CODEX FILE; & ETC, :CONVERSATION PIECE--Stained Paper Archive, 1796 Byng Rd., Windsor Ontario CANADA, N8W 3C8. 6 pp. @, $1.00/set. The DOSSIER is an absurdist list of characteristics(?) such as teeth rot, "Sharpen dull hooks by dulling the hook on that which is sharp," and "TBA." The CODEX FILE is a set of poems rendered unreadable through overprinting, which makes Chinese characters of their letters--and makes a jump after three poems in lower-case letters to a poem in upper-case suddenly & extremely dramatic. ETC. is a series of designs comprised of chunks of letters and numerals in different kinds of typography--an example of what I call "textual illumagery."--bg Jack Moskovitz: VERMICELLI VIXEN--Aran Press, 1320 S. Third St., Louisville KY, 40208. 68 pp., $5.00. Well-wrought tale about a sixty-year-old man's lugubrious adventures in the company of a prostitute after a night at the local bar. In the process he reels through the post-midnight of his past relationships with women (and of his current dead-on-its-feet one with his companion), as well as into quite comic scenes connected with his having to re-bury one of the customers of his business which is the selling & re-selling of a single cemetery plot. A literate, surrealistically-energized and Winesburg-authentic novella.--bg Harryette Mullen: S*PeRM**K*T--Singing Horse Press, PO Box 40034, Philadelphia PA, 19106. 48 pp., $6.00. Attention shoppers! I strongly recommend this book of poems for its acute sociology of consumer culture and its warm jazzy sense of humour. S*PeRM**K*T details the supermarket seen in its obscene reductive essence. "So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant." Commodities, like they say, are us. After reading S*PeRM**K*T you will never look at a grocery aisle the same way twice. Ring on Produce--tb Claire Needell: NOT A BALANCING ACT--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove Ave., Providence RI, 02906. 60 pp., $8.00. Poetry which requires a certain amount of philosophical and linguistic foregrounding for full appreciation. Of primary concern is the naming process: "A car is a cave and a hotel is a cave... giving a name to an event is a matter of pure inference." Also, there are wry observations on the intractability of human behavior--Needell seems to suggest that since language is flawed, and communication an illusion, there are limits to the civilizing and taming force of it.--ssn Kurt Nimmo: TIOGA PASS--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd. # 86, Canton MI, 48188. 56 pp., $4.95. So far to the left it's right. Nimmo's pseudo-nihilism and unreserved gonzo stance of delving into the unique fractures of our society has produced a novella full of fun, controversial characters, and wild rides splattered with hidden meaning. The narrator, a cynical alcoholic named Blake, travels across a terminal American landscape with three friends from out of his past. If there is a search for meaning it is lost in the volatile dialogue and anarchical overtones of the main character. From Detroit to LA and back, Nimmo's Blake explores our country's socially-strained and decadent wasteland, a nation of spasms: "It's death. Our Manifest Destiny's death. It's a primordial fear of nothingness." Drinking constantly and criticizing everything imaginable, Blake takes on all comers, from Arabs to vegetarians. In him, Nimmo has combined America's scaly underbelly into a motif of bright awareness. "We learn absolutely nothing from history. We believe lies, distrust truth. We hate genius and celebrate mediocrity. We love our chains. We fear the unknown and act in accordance. We're doomed, fucked and doomed." --rle Jena V: AMBLYOPIA--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA, 94924. 42 pp., $8.00. AMBLYOPIA is a serial poem in the form of twenty meditations working the edges, the inbetween states and metastates of object relations. Not unlike the vision problem the title is taken from, perceptual distortions make strange the familiar in the absence of apparent pathology. What emerges is a kind of epistemology of alienation on the model of the human eye in which "Each body represents a separate approach to purpose," and where reader and writer both are found "Living in the device." This is an eloquent and moving book of unusual intelligence.--tb Nicole Panter: MERCURY RETROGRADE--PO Box 862, Venice CA, 90294,. $6.00. If you saw the punk-rock documentary THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, you saw Nicole Panter trying to manage THE GERMS. THE GERMS were a popular band that had trouble getting booked in local clubs because the band members were too fucked up to play their instruments, and the singer often crawled around on the floor, forgetting the words to the song he was trying to sing, and simply mumbled stuporous alcoholic drug-infested guttural sounds instead. Nicole has come a long way since then. In her latest book of short stories, MERCURY RETROGRADE, she takes on the innocence of two teen-aged girls moving to San Francisco. You catch an honest insight to that innocent ignorance, and learn, along with the girls, what it is like to grow up in an ugly city. In another story (the best Nicole has written to date), she examines the relationship between a young woman in her 30's with an "older man." The brutal sexuality, manipulations, lies and dishonesty are captured in a matter-of-fact writing style that comes too close to the truth for comfort. The exploitive nature of the man in the story, and the victimization of the woman, leaves you with that ugly ice-cold alienation you get when a relationship turns into a sack of shit.--oberc Stephen Perkins (ed.):SUBSPACE INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW CATALOG-- Plagiarist Press, 1816 E. College St., Iowa City IA, 52245. 52 pp., $6.00. SUBSPACE is both an ongoing archive of micropress zines, and an occasional gallery space that sponsored the INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW last year--this publication is the catalog from that exhibition. Geographically ranging from Belgium to Uruguay; subject matter is even more far-flung--but with particular emphasis on punk, anarchy, mail-artists, and queerzines. Each entry includes description, address, and a cover-shot of the zine in question (hundreds of them!); many also include notes by the individual editors on their perception of zines & the micropress underground. Some of these publications may no longer be in business--nevertheless, this is a dense and meticulous portrait of the scene at a particular moment in our history, and an invaluable resource--lbd John Perlman: TEL 28 LET--tel-Let, 1818 Phillips Place, Charlesto n IL, 61920. 12 pp. A showcase of Perlman's gorgeous, symmetrical, seamless work. Visual poetry is finely honed here, and the form suggests the subject--a contemplation of the relations between word and world. "A Prayer of St. Basil's" skirts the margins of erasure, and touches on an individual's horror of nothingness and extermination. If one cannot be included in the picture, does one cease to exist? "Willis Ave. Bridge" contains a similar poignancy, and a sense of mourning for a self that is always on the edge of loss, or (tragically) self- erasure.--ssn Dan Raphael: THE BONES BEGIN TO SING--Twenty-Six Books, 6735 SE 78th, Portland OR, 97206. $7.00?. The title of this book of poems is especially apt for its new more clearly discursive slant, built on techniques and formal structures Raphael has been developing for some years now. These are large poems, each one filling an 8.5 x 11" page or more, dealing passionately but not simplistically with such large questions as human survival or "purpose", the evolution of consciousness, and social and cultural decay or change, all couched in an intensely expressed surrealist discourse glittering with the "ephemera" of daily life: RI can see the music in the blood of the guy running down the alley pushing a shopping cart with a tv inside it, repeatedly looking over his shoulder at the miniature cars which like a pack of dogs keep trying to jump & fly into the low-lying clouds of meat teasing all below with the threat or treat of carmine rain.S.. (from "Shopping Cart") These poems, which include so much and range over such broad territories, remain rigorously focused on particular themes or qualities of consciousness. This partly explains why their endings seem so convincing, and, although often formally trailing off, provide an amazing sense of closure: Rif only our bodies were aligned not this inexorable clash into himalaya of unresolved momentum, rolling over like dogsdogs inhaling each minute like meat, each om-bark silkily draping the light at the end / of the moon snaps open.S (from "Divercity") No brief review can do justice to these important new poems. Essential reading.--jmb Werner Reichold: LAYERS OF CONTENT--AHA Books, Box 767, Guala CA, 95445. 128 pp., $9.00. Strong, fresh poems whose stanzas, in general, approximate haiku. Sensualities both personal (e.g., "we who have been two/ tongues inside one laughter/ close each other's lips") and impersonal ("outgrowing angles/ the river swallows/ thistle seeds") that sometimes veer into surrealism, as when a footprint is described as "sleepless," or the narrator speaks of his name's "skin."--bg Sherry Reniker: ATTICUS CHRONICLE--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 44107. 8 pp., $1.00. An ingeniously folded small booklet of five poems, which are delightfully playful and non- discursive. Just the thing to tuck in your pocket: Uniluxurious late woo chiming misconstrue. orchard foist blankety bulge flawed amalgamate obligatory parley parley parley --jmb Laura Ryder: EXCHANGING GIFTS--O!!Zoone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057. 78 pp., $12.50. Nice mix of autobiographical poetry and prose by Laura Ryder, & with photographs (mostly nudes) that together appealingly evoke a quiet but sexually-charged (mostly lesbian) Mediterranean summer in the life of a girl coming of age.--bg John Shirley: NEW NOIR--Black Ice Books, PO Box 241, Boulder CO, 80306. 190 pp., $7.00. Six crime genre stories from writer/rock'n'roller John Shirley (who, among other projects, wrote lyrics for the proto-heavy-metal band Blue Oyster Clt). Shirley's stories are hallucinatory explorations of borderline lives; their most extreme actions only just suffice to lay bare the post-apocalyptic horrors lurking under the thin skin of pseudo-normality. In other words, any Youth suffering Entrapment in the Deep Suburbs ought to get off on this stuff. Examples--in "Jodie and Annie On TV" the title characters, criminal lovers, calculate their apparently random drive-by shootings with the needs of TV news producers in mind. Film at 11! In "Sketter Junkie," El Passo junkieman turns into female mosquito, sucks blood off luscious female human in downstairs apartment, then turns into giant female mosquito and fucks said luscious human with his/her 30-inch proboscis... and dies in the end, of course. And in "Just Like Suzie," the hapless middle-class degenerate Perrick chokes his crack supplier and whore Suzie to death with his dick while she's fellating him. Then he discovers her jaws won't unclench... One friend of mine (a rock'n'roller himself and an experienced fellatee) claims this last scenario is impossible. I dunno. The writing's believable enough.--charlotte pressler Eleni Sikelianos: TO SPEAK WHILE DREAMING--Selva Editions, 1701 Bluebell Ave., Boulder CO, 80302. 79 pp., $8.00. "The path i talk about leads from the other side/ of jailed or crazy or disable/ who scared me when they grimaced/ thru the chainlink/ there to spread out across & to dream/ while speaking." This handsomely produced book presents the poet as sibyl--to speak while dreaming--the words coming through her and settling on the page still vibrating and with all the motion and music intact. She writes deftly and sensually of love(s) moving across the (American) landscape; the poems, with thoroughly modern rhythms, linebreaks and enjambment, hint towards classical mythology--ripe with Eros--and lay it over a foundation of the parting lot and the Indian Reservation. The space she creates evokes a whole tradition of poets including Anselm Hollo, Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger; a series of openform sonnets are in the lineage of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer. Filled with both vision and music, indebted to but not enslaved by Naropa poetics.--jc Bucky Sinister: A FRIEND AND A KILLER--PO Box 170664, San Francisco CA, 94117. 16 p., $3.00. This short chap carries a vicious edge, and with lines like: "He's got a heart of gold/ and his enemies have an extra asshole./ He's everything I want in a friend/ and a killer besides./ He makes me laugh/ and makes others bleed" you know you're on to something filled with violence and wisdom gained from way too many gutters. "Living on Methadrine Time" reminds me of my speed freak days, where time moves too fast, there are too many things to do, and aging suddenly becomes something you're incredibly aware of. In "Blood Virgin" we go hunting with a boy and his father for the first time: "I shot her once/ and she kicked/ painridden and desperate/ the second shot/ she heard but never felt/ kicked some more/ it was the first time/ for both of us/ the third shot and she lay still/waiting for me". "The Jesus Virus" caught the desperation of trying to save others when you're only trying to save yourself. This is a great collection of poems, capturing a desperate dangerous world where things go downhill in a hurry.--oberc Laurel Speer: GRANT DRANK--PO Box 12220, Tucson AZ, 85732. 20 pp., $2.00. This collection of Speer's prose-poems is loaded with allusions to famous people (Ulysses S. Grant, Flannery O'Conner, Zero Mostel, Mahler, Picasso, Apollinaire, Hitler...). I'm not sure I like being taken on a trip around some historically-induced Disneyland, but overall it works, because the author has created an aura of significance. There is pain: "...the grief of knowing he's sold me so cheaply is immense." There is paradox: "It was a laugh a minute/ it was bad." There is promise in these twenty poems, as Laurel Speer travels, explores historical incidents, with a clear voice, from within.--rle Pete Spiro: 1-800 SUBWAYS--Lazur Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow NY, 11554. 24 pp., $3.00. This is the "Grand Slam" edition, Spiro having won a 1992 New York Grand Slam competition. Spiro has power in his urban voice; he activates his characters with Beat cadences: "...move the poets of another color/ the lip blisters, the three quarter mister keep your change/ sister hipster black poets..." He shakes the tree of poetry, he doesn't dance around it, elusive is not his style. He is bold & blatant, loud & quick, scary & real. He is "some sort of turbulent, flesh, sensual, eating, drinking, and/ breeding/ son of Brooklyn." He gives it to us straight & condemns those who don't--one of his poems is titled "Poetry; A Broad Historical Review; or, Just Read the Fucking Poem, Man." Read this one outloud.--rle Surllama: PHILPHLEXLUDE--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271, Sarasota FL, 34231. 8 pp., SASE. Prose about a student returning home from classes stoned, one way or another. The result is a cracking dream-collage of current events, household events, math homework, plain insanity, and so on. At one point, the first- person protagonist starts swaying--the trees, squirrels, birdbaths, wheelbarrows, plums, "and even the outhouses over by the tennis courts" join him--"but wow! they sway so hard, they fall over."--bg Thomas Lowe Taylor: JFK: THE ADIRONDACK DIARY--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072. $4.00. Two sequences of poems or stanzas, with each text accompanied by collaged images of J. F. Kennedy and related assassination imagery. The first sequence could be the voice of JFK speaking from the grave; it is a voice shorn of connections and identities, yet also the voice in us that connects all events and places: "Rocks are forming outside. They are growing into flowers of lava and time." The second sequence is called "The Chorus"--it includes the voices of Oswald, Ruby, Sirhan, and others, also speaking from death, circling around the themes of myth and history. The book concludes with an essay by Taylor discussing the evolution of American culture and of the need to put to rest certain obsessive symbols such as JFK, to release them to the underworld--a process in which the poet must take part (paradoxically, it would seem) by writing about them. A highly thought-provoking and evocative book, a meditation on culture and time.--jmb Joseph Torra: DOMINO SESSIONS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222. 8 pp., $2.00. No punctuation but a few question marks among 14 small prose chunks where words collide like dominoes and, like dominoes laid out acrostically and accumulating patterns, visions appear from the text, images accruing from the words whipping past us as we read. Descriptions, meta-descriptions, narrative and not, of an apartment building on fire, a flood, a mountain hike, a toxic cloud, an unpeopled domestic twilight scene: things fairly familiar rendered in a prose that excites the subject. "Floating these currents rest seems hardly possible." In its unflagging momentum this writing points beyond itself--as if each description is a seed of a bigger picture: "unlinear whisper today tornado tomorrow in remote altitudes from a stream-pool a goat drinks its image flows ever toward the sea what effect its glare on global tides?"--jc Turman Art Gallery: IS POETRY VISUAL ART?--Indiana State University, , Terre Haute IN, 47809. 56 pp. A beautifully packaged catalog for an exhibition devoted to combinations of visual and verbal art. It contains a few visual poems such as Kay Rosen's rousingly dramatic "John Wilkes Booth," which consists of the following, printed in red against a black background: assass inin thethe ater Most of the other works reproduced are merely paintings that include textual material, or texts that are visually heightened only in the sense that Madison Ave. advertising texts are visually heightened. But the catalog also includes a number of good essays on its subject, and would make a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in visual poetry and related pursuits.--bg Nico Vassilakis: ENOCH & ALOE--Last Generation Press, 2965 13th St., Boulder CO, 80304. 22 pp., $3.50. This single long poem provides the context for one of the things Vassilakis does best: move around and through a topic and its multiple circumstantial associations to create an interpretation of the world as a kind of multi-layered swarming in which any particular theme or obsession (here, "man/woman" and language or story/history) seem increasingly small and of uncertain significance. A beautifully written work that grows with repeated readings.--jmb Mark Vinz: LATE NIGHT CALLS--New Rivers Press, 420 N. 5th St, #910, Minneapolis MN, 55401. $8.95. Mark Vinz's prose poems are brief, no-frill recountings of his everyday life, neither sordid enough to be called confessional nor dramatized enough to be pure fiction. He writes of the "blue stuff" used to clean toilets, the joys of taking an afternoon nap, and the problem of running out of gas in front of the state prison. Vinz's prose is direct and simple, using few metaphors or allusions, and his first-person narrator speaks in a comfortably ordinary voice. In these texts, there seems to be no boundary between Vinze's life and art, between the private man and the public persona. Imagine that.--tw Mark Waid: THREATS OF OPPOSITE--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San Francisco CA, 94159. 36 pp., $5.00. There is now a(nother) revival of interest in the long poem, and here is a long poem that works to resolve "threats of opposite" by playing them out on as many different levels as possible: psychological, cultural/historical, sexual, linguistic, and poetic. Waid's loose, disjointed narrative, apparently random in its associations ("paratactic"), plays off tightly organized formal poetic techniques--structure questioning itself. The Argument of the Poem (as Milton might say): WIttgenstein's (& Lacan's) baby is birthed into the world by doctors and nurses who snip off his foreskin while initiating him into the culture's language games. "Uncle" appears almost at once--Uncle Sam, perhaps, but maybe also the initiatory mother's brother of matriarchal societies. The narrator observes Uncle's dithering, records his odd jobs, worries, and search for the "faster route to Medical Emergency." "She" is there, too--as obliquely observed as Uncle. Finally Uncle "leaps from the balcony" as She and the narrator unite in a Nietzschean (if rather muted) "flight out of the sex- distinguished."--charlotte pressler Michael E. Waldecki: THE WIND ALWAYS SINGS SOPRANO--310 W. 7th St., Lorain OH, 44052. 36 pp., $4.50. Never verbose, most often relentless in his poetry jabs at the world's bulging absurdities, Michael Waldecki is at his most political in this new book--a revelation of the misuse of power and the consequent poverty of the body and spirit created. Waldecki, like his patron saint Russell Edson, is among the few Absurdists still writing today. "But these things happen in cycles/ like foreign affairs/ with passive resisters/ who pelt Iraqi cab drivers/ with stale donuts." These poems are packed with awareness, often lightly encoded but most often undeniable in its exaggerated declaration: "The constipated Global Village/ is at the brink/ of disastrous relief./ Down wind, you can almost/ smell the plutonium." Waldecki continues his original poetry into a third decade of publishing--a court jester with his eyes and heart still open. --larry smith Rosmarie Waldrop: LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE--Tender Buttons, 54 East Manning St. #3, Providence RI, 02906. 81 pp., $7.00. These poems are intimately voiced investigations of the terrain where philosophy and poetry meet. I detest paraphrase. Here is a collage of quotes arranged to suggest some of the book's argumentative threads: "... the four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone. Something that can be held in the mouth, deeply like darkness by someone blind or the empty space I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration." (pg. 11) "It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and have your errors pass for objectivity." (g. 13) "Then I realized that the world was the part of my body I could change by thinking and projected the ratio of association to sensory cortex onto the surface of the the globe, inside out as you might turn a glove." (pg. 77) "Every thought swelled to the softness of flesh after a long bath, the lack of definition essential for happiness, just as not knowing yourself guarantees a life of long lukewarm days stretching beyond the shadow of pure reason on the sidewalk." (pg. 47) "There remains an ultimate gap, as between two people, that not even a penis can bridge, a point at which we lose sight of the erections crossing a horizon in the mind. This is accompanied by a slight giddiness as when we jump over our shadow..." (pg. 66) LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE deserves a volume of responses and I believe at some point it will receive them. It ranks with a handful of other books (Michael Palmer's SUN, Lyn Hejinian's THE CELL, Bruce Andrew's I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP, Rachel Blau DuPlessis' DRAFTS) as among the most important writing of these last few years. This is one of the books to take to that fabled desert island. Especially if you enjoy the sensual vagaries of thought.--tb Paul Weinman & afungusboy: MY MORNING FEET--afungusboy press, 16 E. Johnson St. #c, Philadelphia PA, 19144. 20 pp., 50". Paul WeinmanUs poetry has become more surreal and dislocated of late and combines very well here with afungusboyUs collages. The images are strong, unforgettable, and humorous in both forms. For instance, two combs juxtaposed on advertisements, and a lone extracted molar are boxed apart by crude lines with an old hat on top of the whole, the letters RmS and RoS hover above and below the tooth. On the page facing it we read, RThe mirror made parchesi / as I looked for my baby teeth./ TThe Good Fairy will shove it up her woowoo.US Joyous and painful simultaneously, MY MORNING FEET is one of those small otherstream masterpieces that make that trip to your mailbox worthwhile.--jb A sequence of eight poems by Weinman each paired with a collage/graphic illustration by afungusboy. These concise, neat poems are among Weinman's best, and combine an expressionistic surrealism with the grit of daily life. They have to do with sexuality, childhood, and gardening, and are perfectly balanced by afungusboy's mix of blurred fragments and specific clear images. --jmb ----------------------------------------------------------------- End TapRoot Reviews Issue #3.0, section b: Chaps. 9/93 -----------------------------------------------------------------