Poetry. Translated by Johannes Goransson. "In lyrical vision and hypnotic spells, this book THE ANGELGREEN SACRAMENT, creates its own mythology...with subtle variations, repetitions and negations, it generates ethereal rhythms and ecstatic resonances as the language dissolves in a frighteningly beautiful song."--from Swedish Radio's announcement of The Lyric Prize
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry, Frost is often quoted as having said, is what is lost in translation, and American poets and critics have long taken this as their cue to subordinate translation to other forms of literary activity and to disqualify translated texts. In TRANSGRESSIVE CIRCULATION, poet, translator, and publisher Johannes Göransson reverses this dynamic, holding that we should use translation to re-assess our entire aesthetic establishment. Rather than argue against the denigration and abjection of translation--and most foreign texts--this book investigates those dark zones of expulsion as grounds for new possibilities, not just for translation but for literature as a whole.
"I went to Italy, the birth-country of tarot, in the new year. After learning that tarot originated in Milan, and in conjunction with the Italian Renaissance, I wanted to explore resonances between and beyond Christian and Pagan systems of meaning-making"--
Literary Nonfiction. "This slim journal contains multitudes. It's a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it's an urgent manifesto. 'Poetry is obscene, ' Göransson writes. 'But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.' This necessary book strips away the various illusions that have obscured poetry's truest values. Göransson concludes: 'This is written without hope.' But paradoxically, POETRY AGAINST ALL offers just that."--Jeff Jackson "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's POETRY AGAINST ALL--for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers--concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one's children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself."--Ken Chen
Eva Olsson is a survivor - of a repressive religious upbringing, World War II, the Holocaust, the deaths of many of her loved ones, bigotry and racism, and being ostracized because of her determination to live life on her own terms. She now dedicates her life to spreading a message of joy, hope and tolerance. Recent events in Kosovo, Rwanda, Bosnia and the Middle East prove the need for this message to be repeated.
Poetry. New poems by Anselm Berrigan. "In the world of Anselm Berrigan sketchiness is next to godliness and repeated heavy-lifting becomes a pleasure. PREGRETS has the feel of wandering a giant armory filled with enigmatic objects and pointed memories. Dust motes in daylight betray a thin path forward so the 'tongue' of the book seems in constant peril; addictively so. 'Red copter rises slicing a scraper into outer cubicle dreams...' Possessed of a haunted style that moves beyond surface. Fathomless."--Cedar Sigo "With PREGRETS; Anselm Berrigan captures the scattered environs and tonal intrusions that compose thought-break as society--a reflection of the seemingly scattered populace; where the all is broken while becoming thought; 'unity would like / its finked deproductions back.' If we remove a cogent arc; the dips and peaks of our lives become weirdly accessible; where each observed indentation of skin on skin action becomes a jeweled aphorism; a telegrammed imagistic; from u to us--'I'm a covered base / levitating carry-ons into sub-extinction.' Berrigan synthesizes time's arrival as an act of pregret; by giving us regrets to degret from; now he's got me doing it! The breathless yet finite scrawl of these poems--ecosystems of empowerment that infuse the neighborhood walk with the centered page--re-train listening as a sort of ekphrasis of unfolding; to capture the journey's formation with a delicate insistence on the everyday apogee found between the words; 'being a thingless / telephat;' of poet to reader; 'give my love to the air out there.'"--Edwin Torres "Houdini word smithy Anselm Berrigan writes elsewhere about poetry coming from a place as if a filter between your consciousness and the world fluttering in. This magic act; not facile; is unpredictable--the filter works lovingly overtime; hard at its alchemy; arrangement; intuitive flowing 'moves' of brain flash; found attitude; multiple voiced increments. Sometimes I'm breathless inside a language barrage or barrel speedily turning not bound by any one thought. Other times I'm with abandon in the cognition quotidian soup. ('The abstract poet runs where in cognito again?') But consciousness is a vivid Zen equalizer--a syncretic piling on as words jump the gate; rhapsodize; list; lumber; scan this wild existence. So what IS the sense of PREGRETS? 'gret' comes from the 'greter' meaning to weep; mourn; lament from the Frankish 'gretan.' Was it that moment before you weep? or imagined later? Future pluperfect? Regrets suggest a past. Begrets suggest something between begetting and beginning; more complicated than 'first thought; best thought' And we have also Deflategrets; Freegrets; Megrets; Gretgrets; and then Degrets de-constructs the lament perhaps. So PREGRETS I figure gets at origins that already have some kind of affect/karma but don't have to add up. A huge relief. This work is all about duration and mind and space; and Time as spiral. Often like dream text with that crazy 'other' fluttering in wild tandem. 'The escapist fig as fondled contour.' Amazing."--Anne Waldman
