Another mammoth compilation from Downtown New York's 'drinking group with a writing problem', the previous perpetrators of The Worst Book I Ever Read, Crimes of the Beats and Help Yourself!, among other innumerable assaults on decency and good taste. Now they finally turn themselves to their most likely subject matter ever (even if it's frequently more a matter of fantasy and theory than of deviant practice)...
“This is a thrilling book of femininity and magic. When it comes to capturing the intimacy of pain, Larissa Shmailo is among the most daring poets of her generation. When speaking of human rights, she is a human flame. She is subtle and provocative, fresh and out of bounds. You will fall in love here, and you will be loved right back.” —Philip Nikolayev, editor of Fulcrum: an anthology of poetry and aesthetics
In Blowout, Denise Duhamel asks the same question that Frankie Lyman & the Teenagers asked back in 1954—"Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" Duhamel's poems readily admit that she is a love-struck fool, but also embrace the "crazy wisdom" of the Fool of the Tarot deck and the fool as entertainer or jester. From a kindergarten crush to a failed marriage and beyond, Duhamel explores the nature of romantic love and her own limitations. She also examines love through music, film, and history—Michelle and Barak Obama's inauguration and Cleopatra's ancient sex toy. Duhamel chronicles the perilous cruelties of love gone awry, but also reminds us of the compassion and transcendence in the aftermath. In "Having a Diet Coke with You," she asserts that "love poems are the most difficult poems to write / because each poem contains its opposite its loss / and that no matter how fierce the love of a couple / one of them will leave the other / if not through betrayal / then through death." Yet, in Blowout, Duhamel fiercely and foolishly embraces the poetry of love.
“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.
Among The Village Voices 25 Favorite Books of 2006 Winner of the 2007 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show in the Trade Illustrated Book Design category. Sometime after Andy Warhol’s heyday but before Soho became a tourist trap, a group of poets, punk rockers, guerilla journalists, graffiti artists, writers, and activists transformed lower Manhattan into an artistic scene so diverse it became known simply as “Downtown.“ Willfully unpolished and subversively intelligent, figures such as Spalding Gray, Kathy Acker, Richard Hell, David Wojnarowicz, Lynne Tillman, Miguel Piñero, and Eric Bogosian broke free from mainstream publishing to produce a flood of fiction, poetry, experimental theater, art, and music that breathed the life of the street. The first book to capture the spontaneity of the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up, But So Is Down collects more than 125 images and over 80 texts that encompass the most vital work produced between 1974 and 1992. Reflecting the unconventional genres that marked this period, the book includes flyers, zines, newsprint weeklies, book covers, and photographs of people and the city, many of them here made available to readers outside the scene for the first time. The book's striking and quirky design—complete with 2-color interior—brings each of these unique documents and images to life. Brandon Stosuy arranges this hugely varied material chronologically to illustrate the dynamic views at play. He takes us from poetry readings in Alphabet City to happenings at Darinka, a Lower East Side apartment and performance space, to the St. Mark's Bookshop, unofficial crossroads of the counterculture, where home-printed copies of the latest zines were sold in Ziploc bags. Often attacking the bourgeois irony epitomized by the New Yorker’s short fiction, Downtown writers played ebulliently with form and content, sex and language, producing work that depicted the underbelly of real life. With an afterword by Downtown icons Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles, Up Is Up, But So Is Down gathers almost twenty years of New York City’s smartest and most explosive—as well as hard to find—writing, providing an indispensable archive of one of the most exciting artistic scenes in U.S. history.
More irreverent than ever, the popular guide to fully understanding and enjoying sex has now been revised with new chapters such as "Sex When You're Really Old, " "When Sex Gets Boring, " and "How to Be Cool When You're Not." 65 illustrations.
Poetry. Native American Studies. "[DEEP RED GUILD] takes the reader inside the mind of a born poet."--Brenda Coultas "These short, interlocking lyric poems/songs and prose/prose-like pieces are alternately intuitive; acutely concrete; fast, voluble and associative; or meditative in an eloquent, nearly silent way."--Peter Bushyeager "[These poems] are right out in the open, site-specific, indelible, challenging, up close and--as they say--personal. Her attention level is through the ceiling, whether asleep or awake. I've been reading her poems for two decades and this is her best and most beautiful work."--Lewis Warsh
An anthology of fictive adventures by the Unbearables and collaborators, a free-floating in-your-face scrum of black humorists, chaos-mongers, immediatists, and verse-spouting Beer Mystics, disorganized around recuperating essence away from the humorless commodification of experience. Includes: Judy Nylon, Max Blagg, Bikini Girl, Bruce Benderson, Hakim Bey, Jordan Zinovich, and the Unbearables.
A surreal novel about a family, and Time and Art and Science, Religion, Philosophy and Current Events spanning from 1940-1990, and pivoting around the 60's. Its locations are New York City, Rome, Italy, and their near countrysides.Wish For Amnesia chronicles five equally-weighted major characters: three family members, one artist and one rogue, two of whom behave supernaturally at times, one of whom murders another. The father, about whom the cast revolves, first appears as a hippie-leader at Columbia University. The book opens two generations before the main events, spans the lives of two characters, and closes in an unearthly (although unnamable, non-referent, and unmistakably fictional) dimension.It is gripping, funny, and not autobiographical, traditional in sentence structure but metaphysical and told almost like a fable. Several forms comprise the text: omniscient narrative, letters, journal entries, fictitious NY Times articles, aphorisms, quotations, definitions, dreams, and dialogue.
