Barrett Warner Wins the 2nd Annual Chris Toll Memorial Chapbook Contest

http://www.publishinggenius.com/?p=4211

Now Let Us Finish Up Praising Genius Guy and Return To A Daily Life With Slightly Less Pixie Dust & Baseball

Okay, this final piece, my own fairly corny one, will wrap up Shattered Wig's adieu to Commander Adam Robinson. I mourn (in a reasonable way, knowing he'll be quite happy in Atlanta and how often did I truly get to see him with my own bulging eyes in Baltimore anyway?) not only his leaving, but the end of one of the high-water marks of the Baltimore writing scene (at least in my view/world). Chris Toll and Blaster transmigrated, Bob O'Brien moving, Amy Peterson moving, Adam Shutz of the cocktail-fueld Artichoke Haircut soon to be in Texas.

But Hell, there have been many high-water periods here or at least a lot of highed up folks. The Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo, Joe Carderelli, Sandy Castle, David Footlong Franks in his prime period surely has to be a favorite of many. I came in on the end of that, but I did get to hear Anselm Hollo savor and play with the name of my poetry/sound tape project with John Berndt, "Readings From Nether Lips". I was working in Second Story Books on Greenmount, around 1984, and Hollo and Codrescu came in. There was a little magazine rack by the door and I had placed my tape prominently at top. "Nether Lips", he said, slowly rolling the words off his tongue, "nether lips". That was truly a nice payoff moment for a lowly poet.

Let us now slowly close the glorious rumpled gilt-edged curtain of Adam's period here in Baltimore when Publishing Genius took spark and went from being a little peeping chick to becoming a re-tooled Godzilla whose feet are sticky with the corpses of action heroes.

"Have you seen Adam caper? I swear, he is so light-filled he capers," the Sun remarked to the Moon. "He reminds me of myself, how I dapple the leaves bringing artists and lovers joy. He is at play in the fields of the Lord and the little bit of pale flesh visible above those really long sports socks are quickly reddening from my powers."

"I don't know about him prancing about or what have you," replied the Moon, "but I have seen him bearded and bitching about bottled water in that book of his, the book with the cover that reflects his visage in an acrylic smorgasbord of colors. He is pulled by unseen tides and draws strength from the darkness he escapes into to desecrate statues and rile his soul with strong liquid spirits. In that way he is like me, for I disturb even the great oceans and when I get full so do the emergency wards."

"He passes through things easily," said the Stream. "He brings clarity and refreshment to those he encounters. And just as people don't mind their feet wet passing through me, they don't seem upset when he leaves a little something on their shoes at late night parties or bbq's after softball."

"He quite often pats my logs," said the Beaver. "Like myself he is consistently constructing, the people he encounters are his environmental tools. But he is not graced with my fine protruding teeth."

We interrupt this sagging Nature Trope to let backdoor phrenologist and former cricket impersonator Rupert Wondolowski have a word as he is wheeled out into the hospital courtyard for his daily airing.

"Yes, to fully appreciate the storehouse of creation that is Adam Robinson, we must scale the mighty fortress that is his forehead. Whereas fellow poet and Publishing Genius stablemate Chris Toll had a vast lunar landscape of a head, Adam's forehead rises formidable and imposing as the front of the mighty Alcazar of Segovia. Not grotesquely cone-like or too high up there, nothing that needs to be covered with a stovepipe hat, just an impressive, strong facade that gives notice that great things are formulating behind it.

To not frighten civilians or the weak of mind he often covers it with an old Milwaukee Brewers hat that has been repeatedly trod upon in the mosh pits of Christian Rock concerts. When tiny Mike Young lived in Baltimore he would often curl up into the overturned hat and take naps in it while Mark Cugini took selflies beside it.

What was I speaking of? Adam Robinson? He was very kind to me once, he published a book of my writings. Did you know I was a writer? Why are you turning my chair around? It's such a beautiful day, why is that orderly taking his belt off and giving me that hideous look? Oh what a world, what world!"

Now Let Us Praise Genius Guy A Month In His Rearview Mirror, Part 1

Dear Diary, can it really be a month since Adam Robinson left us? Since the skies of Baltimore turned gray and creased like a hobo's hat, choked full with squawling ravens? Is there a connection between his desertion and the bull running loose last week on Preston St.? I am neither a Zoologist or a traffic cop, so I cannot say for sure.

Is Atlanta holding him tight against its sweatervest, putting Publishing Genius titles in the front window of all its bookstores, having him sing the National Anthem at Braves games? Does he ever think of us (other than when he is in his room hearing police sirens)?

A month ago we threw a going away party for Adam at Normal's and he did a great extemporaneous history of Publishing Genius and writers that he's published read in the chronological order of when they were published by him. I asked the readers to write an homage piece and I gathered them into tacky pamphlets. Now here they are in glimmering Web Space.

Man, Are You Serious?

I'm not going to take this sitting down
I'm not going to walk this around the block to a car waiting out back
Engine running
Fox, box, mouse, house, not, not, not, etc.
Everyone closes their eyes and then everyone is invisible
Our hearing gets better
We lost track of days and nights
So many unexpected things are all the rage
Keep it going

===Jamie Gaughan-Perez

Something about God in his infinite wisdom
just his wisdom
created the fly, sure
and then forgot to tell us why
-- Macklemore

Would you ever laugh at someone with an
intellectual disability?
What if they were in a physical comedy troupe?
That's different.
What if they didn't know they were in
a physical comedy troupe?
That's when we started laughing.

Adam Robinson, there are no parallels.
Things are still like other things --
everything just like a mowed left field.

-- Lauren Bender

A Megan McShea Snowglobe Afternoon of March Splendor

In a year of choking back tears praising golden fallen comrades at memorials, it felt comforting and promising that on this day we were gathered to toast a living friend and author who had a fresh book out "approaching greatness sideways like ants without eyes". This wondrous book is called A Mountain City of Toad Splendor and was published by Publishing Genius Press.



Being a lover of collaboration and experiment in the creative process - she was/is after all the headmistress of Miss McShea's Writing Workshop 3000 which was actually just a front for Blaster Al Ackerman to keep Megan's cat Sugar knee-deep in catnip - Megan had five of her writer comrades (this writer being one of the honored) on hand at the book release celebration to read one of their favorite pieces from the book and then write and read a response to it.



Above is Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius Press who with his exquisite taste in manuscripts to work with and ingenious innovative ways to present poetry as being as vital and necessary as your favorite music and as rewarding as spirituality brings the excitement of a pop cultural moment like the forming of Factory Records in the '70s to modern poetry of the 21st Century.

Adam in his introduction kicking off the day's festivities said that to him Megan's book is about pleasure. And indeed it's in the title of the collection's first piece "The Brain Is A Pleasure Organ" and it pops back up two pages later in the delightfully titled poem "11 Irritations That Morning". I am experiencing pleasure right now reading the simple zen-like burst of "Table Saw" that is sandwiched between those two. It goes:
Table
Table saw
Table saw bird
Table saw bird fly
Table saw bird fly out
Table saw bird fly out singing

And no one knows pleasure better than Adam R. That day he had just flown in from Florida where he had been swimming hours before and here he was back in Baltimore on a cold dark afternoon that would have been so gloomy without his publication of Megan's book and the party that that publication necessitated that Baltimore would have easily lost two or three more poets. In fact, Ryan Walker, who is actually from DC, said he had briefly considered closing his Volvo door on his nuts to remove them that morning before he remembered the McShea show. "Man, that's a rough way to go unless you're making a gender statement," I said. "Give me a running car in a closed garage." "No," said Walker, irritated, "not to off myself. To sing like my hero Neil Young. I have not been able to master his high notes."

Adam returned to us carrying Florida swimming water in his ears, though, and it caused him to have a kind of listing MC delivery like some pitchers throw a sidearm curveball. He also really had no idea what anyone was saying to him all day and just kept mumbling "yeh, doogle". Critics for decades will debate the impact of the earwater on his performance and even break into two camps - those who thought it was pool water and those who surmised ocean swimming was more likely Robinson's m.o.



It was extremely kind of Daniel Day Lewis, above, an old high school acquaintance of Megan's to make an appearance, but he completely ignored the rules of the reading and just re-read his recent Oscar acceptance speech.



Above is poet and performance artist/musician Bonnie Jones. I love this picture because it seems she is singing an incredibly lovely version of a ballad or something.



Worms avatar Bob O'Brien always hungrily and masterfully launches into a mic like an HBO sex scene.



This was The Mole Suit Choir's second gig and our first with mics and psychedelic threads from Ruth Turner's fantastic shop Caravanserai. We had two new songs in addition to our set opening for Daniel Higgs. One was Chris Toll's poem "Why Is If in Life" musicized by Liz and the other was a Liz treatment of my poem "The Heart Is a Rage of Afflictions".



After Mole Suit had their say, Megan took the stage to enthusiastic applause and cheering from the packed Windup Space crowd - damned impressive, especially for a Sunday afternoon. "Right now the introvert me is battling the narcissist part of me," Megan modestly said. "Narcissist part, narcissist part," someone (I think Lauren Bender) in the crowd answered.



After Megan finished with an encore the raw fiery Electric Junk Band dropped some fine meat into the day's savory gumbo.



Here Madame Liz relaxes after Mole duties. Have I mentioned yet that singing with her is like having champagne pumped through your soul?



"I like Megan, she is a good poet. it's sort of the deepest kind of poetry. Not about anything in particular, just about life and how we don't understand it and also how we do understand it." Were these wise words spoken by the gent seen below sprawled on the couch like he has just put a call in for Brandy of Patapsco Ave. and a wand of blow? No, they were spoken by Megan's young second cousin Max, a wee lad of 9, after attending the Day of Toad Splendor. A lad so precocious that when his parents asked him a few years back what they should call his upcoming little brother, he answered "Highwalls".

It is the magic linguistic mystery of how a five or six year old would summon a name like that makes life interesting and it abounds in Megan's book, "a toffee, a tart, a perfect bedlam".

Remembering Chris Toll - Books - Baltimore City Paper

 I'm sure Chris is at this moment sitting down in a special screening room with Rod Serling to view a Batman movie that Bob Kane made just for them, Chris holding in his lap his Famous Cardigan Sweater that Sylvia Plath soaked with her tears.



Below is a beautiful piece written by Bret McCabe about him and his full life.  But how I already miss him.  We had a great show here at Normal's last night and I kept thinking especially during the theatrical accordion/trumpet vocal gypsy sea chanties for land lubbers of Dear Rabbit and Jon Lipscomb's beautiful rendition of Skip James' "Crow Jane", "I wish Chris could have heard that."




Remembering Chris Toll - Books - Baltimore City Paper

Pratt Chat | The Emily Dickinson of Mars: Gifts from Baltimore Poet Chris Toll

Pratt Chat | The Emily Dickinson of Mars: Gifts from Baltimore Poet Chris Toll

"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls for Revolutionary Love

 Well, the danger in saying yes to writing a book review for a magazine you've never heard of by a guy you've never seen or heard from before is that you'll write the review and never hear back from the editor ever again.  The upside - especially if you knew you loved the book anyway - is that you write a book review and force your (my) feeble brain into forming some kind of passing logic for why you love what you love.







"The We in Weep": Chris Toll Calls For Revolutionary Love in his The Disinformation Phase


  

  Chris Toll's latest book, The Disinformation Phase (Publishing Genius Press, Baltimore), is awash in the baptismal, transformative fluids of tears and rain: "The rain,/heart in ruins,/staggers out of town"; "Rain sits/in the evicted easy chair"; "Raindrops are calling to the last in love./Them tears are a school that consoles."



   The outside rain mirrors the tears of the protagonists and cast extras in Toll's heartfelt lines. His freely running tears are the lubricant of a soul constantly searching for love - human to human, between nations and interplanetary - and rebirth: "How long can I stay at the inn in innocent?/Love is so hard/and it's all we came to do."

 

  Of course pleading a case for no holds barred love, is not new in Toll's writing, one of his older books is entitled "Love Everyone" after all, but there is an extra crisp sense of urgency to this collection. Due in part to the compact size - most are from 14 to twenty lines long, only running about an inch across, a few like "National Poetry Month" (5 lines) and "I Expand Before Nebulae" (6 lines), even less - but perhaps also due to the world around Toll in "reality" mutating and rocking ever harder with catastrophes that his "fictional" world of Everything At Once, Batman fighting it out with vampires, worlds teetering on collapse, makes even more emotional sense. 



    A day doesn't go by now it seems without a major earthquake devastating a population, a tsunami reducing humanity to chess pieces swept off the board by a raging loser, droughts, floods, war after war.  Recently the news was so full of cannibalistic violence - a college student eating his roommate's heart and brain, a teenager in Florida eating the face of a homeless man - some people blaming it on the over the counter drug called "bath salts", that the Center for Disease Control felt they had to state that we weren't in a zombie apocalypse since they had jokingly posted on their website over a year ago "How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse".  It truly does feel that anything could happen at any time and it's hard not to search the skies for some kind of winged hero.



    Because of the naked yearning and whimsy in Toll's writing and the interweaving of lowbrow/pop culture with his more erudite side, I've always thought of him as The Emily Dickinson of Mars. "The Queen of the Vampires" assembles her "army of zombie shamans./They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus./No cross is is erected on top of Golgotha." He is as familiar with The Bible as he is with Marvel and DC Comics, Poe and Plath sit comfortably in the mad swirl of zombies, vampires and werewolves. 



  After all, who's to say that in a hundred years sitting in some wretched post-apocalyptic bunker there won't be a surviving tribe of humans passing around Iron Man comic books as sacred text, like the worship of Punchinella in Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker?



    Although most of the pieces in Disinformation Phase are not radically different from those of other Toll books (why is "try in Poetry", "why isn't destiny in clandestine" - examples of the kind  of pop linguistic deconstruction that he's been doing since I first became aware of him in the '80s ), but more terse and urgent, this book does herald a new form by him. 



    In the pieces "What Have You Done for Global Warming Today?", "My Ruby Hat", "1776", "Money Never Weeps" and "Writing Groups of the Future", Toll introduces a rich, playful conceit of never before read poems by old masters - John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Dickinson again, Poe and Sylvia Plath respectively - being found under arcane circumstances and then translated by Toll himself.



   The prose introductions to these pieces are transcendentally effervescent and the first time I've seen fiction written by him:  "Correspondence from Emily Dickinson to Arthur Rimbaud was recently discovered in a farmhouse in France.  The three letters were hidden beneath the false bottom in a china cupboard.  Emily and Arthur were both Farsi scholars, and they particularly loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." (from "My Ruby Hat")



    Of course part of the humor and twists of these pieces is that after Toll sets up extravagantly bizarre circumstances to how these lost poems of masters are found, he then claims himself as the translator of these works and unleashes wild Tollisms in them, like in "My Ruby Hat":



"I love in 256 Dimensions.
A Prophet devours a Candle -
A Leopard sleeps with a Lizard -
The Word is on the wing."



    Toll's goal is beyond and he wants to reach your heart at any cost, with any tool. "The moon recites the same prayer over and over./Find me soon."



    The final lines of the final poem in the book, "Perfect Love", are a call to break down all walls, including gender, to reach divine love:



"O giant in chains,
O darling ,
let the eternal divine feminine energy
awaken within you."

 

  I've often heard Chris Toll speak of how "Giants once walked the Earth", like in describing seeing Bob Dylan live during his Highway 61 period and putting the words "Giants will stride the Earth again" in Dickinson's letter to Rimbaud in "My Ruby Hat".  Every impassioned and well crafted line he writes is a call to bring to life the giant that lives in each of us.

Cort Bledsoe's Wonderful Review of My Mole Suit in "Murder Your Darlings"!

Review of Rupert Wondolowski's The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit, poems by Rupert Wondolowski. Baltimore: Publishing Genius Press, 2008.

I met Rupert Wondolowski at a reading in Baltimore hosted by Artichoke Haircut, a local literary journal which hosts amazing readings. (Seriously. Kazoo solos. Sex with octopi. People taking their clothes off without even putting it in the context of a Matthew McConaughey vehicle). This night, Publishing Genius Press was featured. Wondolowski read with Joseph Young (author of Easter Rabbit, a flash collection I blurbed a couple years ago.) Wondolowski blew me away. His poems balanced absurdity with hard-hitting truth. Someone once asked me why I write some of my more absurd pieces, and the only answer I had was that they are more real than most of my straight realist pieces. There’s an oft overused saying that writers ‘lie their way to the truth’ and, in a similar vein, absurdist writers ‘stand their way to the poof.’ Wondolowski brings to mind a line by John S. Hall from “It’s Saturday”: “Sense cannot be made. It must be sensed. And I, for one, am incensed by all this complacency.”

There’s so much humor in these poems, it’s hard to pick out one piece to focus on. A good start is “Steve Fischer Continues,” a poem about the pulp writer of I Wake Up Screaming, and many other pulp books. Wondolowski lampoons the melodrama so often seen in this type of writing while simultaneously paying homage to a master of the genre: “I wake screaming./I scream scratching the dog’s belly in bed,/ scream seeing the third pillow has fallen to the dusty floor.” (lines 1-3).

And what is a heated mole suit? Obviously, it’s uncomfortable and awkwardly unattractive. And if one were wearing it, others would probably react strangely, leading to paranoia. I can’t help but think Wondolowski is talking about the body, the meat suit. In the title poem, Wondolowski waxes melancholic about his childhood (or at least of a child-like narrator): “It’s the loneliest Halloween ever, Charlie Brown. I’m packing my bags for the Patsy Cline Institute for the Emotionally Disabled as chunks of nations are being swallowed or washed away like mashed bananas in a baby’s cereal bowl.” (12-16). Towards the end of the poem, as the narrator sits in his mole suit, he has “an epiphany. All I want is some flatbed truck resonance, a slightly burned picnic table, a clean giddy life of grass stains.” He yearns to return to a more innocent time when he wasn’t concerned about global war, self-image, and the horrors of the world.

The reason that Wondolowski’s poems work isn’t just that they’re funny, or full of pop culture references, or so strange that they instantly invite consideration; plenty of poets are filling their poems with these things these days, juxtaposing Papa Smurf with drug dealers. To be honest, that’s not that difficult to do. The reason Wondolowski’s poems stand out is that there’s something inside the mole suit. And that IS difficult. Wondolowski’s narrator feels like he’s in a mole suit and mocks himself and also mocks that mockery. This is complex stuff and human but Wondolowski refuses to let it sink to the level of melodrama without getting in a few good laughs first. It’s rare for me to find a poet or writer whose work I truly admire, but I admire what Wondolowski’s doing here. His language and imagery are startling, fresh, and insightful. As a matter of fact, before I wrote this review, I ordered his other books. I can’t wait to read them.

-CL Bledsoe

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Bio: CL Bledsoe is the author of the young adult novel Sunlight, three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year, and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. A minichap, Texas, was recently published by Mud Luscious Press. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 3 times. Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.

I Have Made It On To a Tote Bag!

To quote from the oft quoted Beckett masterpiece, The Unnameable: "I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, wait, my name's on a tote bag, I'll go on."

I made it to the Publishing Genius book release party for Senor Powerhouse Justin Sirois' novel detailing the horrors of Fallujah, Falcons On The Ground and not only got to see some great friends and hotshot Baltimore writers and bon vivants, finally get to hear legendary anthropologist/philosopher/writer Alphonso Lingis read, soak in Adam Robinson's thoughtful interview of Justin on stage about the writing of the book and then get to hear Justin read from the book, but I also had the pleasant surprise of scanning the merch table - looking for some unguarded french fries or a just opened Coke - and seeing a fresh red and black Publishing Genius tote bag made for the recent AWP conference with my long-assed name among a bunch of other folks who I admire.

If only my momma were still alive to see the family name brandished on a thick durable tote that will one day carry Everly's Perrier (in about two hours later that night), Little Debbie Devil Squares and various tomes. Of course, mom would probably still have loaded the bag with oranges and beat me with them, taunting me with "Diane Rehm's got her own fucking radio show, tote bags are what they give the rubes who give money to her station."

And cheers to Justin for his fantastic new book, to Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy who helped him research it and to Adam Robinson for putting it out there in the literary wilds. The interview before Justin's reading touched on, among other things, the battle between making what you hope is a lasting work of art that will engage a reader versus partisan propaganda. Which reminded me of some old Revolutionary Communist pals who would only read novels that spoke explicitly of armed revolution.

Justin's apt illustration was the work of Sue Coe. Surely heart felt, but if you're walking through a gallery of it you know exactly what you're going to see. And most likely you're only seeing her work because you already are sympathetic to its message.

And here's to a wild-eyed dream that our country won't be sucked into another blood-soaked futile war! And by the by, Mr. Cheney, it should be pretty obvious that you and this heart thing just don't go together. Stick by your guns and try to live on pure bile.

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty - Books - Baltimore City Paper

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty - Books - Baltimore City Paper

Can Aliens Be Reborn? For Once It Is Not a BM Placed In My Hand But A Beautiful New Book By Chris Toll

When Publishing Genius mastermind Adam Robinson knocked, scratched and rubbed feverishly against my door at 3am two nights ågo, I thought the exterminator had failed in his job of eradicating the herd of raccoons that had invaded our neighborhood after "Lay Your Trash Out Resplendently In The Grass Week".

I hurriedly ran downstairs with my pellet gun after Everly refused to go first.

With beer foam still caught on his late 1800's baseball player neo-handlebar moutstache, writers of more purplish prose might have described Adam's state as "mad as a hatter", or "rabidly inflamed" or "downright batshit", but I will go for a more subdued description of him as beside himself. "Please calm down, Adam. Tell me what's going on. And why do you have that microphone with a ripped cord in your hand?"

"Justin, Steph and I were out karoaking and you'll never believe what we found out behind the building! This being from another planet that drinks beer and looks like Lenin! After we warmed him up some at my apartment and showed him cashmere sweater porn that he requested, he actually began to speak. And his language came out in almost poetic form - a weird cross between Emily Dickinson and some kind of cosmic spiritual sci-fi."

It was at this point that my spider senses began to tingle. Either Max my faithful collie was rubbing against my bare leg or I had a strong suspicion of "what" or more precisely "Whom" Adam had stumbled upon.

An hour later, after Adam and Justin had for no particular reason put a black bag over my head and made me empty out my bank account at two ATMs (my bank's ATMs only dispense $10 at a time), we arrived at the condominium that sits on the Inner Harbor where Adam resides with the city's ingenue mayor, Stephanie Rawlings Blake.

Sure enough, once we passed through the guards and the heavy penthouse door swung open, there facing us, sipping a Yuengling and looking like the cat who ate the canary or the Burt Reynolds who gave the Dom DeLuise a wedgy, was none other than my old friend and literary mentor Chris Toll.

When I first moved to Baltimore in the early '80s, the last glow was fading from the Orioles and there was a fantastic poetry magazine here run by Chris called Open 24 Hours. Over the next few decades many writers have succumbed to burnout or drugs or booze or death itself, but Senor Toll continues to evolve and shed skins. He even started a new reading series a few years ago with the Italian Futurist, Barbara DeCesare. Now here he was, youthful again, with a new book coming out on a powerful Baltimore press. The book in question is The Disinformation Phase and it sports an original Toll collage on its cover.

Chris Toll's precision with an Exacto knife, the main tool of his collage making, is so legendary at this point that when Dick Cheney was brought to Johns Hopkins for a tumor on his moral conscience, they had to bring in Chris to locate and excise the miniscule portion of Cheney's brain. Chris, despite whatever he felt about the former Vice President, felt obligated to carry out the task - such is the weight of his powers.

As always, Chris is irresistibly quotable: "Chaos is my preacher/A Big Voice pours through me" (Irregular Galaxy); "I call my sickness the Guest./The Guest will speak now." (No Blues Blues #43); "Satellite dishes drink stars,/a church falls asleep in front of the TV,/and you're a prayer just the way you are." (Love Your Enemies). As I pull these, more lines jump out waving their arms in stay pressed unitards of quirky timelessness.

As Magus Magnus, the frighteningly brainy poet with the eery saucer eyes says on the back cover of the fancy "Advance Review Copy" I am lucky enough to hold (but which may soon belong to Henry Rollins since his $50 bid on it on ebay is so far the highest):

"His is poetry of propulsion : for/towards a sonic age, every sentence goes off like a rocket, objects act, sonnets are psionic, civilization collapses while shafts of light break through the earth's crust. What's more, The Disinformation Phase, as a phase, suggests the next phase: if suns go out, manufacture new suns (through chaos magic, as in 'paradox is my toolshed'), manufacture new solar systems. Cosmic!"

The official release date for this book is June 28th and summer seems like an appropiate season for it. You can feel the ache of brutal winters past in these prayers to the skies, but there is a feeling of fresh urgency and rebirth to them; each one explodes with possible stories, possible new lives. Chris writes that "the job of the poets is not to explain the Mystery./The job of the poets is to make the mystery greater." and indeed with his dynamic new book he has given us many more cloaks to wrap ourselves in and feel like Cyclops strutting on the crumbling catwalk arching over the Milky Way.

If you are not already familiar with Publishing Genius or you want to contact them to pre-order this great collection, they can be found at:

http://www.publishinggenius.com/

Shattered Wig 28 Sneak Preview #7 - "Conductivity" by Stephanie Barber

CONDUCTIVITY

one conducts electricity or symphonies, big bands or
trains or themselves with restraint.
some imagine the molecules of their body dissolving,
feet first and half greek,
into beams of light and being sucked up into
the myriad wires that criss cross cities.

they find solace in the sensation of their electro
magnetic ray feet lifting them
up off the earth and scattering flugel horn like through the city.

some find solace in the winning of bingo--
i heard that a woman named mary won at bingo last night.
i heard larry took her out for breakfast this
morning and sheila bought her a piece
of cake for her birthday which isn't until wednesday
but from what i gather sheila won't see her on wednesday.

that goddamned mary has all the luck in the world.
what do you bet me she'll wake up on wednesday
morning and at the foot of her glorious four post bed
with the delicate floral duvet
will be lying a white, baby tiger
who is house broken and will never grow up.

he will always be a 30 pound white baby tiger!

and probably he can talk too.
and listen--oh what a great and empathic listener that
eternally adorable talking baby tiger is.

women like mary have no time for imagined dissolvings.
that sort of nonsense is simply banal to a woman like mary.

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Stephanie Barber has had screenings of her film and video work at MoMA, NY, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, Chicago Filmmakers and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Her performances have been featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Museum of Art, The Haggerty Museum of Art and galleries and artspaces around the world.


Her book these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtracks of six films by stephanie barber was first printed in 2008 by Publishing Genius Press and a second, revised edition of it was just issued.
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November 20th Shattered Wig Night

Screening of the film "I Will Smash You" by Michael Kimball and Luca DiPierro.
Music by Sweatpants.
Readings by Ingrid Burrington and Blaster Al Ackerman.

Last weekend's Tinklers Publication party was so solid and well attended by attentive responsive humans that it almost feels sacrilegious to already be hyping the next one, but I will just use this bliss as the new plateau from which to build higher to altered consciousness.
The November show should leave no one disappointed, either.

I WILL SMASH YOU (2009; 50 min)
a documentary from Little Burn Films www.littleburnfilms.com
CONTACT: Michael Kimball
michaelkimball@verizon.net; 410-467-0966; 410-205-0075

I WILL SMASH YOU started as an open call on social networking sites. Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball invited people to choose an object that has some personal meaning for them, to tell the story of that object (Michael conducted the interviews from off-camera), and then to destroy that object. They filmed in Michael Kimball’s backyard for 2 days in the spring and the result is this documentary film.

A teenage girl destroys a papier-mâché version of her teacher's head to get the meanness out.
A man smashes his procrastination with a cement block.
A woman stomps on family heirlooms that have become a burden to her.
Another woman cuts up an intricate lace doily as a personal and political statement about the violence and hatred in parts of Bosnia.
A man sings a Christian hymn and then swings a baseball bat at the song’s notes in an attempt to resolve his complicated relationship with religion.
Another man burns his favorite double album, the one that he listened to over and over to get through his teenage years.
A man burns his discharge papers from the Army in attempt to exorcise his recurring nightmares about being forced to re-enlist.
A woman destroys a ceramic bust of Zeus that has an uncanny resemblance to her husband.
Another woman smashes her car with a crowbar because it is cursed.
Plus many more stories and much more destruction (and catharsis).

I WILL SMASH YOU is funny and moving, angry and strange (a clinical psychologist described it as a kind of smashing therapy). You have never seen a film like this.

Sweatpants is a vigorous band that brings the rock led by Publishing Genius magnate Adam Robinson. After they opened for Springsteen in Munich a year ago Springsteen said he was too shaken to do his five minute monologue opening to "The River" and instead he told the band to leave and performed a short acoustic set.