William Fuller

The human universe

Kendall Owens

Editorial assistant Kendall Owens reviews three strange, experimental poetry titles in this set of capsule reviews: Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe, Daybreak by William Fuller, and Cosmic Diaspora by Jake Marmer. On Marmer’s book, Kendall writes: Reading Cosmic Diaspora is reading music, as it takes on all of the qualities of improvisational jazz found in its accompanying album, Purple Tentacles of Thought and Desire. Speaking from experience as an immigrant from “the outskirts of the universe — provincial Ukrainian steppes,” Marmer describes how immigrants are stripped of their culture and molded into less “alien” beings: “they lawyered me out of my alien appearance / though couldn’t fix the accent.”

Recently in Jacket2

Topsy-Turvy

Charles Bernstein

from University of Chicago Press at the end of April
176pp, paper, ebook, and audiobook
(audibook available from the press and soon to be avaialbe from Amazon/Audible)

••Rain Taxi video launch with Tonya Foster, May 18
••With Chris Funkhauser at Poet Ray'd Yo, WQXC, radio, April 22, 2020 (60 min)
••SemCoop / By the Book video launch with Craig Dworkin, April 29 (YouTube)
•
••Jeremy Sigler, "The Yid and Yang of of Poet Charles Bernstein," Tablet (April 26, 2021)
••Thomas Fink in conversation with Charles Bernstein on Topsy-Turvy at Dichtung Yammer.
••Jefferson Hanson, "Tribute to the Critic of Tone Jam: Remarks Off Bernstein’s Topsy-Turvy," Altered States
••Paul Bove on "Echologs" at Harvard Univ. Press blog

The Bookseller: "Not set out to be a book about the pandemic, this rowdy collection of poems, performances and translations nevertheless speaks volumes about the upside-down world we have all found ourselves living in."

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of “covidity,” as Bernstein calls it in one of the book’s most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers.

Radical reclamations

Queer feminist collaborative acts by Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo

Margaret Rhee

Photos courtesy of Sophie Seita.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “reclamation” in the past few days.

Hilton Als on Gertrude Stein & Wallace Stevens

Al Filreis

During a recent one-hour interview/conversation with Hilton Als conducted by me, I had occasion to ask Hilton about a reference to Gertrude Stein in one of his essays. Here is a 4-minute excerpt from the video recording of the discussion. In another essay, collected in White Girls, Hilton does a close reading, here and there, of Wallace Stevens's poem about the muse, "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch." I asked him about Stevens, too, and that excerpt is presented below as well. The discussion was a program hosted by the Kelly Writers House for the annual Kelly Writers House Fellows program. Hilton Als was the second of the three spring 2021 Fellows to engage with the Writers House community, and many others, in three sessions. This was the third of those events.