Denise Newman Reading February 28th

Denise Newman, author of Post-Apollo's The New Make Believe will be giving a reading at CCA's Oakland Campus on Tuesday, February 28th. She'll be reading from her collaborative work with the artist Gigi Janchang

Looks to be an exciting event!

New Poetry from The Post-Apollo Press!

THE POST-APOLLO PRESS is pleased to announce the publication of,


Vision of the Return
by Amin Khan
Translated by Dawn-Michelle Baude

Poetry $12 62pgs 978-0942996-75-3


Please join us in welcoming the newest member of our Contemporary Poetry Series and our latest translation, Vision of the Return, into the world! This collection marks poet, Amin Khan’s first U.S. Publication and Dawn-Michelle Baude’s return to The Post-Apollo Press (her own collection of poetry, Egypt was published in 2002).

To read an interview with Amin Khan, visit the post-apollo press blog at : http://postapollopress.blogspot.com/


Praise for Vision of the Return:

...Khan’s meticulous phrasings show us how language thinks experience into a multiplication of itself—which is multiplied yet again as the poems leap from French to English. Baude’s exacting and seamless translation does what all translation dreams of doing: it lets us think with a different mind. —Cole Swenson



Amin Khan proposes a poetry without illusions & in need of a tabula rasa—ambitious work that wants to reinvent a space of writing (& breathing). Weary of earlier generations’ lyrical excesses, Khan thrives on the quasi-laconic statement & proposes a language conscious of, & carefully focused on, its own movements... —Pierre Joris


Amin Khan was born in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence in 1956. He grew up in a revolutionary family, writing poetry, and nurturing interests in philosophy and politics. Studies at the University of Algiers, the University of Oxford and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris followed. As a diplomat and international civil servant, he held positions at the United Nations (New York), The World Bank (Washington, D.C.) and UNESCO in Paris, where he now lives with his family. His books include Les Mains de Fatma (Sned 1982) and Archipel Cobalt (MLD 2010), as well as the forthcoming Arabian blues (MLD 2012).

Dawn Michelle Baude is an international author, educator and Senior Fulbright Scholar with seven volumes of poetry, including Egypt (The Post-Apollo Press, 2001) and Finally: A Calendar (Mindmade, 2009). She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she authors the blog, “Mind in Vegas” www.lasvegasmind.com.

Order: online from Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org or directly from the press by phone: (415) 332-1458 mail: 35 Marie St. Sausalito, CA 94965
email: postapollo@earthlink.net. Publicity contact: Lindsey Boldt, lindsey@postapollopress.com

An Interview with Amin Khan Author of VISION OF THE RETURN, forthcoming from The Post-Apollo Press

Here at The Post-Apollo Press, we are eagerly anticipating the publication of our newest book and latest addition to our Small Series, which has featured such gems as Leslie Scalapino's It's Go/In Quiet Illumined Grassland, Lyn Hejinian's Happily, and most recently, Denise Newman's The New Make Believe.

Forthcoming in February of 2012 is Amin Khan's Vision of the Return, translated from the French by Dawn Michelle Baude, author of Post-Apollo's Egypt.

Amin Khan is an Algerian born poet who now lives in France. He and our publisher, Simone Fattal have known each other for upwards of 20 years. Simone first read Vision in its original French many years ago and has wanted to publish it ever since. Vision of the Return will be Amin's first book published in English, and to help us get to know more about him and his life, Amin generously arranged an interview with a long-time friend, Ahmed Djebbar.


An Interview w/ Amin Khan

by Ahmed Djebbar

Paris, July 31 2011

AD: At what age did you start writing poetry and it what circumstances?

AK: I started writing at the age of 10, one afternoon in the fall of 1966. I wrote a poem from beginning to end, without hesitation, the only poem I still remember and can, to this day, recite from memory. It was titled The Desert. At that time, I was attracted by large spaces. That attraction has remained an essential dimension of my imagination. I have always been fascinated by the desert and by the sea, which incidentally, are major landscapes of my country.

AD: Your first published collection?

AK: My first collection is called Colporteur. It was published in Algiers in 1980. It brings together poems written in the 1970s, poems of a young man…

AD: What was then the place of poetry in Algiers?

AK: A mixture of several things. The end of an era, of a system, which strictly controlled citizen expression including in literature and poetry. At that time, most Algerian writers published in Paris or Beirut. The Sned, which was a public enterprise, played its part in the censorship exercised by the State. However, thanks to the competence of the people who managed it, and of their skills in the literary and editorial fields, the books published by the Sned were of quality. There was a demand for quality and a real professional rigor. I remember when Colporteur came out, I had had with the director of the publishing house a real discussion about my manuscript, which had already been read by people such as the Poet Djamal Amrani. The discussion was about the opportunity and the “right” to a neologism in my first collection. I insist on this particular point because unfortunately, this quality of people has since disappeared… We were at the junction of a time of controlled freedom but also of competence and respect for the written word. It was also a time marked by the brutal power of money, of alienation and the decline of the ethics of the managers, and all this, within the same political and cultural system.

AD: Apparently, your poetry wasn’t subversive enough to be censored.

AK: This may be true. On the one hand, the national cultural scene gave a very modest place to literature in general and to poetry in particular. At that time, important Algerian writers were altogether excluded from that scene. Mohamed Dib lived and published in France. Kateb Yacine wasn’t writing any more poetry or prose and had started to write for the theater in “popular” Arabic. The new generation of poets, in the wake of Jean Sénac, either published in a marginal manner. And this included Tahar Djaout’s generation, which is also mine. Literature and poetry were marginalized. It is in this that Kateb Yacine’s approach was revolutionary. He quickly understood that people who would read his poetry or prose written in French wouldn’t be very many, but that on the contrary, the people would be reached through the usage of “popular” Arabic and by the medium of the theater. The regime perceived a greater danger coming from him than from any other poets even if they could also have a critical or rebellious discourse, which was confined to the margins of an already marginal and controlled cultural scene. I believe that the decision to not censor me was primarily due to the marginal status of poetry.

AD: You mentioned Djamal Amrani. What was your relationship to him?

AK: My relationship with him was episodic. He was in Barberousse prison during the war of Independence at the same time as my mother who was arrested in February 1957 (four months after I was born), during the Battle of Algiers. They didn’t know each other. I met him while at the university of Algiers in the 1970s. I then didn’t know much about his militant past. He was one of the readers of my first manuscript.

AD: What is your conception of poetry?

AK: The poetry I aspire to is limpid, understandable by most, and a poetry that translates a human experience, whether it is a historical, personal and/or collective one. Poets I admire the most, like Nazim Hikmet, speak of a total, complete, concrete reality with a clear point of view and a strong sensibility. For me, true poetry is capable of producing and projecting thought, has an intellectual quality to it, and is carried by an emotion without frills, flourishing, and mannerisms. I don’t like “poetry for the sake of poetry”. I don’t like formalisms or poetry as a political and ideological discourse. Poetry is a link established between the self and others by a same movement of emotion and thought.

AD: Have you ever thought of placing your poetic discourse in an existing school? And have you told yourself: I am part of an “intimate” or a “nationalist” school of thought?

AK: I started to write when I was a child, for reasons that are personal and mysterious, but without a poetic culture or knowledge of the existence of styles, schools and so on. I continued to write that way. Later on, influences and admirations came about. I consider my poetry to be neither intimate, nor nationalist, or any other “ist” for that matter. There is this personal approach which is for the most part inspired by my country, its history, its landscapes, by my personal story which is very closely linked to my country’s history in so that on both my mother’s and my father’s side, I come from a tradition of people who fought for the freedom of our people. I was born and I grew up in Algeria. My poetic images formed there. My travels allowed me to develop a wider vision, but that was also through the prism of my first poetic experience, hence my affinity, my passion, my dreams, on the side of the weak, the oppressed, the ones who fight for justice and liberty throughout the world, for Africa, my kinship to the blues.

AD: Now a question on the alchemy of the poetic discourse. My question came about after having seen images of you in China. I was interested in a remark that someone made in an account of your visit: “from time to time, Amine Khene stopped to attentively contemplate the gardens, the lotuses, and the medlar trees from Japan… Before he left he praised the exquisite Suzhou gardens...” How does the alchemy of your poems come about?

AK: I believe that when you are a poet, you have a certain way of looking at things. A personal view, that you never lose, that is always present and can manifest itself in many ways. Today, I can say that poetry is my real identity because it is through it that I see things and people… which has actually led me to make some mistakes… And of course, this doesn’t always translate in a poem. So, sometimes, you have a Chinese public servant, who probably is poet himself, who perceives that. I never thought however, that my emotion in front of the lotuses was so visible…

AD: You used the word freedom…

AK: I love freedom. However, more than freedom, I love justice. And so, I am not in an insoluble dilemma in how I live my poetry, my everyday life and my convictions. There is an interior harmony, perhaps a precarious equilibrium, which permits me to live these different dimensions – not without tensions, but without contradictions.

AD: What is the role of the deliberate lack of punctuation?

AK: Non-punctuation is a discipline. This discipline is a reflection of my conception of a poetic text, which should, in a spontaneous and natural way, have a rhythm and musicality without the need for punctuation.

AD: Your country is present through what constitutes a geography, but not a topography.

AK: Yes, this responds to a necessity of the poem. Most of my poems seem to not need the mention of any particular place.

AD: But they need references to impressions and general scenery?

AK: Yes because a historical and geographic context is present, though filtered by the junction of thought and emotion, which results in an abstraction level, more or less defined in the poem.

AD: Ok. What is your poetic “path “?

AK: I published Colporteur in 1980, poems of the 1970s. Les Mains de Fatma in 1982, poems of the 1980. Vision du retour de Khadija à l’Opium in 1989, poems written between 1980 and 1985, years in Algeria, as I perceived them anyway, which were a prelude to a catastrophe. The sudden irruption of money as a universal value was henceforth a dominant and was quickly destroying what had been built since the Liberation. Behind the so-called liberal discourse, there was a will to keep the worst of the regime, namely repression, authoritarianism, bureaucracy. And, the combination of the two materialized with corruption. This was on my mind when I wrote these poems. It was also a time when I was young, full of optimism, energy, love, and I had believed that Algeria was going to react and that my compatriots wouldn’t be led like that, to slaughter. I wrote within that contradiction: in a moment where I was in the upward curve in my life, while in front of my eyes, the future was collapsing.

AD: Here are a few statistics I made. I took the words you use. The words that come up the most pertain to the cosmos and the sidereal. When you have more human references, they are intimate and non-societal. Do you confirm this tendency?

AK: It is not conscious but at the same time, I take responsibility for it because, although not having a real culture in the domain, I am mystical. I think that’s what shows in some of my poems.

AD: You didn’t want to go there earlier.

AK: Because it’s not easy to talk about it. In my poetry, I am in, and I want a harmony, which is that realm, with elements of the cosmos, of the earth and the sky, and of humans, which are more or less abstract…

AD: This is confirmed in the 2^nd category of statistics where what is linked to the human is tragic.

AK: It is in that sense that historic experience is filtered though personal expression. When I think blood, it is not necessarily mine. Maybe I’m thinking of the blood of certain martyrs. Or when I think sorrow, it is not necessarily mine, or mine only...

AD: Last question. Why this personalization with a name, Khadija, which is so historically marked?

AK: I chose the name Khadija because at the moment I wrote the poem, it was for me the face of Algeria. I wrote it in 1985 with an intuition that Algeria was going back to a very unfortunate and very sad past. It is the vision of the return of Algeria to a time of stagnation, of despair, a tragic regression in history. This poem is a one on one between two lovers. It is also a terrible disappointment, a time of mourning, a promise, a country…

* Amin Khan was born in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence in1956. He grew up in a revolutionary family, writing poetry, and nurturing interests in philosophy and politics. Studies at the University of Algiers, the University of Oxford and the Insitut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris followed. As a diplomat and international civil servant, he held positions at the United Nations (New York), The World Bank (Washington, D.C.) and UNESCO in Paris, where he now lives with his family. His books include Les Mains de Fatma (Sned 1982) and Archipel Cobalt (MLD 2010), as well as the forthcoming Arabian blues (MLD 2012).

*Ahmed Djebbar is currently Professor Emeritus at the Sciences and Technology University of Lille (France). He is a renowned Historian of Mathematics, a former Algerian Minister of Education, and an avid reader of poetry. Amin and Ahmed have known each other for about 20 years.

Upcoming Events for Etel Adnan

* In contemporary world the political and financial conditions have not only diminished and deformed fundamental virtues of art, but have also rendered extremely difficult the substantial meeting and the flourishing dialogue between the artists of different cultures. Within the outside edges of contemporary political and financial reality, the 3rd International Meeting of Ancient Drama in Sikyon aspires to encourage the articulation of a free voice, to defend the significance of tradition, but also to support the demand of research and experimentation on theatre stage, within the framework of the contemporary dynamics. The 3rd International Meeting of Ancient Drama in Sikyon through the fundamental virtues of dynamism multi-centralism and theatrical polymorph looks at the future not nostalgically but decisively.

-Theodoros Terzopoulos Director, Artistic Director of the 3nd International Meeting of Ancient Drama.


Thursday August 25th
12:50-13:05
PODIUM
Etel Adnan (France)
Poet, Painter, Playwright
T o l e r a n c e
First Presentation // Read by Savvas Stroumbos
13:05-13:20 Discussion with Etel Adnan
13:20-13:30 Spyros Stamatopoulos, Mayor of Sikyonion
Praise
The Municipality of Sikyonion honours Etel Adnan


*DIONYSUS IN EXILE*
Dionysus in Exile
The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos
International Conference
organised by the Dept. of Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
23 - 24 September 2011
Griechische Kulturstiftung Berlin, Germany

For more than thirty years, Theodoros Terzopoulos has been producing a deeply political theatre, characterized by a persistent resistance against established norms and perceptions of body, space and meanings. In their performances, Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre employ disconcerting tactics, seek to destabilize and create ambivalence. Terzopoulos stages the representational instability as an uprooting and aims at a theatre in wandering that deprives the objects from their trivial positions and settings and mobilizes feelings of inquietude. As the familiar is absent, significations become suspended allowing the development of multifocal and centrifugal arrangements. In this sense, Terzopoulos’ theatre is in exile. The symposium will explore the wandering of Terzopoulos and his theatre in space and time, in order to describe the way in which the director and his theatre destabilizes the given and displaces forms and significations, to think about the »aesthetics of the exile« as a political act of entrenchment of the unfamiliar.

dOCUMENTA 13 : Featuring Publications by Post-Apollo Authors: Etel Adnan & Jalal Toufic

“100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.” Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz have initiated a series of publications driven by the logic of the mind-at-work, presenting, writing, and drawing scenarios that point outside the normative bounds of academic text production. In the form of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations between artists and writers, and conversations, they present models of connection-making between the private and the public, between the pre-stage of intuitions, the naming of ideas, and the key-chain of arguments that provide the reader with a singular insight into working methods. The series is formed through interconnections, so that the notebooks could be described as an “interregnum,” a temporary rupture in discursive intelligence; they do not direct us towards reason as such, but towards a different understanding of the role of consciousness. They appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and they are between 16 to 48 pages long. The contributors come from various fields such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature studies, and poetry.

They include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G. M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner. Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” series will be launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project.



006: Etel Adnan : The Cost for Love We Are not Willing to Pay

In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.

English/German
20 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2855-3
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3035-8

Etel was born in 1925 in Beirut and lives in Sausalito, Cal., and Paris. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley University. In 1984, she worked with Robert Wilson on his opera CIVILwarS and has exhibited internationally. Her recent publications include Master of the Eclipse (2009), Seasons (2008), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and In/somnia (2002). 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 006: The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay photo: Franck Guérin, 2011



Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically

In the second edition of his book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003), Jalal Toufic notes: “I was for years concerned with schizophrenia and with schizophrenics, who appeared in my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; and I am now interested in ‘the little girl,’ whom I expect to appear in my coming vampire film. . . . At one level, the Thirteenth Series in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, 1969, ‘The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ can thus be retrospectively viewed as a program for the work of a decade on my part.” In this new essay, he writes on the portrait of the pubescent girl, including in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “The successful portrait of a pubescent girl is not a rite of passage but a rite of non-passage; what needs a rite is not passage, which is the natural state (at least for historical societies), but non-passage, the radical differentiation between the before, in this case a pubescent girl, and the after, a woman.” From the portrait of the pubescent girl, Toufic moves to the portrait in general and its paradigmatic relation to the angel; thus the title of this notebook: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically. — Most of Jalal Toufic’s books are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com > .

English/German
24 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2860-7
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3040-2

Jalal Toufic, writer, artist Born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad, Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of, among other books, Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
(2009), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell
You (2005), Forthcoming (2000), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), and Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003). Most of his books are available for download as PDF files at his website www.jalaltoufic.com. He is a guest of the 2011 Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 011: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically Welcome to the info section of the dOCUMENTA (13) website. ... http://d13.documenta.de/panorama/#participants/participants/jala...
1

For more information about dOCUMENTA 13 visit their website.

WINNERS!

The Post-Apollo Press' very own MARIBOR won the 2011 Northern California Book Award (NCBA) for best Poetry Translation this Sunday!!!

The Northern California Book Awards were established by NCBR (formerly the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, or BABRA) in 1981 to honor the work of northern California writers and recognize exceptional service in the field of literature here in northern California. They are co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, the Center for the Art of Translation, the San Francisco Public Library, the Friends of the SF Library, the Mechanics Institute, and PEN West. The awards recognize excellence in newly published fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, and children's literature. The Translation Awards are sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation.


Heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Maribor's translators, John Sakkis & Angelos Sakkis. This award represents much deserved recognition of their refreshing and contemporary approach to their work with poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis.

You can read more about Maribor here at our website.

You can order your own copy of Maribor, directly from us by by:
email : postapollo@earthlink.net
phone : (415) 332-1458
fax : (415) 332-8045
mail : 35 Marie St., Sausalito, CA 94965

Or online via our fantastic distributor, Small Press Distribution.

The Phenomena Pre-Publication Special Offer from Your Two Favorite Small Presses : Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press.

In 2010 both Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press had the honor of working with poet Leslie Scalapino on what were, sadly, to be her last two books. The first, an epic work of prose poetry, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, published in August, 2010 by The Post-Apollo Press and now, forthcoming May 2011 from Litmus Press, a new and expanded edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets in 1989). This new version includes twenty-three new essays (only three of which have been published in previous collections) and seven additional poetic pieces.

During the Month of April take advantage of this pre-release deal by ordering both titles How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (in advance of its publication in May) and The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom via Litmus Press for only $30*. Through this deal, you’ll be buying Dihedrons and getting Phenomena for $1. Such a deal!

Checks payable to Ether Sea Projects, Inc may be sent to:

Litmus Press
925 Bergen St. #405
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Please include a printout of the announcement, or write "Phenomena Pre-Pub Deal" on the memo line of check.

*Domestic orders add $3 shipping; international orders add $10 shipping.

You can also follow this deal on Facebook


How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
Leslie Scalapino
May 2011 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-12-2 • $24
Litmus Press

In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager … Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future …
Joan Retallack

Praise for the 1989 edition:

“Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference between form and content, so now they would separate "“theory” from “practice,” and thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a thinking about thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and practice as irrelevant as that of form and content, mentality and physicality, art and reality.

Leslie Scalapino is one of a certain number of contemporary poets who have engaged in the struggle, not against distinctions but against the reification of false oppositions … these essays (works) are an essential testament to poetry and to its embodiment and the book is an important contribution to the singularity and wholeness of her project.” Lyn Hejinian



The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
Leslie Scalapino
August 2010 • ISBN: 978-0942996-72 • $29

Described by the author as referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland … composed by process of alexia, (word blindness) : unknown words were chosen by leafing through Webster’s Dictionary at random; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses . . . ; by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures — who inhabit the emerald dark . . .

The Divine Comedy for our age, with, if one could say, more humanity and
more derision.
Etel Adnan

This is not a poem or a story but a mystical vision.
Fanny Howe

Scalapino’s jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of
purest imagination. . . . it zooms with the elegance of a gazelle or a wolf . . .
Virginia Woolf.
Michael McClure