LA Liminal Now Available!

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THE LOWDOWN

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LA Liminal by Becca Klaver

Kore Press (March 2010)

88 pages, 6x9" paperback

ISBN: 1-888553-37-5

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BUY IT

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1. Directly from Kore Press via PayPal (best!)

2. Ask your local independent bookstore to order it (second best!)

3. Amazon (easy!)

4. If you're going to AWP Denver, visit the Kore Press table!

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WHAT SOME FABULOUS POETS SAID

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This is LA: Didion's, West's, Chandler's -- but it is also Becca Klaver's now, a beautifully-earned poetic residence -- " ... the new city /fire on the asphalt, antics in the firmament". Who knew there were poems this cock-eyed brilliant and convincing ("skate punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal") to be written about our most spectacularly illusory City? Who knew Klaver was going to burn up Paradise with a full-blown literary style, like a rocket-hot Santa Ana? What a radiant, wickedly-liminal debut, what a star show of sheer talent: hip, lit, hallowed. —Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California

A skeptical fabulist with a penchant for “monomyths” and “mythovarnishes,” it is no surprise that one of Becca Klaver’s favorite descriptions of L.A. would be Baudrillard’s “a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions.” Klaver revels in the interstices between proportion and dimension, jerking the reader while shifting her gaze back and forth from screens of all kinds to the personal space she feistily stakes out. Of course she knows the two are inextricably entwined. As if in cinema’s perpetual present, the ghost of L.A. keeps popping up, haunting her debut collection and, fittingly, mesmerizing the reader into a languorous state of mind. —Mónica de la Torre

LA Liminal gives us bright, lively, playful poems, that know how to cross over and under thresholds, perspectives, and transitions. —Joanne Kyger

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REVIEW COPIES

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Kore Press has a limited number of review copies available. If you would be willing to review the book in a web or print publication, please email me!

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SAMPLE POEMS

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EXT. LOS ANGELES – NIGHT

Flip-flops scuff bar to pier, sawdust to moondust.

Skate-punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal.

No fares. I’m rolling on eight pink wheels

fame-walking, parading the promenade. A float.

Fountains shriek mutely. I’m swinging a bouquet

of boutique bags. Lycra and velour blend seamlessly.

Clash kinda cutely. What happens next

isn’t deus ex machina, it’s only spring break.

Bienvenidos a Cabo, Tijuana, Mil-ee-wauk-ay.

Flick my fingers in the water, unstick my toes

and head east, (s)tarred goddess from machine.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GOTHIC

The Mountain Goats

wherein California

rhymes with warn ya.

Gillian Welch & Nina Nastasia

sprung from Hollywood cement

singing down down dark.

Joan Didion, anthropologist,

structurologist, expat.

Her Maria forever sunbathing

beside one of

David Hockney’s pools

where bleached light

spares only edges.

David Lynch’s

drive through the hills.

Manderley’s soundstage.

Fisher & Sons Funeral Home.

Buffy Summers

slayed by the weight of

the world’s perfect metaphor,

high school as hellmouth.

YOU BET

paradise haunts me rattles

me nightly sticks its

invisible pins in my lips

as I lie sleeping and when

this       sticky       stellar

melancholy seizes my sides

I fête it             pet it

prettyprettyprettypretty

inhaling mal de corazón

like the menthols I sucked

while palms arced absurdly

into the foreground of a scene

another       away       mine

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BOOK TRAILER

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Rick Moody Has a Band

It's maybe good?!

Omar Little, Meet Felix G. and Gilles D.

No kiddin':

As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) remind us, strictly individualized enunciation does not exist: "the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so." Omar is merely an expression of whole populations that exist exterior to The Wire's molar strata.

Lucille Clifton Tribute!

Part 3 of the Lucille Clifton Tribute at Delirious Hem, curated by Shanna Compton, is now up.

You should also check out Shanna's poems at No Tell Motel this week, as they are delightfully bursting / aslosh the midcountry!

narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers

Now available as a free e-book from Recycled Karma Press (PDF)

Contributors: William Allegrezza, Nick Demske, Kate Durbin, Adam Fieled, Elisa Gabbert, Brandi Homan, Becca Klaver, B.J. Love, Daniela Olszewska, Kathleen Rooney, Kim Gek Lin Short

It's like I edited it myself! But I didn't, Kristina Marie Darling did -- thank you, Kristina! -- and here's some of what she says in her editor's note about the status of prose poetry in 2010:

As the prose poem enters the twenty-first century, its writers have been borrowing from an even wider range of literary and cultural texts, which include nineteenth and twentieth century verse, popular fiction, magazine writing, scholarly articles, technical writing, and a variety of other source materials. I hope that this anthology will illustrate the ways the prose poem is expanding its horizons as the next generation of writers comes of age.

Little Tucson-Looks-Like-LA Video

TUCSON FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

(i.e., where I will see LA Liminal for the first time!)

The Tucson Festival of Books takes place on March 13 and 14, 2010, on the University of Arizona campus mall. A complete list of events is available at the Festival’s website. Don’t miss this program of poetry readings, taking place in the Kiva Room in the main Student Union.

Saturday, March 13

10:00 a.m. Charles Bernstein, Barbara Henning,
& Tenney Nathanson
11:30 a.m. Panel Discussion: “Chapbooks: How to
Make One, and Why You Should”
1:00 p.m. Kim Addonizio & Abraham Smith
2:30 p.m. Poetry Reading on the International
Stage, Modern Languages room 311,
with Tedi López Mills & Wendy Burk
2:30 p.m. A Celebration of Will Inman with
David Ray & Michael Rattee
4:00 p.m. Alice Notley & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Sunday, March 14

10:00 a.m. Jonathan Rothschild & Pamela Uschuk

11:30 a.m. D.A. Powell & Becca Klaver
1:00 p.m. Rigoberto González & Maria Meléndez
2:30 p.m. Sheila E. Murphy & Geraldine Connolly
4:00 p.m. Anne Waldman & Laynie Browne

Dana Stevens on Kathryn Bigelow's Win(s)

We all know what Kathryn Bigelow's double victory against James Cameron meant. Its meaning was overdetermined by so many circumstances: their genders, of course, and the fact they were once married to one another, but most of all by the two different moviemaking worlds that The Hurt Locker and Avatar represent. Bigelow beating Cameron was small beating big; art beating commerce; independent beating studio; small, restrained, thoughtful chamber piece beating giant, obvious, jerkwad extravaganza (and I say this as a non-Avatar hater, indeed a proud Avatar-enjoyer).

All of these meanings in turn redound to Bigelow's femaleness—sorry, Kitty, I want to move beyond the need to make that point as quickly as possible, but they do. If you'll just let me represent for my tribe for a moment here, Troy—and I know it's a feeling many men share, too, but, still—it's unbelievably gratifying to see a woman who does fine, small-scale work triumphing over a man who erects massive monuments to his own vanity. Bigelow's victory makes it seem like hard work is worthwhile, because someday someone will recognize it, no matter how loudly that asshole at the center table is talking about himself. And that's not a message for women alone (even if more of us are likely to get seated at the shitty tables).

--Slate

New Adult Swim Show feat. Neko Case, T-Pain, Doom

[watch]

Birds, LLC launches with Gabbert & Tonelli!

Here's what they've got for you:

Birds, LLC is a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world.

The first two books published by Birds, LLC are The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli.

SPECIAL PRE-SALE OFFER: Buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. Pre-Sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.

About The French Exit:

It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch.

--Caroline Knox

About The Trees Around:

Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.

--Graham Foust

NPR has great streaming music up right now

Pavement: Songs We Love

(see esp. "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" -- amazing AND timely)

The Austin 100: A SXSW Mix For 2010

(You can't choose what to listen to, but you can elsewhere: Fanfarlo, Real Estate, She & Him)

Oh and here's a tiny little Gillian Welch / David Rawlings concert video.

Pavement Reunion Tour Also Launched!

Go here to relive the magic. Unless you were there, in which case I will hound you for tales of the 90s I missed. See you in Central Park in September beeotches!

Gatewood Prize Launched!

Go here for details on Switchback's contest for a first or second book by a woman poet.