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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

List of Books to Review

Would anyone like to review one of these books? Payment is a free copy of the book.

Lynda Schor The Body Parts Shop (Fiction Collective 2) I found a reviewer for this.
A.B. Spellman Things I Must Have Known (Coffee House Press)
Larissa Shmailo A Cure For Suicide (Cervena Barva Press)
Mark DuCharme The Sensory Cabinet (BlazeVOX (books))
Michael Turner The Pornographer's Poem (Soft Skull Press) I found a reviewer for this.
Ronald Palmer Logicalogics (Soft Skull Press)
Ben Lerner Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press)
Marco Giovenale a gunless tea (dusie kollektiv project)
Nico Vassilakis Text Loses Time (Many Penney Press)

I found a reviewer for the Metcalf books, described below.
Also: In the mid-90's Coffee House Press published the Collected Writings of Paul Metcalf in three handsome volumes. They are presently on sale for $50, and I have an extra set. If any of you would care to dive into a few of his works and tell us what you think, I would be delighted. Let me know if you would like to own the books in exchange for a thoughtful, thorough piece on one of his works. 

Metcalf was a mixed genre writer who combined historical facts, fiction, and poetry into works of startling originality. Deeply influenced by the Black Mountain Poets, Metcalf moved the notion of "composition by field" into the 'novel' where time, place, and genre all became fluid.

One example of his writing: "Willie's Throw." The 'poem' is about Willie Mays' famous 1959 catch in deep center field, followed by his wheeling on his left leg to throw out a runner at home plate. Metcalf quotes from Mays, from Homer (after considering that Mays' throw resembled a discus thrower which Homer described), from the actual box score, and so on. The piece thematizes the way reading is always informed by other literary works and by facts outside the realm of 'literature'.

(P.S. Metcalf is a direct descendant of Herman Melville.)

7 comments:

  1. i wd love to write re paul metcalf--!!

    actauly via paul's uses of his grea grandfathers works in his own--esp n genoa--

    one might say that he turns the great grandfather into one of the children of his own aspect of ebing
    "the auuthor of one's days"
    i the sense of finding and bringing to light
    giving birth to
    perhaps
    a new melville

    ie his own son

    from the author of his days--

    just as in a peculir way one may think of hawthorne haunted by a predeccesor whom he tin urn haunts by writing him into his works as a presence of an absence who had been but too present in hawthorne's life--
    and so, making of him a presence of his own creation, absenting that other presence from haunting him--

    in this way as burrough also notes--to write is to write one'
    s way out--and to write those powers and ghosts which haunt one, IN--in to the writing where they no longer in control--

    but now haunting beings in the sense of art being a house that tries to be haunted as emily dickinson wrote, and not, like Nature, a Haunted House--

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good luck with this project,Jeff. It shows great promise.

    Best wishes,
    Tom

    ReplyDelete
  3. I got something here
    somewhere

    that Paul sent..

    I guess that I am getting old and dis-
    congecting

    OH WELL,

    it's only "Rock and Roll"

    cheers

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'd really like to review the Palmer book.

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  5. I'm interested in reviewing the Shmailo book. The title is intriguing.

    -Nicole

    (my contact information is on my blog)

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  6. I would like to review Mark DuCharme's The Sensory Cabinet. I'm a huge fan of BlackVOX.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Maybe since you didn't review the chapbook I sent you for that, you'd want to put it up for someone else to review? Or if not, I could send in the full length book if you want to list it.

    ReplyDelete