Aaron McCollough: “Preliminary Notes” & “A Stray Note” from Underlight

[Reprinted from Underlight, published 2012 by Ugly Duckling Presse]                                                                 

     In Contact with the Ground (Personal Sun)

I needed to match our feelings, mine and the other living

     things.

May I tell you how this became deadly without polluting you.

I reached out for the dog that lay on the downed wire that

      led to the lightning.

I put the wrong things in my body till my skin extended to

     harder surfaces. Canals.

Practiced the sacrifice. Bought a gun.

All this brought me closer to the ground,

     which I learned was inert.

I chose a suitable room.

But isn’t the whole plot a forest of suicides since Christ is

     hung on every tree.

My discovery, my watering descent.

 

     MERCURY

 Each soul to the quick.

 God’s center in this gutter, your reading glance.

The circumference, maybe nowhere.  Flaws in the windows.

Not strictly joy, when I reflect on creation.

The light of knowledge just leaches through vapor.

 All deals double back.

 The soul whatever, even if turning somehow occult.

 The mouth has potential but even closed it holds nothing in

       or out.

Mouths are more like rings than openings. Rings are groans.

Whatever I’ve done to harm you is the idea of men and women.

I’m trying to sound out the beginning so I can stand it.

How miserable, you lamented, is the soul that depends on a

     soul.

Having not yet noticed the problem’s reflection.

     Sulfur

Is there a badness in you like a pruned branch. That’s tough.

Think of the soul in bigger, rougher shapes.

Rough soul.The hawk wants a mate, so does the man, the lion,

     says the beast.

This is one way to self it out.

Messias can mean measured. Always found wanting. Quell.

     To kill or well out like water.

We feel something divine most under gravity and say yes,

     whatever you require.

This was the window shade drawn. That was an open one.

The burden of responsibility for your desire almost becomes

     my own.

I do adore the flaws near fitting. Narcissus blistering the

     surface.

The record is complicated enough to include sacraments of

     abuse, but no one says so.

Lord, make me large so I can see you in your smallness.

Barking like crazy at the threshold.

 

     A QUINTESSENCE

 

Fear of getting stuck makes the soul aware, forlorn.

The messenger, he ran; he took on need and got hanged.

     Sticking is constant.

Her look says no amount of permission can overcome the

     law’s resistance.

The window bounds everything, and all threats are

     announced.

Measured in a friend and jackal, our evenings narrow, but

     friends pass.

Permit these stops as the reed still quavers higher. Observe

     small minutes. Even if this means more defilement,

     unlatch the top again and put your face in the steam.

Not a failure of the tongue; what the mouth cannot

     encompass with every organ and orifice.

We are trying to make do with this dross, this sweat of the

     sun.

The tree branch a warbler. The incisor that’s plugged in the

     hide.

 

     A Stray Note, Sometime Called “Runout Groove”

The little chirruping birds (the Wren, and the Robin)

                         This one is like the dogs by the sea in Aesop
                         who cannot get at a floating corpse and therefore
                         try to drink themselves a path

They sing a meane; the Goldfinch, the Nightengall, they joyne

                         in a flowing stream water rolling on water
                         over a stable bed fleeing and pursuing
                         and driven by the following drawn by the former—
                         same stream, waters ever-changing

in the treble; the Blacke bird, the Thrush, they beare the tenour;

                         this one is like Gryllus, the boar who prefers it
                         to his prior infirmities, the law’s push-
                         pull, the reason’s civil argument,
                         order into which unlikeness obtrudes, always

while the foure footed beasts with their bellow sing a base

                         and the beasts are like children, they think this
                         is happening, not familiar,
                         not triumph, hardship, thing I’ve done wrong

and the man stands there strumming strings made from
    another beast’s gut;

                         the young boy in his lawn smiles making a sign
                         across his throat; from this line goes all difference,
                         an opening that’s easy to recognize

[note.  In McCollough’s fifth book it is clear again how his work calls up sources & resources that expand while they almost deny the personal nature of the work that the work also proclaims.  Of all this he writes: “As the titles of the ‘Preliminary Notes’ poems might suggest, I was thinking about the Alchemical tradition during their composition. My actual notes from that time indicate an engagement with the work of Thomas Vaughan (brother of poet Henry Vaughan) and also with pseudo-Dionysius. I was already deep into the writing and rewriting of the manuscript for the book that would ultimately be called Underlight but which was under the working title ‘Rough Soul.’ Although it’s probably true that all of my books are about ‘personal magic’ at some level, or about trying to work magic on the world and the self from my own isolated garden, 'Rough Soul'/Underlight is especially personal. The book is a house. It’s my house with the traumas, recoveries, and ecstasies marked in ways that are often obscure, and the ‘Notes’ poems offer the reader some tips about the rules of the house. I’ve always been drawn to Medieval/Early Modern micro-/macro-cosmological descriptive vocabularies. My house is a cosmic house. So, the ‘Notes’ poems are meant to offer tips about the rules of the cosmic house. The genius of the place is the Hebrew letter ‘Bet.’ First letter of the Torah. Number 2 in gematria. The letter with which the creative act can take place (as it does in Torah: ‘Bereshith’). The place for creation. House. ‘Rashi points out that the letter is closed on three sides and open on one; this is to teach you that you may question about what happened after creation, but not what happened before it, or what is above the heavens or below the earth’ (pseudo-Dionysius). The book questions and rejoices in what’s happened since creation as a way to feel out what might be above or below it. The seed is in the ‘Notes’ poems.”]

Celia Dropkin: from "In Her White Wake: The Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin"

Translated from Yiddish by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[From the bilingual book forthcoming from Tebot Bach Press]

My Hands

My hands, two little bits

of my body I'm never
ashamed to show. With fingers—
the branches of coral,
fingers—two nests
of white serpents,
fingers—the thoughts
of a nymphomaniac.

I Fall to the Ground

Like juicy red apples

my cheeks flare up
in the sun
with a red flame.

I hold on—barely—

to the tree, and not
today, tomorrow,
fall to the ground,
and when someone,
dazzled by my red
cheeks, lifts me up
from the dirt, he then
tosses me aside with disgust
and pity because
my heart is eaten up
by the worms,
and that fat worm—passion—
just won't crawl out
of my juicy body.
I am left, discarded, as it
rots me to death.

 Suck

You revel, I revel,

in us revels the God
who ruins everything,
who won’t forbid.

Hammer my hands,

nail my feet to a cross:
burn me, be burned,
take all my ardor

and leave me deeply ashamed:

suck it from me and throw it away,
become estranged, alienated
and go your own way.

You Plowed

You plowed deep

into me—fertile earth—
and sowed there.
Tall stalks grew—love-stalks—
with roots down deep in the ground
and golden heads to the sky.
Surrounding  your stalks, red poppies
amazingly bloomed.
You stood, suspicious,
and thought: Who planted poppies?
A wind passed through;
you had an impulse
to show it the way.
A bird flew through;
you followed him
away with your eyes.

Adam

Spoiled,

you had been fussed over
by many women’s hands
when I came across you,
young Adam. And before I pressed
my lips to you
you pleaded, your face paler
and more gentle
than the gentlest lily:
Don’t bite, don’t bite.
I saw that teethmarks covered
your entire body. Trembling,
I bit into you—you breathed
over me through thin nostrils
and edged up to me
like the hot horizon to a field.

In Sullivan County

1

Today in the first light hour after the rain,
the sun shines calmly, softly on me.
The fields in the valleys of Sullivan County
stretch far from the narrow path.
Somewhere out there trees turn blue
on the mountainside. The fields are sown
with raspberries, but it’s often not easy
to eat enough of them: you quickly lose yourself
in a labyrinth of outstretched green stabbing arms,
a braided, thorny wall of branches.
Yet after the rain there are tons of raspberries.
The sun shines calmly, softly on me.
Fresh milk awaits, but I don’t hurry to the farm.
My arm tears on the jagged twigs.

2

Yellow and red mosaic of fields,
cultivated rows of trees—
here and there a lone tree.
You can barely see the mountain.
A world hemmed in by trees,
the mountain obscured by fog.

3

No mountains—this is better.
The horizon gets farther, bigger,
in the soft distance.
My soul wanders, aimless.
In the soft distance, it blurs
and lightens. The whole world
swims in a tender gray.

No world—this is better.

My eye gentler, bigger.
In the tender gray,
no world, no earth.
In the tender gray,
I swim undisturbed.

4

I went up on the mountain and saw
fields like golden rivers
and trees on them like sails on ships:
green sails on golden rivers.
Close, in a deep, green abyss,
the road wound through the endless
seeming forest—a pink serpent
twisting between green sails of ships.
How insignificant, how small
was my valley, my little green valley:
it carried to me, as on wings of wind,
a lamenting sound.
My baby was calling to me.
But I was welded to the mountain,
and for a long time sorrow swung around me
and for a long time the baby cried and called out
until the valley heard my steps again.

New York at Night by the Banks of the Hudson

Seeping from the cells of your skyscrapers

is golden honey, light,
through millions of windows,
as through the cells of gigantic honey-combs,
you can see golden honey,
human honey, light.
Immense bees built their beehives here,
a forest of beehives,
and filled them until they overflowed with honey,
human honey—light.
The Hudson at night is black as pitch,
and the honey flows
and swallows the pitch on the shores of New York.

*          *          *

Trees like these with golden fruit,

a forest of golden fruit,
gigantic cedars
hung with lanterns.

[note. Among the more experimental Yiddish poets in early twentieth-century New York, Dropkin (1887-1956) was significant both for her exploration of open verse as a compositional strategy & for her assertions of female desire beyond the limits observed by most of her contemporaries, both in Yiddish & in English. Born Zipporah Levine in present-day Belarus, she wrote first in Russian but turned to Yiddish on arrival in New York circa 1910, where she participated in the already active Yiddish poetry world, including the experimental In-Zikh (Introspectivist) poets, while developing more markedly transgressive themes than theirs: sexuality, depression, guilt & longing, fury, violence, even at its limits the representation of sado-masochism & other taboo, once hidden subjects. Her work in that sense is a further confirmation of Kenneth Rexroth’s observation of a Yiddish avant-garde & Futurist presence in his own early years in New York: “A good case could be made for the claim that the best writing done in America in the first quarter of the [twentieth] century was in Yiddish. I don’t think it’s really true, but it is sufficiently true to be passionately arguable in one of those passionate arguments that used to sprinkle the whiskers with sour cream in the Café Royale.” And despite Kenneth’s charmingly flippant tone, the active historical presence of two languages & poetries in a single American city is itself worth noting. (J.R.)]

Jerome Rothenberg: Some Addenda to “A Seneca Journal”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[In advance of the forthcoming reprint by Nine Point Press of my 1978 book, A Seneca Journal, the following are some of the poems omitted from the original publication & now ready to be seen anew.  Other work from the Seneca years has appeared since then in Shaking the Pumpkin & elsewhere. (J.R.)]

 

A Seneca Memory

At Harry Watt’s old place

above the Allegany River
Leo Cooper tells me:
“I could have been the first
“American Indian
“rabbi    were it not for my love
“of pork                                                                                                                                                
circa 1972, Salamanca NY

For A Seneca Journal: “The Grandfather”

Bucktooth, about middling height,

spare & thin, hair cut close to his head, quite white.  He
     resides near the mouth of  Bucktooth Creek
8 miles above Coldspring on the northern bank of the
     Allegany near his cabin are the Bucktooth Mills
     Bucktooth Hotel & Bucktooth Postoffice
So his name is likely to have a local celebrity long after he

     shall have passed away.

Memo.  Old Bucktooth died June 1851.  Ben Williams letter,
Sept. 4, 1851.

In the Direction of the Equator but My Feet Still Facing North

pale eyes.  the tree

is friendly
friend Jerome    he says
my watch says
3:15.
I walk to the old corner of Main Street
past the Seneca
Theater & cross
the bridge.  hello
you citizens of
Salamanca.
hello the dog says.
he is the tree’s friend
& mine.
he is a silly yellow
color.  eyes are shining
lightly into eyes.
in Yucatan the skies are never
empty & the trees
of Yucatan talk Mayan.
someone tells us:
you are going on a trip.

Two Sky Poems

1

the sky is a large
animal
             we live
under its tongue

2

my tongue is a large
animal
             grunting
is how we see the sky

The Beaver 1-12

THE BEAVER (1)

They shall eat it.

THE BEAVER (2)

In her womb.

 

THE BEAVER (3)

And the sand lizard.

THE BEAVER (4)

He comes running.

 

THE BEAVER (5)

Someone slain.

 

THE BEAVER (6)

Their father.

 

THE BEAVER (7)

His sins.

 

THE BEAVER (8)

A harlot.

 

THE BEAVER (9)

In the heat.

 

THE BEAVER (10)

He shall lead.

 

THE BEAVER (11)

The prophet.

 

THE BEAVER (12)

And he built.

[composed by gematria]

Ritual Poem

dead dog –

– my enemy –
dead stone
dead stallion
– my deliverer –
dead mind
dead metal
dead appendage
– king of promises –
–  my burden –
first & foremost
–  my dead star –

Heriberto Yépez: from The Empire of Neomemory

Translated from Spanish by Jen Hofer, Christian Nager and Brian Whitener

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Excerpted from the edition published by Chain Links in 2013]

There are Laws: Taking Down the Pantopia

“There are laws,” begins Olson’s essay “Human Universe” written in Mexico. How does one create the illusion that there are general laws? The foundation of time reduced to space is, precisely, the supposition that there exist laws that function in the same way (homogeneously) across all (heterogeneous) times. If different times are united by the same laws, then, these times are not separated and thus form a single space.

This belief is the basis of totalitarian thought, in all its forms. Television fabricates images—and society fabricates images for television—and the spectacular relations between these fragments produce the fallacy of a commonly held reality: the space of a “nation,” a “territory,” an “epoch.” The takeover of the center of Oaxaca by striking teachers, the flooding in Ciudad Juarez, and civil resistance in Mexico City, in co-existence with the war between Libya and Israel, the state of maximum alert in the United States and England—these events are represented in discourse and the news as symptoms of the same phenomenon, as events related to each other. The pantopia has penetrated deeply into our semi-consciousness and is situated at the border between the unconscious and conscious, in such a way that it permeates, in both directions, human thought. It is thus the Interzone or semi-consciousness that has become the key site in our present-day psyche. Pantopia seems so “natural” to us that doubting that its events are related and even considering that each event might obey its own laws in the space-time in which it is realized, as distinct from other space-times, can only appear a strange or at least very unusual idea.

Olson was not entirely wrong. He had come to Mexico looking for the traces of another concept of time. His error was not having been sufficiently patient to generate a personal time that would be capable of grasping Mesoamerican cultural notions of time, of not leaving behind the time of USAmerican English as he knew it. Moreover, Olson encountered an indigenous culture with an essential similarity to his own: a culture that had mutated towards a notion of imperial time. We have discussed before the ideas of time of the Maya and present-day indigenous communities in Mexico and the United States and we know that the Maya fluctuated between ancient notions of time as plural and an imperial political decision of forming a total calendar—their model of kin. The Maya were a civilization based in a single time, or a set of universal laws which ruled in the same way, macro and micro. However, the greatness of the Maya was that their notion of time captures many models of time—each one functioning in accord with its own process—under a mysterious macro mathematical and poetic model. For the Maya, kin functioned as a cycle of time that turned around itself—and that periodically changed its motor, its god—and this changing cycle functioned as a component of a larger cycle, composed of various smaller cycles, and this new cycle as a component of another larger cycle… And thus, for the ancient Maya time was a series of distinct cycles placed one inside another, concentric or centripetal times. In the Mayan chronovision, imperial notions of time—pantopic—are combined with nomadic understandings. Mayan hegemnemic Time could be defined as an enormous machine of molecular appropriation of other micro-cultural-times.

Imperial ideas transform time into space. Nomadic ideas, on the other hand, tend to understand time as a multiplicity of times. These times—tribes of monads—are autonomous from each other, each one obeying its own laws. (The notion of a single spatialized time is linked to the historical appearance of the State.) The Rarámuri, for example, developed a model based on the existence of more than one internal time, sustaining the existence of various “souls” that simultaneously co-existed within the human body. While the Huichol believe that when a pair of nomad groups meet two different times collide. This understanding of time not only functions to plumb the profound nature of the human animal but also to impede the formation of a unitary political order, a system of centralized control.

For cybermnenetics to be possible, a civilization has to choke off the nomadic notions of space-time and to institute a general calendar, a hegemonic, spatialized notion of time, “universal.” The Maya and Aztecs conserved nomadic notions of plural space-times, although in debased and manipulated forms, used to justify an Imperial centralized order, based in numerical science, just as in Oxidental empires from Greek antiquity to the United States. In the roots of these empires there exists as well nomadic notions of time as polytopic and polychronic, wherein time is represented in diverse forms, precisely, because there is not one time but rather many times, with each forming its own world.

Writing is, certainly, pantopic.

What imperial documents—from official histories to poets and mass media, from films to nightly news—do is make sequential images of distinct space-times, creating the mediatic simulation that they belong to the same visual horizon of events. The creation of the illusion of a total space-time simultaneously shared by all is a lie that builds up a social coexistence. It is this fantasy that I have called pantopia: the notion of a total space, individuated from every other space, which contains all things, all events, ordered under the same set of laws, under the same empire. This idea, of course, is the cruelest of all of them. The pantopia is absolute control: the pantopia is the inexistence of time.

In the pantopic fantasy, time does not annihilate things, allowing death to liberate the world from itself and allowing the world to be always incomplete, which should be the idea that governs us, incompleteness not Totality. Without death, beings are allowed to share, cryogenetically, the same site, forever. In the pantopia, time as individual measure, as autochronology, in which each being lives its own chaosmos, is not allowed to exist.

In the pantopia, time as death and the successive forgetting of each world have disappeared, and time as its own-law, as individual-time, not determined by the laws of another time has disappeared as well. The pantopic is the fantasy of creating a space—whose avatar can be a poetics or a global empire—from which nothing can escape.

As in the house in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, once one enters, for some unknown reason, one cannot leave. In Olson, the pantopia took the form of not a totalizing agglomeration (as in the theory of the black hole or the vortex in Pound or in the Aleph of Borges) but in the gaze. Again and again in his work, Olson speaks of a gaze that can hoard everything it falls upon. The pantopic is thought throughout his work more and more in terms of a screen.

In the present state of civilization, the pantopia is reenforced daily by television. I am not referring exclusively to the device that plays the role of pater familias, but to television in a broader sense and of which the contemporary television set is but a rudimentary precursor of coming televisions. Television makes it possible—as state legislation, monolinguism, and writing once did—for distinct space-times that do not share common laws to appear to possess one via the daily compiling and updating of images that produce the cinematographic illusion of real time and a common omni-space, amongst what are, in reality, dissimilar realities, separate-cosmos.

If images are the units of pantopia, then to undo its regime it is indispensable, before anything less, to impede the formation of images, thereby destroying spectacle. Impeding the function of empires signifies preserving languages alive and increasing the number of them, as in the passage from one language to another—in the impossibility of translation—supposedly common notions, shared images are destroyed, undone. Languages are the primordial defense against the pantopia, as each language is its own chaosmos. And if not letting go of memory produces pantopias, ergo, the cure is to forget.

[note. Over the last two decades Heriberto Yépez has emerged as a new & provocative voice in Mexican letters & as a thinker about writing, art & performance, & a range of literary, philosophical and social issues.  Over that same span he has published in a wide variety of genres – fiction, poetry, essays, translation, criticism, & theory, & has proven to be a controversial literary artist & critic in Mexico, while the range of his critical interests covers both Latin American & North American issues, extending into works of experimental & political interest on both sides of the border & beyond.  His innovative writing & his critical essays have won him – at latest count – some fourteen awards in Mexico, including four national literary awards over the last decade, & he has received increasing recognition among experimental & younger writers in the United States.  With all of this in mind the distinguished Mexican critic Evodio Escalante has written that “there is no question that Heriberto Yépez is one of the most powerful literary intelligences now active in our country.”

               The Empire of Neomemory begins as a sometimes harsh critique of Olson’s experience of Mexico but expands into what the Chain editors describe as “a breathtaking investigation of the relation between USAmerican poetry and Empire that careens idiosyncratically through the great men of empire—not just Olson, but those many other men who also traveled to Mexico, such as William Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, and Ray Bradbury.”  Writes Yépez himself in summary: “Olson is part of the American dream, the dream of expansionism in all its variants. It is with the purpose of understanding this empire that I have written this book. Olson in and of himself does not interest me; I am interested in his character as a microanalogy for decoding the psychopoetics of Empire. Philosophy tries to comprehend reality through a discussion of abstract concepts produced by floating masculine heads (decapitalisms); in contrast, what I want to understand is the present via concrete bodies, historical microanalysis via the hunt for biosymbols. Using the text, I want to see through it to glimpse the substructure and the superstructure.”  And the Chain editors again: “This work is a dismantling of Olson, and of empire, and yet it is also clearly an inside job, a book that could only be written by someone who had spent hours thinking with and through—and beyond—Olson.” J.R.]

E. Tracy Grinnell: from “body of war / songs” with a note on the process

after Danielle Collobert
 

the crowds
evisceral     subjects     sun-setting
in the sun
clashes waste
            depopulating fray

afraid

hurled

_____________________

  

the revolt

executed

in spasms

projected

projectiles

                        human or plastic

embraces 

   shadows grounding

                        succumb

in flashes of emptiness, rhetoric

 

galleries of disaster
so the remove
of frozen images

subterranean

habitation of
because earth absorbs shock
waves

hands absent horizons
knock
impotently against
the walls
around

_____________________

the deep tombs, sink under

stones arranged

the stones and gold

light 

      from another source

pierces the front

of solitude

the passage

suffering
encircles

infiltrates

the reflection of an abyss
in the morning
frost

_____________________

 

futility mirrors

the inertia

of the face filtered

through an obsolete

medium

the wind

brushes

hands, raised

carries off voices

raised 

what we hear of it

the nightmare

sounds off

the infant is born

into an aging infantry
carried aloft
against the earth

inscribed

on again
against a cliff’s edge
temporal
inflammatory

the fire nourishes

by what it consumes

____________________ 

attention of destruction to

           cradled into uncertainties

   the corpsman logs

what lays before

him 

torrential forces

force of machinery’s

           hard certainty 

searches the seas

peopled with the coins

of our present 

gardens

are erasures of

penetration
immovable figure
situated

equivalent

deaths
of heros
who are

they

errant mutations

achieved

Note.  On “body of war / songs”

In 1961 Danielle Collobert self-published an edition of poems titled Chants des guerres. Some years later, she attempted to destroy all copies of the book. I came to these particular poems via It Then, via her Notebooks 1956-1978, and recently Murder, first as reader and then as editor/publisher. After the recent release of Murder (translated by Nathanaël, published by Litmus Press), I went back to Chant des guerres to read them in the original French (they are not translated into English). “body of war / songs” is that foray into reading her early poems.

As with my other explorations/experiments in translation, I consider translation a mode of reading, and/or reading a mode of translating, and both as a mode of writing. “body of war / songs” is very much after Collobert, temporally, as homage, but also as exploratory translation. Initially, I ‘faithfully’ translated the terse minimalist poems, leaving spaces for words I did not know. Then I translated some of these spaces, using a dictionary, or making a homophonic translation. Then I simply wrote through the text as if it were my own. Words shifted, altered, moved across the page, filled in, departed.

There are a couple things that interested me about this process of translating/creating – that Collobert’s writing was so familiar to me, that the words, the syntax itself, felt familiar. Not just because I have known her work since 1998 or so but because of poetic affinity, of writing the body in/into the poems. The sense of body, of the alienation of our bodies even in community. A sense of bodies moving through the world and touching / not touching. The remove. Also, it struck me that these poems written in 1961 could have been written now, or at any time in the last 50 years: what has actually changed? War is an ongoing, perpetual, mode. How pressing that these poems – Collobert’s – know this. It presses, as relevant, but also as pressure to write it, rewrite it.

In some ways, the distance between my poem and hers, the distance in time, in language, in other removes, between our poems and the wars they address, is also the distance between ‘zone’ and war zone. The remove of the U.S. from the carnage it enacts, the remove under which we in the U.S. are able to move about. Under drones, yes, fearful in the face of a lack of agency or ability to alter, yes, but with a very different sense of security. So when the carnage punctuates the remove, as it did in Boston most recently, we must translate this proximity into compassion, empathy – a deeper level of comprehension.

[E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001). An excerpt from Helen: A Fugue was published alongside Leslie Scalapino’s A Pear / Actions Are Erased / Appear in volume #1 of Belladonna’s Elder Series (2008). New and recent work is collected in the manuscripts Hell Figures, portrait of a lesser subject, and All the Rage. She is the founding editor and director of Litmus Press.]