2.8.06

New online zines
Recently read titles
Two CDs



Kate Fagan has announced the new issue of How2

VOYAGE INTO GEOSPACE
Vol. 2 Issue 4

A galactic range of poems, critical reviews and papers... with special features on Pacific poetries, innovation in contemporary Indian writing,'outer alphabets' and London innovation, forums on small press publishing and bookarts, contemporary Chinese poetry in translation and tributes to Barbara Guest


PACIFIC POETRIES + edited by Susan M. Schultz + featuring Tusiata Avia + Pam Brown + Faye Kicknosway + Selina Tusitala Marsh + Deborah Meadows + Meredith
Quartermain + Barbara Jane Reyes + Shin Yu Pai + Hazel Smith + Teresia Teaiwa + Zhang Er + and an interview by Jane Sprague with Susan Schultz on Tinfish Press?

INDIAN INNOVATION * edited by Mani Rao *
featuring Jane Bhandari * Priya Surukkai Chabria * Sampurna Chattarji * Mamang Dai * Minal Hajratwala + Jam Ismail * Kavita Jindal * Smita Rajan * Mani Rao * Archna Sahni * Rati Saxena * Menka Shivdasani * Arundhathi Subramaniam

OUTER ALPHABETS = edited by Kate Fagan =
featuring Jill Magi = Claire Hero = Chris Turnbull = Beth Bretl = Kristi Maxwell = Heather Woods = Marthe Reed = Evelyn Reilly = Mary Kasimor = Britta Kallevang = Arpine Grenier = A. K. Allin = Sascha Akhtar = Mary Michaels = Jennifer Firestone = Cristina Bellodi = Masha Tupitsyn = Megan Jones = Claire Potter = Marie Buck = Ellen Baxt = Jenny Boully = Bronwen Tate = Michelle Detorie = Sarah Vap = Sarah Dowling

LONDON CALLING + edited by Redell Olsen + featuring Rosheen Brennan + Emily
Critchley + Kai Fierle-Hedrick + Kristen Kreider + Frances Kruk + Marianne
Morris + Sophie Robinson + Lydia White

CONTEMPORARY CHINESE POETRY IN TRANSLATION = edited by Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong = featuring Cao Shuying = Lan Lan = Ma Lan = Tang Danhong = Zhang Er = Zhang Zhen = Zhao Xia = Zhou Za

BOOKARTS FEATURE * curated by Susan Johanknecht
* with Sarah Jacobs * Lin Charlston * A C Berkheiser * Sharon Kivland * Heather Weston * Emily Artinian * Anna Trethewey

SMALL PRESS PUBLISHING FORUM = convened by Jane Sprague = Daniel Bouchard = Mary Burger = Allison Cobb = Kristen Gallagher = Jocelyn Saidenberg = Judith Goldman = Rachel Levitsky = Jill Magi = Bill Marsh = Anna Moschovakis = Elizabeth Robinson = Kaia Sand

Plus new work by Linda Mari Walker, Joyelle McSweeney, Ren Powell, Randall Couch

And reviews of Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Brenda Iijima, Catherine Daly, Thalia Field, Andrea Baker, Catherine Wagner, Ann Lauterbach, Elizabeth Willis, Lisa Fishman, Pam Rehm & Gertrude Stein


Editor: Kate Fagan (Sydney)
Managing Editor: Redell Olsen (London)
Designer: John Sparrow (Arizona)

Please visit the new How2 archives





Mark Young, editor of Otoliths has announced the second issue of this eclectic poetry and visual e-zine.

It contains work by Karl Young, Juhana Vahanen (translated by Karri Kokko), Martin Edmond, Rochelle Ratner, Louise Landes Levi, Cath Vidler, Michael Farrell, Christian Jensen, Ira Joel Haber, Bruce Covey, Jill Jones, Allen Bramhall, Derek Motion, Caleb Puckett, Sandra Simonds (a mini-chap —The Tar Pit Diatoms), Vernon Frazer, Pat Nolan, Donald Illich, J.D. Nelson, harry k stammer, Steve Tills, David Meltzer, Tom Beckett, Thomas Fink, Crag Hill, Ira Cohen, Carol Jenkins, Miia Toivio, John M. Bennett, Michael Rothenberg, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste Chirot, Aki Salmela, Sandy McIntosh, Michelle Greenblatt, Janne Nummela, Tom Hibbard, Marko J. Niemi, Phil Primeau, Kevin Opstedal, Olli Sinivaara, Nico Vassilakis & John M. Bennett, Michael McClure, Pam Brown, Leevi Lehto & Eileen Tabios.

Print on demand editions of Otoliths issue one and its associated chapbooks from Jean Vengua and from Ray Craig are available here.




John Tranter has announced issue 30 of Jacket.
It's packed to the gunnels,
or should that be gunwales, as usual.



David Prater announces the latest issue of Cordite - Common Wealth features over fifty new poems by Australian and international poets including Kris Hemensley, Kevin Brophy, Ban'ya Natsuishi, Carol Jenkins, Aileen Kelly, Rebekah Moon, Todd Swift, Diane Fahey and many more

Plus Candylands a special American poetry feature edited by Michael Farrell including poems by Catherine Daly, Kevin Killian, Del Ray Cross, Judith Bishop, Mary Jo Bang and more.

Features and reviews are now posted on a rolling basis - giving you even more reasons to check back to the site. Recent features include Adam Fieled on post-avant poetry and Leanne Hills on rooku and Melbourne's trains. Also, Paul Mitchell reviews Les Murray's 'The Bi-Plane Houses'




Three books I've read recently

                     Photo by Jean Mohr

John Berger is 80 years of age this year. There was a kind of festschrift to celebrate and explore his life and work in London, U.K. last year. I've read many of his books but I think my 'favourites' are To The Wedding, a book that deals with AIDS, and King, A Street Story a tale told by a dog who hangs around with a group of homeless people in a junk-filled wasteland beside a motorway in post-Bosnian-war Europe. This new book Here Is Where We Meet, typically, mixes genres and defies categorisation.


In Here Is Where We Meet, a man named John meets the ghost of his late mother in Lisbon. He travels throughout Europe, visiting the ghosts of those who have influenced his life. He meets a friend from his war years in London, in Krakow he meets the older man who introduced him to books and sex, and in Madrid he finds the schoolmaster who taught him how to write. The ghosts have each chosen the city for their afterlife that best suits them. John Berger's novel is an exploration of this past that makes both a person and a city or civilization. Here Is Where We Meet has received positive reviews with the 'New Statesman' saying, 'Formally, Here Is Where We Meet is recognisably a genre that Berger long ago made his own: the rich amalgam of novel, essay and autobiography.'

You can read multiple reviews of Here Is Where We Meet.






The publisher, Scribe, describes Herzl's Nightmare this way:
'Theodor Herzl's dream of a national homeland for the Jewish people was realised when Israel declared its independence in 1948 - a triumph achieved in little more than half a century. Yet it was made possible only through the deaths of millions of European Jews and at the expense of Palestinian society. Whatever their historical claim or emotional attachment to the land they came to rule, the Jews of Israel had supplanted another people - a people who would not forget what they saw as a grave injustice. Herzl's dream of ending Jewish insecurity, once and for all, would prove illusory.

While the story of the conflict between Jew and Palestinian in the past century has its share of both political and military and human triumphs, too often the recurring themes are those of lies and hypocrisy, myth-making and mutual demonisation and of a determined, energetic refusal to contemplate and acknowledge the other's history and point of view.

This important new study shows how little the dynamics of the conflict have actually changed; how eerily reminiscent today's antagonisms and falsehoods are of yesteryear's; how 'modern' leadership is anything but; and how much today's self-righteous intransigence owes to what went before. Peter Rodgers brings a rare understanding of the recent history of the region to explain with fair-minded clarity the nightmare of modern Israel and Palestine.'

The Australian author, Peter Rodgers, is a former journalist and an Ambassador to Israel.





Rachel Loden has kindly sent me the annual of poetry and poetics New American Writing - 24 for 2006.
It's a solid read - a mix of poetry edited by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover and with a great big barcode on the front cover, just below the underwater image from Bill Viola's video The Messenger.
There's a feature on Nathaniel Mackey, poetry by Nguyen Trai, Neruda, Holan, Lopez-Colome and many usual and unusual suspects - Pierre Joris, Rosemary Waldrop, Douglas Messerli, Noelle Kocot and Andrew Early. That list covers only some the contents.




Meanwhile, the music of Burkina Faso-born Cheikh LÔ and Malians Ali Farka Touré who died last year, and the griot Toumani Diabaté has been warming the wintry air in the little flat we inhabit in Rose Bay, Sydney.


The CD titles are Lamp Fall and In The Heart of the Moon


       Cheikh LÔ
       Toumani Diabaté and the late Ali Farka Touré


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