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Brenda Iijima : Daily Life in China
with an afterword by Lonely Christopher


Brenda Iijima's Daily Life in China teleports transhistorical personae together in a polyphonic masquerade. Free verse and one-liners shuffle together in a dreamy dialogue. Or as one character puts it, “Meanings multiply when I cling to hope's slippery surface.” Very strange bedfellows are made in a process Iijima describes as using “kaleidoscopic time as a tool of feminist revision inside history's contingencies.” Through this exquisite threading, Dickinson, Vidal, and Mao's ex-wives suddenly make sense as correspondents. Other ghosts and holograms creep in and out, including Mata Hari and a pair of talking oranges--all housed by an artist’s colony-prison caught in Buñuelian limbo. The theater of it all is underwritten by a keen sense of allegory as a way to both picture the corruptions of the present and to imagine otherwise. Daily Life in China reminds us of the capacious capacity of Poets Theater to reset and rethink the horizons of history and literature. —Felix Bernstein

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Brenda Iijima is a poet, novelist, playwright, choreographer, and visual artist. She is the author of nine books of poetry. Her involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of genre, mode, receptivity, and field of study. Her current work engages submerged and occluded histories, other-than-human modes of expression and telluric awareness in all forms. Iijima is the founding editor-publisher of Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs. She lives in Brooklyn.

Daily Life in China will soon be available for purchase from our distributor, Asterism Books.




E. Tracy Grinnell : portrait of a lesser subject


I suspect that E. Tracy Grinnell is an ecstatic. Yes, I'm using the word as a noun. Very few poets are able to sustain, and then communicate to others, the state of being outside oneself, or beside oneself, as she does. It's only from the experience of being formless that someone can embody multiple forms in time (all time). Poetry—the page—may not be the most effective at easing our human terror (that solid ground is an illusion, that we may all just be a sound that repeats...) however, ‘while in duration / even then / are elements of light."—Stacy Szymaszek

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E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of three books of poetry: portrait of a lesser subject (Elis Press, 2015), Some Clear Souvenir (O Books, 2006), and Music Or Forgetting (O Books, 2001). She has taught creative writing at Brown University, Pratt Institute, and in Naropa's Summer Writing Program. She is the founding editor and director of Litmus Press.

portrait of a lesser subject can be purchased from our distributor, Asterism Books.





Jamie Townsend : SHADE    


Jamie Townsend's SHADE attends to 'lust, lost, friendship' with a rich, expressive desire for the 'solidarity of raw physical closeness,' for something 'beyond subjectivity.' These poems—at turns dark, disjunctive, fluid, and expansive—know the complicity and power in wanting, and also the necessity in insisting on personal longing and emotional life. This book is an effervescent and urgent soundtrack to the struggle towards “a new life in honey after rent.”—Alli Warren

Jamie Townsend's SHADE is all torn pop-culture ligaments and mediated flesh, like early Cronenberg movies where the body itself is “the not the body.” Activated and made real by pop songs like Lionel Ritchie's “All Night Long,” and song-Events like Antony's cover of “Crazy in Love,” flesh is now really and only “the way we move tonight."—Masha Tupitsyn

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Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet and editor living in Oakland. They are the author of 6 chapbooks as well as the long-form collection SHADE (Elis Press, 2015), and SEX MACHINES (speCt Books, 2020). They are also the editor of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat, 2019) and Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk (Jet Tone, 2019). With Nick DeBoer they curate Elderly.

SHADE can be purchased from our distributor, Asterism Books.