Thursday, March 04, 2010

another post in which I shamelessly plug new books by my friends




The Range of Your Amazing Nothing
by Lina ramona Vitkauskas


Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-9822115-6-4
Lina ramona Vitkauskas’ poetry is richly textured and layered, a palimpsest pleasure. In THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING, Ashbery and Superman, Lorca and Jacqueline Bisset, Nancy (the comic strip character) and Forrest Gander all coexist and inform her most amazing verse.





Available March 13th:
LA Liminal
by Becca Klaver

88 pages, 6 x 9" paper
Price: $14.95 ISBN 1-888553-37-5

LA Liminal closely examines what lies beneath the “glatzy” spectacle of Los Angeles. Through the x-ray eyes of a failed Hollywood hopeful, with the advantage of distance and a sharp tongue, the reader gets a guided tour through an internalized, apocalyptic landscape. Transitional places and phases are imagined as both frightening and ripe, capable of producing a space where anxiety and creativity co-habit in the narrated realm of the speaker. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver’s probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.

“This is really exciting material. Becca Klaver grabs my attention with her use of the city of Los Angeles, and surreal, hyperreal, and reel/ real imagery. This is quite a ride!” — Jane Miller, author of Midnights