Jasmine Chatfield reviews The Chilean Flag

The interchange of the Flag between object and woman conjures unusual and arresting images: ‘stabbed by matadors’ flags she bleeds in a plastic bag’, a line that sounds almost out of a nursery rhyme, its jauntiness a mockery that serves to underscore the degradation of the country. The Chilean Flag is ‘used as a gag | and that’s why surely that’s why | no one says anything’.

Read more at Modern Poetry in Translation.

There Three collects Devin King’s early collections of poetry, previously published in now scarce, limited editions: CLOPS, These Necrotic Ethos Come the Plains, and The Resonant Space. Devin King is the poetry editor for The Green Lantern Press. His narrative poem, The Grand Complication, was published by Kenning Editions in 2019.

Meanwhile, a subscription to Kenning Editions will get you this new title and all of the others moving forward.

The third installment of “I can explain everything” is up, and it is devoted to Killian’s poetry and poets theater work. Read it all here.

“Is poets theater even a genre at all?” Kevin and David Brazil asked in their introduction to the volume they edited together, 2010’s The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater. … Kevin identified himself as part of a second wave of San Francisco Poets Theater because, as he told Heidi Bean, “there was a vacuum into which, I thought, I could harness some New Narrative energy. And gay it up a bit—it was a terribly straight place. Maybe not earnest, but straight.” He cast other writers and the rehearsal process was extremely short, perhaps meeting the day of the show to work out entrances and exits and minimal blocking. Light costuming may have included a robe or Halloween store cloak. His actors held scripts so they didn’t have to memorize their lines, but that meant they weren’t looking at each other. Their performances were varying degrees of amateur, which rather than inducing cringes provided for a vital sense of authenticity.

Attending the AWP conference (March 4-7) this year? Visit the Kenning Editions table (#933) at the book fair. All available titles will be on hand. You can name your own price for any and all books! Signings by Kenning Editions authors, at the table, include Jesse Seldess 10:30-noon and Mayra Rodriguez Castro 1:30-3:00 on Friday the 6th, also Olivia Lott 11:00-12:00 and Devin King 1:00-2:00 on Saturday the 7th.

Also, don’t miss our panel, Disciplinary Poetics: Room 210B, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level, Friday, March 6, 10:35-11:50. Moderated by Patrick Durgin, with papers by Tyrone Williams, Jennifer Nelson, Devin King, and Marty Larson-Xu.

This critical panel examines a few ways poetry intervenes and enhances—provides alternative models of research to—disciplines that constitute literature’s “outside.” This is a metacorrective to the once astounding but now flaccid notions of interdisciplinarity and genre hybridity. How do the disciplinary logics of biology, information science, philosophy, political economy, anthropology, history, geography, journalism, classics, visual arts, etc. react to a poetic working over?

We are also co-hosting a big off-site reading.

ACTION BOOKS, GREEN LANTERN PRESS, KENNING EDITIONS, and SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION invite you to an OFF-SITE READING by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar / Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro (reading Audre Lorde) / Joel Craig / Rachel Galvin / Katherine Hedeen (reading Legna Rodríguez Iglesias) / Cathy Park Hong (reading Seungja Choi) / Valerie Hsiung / Devin King / Olivia Lott (reading Soleida Ríos) / John Pluecker / Lara Schoorl / Jesse Seldess / Candice Wuehle at the Cherrity Bar, 302 Montana St, San Antonio, a two minute walk from the convention center / Cherrity Bar’s proceeds go entirely to worthy community non-profits / best Ramen and craft cocktails in San Antonio / admission is free / starts at 7:00 PM, Friday March 6

It’s a “ModPo Minute” or nine of them, in which two great readers of contemporary poetry delve into Craig Dworkin’s The Pine-Woods Notebook.

Watch here.

Over at Full Stop, an insightful review of The Dirty Text, by Soleida Ríos.

With reality itself at stake, Ríos’ materialization of dreams in literature is not mere narcissistic auto-analysis. Opposed to petrified, insomniac ideologies that prove increasingly inadequate to the task of averting societal implosion, dreams liquify the strictures of consciousness to yield the raw material of fresh understanding. That material must be recognized and refined, cooked into language, for understanding to develop far enough to reflect back into dreams and charge them with new material to reshape.

La editorial de Chicago Kenning Editions publicó una antología de la poeta y periodista venezolana que ha tenido un éxito inesperado. Faride Mereb, a cargo de la selección junto con Elisa Maggi, cuenta la historia de este libro…

…dice Miyó Vestrini: “Cada generación traduce de nuevo, y de nuevo, incansablemente, aportando sombrías o risueñas desmitificaciones. El texto llevado a contrapelo, se alborota, se aquieta, se enfurece y regresa siempre, lleno de otro con-texto”.

Read it here.

Patrick Durgin, author of PQRS, is reading with Alex Karsavin and Kristiana Rae Colón as part of their Open Door Series Tuesday, January 21, 2020, 7:00 PM. The event is free and ADA accessible. Details can be found here.

At Lithub:

I reread and taught Dolores Dorantes’s Style a compact epic-elegy about violence against women—possibly but not exclusively, in the US-Mexico borderlands. She wrote it in 2011, while waiting for her asylum case to be resolved, in Texas. It is, without a doubt, one of the best books of poetry written in this century. It has something of Henry Darger, something of Anne Carson, something of Eliot’s Wasteland. But in its utter uniqueness it’s not easy to place. It’s simply masterful.

ACTION BOOKS, GREEN LANTERN PRESS, KENNING EDITIONS, and SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION invite you to an OFF-SITE READING by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar / Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro (reading Audre Lorde) / Joel Craig / Rachel Galvin / Katherine Hedeen (reading Legna Rodríguez Iglesias) / Cathy Park Hong (reading Seungja Choi) / Valerie Hsiung / Devin King / Olivia Lott (reading Soleida Ríos) / John Pluecker / Lara Schoorl / Jesse Seldess / Candice Wuehle at the Cherrity Bar, 302 Montana St, San Antonio, a two minute walk from the convention center / Cherrity Bar’s proceeds go entirely to worthy community non-profits / best Ramen and craft cocktails in San Antonio / admission is free / starts at 7:00 PM, Friday March 6

Care of the Chicago Review of Books:

Vestrini’s poetry is something I never knew I needed so dearly. It is so raw and powerful (and translated so rawly and powerfully by Anne Boyer and Cassandra Gillig) that each poem, sometimes each line, feels like something that could shatter the world. Probably they do, as in the poem from which the collection takes its title: “Allow me, lord, / to see me as I am: / rifle in hand / grenade in mouth / gutting the people I love.” We should be so thankful to be able to read her in English, finally, and hopeful for more translations to come.

Grenade in Mouth is right here for you.