February 27, 2011

Canarium Books (Robert Fernandez, Ish Klein, Joshua Edwards) & Dan Kaplan


Sunday, March 13
7:30 pm


The Waypost
3120 N. Williams Ave.
503-367-3182

$5 suggested donation

Robert Fernandez was born in 1980 in Hartford, Connecticut and raised in South Florida. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Iowa Writers's Workshop and the University of Iowa Department of English. We Are Pharaoh is his first book.

Ish Klein grew up in Long Beach, NY. Her book Moving Day will be out in 2011 from Canarium books. A dvd of her videos will also be released from Poor Claudia of Portland, Oregon. She's lived all over the world and now lives in Amherst, MA with the writer Greg Purcell.

Joshua Edwards is the director and co- editor of Canarium Books. His poems and translations have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, CROWD, Slate, Skanky Possum, and elsewhere, and his translation of Mexican poet Maria Baranda's book- length poem, FICTICIA, was published by Shearsman Books in September 2010. He's received grants and fellowships from the Fulbright-Garcia Robles Program, Vermont Studio Center, Zoland Poetry, University of Michigan, and Stanford University, where he's currently a Stegner Fellow.

Dan Kaplan is the author of Bill's Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Bateau, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, The Hat, and elsewhere. His website can be found here.


VAPORS

Summer hangs on until midwinter, when
reproach echoes a reminder that no softness
can exist without some sort of trickery.
Bruised and slightly faster than average,
the heart stands out in the last downpour
and won't be mentioned again until it stops.
Anguish and poisonous phantoms explode
in art, to restore it with their vapors,
their lights that correct color from above.
If the soul is a souvenir in human shape,
the sun is half its shadow and discloses
who is what when in public, but when alone
there are other, brighter stars, all like
contemporary prisons in every way
but the one that is memory. Fangs grow
from those stars. Day after day, the sea spits
up at the sky, always from new mouths,
and sometimes a cloud obscures the moon
just as two people step out onto a balcony.

Joshua Edwards


BONFIRE, JETTY 

I get on, nothing to contribute,
and stay happy according to the fire,
nothing to contribute, maze
of loose brick--in inclines
degenerate--bound (higher)--
raking the form from those leaves,
unbuttoning the shirt for those leaves . . .
For the wall, the monument,
Bolivar shattered into rags
& sunlight; unity, "it is our
distinct pleasure . . ."
As the hands topple--affection--
I was, I became, I preferred the sweep
of the water to that fall, I preferred
the jets of pale marble--& the women
they've said to me, & the men
they've said to me, between
the sun's wavering, the water, they say
and remain faceless and beyond my reach.


Robert Fernandez



+


I cannot accept flowers

but will open this morning.

Poised, everything is looking up.

Now I see those impressions
and where they come from.

I worry about reaching other bodies and feeling
like that moment's back.
So many formalities.

Many scientists believe humans
resent an interesting transition in time

and the explosion might leave a star.

O those above,
please don't cloud this peak.

Dan Kaplan



Eggheads and Rejects in and Around Science Fiction Society

And of course when I say 'reject' it is meant
as self-reject. There is only the self, empty,
no inherent meaning but for flow.

I have been in the hall where the screaming people
have not succumbed to television. So I tell you:
Grateful I am that you can be not so noisy

and with memory. I have undergone the reject
stamp, somewhere in the back of my head
my soul said yes to the scientists, yes to the scab.

I think it was a capture in a game
like isolated pawn.
No I do not like isolated pawn.

Rejects please meet up with me on disc 4.
Rejects please realize that we have to go slow
on four talk about the beautiful things of our time.

I will start: I loved the thought of Christmas in other places
lights and color- cold very cold, only horses.
It is remote. I give them the beautiful cigar boxed scene:

animals in outfits dance on mirrored glass
handiwork A++, the sky, diamonds in the glint
geometry, little bit of moss, going slow etc.

I will make them proud; maybe even frighten them
with my big magnifying lens glass head.
They will give me a coat to wear for the rest of my life.

In the real are the joke shows
-What are you doing?
Nothing.
-That's right nothing! Now all of you get to bed!

I heard tell about the horrible pink foam:
save us from the pink foam; the foam as fixative.
I've heard how the upper level is dreck

and therefore we are below dreck, we feeble people.
I tell myself I must not believe this honky speech.
Then dream, the shaved head with scab in the sun

then someone took a picture
how horrified was I?

over 50% takes the whole thing, it's proven.

The flea of a machine, conceive.

The circus I run to
an organized show of things practiced.

I will blow up them come back again.
Every little leaf of my skin
right back intact, my flea trick or trap.

There are many now who will shrewdly
be waiting with their cameras
I'm not happy to say

though I've fixed its' hold on me.
I've fixed it so they will not see-
these guards apart who love only the dogs for they have trained them.

Eggheads who will somehow help- they know they can do anything!
Eggheads who cannot conceive.
Eggheads who are from somewhere cleaner.

Why do they not get one of our pawns turned queen in here?
You from the prosperous provinces
do not know the thickness of our skin

nor its astounding capacity for callous
nor its borted capillariel cones
nor its consequence-bisect hearts

You who grew up around a soul
whereas we are coral
underwater, we build ground up

from almost nothing
which is what we love.
A ride to the movies, the ride home from the movies

Ish Klein