GOLDEN MILK by Sheila E. Murphy

Sheila E. Murphy

GOLDEN MILK

Sheila Murphy writes of “The stasis I so love that tunes me to attunement,” yet Murphy has always defined the tune, tuned the tune. She has, since I have known her work in the mid-1980s, been the consummate poet, a “poet's poet” because her chords, her lines, her diction, syntax, and formal perfection serve as a model, and we learn. But here, in GOLDEN MILK, she risks the untuning, the dis- or re-alignment, all the uncertainties of our world, our moment in the world. And she is very much in the world, its colors, its “woods and blooming pine,” its reality and its “shadow artistry.” She says we do things “within the confines of this monsoon weather” (something she well knows in her desert realm), yet she transcends weather, transcends “veritas” to move into possibility. Her sensuous clasps, kissing, and myriads of strings are well plucked here. Murphy has always been a brilliant poet and a poet of brilliance, in light and song, yet here she goes somewhere else, wings out, she flies, as she cries “fluently in your language,” leaves “work in my psyche constantly undone,” yet searches and finds “contingent acts of God” in the air through which she moves. She closes the book with a request that we “Stay here with me and within hearing touch that I may breathe again.” Listen to her breathe. You will breathe within the whisper through this glorious and golden book, which of course can not close, rather opens towards the light. —CHARLES ALEXANDER [The following is another review] In many cases and as aided by an in-beat lyricism, the silk of Murphy’s poems offers transparency through a lack of punctuation especially ending punctuations like periods. How appropriate given how she carves out new doors for readers’ imaginations, e.g. “any time you walk vocabulary words down lanes the empty sidelines shepherd riverways where livestock and the sunlight chasten quietude”—as in quietude being the opposite of continued engagement with those “vocabulary words.” When “vocabulary” becomes an adjective of “words,” one notices how words don’t need to rest in static definitions but can point to new ways to engage—a basic purpose to poetry if expanding vocabulary is a means of acquiring knowledge. These turns to re-exploring language as a haunting are illuminating, steeped as they are by experience and maturity. Murphy is incandescent through a prolonged and “effervescent fealty” to poesis that melts previously-defined words into something ineffable but sweet. —EILEEN TABIOS

131 pp.

$18.50 US

ISBN 9781938521645

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ENDNAME by John M. Bennett

ENDNAME

John M. Bennett

Poetry and Visual Poetry

141 pp.

ISBN 9781938521652

$16.00 US

Contents of this book include poems written by the author February through May, 2016. Interspersed throughout are a series of eight visual poems written in the author's signature calligraphy with rubber stampings. Sinclair Scripa aka Tara Verheide, wrote the following: "Ode to the work of John M. Bennett; I believe that the broom closet is where John M. Bennett's words hide. Bennett's language, immersed in buckets of wetness, emerge from the closet, carried by Fantasia's Micky Wizard's brooms in intense exponential rigor. They spill as poetry, endlessly over the edge and down the stairs of the effervescent fountains of life's dark and mysterious castles."

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TURPENTINE by Mark Young

TURPENTINE by Mark Young

Poetry, $12.00 US

ISBN 9781938521638

100 pp.

This masterful poetry extinguishes those artificial lines that distinguish a moment from a century. It is all here and available to us, Mark Young shows. “A late/afternoon/point of co-/incidence // this bench/in the/Botanical Gardens/shared/with Desnos/& Diogenes” reminds us nature crafts consciousness right back at us. “Black cockatoos . . .small white flowers.” This against the beautiful political purity of stating the truth in “damp trumpets.”

Where are the

submarines? I

shouted out. You

promised you'd

drain the swamp

so I'd be able

to see the submarines

that were lying

on the bottom.

Things come together from a distance above, revealing equally how far they are apart. Mark Young’s keen eye disturbs predictability. He knows from many angles refutation and commingling. Pachelbel’s Canon and mismatched feelings between a man and a woman.  -  Sheila E. Murphy

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OJIJETE by John M. Bennett

OJIJETE

With Prologues by Luis Bravo, Iván Argüelles, and Juan Ángel Italiano

“I consider OJIJETE Bennett's finest work yet with its graphics, typography, marvelous cacophony/mayhem of language, confusion of music and sound, tonalities and accents in dialects hitherto unimagined! Insanity masked as poetry in its most primordial semi-conscious origins namely the utterance of the sacred vowels and regurgitating them ad infinitum in cosmic misrepresentations.” -Iván Argüelles/ / “Bennett cultivates an experimental poetics which works through intermediality; his iconoclastic attitude places him outside the “what must be done” of the academies and the “what will they say” of the literary cliques. Today at 77 years of age he continues being the “seminal poet” perceived by Richard Kostelanetz decades ago; his production proliferates in a continuum which snakes among multiple languages, through which he moves naturally. His is a vital and subversive poetics, which uses no passport between languages nor is detained at the frontiers of what is already known.” -Luis Bravo“I consider OJIJETE Bennett's finest work yet with its graphics, typography, marvelous cacophony/mayhem of language, confusion of music and sound, tonalities and accents in dialects hitherto unimagined! Insanity masked as poetry in its most primordial semi-conscious origins namely the utterance of the sacred vowels and regurgitating them ad infinitum in cosmic misrepresentations.” -Iván Argüelles/ / “Bennett cultivates an experimental poetics which works through intermediality; his iconoclastic attitude places him outside the “what must be done” of the academies and the “what will they say” of the literary cliques. Today at 77 years of age he continues being the “seminal poet” perceived by Richard Kostelanetz decades ago; his production proliferates in a continuum which snakes among multiple languages, through which he moves naturally. His is a vital and subversive poetics, which uses no passport between languages nor is detained at the frontiers of what is already known.” -Luis Bravo

POETRY

$20.00

ISBN 9781938521621

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TOCHTLI by John M. Bennett & Tom Furgas

TOCHTLI: Four Pieces, by John M. Bennett, Edited and Realized for Piano by Tom Furgas

Includes the Original Score, the Edited Score, and an audio CD of the Furgas performance.

$10.00

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LUNA BISONTE PRODS

137 Leland Ave.

Columbus, OH 43214 usa