Click through to read the full review of Derek White’s MARSUPIAL, the thirty-ninth in this full-press review of Calamari books.

MARSUPIAL, the second novel from Calamari Press’s founding editor Derek White, is more of a novel proper than his debut book, and more digestible as such. While White’s POSTE RESTANTE read as a series of vignettes held together mostly by its insistence on travelogue, MARSUPIAL gives us a clearly threaded narrative and a hook to pull us along its corridors:

One by one the light particles accumulate in this living room, buzzing wasps painting an impressionistic scene, shedding light on Marie-Yves’s dysfunctional furniture, for the most part discarded movie props. I could be anywhere, but here I am in this living room, this “habitation,” this building, on this street, in this city, in this foreign country—a country I have only read about in magazines or books or seen in movies. And my brother is a crawdad junkie and I am slated to be his stand-in. I struggle to make sense of all this, and to make sense of Marie-Yves Curie by her décor and dysfunctional furniture props. And to make sense of my brother by his choice in her. I continue reading into it.

Told via mixed genres, blending standard first-person narrative, faux definitions and encyclopedic entries, screenplay excerpts, film production callsheets, and other errata, White builds the story of movie-making in a foreign country where the lives of Marie-Yves and two brothers entangle (read: ensnare). But rather than be the simple story of lives intersecting, MARSUPIAL is a novel that continually evolves, characters turning in and out of crawdads, living lives that seem like films, making films that mirror their own lives, and amongst it all the tension of brother on brother, lover on lover, where names transform and characters figuratively (and literally) ingest one another:

When they found Juane, I was in the vulva bed wearing Crawdaddy-O’s outfit. I had thrown up all over myself and was mumbling that I had “swallowed pieces of our mother” and was “burning from the inside.” According to Troy, Juane was ranting on about “the changes going on inside of me,” that whatever was incubating was now hatching, and when they took Juane across the street to the studio hospital, I insisted I could “explain everything”…

MARSUPIAL is a dynamic read, and is evidence of Derek White’s growth as a writer, both in terms of how he handles a narrative that is expansive and corrosive yet with a straight-forward root system, and how his language has developed into more looping and overlapping, with a broadened vocabulary palate and a refined strength in structural presence. The pull of MARSUPIAL is much more magnetizing than White’s previous novel, which is what good writers strive for in each new work, and all of it makes me even more excited for his forthcoming ARK CODEX ±0, which you can and should be reading up on here.

But, as the ARK CODEX ±0 isn’t available yet, pick up a copy of MARSUPIAL here to get your Derek White on.

Up next: Gary Lutz’s STORIES IN THE WORST WAY & SLEEPINGFISH 8.

39 down, 2 to go.

Click through to read the full (super-mega) review of 3^RD BED [7, 8, 10, &11]

I feel like I would be repeating myself to review the final four issues of 3^RD BED – each one is fantastic, brilliant in its own right, but I would be saying the same for each: wonderful words, beautiful layout, amazingly sad that this journal wasn’t able to continue and simultaneously fortunate that these issues are still available via Derek White and Calamari Press.

So, instead of repeating infinitum, I’ll tackle each of these volumes in short by listing their awe-some contributors, an excerpt of a stellar piece that caught me off-guard, an excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was, my single favorite sentence from the issue, and an excerpt from a piece that should sell you that particular volume in one-fell swoop.

3^RD BED [7]

Contributors:

Steve Gilmartin,Eric Baus, Kira Henehan, Christine Hume, Diane Williams, Andrew Levy, Laylah Ali, Rachel Zucker, Amy Day Wilkinson, Jeffrey Levine, Walter Map, Lisa Pearson, Jeffrey Encke, Matthew Kirby, Laynie Browne, Gary Amdahl, Ryan Murph, Norman Lock, Arielle Greenberg, Anna Joy Springer, Julia Elliott, Michael Burkard, Kathryn Rantala, Keith Driver, Ander Monson, Susan Lander, Nina Shope, Michael Savitz, & T. R. Hull

An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:

from ‘If You Cannot Work the Eskimo Yo-Yo’ by Christine Hume

If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo in frigid midnight

air, you must walk around and create a map inside your

muscles. There, a secret heat makes a secret flight, making

air remember birds. Your absurd hands will go to seed.

Only the other day, your pacing made something stop

sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.

An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:

from ‘I, Your Man, Your Man’ by Diane Williams

There I am, I, your man, mixing food with utensils. My challenge is inflamed by herbs and gummed by fruit rich in Vitamin C. Such rigors are interrupted by event involving neither cocaine or cigarettes.

My single favorite sentence from the issue:

from ‘Night, Mystery, Secresie, and Sleep’ by Gary Amdahl

A strange little tune, breezy but suggestive of the inner lives of clowns, one associated perhaps with ice-skating, with red-cheeked young men and women holding each other’s hips and hands while their bladed feet cross snicking and rasping according to the metronome of what is possible, over the thin ice of what is not, dance hall rhythms inconsequent in themselves but burdened in some incomprehensible way and accompanied by such dark and unlooked-for harmonies as one can hear only in silence and the presence of death.

An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:

from ‘Subtraction Is the Only Worthwhile Operation’ by Ander Monson

This story is a twin, a bomb, a heart within a heart. Is seen through Sunday glass and on TV. Is watched from outside houses without sound. Is found scratched in the cover of an old Webster’s with a knife or with another semisharp instrument like a compass or an edge of glass.

3^RD BED [8]

Contributors:

Forest Aguirre, Laylah Ali, Louis Aragon; André Breton, & Phillipe Soupault (trans. by James Grinwis); Kaoru Arima, Bridgete Bates, Kenneth James Calhoun,Walter Cummins, Ruth Danon, Danielle Dutton, Margaret Frozena, Bob Harrison, Hiroshi Kan, Daniil Kharms (translated by Matvei Yankelevich), Michael Martone, Corey Mead, Henri d’Mescan & Davis Schneiderman, Kim Parko, Heidi Peppermint, Andrea Read, Elizabeth Robinson, Fish Ryan, Tomaz Salamun (trans. by the author and J. Beckman), Selah Saterstrom, Catherine Scherer, Kan Takahama, Christian TeBordo, Tristan Tzara (trans. by Nick Moudry), Keith Waldrop, Rosemarie Waldrop, & Mark Yakich

An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:

from ‘HmmBird’ by Kenneth James Calhoun

The brother sees this. A wedge drops out of his face, as if hacked out with a single swing of an ax. This is a smile. Here is what he has been waiting for: an opportunity to reject the possibility of imagination. When he plays animal games now, he plays the possum or the rattler. He loads a gun with tacks.

An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:

from ‘Explain’ by Kim Parko

Explain the potential causes.

If your heart is both loose and beating rapidly. It is good to identify why. Practice by lying in bed. Concentrate on the looseness and the beating. Think of three vastly different concepts. Some choices: houseplant, cobweb, unmade bed. One will certainly exacerbate the situation.

My single favorite sentence from the issue:

from ‘Love Is a Thing that Wakes Up in the Middle of the Night and Burns Down the House’ by Tara Wray

The couch was not burning, just the fires, and so I tried to sit.

An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:

from ‘A breath of Fresh Death’ by Christian TeBordo

A boy awakes to the smell of death, and for a moment, it is his own. It is the smell of his own death. But he is not nauseous. The smell of death is not nauseating when it is your own, when the death is radiating from your nostrils. Your own death smells like withered flowers doused in gasoline, or so I am told. The boy’s death smells like withered flowers doused in gasoline.

3^RD BED [10]

Contributors:

Forrest Aguirre, William Allen, Kelli Auerbach, Melissa R. Benham, Jedidiah Berry, Kate Hill Cantrill, Kevin Caron & John Cotter, Tim Conley, Patricia Eakins, Joshua Edwards, John Fried, Diana George, Arielle Greenberg, May Hall, José Hernàndez & Luis Buñuel, Kirsten Hilgeford, Joy Katz, Lady Mannequin, W. B. Keckler, László Krasznahorkai (trans. Gabor Komaromy), Bill Kushner, Gary Lutz & Thomas V. Davis, Mitchell Marco, Michael Mejia, Bruna Mori, Jennifer Moss, Marc Phillips, Jonathan Pickering, Pedro Ponce, Daniel Rounds, G. David Schwartz, Sims, Joseph Starr, Peter Tunstall, Deb Olin Unferth, Wendy Walker, Timothy Watt, John Dermot Woods, & Tara Wray

An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:

from ‘The Question’ by Peter Tunstall

I wake to the red light of St Lupine’s day just dawning, just like that first kindling, and bits of my tongue are scattered over three continents, and the left cloud is just spitting, and the right cloud is biding its time. And it’s cold now, and that sort of thing.

An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:

from ‘The Pornographers of Lilliput’ by Pedro Ponce

The pornographers of Lilliput are easily impressed. They train their cameras on the boring and banal, mistaking bulk for a form of grand obscenity. Dazzled by the vast proportions of the ordinary, they fail to distinguish between acts of pragmatism and passion. Everything is foreplay, everything is consummation. Minutes into filming, the director is already flushed, breathing heavily, barking Get that—Get that—and that—

My single favorite sentence from the issue:

from ‘Bacanal’ by Luis Bunuel and Jose Hernandez

The puddles formed a decapitated domino of buildings, of which one is the tower they told me about in childhood, with only one window as high up as a mother’s eyes as she leans over the cradle.

An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:

from ‘The Sordid’ by John Dermot Woods

(I can’t excerpt this here as it is a comic, beautifully reproduced in this issue, but it is the first comic that John Dermot Woods published, and as such, definitely a piece that you should own)

3^RD BED [11]

Contributors:

Anna Lewis, Rachel Beth Glaser, G. C. Waldrep, Hillery Hugg & Adriana Grant. Chapbooks, Excerpts & Novellas by Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz & Tom Davis, Corey Mead, Sam Michel, Kathryn Rantala, Nina Shope, Laura Sims, Heidi Lynn Staples, Steven Stapleton & Jane Unrue.

An excerpt from a stellar piece that caught me off-guard:

from ‘Take Car Fake Bear Torque Cake: A Memoir’ by Heidi Lynn Staples

I wasn’t conceived in take car fake bear torque cake. My mother almost died giving take car fake bear torque cake to me. My father confessed to some myriad of take car fake bear torque cakes to her on the night of my take car fake bear torque cake. Not exactly an auspicious take car fake bear torque cake.

An excerpt from a piece that I knew was going to be amazing and then was:

from ‘Fugue-State’ by Brian Evenson

Startled, he must have exclaimed aloud, for Bentham turned his head slightly in the direction of the intercom speaker. The blood in one socket slopped against the bridge of this nose. The blood in the other spilled down his cheek, gathering in the whorl of his ear.

My single favorite sentence from the issue:

from ‘In Urbem’ by Nina Shope

in the night, whole blocks collapse, building upon building falling to the basement.

An excerpt from a piece that should sell you this issue:

from ‘You Eat Pancakes Every Day’ by Rachel B. Glaser

We had thought for most of forever that the Bee-Gees were young black women, wiggling wide hips and waggling their eyelashes at each other. So now, now they are bearish looking white guys instead? They look like next-door-neighbors. Disappointed isn’t always the right word. Sometimes there isn’t a right word, there’s just the thing.

So that is that. The 3^RD BED empire, one I wish was still growing but that was halted by the financial burdens of the world; one though that is, thankfully, still available (for the time being) here.

Up next, to close this mother out: Derek White’s MARSUPIAL, Gary Lutz’s STORIES IN THE WORST WAY, & SLEEPINGFISH 8.

Click through to read the full review of James Wagner’s THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS, the thirty-fourth in this full-press review of Calamari books.

I don’t understand James Wagner’s auralgraph poems. I don’t. There, I’ve said it. This doesn’t mean I didn’t try. I tried. I read THE FALSE SUNRECORDINGS backwards. I read it out loud. I read it carefully. I read it as slowly as I could. I read it looking, listening, wanting. I tried and tried. But still, nothing. They are beautiful words, these poems, but I don’t get them, together, as poems.

I don’t understand Wagner’s work, and so this book escapes and eludes me, and I fall short of being able to review THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS in a way I’d like. Others have understood more about THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS, so I went to learn from them, but I still don’t get what ‘ear-writing’ / homophonic translations really do or how to read and understand them (if there ever is such a thing as understanding or meaning in poetry).

So, as I can’t do this book justice, I’m going to let Joyelle McSweeney highlight what she can about Wagner’s work:

the false sun recordings begins with a group of fifteen short lyrics whose titles—anagrams? foreign and technical terms? bits of onomatopoeia?—seem not quite parseable as English: ‘Klart,’ ‘Oremoth,’ ‘Chilema.’ These titles signal the dense and endlessly interesting texture of the lyrics they emblazon. ‘Veste,’ a thirteen-line poem, begins:

The phantom vacuum of. Rain in the locative, the
Relaxing incisors. All bullets deprive the gold from
Sunning. The peach trees reach like a banker. [ . . . ]

This is an evocative description of relentless rain, rain that in its flaccid insistence is like ‘relaxing incisors,’ like ‘bullets’ that make one feel stuck in place and make that place into a ‘phantom vacuum.’ The repetition of ‘v’ sounds only drives this point home. Once inside the texture of this never-ending rain, we then see through the rain like a lens: The ‘peach trees’ seem to reach up towards their own gold fruit, and in reaching for that gold are ‘like a banker.’ Thanks to the deftness of what I can only (but am loath to) call ‘craft,’ we see through Wagner’s written world like a lens that makes that world even denser, even (visually) clearer.

One may see rain in the last image of the poem, ‘the dreary Syracuse ambulance corps,’ but one also sees and hears ‘corpse’ in this line, the corpse which a (literally, emotionally) rained-upon body has been rendered in the course of the thirteen lines. This subject ‘I’ seems to surface in rather than to utter the poem, not appearing till late and then going from second to third to first person from line to line:

As if the peanut butter would never leave his ridge.
Pointing to areas of relief on my body. Your body
Is an index they want you to embrace strangers in
Western apartments of. I may not be much, but I
Am all I think about [ . . . ]

These lines form a semi-coherent push-me/pull-you-type dialogue about stability and wholeness, by turns humorous (the peanut butter stuck in the mouth, the narcissism of the last two lines) and serious, for the body itself is a puzzling ‘index’ whose location grows more uncertain with each mangled adverbial phrase: ‘an index they want you to embrace strangers in/Western apartments of.’ By the end of the poem we do have a corpse but it is perhaps a paper corpse, washed apart by the rain.

The poem, however, remains coherent because of its tone, the knitted-togetherness of its sonic effects, and, importantly, its iconic lyric status on the page. ‘Veste’ is a thirteen-line poem with short, pentameter-looking lines. It doesn’t matter that they are not actually pentameter: ‘Veste’ and the other poems in this group look like sonnets and have the confident, echolocating quality of Keats’s odes. Wagner’s use of line is also traditionally lyric: enjambed, varying musically between long runs and short staccato phrases, using breakage and flow to control the current and pitch of the poem. He uses line plus syntactical repetition-with-variation to create suspense and release, which in turn produces a dramatic whole. In ‘Eyth’

Meat-house-valium. I superceded. I filmed the
Film was forgetting itself. I was forgetting the for-
Getting was forgetting. We allow ingots. Their
Wrens. They rubbed us in a wrong way. [ . . . ]

In this ‘I’-based poem, enjambment allows Wagner to pull his sentences off in unexpected directions, to make the word ‘forgetting’ spool like a piece of film and thus somehow shore up the equation between the two. Sonic dismemberment allows him to produce ‘wrens’ and ‘ingots’ from this reel of words, and to put them into motion based on their ‘r’ and soft ‘o’ sounds, ‘rubb[ing] us in a wrong way.’ Ironically, in a poem finally seemingly uttered by an ‘I,’ it is the ‘I’s ineptness with the medium (film) that sends the poem off the sprockets of mere reportage and allows the poem to ‘remember’ that it is sounds that produce words and not the opposite.

Read the rest at the Constant Critic, and thanks to Joyelle for letting me steal her words to replace my lack of understanding.

Want to try your hand at this? Get yourself a copy of James Wagner’s THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS here.

Up next: A super-sized review of the final four issues of 3^RD BED, Derek White’s MARSUPIAL, Gary Lutz’s STORIES IN THE WORST WAY, & SLEEPINGFISH 8.

We are almost done. Chug-a-chug-a.

Click through to read the full review of SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ, the thirty-third in this full-press review of Calamari books.

SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ is:

David Wirthlin, David Hollander, John Dermot Woods, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Rick Moody, Miranda Mellis, Patrick Leonard, James Reich, Paul Kavanagh, Elizabeth Ellen, Kate Hill Cantrill, Brian Foley, Nathan Pendlebury, Christopher Chambers, Ladee Hubbard, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Eugene Lim, Kim Chinquee, Dana Miceli, Marin Buschel, Nick Bredie, Ed Taylor, PF Potvin, Nan Burton, Kathy Fish, Norman Lock, Kathryn Regina, Cliff Benston, James Grinwis, Astrid Cravens, Dawn Raffel, Tara Rebele, Joshua Ware & Rachel May, Ali Aktan Askin, & Jac Jemc

I read SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ entranced. And I kept asking myself, what does it take to get into an issue of SLEEPINGFISH? The answer: write f***ing great words.

from David Hollander’s ‘A Voice from the Cancer Ward, Circa 1991’:

The woman on this ward is in any form to be treated, no. They must draw the catch in this moment. Draw the plug as it is said. All that shouting. I want to say, I know that it is a hospital and a certain quantity of pain must be envisaged, but this, this is equal to torture. What do they do with this woman? When she shouts I am breaking inside. Can’t I take it, no. I hold the pillow above my head and am moaning, so that I only can hear it, the moaning inside my ears. This is better than that of a woman! Sometimes I take two pillows, and one goes behind my head and beyond my ears and the other on my face, like if to choke myself. Don’t I want to be choked, no. But I don’t want to hear this woman more.

As with all previous issues of SLEEPINGFISH, this one includes art and text, both poetic and fiction leanings, and a well-balanced diet of straighter narrative and experimental / language-twisting works. All of the writing in this volume of SLEEPINGFISH is good – all of it – but there is more to it than that, more that makes Calamari Press’s flagship journal the excellent and prized monster that it is.

from Elizabeth Ellen’s ‘Discernible’:

This woman has a lump in her right breast, small but discernible. There is no mistaking the lump. The lump was not always there. The woman performs regular self-exams, standing in the shower or lying flat on her bed, as she’s been shown in numerous doctors’ offices and women’s magazines. Typically she is shown this before her annual pap smear, right after they weigh her and before they ask her to pee in a cup. The last time she had a pap smear the lump was not there, or was no yet discernible.

I can only imagine each of these pieces skidding across the virtual submissions desk of Derek White, and the happiness of finding the next right piece from the next right writer for the next boundless issues, because each piece in SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ seems to fit beside the next, each story or poem or artwork bleeding and collaborating in some sense with those around it. And this isn’t blowing smoke, this isn’t a**-kissing – these latest issues, both ZZZ and 0.9375, are worth every second of reading, every penny of consumption, and are the reason that SLEEPINGFISH is what it is in our literary community.  

from Ali Aktan Askin’s ‘Transparencies’:

everything grew out of our desire to see the things hidden int eh gaps of perspective. we studied the methods proposed by history, the methods of inclusion. we toyed with the gadgets of men, meant to measure, record, and explain the major forces. we dwelled in the unforgiving hole of physics, and wrestled the calculations of generations and generations of thought, we studied the accounts of men at the edge of experience, the involuntary worlds of imagination, and the hardship of return, the endurance required to see through time.

I can’t quote it all. There is greatness from Norman Lock, beautiful words from Jac Jemc, a wonderful selection from Carmen Gimenez Smith, and James Grinwis’ ‘Village’ excerpts are fun as hell to read. Don’t take my word for it, get yourself a copy of SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ here and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.

Up next: James Wagner’s THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS, Derek White’s MARSUPIAL, & 3^RD BED [7].

Also: Try dipping chocolate donuts in orange juice. It is good.

Click here to read the full review of Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect, the forty-third in this full-press review of Calamari books, which appears at Newpages.com.

Copies of A Mortal Affect can be consumed here.

Next up: SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ

Until then.

Click through to read the full review of James Lewelling’s TORTOISE, the thirty-second in this full-press review of Calamari books.

This is my second time chewing through James Lewelling’s TORTOISE, and I say chewing because I find Lewelling’s writing style both accessible but meaty, thick. The thickness comes, for me, from repetition, and Calamari houses a few writers who take this tact – Peter Markus for one, Robert Lopez for another – and I’d add Lewelling to that mix for repetition that is both purposeful and dense. For instance, a chunk like this:

Lillian once told me about this guy whose daughter drowned in a pool, I recalled, looking down at the blue water in the pool. He thought she was asleep. He was reading a book somewhere. He put his daughter down for a nap and then went off to read a book. He thought his daughter was asleep but instead she was awake. She got right out of bed and wandered off to drown herself in the pool. She was a small child. Falling in and whatever thrashing around she did hardly made a splash. She did that while this guy was reading his book. He didn’t have a clue. He thought she was sleeping. He thought she was sleeping right up until he wandered up by the pool and found her there face down in the water.

In tandem with this repetition, there is a young (though less-angst ridden) Holden Caulfield type voice in the narration of TORTOISE that I couldn’t shake while reading. There is a dream scene with tall grass and falling, there is the perpetual notion of being bothered:

There were flies everywhere. The people lived with the animals and everything was covered with flies. The flies were maddening. They put me in a state. I hate flies. I couldn’t think about anything else. All I could think about was the flies.

Remind you at all of the ‘fuck you’ sequence in Catcher?

Or in other places, like here:

I worked at a pharmacy. I hated it. I didn’t mind working. I hated sitting in front of the counter waiting for someone to approach. I could chit-chat with the other guy when he was around, but he wasn’t always there and I didn’t always have anything to say.

There is even a bit about a writer who constantly felt harassed about his books, to a point where he started keeping his work private. Sure, there isn’t a hooker scene or a carousel, but the narrator is traveling to see a father-figure to supposedly heed advice or significant information, and there is an enormous amount of talk about family and the individual vs. society – and really this is not all to say that TORTOISE is writing Salinger already completed, but simply to note a parallel thread in this novel that I couldn’t ignore while reading, so there you go.

Though it has moments that slow down a little too much due to the repetition or the turtle-speed of the plot (pun-intended and intentional by the author as well), TORTOISE is a book that I enjoyed overall and that is worthwhile from a variety of angles. What to do with the Catcher parallels? I’m not sure. Maybe you could read this book and let me know? Get yousselffff a copy here.

& then, there will be: SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ & James Wagner’s THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS.

I listened to Led Zeppelin’s How the West Was Won while writing this, just fyi.

Click through to read the full review of 3^RD BED [6], the thirty-first in this full-press review of Calamari books.

3^RD BED [6] Contributors:

Lara Glenum, Ben Miller, Mark Laliberte, Lucy Ives, Stacey Levine, Marc Palm, Geoff Bouvier, Lisa Jarnot, Steve Potter, Kate Bernheimer, Billy X. O’Brien & Ronald Palmer, Brian Evenson, George Lichtenberg (Translation by Sam Stark), Osip Mandelshtam (Translation by Kevin Kinsella), Greg Bachar, Anthony Hawley, Amina Cain, Laura Sims, Ed Skoog, Thomas V. Davis, James Wagner, Catherine Kasper, David Ohle, Noah E. Gordon, W. B. Keckler, Jeffrey M. Bockman

Just as with my review of 3^RD BED [5], I start this one by saying how beautiful 3^RD BED [6] is, how nice it feels to hold, and how well-designed and artfully wrought the content is. Also, as with 3^RD BED [5], I want to mention the extremely close aesthetic relationship to our still wonderfully kicking Caketrain – more on that later though – for now, some highlights of 3^RD BED [6]:

from Stacey Levine’s ‘Pat Smash’:

As a youth, Pat played a game that often made him tingle. He held a short male doll before him, wondering who—he or the doll—would be killed first. He waited. From the porch he saw the heavy car which bore his father home. He ran to his room, always the same, the world around him fresh as a bare red embryo before the moment it was gashed.

from Brian Evenson’s ‘House Rules’:

The first of the house rules, the only one Horst ever manages to recall, is No leaving the house. He only remembers because it is posted on both front door and back. Though he can no longer read, that portion of his brain concerned with reading having been compromised (Hatcher’s language), Horst recognizes the signs. Rarely, however, does their significance strike him until after he has tried the handle of the door in question, found it locked.

from David Ohle’s ‘Ratt’:

While his mother returned to her estate, Moldenke took a sooty-ceilinged, three-walled room at the old Adolphus, furnished only with a pull-down bed, a wicker chair, a table, a radio, and a fusel oiled lamp that puttered and smoked.

Lying in the pull-down his first night, he listened to Radio Ratt, determined to stay abreast of all the changing statutes and avoid any further tangles with the law.

These are all I’ll quote from here, but 3^RD BED [6] also includes a story from Kate Bernheimer, work from Lara Glenum, an ad for Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way, two awesome comics, art + text, formal and experimental poetry, flash fiction, and standard-sized short stories. And what is amazing about all of this content, apart from it being truly admirable writing, is that even with this variety, 3^RD BED [6] doesn’t feel scattered for one single moment. Somehow, all of it works together to create a volume of literature that is mesmerizing and grand.

And this brings me back to Caketrain. Remember how when they sold out of their print runs of early annual volumes they offered them up as issuu or pdf on their site for free, so that people could keep reading their words? This is what I want from Derek White at Calamari Press and Vincent Standley of 3^rd Bed. Can’t the same rule apply to what is left of these 3^rd Bed’s issues? If we promised to keep buying copies until they are sold out, could one or both of these fantastic gents get the sold out issues up online for free? This is now my mission for the 3^rd Bed portion of this full-press review, because these volumes are something to behold, and we should all be holding them in one form or another.

So while we are fingers-crossed that Mr. White might make us a deal, as a show of good faith, maybe one or two of you could hop over and get a copy of 3^RD BED [6] here? It is worth the coin.

Next up: James Lewelling’s TORTOISE, SLEEPINGFISH ZZZ, & James Wagner’s THE FALSE SUN RECORDINGS.

Are you guys watching Bored to Death? Love that Zach G.

Unbelievable. This is my 75^th guest blog post since March 2011, as part of my Stranger Will Tour for Strange to support a couple books that came out/will come out in 2011. Big Other was kind enough to host my 2^nd blog post, way back on March 21^st, so it seems fitting to come back and offer a tour wrap-up. What follows is an absolutely true, behind-the-scenes highlight reel from one of the craziest blog tours (re: not real tour) the literary world has ever seen. Some of these images showcase uncouth debauchery. You’ve been warned.

March 23^rd: Hello Thunderdome!

Early on in the tour my dedication to providing every single blog viewer with top-notch content is evident by the stern look in my eyes here. No amount of groupies—no matter how naked and pixilated—were going to distract me from the art of the blog post.

April 13^th: Hello Matt Bell’s blog!

You’ll have to excuse the apparent frustration caught in this image. See, as a super famous, world-wide blog touring author machine all the cameras and adoring fans that come along with such a position can bring a guy down. It gets exhausting. There are so many tweets to @reply. So many fake endorsement deals to be ironed out. So many lawyers (re: popup windows and email spam messages) to appease. Unfortunately, I was just caught in a rare moment of weakness here.

May 1^st: Hello ChuckPalahniuk.net!

Late nights, right? You little people just have no idea how hard it can be to give and give and give all day, every day. Despite the party atmosphere in this image, I was actually suffering quite the case of jetlag during this tour stop. I left my chair briefly to use the bathroom, which is two floors away from my office, so you can imagine how tired I was when I returned. My apologies to everyone at the ChuckPalahniuk.net forums if my performance seemed lackluster. Maybe jetlag isn’t the right word. Walklag?

June 22^nd: Hello Electric Literature blog!

Here I am back to March 23^rd form. I credit the lamp in the background. Something about a lightshow when performing reminds me why I do this. I’m here to entertain, people. I’m here to entertain.

August 12^th: Hello Paul Tremblay’s blog!

About this time in the tour I started to sense the impending end. Bittersweet, for sure. I’m flexing my brow here and covering my mouth to hide the tears and shield the quivering lip. I’ve established so many strong relationships along the way, from the bird that kept flying into my window to the spider I found dead next to my keyboard one morning. You will each hold a special place in my heart. I hope to visit my own ground-level office again someday during my next blog tour…

There you have it. The 2011 Stranger Will Tour for Strange is officially over.

“But Caleb,” you are surely thinking, “Do you really expect us to believe that just because your shirt differs in each picture that these images were taken during the actual writing of the noted blog posts?” Yes, yes I do. “But what about that piece of paper hanging from the lamp in three of those pictures. Did you really have that hanging there for nine months?” It’s an important piece of paper, okay! “And you hair; always the same, huh?” WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?

Click through to read the full review of Michael Peter’s VAAST BIN, the thirtieth in this full-press review of Calamari books.

I don’t get Michael Peters’s VAAST BIN. Reading it made me feel like a red-faced kid swinging at a bully who was easily holding him at arm’s length, palm on my forehead, the arc of my fists grwing wider and wider. I was groping, straining, trying to figure out what was going on there. Unfortunately, I never did.

Perhaps it is my lack of math function skills. There is all of numbers about Peters’s VAAST BIN and I knew the book needed me to research, to google or wikipedia or otherwise learn before I read, but I wanted to approach the book honestly, from my own perspective, one with little math terminology. I wanted to see what would happen. What happened was that I was mostly lost for the duration of this poetry collection.

I did catch phrases that I loved, and I did enjoy some of the words that waved over me, but I didn’t get the full scope of what Michael Peters was doing, and I didn’t understand what VAAST BIN was, and I probably fell short of the book itself. Nonetheless, good phrases are good phrases, and there was this:

night,

ravenous with idle tendrils

drinks with cylindrical tongues, cupped

and this:

the bin of localized meaning

frothy, hexed, numbed

anesthetized white storms swarming to the lip

of each black chasm

repeating its end

in the disservice of its own closure

and this:

you, cloven vomer, coming apart with in seams—

to lett. numbers lie in their feral sequences

to impart the separation of this thing

touching our lungs—

I would worry if I loved every book I read in a catalog as large as Calamari Press’s. I would worry that I was overcome by fancy. I would worry that I wasn’t being genuine in my reaction to their books, that I was flirting instead of evaluating. But, Michael Peters’s VAAST BIN takes away my concern for this. I was lost, and saddened, but sometimes that happens in life, and we get over it, and we move on, and we no doubt learn from all of this.

Get bullied yourself here.

Next up: 3^RD BED [6]

Today, this is all I can muster.

& copies of divorcer (a truly phenomenal book) can be had here.

Pending: VAAST BIN & 3^RD BED [6]

Yes.