My favorite book [besides Norman Lock’s SHADOWPLAY and Joanna Ruocco’s THE MOTHERING COVEN] was probably Jennifer Moxley’s CLAMPDOWN. a surprise to me, Moxley is less a wild innovator than a poet who seems perfectly in tune with our current moment. Not that she’s merely fashionable but just that these poems seemed to capture, seemingly effortlessly, our era of stagnation, broke-affluence and armchair-radicalism. Her gorgeous lyric poems risk meaning while defying the received emotions of staler narratives.
From “The Fountain”:
The public policing
of money and morals
destroys beauty
such as this–
for most of us
to “grow up”
means learning
to loathe what’s cheap
and what’s free,
when to value
the latter is
surely to be it.
The pleasure of
tonguing a pink-
lipped stranger
does not accrue,
it can be repeated
endlessly and yet
feel quite new.
Profound and foolish, meditative and absurd, Hsieh liked to do things in year-long increments. Why? “Because one year is the largest single unit of how we count time. It takes the earth a year to move around the sun. Three years, four years is something else. It is about being human, how we explain time, how we measure our existence.”
Like you, I spent the year looking for beautiful things and (other than everything) found these three.
John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
Ditto on Shadowplay and The Mothering Coven. And, though they came out in 2008, you can add your Fog & Car and Eugene Marten’s Waste as well for me.
Tehching Hsieh is a marvel! I find his work more inspirational than almost any other contemporary artist.
Adam