I just heard about a new book that looks/sounds promisingly beautiful. Press release below.

Announcing the release of
Occultations
By David Wolach
Black Radish Books
ISBN 978-0-9825731-2-9
Poetry/6”X9”/168pp./May, 2010
Price ($15)
Trade Paperback Original
 
This is Wolach’s courage of paradoxical evocation…Facing the man “whose imagined / Misery we call a particular logic / While the bird vanishes.” There is something in his work, with all the force of unstated quest, in its refusal of the elegiac, that is hauntingly ancient and entirely contemporary—eros and thanatos breathe each other’s air, love-hate the forced intimacy: “you have no name you are / this close.” – Joan Retallack
 
Black Radish Books announces the release of David Wolach’s poetry collection, Occultations. This is Wolach’s first full-length collection of poems and the second release from the book publishing collective, Black Radish Books (BRB).
 

Occultations “helps us to consider,” writes David Buuck, “again and against, ‘what’s created out of the rubble?’ Through site-specific and embodied interrogations of biopolitical and militarized contact-zones, and procedural rituals of tactical magic, Wolach shows us the ‘body signing in space,’ singing through the ‘post-industrial land-scrape clack.’ Here the body-in-crisis is not some theoretical abstraction but a lived condition, subject not only to the ‘surveillance-industrial complex’ but also to the limitations of language’s ability to fully articulate ‘what work this dying is’. The page thus becomes for Wolach a (non)site of performance, the texts and counter-texts spewed and spat into a kind of splenetic life-force that ‘invade[s] yr lyric purity,’ negations that ‘organize the no.’ Amidst the textual/visual palimpsests and constellatory practices at work here, Occultations begins to suggest new vistas beyond, for both poetics and politics.”  And Laura Elrick writes that as abject materiality, Occultations ask us to “consider how the body’s mortal we (in other words, its occluded, collective constitution and disintegration) might live its demise.” For Elrick, “to ask ‘why do you hesitate at the covered parts?’ is to pose the question of an ethics of the senses: is it possible to construct the parameters through which the practiced lie of control might be relinquished, through which, at the same time, the fault-lines out of whose collisions our lives are rent might be sense-d?”
 
David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, a former union organizer, and participant in Nonsite Collective. His most recent books are Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). Critical work on the poetics of spatial practice is forthcoming from Jacket and Sibila: Poesia y Cultura (Brazil). Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.                                                          
 
   Lafayette, LA
   blackradishbooks.org
   Black Radish Books are available
   through Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org)

Marthe Reed’s Gaze is also now out from Black Radish Books and Mark Lamoreux’s Spectre is forthcoming.