Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother

 Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother is now on sale at UK Amazon at this link. It is also available from US Amazon. See the post below for further details.

This is the latest book in McLean's series about aspects of goddess, & Lamaštû is, together with Maa Kali & Tiamat, one of the three aspects that he regards as most primal. The next will probably be about Tiamat. As always there is a lengthy prose introduction before the poems.

The depiction of Lamaštû in popular fiction & films for the great unwashed is as offensive as the scurrilous lies told about Lilītu by the devotees of the patriarchal "gods".

But Lamaštû is a primal Mesopotamian goddess who was seen as being tasked with curbing human hubris. McLean sees Her as the form of Dark Mother most suited to the modern age, when population needs to be controlled & humanism & human narcissism need to be stamped out.

"tundra", by Tanya Rakh

From the blog of David C. McLean:

It is enormously gratifying that a new book, tundra, by Tanya Rakh is now available from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, with a brief introduction by me. The book is fifty numbered pages, & includes Tanya's own illustrations & cover art. I might as well post my introduction below, after the cover. 

The book is available direct at this link, & the proof has been approved so the book is coming to online sites like Amazon shortly. Feel free to buy direct though, because Lulu pay authors much more than Amazon & other major booksellers.

 

It is gratifying to publish this present volume by Tanya Rakh, a short collection of poems called tundra.

For reasons that I have elsewhere described at great length, it is not possible to capture intensity & fire in the drab garb of the natural languages, but it is undoubtedly possible to adumbrate them via negativa, or to hint at them as the unnameable that hides within the interstices of the text.

that’s the secret
you can paint
with the other side
(“quill”)

As I have previously written of Rakh, this focus on fire & intensity, on all varieties of passion, means that she produces Dichtung, not Poesie: the work thereby belongs to & reveals earth as it pertains to beast & goddess, not the paltry human world, the scientific world that relies on commensurability to describe everything in terms of quality & quantity, a world blind to intensity.

It is also most gratifying to me to note that this book clearly touches on the eternal return, & does so in a way that is entirely compatible with my own Deleuzian understanding of Nietzsche & the selective, as it were, nature of the divine attention:

yes, it’s always the end, we finally make it and the wind picks up and the mountains peel back to beginning again. how do we stay? what imprints are left after the blood tide? after all these planets close their eyes?

nothing but this, love. a wide-eyed sea. all screaming ghosts of sun flesh swimming through the open dream. a sky arched over water. soft lights twinkling past the edge of a century.

As the above quote illustrates, it is only intensity that is ultimately real, because the energy that constantly emanates from goddess to fuel this illusion that it pleases Her to construct is ultimately fire - it is the eternal & infinite fecundity that quantum physics shows is always already there instead of the grotesque & imaginary void that torments the imagination of the weak & reactive. It is always fang & fury & pain, & this is obviously nothing other than love.

The poem “sulfur” is perhaps the closest this book comes to the Mesopotamian understanding of primal goddess:

I cry my soul
into seven ancient rivers

each opens the mouth
of a burning star—

a sulfur world
that breathes our language

If that isn’t redolent of Lamaštû, the seven witches, then I don’t know who screams in the night or why.

poems for Lilītu & Lamaštû

Today I make available divine fury: poems for Lilītu & Lamaštû from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. I am also about to release Tara is the fire, but I shall give that a separate post. Here is the first of these books on sale direct, probably coming at Amazon soon. After the Tara book, I am writing one solely about Lamaštû - partly from gratitude to Her for favours received, partly because Her role in preventing conception makes Her very well adapted to my antinatalist predilections.

In the Lilītu & Lamaštû book, with which I am rather pleased, I do deal with my usual themes: humanist narcissism, how Dark Mother has become dea abscondita, the bogus patriarchal religions with their daddy kinks, the narcissistic fear of chaos, the "bipolar" contrast between spicy forms of goddess & the more vanilla aspects of divinity, masculinism & sexism within religion & the occult, &, of course, last but not least, the incommensurability of intensity & the shortcomings of language.

I am hugely grateful to Nausicaa Morgue for the cover images & for discussion of both these aspects of Dark Mother.

Blurb & cover follow:

This book extends McLean's series about goddess to include Lilītu & Lamaštû, & removes Lilītu completely from the fictional image of Her as a creature of the patriarchal god. She is a black moon Kali & a central aspect of Dark Mother.

Seeing Lilītu as a demon is not seeing Her in Her full bipolar divinity as goddess, with Her benevolent & "malevolent" aspects incorporated.

If we cannot accept the spicy aspects of goddess, then we do not deserve Her incalculable bounty.

"Laying Flowers on the Boundary" by Carolyn Srygley Moore

 

Delighted to announce a new book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. It is now on sale at this link & the proof has been approved so it will appear on Amazon soon.  Laying Flowers on the Boundary costs $10, €10, or £8.

As I say in the blurb, this is definitely some of her best work, & Carolyn & I did a good job preparing it, I think. The poems adumbrate a fundamentally aesthetic stance that is innately moral, since moral development is largely based upon aesthetic considerations, & a poem can itself perform a small scale transvaluation. Discriminations are empty & serve to strengthen the insistent falsification that is Maya, & inspiration is arbitrary, so the sense of an aleatory & random imaginary is a great strength of this book. Generally goddess does not care for American writers, because of their narcissism, but She thinks it's alright for me to publish this & Carolyn's previous here, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts.

The cover, featuring Carolyn's photography & designed by me, is below. I endorse this book.

"Laliat drink too much" at Amazon

Lalita drinks too much hits Amazon (soon) at this link or at this one for US Amazon.

Here it is at Lulu.

Samples posted in this post.

Cover & blurb below.

This book continues McLean's series about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas & is about Lalita or Shodashi, the third Mahavidya.

The poems are preceded by a lengthy & controversial introduction, where McLean discusses goddess; the selective Nietzschean eternal return as a template for reincarnation; Kali & temporality; the imaginary ego; spirituality & narcissism; the narcissistic nature of the guru phenomenon; intensity & incommensurability; the patriarchy & fratriarchy; & the colonialism to which the tribal peoples in India are subjected.

The cover image is the Sri Yantra.

AmaLilith store by Nausicaa Morgue

For religious reasons I use Posthuman Poetry & prose to promote some beautiful & rewarding work by my brilliant friend Nausicaa Morgue.

I'm pleased to announce the arrival of AmaLilith online shop at Big Cartel, with arts, crafts, & bone sculptures, created without harmful chemicals with traditional methods, by Nausicaa Morgue. The shop is online at this link. There is also a blog that I previously mentioned here.

Nausicaa's products are inspired by, & imbued with, the powers of Lilith, Hecate, Asmodeus, & Astaroth, the goddesses & demons with whom Nausicaa works. Lilith & Hecate are both forms of our Dark Mother goddess, & both of these are subjects of future books by me, obviously. The products, however, are of great aesthetic value even for those of a secular inclination. Some sample photos are included below. 

Whatever one's faith, Nausicaa's products channel the power & beauty of nature, & these pieces, none of which is particularly expensive, are full of life & vitality, fragility & immense power. The Divine Mother has directed me to be of assistance to Nausicaa in whatever way I can, & I think that her artistic expression adumbrates the beauty of incarnate spirit as a simple expression of goddess, in more or less the same way that I aspire to do through words. The pieces are transformative in their celebration of the ecstasy of becoming, rooted safely in decay, of the profound love that preserves the inconsequential, & sees the essential in the interstitial & the liminal.

These are offerings for the crossroads where Hecate & Matangi shepherd the broken ghosts home, the impure purity of the fragmentary that is all that ever deserves to return.

Autoerotic Elegies: Four samples from "Lalita drinks too much"

Autoerotic Elegies: Four samples from "Lalita drinks too much": As usual I post here a few poems as samples from the latest. Here it is at Lulu. Amazon link coming later.

"Lalita drinks too much"

 

The latest in the Mahavidya books is now available, a little more controversial than usual. The Divine Mother wants this one out now, & I am starting a new one about Tara. The order in which these books are appearing is fairly arbitrary. In this book, I discuss Deleuze, Lacan, Nietzsche, colonialism, & spiritual narcissism, & I swear as little as possible while so doing.

The book is on sale here at this link, it is coming on Amazon soon, & the cover & blurb follow.

This book continues McLean's series about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas & is about Lalita or Shodashi, the third Mahavidya.

The poems are preceded by a lengthy & controversial introduction, where McLean discusses goddess; the selective Nietzschean eternal return as a template for reincarnation; Kali & temporality; the imaginary ego; spirituality & narcissism; the narcissistic nature of the guru phenomenon; intensity & incommensurability; the patriarchy & fratriarchy; & the colonialism to which the tribal peoples in India are subjected.

The cover image is the Sri Yantra.

 

"Durga sings every night"

Here is Durga sings every night, Amazon details in due course.

This book by David C. McLean is a complement to the series that he is writing on Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas. 

It contains an introduction that relates Durga to Kali, & describes the contrast between the demands of commensurability & intensity, between chaos & order, & between goddess & patriarchal oppression. 

McLean argues that the only fundamental wrong is narcissism, & describes the selective eternal return in Deleuzian terms so the ego is excluded, only the partial & fragmentary gets to be born again, only that which is incomplete & process.

Whisper of Life by Nausicaa Morgue

I am pleased to announce that I just helped the enormously talented Nausicaa Morgue to set up the blog linked here for her wonderful bone sculptures.

Currently two items are available there at a very fair price, open to negotiation. Brief descriptions follow. The bones are prepared with old craftsmanship & without chemicals. They are made into objects of sombre beauty in a gesture of profound respect for the departed, to honour the eternal return & eternal fire that goddess prepares for those that love Her. The only magic in these pieces is the magic of devotion & art, of life & fire itself.

 

Here is Nausicaa's "cow baby" sculpture. Nausicaa burns brighter with goddess than anyone I have ever known, & it is my nature to tend flames, so I shall be promoting the living shit out of her work. This statue elevates the fragile & resilient beauty of abjection, carrying at the same time the protection of a crescent moon of obsidian, & it screams its promise of incarnation forever, flesh not identity. The intensity that is captured in this piece is from goddess Herself, channelled through Her best reflection. It is an expression of the fire that burns, the restive fury of goddess in the beast.

 

This second statue is a scrying mirror, or just simply a mirror, & it is made to honour the remains of an armadillo. Nausicaa selected an older mirror that showed the passage of time in order to complement the time & timelessness that the stature celebrates. Kali is beyond time & controls it, like every other illusion it does not affect Her. It is Maa Kali who has told me to  assist Nausicaa as best I can, & I am confident that the purchase of any of these will secure Her divine blessings, it will certainly secure  mine.

Buy one or both here: https://whisperoflifeart.blogspot.com/

From the blog of David C. McLean

There's a new book by me at the Lulu bookstore, forthcoming from Amazon etc but it's better for us if you buy from Lulu anyway. Full of massive love for Kali Maa & Her aspect Matangi. Blurb & cover follow, linked here Matangi assembles Her rejects.

I now add the Amazon link, here it is. The UK Amazon link is also live here.

This is the second book about Mother Kali from David C. McLean & it focuses on the Mahavidya Matangi, who controls art & poetry, & is the goddess of impurity. She is related to Hecate & other Dark Mothers. 

In the introduction there is discussion of Her as source of understanding of the incommensurable & McLean relates Her to Deleuze & Lyotard. He sees in Her a solution to the issue of the expression of intensity. 

We hope that this book pleases Kali Maa.

Tanya Rakh - "too short a far shot"

It is with immense delight that I can announce that a new book by Tanya Rakh is going to be available as soon as one of us has seen the proof. It is with great happiness that I announce this & naturally I have done an introductory manifesto. 

This follows, as does the cover. The picture is Tanya's "spiral tree." It is now on sale here, coming to Amazon soon.

EDIT: Here is is at this link on Amazon. Here it is at this very similar link on UK Amazon too

Introduction 

This book is written as a purge of old ghosts, or Tanya said it was at least. It is her fourth book with Posthuman Poetry & Prose. It speaks of alienation & distances, the incommunicability of intensity. I too know how it feels when organs do not fit in this stupid human skin, & I certainly don't understand capitalism. Tanya, too, has a fish family to look after, we all have something that obliges us to engage with gross & grotesque world.

There is no doubt that this chapbook is a book that deserves to be published independently, it functions as a coherent unit, & I attribute the fact that Tanya suddenly sent it to me to its being a boon granted her, because goddess demands tribute always, & quite rightly too.

Anyway, what is purged is things that do not appertain to the now, things that are inessential & already transcended; the machinations of Maya, that what is not, what Mahadevi has done to pass Her time & entertain Herself, because eternal perfection is dull when One is wanton & grows desirous, as She says Herself that She does. Intensity cannot be expressed in any human tongue, but Kali as Matangi can show it to those She favours, so we can step sideways into the light with Her for a while. This book does this, & sings the perfection of the dirty, the impure, the “immaculate dirt”, for everything is essentially divine. The book ends with the chain of return seen as always already perfect, every fall, everything part of Mother with the “huge black eyes”.

For everything is what it is, & this book shows how to approach the essentially incomprehensible nature of what is, the cruel confusion that seemingly is, & these poems delineate a stance to take to the world that allows us to see earth behind it, sustaining & upholding it. Tanya shows that the only way to do this is to relinquish the illusions of humanism & affirm the beast.

Because goddess is always desirous, She always wants things to happen, so there is not going to be any quiescent end state, incarnation is forever, these fleshy transactions, &, like Mr. Fish himself, we shall always carry some false body around, though we are fire & formless, & we belong in Her perfection.

As Tanya points out, the animal sleeps like Maa Kali lives, naked & dressed in space, too large to ever be contained.

Naturally, I advocate the purchase, reading, & regular rereading of this book. I do not interpret it, for it is a manifestation, an expression of the emptiness & the ever-present ghosts, the hungry ghosts, the ghouls at the heart of illusion. It is a very beautiful book & I am sure that Kali is delighted, for it is fire & power, as is She.

 

 

"Kali breathes this fire" by David C. McLean

From McLean's blog:

Finally got my new book finished after much buggering about, since I need to be comfortable with it, it being about the Divine Mother as it is. But Maa Kali cherishes imperfection & impurity, so that's something of a consolation. I am releasing it now because I have been constantly & obsessively adding to it, & want to hurry up with writing the next book about Matangi instead.

It is on sale here at Lulu, & here it now is on Amazon at this link. It is listed on  Amazon UK as well. The book is more expensive than I might wish, £12.50 or $16.50, with other currencies at corresponding rates, but blame the twats at Amazon for that, given that the book is 232 pages in length.

Four poems are on the images below, one of which is on two pages. 

The book contains a 45 page introduction about Kali. The introduction does not pretend to be comprehensive but relates the scriptures about Her to posthumanism, & the selective & creative nature of reincarnation, & speaks of the ultimate eternal return after the dissolution, when Her restive & fickle nature will create again. Some of this is drawn from the Posthuman poetry manifesto & adds to that. (Here the manifesto is on Amazon too.) Anyway, as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa wrote, She only saves one in a hundred thousand. 

The introduction also includes much ranting about narcissism, neo-colonialism against indigenous peoples, the patriarchy, the caste system, the narcissism of many "gurus", & the disgraceful British empire.

Blurb, cover, & samples follow:

This book is the first about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas that McLean has written. This is what he proposes to write about in the future. 

The book includes a 45 page introduction in which McLean relates the Divine Mother to posthuman themes. There will no full manifesto on the basis of this but the ideas will be developed in later books..

The cover image is Kali's yantra.

New book by Carolyn Srygley Mooore

 From McLean's personal blog:

 We all have a past, Watson. Ghosts. They are the shadows that define our every sunny day.

// Sherlock Holmes;
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We have just completed a book called For All of My Beautiful Ghosts by awesome American poet Carolyn Srygley Moore. Carolyn actually writes real poems, which is enormously unusual nowadays, & we have done this book for her with a little better ink for the 177 numbered pages, since it also contains photos. This means that it would be inordinately expensive on bloody Amazon, pirates & scavengers that they are, so it will be on sale direct from Lulu. I shall add a link later, once we have seen the proof. 

EDIT: It printed fine &, after final edits, here it is at Lulu, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts. Because of the ink, it's more expensive, though to cut costs for the buyer we did at first not sell it from corporate scumbags Amazon we have now made it more expensive & moved it to distribution through Amazon. This is people are prepared to purchase it there & evidently prefer to spend more rather than less. The link is coming soon.

I shall almost certainly review it later, but I am currently reading about Kali Maa & finishing my book about Her as primal goddess in the Mahavidyas. Carolyn sets a bloody high bar for me with her wonderful book, but I want it to be my best ever.

Cover, featuring a collage by Carolyn herself, & my blurb follow:

Posthuman Poetry & Prose is delighted to release this book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore, a poet & artist resident in New York State.

These poems tell a life, & they are of ghosts in the sense that what one relates to is ghostly; it is the poematic impulse, which is to capture the past, to prove that it was real & that it still is, to produce "a photograph of the feast in mourning", as Derrida so aptly puts it, so there is always poem when the ghosts fade at sunset & earth is there, sustaining the futility that is world.

"Alien Songs" by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru

Delighted to announce the arrival of a book of duets by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. The poems in Alien Songs, on sale here, & on sale here at Amazon, are of the posthuman diaspora that learns to survive beyond identity. Only the divergent returns. Only what is "alien", in the sense of estranged from humanist traditions, only what is Dionysian individuation - not the I, the self, & their identity - will be validated by the posthuman naissance that celebrates the chaos of the eternal return, where the subject is the Other, & alienated, in principle, from its "self" by the Kantian "Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includ[ing] in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other." (Deleuze). The chaosmos goddess creates is anarchic; identities are weak, they do not return. 

& poetry just is a nostalgia for presence, for simple self-identity, for all the substantial constructs, or so Derrida tells us. But poetry needs to be the inarticulate cry of intensity, the indeterminate, that which is not concealed behind a name or a face  but dances its passion in the flame & naked. Poetry needs to capture this, per impossibile - it might scream to that which throbs an instant in the meat & cannot be measured against anything. Otherwise things play real when you look at them & words grow into unreliable maps & forget what stars there are.

Though I publish others on an occasional basis, Tanya is basically the other half of posthuman poetry, & when I return to goddess it is my hope that she will take it over. It is a privilege to publish all of her previous & forthcoming work, & a delight to see how seamless this collaboration with Ndotono is.

Tanya & Ndotono wrote this intro

Alien Songs is a fully collaborative collection of duets in verse. These duets each stand alone as individual pieces, but also join together to create an amalgamated star atlas for a breathing and multitextured extraterrestrial world.

Each of our songs embodies an aspect of this world—some echo an element, others an organ, yet others a phenomena of nature—and there are many more totems to explore. All of these pieces, separately and combined, are calls to a connection beyond the confines of everyday space and time, the heavy matter of humanity.

While the maladjusted soul may not be able to easily drag its accompanying body off this planet for a spell, it can dissolve for a while between astral wind currents when the right words are sung. These duets are incantations, oracles, scribblings on the walls of the heart. By reading them, we hope all lonely Aliens can catch a few glimmers of their home stars.

Tanya Rakh and Ndotono Waweru

The book is absolutely amazing, & the cover is below, with thanks to the brilliant photographer Shaina Sterrett for letting us use her image. Here is Shaina's Instagram where she shares her art.

Here is a sample poem online at Spillwords at this link. Alien Songs is on sale at this link. it can also be found on Amazon at this link. Note that it is better for the writers if you buy direct from Lulu.

I am looking forward to the publication of Tanya Rakh's ghost fractals soon, goddess willing. There will also be a book of visual poetry, vispo, coming from Tanya too, this will be printed with quality paper & ink, everything you do to the moon. It will be awesome.