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.

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.

"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.

"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.

David C. McLean "goddess gives sun enough"

From blog of David C. McLean.

I have a new book of poems forthcoming soon, the first since moving to the UK, which will be available for sale once I have seen the proof. By me, David C. McLean, from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, goddess gives sun enough. Five samples & cover below. I shall update this post once I have seen the physical cover & made the book available for sale.

EDIT. This book is now on sale here at Lulu, Amazon too. This link is to UK Amazon. This link is to US amazon.com.

Blurb follows, then cover:

This book is the first written since McLean returned to England in 2022 , & follows a series of books of love poetry. As such, it shows an attempt to reorient to a life that is meaningful because of earth, nature, beast, & goddess, without any focus for the sexuality with which the flesh, as such, is instinct, & without any sense of social connection. The intensity differs thereby in its focus, though some themes are retained. These are poems about living on, & trusting in the goddess to give the fire & the words one needs to live & feel.

 

Books by David C. McLean

Here is McLean's Lulu Spotlight for Posthuman Poetry & Prose. There are three novels & twelve books of poems, predominantly full lengths. A couple of them are inspired by the major works of Deleuze & Guattari, & one is composed of poems all inspired by Gertrude Stein. Most of the books were originally from Black Editions Press & Oneiros Books.

It is obviously better to buy them from this link, but if you prefer to use Prime & get free postage, many of them are available at my Amazon author page here. Amazon are a disgraceful company however, & oppose unionization & workers' rights.

Below is the cover to the first of them, nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die. Below that is the cover to Things the Dead Say, which is on a huge special offer, with two thirds off the $10 list price, at Amazon right now, for some reason. Third comes the cover to too little beast, an extended version of the antinatalist chapbook too much human, that extends the manifesto of the latter to incorporate anithumanism. The third book is not on Amazon, however, but only on Lulu.