Review of "everything essential" by Carolyn Srygley-Moore

 From David C. McLean's personal blog:

The book reviewed below, 205 pages of poems, & including a version of the new posthuman poetry manifesto, is on sale at this link. This link is to the book on Amazon UK, &, of course, this link is to Amazon USA. As always, i would prefer that you buy it from Lulu direct, but, if you hate trade unions or just need free shipping from Prime, you can use goddam Amazon.

Very grateful for this review of my (very soon) forthcoming everything essential by Carolyn Srygley-Moore. Delighted by this, I preserve her formatting as well as possible, given the exigencies of blogging. I would simply point out that I am not a philosopher, & am not sure what that would even mean (thus alluding, & without a trace of embarrassment, to Derrida), & I would add that memory, fairly obviously, is confabulation, telling stories. But still it's real, for, like all illusory constructs, time is perfectly real on its own terms. 

Review of everything essential
A book by David C. McLean.
By Carolyn Srygley-Moore, author of ‘miracles of the BloG: a series & Ode to Horatio and Other Saviors & other books, also with one forthcoming in the future from Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

Review of

everything essential

A book by David C. McLean.

“”

I am no philosopher.
However I’ve been a reader
And appreciator of David’s poetry for over a decade. (He is a writer of prose and a fine photographer as well.) We have also become friends. For a few years we lost contact. In those years David discovered & embraced
The Goddess.

When, via social media,
We first began exchanging writings
David professed a stern atheism; yet he
Arrived to my work (I then expressed
Myself as a Christian) without a derisive
Attitude; he was not contemptuous, and
Was able to read my work without derision.
That’s where I approach his new book.
With a blank slate attempted if not completely possible.

“”

McLean is a philosopher.
I arrive to this book with some cognizance
Of his prior work, and the tangentiality
That work has to this book.

“Ghosts.” That is
My echo. From my sense of his past work & the echo I cannot shake while reading.

“”

This book ,
Emma, & the poet, fuse into an amazement, a carnal revival occurring
On the head of a pin. There is no time.
Memory exists in the sensate, the beast,
A celebration that cannot be named
For language would corrupt that celebration.

“”

David, the person, tells me that we — humans, beings, sentient —; have no past.
Maybe all beings, in fact.

Yet memory, in these poems, is acknowledged. Remember that language
By no fault —: corrupts.

This is not the pop psychology of so called “false memory.” For memory in these
Poems is. Present carnal sacred.

“”

Is Emma (by the perspective of one who feels constrained by time as construct) a way of erasing
History per-say ( which David calls to my attention as “not mentioned” in the book)
Of radically traveling via Emma & goddess
Into the past, bringing back with him
The ghosts that riddled his early
Books with a kind of stasis however
Appreciative of the absurd //; returning
In Emma’s skirt pockets ghosts that
Have heartbeats without degeneration,
For time, and the past, are not
To be acknowledged. The Goddess is.

Without time; with the circularity, the
Regeneration exigent to the Goddess
Paradigm:
Emma exists past the perversion by
A language that McLean crafts
Flawlessly, intensely, even effortlessly.
As the reader I felt
Gratification that any
Person could experience love
With the transgressive intensity
Embodied in these poems.
The blaze, the beauty, and the
Resultant affirmation of what
Truth can be //: this is what I take
Away. & I am
Happy, especially for my friend.

“”

Foucault & Kafka, the incarceration &
The prisoner of the Penal Colony ::
Are crashed into, crushed as shell to
Grit. & we are freed. We are
Liberated by a manipulator of
Language// through
Language. We are left without
Corruption & the
Feeling Is marvelous.

Hence: even to those who find history
A weight, a presumptive cargo -/:
To whom trying to see time as not only irrelevant but nonexistent-:

What is remembering?

“”

What is sacred? Not time. Not the past.
But the dance on the head of a pin,
Beyond carnal, love, all consuming.

Emma is a means of liberation for
Those who devour these poems.
Where decay & death are acknowledged,
Even death —: endings are not.
All is infinite. A comforting, and uncomfortable, insinuation.

“Here we are memory” is a poem title
That gives me permission to read
These poems, & my personhood,
As a dialogue & confrontation & challenge
To /: my history my past. My ghosts
My memory. It is a profound
Permission coming from David
McLean, grab it. Writer. Philosopher.

Hold on.
Prepare yourself for a festival.
Dark & bright,

Carolyn Srygley-Moore

HYDROGEN SOFI by Tanya Rakh

As noted in the previous post, we are re-releasing the books that Tanya Rakh (a Libra & a credit to that sign) previously did elsewhere along with her future work at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. 

We are delighted to say that the wonderful Emma (a Leo & the fire that burns within me, an Aries so I like the burning) agreed to appear on the cover of Tanya's HYDROGEN SOFI that we include below.

EDIT: To the greater glory of muse Emma, & of poet Tanya, & even of me, the designer, we have produced a new cover. This is up now. The image below is the new one, & way nicer. I have also done the cover for Wildflower Hell, which is good to go soon, & huge thanks to Rob Plath for permission to use his awesome erotic shot of a pollen drenched bee flourishing her some flowers.

Here is HYDROGEN SOFI at this link. 

This book is a huge tribute to the goddess & the beauty of the musal function that she institutes for us, where this applies regardless of the actuality of the real muse, Sofi. It relates to the becomings of Deleuze & Guattari, where the poet becomes a pack, just as one never becomes a solitary animal. (When I say "poet", I mean rather the person who writes poems, & I here remind the reader of Dichtung & Poesie as they are differentiated by Heidegger, &, seriously, fuck "poetry". Did you know, gentle reader, that some sons of whores translate Dichtung as "poesy"? Can you imagine a less appropriate translation?) The "poet" becomes the love & the relationship between the parties, which are both parts of her. Thus the book narrates a "becoming-Sofi" in the damp decay of a cityscape, a fictional union as real as any other. (The pigeons do not want us to say any of this. At some point in everybody's becoming they must stop listening to the pigeons & heed the song of the seagulls.

This book is exceptional through the absence of any actual Sofi, since this highlights a real problem. The Other is constructed in general on the basis of egomimesis, according to an image of the beloved self, which lurks behind the myth of empathy, & all the beetles in all the fucking boxes, all frenetically cancelling out, everything real "divided by zero". Walk a mile in my shoes & you'll get athlete's foot, as Killdozer put it. But Sofi is more real than most characters in memoirs, more real than most actualized characters with whom I ever interacted. This is both a tribute to the splendid fertility of the madness that is Tanya, & also an indictment of the generic & slipshod construction of the Other.

Poesie is of the damn "poetic text". Poesie is seldom really the site of Dichtung, which is the poetic impulse to thought, the opening of thought to Being, & that which aligns real poetry (also Dichtung) with philosophy. It is the origin of thought, it is adumbrated in the play of identity and Otherness that constitutes the narrator/Sofi as real persons. This is why I am happy to publish Tanya, because Being itself plays in her texts, because she is a clearing, a place for the opening of truth. The universal truth of being becomes particular in some Chicago/Paris that never was, fuck the details, & art is dependent on Dichtung ("poetizing") qua the happening of truth, the same happening that projects these characters in their original leap into Being that makes the world of Sofi more real than alleged Gothenburg outside this window here right now.) But there are seagulls here in Gothenburg, some fine seagulls here, & they open up for me the whole of Earth. 

Emma made me become beast & thus truly me. She is my mentor, through all our lifetimes, & deputized by the goddess Herself to create me. It is a testimony to Tanya's strength that she survived the writing of this book, where she herself creates the one that creates her. I couldn't do that, & I thank the goddess for sending me baby girl to teach me my beast being so I never had to try. 

To return now to the book at hand, we post an Amazon review here, then the cover.

Tanya Rakh’s poetry is audacious and galvanizing. She speaks words that are the cotton candy melting on the pages in a lavender sky. Her ways of spinning luminous verse guide the reader through effervescent forests, sometimes seeming frightening, only to pull you back to safety and calm with her ardent sincerity and candid vulnerability. Rakh reaches depths of swirling cosmic oceans and the still waters of complete tranquility, all the while allowing you into parts of her that feel like dipping your feet into her personal diary of a man-made pond, tossing in countless pennies, where wish after wish seem to go unnoticed.

Hydrogen Sofi is an effulgent whisper, picturesque with such breathtakingly ravishing songs. This book makes feelings twist and turn up liquefying, marble, spiral staircases, like walking slowly on quicksand, in which you just must let yourself sink. It takes emotions yet to be named or felt and drags them through dusty trails hidden on the highest of mountains while allowing you to swim through mercury and emerge safely somehow. You will hold your breath at times.

I’ve never read any other poetry as fierce and raw with so much naked purity as Tanya Rakh’s. Hydrogen Sofi is a touch. It’s a flavor. A mood, a vibe, a taste, a smell, an image splattered on a canvas vibrating against a humid Summer sky and skipping like a stone over a lost creek where magic grows.

This book will change the way you look at poetry. There’s no way to describe it without reading it and dedicating your own poem to the book itself.

 

Reissues of two novels by David C. McLean

Two novels by David C. McLean in expanded versions. Below from his blog.

A while back I decided to do revised, corrected, & expanded versions of my two first novels. This is done now & they are linked below, available in second editions from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. Both originally from Oneiros Books back in 2015. They were very unsatisfactory versions, when I looked at them, but now I am finally satisfied with the various versions of the books on the Amazon & Lulu pages. It looks like Amazon already updated the things in a fit of incredible speed, for some reason.

Here is Henrietta remembers at this link.

& here is flesh & resurrection at this link.

Huge thanks to Emma for the covers, she is mentioned in both these novels, & inspired them &, basically, all my writing previously, which only started to become more serious after I met her - a meeting that pretty much changed me forever. It started a process of evolution which has reached the point now where, when I caught covid a while back, it basically cured my COPD, gave me limitless energy (which I still have a year later), & took most of the gray out of my beard. Blessings on the goddess for giving me this virus, & blessings on Emma for helping me leave humanity.

Anyway, Emma & I put our heads together, & this is what we came up with - Beauty & the Beast.

 

Lulu Spotlight

Here is the Lulu spotlight for David C. McLean at this link.

Here are the last three book covers. Some of McLean's best work is in these books. Use Lulu, boycott Amazon. Solidarity with unionization, people.