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.
