"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.

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.

 

 

"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.

Lulu spotlight

Here is the Lulu spotlight for Posthuman Poetry & Prose. These are the books I have available, as well as books by Tanya Rakh & one by Linnet Phoenix, here at this link. Lulu charge postage, but this has become much more reasonable than it used to be.

All my extant books from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & some other places earlier, are there. There are three novels, all fairly weird, basically anti. There are several chapbooks, & a considerable number of books of poetry. I have reduced the prices on the older ones, from other publishers than Posthuman Poetry, to conform to my current pattern of pricing, since I think the original prices were a little too high, & the listings on Amazon now reflect this change.

Themes in the books range from antinatalist & posthumanist manifestos, discussions of cPTSD & trauma, the goddess, the great mother, becomings_animal, the beast, sexuality, BDSM, love, libidinal economy, the incommensurability of intensity, diverse inequities, & psychiatric fascism. I am indebted to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Mother Juliana of Norwich, Gertrude Stein, Derrida, & others for inspiration. Many of these books, the vast majority in fact, are written for my wonderful muse, Emma. After the older books, about half of the books belong to the thirteen volume series of "poems for Emma". Though the books written since my return to the UK, on the first of February, 2022, are not part of this series, technically speaking, Emma remains my "muse" & motivates my writing & is still present in almost all the poems.

As you may know, Amazon are sleazy & try to prevent unionization so they can carry on treating their workers like shit. They also, in my case at least, frequently list books from the wrong places, like Book depository, so you have to find the Amazon version yourself. As noted, it is way better if you buy them from here, unless relying on prime for shipping. In any case, Lulu are not quite as expensive for shipping as they used to be.

 

A reading from "Wildflower Hell" by Tanya Rakh

Here is a video of Tanya reading from Wildflower Hell at midnight in Texas.  Here is the book.

The book is coming to Amazon soon. 

 

"Wildflower Hell" by Tanya Rakh

It is with great pleasure that we at Posthuman Poetry & Prose hereby announce that Tanya Rakh has now seen & approved the proof copy of her Wildflower Hell, which is therefore now officially released & on sale at this link.

There is a brief manifesto/introduction by me in this book, at Tanya's request, & that appears in a post further down in this blog, which I link here too.

Both this book & Hydrogen Sofi are now also approved for Amazon, & both should appear there soon. The links will follow, naturally, because I shall update this post when they are on sale there.

& here is the cover. Huge thanks to Rob Plath for letting us use his photograph. It's a birbcore illustration for a birbcore book. Cover design by David C. McLean.

Tanya Rakh reads from HYDROGEN SOFI

 

Here is a reading of "Chicago to Paris VII" from Hydrogen Sofi, by Tanya Rakh from FB. The book is on sale here. It will be appearing on Amazon too in due course. Tanya's Wildflower Hell is also due soon, along with as yet undisclosed future work.

If you use Facebook Container you will probably have to allow this site to play the video.

 

 

 

 

 

Wildflower Hell, forthcoming second edition from Tanya Rakh

Soon we shall be releasing Wildflower Hell by Tanya Rakh, &, apart from editing & designing the cover, for which Rob Plath kindly gave us permission to use his awesome picture of a bee getting pollen all over her, I have written a little introductory manifesto, about the book giving a perspective on cPTSD, & nice to read for those of us with this condition. It is how Tanya handles her fire, same as me really. So I post this below, the book is coming soon enough. It will only cost $8, & I can recommend the living shit out of this book. 

EDIT. Now on sale at this link.  

An introductory publisher's manifesto

The year begins with spring, one tends to assume, because that is when the process of growth is initiated through the return of the sun, & when life burgeons. But Wildflower Hell starts in the winter, hell-set in traumatic darkness, because this is a book of healing, of resurrection, of the goddess leaving her blessings in the most unlikely places. It is a beautiful book to read, & it is a manual of sorts, if understood in a certain way.

Of course I have read these poems intently before, for I have plundered all the works of Tanya for epigraphs, a process which finally resulted in me writing, when the plundering reached its maturity, because the stars says so, the fourth book for my own beloved muse. But rereading these now, I think for the fifth or sixth time, to produce this little manifesto, I am struck afresh by the power & profundity of the words in this guidebook about how to tend & manage your cPTSD in order to produce beauty, & thereby ultimately heal yourself. The trauma does not disappear, but is incorporated productively. We start thus at wintertime, because it is de profundis that the healing begins.

This is a small book, a chapbook as they like to call them, & yet it contains so much of a life; there are worlds written in it. Don't tell me about seashells, I agree; tell us instead of the seagulls that control the skies over them, always watching out for snacks & keeping away the pigeons, some of them dressed in dove drag, all tricked out to lie to us, to make us hamsters when we could be possums & hyenas & lions & wolves.

If we sit with Tanya a while, her head full of stars, like the head of the goddess is full of fire & every universe that ever was or ever shall be, she asks us to "[p]aint with me a doorway, a gash in monotone night." This is because we create our own reality in order to exit the traumatic scar: we make our own portals, poetic & perhaps interstitial. We notice our potential lines of flight that will let us escape the rigid stratification of our role as victim. We fly to passion & intensity, as Deleuze & Guattari show us, to create a safe zone to be our animal, to become (more) beasts. We create the crack that lets the light in. The sky is cryogenic in this doorway poem, because it is part of a cold mythology of freezing things down to preserve & protect, the gently snow & the mercy of winter, freezing things to await the chance of healing, & yet it is humming there, because, under the frozen scar of trauma, life still throbs its confusion, a million healthy feelings waiting to burst out alive again.

Spring follows winter, & in spring we fuck the pain away. It does not work every time, but it can "send each recurring nightmare/ as thunder back to sky" for a while. Summer become awareness of the recurrence, it is solidified by now into always the same nightmare, love & time sleeping rigid on opposite sides of the bed, without making eye contact. But the trauma grows in the child, the ghost that you can still hear howling in the skeleton, echoing nightingale there, & maybe it she who leaves the daybroken poems there before the sun comes up. This is part of what happens in the poem "that summer", when "she" grew so much older.

The summer section represents "hell", & hell is not, pace Tanya, a desert making love to fire, that is what heaven is too. Hell is what happens in "breathe", when you apologize for everything, when you surrender yourself to shitty connections, & you breathe or you don't breathe, whatever. We are poet, the scapegoat animal that is not sacrificed, but sent out into the desert wilderness, what we sing is absolute deterritorialization & broken borders, so, as Deleuze & Guattari tell us, no signifying regime can tolerate this. They write that "[y]our only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests" & it is the goddess we should serve, as do I, & She needs no goddam priests. The goddess is made of love & fire, she makes us out of love & fire, our souls, & the fire is our truest home.

We come to endings, to fall. & the birbs are in the first poem. They pretended to leave early, "replaced by dynamite" & "don't even get me started on the fish", Tanya tells us. The fish, they are innocent. We are the goddam fish. Mr Fish is innocent, he does not understand capitalism but he has a wife to feed, probably little fishies too. The pain he feels is the pain we felt leaving the water so many lifetimes ago. Emma & I did the same thing, it was not easy. Now the pain is the skeleton & the other bits in us as we leave the human being behind to shift into our beast becoming, as we evolve thus, but not all the new bits fit perfectly together yet.

All the newspapers catch fire and the smoke gives way to chants, marches, hashtags . . . all those little things we like to use to distract ourselves. It's always been this way, really . . . a stone isn't always a stone isn't always a memory doesn't always carry moss. For years now it's been easier to dive into molasses but what do we have to show for it? Just ask the fish . ..
(spool)

What can one say? What matters is not all these petty squabbles, this fashionable nonsense, politics & idiots, not any ideology, what matters is the healing & the ontology, it is goddess & resurrection, what aspects of us we are to choose to affirm, & to hope that She affirms & lets them return with us for all our other lifetimes.

 

In this final fall section of the book we deal with the realization of the hell we discovered during the summer section:

like I had drowned,
and the drowning
was done,
and the rain
was over.
now my heart can
die alone
again tomorrow.

and the next day.
and all the endless days we
die alone.
(you die alone)

The horror of cPTSD is its persistence. But ultimately we realize endurance, we perdure & see that

I've lived too many years
here as a dead thing
just to die now
an alias in oil slick,
(always)

All that remains is to find the one of whom one can feel that you are together & you both know it like the ocean knows, like the seagulls tell you their truth, not the murmuring lies of the goddam pigeons:

all that always was and
all the ways we'll fly again

everything we are, and
all the ways we'll fly again
(always)

So it is with pride that we at Posthuman Poetry & Prose present to you a new & restored edition of this great work by Tanya Rakh, her second book with us.

 

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.

 

An announcement.

It is with great pleasure that we announce that Posthuman Poetry & Prose will be publishing the works of Tanya Rakh. Starting now obviously, since we are all manic here. First we shall be doing new, edited, & improved editions of Hydrogen Sofi & Wildflower Hell.

Both these books are tremendous books of poetry, so we are very excited to be working with Tanya on future projects too. The reader may be aware that these two initial volumes are the only works by a living poet that David C. McLean has used for epigraphs, for e.g. because the stars say so.

Another poet has expressed interest in McLean editing a book for her, & this will be announced in the future. This however does not mean that we will be publishing any other writers, so please do not ask. 

The horsemen of the posthumanist apocalypse are not actually real men on horses. As angels, we will not kick a horse, but we need to kick their knees. These are demons, just one being, not a horse & its rider, but one being, & all demons. The pigeons have told us. They know that WE KNOW ABOUT THE DUCKS. 

The goddess takes care of us. 

EDIT: here cover to first book by Tanya we did. Thanks beautiful, wonderful Emma Holtze for being Sofi for the cover.

5 samples "because the stars say so"

Here from David C. McLean's blog 

As is my wont, & before I forget about it, which also happens, here are some samples from because the stars say so. This is on sale at this link. It is 172 pp & £10 or $12, which is pretty inexpensive for a big motherfucker of a book. There are five samples here. It is a great buggerly long book, so five seems warranted. It will be on Amazon at some point, but, seriously, fuck them & the horse they rode in on. Purchase from the above link is greatly appreciated. I get more & there is less oppression & other fuckery involved. 

Also, here is the British Library free access copy of Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Juliana. Now I am pretty sure that it is the goddess who visited her. Given her identification of Jesus as the Mother, & the actual content of the divine revelations, it seems that the values of her time led her to misidentify the goddess as the fictional christian god.  You will only find the real goddess here, in Sartre, oddly enough, & in my poems. Do not pray to her. It enrages her.