"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.

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.

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.

 

Linnet Phoenix, "Post-ed on Your Mirror"

From the blog of editor David C. McLean:

I am pleased to announce that Post-ed on Your Mirror by Linnet Phoenix is now on sale at this link.

See my review in the previous post. The cover is posted below.

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.