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.

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.

 

 

"Kali breathes this fire" by David C. McLean

From McLean's blog:

Finally got my new book finished after much buggering about, since I need to be comfortable with it, it being about the Divine Mother as it is. But Maa Kali cherishes imperfection & impurity, so that's something of a consolation. I am releasing it now because I have been constantly & obsessively adding to it, & want to hurry up with writing the next book about Matangi instead.

It is on sale here at Lulu, & here it now is on Amazon at this link. It is listed on  Amazon UK as well. The book is more expensive than I might wish, £12.50 or $16.50, with other currencies at corresponding rates, but blame the twats at Amazon for that, given that the book is 232 pages in length.

Four poems are on the images below, one of which is on two pages. 

The book contains a 45 page introduction about Kali. The introduction does not pretend to be comprehensive but relates the scriptures about Her to posthumanism, & the selective & creative nature of reincarnation, & speaks of the ultimate eternal return after the dissolution, when Her restive & fickle nature will create again. Some of this is drawn from the Posthuman poetry manifesto & adds to that. (Here the manifesto is on Amazon too.) Anyway, as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa wrote, She only saves one in a hundred thousand. 

The introduction also includes much ranting about narcissism, neo-colonialism against indigenous peoples, the patriarchy, the caste system, the narcissism of many "gurus", & the disgraceful British empire.

Blurb, cover, & samples follow:

This book is the first about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas that McLean has written. This is what he proposes to write about in the future. 

The book includes a 45 page introduction in which McLean relates the Divine Mother to posthuman themes. There will no full manifesto on the basis of this but the ideas will be developed in later books..

The cover image is Kali's yantra.

"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.

New posthuman poetry manifesto

The manifesto about posthumanism that was posted previously in this blog now serves as the the introduction to my recent book of poems, everything essential. It builds upon the two previous manifestos about antinatalism & posthumanism that were included in the earlier books too much human & goddess says, Emma.

But I have now released a book of prose that isn't a novel. It's a book of theory about posthumanism, deep ecology, goddess, & poetics, There is quite a lot about posthumanism, about new materialism, about Heidegger & Derrida's discussion of poetics, about deep ecology, earth & world, & becomings-animal, & about Deleuze & temporality. Also, naturally, there is much about goddess & Tiamat, prior to the patriarchal deities of Babylon & later. All this in detail in the long version that is now on sale.

Here is the poetry book with the shortened introductory form of the manifesto - this is everything essential at Lulu. Then here is the Amazon UK link, & here is the link to Amazon USA.

Now this is the Lulu link for the full version, A new posthuman poetry manifesto, the proof looking great. The covers for both books are directly below too. The table of contents for the full manifesto follows.

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.

 

Extended version of the posthumanist manifesto

Here from the blog of David C. McLean.

(Here the current form of the manifesto for goddess says, Emma, the next Emma book that I am writing. I do think that this is interesting & important. I include footnotes, endnotes obviously in the blog form, & hope that this does not make the reader lose her erection.)

Earlier this year, I wrote a manifesto for too little beast, a revised & posthuman version of the shorter antinatalist manifesto for too much human, a chapbook that I had written a few years previously. Now this present text is an addendum, an extension, & a clarification of parts of that earlier manifesto. I shall not supply a list of references, & I do not think that footnotes are very appropriate in a book of poems; they are fine in novels, not poems, but I have used them anyway in case the reader wants to find out more about the subject. Basically, what I add here boils down to the observation that posthumanism, allied to new materialism, is an extension of the liberatory effect of feminism that adds the whole relational context of animal & vegetable being to the agents & patients to be taken into account in discourse.

By "posthuman", I do not want to lead the reader to thoughts of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, whatever, which are a part of transhumanism, since I myself am inclined to interpret posthumanism as more of a focus on the nonhuman after the end of humanism, which has very much overstayed its welcome. In Francesca Ferrando's terminology,¹ I would probably count as belonging to the post-anthropocentric wing of the posthuman, which is actually, according to Ferrando, more radical. As she points out, transhumanism is a sort of ultra-humanism. Posthumanism, on the other hand, originated in feminist discourse in the eighties & nineties; it is opposed to speciesism, it is opposed to exceptionalism, & it is anti-exclusionary. There is a metahumanism that bases itself on the writings of Deleuze, & that emphasizes the significations of relational embodiment, but I shall not discuss this further here

In general posthumanism is a rethinking of what humanity & humanism's place, if any, should be in the world. Here, as elsewhere, I always mean "world" as something very much like Welt in Heidegger, as opposed to Erde, or "earth". The world is the framework of meaning & definitions by which we who use language understand things in the world; it is human & verbal. The earth is being as such, presencing, & it sustains, shelters, & protects. It cannot be grasped or exhausted by the world, it is pre-verbal:

The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the world. …The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art)²

The earth in all of my books for Emma, & in this one too, is something sacred given by goddess, the fire & love at the heart of being, it is beast who lives there alone, poor in world.

Now Heidegger was an opponent of humanism, as a relic of essentialist metaphysics, & his work has been seen as eminently suitable to ground a deep ecological understanding of the predicament we now face.³ Both Arne Naess, who founded deep ecology, & the later Heidegger argue that ethics, the world around us, & human beings must be understood in new ways in order to save the environment. The natural environment should be seen as a value in itself, not just as framework for resources.⁴ Mankind is not the sovereign, at best a shepherd of being for Heidegger, a subject who must widen & deepen her narrow isolation to become the deep self for Naess, & in both cases what is called for is a radical transmutation. There is a releasement for Heidegger & Naess, there is a becoming & a conversion for me. 

In all cases a surrender to the self-giving of poiesis, both as phusis & through our techne, which waits respectfully for what is given us, takes place. Cost benefit analysis will never get us there. Part of respecting deep ecology or earth, however, is a posthuman perspective. So I see the Heidegger/Naess deep ecological perspective as a natural way of applying this posthumanist perspective, an allied philosophy that calls for a transformation & a questioning of how subjectivity is understood.

Now, as noted, many people understand posthumanism as something to do with AI or robotics, whatever, some form of transhumanism, an extension of the human. I am not espousing this. Far from it, I instead would refer the reader to Lyotard, & the case of his postmodernism, understood as a detachment from the grand narratives of modernism. Postmodernism is also something that precedes modernism, it's a crisis state of modernism itself, & the "post" should not be taken as implying a strict & sequential evolution from modernism to postmodernism, the latter understood as a successor state to the less developed former state.

For me, posthumanism also implies a de-evolution, a reevaluation of evolutionary "priorities", & a variegated becoming-beast. As in Deleuze & Guattari & becoming-animal, it is a real becoming that does not necessarily involve an actual end state with some physical animal body. Now it just so happens that I am a shapeshifter, Emma made this start, it is she who first made this change happen in me, & I might have inadvertently scared other people on occasion by changing at heightened or excited moments. It is not, however, the case that becoming beast necessarily involves this actual change. I would, however, advocate it; we are not all permitted to evolve, but it is possible to switch allegiance, to identify as something better, to not let whatever it is that screams our passion & desire be stifled & restricted any more by our genetic identity than it should be by an outdated set of gender roles.

Now valuing the beast is not to be misunderstood as idealizing the cute animal, or ignoring the savagery & violence of nature. I do not have issues with pain, violence, predators predating. I myself am a vegan for moral & ecological reasons, but that is another issue, I'm just not biologically a carnivore. Wolves or cats predating is not a moral issue, they are moral patients, not moral agents. Me eating meat would be a moral issue, & for a great number of reasons. The complaint of the carnist is a disgusting echo of the past: "Don't worry about slaves." "Don't worry about women." "Don't worry about animals."

As i said in the earlier manifesto, humanism used to have a point. It was a grand narrative or meta-narrative that established science & empiricism, broke away from the religious control of everything. This was because theology was the principal enemy then, & the proper study of mankind, according to humanism, was "man".

As I wrote in the first manifesto: "Posthumanism does not only or necessarily involve hybrids & AI. It can be a return to a prehuman animal identity, as the postmodern precedes the modern. The beast precedes the human both in the order of chronology &, now, let's be realistic, in the order of priority. I am animal: not subhuman or superhuman, just different." We need to shake off the old identifications, as well as the belief that the earth that shelters & protects us is of any less value than the cultural worlds that goddam humans inflict upon that earth.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately, every "thing " - even materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.⁵

Barad is a new materialist. For new materialism, there is no clear line between matter & culture. As biology is mediated by culture, so is culture a product of biological organisms. The problem with radical constructivism is that, as Barad points out, one pays attention to everything but nature & matter. "the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter."⁶ To posthumanism & new materialism, it all matters. Ferrando describes the work of Butler as creating a lack of balance, where only language & culture was recognized. Butler's Bodies that Matter does not recognize the influence of the actual matter in the body, & how socially constructed biology is reciprocally constructed by the matter that Butler sometimes seems to think does not matter.⁷

I shall here quote the end of the last manifesto:

The Anthropocene is leaving terrible scars on this planet, on this Earth that shelters & protects. It is a relic of an obsolete humanism to pretend that the human race deserves any special consideration compared to other sentient beings, & even worse to believe with the religions of the disgusting book that any god has given humanity the right or duty to consume the flesh of animals & possess them as chattels. The only beast, mankind, with a whole history of being scumbags, polluting everything else with their dreadful excess.

There is too little beast. There is too much human.

We have to see that all sentient life is of value. Compassion for all sentient beings, & respect for the ecosystems of the earth that they need to flourish, shows us that deep ecology, based on evaluating all aspects of animal & plant life positively since it all fits together & nature functions as a whole, should lead to a reduction, at the very least, of the drastic human overpopulation. The reduction should be probably be very large. Not only sentient life, but all life, is morally significant, at least in part because all sentient life is part of the whole earth & relies on non-sentient life to sustain it.

There is certainly something that Ferrando would describe as an antihumanist tendency that is discernible in my work, but this is, as she points out, not really part of posthumanism, which is about the deconstruction of the humanist ideal rather than a destructive declaration of the "death of man" in any Foucauldian or Nietzschean sense. In the same way, my antinatalism does not extend to total pessimism & a desire for the total extinction of humanity, just much more restraint in reproduction.

More nature, more animals, more beast; less human, fewer humans. As Ferrando says close to the end of her piece:

As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse. In tune with antihumanism, posthumanism stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well. In such a framework, the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system of relations.⁸

Goddess gave us earth. Stop fucking it up. She put other creatures there to share it with "us". Stop driving them to extinction. No species is more important than any other. Even bugs that might gross me out have a goddess-given right to live. Posthumanism is not denying anything; we're just pointing out that a lot of other things are equally important. You can have ten million people in Sweden but you can't have twenty thousand wolves like Spain does? Get over yourselves, humans.

1I lied about footnotes. Francesca Ferrando (2013) "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms Differences and Relations". Existens Volume 8, No 2, Fall 2013

2Martin Heidegger (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & Row.

3Matthew Antolick (2002) "Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology" Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1326

4Martin Heidegger (1997) The Question Concerning Technology (New York, Harper and Row; Arne Naess (1995) “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. (Boston, Shambhala Press)

5Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28/3 (2003), pp. 801-31.

6Op. cit.

7Judith Butler (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge

8Ferrando 2013

 

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.

 

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.

Work from Posthuman Poetry & Prose

Below we shall post the corresponding pinned post from David C. McLean's personal blog, but first list other works from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. I take this in chronological order, but with the other writers first.

Very soon I shall be marrying Misti Rainwater & taking her name. Future books by me will appear under that name. First we produced STUNT COCK & are now 75 pp. deep in SLURP . Here is the illustrated & unexpurgated STUNT COCK at Lulu, & it is later coming from Amazon etc. It is more expensive than we might wish but it is on 80# coated paper & uses premium ink. The book contains the same poems as the other version, but each poem is accompanied by a new photo or collage that may or may not relate to the poem in some way. 

The cover is below & it is on sale at this link.

As noted previously, the next book is SLURP. This is more minimalist with no blog posts & no illustrations. There is a version without illustrations, this is a little cheaper & is here. 

 

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.

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.

 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. It is now at Amazon at this link..

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.

Here is the cover to a book of collaborations between Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru. A link will appear here when we have seen the proof. Huge thanks for Shaina Sterrett for the use of the cover image.

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

See my review elsewhere in this blog. The cover is posted below.

First Posthuman Poetry & Prose released new versions of the two books previously available by Tanya Rakh, & we shall release future work by her. The first two, Hydrogen Sofi & Wildflower Hell are available & future work by Tanya, & others, is planned.

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

To the greater glory of McLean's muse Emma, & of poet Tanya, & even of me McLean, the designer, we have produced a new cover. This is up now. The image below is the new one, & way nicer.

Here is HYDROGEN SOFI at this link.

Now about McLean's work from his personal blog:

This is the restored Autoerotic Elegies, with a new URL It is the blog where I, David C. McLean, list publications & so forth. I no longer have all the links to online work,  but had a good number of these bookmarked, & have listed them in the links section. There are about 700 magazines, online & in print, where work by me has appeared. Quite a few of my earlier chapbooks & the first three full length poetry collections are also mostly omitted here.

Here is my Amazon Author Page, to simplify locating "product". As far as I am concerned it is best to buy at the Lulu spotlight linked here anyway.  There are three novels, four chapbooks, and a considerable number of full length poetry collections at Lulu. These are also now available at Amazon, where they should appear a couple of weeks at least after they are available at Lulu.

I shall begin with things written from 2020 on. Honestly, these are way better. The most recent come first.

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.

There's a new book by me at the Lulu bookstore, forthcoming from Amazon etc but it's better for us if you buy from Lulu anyway. Full of massive love for Kali Maa & Her aspect Matangi. Blurb & cover follow, linked here Matangi assembles Her rejects.

This is the second book about Mother Kali from David C. McLean & it focuses on the Mahavidya Matangi, who controls art & poetry, & is the goddess of impurity. She is related to Hecate & other Dark Mothers. 

In the introduction there is discussion of Her as source of understanding of the incommensurable & McLean relates Her to Deleuze & Lyotard. He sees in Her a solution to the issue of the expression of intensity. 

We hope that this book pleases Kali Maa.

 

Finally got my new book finished after much buggering about, since I need to be comfortable with it, it being about the Divine Mother as it is. But Maa Kali cherishes imperfection & impurity, so that's something of a consolation. I am releasing it now because I have been constantly & obsessively adding to it, & want to hurry up with writing the next book about Matangi instead.

It is on sale here at Lulu, & here it now is on Amazon at this link. It is listed on  Amazon UK as well. The book is more expensive than I might wish, £12.50 or $16.50, with other currencies at corresponding rates, but blame the twats at Amazon for that, given that the book is 232 pages in length.

Four poems are on the images below, one of which is on two pages. 

The book contains a 45 page introduction about Kali. The introduction does not pretend to be comprehensive but relates the scriptures about Her to posthumanism, & the selective & creative nature of reincarnation, & speaks of the ultimate eternal return after the dissolution, when Her restive & fickle nature will create again. Some of this is drawn from the Posthuman poetry manifesto & adds to that. (Here

This is the second collection of poems written by McLean since his return to the UK this year. It writes of how the goddess is to be seen present in the nature of Somerset. This is a book about flesh & intensity, the fire inside. Some parts are protective magic, & McLean also has issues with the ghost that has always accompanied him, but they are ultimately reconciled.

the manifesto is on Amazon too.) Anyway, as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa wrote, She only saves one in a hundred thousand. 

The introduction also includes much ranting about narcissism, neo-colonialism against indigenous peoples, the patriarchy, the caste system, the narcissism of many "gurus", & the disgraceful British empire.

Blurb, cover, & samples follow:

This book is the first about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas that McLean has written. This is what he proposes to write about in the future. 

The book includes a 45 page introduction in which McLean relates the Divine Mother to posthuman themes. There will no full manifesto on the basis of this but the ideas will be developed in later books..

The cover image is Kali's yantra.

The manifesto about posthumanism that was posted previously in this blog now serves as the the introduction to my recent book of poems, everything essential. It builds upon the two previous manifestos about antinatalism & posthumanism that were included in the earlier books too much human & goddess says, Emma. But I have now released a book of prose that isn't a novel. It's a book of theory about posthumanism, deep ecology, goddess, & poetics, There is quite a lot about posthumanism, about new materialism, about Heidegger & Derrida's discussion of poetics, about deep ecology, earth & world, & becomings-animal, & about Deleuze & temporality. Also, naturally, there is much about goddess & Tiamat, prior to the patriarchal deities of Babylon & later. All this in detail in the long version that is now on sale.
Now this is the Lulu link for the full version, A new posthuman poetry manifesto, the proof looking great. 

I have three new books of poems out now, the first since moving to the UK. From Posthuman Poetry & Prose all of them, the third is everything essential. It is on sale at this link. It also contains a shortened form of the above manifesto. Themes & inspirations include nature in North Somerset; goddess Tiamat; posthumanism & postmodernism; Deleuze & Guattari's becoming animal & rhizomes; Foucault's antihumanism & antifascism; Derrida's ethics, poetics, & ethopoetics; Nietzsche in general, especially the return as the return of the dissolved self; Lyotard's intensity; new materialism; indeterminacy; goddess chaos versus patriarchal order; the Enuma Elish; & love, sexuality, & BDSM.

The book is 205 numbered pages, with a 45 page introductory manifesto that took a lot of work. I have edited this & given more attention to it than usual. It's a sort of statement. The manifesto is about posthumanism, goddess Tiamat, chaos, & posthuman poetics, & I try to enact it in the poems - the dissolution of the ego in Deleuze's reading of the Nietzschean eternal return, the intensity, the beast, the ahuman that I am become. The sexual intensity that was always there in previous series has transformed into something else & now pervades everything - from goddess to brutality, from butterflies to philosophy. Now everything essential is on sale at this link. 

 

The second is skulls & dust, & it is available at this link.

This is the second collection of poems written by McLean since his return to the UK this year. It writes of how the goddess is to be seen present in the nature of Somerset. This is a book about flesh & intensity, the fire inside. Some parts are protective magic, & McLean also has issues with the ghost that has always accompanied him, but they are ultimately reconciled.

The first UK book was goddess gives sun enough. This book is 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.