Ahadada Books Presents on Saturday June 13, 2009

an event  hosted by Ahadada author Robert Thompson

set to run from 6:30–8:30pm

@

82 West 3rd Street
(between Thompson & Sullivan—see map below)
Greenwich Village
New York NY 10012
Get directions

About Michael Heller

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. He has published six volumes of poetry, the most recent being Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (2003). Earth and Cave, his mixed genre journals of the 1960s when he lived in Spain, was published in 2007. A memoir, Living Root, was brought out by the State University Press of New York in 2000. His most recent critical work is Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (2008). A selection of his essays, Uncertain Poetries, appeared in 2005. His ground-breaking book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches: Essays on the Objectivist Poets and Poetry was published in 1985 by Southern Illinois University Press and has been reissued by Spuyten-Duyvil. His poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Harpers, New Letters, The Nation, American Poetry Review and The New York Times Book Review. His libretto for the opera, Constellations of Waking, was set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia in 2002. He has won prizes for his poetry from The New School for Social Research, Poetry in Public Places, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State CAPS Fellowship in Poetry, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America, the New York Foundation on the Arts Fellowship and the Fund for Poetry. He lives in New York City with his wife, the poet and scholar Jane Augustine.

About Amy King

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press), and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox Books).

Amy edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. Amy King was also the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School.

Robert Thompson

Robert Thompson, a Midwesterner living in Brooklyn for the past twenty-five years, studied poetry at Brooklyn College and wrote a doctoral dissertation on James Schuyler at  the C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center. City of Water (Ahadada Books) was published in 2008. A chapbook entitled The Pear Tree's Winter was published by Intuflo/Groundwater Press (Hudson, New York). He teaches English at Touro College in the School of Career and Applied Studies.

Robert Thompson's poems have many admirable qualities, chief among them: a light touch. A light touch is only admirable when it goes against the grain, when it is something more than willful fun 'n games, or mere whimsy, when it undermines solemnity without sacrificing attention.

Like other New York poets, poets in New York, Thompson must find a way to respond adequately to the lacerating edginess of the urban. This he does with a diffident but not indifferent, slightly askew, slightly surreal diction, the effect of which is like someone whistling a tune in the midst of a traffic jam.
            —Ann Lauterbach

Study of Thompson's poems is always rewarding, because they are both serious and witty, fascinating in their allusiveness.
            —Sir Stephen Spender

About Donald Wellman

Born in Nashua, NH, USA, he attended University of New Hampshire, served in the US Army(1968-71), and completed a Doctor Arts at the University of Oregon in 1975 (concentrations in Old English, Middle English, and Modern Literature. He has taught in the Caribbean and in the Boston area. He is currently professor of Writing and Humanities at Daniel Webster College. From 1981 to 1995, Wellman directed O.ARS, a literary and cultural organization, publishing anthologies of poetry, visual poetry, experimental prose, and commentary. Each volume explores an aspect of postmodern poetics. From its inception O.ARS published works of experimental or sur-fiction, visual poetry and other forms of writing associated with the international avant-garde, as well as what has come now to be known as language writing.

Wellman’s poetry and criticism have appeared in a variety of venues, including the on-line journal Jacket. An e-book entitled Baroque Threads has been published by Mudlark. Fields . a selected poems, spanning twenty years work, appeared in 1995 from Light & Dust. Wellman has given conference papers and published criticism on key modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Charles Olson. He has also written and published on contemporary world poetry, especially that employing hybrid forms. In both his poetry and prose, Wellman engages a field poetics, using tropes like margin, frame or overlay to explore the ways in which cross-cultural contact or liminality produce meaning. He has translated contemporary poetry from French, German and Spanish sources. Current translation projects include Jardín cerrado by Emilio Prados and several works by Antonio Gamoneda, 2006 winner of the Cervantes prize. His translation of Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold  is forthcoming from Swan Isle.

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Term as in Aftermath is Alan Halsey’s first full-length collection since his retrospectives Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006). Here is the complete ‘Looking-glass for Logoclasts’ alongside the first viewing of his 'Unkempt Archives' and in the title sequence re-readings of texts from the schoolbooks of the ancient Egyptians via Seneca and Stein to The Tennis Court Oath and the codenames of recent military operations, together with translations of newly discovered fragments of Mercurialis and further studies of the lizopard.

What Paul Merchant has called Halsey’s ‘kabbalah of cultural signs' made Andy Sanderson ‘feel a fierce horror and pity for language’ while Ian Seed was ‘startled into seeing language and its possibilities in a fresh light’ and Nikki Santilli remarked that ‘Halsey mixes his materials until the work is emptied of even a post-modern grin’. ‘The craftsmanship is impeccable, the lines breathe intelligence’ wrote Lyndon Davies, and Tony Lopez: ‘pure intelligence of various means of departure, refined and sharpened up, exactly located, appropriately geared, and cutting right into ore as we dream’.

About Alan Halsey

Born in London 1949. Philosophy degree, London 1972. Ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-97. Has lived in Sheffield since 1997, working as a specialist bookseller & publishing West House Books. Married Geraldine Monk in 1998.

Alan founded West House in 1994 to publish contemporary poetry and poetry-related work. In recent years he has run it in partnership with Geraldine Monk.

Alan Halsey's books include Perspectives On The Reach (1981), Five Years Out (1989), Reasonable Distance (1992), The Text of Shelley's Death (1995) and A Robin Hood Book (1996).

What others say about Alan Halsey

As Alan Halsey has written, Sing or else.  Or was that Jerry Lee Lewis? Could be either, they’re such similar figures in my mind.’

    —Kelvin Corcoran

...his most original contribution is the re-absorbing [of] verbal dispersion into poetry in a manner one is tempted to describe as post-concrete... One might alternatively describe his work as Neo-baroque .

    —Yann Lovelock

The few attempts I've seen at dealing with his work seem to throw their hands up and just regard him as a force of nature. I think I can agree with that. His writings are the dark side of the moon, and reading them from the front isn’t very profitable.

    —Michael Peverett

[he] has a form which is about as bilateral as a mash of notes just before Monk’s left hand has hit them

    —Tony Baker

It seems to me Mr Halsey’s poetry (like all logoclastic poetry) foregrounds the communicative value of discourse.

    —Gregory Vincent St Thomasino

Alan Halsey is one of our more singular voices, and the Stride selected is a good place to start. He has a number of scholarly and antiquarian interests that can leak into and inform his work as a poet

Alan Halsey is one of our more singular voices, and the Stride selected is a good place to start. He has a number of scholarly and antiquarian interests that can leak into and inform his work as a poet; hence his prose 'treatment' of Robin Hood (maintaining an interest in British myth) and the Shelley volume, which in prose and in a loose-lined verse tells the story of the title from various viewpoints, aping the scholar's variorum approach, but taking off into new directions with the writer's own sensibility interjected instead of the more reticent scholar's. But his latest career-summary, the beautiful Marginalien, which can be recommended both for its contents and as an object (a lesson in the art of design from Glen Storhaug of Five Seasons).

    —Shearsmen Books

Ahadada Books is pleased to announce the publication of Exhibit C by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. This title is now available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher.

About Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

What others say about Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Without the least strain, Jane Joritz Nakagawa takes readers on a carnivalesque tour of  American culture in language that splices together the strange heights and depths of the  terrain. Her ear is tuned to what makes the language live and there's eye candy  too: lithe cuts and jumps that make each line worthy of notice. Exhibit C is a rare pleasure.
               —Maxine Chernoff

 Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s poems partake readily in the pleasures of freshly arranged particles and atoms of language. Frequenting a realm of happy appropriation, she daringly reorders and disrupts conventional poetic expectations -  and she often conducts this pretty quickly. Readers, be alert.
               —Pam Brown

There are few poets who can render emotion with such ferocity and intelligence.
               —Paul Hoover

Exhibit C (2008 / 166pp / $14.95 / softbound / 978-0-9808873-7-2) is published by Ahadada Books. It is available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and direct from the publisher.

Click here to order from Small Press Distribution.