Latest News
Mar
31
2008
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Monday, 31 March 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present Age of the Demon Tools by Mark Spitzer. You may order our newest title by clicking here. Check out more about Mark Spitzer by clicking here.
Of the newest title from Mark Spitzer and Ahadada, Ed Sanders writes: "When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century."
Mark Spitzer (poet, novelist, literary translator, essayist and muckraker) grew up in Minnesota and lit out for the University of Colorado, where he earned his MA in1992. He then ended up as Writer in Residence at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where he translated manuscripts by French criminals and misanthropes. After a few years being Bohemian, Spitzer went back to America and the big old ugly fish he loves (ie, eely bottom feeders, primitive gar and monster cats) and got a job as the Assistant Editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse (which, ironically, had forced him to assume the guise of bastard child of American avant-garde letters just a few years before). He then goofed his way through an MFA at LSU, got a professor job up in Missouri, and taught creative writing at Truman State University for five years. He is currently a professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Toad Suck, AR.
What Others Say about Age of the Demon Tools
You have to slow down, and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title, Age of the Demon Tools, is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology—you know, corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths.
—Ed Sanders, literary icon
Only dumbf**ks will not read this book and exult. Spitzer's furious epic is a supremely satisfying blasphemous gorgeous cantankerous yowl for a generation of hep-infected-cats neutered by American supremidiocy. He has managed—quite un-nicely, thank you!—to tweeze every bloody splinter from our polluted and polluting culture. His Missouri misery odyssey ra[n]ges from big bass to big brass, from celebrity bodies to celestial bodies, from a micro-war between the blustering hero-narrator and local developers bent on greed and eco-genocide to a macro-war between the US government and practically everybody else, including its own soldiers. Most rewarding is Spitzer's renovated language that, read and screamed aloud, bends and twists and curls the tongue so erotically that orgasm is a valid conclusion. Really.
— Debra Di Blasi, author of The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions
Triage of daily life and text, mines in the headlines, flat faced mutancy in the details of man's folly and avarice, rapacity and ballsack confusion, set against an individual pastorale amid the cowpies, text addled by brush, "angry vines," and "channel cats with mongo backs," sluiced with wind and wave, in turn set against the maw of what increasingly seems to no longer exist, green world of birdsong, face of simple intention, word strong as bough, and so forth (and yet . . .). Text with an edge like a serial killer's holiday in a target rich environment, the monkeyward of Washington, or the plains of Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate board rooms and city council meetings clotted with preening inanities in the form of the human, etc., the text's language slick as a lineman's clit, doffing a nod to the warbled wordexitry of Burgess and the wee ones who sleep in eaves, all woven with the witchery of electronic missives, condensing words to mush. Spitzer in battle-rut (Moloch panting beneath.)
—Skip Fox, author of At That |
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Mar
22
2008
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Saturday, 22 March 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present Torque by Alison Croggon. You may download it by clicking here:
 Torque by Alison Croggon (145 KB
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Check out all of our Ebook offerings in our catalog by clicking here. Read more about Alison Croggon via her author profile.
Torque is the third release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly — it's the eighteenth online chapbook offered by Ahadada.
Born in 1962, Alison Croggon is one of a generation of Australian poets which emerged in the 1990s. She writes in many genres, including criticism, theatre and prose. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the national daily newspaper, The Australian, and keeps a blog of theatre criticism, Theatre Notes.
Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. Her most recent poetry publication is a chapbook, Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2007). A new full collection, Theatre, is forthcoming in 2008 from Salt Publishing. Other titles include November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne, (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh (New and Selected Poems) (Arc Publications, UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being, (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002).
Read more about Alison Croggon here. |
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Feb
17
2008
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Sunday, 17 February 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present Sweet Potatoes by Lou Rowan. Sweet Potatoes is Ahadada Books' latest release and is available via Small Press Distribution and through our website. Click here to order.
A native of Southern California, Lou Rowan began his writing career in New York City, where he earned his living as teacher and as an institutional investor. He lives and writes in Seattle. His current projects include a novel about the losing of the West, a sequel to My Last Days, stories, and his editorial duties at Golden Handcuffs Review. Click here to visit Lou Rowan's website.
Writes Patrizia Hayashi:
With incisive wit and a remarkable eye for the human condition, Lou Rowan weaves together a collection of short stories that will arouse laughter, nostalgia, and an occasional dose of pity. In Sweet Potatoes, the author lays his characters bare, digging into their psyches, presenting their foibles, and in doing so, holding up a mirror that dares the reader to recognize himself.
Please, click here to read an excerpt.
Writes A.J. Glusman: "Lou Rowan . . . is retired, in love and charged. He was raised by horse breeders and went to Harvard and thus possesses an outward polish. But he talks like a radical, his speech incongruous with his buttoned-down appearance. Golden Handcuffs Review, the local literary magazine that Rowan founded and edits, is much like the man himself: appealing and presentable on the outside, a bit wild and experimental at the core.
What Others Say About Sweet Potatoes
Lou Rowan's exuberant and richly varied book presents a series of dramatic monologues whose personal and imaginary components are fused in the blaze of the author's enthusiasm. The feeling that he is doing exactly what he wants to do produces consistently lively results, no matter how downbeat the struggles described - with parents, lovers, wives good and bad, business problems, and of course the inescapable self. In the final story, a counterpoint of these voices raises the narration to a level of intensity both harrowing and irresistible...
—Harry Mathews, author, My Life in CIA
The stories in Lou Rowan's collection "Sweet Potatoes" are brilliantly rendered in a mesh of grim and exuberantly funny shifts of highly original tale-telling. The variety of characters are utterly real and fascinatingly complex. Their daily actions and experiences offer a mesmerizing picture of much in society that is false and outrageous and yet all too forgiveably human. Rowan tunes up his one of a kind narrative voice with resonances of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Mickey Spillane.
—Rochelle Owens, author, Luca: A Discourse on Life and Death, and Futz
These very short stories are a blend of maybe memoir, crazed case history, and raunchy comic fiction spun by a deadpan narrator with a gift for dazzling transitions.
—David Antin, author, i never knew what time it was, and what it means to be avant-garde |
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Jan
28
2008
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Monday, 28 January 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot by Judith Skillman. Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot is the seventeenth release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series. Download it by clicking here.
Over the past three decades Judith Skillman has written and published numerous poems for books, journals, and anthologies. She has collaborative translations from Portuguese, Italian, and French. Skillman's publications include FIELD, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, The Northwest Review, and Midwest Quarterly. She has ten books of poems.
From 1977 - 1978 she held a teaching assistantship at the University of Maryland, while working towards her masters degree in English Literature. She received the King County Arts Commission’s Publication Prize in 1987, judged by Madeline DeFrees. This prize enabled her to find a publisher for her first book, “Worship of the Visible Spectrum” (Breitenbush Books.) In 1991 Skillman was awarded a Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship.
Read more about Judith Skillman here.
Skillman's poems move out from their opening point meditatively and delicately to embrace distant sights, memories of the past, other countries, and also mythologies and similarities. "Bearing the universal/forward in each particular...," she writes in "Cardoon." She is not seeking anything in this movement--neither knowledge nor possession nor control. The movement is not an urge, but rather the natural penchant to connect with what is beyond the immediate self. Things within the broader world are connected by a tissue of shared qualities. "Increments of blue and pink chalk/can be made..."-- from "On Circe's Island". Or, as she writes in "Zaydee," "...pink fragments claim/the edge of a wave...." Skillman's poems are created by following where an initial sensed quality leads; and all of the world, from objects to envisionings, is spun together by qualities similar and different.
—Henry Berry
Download Anne-Marie Derése in Translation & The Green Parrot by Judith Skillman by clicking here
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Jan
13
2008
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Sunday, 13 January 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present First Portions by Hank Lazer. First Portions is the second release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly — it is our sixteenth online publication. You may download it by clicking here.
Hank Lazer has published 13 books of poetry, including The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays 1996-2008 is due out shortly from Omnidawn (and is available at a big discount by clicking here). Please feel free to contact the poet by
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Known for his acute criticism as well as exploratory poetry, Hank Lazer is a poet who might be described as a stylistic risk-taker as well as forager in the treasure house of words. …
—Cynthia Hogue, Rain Taxi
Lazer blends the purposes of poetry and the ISMs of various camps and forges poems that is both fun to read with the heart and with the mind. This is no easy exercise in these days of thick lines between the many classes of poetry.
—Michael Basinski, Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY-Buffalo
For more information on Hank Lazer, click here. |
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Jan
06
2008
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Sunday, 06 January 2008 |
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 Ahadada Books is pleased to present Darjeeling by T. A. Noonan. Darjeeling is the first release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly. This is T. A. Noonan's first electonic Chapbook, and second published chapbook. Download it here.
T.A. Noonan was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. from Louisiana State University in 2002 and her M.F.A. from Florida Atlantic University in 2006. Her work has appeared—or is forthcoming—in The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, Harpur Palate, elimae, Word For/Word, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, FOURSQUARE, Blink: Flash Fiction Before You Can Bat an Eye, and many others.
Balm, her first chapbook, is available from Flaming Giblet Press. She currently lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Southern Mississippi.
Download Darjeeling by clicking here! |
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