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Ahadada Books publishes titles both online and in print. We present broadsides, chapbooks, and perfect bound books of diverse literary forms.
 
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Mar 02 2010
Available Soon: Coördinates of Yes by Janée J. Baugher
Tuesday, 02 March 2010

Ahadada Books is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Coördinates of Yes by Janée J. Baugher. This title will soon be available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and direct from the publisher. Click here to order! 

Written during a six-week trip through Europe, Coördinates of Yes marries nuances of travel (loneliness, restlessness, adventure, reverie, risk, discovery) with ekphrasis (poems inspired by the visual arts).  This collection of poems addresses different ways of seeing:  The experience of travel and art-viewing can enlighten as well as confuse, while the literal eye that travels is undifferentiated from the eye of the imagination.  At the core of Coördinates of Yes lies dualism:  “Coördinates” refers to place and transience of travel, and “Yes” suggests the mind-set required of both traveler and viewer of art.

Praise for Janée J. Baugher

Janée knows how to snap a moment into focus, without condescending, on behalf of her readers.  Her interest in what happens when a poet lets the world speak for itself inhabits large swaths here; each page benefits from it.  These felt to me like steady poems in a moving world, or like reliably still reports from travel’s manic introspection.  I was enchanted reading Coördinates of Yes.  It’s honest and intimate without ever becoming precious, and it gives us the self without the usual indulgence.  There’s an unusual, and refreshing, sincerity in these poems, from a poet who has stripped herself of cynicism.

         – David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars and The Other

Though they traverse European landscape, these dense, rich poems are voyages as Baudelaire inscribed the term: journeys to the interior.  Baugher conducts us through a paradis artificiel where art is the window to journeys within.  A stunning début collection.

         – Peter Cooley, author of The Van Gogh Notebook and Divine Margins

If, as Wallace Stevens said, “the greatest poverty  is not to live in the physical world,” Janée Baugher is, indeed, a rich woman. Whether she is regarding a work of art or a landscape seen in “the altered state [of] travel,” Baugher is keenly observant, almost “walking on eyes,” while simultaneously aware that “It is only with one’s heart that one can see.” Coördinates of Yes is an impressive début collection.

         – Grace Bauer, author of Beholding Eye and Retreats & Recognitions

May you have the great fortune to read Coördinates of Yes on an eastbound transatlantic flight as I’ve just done.  This book is an exquisite poetic guide through cemeteries and village spires, 2 a.m. city streets, sunflower fields, derelict hotels, young loves, sea cliffs, and work after work of articulate art, an old world made new by Baugher’s insightful gaze, deftness of phrasing, and companionable spirit.

         – Jonathan Johnson, author of Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves

In reading Coördinates of Yes, one encounters an alchemy of images, surprising textures, and an alluring contemplative spirit that announces Baugher’s joy simply in making language sing beyond mere observation and description.  Through her travels, both imagined and real, one realizes an evolving, stark cosmopolitanism in Janée’s language inventions.  I am thrilled by her elegant utterances and animated insights in poem after poem.

         – Major Jackson, author of Hoops and Leaving Saturn

The Swiss painter Paul Klee famously said in his notebooks, “One eye sees, the other feels.” These lapidary ekphrastic renderings by Janée Baugher take Klee to heart.  Braiding sensory pleasures with meticulous observation, she fully succeeds in transporting us to places previously un-sensed and unseen.  Here is a garden of depths and delights.

         – Jeffrey Levine, Publisher, Tupelo Press, and author of Rumor of Cortez and Mortal, Everlasting

 

 
Dec 20 2009
Now Available: Hollerin from This Shack by Grace C. Ocasio
Sunday, 20 December 2009

Ahadada Books is pleased to announce the publication of Hollerin from This Shack by Grace C. Ocasio. This title is now available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher. Click here to order!

The poems in grace Ocasio's chapbook Hollerin from This Shack call us, challenge us to assess our lives.  Her speaker trains her eye on urban and suburban landscapes.  In many of the poems, she urges us to observe our daily rites:  how we behave at the grocery store or mall, how we treat the opposite sex, and how we view our position to nature.  We see ourselves in these poems and we cringe:  few heroes exist, and the ones who do existreal-life figures like Dr. King and Mother Hale—appear because of their referential or historical import. If we are disturbed by these poems we should be. Ocasio's vision is troubling, to say the least.

Grace Ocasio is a member of the North Carolina Writers' Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Carolina African American Writers' Collective.  She was born in New York City and raised in Hartsdale and White Plains, New York.  She holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Recently, she completed a residency at the Soul Mountain Retreat in East Haddam, Connecticut.  Besides writing poetry, she contributes reviews of literary journals to the online Web site, The Review, Review.

Praise for Grace C. Ocasio:

The voice in all of the poems in Hollerin from This Shack is immediate, unpredictable, insightful and, at times, startling.  It's a friendly voice that encourages a closer look, then gains your trust so it can show what is extraordinary in the ordinary concerns of everyday life.  Grace Ocasio expands the traditional landscape in these carefully constructed poems and all are enriched who travel it with her.

            —Kevin Pilkington

Grace Ocasio writes poems that are powerful, loaded with subtext, and full of social consciousness.  She takes on the role of poet-philosopher, giving a voice to many who don't have a voice in our society.  In these pages, you will "listen to the sun's heart stutter." You will see "tears the size of grapefruits," "poverty's breath," and "objects that glowed like cotton candy."  Her poems speak for a soul group, "When the only thing that lived beside me was the dark."

            —Diane Frank, author of Blackberries in the Dream House and Entering the Word Temple

I approach Grace Ocasio's elegant, original, angry poems in Hollerin from This Shack with a certain humility.  As a black woman, she writes of prejudice with a taut rage that alternately smolders and blazes, blossoms in poems that sing with startling images.  Yet these pieces inhabit a universe of shyness and innocence, a world of fierce honestly that places her as a sister to poet Everett Hoagland, a daughter to poet Gloria Oden.  She often writes as a child, or as a woman about to be hurt. Ocasio summons up real tensions between men and women, women most always seen as victims to be.  She writes with depth of the fear stemming from roots scarred with racism.  Grace Ocasio outlines personal situations, but they carry a universal charge.  In unique ways, she takes on themes that deal with the killers of Martin Luther King, her emotions about Lady Day, and her admiration for Mother Hale.  Her stark language enriches us.  In "Our Lady Day" Grace Ocasio writes: "If you take her voice out/ you will see tears the size of grapefruits whirling down from the sky."

            —Judy Katz-Levine 

 
Sep 23 2009
Now Available: Seducing Velasquez and Other Plays by Dayana Stetco
Wednesday, 23 September 2009

Ahadada Books is pleased to announce the publication of Seducing Velasquez and Other Plays by Dayana Stetco. This title will be available shortly from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher.

Dayana Stetco’s plays have been produced in her native country, Romania, the US and the UK. In 2001 she founded the interdisciplinary physical theatre ensemble, The Milena Group. Her fiction has appeared in various journals including The Means, Emergency Almanac, mark(s), Interdisciplinary Humanities, Metrotimes, Gender(f), and Dispatch. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Film.


Seducing Velasquez is a collection of nervy, impish, unconventional dramatic works that draw their strength from Stetco’s rigorous investigations into the connection between verbal, visual, and physical languages from the innovative performance traditions associated with the author’s native Romania. These plays are witty and marvellous, in the mode of the best absurdist art, and are welcome interventions into the American theatre scene

            —Carla Harryman

On the stage, Dayana Stetco’s plays are so lush with colour and texture as to seem very nearly a visual art; there is an attention to movement and detail that can make even a torture scene seem like the highest ballet. As such, it is hard to believe these plays would have as strong an impact on the page; yet, every play in this collection carries over the saturation, menace, and beauty they present on the stage,. Even as each piece works spectacularly alone, audiences with a little cultural knowledge or literary awareness will find woven throughout a brilliant interplay—of theory, philosophy, literature, history, and more. One finds the Pinteresque, the 21st century. While the character of Graham in Milena, Stripping defensively claims “Come things are not meant to be analyzed,” Stetco’s plays are exciting and powerful theatre (and literature) whether the audience wants to analyze all the dense layers or simply sit back and enjoy the experience.

            —Rita Costello

 

 
Jul 16 2009
Issue 2 of Ekleksographia is now live!
Thursday, 16 July 2009

Check it out!

 
Jun 27 2009
Now Available: Delta Blues by Skip Fox
Saturday, 27 June 2009

Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Skip Fox's Delta Blues. Delta Blues is the fourth in a series of texts tentatively titled Dream of a Book. It was preceded by What Of (Potes & Poets),At That (Ahadada Books) and For To (BlazeVox). Reprising his role as entomologist, Skip Fox presents passages sprawling and pinned in a shadow box of observations and odd lots.

Writes Fox in Delta Blues:

age is telling a long joke, with some apparent joy, early
at a party, not all the guests have yet arrived, a first
drink freshly in your hand, he's an interesting stranger in
no hurry, pausing for laughs, comments, not prolonging
the punch line but forgiving it its necessities, standing and
laughing and listening, slowly he reaches the part about
pest Pacific blue and the sound of sails at sunset, how
their color changes in the changing light, shades of white
in encroaching darkness, pewter, you are still young, any-
thing can happen, yet is a word you can still use as a soft
wedge, argumentation may again be filled with joy, now
for witness of sheer mind's leaping, but his words have
slowed, slightly, and his head almost turns, then with a
light shift in his eye, oh yes, the abyss, I almost forgot

Delta BluesSkip Fox is currently serving what appears to be a life sentence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where he lives on three acres with a log cabin and a pond in one of the poorest parishes in the state. Fox writes poetry, prose, and short fictions as well as reviews.

He dates his birth from his first reading of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. He also has three chapbooks, one bibliography (on Creeley, Dorn, and Duncan), and years on MLA Bibliography and Bulletin of Bibliography. In addition to Ahadada's At That, his book, What Of, is available from Potes & Poets Press.

He graduated from Bowling Green State. He has worked in woods (Pacific Northwest), warehouses (San Francisco), shake and shingle mills (Beaver, WA), lumber yards, ketchup & catfood factories, Chrysler, mental hospitals (Ohio, seven years), and so on.

His work is included in Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama). He has been published by such little magazines as Hambone, o.blek, Talisman, and Exquisite Corpse.

This title is available now from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is available direct from the publisher. Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions.

 

What People Are Saying About Delta Blues:

“That most of these untellable stories are not told because they have not happened, and cannot happen, is something I find best told by Skip Fox, in his new book Delta Blues.”
          —Susan M. Schultz

“no other hurricane prose
can match the gnash of the storm Skip
Fox has unleashed
this super-hyper-organic-destructo-twister of pure
Incandescent
    Blazin'
       Brilliance!!!—

dissolving like battery acid
the flesh of all
we think know.”
          —Mark Spitzer

“As I consider Fox's poem, I realize why [Mark] Young [author of Lunch Poems] and Fox are achieving some truly wonderful poems: both possess the mental suppleness required to address complexities without being overwhelmed, before proceeding forward to write with admirable deftness.”
          —Eileen Tabios

 
Apr 01 2009
Now Available: Demosthenes’ Legacy from Jonathan Monroe
Wednesday, 01 April 2009

Ahadada Books (Toronto & Tokyo) is pleased to announce the release of Jonathan Monroe's Demosthenes’ Legacy. Writes Alice Fulton: "With Demosthenes’ Legacy, Jonathan Monroe creates a brilliantly elusive “poetics of asides,” a mutable linguistic field of planned accidents that evoke the uncontrollable suasions of speech." She continues:

Rhetoric is estranged as “language falters through its paces.” Syntax and grammar seem selfanimated: revelatory mechanisms shimmering with slippage and wit. Idioms are torqued by difference, platitudes skew toward the strange, conventions are revamped, the metrical foot rebooted. The erotics of perception shift as ground becomes figure, and refracted surfaces illuminate the possibilities: “Nothing severed, nothing gained.” Wayward strophes riff on Demosthenes, enacting their misgivings toward oratory eloquence and arriving at rougher, gnostic stutterings “where the jewel erupts, unfolds.” Words melt into cognates and homonyms as if purposefully mumbled, improved by a mouthful of pebbles. Demosthenes’ Legacy is more adroit for such impediments, more enthralling for its resistances. These poems are infinitely rereadable, rich with the subtle and seditious possibilities of language. 

This title will be available shortly from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher. Click here to order. Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions.

What others say about Demosthenes’ Legacy 

In Jonathan Monroe’s Demosthenes’ Legacy, the oracular orator nicknamed Demo travels a playful, intricate “path to unknowing.” Through a lifetime of rolling “word pebbles” in his mouth, as “language falters through its paces,” the quest for eloquence is transformed. In Demo’s virtual landscape, “net waves” of speech unravel and “audible suasions” conduct the reader through a “digital pluriverse” where “pronouns retain their right to grieve”. Beauty and knowledge emerge in language’s “predilection for uncertainty.” Experiencing language from within leads this Demo to a profound embrace of impermanence. 
         —Cecilia Vicuña

In this jeweled, aureate abecedary, Jonathan Monroe assembles an anachronistic account of Demosthenes’ “world beyond flesh.” What we find, delicious surprise, is a time porous with our time, aching for articulation. Clipped juxtapositions comprise each compact entry, vowels echo across the interiors, and sonic marvels are tapped to the dry-wall-stud of the prose with ringing nails. The legacy is our own. Monroe’s tensile prosody is masterful and the pleasures of the poems are exuberant. 
         —Forrest Gander

Is Demosthenes’ Legacy a translation of a real Demosthenes or his words or is it, as the impossibility of translation, fiction creating a character? Just as the word “kinesthesia” translates the sensation of movement (as if the word translates “muscle sense”), Jonathan Monroe’s fragments in Demosthenes’ Legacy are, as only immediate events, “Nobody’s narrative, no one’s dream.” The assembled fragments are Monroe’s comparison to modern media? Monroe’s playful text is a virtual “muscle sense” of the nature of event at all: “Webs released in matching threads.”
         —Leslie Scalapino

And so I asked myself: Is Deleuzean stuttering brought to bear on classicizing rhetoric? In any event, stuttering proves eloquent throughout Monroe’s writing, by providing a thoughtful way to utter a poetics. Demosthenes’ Legacy is the fine consequence of this deliberative process. 
         —Marjorie Welish

 

 
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