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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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About Yoko Danno

Yoko Danno was born, raised, and educated in Japan. She has been writing poetry solely in English for more than 35 years. In addition to being a poet, she is also a translator and the editor of the Ikuta Press in Kobe, Japan. Click here for more information.

The Ikuta Press was established in 1970 in Kobe, Japan by American expatriate poet Lindley Williams Hubbell and Kanaseki Hisao, a scholar and translator known for his work on Gertrude Stein and American Indian mythology. Editor-in-chief Yoko Danno put out the first Anthology, an annual, or sometimes biennial, poetry collection. Among the writers Danno published in the series, which continued until 1991, were Sato Hiroaki, Timothy Harris and Arturo Silva.

She has published several chapbooks including Passage' 77, Four Songs (reprinted in the International Anthology of Poetry and Prose 47 by New Directions, New York, 1983) and Portraits' 78. She is the author of five books of poetry: Trilogy (1970, 2004), Hagoromo (1984, 2004), Dusty Mirror (1977) (all published by The Ikuta Press, Kobe), Epitaph for Memories (by The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, Washington, D.C., 2002) and The Blue Door (written in collaboration with James C. Hopkins, published by The Word Works, Washington, D.C., 2006). She lives in Kobe, Japan, with her family.

May 24 2008

Now Available: Bela Fawr's Cabaret by David Annwn

Saturday, 24 May 2008

Ahadada Books is pleased to present Bela Fawr's Cabaret by David Annwn. You may order our newest title by clicking here. It's now available from Small Press Distribution, please click here!

Writes Gavin Selerie: "David Annwn’s work drills deep into strata of myth and history."

He continues:

...exposing devices which resonate in new contexts. Faithful to the living moment, his poems dip, hover and dart through soundscapes rich with suggestion, rhythmically charged and etymologically playful. Formally adventurous and inviting disjunction, these texts retain a lyric coherence that powerfully renders layers of experience. The mode veers from jazzy to mystical, evoking in the reader both disturbance and content. Bela Fawr’s Cabaret has this recognisable stamp: music and legend ‘Knocked Abaht a Bit’, mischievous humour yielding subtle insight...

On earlier books by David Annwn

Annwn’s turbulent//boundaries forces the limits of boundaries by making them jostle and ultimately confront each other ... bacchanalian feast of pagan rite meets media hype ... ancient meets modern and languages of nations meet each other head-on with delicious abandon and undiluted energy.’
—Geraldine Monk

Blake’s Kayak: ‘This “descriptive catalogue of pictures, poetical and historical inventions” maximizes Blake and Blake, simultaneously emphasising similarities yet focusing on strategic particulars, hence the “Rob Roy canoe” informs us that “Blake wasn’t a swimmer” though for both writer and reader “the effect is that of looking through water / down into wondrous depths”. Annwn’s project is one of temporal range and linguistic complexity, informed by an incisive historical lens, uniquely evoking a provocative mapping beyond any “geographic”.’
—Karen Mac Cormack

About David Annwn

David Annwn is a poet and critic who lives in Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK. He lectures for the Open University in Manchester. He is a recipient of the Cardiff International Poetry Award and a Ferguson Centre award for African and Asian Studies.Most recent amongst his books are the collaborations: It Means Nothing To Me, (with Geraldine Monk), and The Last Hunting of the Lizopard, (with Alan Halsey.) One of his poems has been made into a book of calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire for the San Francisco Libraries Collection.

Mar 31 2008

Now Available from Ahadada: Age of the Demon Tools by Mark Spitzer

Monday, 31 March 2008

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

Mar 22 2008

Now Available: Torque by Alison Croggon

Saturday, 22 March 2008

Ahadada Books is pleased to present Torque by Alison Croggon. You may download it by clicking here:

Torque by Alison Croggon (145 KB )

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).

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

Jan 28 2008

Now Available: Judith Skillman's Latest

Monday, 28 January 2008

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.

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