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Stephen Ratcliffe at Counterpath

Stephen Ratcliffe reads at Counterpath Stephen Ratcliffe did the inugural reading at Counterpath on January 12, 2011, spending some time presenting his press Avenue B. Stephen Ratcliffe is a poet and critic whose most recent books are Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath Press, 2009) and REAL, a 474-page book of poems written in 474 consecutive days (Avenue B, 2007). Previous books include Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/(system) (Green Integer, 2002). Listening to Reading, a collection [...]

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Kids Interview

Attendees of the music & swim summer camp of Greg Degroat stop in on their way to the pool and talk about their impressions of Counterpath.

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VACANT LOT
Oliver Rohe

Set in a city much like Beirut in the aftermath of bloody civil war, a former mercenary relates his fate and that of others of his kind after the peace. The world is rapidly healing itself—people getting back to their lives, the city being rebuilt. But he is unable to leave the site his crimes. Rohe’s narrative is striking in its understatement: much of the work’s power lies in what’s unsaid, what’s hinted and inferred. Sentences run on and on [...]

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THE FIELD IS LETHAL
Suzanne Doppelt

The supernatural, ventriloquism, table-turning, magic carpets, ghosts, The Field is Lethal is immersed in a late nineteeth-century spiritualism . Borrowing freely from folklore and anecdote, Doppelt mixes oblique references, catching us in the sound and play of language as much as of ideas. Well-known as a photographer, Doppelt juxtaposes her text with delicate, eerie images. As Avital Ronell writes in her Postface for the book, we appreciate here “her manner, her astonishing modalities, the precision of her cuts.” Suzanne Doppelt, a [...]

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THE DESIRES OF LETTERS
Laynie Browne

“Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again” (Anne Waldman). Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a passionate commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the [...]

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THE USE OF SPEECH
Nathalie Sarraute

In this reprint of a classic later work from French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, one finds a “delectably austere, beady-eyed book. . . . The phrases that give rise to the scenes or episodes are ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a café or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can be the most [...]

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SHOT
Christine Hume

In alternating currents of prose and verse, Shot reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. Shot inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an [...]

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INCIVILITIES
Barbara Claire Freeman

In her first collection, Barbara Claire Freeman links lyric subjectivity to an exploration of crucial moments in U.S. history. There are meditations on the Declaration of Independence, institution of slavery, Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Civil War, Great Depression, terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as on our contemporary economic and cultural lives. These formally inventive poems braid the personal and the political. They offer no compromise, no synthesis, but they do offer hope as they invite critical reflection [...]

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READING THE UNSEEN: (OFFSTAGE) HAMLET
by Stephen Ratcliffe

Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet is about the presence and significance of offstage action in Hamlet, things we hear about in words but do not see performed physically onstage—things like King Hamlet’s murder “while [he] was sleeping in [his] orchard,” Ophelia’s death in “the glassy stream,” Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia’s “closet . . . with his doublet all unbraced,” Gertrude and Claudius having sex “in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed.” In a series of brilliantly original “close readings,” [...]

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ROSE ALLEY
Jeremy M. Davies

When violence erupts on the streets of Paris in May 1968, a hapless international film crew finds itself stranded during the shooting of a preposterous low-budget blue movie about notorious 18th century erotic poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. A deadpan and digressive behind-the-scenes catalog of the actors, filmmakers, bystanders, and subjects involved in this movie, Rose Alley is also a fantastical and venomous love letter to French film and literature, obsessive collectors, pornography, language, revolution, misanthropy, the joys [...]

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AURA: LAST ESSAYS
by Gustaf Sobin

Gustaf Sobin’s final book of essays continues his meditations on the meaning of archaeological vestiges in the south of France. Sobin’s writing synthesizes insights from anthropology, philosophy, theology, and the history of art to produce a spiritual and poetic travelogue through vanished time. Left uncompleted at the end of his life, the present volume would have concluded the trilogy whose first two volumes were published by the University of California Press (Luminous Debris [1999] and Ladder of Shadows [2009]). The [...]

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PLACED
Carol Snow

Placed is a poetic sequence that juxtaposes words, phrases, quotes, and lyric excerpts in the manner of stones in a Japanese dry-landscape Zen garden—karesansui. “Subtexts” identify sources of quotations, ranging from Basho to the Marx Brothers. Time is stilled here, each one or two line poem, for rather than about insight, is both brief and durable, inviting the reader to explore and reconsider a complex of associations. Carol Snow is the author of Artist and Model (selected by Robert Hass [...]

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DIVERTIMENTI AND VARIATIONS
Heimito von Doderer

A story collection by the acclaimed Austrian novelist of the early and mid twentieth century, Divertimenti and Variations mediates traditional and experimental story technique to explore the authentic self and creates musically-based narrative forms. These narrative experiments were begun in 1923, not long after the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, with its “Sirens” chapter structured like a fugue. Traditional psychological realism combines with four-part “symphonic” experimental form—complete with development, intermezzi, and thematic repetition and variation—to demonstrate how technique is adequate to [...]

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LYRIC POSTMODERNISMS An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries
edited by Reginald Shepherd

Lyric Postmodernisms gathers many well established poets whose work transcends the boundaries between traditional lyric and avant-garde experimentation. Some have been publishing since the 1960s, some have emerged more recently, but all have been influential on newer generations of American poets. Many of these poets are usually not thought of together, being considered as members of different poetic “camps,” but they nonetheless participate in a common project of expanding the boundaries of what can be said and done in poetry. [...]

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY/OUGHTABIOGRAPHY
Anthony Hawley

Through two series of poems, Autobiography/ Oughtabiography explores tensions between memory, erasure, writing, and the self. The title sequence tracks a speaking voice as it works through shards of its past, questioning and, at times, undermining the autobiographical act, often perpetuating its own disappearance. With the second series, “Apple Silence,” the already unstable voice becomes increasingly fragmented, deformed. Anthony Hawley grew up in Massachusetts and received his BA and MFA from Columbia University. He is the author of The [...]

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MOPUS: A NOVEL
by Oisín Curran Introduction by Steve Katz

An astounding debut novel, written with courage, innovation, wisdom, style. Oisîn Curran leads us onto a topology of narrative surfaces that appear and disappear seamlessly: subway terrorists in an urban density, a bucolic meadow and stream, postapocalyptic devastation, a ninth century abbey, forty-fifth century conspiracies. The narrative here allows one to enter the creative guts of storytelling, to experience it as a living force. Curran is like Beckett, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, Bernhard, Celine, Faulkner, in whose work powerful prose excavates [...]

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AIR AND MEMORY
Franco Loi

After World War II dialect poetry became widespread in Italy, with the Milanese poet Franco Loi being one of its most prominent practitioners. In the 1970s, a leading critic called Loi “the most powerful poetic personality of recent years,” and since then Loi has been considered one of the most distinguished living Italian poets. Loi was born in Genoa in 1930, but his family moved to a working-class area of Milan in 1937. His father was from Cagliari, Sardinia, and [...]

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DAILY SONNETS
Laynie Browne

In Daily Sonnets Laynie Browne charts new territory as she subtly investigates the daily influxes of the poetic moment. From longing for the family in the very midst of the family, to the play of the mind which mimics and shepherds the visible games of children, Browne offers here the mimesis of the possible, a moving reflection of action and intimacy, a letting go and a grasping of the poetic and the political, all in the firm hold of song. Laynie [...]

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Interview with Brian Henry

COUNTERPATH PRESS: Could you talk about the structure of the book, about how the two longer pieces that comprise the book took shape? BRIAN HENRY: The book consists of two series: “More Dangerous Than Dying” and “The Stripping Point.” The origins of “More Dangerous Than Dying” go back to a period when I assigned myself the task of writing a poem every day for about three months. The poems that resulted were connected through their protagonists—a couple whose relationship was [...]

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Donate Please support Counterpath Press by buying our books and attending our events. Showing support by making a donation, even in smaller amounts, is also crucial to the press as an independent, nonprofit publisher that sponsors extremely low-revenue arts projects. Counterpath Press is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization and all contributions are tax deductible.

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