Friday, June 8, 2012, at 8 p.m., Rodrigo Toscano reads at Counterpath. Author most recently of Deck of Deeds (Counterpath, 2012), he is also the author of Collapsible Poetics Theater (National Poetry Series, 2007), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Diasporic Avante-Gardes (Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement), and in the anthology, Against Expression. He was a recipient of a New York State Fellowship for the Arts in Poetry. Toscano has been involved in labor movement politics for over fifteen years.

Saturday, May 26, 2012, 7 p.m. Join us for an electronic literature reading/performance and an exhibit that will feature the work of a number of poets working in the field of electronic literature. Featuring readings by Amaranth Borsuk, Erin Costello/Aaron Angello, and others TBA. Video/Film poems by Kate Greenstreet, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Jeanne Liotta, Zuzana Husarova, Mark Banzhoff. Early works of Elit presented on the computers for which they were written, thanks to Lori Emerson’s Archaeological Media Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Interactive computer stations where guests can experience a range of E-Poetry. Exhibit at 7pm; Reading at 8pm. Cosponsored by The Electronic Literature Organization and SpringGun Press.

Winner of the 81st Annual California Book Award for Poetry

In this diary of intentionality, the behearer and the beholder approach the world with an attitude of longing—for less: less sorrow, less suffering. Daily practice delivers the speaker to profound meditations on the nature of the self. These poems press against our deepest held questions: what is an I? Where are my borders? What or how am I “with”? “From whom—from what—do we hide?”

giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. A recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature, she frequently presents on writing, editing, and graphic design at schools and conferences, including the American Literature Association and Spelman College. She has been a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Her work has appeared on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and in Zen Monster, VOLT, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, & Stories for Children, and I’ll Drown My Book: A Collection of Conceptual Writing. singleton has taught at Saint Mary’s College, Naropa University, and in museums and schools throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

ASCENSION
giovanni singleton
$14; 6 x 8 1/4;
100 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-26-4

After 17 years, Bin Ramke is stepping down as editor of Denver Quarterly, the acclaimed literary journal based in the English Department at the University of Denver. Please help us celebrate his extraordinary tenure, as well as the transition to the Quarterly‘s new editor, Laird Hunt, as current and former DU students and faculty, along with special guests, read selections from issues of the Quarterly published under Bin.

With readings by:

Selah Saterstrom
Scott Howard
Laird Hunt
Brian Kiteley
Chris Kondrich
Maik Nwosu
Adam Rovner
Andrea Rexilius
Katie Jean Shinkle
Mathias Svalina
Sara Veglahn

Like its predecessor, HEATH (plagiarism/outsource), Heath Course Pak exists somewhere between a Project Gutenberg version of Samuel Pepys Diary and a minute-to-minute news feed and blog of Heath Ledger’s death. Sad, appropriated, lyrical and confused, the book contains a brief history of recent performance art, a legal defense of plagiarism, the diary of a poetry workshop at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop, an MP3 protest song, and an examination of SMS and GMS technologies as distribution networks for human sadness. Multi-authored, and with numerous text blocks and photos, Heath Course Pak adds a multivalent commentary to its first edition, once again in full color.

Tan Lin is the author of Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), Blipsoak 01 (Atelos, 2003), HEATH (plagiarism/outsource) (Zasterle, 2007), and Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Wesleyan, 2009). His visual and video work has been exhibited at the Yale Art Museum, the Sophienholm (Copenhagen), and the Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York City). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at New Jersey City University.

HEATH COURSE PAK
Tan Lin
$17.95; 4.75 x 8;
128 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-27-1

In college, Kevin Kopelson passed off a paper by his older brother Robert as his own. In graduate school, he plagiarized nearly an entire article from a respected scholar, and then later, having met her and been asked if he would send something for her to read, sent that essay he had plagiarized from her work. This is not to mention the many instances in which he quoted others extensively, not passing their work off as his own, but substituting it for his own words when his words were what were called for. Until recently, such plagiarisms and thefts had been his most shameful secret, shared only with a trusted few. But then Kopelson—now an English professor and the author of a number of respected books, most recently 2007’s Sedaris—wrote an essay entitled “My Cortez,” which was published in the London Review of Books in 2008. It was a satirical literary confession, an exploration of Kopelson’s personal and professional life via his various acts of plagiarism. From that jumping off point and exploring also his other vices, Confessions of a Plagiarist is the compelling and clever retelling (not to mention renovation) of Kopelson’s life, one transgression at a time.

A native New Yorker, Kevin Kopelson attended both Bronx High School of Science and The Juilliard School. He majored in music at Yale (graduating at age nineteen) and then got a law degree from Columbia (at twenty-two). After practicing law, he got a doctorate in English Literature from Brown (at thirty-one). Much to his surprise, he’s been in Iowa ever since—teaching “critical theory” at a university there and also, unlike some even older colleagues, writing books (Love’s Litany [1994], Beethoven’s Kiss [1996], The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky [1997], Neatness Counts [2004], and Sedaris [2007]). Much to his surprise, he’s now fifty-two.

Part 1 of an interview with Kevin Kopelson:

Part 2:

Part 3:

CONFESSIONS OF A PLAGIARIST:
AND OTHER TALES FROM SCHOOL
Kevin Kopelson
April 16, 2012
$17.95; 6 x 9;
240 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-30-1

Deck of Deeds is comprised of seventy poetic prose image captions (without images) whose titles are inspired by the popular Latin American loteria card game. Written by a poet who logs in an average of ten thousand miles of air travel each month working as a union trainer and coordinator throughout the U.S., the “cards” reflect a dizzying array of cultural-geographic locations, each one acting as a scene-setter for highly dystopian portraits of “people” caught in a tangle of industry-specific “predicaments.”

Rodrigo Toscano is also the author of Collapsible Poetics Theater (National Poetry Series 2007), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Diasporic Avante-Gardes (Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement), and in the anthology, Against Expression. He was a recipient of a New York State Fellowship for the Arts in Poetry. Toscano has been involved in labor movement politics for over fifteen years.

DECK OF DEEDS
March 15, 2012
Rodrigo Toscano
$15.95; 6 x 8 1/4;
128 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-31-8

The first publication of the complete series of Jackson Mac Low’s “Forties” poems. Written and revised from 1990 to 2001 with a method Mac Low called “gathering,” where he took into the poems words, phrases, and other kinds of word strings, and sometimes sentences, that he saw, heard, or thought of while writing the drafts, the poems include detailed markings of caesural spacing, timing, compound words (many neologistic), and metrical stress. Each of the poems adhere to what Mac Low termed “fuzzy verse form”: 8 stanzas, each comprising 5 lines (hence “forties”): 3 moderately long lines, followed by a very long line, and then a short line.

Jackson Mac Low (1922–2004) made poems, essays, and musical, performance, visual, and radio works. Author of about 30 books and published in over 90 collections, his works have been published, exhibited, and performed (often by his wife, the poet, visual artist, and composer Anne Tardos and himself) in many countries. Awards: Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and CAPS fellowships and the 1999 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets. Recent books: Doings: An Assortment of Performance Pieces 1955–2002 (Granary, 2003) and Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works (University of California Press, 2008).

Anne Tardos is a poet, visual artist, and composer. Her many books of poetry and graphics include, most recently, Both Poems (Roof Books, 2011). She is also the editor of Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, by Jackson Mac Low (University of California Press, 2008).

154 FORTIES
October 15, 2012
Jackson Mac Low
Edited by Anne Tardos
$22.00; 7 x 10;
328 pgs.
ISBN 978-1933996-29-5

(Author photo copyright Lawrence Schwartzwald.)

Invokes a narrative and intimate distance through the imbalance of power between men & detectives and women & wives, leaving a risky proposition like an alphabet or the simple complexity of memoir and writing about memory. A sobering examination of the ultimate spy-styled popular thriller, a nuanced deconstruction of model masculinity in mass culture.