theenk Books           

Available now: January 20, 2013:

Eileen R. Tabios' The Awakening

Eileen R. Tabios has released 21 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and a collection of novels. She has also exhibited visual art and visual poetry in the United States and Asia. Recipient of the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry, she has crafted a body of work that is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, computer-generated hybrid languages, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Music, Modern Dance and Sculpture. She also edited, co-edited or conceptualized nine anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays as well as founded Meritage Press (St. Helena & San Francisco). She is the editor of Galatea Resurrects, a popular poetry review journal.              


The Awakening, with its titular gesture boldly troping on Kate Chopin, features Eileen Tabios' "Seance with William Carlos Willlams," one of the most powerfully feminist poems of her career.                   – Thomas Fink

John Roche's Road Ghosts

John Roche is an Associate Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, where he advises the campus literary magazine, Signatures, and teaches a variety of literature and creative writing classes. He earned a BA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs, studying with George Butterick, Charles Boer, and Glauco Cambon, an MA from University College Dublin, and a PhD from SUNY Buffalo, studying with Robert Creeley and John C. Clarke. He has been granted four National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships and an SOS grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His full-length poetry collections, Topicalities (2008) and On Conesus (2005) are available from Foothills Publishing (Kanona, NY). His poems have appeared in magazines like Yellow Medicine Review, Flurb, House Organ, Big Bridge, Jack Magazine, Interim, Intent, Coe Review, The Woodstock Journal, Buff, The Burning World, and in several anthologies. He also edited the collection Uncensored Songs for Sam Abrams (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), featuring poems by Amiri Baraka, Ed Sanders, Bob Holman, Anne Waldman, Andrei Codrescu, and other friends of the emeritus RIT professor. Dr. Roche sits on the Board of BOA Editions, one of the nation’s leading non-profit poetry presses. He co-edited, with Patricia Roth Schwartz, an anthology of poetry by inmates at Auburn Prison called Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind (FootHills Publishing, 2009).

An unexpected treasure, Road Ghosts, is an on-the-ground poetic document of radicalized students coming of age in the late '60s & early '70s. Its clarity of external & internal detail is often startling. Its detached camera eye lucidly documents the process of portent, pretense & Utopian fervor associated with that brief opening in U.S. dissident cultures & the generational clashes inspired by idealism, psychedelics, & quest fever. It's a profound personal essay on being & becoming.                    – David Meltzer

Stephen Ellis' O P U L E N C E                          

Like Olson on steroids! In this “pre-toxic frenzy of Dionysian inhalation,” Ellis breaks out of the chains of limiting categories, where all knowledge and experience is free to roam where it will – “knowledge thus a scattering of language.” Ellis’ poetry leaves postmodern surface way behind, bringing us a poetry of unlimited height and depth; unlimited dimensionality.
                                                                          – Eric Selland

Tempered, perhaps, but unrestrained, with all that reading on his tongue, and the patience that comes from learning that defeat is durable, Ellis' poems treat of evidence that victory opens only when declared. These sonnets - clear about their debt to Jack Clarke - still certify the divergent passions of master and student. Clarke’s concerns are epic, while Ellis is all about eros, the love set to its sense, the hours of touch and solitude, the clarity of specific spaces his constant theme. To be clear in these variations yet constant to the gliding phantom of their underlying base, remarks of a deft hand, given that the periodic unit here is line over grammar. While he treats of simple thought and homeliness, he is equally didactic, discursive, encyclopedic, and one honey-tongued mother fucker. We are lucky to have him.
                                                                          – Brian Richards, Bloody Twin Press

From John Clarke’s majestically feathered seminal plenitude in mythopoesis, Stephen Ellis has mastered how to make the heavenly headdress for the gut-driven divining rod which points with Opulence – toward the starry brilliance of a soul ever-ready to hang the next poem with Jackal and Jill in the achy breaky Hall of the Double Truth.
                                                                          – Kenneth Warren, House Organ

Steven Farmer's glowball

Farmer is one of those writers who just don't get published enough, for often when I look at current events I long to find out what Steve Farmer's take on it will be, and then ten years later, in a book like glowball, it's still the news that makes news. He is always inventive, and his long poems have a shapely quality to them denied to some of his peers. Even in a traditional attraction such as the metaphor, his are exceedingly gorgeous: I like the "greater Los Angeles area" as a "manuscript in a parking lot." You can tell he takes the long view: the cover is a Robert Fisk photo of US bomb activity in Iraq, and makes it seem like the "return to immensity" nasty old George Bataille was cheerleading for in his cold-war take on de Sade. Well, a sort of jewel box awaits you, courtesy of Palmyra, New York, and its mighty little theenk Books, and when you read glowball, that it came from Palmyra will seem so apropos.    – Kevin Killian, Attention Span
                           

 

Steve Tills's Rugh Stuff

The orchestration of Rugh Stuff amazes me: in terms of the music of highly allusive, multiple voicings, as well as in conceptualization, it is an extended poem of meta engagement. Ostensibly what could appear a trivial framework – the game of golf – instead becomes a viable poetic platform, morphing continually, becoming a guide to daily life, a cause for inner dialectic, a comic song, a sea change, a ruse, a critical perspective, all in one. Rugh Stuff picks up where the classic, hilarious comedy of love and golf, There’s Something about Mary, leaves off, in that the poetry everywhere rings clear, is poised with a vulnerability just shy of self-knowing, and in so doing, offers the extra dry in humor and martinis – yet is always full of soberingly tender force. One master achievement here is that the dialogic streams of intertwining multiple voices sustain a balanced sense of continued interplay, and at such length. Anyone who’s attempted to create such a project knows how difficult it is to sustain the interplay at length. In that, Steve Tills’s Rugh Stuff becomes a maximally sustained repartee between people and language – all of it talking back continually to the sand traps of mere self interest and over-indulgent western ways. What I have to say next makes of tribute a contention but this must be recognized: this book ranges widely in the western literary tradition – reading it I was reminded over and over of nothing less than the best of prickly Shakespearean comedy, as full of double entendre about the sexual frisson of life and language, as any Much Ado, or happily sassy, untamed Shrew. Rugh Stuff is just that entertainingly and artfully done.      – Chris Murray, University of Texas at Arlington
                                                                                                                                

Working his way through the rough stuff of word/sound magic – front nine, back nine, nineteenth hole and dance floor – Tills has talleyed “almost all sublime numbers” in this book of life on the greens, the poem that Ben, Arnold, Jack, and Tiger never knew they’d been missing – “Ah, just tap on it, Mate.”      – Stephen Ratcliffe







                   

Black Spring Issue 1             

Poetry by Stephen Ellis, kari edwards, Jim McCrary, Steve Tills, Brent Bechtel, Catherine Daly, Chris Murray,
and Layne Russell.

 

Black Spring Lawrence Issue                        

  


Poetry, Art, and Criticism celebrating Lawrence, Kansas, poetry community with work by Lee Chapman, Hawkman, Kenneth Irby, Jonathan Mayhew, Jim McCrary, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, John Moritz, Monica Peck, and Judith Roitman; essays by David Baptiste-Chirot, Stephen Ellis, Robert Grenier, Maryrose Larkin, Susan Smith Nash, Dale Smith,
and Steve Tills

Steve Tills 's Behave

To someone like myself, who seriously believes that poetry should be funny even when it’s being serious, who believes that words should be trifled with, truffled with, trod upon, sat upon, shat upon, played with, plaid with, parlayed into other words, speyed, splayed, relayed, decayed, flayed within a micrometer of their possible meanings & then given mouth-to-mouth so that the whole process, the hole progress, the holy protest can start all over again, this book is a joy. I’m reminded of a jazz musician, has to be a sax player, someone of the caliber of Bird or Coltrane, who starts a solo with an exquisite phrase, returns to it, reworks it in a series of variations that build upon themselves until a point is reached which it seems can not be gone beyond, that it can’t get any better. & then goes & tops the whole thing. & then moves on to the next song, where it happens all over again.       – Mark Young

This book is so full of the pleasure of wit that we’ll have to call the USDA wit-regulators to come in and stamp it with indelible purple logos. Behave is entirely Foucault and language, combining problematics of meta-discipline with all the possible linguistic modes of getting to the sheer logos of wit: concision, metonymy, music, punning, and far more. It’s like Lorca on speed and enthymeme, or Aristotle on pheromones, or Spicer on B-12 elixir, an olive, an onion, and a wedge of lime. Smack your lips and brain, folks, and keep on reading these rants, I say.   – Chris Murray

Steve Tills has an open heart, a good ear, and writes killer serial poems. Rage, passion, humor, intelligence of the razorish kind, combine and coalesce in these numbered “Rants” which come to constitute a roiling meditative sea within which any utterance, any blood red thread of discourse, may possibly swim. This book belongs on the same shelf as Ed Dorn’s Abhorrences or Jim McCrary’s The Book Of Arrogance – it’s that edgy. But – at the same time – it is more discursive and more emotional, more driven. Here is a man who was born to write – and, ok, to play golf – who is flooding all available space with the formidable searchlights of his intellect.        – Tom Beckett

Available Later This Year, 2013:

Black Spring Sonoma Issue                          

Black Spring Prose Poetry / Hybrid Issue