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  Issue #3.0, section b                                  9/93
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TapRoot is a quarterly publication of Independent, Underground, 
and Experimental language-centered arts. Over the past 10 years, 
we have published 40+ collections of poetry, writing, and visio-
verbal art in a variety of formats. In the August of 1992, we 
began publish TapRoot Reviews, featuring a wide range of "Micro-
Press" publications, primarily language-oriented.  This posting 
is the second section of our 3rd full electronic issue, containing 
all of the short CHAPBOOK reviews; the first section contains all of 
the Tzine reviews.  We provide this information in the hope
that netters do not limit their reading to E-mail & BBSs. 
Please e-mail your feedback to the editor, Luigi-Bob Drake, at:

                 au462@cleveland.freenet.edu 

Requests for e-mail subsctiptions should be sent to the same
address--they are free, please indicate what you are requesting-- 
(a short but human message; this is not an automated listserve).
I believe it is FTPable from UMich, which also archives back issues.
A cummulative, searchable, and x-referenced HyperCard version is
under development--e-mail for status & availablility information.
Hard-copies of TapRoot Reviews contain additional review
material--in this issue, reviews & articles by John Byrum, Dick 
Higgins, geof huth, Mike Basinski, Tom Willoch--as well as a variety
of poetry prose & grafix.  It is available from: Burning Press, 
PO Box 585, Lakewood OH 44107--$2.50 pp. Both the print & 
electronic versions of TapRoot are copyright 1993 by Burning 
Press, Cleveland. Burning Press is a non-profit educational
corporation. Permission granted to reproduce this material FOR 
NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES, provided that this introductory notice 
is included.  Burning Press is supported, in part, with funds
from the Ohio Arts Council. 

Reviewers are identified by their initials at the end of each review:
Michael Basinski, Tom Becket, John M. Bennett, Jake Berry, Jeff Conant,
Daniel Davidson, Luigi-Bob Drake, R. Lee Etzwiler, Bob Grumman, Susan
Smith Nash, Charlotte Pressler, Larry Smith, John Stickney, Thomas 
Willoch, & Ron Zack.

*** Many thanx to all contributors. ***



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CHAPBOOKS:
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Etel Adnan: OF CITIES & WOMEN (LETTERS TO FAWWAZ)--Post-Apollo 
Press, 35 Marie St., Sausalito CA, 94965.  114 pp., $11.00.  
Fiction in the form of an epistolary novel that converges with 
women's studies.  A woman, Etel, writes letters to deal with the 
agonies of loss and life during wartime.  In it, the problems of 
Arab women (and all women) are probed gently, fairly, but with 
unflinching honesty.  Adnan refuses to endorse reactionary stances 
of tit-for-tat hate discourse.  She remains level-headed and 
articulate.  In attempting to explain the motives behind war and 
the overwhelming destruction of Beirut, Adnan makes insightful 
observations on the relation of culture and gender roles.--ssn

Dennis Barone: WAVES OF ICE, WAVES OF RUMOR--Zasterle Press, Apdo 
167 La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, SPAIN.  34 pp., $8.00.  A 
response/call to Desnos, Prvert, and the Great French 
Song     heart of the mind and eye, a sculptural lozenge of words 
after Arp     quiet as the silence after a rock fall     resting 
isn't inattentive, but creates a slope     a flask to continue 
with after everything has preceded.--daniel davidson

Michael Basinski: CNYTTAN--Meow Press, 334 Bryant #7, Buffalo NY, 
14222.  16 pp.  Purely textual, and literary, multi-interpretable 
collages concerned with Artemis, snakes, something "good against 
meancholik," modern zoology, fairy tale transformations, and other 
items too numerous to mention--all of them, for me, flowing 
implicitly or explicitly towards various kinds of re-births.  
Along the way this masterful infra-verbal poem:
   WIT
   WAT
   ICH
   TCH
   HER
which beautifully expresses a becoming so gradually full as to 
be tactile.--bg

Batworth: BETTER COMING UP--Shattered Wig, 523 E. 38th St., 
Baltimore, MD, 21218.  28 pp., $2.00.  Batworth knows how to 
confuse, rip apart, reassemble, and leave the adrenaline still 
running in your system even though the accident is a long time 
over.  You get the crashing metal of cars, with words like: "God 
is lice-infested," "The sun does in fact/ shine out of his 
asshole," and conclusions that scream: "Swinging like a fine 
hearse/ squeeling like a flock of reeds."  I don't know, maybe I 
got some kind of disorder, but this high speed energetic swinging word-
play catches me off guard, and makes me want to hear more so 
I can re-establish my equilibrium.  When he screams "Soups for 
creeps, soups for creeps..." in "Information Feeds On Me" I want 
to sit down, stand up, touch my toes, count to ten, then pick up 
this chap again.  There is the schizophrenic wordplay, combined 
with quick jerks to reality, and I want to stop that crazy fucker 
on the street and say, yeah, I understand, but you got to make 
more sense! You got to make more sense! These are either the words 
of a madman, or a person so gone that the occasional glimpse into 
reality is quickly lost and they don't even realize they were on 
the right road for once.  When Batworth tells me: "Everybody in 
the real world was in what/ I would call a weird mood.  People 
trued/ patty-cake with feet.  Others walked side/ ways for fun.  
Still others thought ord-/inary life was tv but they didn't know/ 
how to live it.  Some wrote books in what/ they thought was their 
free time, but we/ know better than that."  I get scared.  He 
knows more than I do about the things that scare me.  He knows 
something that I don't, and I don't feel comfortable letting a 
madman have the advantage.--oberc

Guy Beining: 100 HAIKU SELECTED FROM A DECADE--O!!Zone, 1266 
Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057.  24 pp., $6.50.  Just the 
full-color cover glossy of a Beining collage of astronaut, bird, 
Ancient Greece and who knows what else makes this thin volume 
worth its price; but the haiku, seldom at all eccentric, are very 
fine, too.  Examples: "A butcher senses/ the wisdom/ of bones"; 
and "Silence of window/ in chatter of/ snowfall".--bg

Gina Bergamino: ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE HE'S IN MY--The New Press, 
53-35 Hollis Court Blvd., Flushing, NY, 11365.  24 pp., $3.00.  
Gina is a poet's poet, and she crafts her poems not around the 
survival instincts of poverty stricken writers, but rather around 
the poetry itself.  She is a crafts-person, and these poems 
capture insightful touches that caress the words instead of 
smashing them into your face.  In "5 a.m. dream" we get lines 
like: "the man/ with fat hands/ is breaking through/ the kitchen 
door/ & I squoosh/ his fingers/ squeeze them/ dig my nails/ into 
his" combined with: "my father calls/ a family meeting/he's 
unhappy/ that I want/ to be a writer".  She rips thoughts out of 
the air, tosses them against other disjointed feelings, and leaves 
one disturbed with the kind of nightmares only a lover can wake 
you from.  At the same time there is an innocence and observation 
that captures those "little things" in a brand new light.  In 
"Unemployment Dream": "You're in the Sunvet mall/ with your 
brother trying/ to decide on strange flavors/ of icecream..." 
while "your father is buying lumber/ inside Rickles.  Sweating, 
he/ pushes dolly...", then: "when he sees you he is happy/ and his 
eyes well up./ You want to give him/ ham & beans."--oberc

Lynne Beyer: THE FUTURE COMES--Pinched Nerves Press, 1610 Ave. P. 
#6B, Brooklyn NY, 11229.  8 pp., $1.00?  Five poems by a woman who 
is described to the fore as "currently looking forward."  Lots of 
very intelligently dopey fun with words, as in "Stoop'" which ends 
with "the action of activity,/ beast or burden, stoop to concur, 
it becomes you."  Lyrical at points, too, as in the description of 
"yellow flowers,/ capable of full expansion,/ (that) absorbed the 
sadness, their/ real origin," from "Krishnamurti's Journal."--bg

David Bromige: TINY COURTS IN A WORLD WITHOUT SCALE--Brick Books, 
Box 38, Station B, London Ontario, CANADA, N6A 4V3.  60 pp., 
$9.95.  These are poems of address and comment in the tradition of 
Jonathan Williams, Anselm Hollo, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn.  
Irony is marked form the start as operative exchange value: 
   "'Irony' i read/ but is said 'Money'."
What I especially value in Bromige's work is his ability to transform 
the materials of everyday life into stunning reverse-image admonitions, 
as in--

      The referents' lair
      for george Bowering

   Carter was talking to the shah
   about a country which had blossomed forth
   under enlightened leadership
   About then i found what i was looking for
   The weather and the sports report
   
Attention to the details of how language gets figured is 
everywhere evident.  "Nothing happens that is not the mind/to us, 
this side of Ouch."--tb

Lee Ann Brown: CRUSH--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., Buffalo NY, 
14222.  20 pp., $2.00.  
   Crush is a way of knowing]
   It is the only way of knowing
   It is a good way of knowing.
It *is* a good way of knowing.  This book is a fine and finished 
dissertation on a lovely theme--the crush, love's exciting sweet 
moment: "Wilderness in domesticity."  Just so sexy discrete simple 
sentences and questions posed in the neutered affirmative carry 
the reader over 13 sections of a poem "with tenderness and 
dancing."  Enticing, brave, and familiar in its language--"She is 
direct with a rhythm"--CRUSH is a gift.--jc

Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin: ON THE PUMICE OF MORONS--The 
Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great Barrington MA, 01230.  20 pp., 
$5.00.  "A Rock Crystal, A Roach, A Tree of Heaven/ Hosiery to 
spectroheliographs long since departed..."     Continuing Fagin 
and Coolidge's collaborative work     this poem maps out a 
personified landscape of habitat     making up an inhabited 
interconnectedness, the personalities of Taxis and Soho     
breaking in like fetishes for a worn-down system     keep your 
shirt off your back if it bites you     take this with you when 
you go shopping.--dd

Tina Darragh: ADV. FANS--THE 1968 SERIES--Leave Books, 357 Ashland 
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222.  12 pp., $4.00.  An Academic LANGUAGE-
type exercise introduced by brief texts on child abuse and 
language.  The body of the book consists of eight visually 
manipulated entries from the Oxford English Dictionary, with 
footnotes.--jmb

Daniel Davidson: PRODUCT--e.g. press, 1506 Grand Ave. #3, St. Paul 
MN, 55105.  44 pp., $6.00.  PRODUCT is a prose format poem based 
on notes taken at various shopping-centers and malls.  It is a 
work intricately concerned with the ways in which advertising and 
marketing create an object-centered push-pull nexus of desire.  
"Development centers on the table, the item that you see.  You 
come here to be what you want."  The particular brilliance of the 
book is in the manner in which it both critiques our possessions 
and shows how we are possessed.  "HAVE, A WAY of life."  This is a 
good book to read in conjunction with Harryette Mullen's 
S*PeRM**K*T [see review in this issue], or anything by that French 
theorist Jean Blowdryer.  I recommend it.--tb

Kevin Davies: PAUSE BUTTON--Tsunami Editions, 1727 William St., 
Vancouver BC CANADA, V5L 2R5.  78 pp., $15.00.  Hyper knowledge 
from the cutting wit of INFORMATION     herds of sentences and 
fragments of the urban coast     if you are what you read, then 
you wrote this text     what if you live here in another place so 
that the view from there is here?     chew on this: only you can 
arm the homeless.--dd

Michael Estabrook: STRIPPED & SHIVERING--BGS Press, 1240 William 
St., Racine WI, 53402.  20 pp., $3.00?  These are a series of 
poetic sketches (with drawings by Dan Nielsen) of various 
characters Estabrook has been thrust against.  When he talks about 
"Joe Sold," we get a heavy drinking womanizer who's still going 
strong at 70.  "John" is "irascible/ rude/ married/ nearing 40 
yet/ he got the most/ beautiful/ woman in/ the building".  "A 
Friend" admits that she is in AA, and is surprised when no one 
seems to be shocked at the news.  There is even a short poem about 
"Patti", the author's wife, setting her angry frustrated 
unemployed eyes on Estabrook after finding no good jobs in the 
newspaper ads.  These are fine thumbnail sketches that capture 
people in short glimpses of reality.  The saddest thing in this 
collection was when I got to the end, and wanted to read more.
--oberc

A. C. Evans: CHIMERA OBSCURA--Phlebas Press, 2 The Stables, High 
Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE.  $7.00.  "Dark 
hyacinth crystals/ flutter behind my eyes" A. C. Evans reports in 
one poem from his new collection.  This visionary quality is 
manifest throughout CHIMERA OBSCURA, which is divided into three 
parts: the first deals with the contemporary world of urban 
England; the second with personal transformation and initiation; 
the third with what Evans calls "The White Earth," a kind of 
spiritual void or hereafter of light and emptiness.  In poem after 
poem, Evans merges the literary, the esoteric and a tad of science 
fiction into a sensory apparatus for picking up hidden messages 
from other worlds--worlds which may only be inside of us.--tw

Huck Finch: EASTER PROUDNESS--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271, 
Sarasota FL, 34231.  16 pp., SASE.  A tiny chapbook of prose that 
begins: "Manure the planet with a finger-smudge of swarming crusty 
foxes", and boils through defecation, bad sex, and the like with 
surrealistic verve and unshutteringly bold imagery.--bg

Edward Foster: THE SPACE BETWEEN HER BED AND CLOCK--Norton Coker 
Press, PO Box 64053, San Francisco CA, 94164.  44 pp., $5.95.  A 
collection of short poems and poetic essays, bringing the personal 
and the literary into conjunction in a deliberate and effective 
way.  Beginning with an essay, "Poetry Has Nothing To Do With 
Politics" (the thesis being, I think, that poetry "precedes 
intention, choice, and dialogue"), the book moves into poems set 
in Turkey, Egypt, and Paris, transcriptions from the Spanish of 
Lorca and the Armenian of Zahrad, sustained references to Rimbaud 
and Mallarme, and the poetic territory set forth explicitly by 
Duncan and Spicer.  The poems unabashedly take part in history, 
ringing with voices, but not neglecting the personal or the 
present tense.--jc

Peter Ganick: CODE ZERO--Texture Press, 3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., 
Norman OK, 73072.  21 pp., $4.00.  Taking part in the tactics of 
Language poetry, where words "mean" in all directions, like 
ballbearings ricocheting in empty rooms (& what room is ever 
"empty"?).  CODE ZERO is a collection of short lyric poems--
"baffled by whom"--where the author's presence retreats behind 
fragments of sentences adding up to nothing, and something.  From 
"Decision to Action": 
   reveals a motion as subjectless
   improves a communications tenfold
   honed in at a reason nearly active
CODE ZERO is discrete and funny, elusive as music on holiday.--jc

Michael Gottlieb: NEW YORK--The Figures, 5 Castle Hill Ave., Great 
Barrington MA, 01230.  93 pp., $10.00.  "This is not your city./ 
You mean the Queen really is in the pay of the Tri-Lateral 
Commission?"     Made of two long poems, "The Great Pavement" and 
"The Ulterior Parkways"     fragments of a long bus ride through 
the inside of an executive suite     memoria producing an uneasy 
acculturation     canisters of metastasis never forgetting any 
conversation     slips of advertising slogans scraped from the 
asphalt diary.--dd

Dennison W. Griffith & George Myers Jr.: JUMP HOPE--Cumberland, 
7652 Sawmill Rd., Suite 194, Dublin OH, 43017.  38 pp., $10.00.  
A slickly produced collaboration between painter Griffith and 
journalist/writer Myers.  Griffith's paintings, mostly faces with 
occasional words, are reproduced in full color, and according to a 
brief note, inspired Myers to "get at the story behind them".  
That story is presented in the form of a woman's diary, which 
touches on her daily life, her family, making art, and broader 
issues such as gender roles and racism.  The text does not attempt 
to "explain" the paintings, nor vice-versa, but both retain an 
intriguing ambiguity in themselves and in relation to each other.  
An elegant collaboration--jmb

Jefferson Hansen: GODS TO THE ELBOWS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland 
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222.  10 pp.  Repetition and incantation on 
"mitigate" and "unmitigate" create a screen of sound in the heart 
of this chapbook.  Visual arrangements tempt the reader to read 
out of sequence, and to form and re-form the text.  Disjunctive 
syntax suggests language's potential to transmute and transform.
--ssn
Martin A. Hibbert: CONCENTRATED GROUND--Stride Publications, 11 
Sylvan Rd., Exeter, Devon, ENGLAND, EX4 6EW.  #7.  Combining 
elements of anthropology, ritual, film, folklore, cut-up and 
surrealism, Hibbert's poems are uniquely his own both in style and 
concerns.  He doesn't so much communicate with the reader as 
create a linguistic-psychological structure into which the reader 
is invited.  In this space, a symbolic merging of time and person 
takes place, although the poet and reader are "Miles apart/ in our 
musty caves/ raising our private shadows."  At a time when too 
many poets speak only of small, personal matters, Hibbert produces 
expansive, challenging poems.--tw

Jeffrey Hillard: RIVER DWELLERS--Cincinnati Writers' Project, Box 
29920, Cincinnati, OH, 45229.  66 pp., $6.95.  Subtitled "Poems on 
the Settling of the Ohio River;" this set of thirteen poems takes 
us back in time, before urban sprawl and industrial necessity 
filled to crushing the Ohio Valley.  Presented in chronological 
order, from 1751 to 1862, and thick with lore and legend--there is 
a richness of detail in these historically-centered free verse 
poems.  Of Marietta in 1788, Hilliard says: "The air has grown 
rife with coal-fire aroma,/ roasting buffalo, venison, a pike five 
feet long,/ enough of dinner to include the whole town."--rle

Susan Howe: THE NONCONFORMIST'S MEMORIAL--New Directions, 80 8th 
Ave., New York NY, 10011.  192 pp., 19.95.  "20.15 Jesus saith 
unto her, Woman,/ why weepest thou?  whom seekest/ thou?"     Two 
sections, "Turning" and "Conversion", reads meta-history and 
micro-associations in a production of folds and followings     
Melville never had a closer reader     falling under the pages 
echoes the entire impossibility of finality     these cracks 
create a present between histories.--dd

Albert Huffstickler: THE SMELL OF THINGS--Press of Circumstance, 
312 E. 43rd St. #103, Austin TX, 78751.  14 pp., $3.00.  The very 
prolific Huffsticker has brought together this small collection of 
poems on the theme of smells.  He peels the skin off reality, 
revealing something naked and elemental to each of us.  These 
poems reach inside the reader to fondle suppressed feelings, 
relics of our prehistoric days, remnants of our animalistic 
tendencies.  For example, in "Beginning" he uses memories to point 
out that "...bad odors/ are learned.  She just smelled personal 
when I drew/ my finger out.  There's more.  I learned her/ one item 
at a time while she watched me..."
   The book is full of olfactory wisdom: in "Retrieval," he writes 
"...I think/ you could die from lack of/ smell..."; in "Lie 
Detector," Huffstickler points out that "Truth has/ its own odor."  
There is an entire poem about the smell of shit, and another that 
mourns the smell covered up by air fresheners and deodorants.  In 
that poem, "Cover and Concealment: Anxiety in the New Age," the 
speaker predicts a time when everyone will smell the same:
   And when that day comes,
   everyone will be so hungry for variety
   That it will generate a whole new business:
   bootleg smells, obtainable only
   at your friendly Neighborhood Nose Dive.
The core of the philosophy expressed in these poems is stated 
in a piece called "The Smell of Love:"
   The eye is easily deluded.
   Ears even more so.
   Taste can be disguised.
   Touch sometimes lies.
   But the nose seeks truth always
   and abides with it.
--ronald zack

Albert Huffstickler: TWILIGHT ON TRINITY--Lilliput Review, 207 S.
Millviale Ave., #3, Pittsburgh, PA, 15224.  8 pp., $1.00.  One 
long poem in a tiny booklet that captures the narrator's voice 
speaking across the miles to and about his long-lost love--while 
outside, it rains on Trinity Street, "that borderland between/ the 
affluent and the/ fallen."  Nice and moody and ending as "the 
named and the nameless/ walk side by side/ in the slow fall."  
Modest production of a personal poem with a subdued emotional 
tone.--tw

Ge(of) Huth: O--dbqp press, 317 Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY, 
12306,.  SASE.  G. Huth and I have long been friends & admirers.  
Nonetheless, this... object befuddles me.  It consists of a yarn-
bound booklet/envelope/? of light-green paper whose corners are 
folded and secured in four different ways (e.g., one with a paper 
clip).  On the outside is printed a large "O" whose hole is 
tilted.  Fascinating, but... --bg

Geof Huth: ANALPHABET--Burning Press, PO Box 585, Lakewood OH, 
44107.  28 pp., $10.00.  A coffee-table-size handbound paperback 
with thick light-brown pages and the handsomest of typography; a 
fitting showcase for 26 charmingly elegant treatments of the 
letters of the alphabet, one at a time in sequence, by G. Huth.  
One page should give you the flavor: it contains two large W's, 
one fashioned conventionally of two intertwined V's, the other of 
two contiguous U's.  The first is labeled "Double U," the second 
"Double V."--bg

Lisa Jarnot: THE FALL OF ORPHEUS--Shuffaloff Books, 415 Norwood 
Ave., Buffalo NY, 14222.  $5.00.  This is Lisa Jarnot's first 
chapbook, part of Suffaloff's Local Habitation Series (includes 
Creeley, John Clarke, etc.).  She is a young poet whose promise 
has arrived.  Her images and juxtapositioning of language merge 
the mythical with the common.  In epistolary form Lisa intercepts 
poetry, reveals a journey marked by signposts recognizable to both 
the senses and the spirit. The poems offer a desire seeking, 
searching for poetry, which is parallel to her anchored poetic.  
There is no conflict, no barrier.  Poetry here is simply all the 
fact.  Her opening: "i'm not in jail anymore,/ i'm on a greyhound 
to memphis."--mb

Norman Jope: IN THE ABSENCE OF A SUMMIT--Phlebas Press, 2 The 
Stables, High Park, Oxenholme, Cumbria, ENGLAND, LA9 7RE.  64 pp., 
$7.00.  Editor of the literary magazine MEMES, Norman Jope creates 
brief texts which explore time and identity in a mystical, lyrical 
language.  In "Preparations for an Exit," a woman claims the night 
piece by piece, until "by her quiet courage, the edge invades the 
centre... and all things widen."  Jope is a poet of the place 
where the personal reaches beyond itself to those common terrains, 
be they historical or metaphysical, we all share.  His language is 
a cross between the literary and the folkloric, expressing quiet 
truths and observations calmly and with an assured ease.  
Ultimately, the question of what remains behind after death, how 
much of our words and thoughts continue in time, is at the heart 
of these musings; "Something of me shall remain--but I shall not 
choose its face."--tw

Andrew Joron: SCIENCE FICTION--Pantograph Press, PO Box 9643, 
Berkeley CA, 94709.  69 pp., $8.95.  The poems in this well-
produced, perfect-bound volume achieve a remarkable synthesis of 
visionary clarity and thoughtfulness that moves them far beyond 
what is usually described as "speculative" poetry.  Using topics 
and themes from science and fantastic fiction, Joron creates a 
highly visual surrealism made coherent in each poem by a 
consistent point of view and/or developing process of 
consciousness.  His language is clean, allusive, and contains 
nothing extraneous.  Do not miss it:
   Men banished from sleep
   wander through the night-market

   Qrummage among
   Marvelous toys: aphrodisiac
   Cures; a thigh-bone
   Strung & tuned
   To the frequency of a quasar
   
   Little dolls with removeable parts
   
   Packets of hair, & coinages
   Of skin
   
(from "Voiceprints")--jmb

Dimitris Karageourgiou, ed.: GILDZEN AT 50: A CELEBRATION--Toucan 
Press, 1129 Morris Rd., Kent OH, 44240.  188 pp., $10.00.  A one-
man poetry conglomerate at Kent State University--where he serves 
as poet, archivist, editor  and critic--Alex Gildzen is here 
honored on his fiftieth birthday with a tribute volume containing 
a complete bibliography of his writings, of works about him, and 
of his many letters.  Also included are tributes from a number of 
poets and writers, photographs of Gildzen, and examples of some of 
his own works.  A touching thank you to a man whose enthusiasm for 
poetry shines through.--tw

Vampyre Mike Kassel: WILD KINGDOM--Zeitgeist Press, 500 Ygnacio 
Valley Rd. Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA, 94596.  26 pp., $3.00.  The 
wildman is back again, with a new collection that tries to scar 
your retinas when you're not looking.  He captures the inner-city 
madness in WILD KINGDOM, and leaves you sitting there breathless, 
recovering from an act of random love that proved to be too 
intense.  He screams about "Yuppies whose wine cellars are worth 
more/ than the gross national product of Africa,/ who can't drive 
and talk on the phone at the same time/ and insist on doing both 
at 60 miles an hour./ The secretaries who dream of marrying them/ 
and probably deserve to."  He screams about "Bike messengers 
burning in a never ending/ adrenalin crazed fit,/ filthy 
hummingbirds moving/ fifty times as fast as the world around them/ 
in a never ending race to/ overtake a shrinking paycheck/ and an 
expanding rent bill/ until they spontaneously combust and blow up/ 
on the hood of your car."  And this is just the beginning, the 
wildman keeps on going, pushing you further into his reality until 
you are so overwhelmed all you can do is sit knowing if you ever 
stand up again there's a possibility that you might die.  I am 
impressed by Kassell's work.  He knows his turf, when he gets cut 
up he doesn't care who he splatters the blood on--he splatters you 
every time you leap into another line, and leaves you showing off 
the psychological scars once you've completed another round.  This 
is what it is all about.--oberc

David C Kopaska-Merkel: A ROUND WHITE HOLE--dbqp press, 317 
Princetown Rd., Schenectady NY, 12306.  16 pp., $2.00.  Just 13 
one-page poems by the editor of DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES with a nice 
range of form and content.  All not news but history too, like the 
following haiku:
   deep sky meadow
   /the snout of broken dreams/
   a moss-ridden brick
Also, an infra-verbal gem called "Phore," that on the surface is 
just a list of seven words or phrases with spaces in them where 
the syllable "phore" has been removed... but in the full thought 
is an amazing deepening out of biology ("chromatophore" and 
"spermatophore") to the investigation of anomalies ("phoretean" or 
"Fortean," itself anomalous!) and beyond.--bg

T. L. Kryss: STRANGE ATTRACTIONS--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. 
SE, Albuquerque NM, 87108.  28 pp., $5.00?  These are soft, gentle 
poems that capture nature and hard work in modern parables filled 
with insight.  The strange thing is these poems captured my 
attention in the same way Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did the first 
time I opened up a book of their ideas.  They are quiet, subtle 
observations, and while I often thrive on the masochistic 
bombardment of hysteria, there are times I need to take a rest and 
really try to understand what all the weirdness is all about.  
This is good place to be when I am in that mood, and actually 
believe that there are possible solutions to the madness that 
surrounds me.--oberc

Anna Leonessa: JOURNAL ENTRIES, ACAPULCO '93--O!!Zone, 1266 
Fountain View Dr., Houston TX, 77057.  24 pp., $6.50.  A stylish, 
26-copy, never-to-be-reprinted collectors edition.  Poems and 
photographs complementing the relationship described in Laura 
RyderUs Exchanging Gifts (reviewed elsewhere in this issue).  
Strictly speaking, not out of the scene TRR is mostly about [what 
"scene" is that?--ed.], but as a side-product of the magazine 
O!!ZONE, worth a mention here, I think.--bg

Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: OUTTAKES / CEREMONIES ABOARD THE 
DRUNKEN BOAT--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, Albuquerque NM, 
87108.  28 pp., $5.00?  I don't think there is a poet worth his 
grain of salt that doesn't know about Locklin.  In this split-
format chap Locklin captures new turf, talking about the paranoia 
he got while driving on the other side of the road on British 
soil, catching a French woman breaking into the men's room because 
she has to piss and the lines are shorter in that arena, and a 
strange attack of anxiety cured by his daughter while his wife 
doesn't really give a shit.  These are the human touches that make 
Locklin more than human, and every time I see or read about a new 
collection of his work I want to know what he's been doing, 
because he has a way of bringing me right there.  Mark Weber, on 
the other hand, has a different style of observation, and he 
captures things from an angle that is every bit as powerful as 
Locklin's, only with a meaner edge.  When Weber screams: "do not 
go gentle into that Brautigan night/ rage! rage! as if your penis 
was on fire/ yelling at God the ultimate liar" I know just as 
clearly, as I do when I read Locklin, what is going on in his 
head.  He has brilliant observations into talk show participants 
and the people who manipulate them, KKK members who make 
statements that leave one with no choice but to decide they are 
fucking blinder than we all thought, and he lets us know, in the 
midst of the confusion reality splashes in our faces, that he (and 
I) love the comforts of drinking and letting this world just 
happen as it is going to anyway.  Gerald and Mark are both keen 
observers of the world we have been tossed into, and both of them 
let you know, point blank, what is going on in their heads.  If 
you want brutal honesty, words that hit the mark, and people who 
know how to say the things that they have seen, this is a good 
place to wrap your fingers.--oberc

Gerald Locklin / Mark Weber: THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FATHER / 
THE DAYS OF WINE AND REMEGEL--Zerx Press, 5016 Inspiration Dr. SE, 
Albuquerque NM, 87108.  26 pp., $5.00?  Locklin captures a world 
that many poets have yet to imagine.  In this collection we watch 
him go back to his hometown for the first time in 25 years for his 
oldest son's wedding.  Locklin captures the awkwardness of a 
history once lived, a first wife and family awkwardness, and that 
strange existential sadness you're left with when memories mix 
with a changed world that no longer works with the way things once 
were.  Weber tells tales of desperation: looking for a job you 
know you're going to hate, not going to college because school 
didn't capture the knowledge he was looking for, and getting fired 
again from a job where the boss was the kind of guy who'd 
masturbate while making an obscene phone call.  These folks know 
the real world, but don't buy into the illusions that most people 
need for their psychological survival.  They drink, they survive, 
they write and let you know what they're seeing happen all around 
them.  We talk about the edge, but they dance on the razor.--oberc

Stephen-Paul Martin: THE GOTHIC TWILIGHT--Asylum Arts, PO Box 
6203, Santa Maria, CA, 93456.  92 pp., $8.95.  Fiction is often a 
series of distorting mirrors in which we see exaggerated versions 
of ourselves, and thereby see ourselves in a fresh way.  Stephen-
Paul Martin creates fictional mirrors which reveal self and 
society.  His narrative is minimal; his prose crackles; 
progression from one scene to the next is nonlogical; and old 
bourgeois bugaboos like consistent characters are courageously 
dispensed with.  And the funhouse mirrors of his fiction show 
amusing, gruesome pictures which seem to be our own faces.--tw

Gustave Morin: INFORMATION: THE COMPLETE DOSSIER;  DOG GRUEL CODEX 
FILE;  &  ETC, :CONVERSATION PIECE--Stained Paper Archive, 1796 
Byng Rd., Windsor Ontario CANADA, N8W 3C8.  6 pp. @, $1.00/set.  
The DOSSIER is an absurdist list of characteristics(?) such as 
teeth rot, "Sharpen dull hooks by dulling the hook on that which 
is sharp," and "TBA."  The CODEX FILE is a set of poems rendered 
unreadable through overprinting, which makes Chinese characters of 
their letters--and makes a jump after three poems in lower-case 
letters to a poem in upper-case suddenly & extremely dramatic.  
ETC. is a series of designs comprised of chunks of letters and 
numerals in different kinds of typography--an example of what I 
call "textual illumagery."--bg

Jack Moskovitz: VERMICELLI VIXEN--Aran Press, 1320 S. Third St., 
Louisville KY, 40208.  68 pp., $5.00.  Well-wrought tale about a 
sixty-year-old man's lugubrious adventures in the company of a 
prostitute after a night at the local bar.  In the process he 
reels through the post-midnight of his past relationships with 
women (and of his current dead-on-its-feet one with his 
companion), as well as into quite comic scenes connected with his 
having to re-bury one of the customers of his business which is 
the selling & re-selling of a single cemetery plot.  A literate, 
surrealistically-energized and Winesburg-authentic novella.--bg

Harryette Mullen: S*PeRM**K*T--Singing Horse Press, PO Box 40034, 
Philadelphia PA, 19106.  48 pp., $6.00.  Attention shoppers!  I 
strongly recommend this book of poems for its acute sociology of 
consumer culture and its warm jazzy sense of humour.  S*PeRM**K*T 
details the supermarket seen in its obscene reductive essence.  
"So this is generic life, feeding from a dented cant."  
Commodities, like they say, are us.  After reading S*PeRM**K*T you 
will never look at a grocery aisle the same way twice.  Ring on 
Produce--tb

Claire Needell: NOT A BALANCING ACT--Burning Deck, 71 Elmgrove 
Ave., Providence RI, 02906.  60 pp., $8.00.  Poetry which requires 
a certain amount of philosophical and linguistic foregrounding for 
full appreciation.  Of primary concern is the naming process: "A 
car is a cave and a hotel is a cave... giving a name to an event 
is a matter of pure inference."  Also, there are wry observations 
on the intractability of human behavior--Needell seems to suggest 
that since language is flawed, and communication an illusion, 
there are limits to the civilizing and taming force of it.--ssn

Kurt Nimmo: TIOGA PASS--Persona Non Grata, 46000 Geddes Rd. # 86, 
Canton MI, 48188.  56 pp., $4.95.  So far to the left it's right.  
Nimmo's pseudo-nihilism and unreserved gonzo stance of delving 
into the unique fractures of our society has produced a novella 
full of fun, controversial characters, and wild rides splattered 
with hidden meaning.  The narrator, a cynical alcoholic named 
Blake,  travels across a terminal American landscape with three 
friends from out of his past.  If there is a search for meaning it 
is lost in the volatile dialogue and anarchical overtones of the 
main character.  From Detroit to LA and back, Nimmo's Blake 
explores our country's socially-strained and decadent wasteland, a 
nation of spasms: "It's death.  Our Manifest Destiny's death.  
It's a primordial fear of nothingness."  Drinking constantly and 
criticizing everything imaginable, Blake takes on all comers, from 
Arabs to vegetarians.  In him, Nimmo has combined America's scaly 
underbelly into a motif of bright awareness.  "We learn absolutely 
nothing from history.  We believe lies, distrust truth.  We hate 
genius and celebrate mediocrity.  We love our chains.  We fear the 
unknown and act in accordance.  We're doomed, fucked and doomed."
--rle

Jena V: AMBLYOPIA--Avenue B, PO Box 542, Bolinas CA, 94924.  42 
pp., $8.00.  AMBLYOPIA is a serial poem in the form of twenty 
meditations working the edges, the inbetween states and metastates 
of object relations.  Not unlike the vision problem the title is 
taken from, perceptual distortions make strange the familiar in 
the absence of apparent pathology.  What emerges is a kind of 
epistemology of alienation on the model of the human eye in which 
"Each body represents a separate approach to purpose," and where 
reader and writer both are found "Living in the device."  This is 
an eloquent and moving book of unusual intelligence.--tb

Nicole Panter: MERCURY RETROGRADE--PO Box 862, Venice CA, 90294,.  
$6.00.  If you saw the punk-rock documentary THE DECLINE OF 
WESTERN CIVILIZATION, you saw Nicole Panter trying to manage THE 
GERMS.  THE GERMS were a popular band that had trouble getting 
booked in local clubs because the band members were too fucked up 
to play their instruments, and the singer often crawled around on 
the floor, forgetting the words to the song he was trying to sing, 
and simply mumbled stuporous alcoholic drug-infested guttural 
sounds instead.  Nicole has come a long way since then.  In her 
latest book of short stories, MERCURY RETROGRADE, she takes on the 
innocence of two teen-aged girls moving to San Francisco.  You 
catch an honest insight to that innocent ignorance, and learn, 
along with the girls, what it is like to grow up in an ugly city.  
In another story (the best Nicole has written to date), she 
examines the relationship between a young woman in her 30's with 
an "older man."  The brutal sexuality, manipulations, lies and 
dishonesty are captured in a matter-of-fact writing style that 
comes too close to the truth for comfort.  The exploitive nature 
of the man in the story, and the victimization of the woman, 
leaves you with that ugly ice-cold alienation you get when a 
relationship turns into a sack of shit.--oberc 

Stephen Perkins (ed.):SUBSPACE INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW CATALOG--
Plagiarist Press, 1816 E. College St., Iowa City IA, 52245.  52 
pp., $6.00.  SUBSPACE is both an ongoing archive of micropress 
zines, and an occasional gallery space that sponsored the 
INTERNATIONAL ZINE SHOW last year--this publication is the catalog 
from that exhibition.  Geographically ranging from Belgium to 
Uruguay; subject matter is even more far-flung--but with 
particular emphasis on punk,  anarchy, mail-artists, and 
queerzines.  Each entry includes description, address, and a 
cover-shot of the zine in question (hundreds of them!); many also 
include notes by the individual editors on their perception of 
zines & the micropress underground.  Some of these publications 
may no longer be in business--nevertheless, this is a dense and 
meticulous portrait of the scene at a particular moment in our 
history, and an invaluable resource--lbd

John Perlman: TEL 28 LET--tel-Let, 1818 Phillips Place, Charlesto
n IL, 61920.  12 pp.  A showcase of Perlman's gorgeous, 
symmetrical, seamless work.  Visual poetry is finely honed here, 
and the form suggests the subject--a contemplation of the 
relations between word and world.  "A Prayer of St. Basil's" 
skirts the margins of erasure, and touches on an individual's 
horror of nothingness and extermination.  If one cannot be 
included in the picture, does one cease to exist?  "Willis Ave. 
Bridge" contains a similar poignancy, and a sense of mourning for 
a self that is always on the edge of loss, or (tragically) self-
erasure.--ssn

Dan Raphael: THE BONES BEGIN TO SING--Twenty-Six Books, 6735 SE 
78th, Portland OR, 97206.  $7.00?.  The title of this book of 
poems is especially apt for its new more clearly discursive slant, 
built on techniques and formal structures Raphael has been 
developing for some years now.  These are large poems, each one 
filling an 8.5 x 11" page or more, dealing passionately but not 
simplistically with such large questions as human survival or 
"purpose", the evolution of consciousness, and social and cultural 
decay or change, all couched in an intensely expressed surrealist 
discourse glittering with the "ephemera" of daily life:
   RI can see the music in the blood of the guy running down 
   the alley pushing a shopping cart with a tv inside it, 
   repeatedly looking over his shoulder at the miniature 
   cars which like a pack of dogs keep trying to jump & fly 
   into the low-lying clouds of meat teasing all below with 
   the threat or treat of carmine rain.S.. (from "Shopping Cart")
These poems, which include so much and range over such broad 
territories, remain rigorously focused on particular themes or 
qualities of consciousness.  This partly explains why their 
endings seem so convincing, and, although often formally trailing 
off, provide an amazing sense of closure:
   Rif only our bodies were aligned
   not this inexorable clash into himalaya of unresolved momentum,
   rolling over like dogsdogs inhaling each minute like meat,
   each om-bark silkily draping the light at the end /
         of the moon snaps open.S  (from "Divercity")
No brief review can do justice to these important new poems.  
Essential reading.--jmb

Werner Reichold: LAYERS OF CONTENT--AHA Books, Box 767, Guala CA, 
95445.  128 pp., $9.00.  Strong, fresh poems whose stanzas, in 
general, approximate haiku.  Sensualities both personal (e.g., "we 
who have been two/ tongues inside one laughter/ close each other's 
lips") and impersonal ("outgrowing angles/ the river swallows/ 
thistle seeds") that sometimes veer into surrealism, as when a 
footprint is described as "sleepless," or the narrator speaks of 
his name's "skin."--bg

Sherry Reniker: ATTICUS CHRONICLE--Burning Press, PO Box 585, 
Lakewood OH, 44107.  8 pp., $1.00.  An ingeniously folded small 
booklet of five poems, which are delightfully playful and non-
discursive.  Just the thing to tuck in your pocket:

   Uniluxurious

   late woo chiming misconstrue.
   orchard foist blankety bulge
   flawed amalgamate obligatory
   parley parley parley
--jmb

Laura Ryder: EXCHANGING GIFTS--O!!Zoone, 1266 Fountain View Dr., 
Houston TX, 77057.  78 pp., $12.50.  Nice mix of autobiographical 
poetry and prose by Laura Ryder, & with photographs (mostly nudes) 
that together appealingly evoke a quiet but sexually-charged 
(mostly lesbian) Mediterranean summer in the life of a girl coming 
of age.--bg

John Shirley: NEW NOIR--Black Ice Books, PO Box 241, Boulder CO, 
80306.  190 pp., $7.00.  Six crime genre stories from 
writer/rock'n'roller John Shirley (who, among other projects, 
wrote lyrics for the proto-heavy-metal band Blue Oyster Clt).  
Shirley's stories are hallucinatory explorations of borderline 
lives; their most extreme actions only just suffice to lay bare 
the post-apocalyptic horrors lurking under the thin skin of 
pseudo-normality.  In other words, any Youth suffering Entrapment 
in the Deep Suburbs ought to get off on this stuff.  Examples--in 
"Jodie and Annie On TV" the title characters, criminal lovers, 
calculate their apparently random drive-by shootings with the 
needs of TV news producers in mind.  Film at 11!  In "Sketter 
Junkie," El Passo junkieman turns into female mosquito, sucks 
blood off luscious female human in downstairs apartment, then 
turns into giant female mosquito and fucks said luscious human 
with his/her 30-inch proboscis... and dies in the end, of course.  
And in "Just Like Suzie," the hapless middle-class degenerate 
Perrick chokes his crack supplier and whore Suzie to death with 
his dick while she's fellating him.  Then he discovers her jaws 
won't unclench...  One friend of mine (a rock'n'roller himself and 
an experienced fellatee) claims this last scenario is impossible.  
I dunno.  The writing's believable enough.--charlotte pressler

Eleni Sikelianos: TO SPEAK WHILE DREAMING--Selva Editions, 1701 
Bluebell Ave., Boulder CO, 80302.  79 pp., $8.00.  "The path i 
talk about leads from the other side/ of jailed or crazy or 
disable/ who scared me when they grimaced/ thru the chainlink/ 
there to spread out across & to dream/ while speaking."
   This handsomely produced book presents the poet as sibyl--to 
speak while dreaming--the words coming through her and settling on 
the page still vibrating and with all the motion and music intact.  
She writes deftly and sensually of love(s) moving across the 
(American) landscape; the poems, with thoroughly modern rhythms, 
linebreaks and enjambment, hint towards classical mythology--ripe 
with Eros--and lay it over a foundation of the parting lot and the 
Indian Reservation.  The space she creates evokes a whole 
tradition of poets including Anselm Hollo, Philip Whalen, Joanne 
Kyger; a series of openform sonnets are in the lineage of Ted 
Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer.  Filled with both vision and music, 
indebted to but not enslaved by Naropa poetics.--jc

Bucky Sinister: A FRIEND AND A KILLER--PO Box 170664, San 
Francisco CA, 94117.  16 p., $3.00.  This short chap carries a 
vicious edge, and with lines like: "He's got a heart of gold/ and 
his enemies have an extra asshole./ He's everything I want in a 
friend/ and a killer besides./ He makes me laugh/ and makes others 
bleed" you know you're on to something filled with violence and 
wisdom gained from way too many gutters.  "Living on Methadrine 
Time" reminds me of my speed freak days, where time moves too 
fast, there are too many things to do, and aging suddenly becomes 
something you're incredibly aware of.  In "Blood Virgin" we go 
hunting with a boy and his father for the first time: "I shot her 
once/ and she kicked/ painridden and desperate/ the second shot/ 
she heard but never felt/ kicked some more/ it was the first time/ 
for both of us/ the third shot and she lay still/waiting for me".  
"The Jesus Virus" caught the desperation of trying to save others 
when you're only trying to save yourself.  This is a great 
collection of poems, capturing a desperate dangerous world where 
things go downhill in a hurry.--oberc

Laurel Speer: GRANT DRANK--PO Box 12220, Tucson AZ, 85732.  20 
pp., $2.00.  This collection of Speer's prose-poems is loaded with 
allusions to famous people (Ulysses S. Grant, Flannery O'Conner, 
Zero Mostel, Mahler, Picasso, Apollinaire, Hitler...).  I'm not 
sure I like being taken on a trip around some historically-induced 
Disneyland, but overall it works, because the author has created 
an aura of significance.  There is pain: "...the grief of knowing 
he's sold me so cheaply is immense."  There is paradox: "It was a 
laugh a minute/ it was bad."  There is promise in these twenty 
poems, as Laurel Speer travels, explores historical incidents, 
with a clear voice, from within.--rle

Pete Spiro: 1-800 SUBWAYS--Lazur Press, 105 Betty Rd., East Meadow 
NY, 11554.  24 pp., $3.00.  This is the "Grand Slam" edition, 
Spiro having won a 1992 New York Grand Slam competition.  Spiro 
has power in his urban voice; he activates his characters with 
Beat cadences: "...move the poets of another color/ the lip 
blisters, the three quarter mister keep your change/ sister 
hipster black poets..."  He shakes the tree of poetry, he doesn't 
dance around it, elusive is not his style.  He is bold & blatant, 
loud & quick, scary & real.  He is "some sort of turbulent, flesh, 
sensual, eating, drinking, and/ breeding/ son of Brooklyn."  He 
gives it to us straight & condemns those who don't--one of his 
poems is titled "Poetry; A Broad Historical Review; or, Just Read 
the Fucking Poem, Man."  Read this one outloud.--rle

Surllama: PHILPHLEXLUDE--Hairy Labs, 5629 Granada Dr. #271, 
Sarasota FL, 34231.  8 pp., SASE.  Prose about a student returning 
home from classes stoned, one way or another.  The result is a 
cracking dream-collage of current events, household events, math 
homework, plain insanity, and so on.  At one point, the first-
person protagonist starts swaying--the trees, squirrels, 
birdbaths, wheelbarrows, plums, "and even the outhouses over by 
the tennis courts" join him--"but wow! they sway so hard, they 
fall over."--bg

Thomas Lowe Taylor: JFK: THE ADIRONDACK DIARY--Texture Press, 3760 
Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK, 73072.  $4.00.  Two sequences of poems 
or stanzas, with each text accompanied by collaged images of J. F. 
Kennedy and related assassination imagery.  The first sequence 
could be the voice of JFK speaking from the grave; it is a voice 
shorn of connections and identities, yet also the voice in us that 
connects all events and places: "Rocks are forming outside.  They 
are growing into flowers of lava and time."  The second sequence 
is called "The Chorus"--it includes the voices of Oswald, Ruby, 
Sirhan, and others, also speaking from death, circling around the 
themes of myth and history.  The book concludes with an essay by 
Taylor discussing the evolution of American culture and of the 
need to put to rest certain obsessive symbols such as JFK, to 
release them to the underworld--a process in which the poet must 
take part (paradoxically, it would seem) by writing about them.  A 
highly thought-provoking and evocative book, a meditation on 
culture and time.--jmb

Joseph Torra: DOMINO SESSIONS--Leave Books, 357 Ashland Ave., 
Buffalo NY, 14222.  8 pp., $2.00.  No punctuation but a few 
question marks among 14 small prose chunks where words collide 
like dominoes and, like dominoes laid out acrostically and 
accumulating patterns, visions appear from the text, images 
accruing from the words whipping past us as we read.  
Descriptions, meta-descriptions, narrative and not, of an 
apartment building on fire, a flood, a mountain hike, a toxic 
cloud, an unpeopled domestic twilight scene: things fairly 
familiar rendered in a prose that excites the subject.  "Floating 
these currents rest seems hardly possible."  In its unflagging 
momentum this writing points beyond itself--as if each description 
is a seed of a bigger picture: "unlinear whisper today tornado 
tomorrow in remote altitudes from a stream-pool a goat drinks its 
image flows ever toward the sea what effect its glare on global 
tides?"--jc

Turman Art Gallery: IS POETRY VISUAL ART?--Indiana State 
University, , Terre Haute IN, 47809.  56 pp.  A beautifully 
packaged catalog for an exhibition devoted to combinations of 
visual and verbal art.  It contains a few visual poems such as Kay 
Rosen's rousingly dramatic "John Wilkes Booth," which consists of 
the following, printed in red against a black background:
   assass
   inin
   thethe
   ater
Most of the other works reproduced are merely paintings that 
include textual material, or texts that are visually heightened 
only in the sense that Madison Ave. advertising texts are visually 
heightened.  But the catalog also includes a number of good essays 
on its subject, and would make a worthwhile addition to the 
library of anyone seriously interested in visual poetry and 
related pursuits.--bg

Nico Vassilakis: ENOCH & ALOE--Last Generation Press, 2965 13th 
St., Boulder CO, 80304.  22 pp., $3.50.  This single long poem 
provides the context for one of the things Vassilakis does best: 
move around and through a topic and its multiple circumstantial 
associations to create an interpretation of the world as a kind of 
multi-layered swarming in which any particular theme or obsession 
(here, "man/woman" and language or story/history) seem 
increasingly small and of uncertain significance.  A beautifully 
written work that grows with repeated readings.--jmb

Mark Vinz: LATE NIGHT CALLS--New Rivers Press, 420 N. 5th St, 
#910, Minneapolis MN, 55401.  $8.95.  Mark Vinz's prose poems are 
brief, no-frill recountings of his everyday life, neither sordid 
enough to be called confessional nor dramatized enough to be pure 
fiction.  He writes of the "blue stuff" used to clean toilets, the 
joys of taking an afternoon nap, and the problem of running out of 
gas in front of the state prison.  Vinz's prose is direct and 
simple, using few metaphors or allusions, and his first-person 
narrator speaks in a comfortably ordinary voice.  In these texts, 
there seems to be no boundary between Vinze's life and art, 
between the private man and the public persona.
   Imagine that.--tw

Mark Waid: THREATS OF OPPOSITE--Sink Press, PO Box 590095, San 
Francisco CA, 94159.  36 pp., $5.00.  There is now a(nother) 
revival of interest in the long poem, and here is a long poem that 
works to resolve "threats of opposite" by playing them out on as 
many different levels as possible: psychological, 
cultural/historical, sexual, linguistic, and poetic.  Waid's 
loose, disjointed narrative, apparently random in its associations 
("paratactic"), plays off tightly organized formal poetic 
techniques--structure questioning itself.  The Argument of the 
Poem (as Milton might say): WIttgenstein's (& Lacan's) baby is 
birthed into the world by doctors and nurses who snip off his 
foreskin while initiating him into the culture's language games.  
"Uncle" appears almost at once--Uncle Sam, perhaps, but maybe also 
the initiatory mother's brother of matriarchal societies.  The 
narrator observes Uncle's dithering, records his odd jobs, 
worries, and search for the "faster route to Medical Emergency."  
"She" is there, too--as obliquely observed as Uncle.  Finally 
Uncle "leaps from the balcony" as She and the narrator unite in a 
Nietzschean (if rather muted) "flight out of the sex-
distinguished."--charlotte pressler

Michael E. Waldecki: THE WIND ALWAYS SINGS SOPRANO--310 W. 7th 
St., Lorain OH, 44052.  36 pp., $4.50.  Never verbose, most often 
relentless in his poetry jabs at the world's bulging absurdities, 
Michael Waldecki is at his most political in this new book--a 
revelation of the misuse of power and the consequent poverty of 
the body and spirit created.  Waldecki, like his patron saint 
Russell Edson, is among the few Absurdists still writing today.  
"But these things happen in cycles/ like foreign affairs/ with 
passive resisters/ who pelt Iraqi cab drivers/ with stale donuts."  
These poems are packed with awareness, often lightly encoded but 
most often undeniable in its exaggerated declaration: "The 
constipated Global Village/ is at the brink/ of disastrous 
relief./ Down wind, you can almost/ smell the plutonium."  
Waldecki continues his original poetry into a third decade of 
publishing--a court jester with his eyes and heart still open.
--larry smith

Rosmarie Waldrop: LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE--Tender Buttons, 54 East 
Manning St. #3, Providence RI, 02906.  81 pp., $7.00.  These poems 
are intimately voiced investigations of the terrain where 
philosophy and poetry meet.  I detest paraphrase.  Here is a 
collage of quotes arranged to suggest some of the book's 
argumentative threads:
   "... the four points of the compass are equal on the 
   lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of 
   meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by 
   morsel, off the bone.  Something that can be held in 
   the mouth, deeply like darkness by someone blind or 
   the empty space I place at the center of each poem 
   to allow penetration." (pg. 11)

   "It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, 
   but quite another to get your image out again and 
   have your errors pass for objectivity." (g. 13)

   "Then I realized that the world was the part of my 
   body I could change by thinking and projected the 
   ratio of association to sensory cortex onto the 
   surface of the the globe, inside out as you might 
   turn a glove." (pg. 77)

   "Every thought swelled to the softness of flesh 
   after a long bath, the lack of definition essential for 
   happiness, just as not knowing yourself guarantees 
   a life of long lukewarm days stretching beyond the 
   shadow of pure reason on the sidewalk." (pg. 47)

   "There remains an ultimate gap, as between two people, 
   that not even a penis can bridge, a point at which 
   we lose sight of the erections crossing a horizon in 
   the mind.  This is accompanied by  a slight giddiness 
   as when we jump over our shadow..." (pg. 66)

LAWN OF EXCLUDED MIDDLE  deserves a volume of responses and I 
believe at some point it will receive them.  It ranks with a 
handful of other books (Michael Palmer's SUN, Lyn Hejinian's 
THE CELL, Bruce Andrew's I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP, 
Rachel Blau DuPlessis' DRAFTS) as among the most important 
writing of these last few years.  This is one of the books to 
take to that fabled desert island.  Especially if you enjoy 
the sensual vagaries of thought.--tb

Paul Weinman & afungusboy: MY MORNING FEET--afungusboy press, 
16 E. Johnson St. #c, Philadelphia PA, 19144.  20 pp., 50".  
Paul WeinmanUs poetry has become more surreal and dislocated of 
late and combines very well here with afungusboyUs collages.  The 
images are strong, unforgettable, and humorous in both forms.  For 
instance, two combs juxtaposed on advertisements, and a lone 
extracted molar are boxed apart by crude lines with an old hat on 
top of the whole, the letters RmS and RoS hover above and below 
the tooth.  On the page facing it we read, RThe mirror made 
parchesi / as I looked for my baby teeth./ TThe Good Fairy will 
shove it up her woowoo.US  Joyous and painful simultaneously, MY 
MORNING FEET is one of those small otherstream masterpieces that 
make that trip to your mailbox worthwhile.--jb
A sequence of eight poems by Weinman each paired with a 
collage/graphic illustration by afungusboy.  These concise, neat 
poems are among Weinman's best, and combine an expressionistic 
surrealism with the grit of daily life.  They have to do with 
sexuality, childhood, and gardening, and are perfectly balanced by 
afungusboy's mix of blurred fragments and specific clear images.
--jmb

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