ENIGMA & VARIATIONS
Paradise Is Persian For Park
Ivan Argüelles
ISBN 1-880766-11-6
8.95
Ivan Argüelles, recipient of the Poetry Society’s William Carlos Williams
Award, is well-known for his innovative, lyrical poetry. ENIGMA AND VARIATIONS
continues a long, ground-breaking epic poem, earlier selections of which have
appeared from Pantograph as “THAT” GODDESS and HAPAX LEGOMENON. In this new work
Argüelles leads us on a challenging, always magical journey. Experimental poet
Jake Berry has written, “Ivan Argüelles is the living embodiment of the epic
strain. He gives us genuinely singing lines, a music worthy of Homer.”
EXTRACTS FROM PELICAN BAY
edited by Marilla Argüelles
ISBN 1-880766-10-8
9.95
A compilation of profoundly moving poetry, drawings and essays by inmates of the
infamous Pelican Bay Prison in Northern California. June Jordan calls this hymn
to the human spirit “a stunning testimony of so many men we have dared to bury
away – in prison. Their own writings indict our heedless, small-minded, sadistic
and ultimately self-destructive intention to devise and enforce a living death.”
EXTRACTS FROM PELICAN BAY has already become an important handbook in the battle
for prison reform.
ANIMAL
Neeli Cherkovski
ISBN 1-880766-13-2
8.95
The poet’s seventh poetry book. Known for his biographies of Charles Bukowski and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and for WHITMAN’S WILD CHILDREN, a collection of essays and
reminiscences of the major Beat writers, Cherkovski is first of all a superb poet.
CUPS magazine calls him “California’s first son of poetry” and Luis Rodriguez writes
of his “textured and layered” language. ANIMAL ranges from the controversial “Queer
Careers” to the eloquently musical “Job, Suffering.” This book is a history of American
consciousness from the Vietnam War to the present.
EXILES
Jack Foley
ISBN 1-880766-12-4
9.95
Jack Foley’s previous Pantograph book, ADRIFT, was nominated for a Bay Area Book
Reviewers’ Award. His new collection, EXILES,is his most stunning book to date.
It includes a major poem written while in residence at the Djerassi Foundation,
several visual poems, short, moving elegies and extended works that probe deeply
into our language and the ambiguities of human imagination and intellect. Michael
McClure calls Foley “our firebrand experimentalist” and poet/critic Dana Gioia
describes Foley’s work as “that rare commodity – genuinely avant-garde poetry…
experimental poetry with depth and intelligence as well as intensity.” This is a
book which takes us on a complex, always astounding journey through the myriad
possibilities of poetry.
SPECIES OF ABANDONED LIGHT
Jake Berry
ISBN 1-880766-09-4
8.95
As in BRAMBU DREZI, Jake Berry’s SPECIES OF ABANDONED LIGHT takes us into the heat
of creation where the boundaries of the self are forcibly melted away, setting us
free in a world of occult powerful forces. The con-straining walls of syntax and
its petty reason are magnificently dissolved. This is the sea of the pre-Freudian
undifferentiated libido where huge battles are fought, where metamorphosis rules
as gods become people and people turn into molecular chains, all a-swirl in a dizzying
energy flux. Berry the preeminent experimentalist of his generation, operates language
at its most primeval and disturbing level. – Harry Polkinhorn
Available from Small Press Distribution
1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702