Dec 13, 2009

CY GIST PRESS HARD TIMES HOLIDAY SPECIAL



So you've lost your job copyediting foreclosure notices for Gog, Magog & Scumbag LLP, Tiny Tim needs braces, the student loan company is threatening to break your Grandma's legs, you've been drinking American beer & now you just don't know what you're going to do about the "Holidays."  Well don't fret, friend, Cy Gist Press feels your pain & is offering you the chance to purchase all of the currently in-print CGP titles (that's: to know this, Off the Beaten Trakl, Berlin Poems, Gingerbread, The Love of Freak Milways & Tango Wax, Looking for Lake Texcoco, Gary Gygax, Dead-Eye Spring, Daybook of Perversities and Main Events, Vorticells and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington) for just $30 plus $5 shipping and handling.  That's less than $3 a chapbook.  Even if you already have a few, give the extras away to your friends and relatives for your Culturally Appropriate Winter Holiday--chances are a Cy Gist Press chapbook will be more interesting than whatever other garbage you were planning on getting them!

While supplies last! 
CGP 18: to know this
by Angela Veronica Wong (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched w/ Die-Cut Stars) $7 ppd.





In to know this Angela Veronica Wong maps the constellation of the body and its desires.  The life of a star is the life of a person.  Wong's spare, precise lines chart a firmament that is both celestial and down-to-earth.


From to know this
by Angela Veronica Wong


                                   to know stars die:
in wartime, countries
trade bodies for prisoners.
what is more valuable—a body
symbolic, or a body alive?  would you
trade for mine would i want
to trade for yours      is it
the body or the wanting
my want of your body my want
for your body to be my body or maybe just
next to my body       animals curled
in water     this is how I wish
to be – warmth       belonging       the L next to an S
somewhere between the meeting and the knowing
the wanting and the having
like clean sheets on a bed
hints of what is to come.

CGP 17: Off the Beaten Trakl
by Joel Sloman (20 pp. Saddle-Stitched) $5 ppd.


Responding to Cy Gist Press editor Mark Lamoureux's call for poets to do more translation, Joel Sloman created this homophonic, stereoscopic, phantasmagoric "translation" of the work of Austrian poet Georg Trakl.  Sloman makes a sock poet of the author's solemn memory, dragging Trakl dumfounded into our contemporary world of Robin Williams films, scones and hip-hop workboots.   With a fetching (pun intended) cover by Kate Ledogar.  In the words of the author, "It's fucking hot, Snowy!"


Sanja
by Joel Sloman


A strange woman wearing a green sweater walks by
Open trucks with hoses guard alterations
Sonja’s legs rest on a chair, she is reviled
Cold regulates bums and hobos

I wave to the sightseers on the trolley
Sunflowers and more sunflowers are delighted
By Sonja’s white interpretation of reggae
Red snow—wondrous—bubbles

A blue clerk wears a muscle tee
Sonja’s shirt is dry cleaned, fumes
Tiers of turbans grates England
Ali’s young daughter wears a long red dress with silver sequin patterns

Sonja sips a thick mocha shake
Her son tags along after her
Her sage brow acknowledges loneliness
Her shirt is too stiff, it crackles

Extensions to her blond hair pinned
She’s disturbed, returns to England
Whatever happened to Neil Hornick?
Subterfuge of sunflowers!

The colors of blooms are already autumnal
A loitering, itinerant red wound
Jumps onto Sonja’s thigh
Yolks and whites break up, no more reggae