2009 Titles

Sky Brightly Picked

Jess Mynes, Sky Brightly Picked

96 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-00-6

Sky Brightly Picked is Jess Mynes's first full length collection. Rooted in the poet's responses to the work of Mark Rothko and the landscape of rural Massachusetts, these concise, witty, and deftly worked poems bring us 'other / kinds of knowing'. Possessed of a fresh and distinctive style, Jess Mynes shows in this book that he knows instinctively how to 'give a line muck / to sense about'.

As John Coletti writes:

Sky Brightly Picks accumulates. An irreducible hope for exact details. Striations of seasonal light, prismic silence. We come up everyday, down to emotional registers. Both colors made comforting unsure. Contrast and the coming thought. Life constantly and less predictable – something beautiful I made. Mind's never made so there's only that engaged totally personal Something I think Rothko intended. Gaps filled in but nevertheless Intended. Jess does that. His poetry isn't invasive, it's well-informed. Moments made externally visible. Without the voiceover. Just kind of fair. And exceptional. Nothing more than what the frame wants to be next to it, openly. Optics, Emotions, and Transfer. We all cope with the uncomfortable results of not quite working through it, but our joy in persisting exists – or never quite does – it’s something you forget in the city. More things on uneasy streets. Your conscience’s unsaid disappointments. Sleepy places of mild success. Hey we have those mornings some nights. Not sad joy nor comforting faces. But to live more deeply than contextual others. Experience is a deep thing in art we forget. Deep feeling. To rely on ability. And maybe do it sometimes.

Praise for Jess Mynes:

Irrepressible, that urge to form the irreducible poem. Jess Mynes has my sympathies, my admiration.

Clark Coolidge

Sample Poems

Untitled c. 1944-45


cock's eye egg
blue guess who

watecolor shore

gone on voyeur

your shaping gains
verdant rushes

frees glut judgment

*

No. 14, 1960


harbor light stains
blue-black scored
docks where fleeting
geese get figured
space in pose whites
surrounding brown

Ordering

Please click on the appropriate button below:

UK Orders: £8.95 (including postage)

US Orders: $15.00 (including postage)

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The World Seen from the Air

Alan Baker, The World Seen from the Air

22 Pages. Printed in an edition of 200 copies.

Alan Baker lives in Nottingham where he co-edits Leafe Press and edits Litter Magazine. His previous collections include Not Bondi Beach (Leafe Press, 2002), The Strange City (Secretariat Books, 2006), and Hotel February (Bamboo Books, 2008). A translation of Yves Bonnefoy's Début et Fin de la Neige/The Beginning and End of the Snow was published by Leafe/Bamboo Books in 2007.

Sample Poem

from Variations on Painting a Room

in late winter/early spring, lilac
emulsion spreading like a curious mind,
watching the trees outside

while sipping a glass of Coke,
(for Coke adds life)
and pondering the quote
on a scrap of newspaper:
'religion used to be regarded
as the opium of the people, now
drugs are that opium'

reflecting on how
the world walks, then runs

in a poem about
being rain-washed, sun-dried,
stunned by the claims of affection
alone in a house
on an early spring day
watching the trees outside
painting a room lilac

watching the trees
thinking that life is the opium of the people
hoping the trees
might re-invent my mind
as process/wind/air/light

Ordering

The World Seen from the Air has now been collected in Alan Baker's Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010 (Skysill Press, 2011), though a few copies are still available. Please contact the editor if you're interested in purchasing one.

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Anxiety Chant

Aaron Tieger, Anxiety Chant

A5. 27 pages. Printed in an edition of 200 pages.

Aaron Tieger lives in Cambridge, MA, where he is co-curator of the Unaffiliated Reading Series and edits Petrichord Books. His previous publications include February (Fewer & Further Press, 2006), The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger and Secret Donut (Pressed Wafer, 2009). He has recently edited the first US edition of Richard Caddel's Uncertain Time (Pressed Wafer, 2011).

Reviews

Review by Jeffery Beam

Sample Poem

7/30/04

Caffeine leaves
system leaving
me empty
as living
rooms across
this town
and others
empty
of boxes and lives
align
in yellow trucks
and yellow light
coats the empty
room and the last
few boxes
sit empty
in the last light
of a living room.

Ordering

A few copies are still available. Please click on the appropriate button to order:

UK Orders: £4.50 (including postage)

US Orders: $7.00 (including postage)