BOOKS

Other Sacred is a book of poems from Tim Kahl’s Bald Trickster Press. George Kalamaras wrote the blurb, and he says, in part: “Smith’s images recall the Bretonian urge to cultivate ‘the marvelous.’ These finely honed poems teem with power and exude exploding stars from a directness and compression of language. This book takes us on a vision quest from the inner worlds into a wider cultural sphere that gains profundity by virtue of the poet having explored the translucent border between meditative and public space.”

Annie’s Soup Kitchen is the story of Annie O’Rourke, a 95 year old retired Irish nurse, and her soup kitchen in Lemon City, California. When the “shadow plague” strikes old and young throughout the world, causing severe dementia and eventual death, Annie decides environmental degradation is the culprit. She and six of her regulars—Whiskey Ed, Library Lady, the General, Roderigo, Skulford Elephant, and Perry—form the Magnificent Seven. They embark on an ambitious plan of environmental monkey-wrenching in order to restore the Santa Ana River watershed and immerse plague victims in pure water to reverse the disease.

The Plain Talk of the Dead is a book of poetry that allows the reader to share the astonishing visions of a Honolulu secretary, William Randolph Hearst’s chief cowboy, an oil rig roughneck, a man in an iron lung, a Korean immigrant, a Chinese-American father-in-law, the Hawaiian goddess Pele, Gertrude Stein, Charlie Parker, a bee woman, and the Oyster Monkey, among others. Maxine Hong Kingston said its “surrealism is necessary, active, intelligent, and American.”

The Map of Who We Are is a vision of the last 1000 years of American history, combining Native American myth and prophecy, Chinese alchemy, and European esotericism to depict a radical transformation in our sense of who we are. The heroes of the novel are the Travelers, who communicate across apparent divisions of time and space by means of the Network, a grid of interlocking energy vortices. They struggle against the Death Squad, whose aim is to prevent the Great Millennial Shift, which will mark the end of racial, ethnic, and gender conflict in America.

No Trace of the Gardener is a translation of Yang Mu, one of the most widely read  poets of the world’s largest literary audience: Chinese-speaking people. This book offers one hundred poems that capture the poet’s haunting lyricism. Drawing on avant-garde traditions of Europe and the United States as well as on the traditions of classical Chinese poetry and prose, his work explores sensuality and the erotic, the anguish of war, exile, the colonial experience, and conflicting views of national and cultural identity.

The King of the Storeroom is a translation of Antonio Porta’s landmark novel Il re del magazzino. His unique vision of the collapse of humanity comes through the eyes of a starving narrator who has outlasted most others by finding a storeroom with some food (mostly raw turnips) in the countryside. The wanderings of his distintegrating mind are both brilliant and heartbreaking.

Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry: An Anthology is an Italian language collection of poems that goes from Pascoli and D’Annunzio in the early years of  the century to the neoavanguardia toward its end. It includes an introduction by John Picchione.

The New Italian Poetry: 1945 to the Present is a translation of twenty-one of Italy’s most influential contemporary poets. Postwar Italian poetry carries on the legacy of one of the world’s richest literary traditions in works that reflect, with extraordinary intensity, the social, psychological, and political turmoil of the modern world. The forty-page introductory essay offers a literary-historical context for these poems.