Happy, newly cold here & I have the thrill of two amazing recent publications: (Four) Factorial, edited by Sawako Nakayasu, & John Coletti’s new book from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Here’s Coletti’s “Only Half Moon”
but crazy half
under double bent
button sewn stitch flowers
tinsel strung
in brachial maples
bowties sprinkled
filled with air
cuffing a line of tiny bells
rubbing clear calamine
into my eyes
golden triangles
half-undressed.
Amazing how the suddenness of each successive phrase both eclipses & enhances the little sliver of moon evoked in the title, the poem somehow having it flash in the mind as a presence then dissipate into the poems physical contents, a little moonlight inculcated in each word. This book has a wildly accurate title: “Physcal Kind” & it hits “like a quilt truck”.
The work I’m initially crazy for in the new Factorial is a four-section excerpt from Brenda Iijima & Stacy Szymaszek’s “Sailor Porn”. It too has a serious, funny tenderness. The salient details of sex farce opening into genuine valentine:
I stand exclamatory
at the end of a pier
a human greeter
a seamark
did I ever thank you
for the drawing
of the big-eyed fish
marvelous as a sun
setting through pollution
I read “momentum hips”
because I watch too much porn
going the way “wherein there is no ecstasy”
and coming out ecstatic
about women and men
just think there are four of us
two upon the dying water
two who have taken up
qigong as the time passes
Nice, right?
September 30, 2005 * 8:18 am
