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smallpressdistribution · 7 years ago

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Wazzzzzap internet. Feast your eyes and your shelves on May’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles from the 90's that continue to rock our world. boo-ya.

Scrunchies, Beverly Hills 90210, Ryan Gosling’s long hair, Xena, The Parent Trap with Lindsay Lohan, all those Bagel Bites commericals...just a small glimpse into humanity's greatest feats. It's not a coincidence that all these feats took place in the 90's either. That's because the 90's were great. It only makes sense that literature in the 90's was great too.

So hold tight to your Tamagotchi, Furby, or Beanie Baby collection: The 90's are back in the form of 10 awesome SPD backlist titles. These titles will leave you glowing brighter than any glow-in-the-dark star on your bedroom ceiling ever could. feat. New Star Books, Talisman House, Publishers, Kelsey Street Press, & more!

1. Debbie: An Epic by Lisa Robertson (New Star Books, 1997)

Lisa Robertson's Debbie: An Epic was a finalist for the 1998 Governor General's Award for Poetry. As arresting as the cover image, Robertson's strong, confident voice echoes a wide range of influences from Virgil to Edith Sitwell, yet remains unique and utterly unmistakable for that of any other writer. Brainy, witty, sensual, demonstrating a commanding grasp of language and rhetoric, Debbie: An Epic is nevertheless inviting and easy to read, even fun. Its eponymous heroine will annihilate your preconceptions about poetry - and about the name "Debbie."

2. The Tower of Babel by Jack Spicer (Talisman House, Publishers, 1994)

An established writer from an Eastern college returning to his former San Francisco haunts becomes entangled in a labyrinthine series of events that culminate in the sudden violent death of a respected poet. Described by Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian as "a satiric look at the private world of poetry gone public in the wake of the Six Gallery HOWL reading of October, 1955," The Tower of Babel includes finely detailed sketches of the San Francisco poetry world and gay life as they existed then.

3. Four Year Old Girl by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (Kelsey Street Press, 1998)

In this extraordinary new collection of poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, writing reflects human presence in the phenomenal world. Physical sensations of experience—a horizon, moisture, a child, a piece of quartz, a loss—become objects of focus and poetic elements. Her written lines, like strings of protein, both create and destroy bonds. Reading affords moments of exquisite vulnerability in which the perceived world is suddenly exposed to the quick. The pace of everday life slips into that of a waking dream. Winner of the 1998 Western States Book Award.

4. Brooklyn Bridge by Leslie Kaplan (Station Hill Press of Barrytown, 1992)

This is the first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's haunting novel about the meaning of childhood and the mysteriously intimate interworkings of child and adult. Here four adults and a child come together in a chance meeting in New York's Central Park, where the child's presence is a question to all of them. The novel pursues the erotic complexity of their various relationships with a special focus on the disturbing interaction between Julien and the child Nathalie. Woven through the affecting depictions of human characters, is the extraordinary depiction of the city, its tensions, its unexpected necessities, its urgencies. Written in a rhythm as electric as its setting, Brooklyn Bridge is a novel for the questioning child in us all.

5. WHATSAID Serif by Nathaniel Mackey (City Lights Publishers, 1998)

Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, WHATSAID Serif, is comprised of installments 16 through 35 of Song of the Andoumboulou, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in his two previous books, Eroding Witness and School of Udhra. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.

6. Another Smashed Pinecone by Bernadette Mayer (United Artists Books, 1998)

"It's OK that poetry won't save us from circumstance, or pave our road to what we're tempted to call Heaven, but it doesn't matter—because reading Bernadette Mayer's poetry is where I always want to be. Here, within the playfulness of her language, is where consequences of daily living are histories of heart and mind. Poetry is in life and life is in Bernadette's poetry, and that's all the reassurance we need."—Kristin Prevallet

7. Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino (Edge Books, 1999)

Equal parts poetry and philosophy, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino's collaboration is organized around the act and idea of seeing, written in the form of a literary dialogue. "We were interested in a joint investigation into the workings of experience," writes Hejinian in the introduction, "how experience happens, what it consists of, how the experiencing (perceiving, feeling, thinking) of it occurs, what the sensation of sensing tells us." Visual descriptions interact with meditations on contemporary life, Western intellectual history, dream, film, poetry, and collaboration itself.

8. Close to Me & Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere by Alice Notley (O Books, 1995)

Alice Notley's two books collected here, Close to Me & Closer...and Desamere, are works that are wholly their art, meaning they occur as their language shape measure. She's invented a measure. The text is a rich current crossing, as at the moment of imagining, into being in death and in an expanded life. Notley transgresses conventional contemporary categories of genre; rather than genre, the form of the writing is the mind's inner sense and motion. "Alice Notley is, I think, the most challenging and engaging of our contemporary radical female poets...infused with uncommon verbal originality, intelligence and joyous playfullness, full of heart, intensity and wonder, provocatively addressing forever unsolved questions of form and identity, life and death, imagination and gender, Notley's poems are unsettling and inspiring"––the San Francisco Chronicle.

9. Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child by Elva Trevino Hart (Bilingual Review Press, 1999)

A vividly told autobiographical account of the life of a child growing up in a family of migrant farm workers. It brings to life the day-to-day existence of people facing the obstacles of working in the fields and raising a family in an environment that is frequently hostile to those who have little education and speak another language. Assimilation brings its own problems, as the original culture is attenuated and the quality of family relationships is comprimised, consequences that are not inevitable but are instead a series of choices made along the way. It is also the story of how the author overcame the disadvantages of this background and found herself.

10. Local History by Erica Hunt (Roof Books, 1994)

"Erica Hunt's Local History blows the public and the personal inside out, estranging familiar forms of writing, letter and diary, while snatching moments of intimacy and insight in disembodied prose that anatomizes artifacts of mass culture, such as screenplay and cartoon strip."—Harryette Mullen

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