New Books from Otoliths—Stempleman, Gabbert & Rooney, Koppány, Beckett

This quarter’s round of books from Otoliths is being released in two instalments. The first lot is listed below. The second instalment, which will follow in around two weeks’ time, will include books by William Allegrezza, Mark Cunningham & Bob Grumman, plus the print editions of issues eight & nine of the Otoliths e-zine.

The direct URLs are given below. The full range of books can be found at The Otoliths Storefront.



The Travels
Jordan Stempleman
60 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-5-4
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/1984840

A rewriting of The Voyages & Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight

A book taken and returned and taken again
from Sir John Mandeville; of darkened artifacts
and incipient wonders; and of the sadness left
from passing through actual and imaginative sights




That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness
Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney
104 pages
Cover design by Catherine Bourassa-Hébert
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-4-7
Otoliths 2008
$12.50 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2210697

This collaboration between Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney is “Just more entertaining than poems are supposed to be. And I'm not using the word "entertaining" as some kind of sly putdown either. These poems have more human interaction going on in a couple of lines than many writers manage in a couple of books. The linguistic energy and, really, virtuosity, can be stunning. These are poems that know what people are like when they're around people.” —Mark Wallace




Endgames
Márton Koppány
76 pages, full color
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-3-0
Otoliths 2008
$24.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2183260

"The extraordinary thing about Koppány’s work is the way he takes gaps in thought and elaborates on them. How he expands the unsaid. How he crafts a visual grammar by framing it in verbal settings. The way he’s able to create more surface area than is originally given. This is a book of billboard puzzles that reveal in the subtlest way. These are posters that disturb meaning. Koppány’s destination seems to want to disrupt logic by executing it perfectly askew. Perfectly."
– Nico Vassilakis

"A completely infectious sense of humor which ridicules no one and degrades nothing makes sense of the inescapable circuits in which his work moves." – Karl Young




This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day
Tom Beckett
44 pages
Cover painting by Thomas Fink
ISBN: 978-0-9804541-7-8
Otoliths 2008
$10.00 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/2266888

"This is not a quest for epiphany: it is a rigorous modus vivendi. Tom Beckett’s is a poetry which, in accompanying us in our questionings — more than this, in feeling with us throughout our errancies — is as much phenomenological inquiry as it is intimate emotive play. It is at once the voice inside our heads and those voices outside, which we love, but cannot understand. From out this space of inquiry and intimacy, Beckett’s work emerges as that poetic praxis most necessary to us in our time. It is a consciousness seeking answers to itself." — Nicholas Manning