geographies: Te Aroha

the citadel

geographies: St. Lawrence

another headline hay(na)ku

Sonnet
jailed for
failed contract killing.

Eight facts about Tatang Island

1.
On Tatang
Mountain
the birds
build hives.

2.
Pomegranates
grow in
profusion.

3.
Day is
one hour
long, night
fifteen minutes.
Nobody notices.
It has always
been that
way.

4.
There are
five
colours
in the local
spectra.

5.
Organized
religion.
Individual
opium.


6.
He left his child-
bride behind.

7.
Everyone
is
related.

8.
Music &

9.
melancholy.

Out from Otoliths—Resinations by Javant Biarujia

Now out from Otoliths

Resinations
Javant Biarujia
72 pages
Cover design by Sheila E. Murphy
Otoliths, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9872010-1-0
$13.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/shop/javant-biarujia/resinations/paperback/product-18929536.html

Javant Biarujia’s latest collection, “Resinations”, takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through, mostly, Western (pop) art, culture and politics, from Kant to Dorothy Lamour, the Inquisition to “Leave It to Beaver”, Tallahassee to Drancy, and much more. Resinations, itself a neologism, is echoic of resonations — every pun is intended in this collection — as well as resignation, at once an Eastern concept and a Western reality for many an employee. In sixty-four numerologically significant “pantoums” (Biarujia’s idea of such at any rate), in which “all pastiche and no parono- / masia makes the past a dull Lautréamont” (“Labdanum”), he mirrors the world back at us, always startling, distinctive, original. His poetry is at times complex and multilayered, but it is always rich, witty and meaningful, what Charles Bernstein has called “quixotically alluring,” and Gig Ryan, “fun and mock bawdiness.” Or, as Biarujia himself says: “through levity to levitation.”

“A subversive master craftsman, [Biarujia] propels the language through a cultural and political labyrinth”— Jaya Savige

“This is a poetry that leads the reader not only in and down but also, through re-sounding, across, crossing boundaries, making unthought of connections, exploring the fertile errata of translation. Biarujia sends out sounds that skip from language to language in a series of transformations/ interactions” — Geraldine McKenzie

“[‘Calques’] is a compelling, stimulating, intricately wrought, sometimes hauntingly beautiful and often very funny book, written in styles at once globalised and hermetic, archaic and futuristic” — Chris Edwards

“Decadence and postmodernism collide and combine in texts which are inimitably Biarujia” — Kris Hemensley

geographies: St. Paul

The Curse

                               When run through any
                      English-Icelandic 
                                     translation app, the 
                                  atomic hypothesis & 
                           its concept of cloud comes 
                                             out resembling a gothic 
                                horror screen-play. No 
                        consideration for classical 
                                         theory. No sensitivity 
                                      toward sociological 
                            phenomena. Persons 
                                   under the age of 18 are
                               included only if they
                                     play in a marching band 
                            or Drum & Bugle Corps.

geographies: Westwood

geographies: Vancouver

geographies: Gavial

geographies: Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi

Victims of the Spanish
trade monopoly in-
clude radical writers,
idealists, advocates of
1990s style populism,
& anyone with a fond-
ness for those musty
old artefacts of Russian
culture found in most
of the Black Sea cities.