wednesday newstrip

We now have precise math to describe how black holes reflect the Universe · UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid tests positive to coronavirus · jumping spiders seem to have a cognitive ability only previously found in vertebrates · military game fan leaks classified docs to win forum argument · UK woman banned from defecating & urinating in public after 25-year ‘poo-bombing’ campaign · wild sulfur-crested cockatoos in Australia are teaching each other how to break into trash bins · Kanye West blasted by fans for charging $50 for chicken tenders at album launch party · invasive insect fall armyworm on the march, but scientists fight back with an oozing virus & an egg-attacking wasp.

Today the post-
woman brought
me an asteroid
belt. Pity I've
got no suit/able
trousers to
wear it with.

Today the post-
woman brought
me a brochure
from EARWAX—
extinct animal 
resurrection with 
academic expertise—
suggesting that if 
I donated both
money & a sample 
of my DNA they 
might be able 
to bring back 
the Amazonian 
smilodon. I de-
clined. Now if it 
had have been 
the mastodon . . .

geographies: St. Arnaud

 

wednesday newstrip

Nintendo: unopened copy of Super Mario 64 from 1996 sells for $2.24 million · fungal leather production could mean change of tack for equestrians · UFO chaser claims photo taken from International Space Station shows aliens circling above Earth · unvaccinated Belgian woman contracted two COVID variants simultaneously · meet the baby Juicero you didn’t know you needed · Jackass star attacked by shark during stunt gone wrong · United States citizens, companies buying up New Zealand land for farming, forestry, wine-making · teardrop star reveals hidden supernova doom.

geographies: Kyneton

 

Today the post-
woman brought
me The Shorter
Oxford English
Dictionary. Such
generosity! I was
lost for words.

wednesday newstrip

Capitol rioters who deleted social media posts of their involvement may have further incriminated themselves · some 53 per cent of Republicans believe DoNuts T.®ump won last year's election & blame his loss on illegal voting; one-quarter of the overall public agreed, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed · US switched off the lights & left Bagram airbase without telling the Afghans · Ukrainian female troops march in heels, sparking outrage about 'medieval mindset' · blazing fire on ocean surface due to gas leak extinguished in Gulf of Mexico · cyber attack on US businesses through Kaseya software to be investigated for Russia links · male dragonflies lose their 'bling' in hotter climates.

Now out from sandy press

The Sasquatch that walks among us has a wide-ranging wardrobe, ranging from the stylish to the stochastic. Poems about places that may never have existed, or if they did are described in a way that makes them unrecognizable. Poems about people who did exist, but never thought the thoughts that are ascribed to them here. Poems that the Sasquatch themself has inscribed on the walls of the modern-day forest they have come out in.

The Sasquatch Walks Among Us
sandy press, California
ISBN: 978-1-7368160-2-8
direct URL: at Amazon.
$US14.95

 

Blurbs

These are poems conscious of mortality’s fate. What results is music as would be played, not in but by, dusk. Thus, wryness, anger of the type refusing to go gentle in the night, acceptance, humor, irony, and more until “the noise / divides & / the song /breaks through.” They form a read so compelling that instead of “reading out of books,” you “read things into them.” Specifically, you read your life into these poems so that you can only hope your life will have contained enough of what creates the lyric: “A light moves on the north sky line … & a world is covered with jade,” or “the moon got in / under his finger- / nails like a fragment of / a Bach cantata.” — Eileen R. Tabios

Almost all of Mark Young's poems in The Sasquatch Walks Among Us comment on current culture, society, and politics fairly directly, doing so with varying levels of wryness, dismay, and humor. This variety in attitude and emotional response makes for a consistently engaging reading experience, enhanced by a great variety of forms and perspectives in the book, including prose poems, centos, sonnets, tercets, doublets, and quatrains in various combinations, and many mixed forms. There are also some poems that use wordplay, such as the almost Lettristic “Quick!”, which riffs on the letters A and I.

In a previous book, Sorties, (sandy press, 2021), a book of essays and commentary, Young describes his influences as: “No poetry”. His writing in The Sasquatch... certainly reflects this attitude, especially in the condensed prose-like diction of many of the pieces, an enhancement of prose which is not prose at all, really. “Cento I”, part of a series interspersed throughout the book, based on Pound's Cantos, is a good example of something quite different: it is a carefully constructed, and beautiful, sonnet which shows a deep familiarity with the formal aspects and sound patterns of poetry. “No poetry” is, however, a useful frame of mind to ignore so-called influences in order to write more freely and independently, which Young certainly does extremely well. Perhaps influence is the wrong word for the experience of writing out from a swarm, or an atmosphere, a deep culture of many voices of poetry, writing against them, inside them, and writing through their swarming. It is a complex evolution within a changing context. In another poem, “Strut”, he expresses dismay at the commercialization of some poetry; Ginsberg used in a fashion show, for example. I can only say that I suspect there is little danger of Young's poetry, or that of the vast majority of poets he publishes in his essential journal Otoliths, being used that way. Which is a very good thing indeed. The Sasquatch... is a wonderful book, which challenges the mind, the emotions, and one's sense of beauty again and again. — John M. Bennett

wednesday newstrip

Mysterious mineral only ever seen in meteorites inexplicably found in sediment near the Dead Sea · Queensland Premier & the state’s Health Minister have blasted the Australian Pram Minister Scat SorrySon's Federal Feudal government over the bungled international border policy · black holes gobbling up neutron stars confirmed as source of gravitational waves for first time · mouth closing device to fight obesity causes scandal · hundreds dead as record-breaking heat wave hits Canada & United States · Apple releases beta versions of iOS15, iPadOS 15, & WatchOS 8 · intact beetle found in 230 million-year-old lizard dung.

geographies: Zumsteins