Belladonna*

Benefit Dancing!!

2011-12-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a tantalizing video from our annual benefit on December 13th. Belladonna* invited the A.O. Movement collective to perform this year--and they made a special dance piece for our benefit. Here is a trailer that Sarah A.O. Rosner, the Artistic Director of the AOMC made from a video of that performance. Check it out!

trailer >>> barrish, curation #3: Belladonna* from the A.O. Movement Collective on Vimeo.

The AOMC is dedicated to sustainability in dance. They created the MENU project to help create a sustainable practice for their dance company while starting dialogues about artist compensation within art communities. We see their MENU project as very connected with Belldonna*s ongoing conversations about Material Lives!

Happy New Year!

Jacket2 reviews Bharat jiva

2011-11-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

Bharat jiva a penultimate comment on the banality and glimmering potential holdout of humanity. Philosophy of philosophy, planetary biological religious cosmic consideration afloat on the tension of gerunds manifesting without always an I, yet I speaks (“did I not say”). There is agency in the dynamic vibrational circumstances through an accumulation of modifying phrases that eventually land on a sentence’s subject, but not always and not definitively, and the subject transmogrifies through sediment layering accumulation.

—Cara Benson for Jacket2; November 7, 2011.

Click here to read the full review

SPD Best-Seller!

2011-11-04T17:27:00.000-07:00

The Wide Road is a SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION BEST-SELLER.

(October 2011)

Cathy Wagner recommends The Wide Road

2011-10-22T16:24:00.000-07:00

Cathy Wagner recommends The Wide Road

"An enviably intellectually-fecund friendship set itself the important work of trying to think and write sex, collaboratively, as women. I wish I’d had this book years ago. “We eroticize our earthly situations and conditions and likewise they eroticize us…Our vagina accommodates the proverbial railway station it has sometimes been compared to. To be enormous is a wish that comes over us in our hot desperation. Then, miraculously, everything on earth swells to our proportions.” Yup that’s how it works. Crazy smart and crazy sexy."

Our Material Lives: A New Feminism by Caroline Crumpacker

2011-10-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

On September 13th, 2011, at the first event of Belladonna*'s 2011 reading series - Our Material Lives: Feminism and Poetry at Various Ages - Caroline Crumpacker read the following statement concerning the revolutionary and poetic nature of women voices. She underlines the connectivity of female work and community to a radical re-understanding of ourselves as viable subjects in our culture, ripe for effecting political and social change.

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I’d like to begin by thanking Rachel, Krystal, Emily and Belladonna* for putting together this panel and asking me to be part of it. I do believe that opening and creating meaningful conversation and asking women to speak is a juicy, feminist, generative act and these conversations carry a great hope and great potential.

I am reminded that when CR groups were inaugurated in the 1970s, they sought to subvert the marginalization of women’s voices from a dominating discourse by insuring that each woman present had an inviolable place in an ongoing conversation. My mother was part of a CR group when I was a girl. Clearly a source of libidinal pleasure, intellectual stimulation, social standing and political necessity, this group played a significant role in the rhythms of our household. Later on in my life, memories of this group informed my bedazzled first encounters with writers including Helen Cixous and Laura Mulvey.

The mechanics of taking part in (inherently masculinist) cultural conversation.

The mechanics of taking apart (inherently masculinist) cultural conversation.

Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For famously inaugurated the 3 rules for cinema worth watching

1. Does it have at least two women in it?

2. Who (at some point) talk to each other?

3. About something besides a man?

Think about it. It could apply to literature, TV, radio, our living room. It never goes out of style. There has always been something radical about respectfully listening to women.

Nina Powers cites Kant, from Anthropology, on the dangers of ‘loquacity’ in women: “In lunatic asylums [women’s] lively power of imagination inserts so much into what they are relating that no one grasps what they actually wanted to say.”

Yes, one ponders what situation of intellectual curiosity Kant assigned to that chilly ‘no one’. But it’s the ‘What they actually wanted to say’ that sticks with me. We don’t know what so many women really wanted or want to say. An unbearable loss. Revolutions forfeit. Reforms abandoned. Lives of quiet or loquacious desperation. And no one can grasp them.

If I can assign a coherent reason to the specifically feminist register within which I write poetry at the age of forty-seven, with a full-time job a seven year-old daughter a dependent parent and a life that generally tends to overwhelm, it’s toward what they actually wanted to say, what we actually want to say, what I actually want to say. Which has very little representation.

From another epic another history. From the missing narrative. From the multitude of narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For another telling for other recitations.

-- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

There is unfathomable promise in the unlistened to, in the readership Harryette Mullen strives for, the daughters of illiterate women, in the words of the hysterical and the tongue-tied (both of which I am with frequency).

Last year, Eileen Myles wrote about ‘an exercise’ she has before presenting or writing her work – she tries to imagine herself “deeply loved”. As even radical male artists like Pier Paolo Passolini were loved (and hated):

“How did he do it—make such amazing work and stand up so boldly as a queer and a Marxist in a Catholic country in the face of so much hate. I have one clear answer. He was loved. Pasolini’s mother was wild about him.…A mother loves her son. And so does a country. And that is much to count on. So I try to conjure that for myself particularly when I’m writing or saying something that seems both vulnerable and important so I don’t have to be defending myself so hard. I try and act like its mine. The culture. That I’m its beloved son. It’s not an impossible conceit. But it’s hard. Because a woman, reflexively, often feels unloved.”

Or IS unloved. It is a timeless radical act to perform Eileen Myles’ ‘exercise’ of imagining that this culture is ours –all of ours. This exercise incorporates gender, sexuality, class, race, culture, ability and disability. Speaking/writing/thinking from a platform in which we are all a beloved son, if you will, offers a kaleidoscopicly shattering analytical lens through which to understand what is happening to us and within us.

This lens necessarily opposes war and brutality, seeks to distribute wealth and power through acts large and small and ‘speaks truth to power’ while listening to that truth in all the languages and from all the nooks and crannies and under-sides of rocks from which it comes. This lens then reveals as solipsistic the tokenism decoyism narcissism or full-access consumerism that can be confused with feminist power. The feminisms of Elisabeth Badinter of the ‘burkha ban’ of Sarah Palin of ‘Feminists for Life’ of Carrie Bradshaw of Lady Gaga of Maureen Dowd of Condoleeza Rice.

It seems that my generation has a particular vantage point from which to see that the tides are rising. And while I don’t think that all ships will sink equally hard or equally fast, there are enough of us in it together that the feminism Eileen so beautifully describes offers what I see as a best way to think write and speak ourselves to something better. Sometimes the only way to hear is poetically. Whatever that means.

-Caroline Crumpacker

The Poetry Foundation blogs about Belladonna*

2011-10-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog:

Belladonna* reading sparks discussion, manifesto about poets’ material needs.

Our Material Lives: A Working Poet's Manifesto by Ana Božičević

2011-10-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

On September 13, 2011, the following statement was read as part of Belladonna*s first event of the season: Our Material Lives, Feminism and Poetry at Various Ages. It was prepared by one of the evening's readers, the amazing Ana Božičević.

Two nights ago, after our latest reading with Uljana Wolf and erica kaufman, we (the audience, the readers) sat in the cozy Dixon Place lounge and discussed our multiple economies--how we survive and make art, jobs for poets, academic jobs, teaching avant-garde poetics in our composition classes, resource sharing, how to better communicate our needs to the community. I think of this manifesto as a resource, a way of re-shaping the way we look at "poet jobs," our work and the work we create.

A Working Poet's Manifesto
Ana Božičević

What does a poem do? Let me rephrase that: what does a poet do? I wake up at 8, let the dogs out, read on the train to Manhattan, work 10-6. After work I take classes or teach, read on the train home, have very late dinner with Amy and fall asleep. Just before I drift, lines start going through my head and so I stir and I write them down. This is usually after midnight. I write them down in the dark.

When I tell people that I work full time and attend grad school and teach, they look at me funny. I don’t remember living another way, though, ever since I emigrated to the US. For a while I tried the broke in Brooklyn thing – eating two bagels a day, feeling heroic in a roachy flat – but I got writer’s block from the hunger and the filth. I did not thrive on punishment. I was not Vallejo. Coming from a country where jobs are at a premium, and having no economic or social support system in the US – as much as capitalism made me retch, electing unemployment felt disingenuous. So I worked.

It’s hard to figure out what kind of work is appropriate for a poet. A few months ago a poet I admire wrote on a blog that a poet should not be a bureaucrat and administrator -- a poet should be a poet, live for the art. Blue collar work was not even mentioned. So, let’s see, regular jobs are unpoetic, but then I read elsewhere that teaching is even worse – academic jobs are somehow deemed “not real,” as though academia were a virtual realm like the internet but counted even less. Staying at home in a different arrangement also doesn’t seem to do a poet good – mom poets are not paid for their work of mothering and often can’t go to readings and travel, poets fortunate enough to have a private income can’t mention it lest they be dubbed trust-fund babies, itinerant poets who move from colony to colony can’t keep a boyfriend or girlfriend to save their lives, poets with government grants are sellouts. Most of you in the room have been pegged as one or the other. Prestige & stigma are doled out in a random system of poet-castes that shift & refract differingly depending on the site you’re reading, the people you’re chatting with.

I listen and I am confused. I eat. What should I eat? I sleep – where? Does it have to be uncomfortable? Can I earn my rent or must I only accept donations, like a fortuneteller? I really don’t like being told what to do, especially by people who are not paying me. Why should a poet be a stranger to any human experience? Maybe it’s only my communist upbringing speaking. All I know is that everything is real and every work counts. Writing counts. Bricklaying counts. Pushing paper typing pouring coffee counts. Mothering counts. Everything counts and everything belongs to a poet, belongs in a poem.

What should a poem do? Auden wrote in lovely flowing lines that Poetry makes nothing happen. Maybe it’s just atomic physics, but nothing looks a whole lot like everything to me from here. How does it make you feel if you switch those two and say that Poetry makes everything happen? Now substitute Poetry for Poet: a poet makes everything happen. Now turn around and look at your friends here – isn’t it funny? It’s completely true: Aphra Behn: a spy, Marianne Moore a library assistant, Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman and Amy King teachers, Vanessa Place an attorney, Hanna Andrews an editor, E. Tracy Grinnell and Rachel Levitsky publishers – poets are making everything happen all over the place. And that means that we also change everything.

POETS FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY AND PEACE

2011-09-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

Poets for Renewable Energy and Peace:
This October 23rd afternoon program (1-4pm) will feature poets from the war
region, including emerging Afghan-American writers Cihan Kaan, Sahar
Muradi, Zohra Saed, and Yusuf Misdaq. It will also include additional poets,
musicians, and speakers to be announced, and a special group performance of Allen
Ginsberg’s famous anti-nuclear power poem, “Plutonian Ode.” This event is
being produced by a recently created NYC-based group, Poets for Renewable
Energy and Peace (PREP), which hopes to inspire new and growing activism
against war and nuclear energy.

@Theater 80 St. Marks Place & First Avenue in the East Village/Lower East
Side. The admission is $10 that goes to HOWL's medical fund for artists and
writers. PREP will be selling advance tickets for amounts above the $10, the
difference going to support the group in its beginning stages, All of these
monies are tax deductible. For PREP checks should be made out to the
Committee on Poetry and note PREP: Poets for Renewable Energy.

Make Magazine reviews The Wide Road

2011-09-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

MAKE MAGAZINE'S LEN GUTKIN reviews The Wide Road. (September 2011): The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” Read more...

SPD Bestseller!

2011-08-29T05:56:00.000-07:00

Looking Up Harryette Mullen is named a Small Press Distribution Non-Fiction Bestseller.

(April - June 2011)

Bellephemera* Found Intros

2011-08-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

by Emily Skillings

please welcome her...

Introducing an artist is no easy task. Do you go for the minimalist intro lite, only reading a few terse impressions of their latest work with some carefully placed biographical tidbits, or do you do the personal intro and talk about your amazing time with so-and-so in Cairo or give a portrait of yourself (much younger) reading their work for the first time and having a profound experience (these intros always seem to be more about the introducer than the introduced)?

Perhaps you try the intro-poem, in which you cannibalize one of their own poems to make a kind of nonsensical hybrid intro. I assume that we do all these things because, at the core of the moment when we are asked to present someone to a body of people, there is a definite awkwardness to the introduction. It has to be interesting, but not distracting, respectful but not boring. It has to present the artist's particular genius without being adulatory. It has to make the artist feel good, while, like a mini-review, illuminating some point or connection that the artist herself might not have noticed. I agonize over these little paragraphs, sometimes for weeks, only to realize that I haven't really written anything that makes sense.

Maybe the introduction is a performance of gratitude.

So you bring this little slip of paper and you give your introduction and then you put it down and listen to the brilliant reading. The little half-sheet of paper gets drinks spilled on it (It wasn't even saved in your computer). Your handwritten notes run. The introduction is very often a lost text, a discarded moment of nerves.

I will say this now: introductions are a community document of great importance. They are a textual representation of a complex moment where a person (introducing) interacts simultaneously with the physical presence of the artist about to read, the work of that artist and the momentary micro-community present at the reading. Imagine if, in social situations, we introduced each other with this amount of care and detail :

"This is Krystal Languell. She writes powerful, ass-kicking poems of great intelligence and clarity. She has an orange cat named Buddy. She is really smart and a great friend."

So introductions are important. In fact--send us your introductions! Send them to belladonnaseries@gmail.com with some information about the event (introducer, introduced, venue, date etc.). If selected, they will be posted on this very blog.

...and now some found intros from the Belladonna* archive!

August 2010--BookThug Nation Bookstore: The Summer Reading--Dusie Collectiv and Belladonna*.

By Krystal Languell

Kate Zambreno's novel O Fallen Angel is a triptych built around three characters: Mommy, Maggie and Malachi. It takes cues from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and, according to Adam Novy at Dossier Journal:

"It doesn't give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck."

Interestingly, Kate Zambreno has this to say about O Fallen Angel in her review at We Who Are About To Die. She has just shared an anecdote about people-watching at Radio Shack.

"My novel O Fallen Angel is that woman holding the little hot dog in her hands who you want to vomit all over and punch. Or, my novel O Fallen Angel is the vomiting all over and the punching the woman holding the little hot dog in her hands, the woman who is society and Midwestern suburbia. My novel O Fallen Angel is both of these things. It is the vomiting and the punching."

This book is available for purchase tonight.

Kate Zambreno is an editor at Night Boat Books and writes the blog Frances Farmer is my Sister, which has spawned an essay collection to be published in 2011 by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series. She lives in Akron, Ohio.

Please welcome her.

By Emily Skillings:

I am very honored to introduce our next reader, Eileen Myles. I first met Eileen when she came to talk in my poetry class in college. In college you get all these guest speakers (usually men) who come in and talk to you about their poetry (or whatever they’re doing) and the projects they are working on, followed usually by a lot of advice. Eileen was different. She came into my class and talked about being a poet, and what that meant. This idea of being a poet was new to me, this identity outside of writing the poem itself. It was like a coat you could put on. Then she read some poems and I felt like all the grossness around poetry, all that sticky sludge I had all over me from going to bad readings was washed off with ice water. Even her voice was subversive, the way her poems tumbled out casually like natural speech but were so much more than that.

Aren’t we all excited about Inferno? This poet’s novel about life and art? After we were told about the cheapness of “I” and of self and didn’t really ever buy it it, this book comes to inflate our sense of I, to give it some fresh air. Myles Writes:

Before I could write before I even knew how to spell I went out with my best friend Billy LeBlanc and we created a bunch of letters out of symbols we knew: sun, wave, stick— we made letters. We had so much to say to everyone and we pronounced our ideas carefully with crayons on paper and we folded them up and placed them in one mailbox on a house on our street. We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over…that sun, the first tiny symbol still sits there in my head.

This gorgeous impetus, sending the self into the world with words is what drives this work. The audacious verbalization of self, as Poet, as Lesbian, as Queer, as Female is portrayed as both simple and complex, ordinary and deeply important.

The only additional thing I want to say about Inferno is that it made me thirsty. I had to keep tearing myself away to down huge jars of water. I think that says a lot.

Please welcome Eileen Myles.

By Krystal Languell:

Cara Benson warns against gatherings of groups like this one tonight in her new book, (made). She writes:

Everybody walked in the room I mean everybody in the same room then walking around that room to sniff the walls as a type of appraisal of that room. The room. All the people in the room looked at the other people in the room to be looking at the people in the room and then the walls. Bowties. Nobody had on a bowtie.

We behave strangely in groups, and Benson points this out:

"It was as if every person in that room knew there was this apple and yet none of them would mention it."

She calls us out of our common, unspoken thoughts, our herd mentality and our reluctance to be uncomfortable, and she does so through uniquely designed prose poems. The titles, if they are titles, often appear at the bottom of the page or are otherwise set apart from the text.

(made) is Benson's first full-length poetry collection, and is available for purchase tonight. It's a collection that knows all about your:

"False testimony hand over one eye but peeking at the horrorshow."

Cara Benson is a Dusier, Black Radish, Belladonna* and BookThug. She edits the online magazine Sous Rature and teaches poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility. Please welcome her.

July 26, 2011: HOT TEXTS @ The Way Station

By Emily Skillings

Paul Foster Johnson's first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published by Apostrophe Books, and his second, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, was recently published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in The Awl, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Fence and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006 he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York.

In Johnson's Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, memories and words become boxes, structures, carrels, rooms in which we are kept and released--almost poured. In this superhuman, Arendtian "study," we are hurled through a tour of places (institutional, private, political, places of desire). We throw ourselves against the walls only to realize a secret door was there all along. Johnson writes in "Study in Pavilions": I would rather make my own ether/than have to explain again/that I don't work with images." This comically taut artist's statement is validated by Johnson's attention to trajectory, space, phenomenology and movement--there is nothing static in this book.

Please help me to welcome him.

Bellephemera--Selected author introductions from recent Belladonna* events

2011-08-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

The following introduction was given by Martine Bellen at the Poets House discussion between Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning on April 29, 2011.

This year has been an exciting one for Belladonna*. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Belladonna*, Belladonna* has provided a forum for feminist and avant-garde poetry since 1999 when it was founded by Rachel Levitsky. It began as a reading and salon series that published small chaplets to commemorate each event. Belladonna* has featured over 1750 writers of wildly diverse age, gender orientation, and origin. In 2011, Belladonna* began re-forming as a collective, now comprised of 11 women, including Akilah Oliver. And this year called—A Year in the Commons—Belladonna* published the collaborative book-length poem THE WIDE ROAD by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian and now Belladonna* is here to celebrate the publication of LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS by Barbara Henning, with an introduction by Juliana Spahr.

In Spahr’s introduction, she says that “LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN is one of those books that can only happen in the arena of community-supported critical writing by poets about poetry.” LOOKING UP HARRY MULLEN is unquestionably a community-supported, a community-conceived, book. It’s made up of two sets of interviews, the first conducted in 1996. It began with Barbara Henning writing postcards and Harryette Mullen writing postcards back, and before long postcards overlapped because of USPS time delay, and postcards grew into letters, and the initial interview conceit took on a lively form of its own. The second set of interviews, which focuses specifically on the individual poems that comprise SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, began in 2009 when Henning came up with the idea that directing a light on Mullen’s practice would offer her grad students at LIU a pivotal perspective into the poetry-writing process; in Henning’s words from the book: “The interview would be in the spirit of the Oulipo artists who reveal their experiments and constraints and catalogue them in the library of Paris. No mysteriously inspired writer’s ‘self,’ but instead a writer who is seriously inventive and willing to share her methods and approaches.”

So back to my point (or rather, Juliana’s) about LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN being a community-supported project—Who makes up the community to which I’m referring? The USPS (who helped create aleatory delays), Henning’s students; Henning herself and Mullen, of course; Rachel Levitsky had the idea of making a book with images so in the book there are photos taken by Henning, Mullen’s sister Kirsten’s friend Lauren B. Parker, Cecil Beaton, among others. An Etheridge Knight poem and a William Shakespeare poem are included in the book, so they are part of the composition of the community. HR Hegnauer worked on the complicated interior design of the book and its cover. For me, working on this book with Barbara has been an extraordinarily collaborative experience. And Stephen Motika and Poets House who very generously are hosting this talk and celebration. The community also extends to the Belladonna* Collective and now, you, dear audience, are part of the community. Of course I’m just naming a small part of the community; once a book becomes a book its breadth is incalculable.

Before I turn the discussion over to Henning and Mullen, I’ll provide you with short introductions of their work: Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, and a series of photo-poem pamphlets, including most recently, CITIES & MEMORY (Chax Press), THIRTY MILES FROM ROSEBUD (BlazeVOX), and MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY (United Artists). In the nineties Barbara was the editor of LONG NEWS IN THE SHORT CENTURY.

Henning’s work is grounded in the world around her, the day, and the moment she’s in. Like a magnet that attracts not only metal, but also light, sound, and gesture, the patterns of her written moment slowly reveal a larger world that we inhabit together, one which includes politics, family, and desire. Henning’s poetry and prose, her vision, are so fluid that to identify her as a poet or novelist or storywriter would be off course with her creative endeavors. And in LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN, some of us are fortunate to be introduced for the first time to Henning the teacher, interviewer, and photographer.

Harryette Mullen currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses in American poetry, African-American literature, and creative writing at UCLA, so we in NYC are especially lucky to get her for this weekend. Her poetry collections include SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and RECYCLOPEDIA, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award. In the introduction to RECYLOPEDIA, Mullen says, “If the encyclopedia collects general knowledge, the recyclopedia salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge. That’s what poetry does when it remakes and renews words, images, and ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected.” Mullen’s poetry, often prose poetry, culls from vast storehouses of knowledge, personal and communal, and objects, and other writers’ writings—Sappho and Stein among them—and synthesizes collaged sound and texture into poem which obliterates any sense of interiority and exteriority, a tornado of salvaged knowledge, some allusions missed and some deeply perceived, which finds respiring meaning that recharges the quotidian.

As in:

A humble monumental

Music made of syllables

Or a heartbroken crystal

Cathedral with gleaming walls

Of Orangina bottles

--“Outside Art”

And now, over to Mullen and Henning…

Bomb reviews Looking Up Harryette Mullen

2011-06-19T09:25:00.000-07:00

Bomb Magazine's Patricia Spears Jones reviews Looking Up Harryette Mullen.

(Issue 116, Summer 2011)

Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

2011-06-05T14:26:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, June 15, 2011; 8:00 pm
Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading.

Please join us as we create a space for people to read and perform Akilah Oliver’s work and work inspired by her. The reading will be in the Parish Hall, a room where she read her work, carefully listened to the work of other poets and taught workshops. The event is an opportunity for us to express our deep gratitude and pay homage to her gifts and her greatness. With Rachel Levitsky, Eileen Myles, Patricia Spears Jones, Julie Patton, Tonya Foster, E. Tracy Grinnell, Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein, Steven Taylor, Tyler Burba, Julian T. Brolaski, Rachel Zolf, Joyce LeeAnn Joseph, Laura Meyers, Stacy Szymaszek, Marcia Oliver and a special tribute from a group of some of her former students: Stephen Motika, Lydia Cortes, Jamila Wimberly & Mia Bruner. Presented with the Poetry Project.

Location: Poetry Project: 131 East 10th Street; New York, NY 10003
Admision: FREE

Revisiting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Event

2011-05-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

The Invititation:
On the weekend of what would have been Cha's 60th birthday (a full life cycle event in the Chinese/Korean lunar calendar), Belladonna* and Kundiman gather poets to perform a staged reading from Dictee. Cha's best known written work, Dictee focuses on the lives of several women framed through the art of the Greek muses, yet in the cosmos of Shamanism and Daoism. Their struggle to speak and overcome suffering is enacted through a mixture of media which destabilizes the notion of a progressive and seamless history.

The Players:
Opening - Soomi Kim/Jen Shyu
Clio - Allison Roh Park
Calliope - Zhang Er
Urania - Genevieve White
Melpomene - Cathy Park Hong
Erato - Sarah Gambito/Kelly Tsai
Elitere - Anne Waldman
Thalia - Cara Benson
Trepsichore - Tamiko Beyer
Polymnia - Myung Mi Kim

The introduction:
Somewhere, sometime, something was lost, but no story can be told about it; no memory can retrieve it. —JUDITH BUTLER, “After Loss, What Then?”

In Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War author Grace Cho uses the trope and actual possibility of the ghost as a lens through which to view the repeatedly untold legacy of the Korean War:

If, in the most basic terms, studying ghosts allows us to rethink a society’s relationship to its dead, particularly to those who were subject to some kind of injustice, the ghost and its haunting effects act as a mode of memory and an avenue for ethical engagement with the present. (29)

Referencing sociologist Avery Gordon’s work on haunting and the sociological imagination, Cho speaks of an ethical and political urgency to dealing with the presence of loss by “mourning modernity’s ‘wound in civilization’ and eliminating the destructive forces that open it up over and over again.” If no memory can retrieve what was lost nor one story be told about it in order to mourn it, we must look to more than the singular - to the multiple, fractal, and even ghostly - to enact the attempt to suture trauma. Butler continues: “a fractured horizon looms in which to make one’s way as a spectral agency, one for whom a full ‘recovery’ is impossible.”

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s films, mixed media, performances, and the book to be performed from today, Dictee, can be said, as in her words, to be “in the perpetual motion of search.” They are works of repetition, fragment, dislocation, intertwining personal, female and social historiography, looking forward and toward the past and from it, perpetually.“There is no destination other than towards yet another refuge from yet another war.” The destination is in motion. Towards and yet and yet repeated. The wound perpetually reopened. To recover the body, the work, is not fully possible. What we have and will have will be partial, excerpted, a dream reconstituted as a haunting avenue to engage with the present and presence of all of us here today, who we draw with us to this space, and those whom we will carry with us as we proceed.
--Cara Benson

This event was curated by Belladonna* Collaborative, Kundiman, and Zhang Er at Bowery Poetry Club on March 5, 2011.

The Poetry Project with Harryman & Hejinian

2011-05-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

• THE POETRY PROJECT'S CORINA COPP interviews Carla Harryman & Lynn Hejinian about The Wide Road.

(April / May 2011)

Rachel Levitsky interviewed

2011-04-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

SINA QUEYRAS interviews RACHEL LEVITSKY about Belladonna* for The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog.

Barbara Henning interviewed

2011-04-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

Rafael Otto interviews Barbara Henning for Not Enough Night

SPD Best-Seller!

2011-04-01T15:58:00.000-07:00

The Wide Road is a SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION BEST-SELLER for March 2011

Siliman recommends The Wide Road

2011-03-22T15:57:00.000-07:00

RON SILIMAN recommends The Wide Road.

March 22, 2011

The Wide Road reviewed on The Constant Critic

2011-03-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

KARLA KELSEY for THE CONSTANT CRITIC:

Here subjectivity (echoing Kristeva) is the effect of linguistic process, rather than something that comes into being before or apart from language. The collaborative nature of the book thus provides a completely different conception of the self in the world than that modeled both by the conventional journey narrative wherein man sets out alone—and by the new critical concept of the lyric, wherein the self of the poem speaks fully-formed from offstage. As such, Harryman and Hejinian’s text does not just propose, but, rather, performs relational subjectivity. Here, not only are the authors directly speaking to each other and to us, but what and who they are is created and informed by this process of relationality, thus creating a work that “has multiple centers of gravity.” These centers include investigations into the relationship between sexuality and violence; power and desire; humans and nature; politics of the self and other; friendship; and “compassion and animal exhaustion (death).” Here, life as a journey down a “wide road” does not circumscribe, but radiates out. Read more...

NEW: Looking Up Harryette Mullen

2011-03-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

Looking Up Harryette Mullen is now available to order!

Six years after Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning first met at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, Henning proposed she do a postcard-format interview of Mullen that would allow for a “very small postcard space in which to respond …The idea of cards flying through the mail & overlapping.” Thus began what is now the first segment of Looking Up Harryette Mullen, unique collaborative conversations that offer a candid look at the influences, politics, and poetics that inform Mullen’s poetry, specifically her books Trimmings and Muse & Drudge.

In these small postcard spaces, which soon expanded into lengthy letters, race and gender, Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Houses, Salt-N-Pepa, black English and Spanglish, to name just a few of topics, are discussed as the two poets travel around the country, letters and postcards overlapping, as layered and thrilling as the poems that they unpack.

The conversation expands even further in the second set of spoken interviews that include concerns as far-ranging as the Heaven’s Gate cult, Oulipian constraints such as S+7 and lipograms, syllabic rhymes, and Aimé Césaire. In stunning detail, Mullen and Henning discuss the origins of each poem in Mullen’s award-winning collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. For poets and readers of poetry interested in witnessing how a brilliant, singular writer embarks on the journey of generating work to scholars researching the inception of Mullen’s poems, this book informs by way of techniques and vitality as Mullen guides the reader through her poetry from A-Z. Twenty-five photos interspersed throughout the conversations act as visual annotations. Included are images of the Babydoll House of the Heidelberg Project; the original handmade “Ask Aden” poem that Mullen drew for her nephew; and her “Dim Lady” poem side-by-side with Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady” Sonnet 130. Besides being a significant pedagogical tool to teach Mullen’s poetry, Looking Up Harryette Mullen generously offers a rare glimpse into process and practice and the poetry community.

The Wide Road review...

2011-03-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

ROBIN ELIZABETH SAMPSON for WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE:

Every now and then, a book does more than just let me read it. It gets my attention from afar, beckons, then makes me wait. When it finally is with me, sometimes I just hold it, turning it over and over, thumbing through and just looking at it in wonder. Why measure desire?When I read, I savor, letting the words be not a grocery store check-out-rack candy bar, but a handmade truffle, sweet and bitter and luscious. A sensual and erotic experience. That’s The Wide Road by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinia. Read more...

TARPAULIN SKY reviews The Wide Road

2011-02-27T15:52:00.000-08:00

TARPAULIN SKY

We're pretty sure that no one needs us to say "run out and buy this book." Newsflash: TSky gives thumbs up to the work of Harryman and Hejinian. So what we'd like to say instead is this: The Wide Road could have been printed on a thirty-dollar HP and bound with rubber bands and tape, and the text still would be great, but what makes this particular edition a joy to hold is the design by HR Hegnauer, incorporating cover art by Nancy Blum. With a 7"x8" trim size, 148 pages of creamy, heavyweight paper, generous 1.5" margins, and even pumpkin-colored endpapers!, this is the kind of book that reminds you why all is not lost for the medium. Seeing that it was printed under the guidelines of the Green Press Initiative just makes the feeling that much more snuggly. Kudos to Blum, Hegnauer, and Belladonna for a thoughtful and pleasing design befitting the work of Harryman and Hejinian. Brill, brill, and brill.

2011-02-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

Akilah Oliver

(1961 – 2011)

We have just learned that our beloved friend, poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, Akilah Oliver passed away in her home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, N.Y. Akilah was a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, one of our authors, and a dear dear friend.

Review of Body of Words

2011-02-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

Eva Yaa Asantewaa reviews Belladonna*s Body of Words event.

"Body of Work also put me in touch with the fact of my own hybridity as a writer in the world of dance, a writer whose understanding of the dance before me starts first in the body and the intuition, not the intellect."

Read the full review here.

February 16, 2011

Jaimy Gordon wins the National Book Award!

2010-11-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

Jaimy Gordon, author of Belladonna chaplet #61: A Month of Love, wins the National Book Award for fiction.

THE WIDE ROAD is now available for pre-order

2010-11-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

Long awaited by many since the early 1990’s, The Wide Roadis a master collaboration between two of our most necessary language innovators. Self- described as a “picaresque buddy being,” The Wide Road explores the simultaneity of thinking and communicating in present time. As such it is a mobile text, at once a constant and shifting travelogue, a celebration of the female body, an investigation into the intersections of female friendship, mothering, writing, community-making, activism and thought.

2011 • $16.00 • 148 pages • ISBN: 978-0-9823387-4-2

Now available to pre-order!

Choose between two different covers!

14 Benefit Items Still Available!

2010-11-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

**Belladonna* FALL FUNDRAISER for a Year in The Commons**

During our fundraiser benefit on Tuesday, October 12, 2010, you helped us raise over $3000! Belladonna is grateful for the generous donations from dozens of organizations and individuals. Thank you! This helps us tremendously for our Year in The Commons!
There are still a few more items available from the fundraiser including original works of art and small press subscriptions.

Click here to purchase the items and see more!

PREVIEW THE SILENT AUCTION ITEMS!

2010-10-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, October 12, 2010; 7:30 pm

Belladonna* FALL FUNDRAISER for a Year in The Commons

Click here for a preview of the silent auction items!

Location: Dixon Place: 161 Chrystie Street New York, NY 10002

Belladonna* FALL FUNDRAISER

2010-09-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, October 12, 2010; 6:30 pm

Belladonna* FALL FUNDRAISER
for a Year in The Commons

Join Belladonna* for a benefit performance and reading to support our new year of readings, and our 2011 subscription series!

Location: Dixon Place

161 Chrystie Street New York, NY 10002

For more details on the fundraiser and the levels of support, please click here.

Elders Series #1: SOLD OUT

2010-07-09T10:50:00.000-07:00

The Elders Series: Volume 1, E. Tracy Grinnell & Leslie Scalapino is now sold out.

Volumes 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are still available.

LESLIE SCALAPINO; 1944 – 2010

2010-05-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

“Scalapino makes everything take place in real time, in the light and air and night where all of us live, everything happening at once.” —Philip Whalen

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino’s most recent publications include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It’s go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an instant’ – should not be,’ is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that’s to be ‘social act’ is it is without formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

Her play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed in New York at Poets House on June 19th at 7 pm and June 20th at 2 pm by the performance group The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost. Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud, and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production is co-sponsored by Belladonna* and the Poetry Project.

There will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21st.

A Zen Buddhist funeral ceremony will be conducted by Abbott Norman Fisher in about a month with the arrangements in a subsequent announcement. Tom requests that in lieu of flowers, Leslie's friends consider a charitable donation in her memory to: Poets in Need, PO Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705; Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR 97202-8199; The AYCO Charitable Foundation, PO Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie Scalapino-O Books Fund to support innovative works of poetry, prose and art; or to a charitable organization of their choice. Condolence cards may be sent to Tom & Leslie’s home address, 5744 Presley Way, Oakland, California 94618-1633.

to make my mind be actions outside only. which they are.
that collapses in

grey-red bars. actions are life per se only without it.
(so) events are minute — even (voluptuous)

—Leslie Scalapino

Catherine Daly reviews Bharat jiva for New Pages

2010-05-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

"The book represents a leap in style, control and application of language, and scope of address and content over hir earlier works, disobedience, iduna, and a day in the life of p. For example, whereas obedience continually lists and refines those lists, working from inclusion and exhaustion, Bharat jiva has a huge scope, a generous posing of questions against lists..."

Read the entire review here.

Upcoming Events

2010-04-30T11:32:00.000-07:00

Join us for these FREE upcoming events (more info on our reading series page):

Monday - Tuesday, May 3 - 4, 2010

Annual Chapbook Festival
The Festival celebrates the chapbook as a work of art and as a medium for alternative and emerging writers and publishers. Now in its second year, the festival features a two-day bookfair with chapbook publishers from around the country, workshops, marathon poetry readings, and a closing-night reading of prize-winning Chapbook Fellows.
Location: CUNY Graduate Center: 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
Admission: FREE
To attend workshops, please register for free by e-mailing abozicevic@gc.cuny.edu

Monday, May 3, 2010; 7:00 pm
“Talk Show”
Presented by Ugly Duckling Presse
Hosted by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch with Rachel Levitsky, Dodie Bellamy, Alex Stein, Matthew Rohrer, and Marina Temkina
On the occasion of the release of two new books, Ten Walks/Two Talks and Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists, Ugly Duckling Presse presents “Talk Show” — an evening of interviews, poetry, and unscripted surprises in the format of a late-night talk show. Hosted by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch (Ten Walks/Two Talks). With poets Dodie Bellamy, Rachel Levitsky, Matthew Rohrer, and Marina Temkina. Plus interview-aritst Alex Stein (Made-up Interviews with Imaginary Artists) interviewing Cecilia Vicuña.
Location: The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, NY
Admission: FREE
This is a seated event and admission is limited. Please arrive early.

Friday, May 7, 2010; 7:00 pm
Rachel Levitsky reads from Neighbor (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).
Location: Cafe Istanbul: 4130 Butler Street, Pittsburgh, PA
Admission: FREE

Saturday, May 8, 2010; 7:00 pm
Rachel Levitsky reads with Kate Zambreno and Michael Dumanis
Location: Visible Voice Books: 1023 Kenilworth, Cleveland, OH
Admission: FREE

Durand and Queyras on Eco-Poetics and Eco-Criticism

2010-04-22T15:15:00.001-07:00

Great little interview and poem by two Belladonnas: here

Special Belladonna Issue of Belgian Literary Magazine

2010-04-11T20:50:00.000-07:00

We are the theme of a Dutch Language Belgian Literary Magazine, DWB.

Belladonna Events in April - AWP and a reading

2010-03-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

Thursday - Saturday, April 8-10, 2010
Join Belladonna* at AWP in Denver, CO
Locations: Hyatt Regency Denver & Colorado Convention Center

Belladonna* will be at the conference book fair at TABLE X, a Publishing Commune.
Belladonna* members will also be a part of many panels, readings, book signings, and other events.

AWP events featuring Belladonna* members and authors:

CLMP Panel — Face Out:
Maximizing the Visibility of Emerging Writers
Thursday, April 8; 9:00 am - 10:15 am
Room: 106 - Colorado Convention Center
Panelists: Rachel Levitsky, E. Tracy Grinnell, Matvei Yankelevich, Rebecca Wolff
Description: A discussion about how small presses present and market experimental work by emerging writers—work too often misunderstood as possessing the least market potential.

And the Beat Goes On...
Thursday, April 8; 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm
Room: Agate Room, Hyatt Regency
Participants: Elizabeth Robinson, Reed Bye, Anselm Hollo, Maureen Owen
Description: Since its inception, Naropa University's Writing & Poetics program has been a living model of "outrider" traditions. This roundtable includes poets who have lived through and shaped poetic movements central to the 20th & 21st centuries: from Beat and Black Mountain experiments through New York School and Language poetries, this roundtable offers conversation with Naropa poets who have been at the center of American poetic history.

Orbiting Salt
Thursday, April 8; 4:30 pm - 5:45 pm
Room: 111 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Sawako Nakayasu, Dawn Lonsinger, Cris Mazza, Alan Michael Parker, Blake Butler Description: This reading features writers recently published in Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Barrelhouse, and Versal. Spanning the traditional and the experimental, the regional and the global, it celebrates the diverse and powerful work of four journals with editors currently studying creative writing at the University of Utah.

Latin American Poets in the USA
Friday, April 9; 1:30 pm - 2:45 pm
Room: 201 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Lila Zemborain, Mariela Dreyfus, Eduardo Chirinos, Víctor Rodríguez-Núñez, Carmen Valle, Eduardo Espina
Description: This bilingual poetry reading (Spanish and English) aims to present six outstanding Latin American poets in mid-career. It is a very representative selection, with authors coming from strong poetic traditions all over the continent, namely Argentina, Cuba, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay. All these authors are long-time residents in the U.S and their poetry collections have been either partially—or fully—translated into English.

Reading by Anne Waldman & Gary Snyder
Friday, April 9; 8:30 pm - 10:00 pm
Room: Four Seasons Ballroom,
Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Anne Waldman, Gary Snyder

Siren Songs From Across the Seas:
Women Poets in Translation
Saturday, April 10, 9:00 am - 10:15 am
Room: 107 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Sawako Nakayasu, Henry Israeli, Forrest Gander, Susanna Nied, Kristin Dykstra Description: Extraordinary women poets from around the world have recently been given voice by a number of American poets and translators. This panel will feature readings of the work of Luljeta Lleshanau (Albania), Coral Bracho (Mexico), Inger Christensen (Denmark), Ayane Kawata (Japan), and Reina María Rodríguez (Cuba), followed by a discussion about capturing the poets' distinct voices in American-English.

CHAX Press Reading
Saturday, April 10, 1:30 am - 2:45 am
Room: 201 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Leslie Scalapino, Jane Sprague, Charles Alexander, Hank Lazer, Kyle Schlesinger, Elizabeth Treadwell

Can Poetry Save the Earth?
Saturday, April 10, 4:30 pm - 5:45 pm
Room: 201 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Brenda Iijima, Leonard Schwartz, Sandra Alcosser, John Felstiner, Jonathan Skinner Description: This panel will investigate the relationship between poetry and ecology, ranging from historical imperatives to contemporary ecopoetics. These panelists—representing activist poets working in zoos and parks, scholars illuminating the vital role of Western nature poetry, and writers redefining our relationship to language and ecology—are at the leading edge of the conversation where poetic language meets environmental education and global sustainability.

The Future of Feminist Publishing
Saturday, April 10, 4:30 pm - 5:45 pm
Room: 303 - Colorado Convention Center
Participants: Rachel Levitsky, Amy Scholder, Brooke Warner, Kate Khatib, Jocelyn Burrell Description: This panel brings together five feminist publishing professionals to discuss these issues: how is the scope of feminist publishing changing with the times? What is a feminist book? Do readers respond differently to self-defined feminist books? Why should authors seek out feminist presses to publish their work?

*****************************

Closing Event!

Belladonna's Year of New Releases

Come join us for a reading and celebration of four great poets and their new work! We will be toasting:

Brenda Iijima (revv. you’ll—ution, Displaced Press; If Not Metamorphic, Ahsahta Press; eco language reader, Nightboat Books)

Dorothea Lasky (Black Life, Wave Books)

Eleni Stecopoulos (Armies of Compassion, Palm Press)

and David Wolach, (Occultations, Black Radish Books)

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 @ 7:30 pm

Dixon Place
161 Christie Street; New York
$6.00

Bharat jiva is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award

2010-03-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

kari edwards' Bharat jiva is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Winners will be announced May 27, 2010.

Interview with Sawako Nakayasu

2010-03-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Sawako Nakayasu is interviewed by David F. Hoenigman on Word Riot.

ON: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE NO. 2

2010-02-28T13:34:00.000-08:00

ON: CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE NO. 2 features Rosa Alcalá, Cara Benson, Mónica de la Torre, Erica Hunt, Jennifer Scappettone, and more Belladonnas.

"what is a body that can be a body not constantly exposed": A Celebration of the work and life of kari edwards

2010-02-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

Robin Tremblay-McGaw blogged about Bharat jiva and NO GENDER on X Poetics

Confinement as Commons

2010-02-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

Rachel Levitsky is a guest blogger for the Poetry Project during February

Notes on Thoughts on Confinement #3

2010-02-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

Rachel Levitsky is a guest blogger for the Poetry Project during February.

Thoughts on Confinement 2: “Hey”

2010-02-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

Rachel Levitsky is a guest blogger for the Poetry Project during February.

The Figure Wanders on Along

2010-02-04T13:03:00.000-08:00

Rachel Levitsky is a guest blogger for the Poetry Project during February.

Winter Sale Special

2010-02-04T10:55:00.001-08:00

Through February 7th!

Buy 4 chaplets, get 1 free! (Plus free shipping)

Buy NO GENDER and Bharat jiva and get free shipping!

Order on our site belladonnaseries.org

Dixon Place Reading Tuesday February 9th!

2010-02-04T10:52:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, February 9, 2010; 7:30 pm
Three First Books In English!

Sarah Dowling (Security Posture)
Michelle Taransky (Barn Burned, Then)
Marina Temkina (What Do You Want?)
Dixon Place
161 Christie Street; New York City
$6.00

Complete subscriptions to the Elder Series are sold out!

2010-02-01T13:00:00.000-08:00

You can still buy individual books from the series through our books page.

The Elders Series is named one of The Best Poetry Picks of 2009

2010-01-05T12:57:00.000-08:00

The Elders Series is named on of The Best Poetry Picks of 2009
Selected by Bob Holman for About.com

"Emma’s unstoppable spirit is the nerve that drives [The Elders Series #4], that and her brilliant writing, her mind. To engage with this book is to engage the unknowable, yet to know a little tenderness of this artist in the making."

—Bob Holman and Margery Snyder for About.com

Dana Ward's review

2009-12-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

Dana Ward reviews Kevin Killian's WOW WOW WOW WOW, chaplet #117 on Galatea Resurrects #13.

Mortified before kari's Bharat jiva

2009-11-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

CAConrad reflects on kari edward's Bharat jiva on PhillySound.

READING ZEMBORAIN AND ALCALÁ

2009-11-15T15:33:00.000-08:00

On Mauve Sea-Orchids & Some Maritime Disasters this Century
by Bonnie Jean Michalski

"Written entirely in the present tense, mauve sea-orchids narrates constant activity of minutia; reading this book feels like watching a nature documentary that takes place inside an organic body and slowed down just a second or two so that the movements of its simulated natural world become trance-like. . . ."

Read the entire review on the University of Arizona Poetry Center's website.

Bharat jiva is named a Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller

2009-10-15T12:53:00.000-07:00

Bharat jiva is named a Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller

Review of the book launch for kari edwards' Bharat jiva & NO GENDER

2009-10-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

Tim Peterson blogs on Mappemunde

Multilingual Poetics, Feminist Implications

2009-10-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

Sarah Dowling on the ADFEMPO Blog

ADFEMPO Report

2009-10-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

Tonya Foster on The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog

How ADFEMPO was conceptualized

2009-10-02T12:50:00.000-07:00

Rachel Levitsky on the ADFEMPO Blog

ADFEMPO. Constellations.

2009-09-30T12:48:00.001-07:00

Michelle Naka Pierce blogs on no use in a centre.

ADFEMPO Report, Part 3

2009-09-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Nada Gordon blogs on Ululations

ADFEMPO Report, Part 2

2009-09-27T12:47:00.000-07:00

Nada Gordon blogs on Ululations

ADFEMPO Report, Part 1

2009-09-26T12:45:00.000-07:00

Nada Gordon blogs on Ululations

Good Grief

2009-08-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

Susie DeFord interviews Akilah Oliver on Bomblog here.

Becca Klaver on what it's like to live now/Belladonna Elders Series #4

2009-07-09T11:26:00.000-07:00

Becca highlights the contemporary need for the book: here.

Laura Hinton Reviews Elders #7 + Series

2009-06-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

"They didn't wait for permission" is here.

NEW: RAIN TAXI REVIEW

2009-05-05T12:26:00.000-07:00

Ellen Kennedy Michel has written a review of Belladonna Elders Series #4: Tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein. You can read it here.

ANNUAL SPRING BOOK PARTY NEW YORK CITY

2009-05-01T20:24:00.000-07:00

Please join Roof, Belladonna Books, Ugly Duckling and other of your favorite presses:

Thursday, May 7, 6:00-8:00 pm
ANNUAL SPRING BOOK PARTY
featuring Belladonna, BootStrap, The Figures, Granary Books, Roof, Talisman, Ugly Duckling Presse, United Artists, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs
@ Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street, NYC
free

Review of Chapbook Series

2009-04-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

by Noah Eli Gordon on Jacket.

Ron Silliman on Elders Series #4

2009-04-23T20:38:00.000-07:00

here.

Author Interview: Rachel Zolf

2009-04-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

... discusses performance style, ethics and her recent work with Joel Bettridge on Jacket Magazine.

Vanitas Magazine reviews the Belladonna* tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein

2009-04-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

Vanitas Magazine and Vincent Katz posted a writeup of the tribute to Emma Bee Bernstein and book release for The Belladonna Elders Series #4; March 2, 2009.

An excerpt from the review:
"This is a remarkable book by and about a remarkable young woman, who left us way too soon. The book has a striking cover by Susan, preface by Johanna Drucker, intro by Emma, interview w/ Susan by Emma & Nona Willis Aronowitz, a memoir about Emma by Susan, interview w/ Marjorie Perloff by Emma and Nona, postscript by Marjorie, text on Emma's poetry by Nona, an editor's note, several collages by Susan, and photos by and of Emma."

mauve sea-orchids review in Jacket Magazine

2009-03-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

Marie Larson reviews Lila Zemborain's mauve sea-orchids for Jacket Magazine #37.

Read the entire review here.

"In Lila Zemborain’s mauve sea-orchids we are presented with a field of blurred bodies, pearlescent with longing and without barrier. There is no immutable inside or outside here except in the most exorbitant sense — everything is inside, and everything is outside. Or, more precisely perhaps, these bodies are not quite borderless but sensually dissected into permeable components that, propelled by love or desire, gingerly grope for each other in their ocean of blindness and vertigo. . . ."

Read the entire review here.

mauve sea-orchids review on galatea resurrects #9

2008-03-31T16:02:00.000-07:00

"mauve sea-orchids is one of the most gorgeous, stunning and impressive feats of a poetry collection I've read in a long while. . . ."

—Eileen Tabios for galatea resurrects #9

Read the full review here.

Leonard Schwartz interviews Lila Zemborain

2008-03-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Listen to Leonard Schwartz's interview with Lila Zemborain on his radio show, Cross Cultural Poetics.

mauve sea-orchids review on The Blind Chatelaine's Keys

2008-02-28T15:56:00.000-08:00

You can open [mauve sea-orchids] at random and every single page contains sinuous, luminous passages, which also often contain deeper meanings. . . Moi poetics: no need to deny the serpents the luminous flowers, for those blooms' fragrances are ferocious...!

—Eileen Tabios for The Blind Chatelaine's Keys

Read the full review here.