August's featured poet is Luis Cabalquinto whose latest manuscript, MOON OVER MAGARAO: New and Selected Poems , has just been accepted by the University of Philippines Press. Congratulations, Luis! Publication release is scheduled for later this year. Here are two sample poems from Luis's forthcoming book:

HUM

With all the lights out, the house
takes on the color of buffalo fur.
It's almost totally quiet, the others
gone out to a party or some other
unreported nightly business.
Shut your eyes tightly: listen to the low
whirr of the midnight city outside --
a hum that seems to issue from
beyond the reach of the farthest discovered
planet, like a coded message from the outermost edge.
You feel weightless in the wooly dimness,
buoyed in space by the keen clarity of your thoughts.
It's like being on a huge stage for an opening season --
this self-knowing intoxication that, in its excess,
admits to dark undertones -- from being humanly born,
from having too often badly lived.
But taut moments like these grow impatient
with negations and encourage the mind to indulge
in the night's exuberant languages.
And as you choose, the body inebriates
itself into the most intense dialect.
The mind and the body couples, the self aligns
with the hum of the room that enlarges into
the larger rooms of the galaxies: like the
orchid bud at your window, swollen and opening.
In the whirring dark, the self's full flowering
is once more providentially approached.

+++++

DREAMWANDERER

Just now the thought slipped in
Of that night in late summer
When we decided to camp on a mountainside
And lie so close to the waterfall
We could smell the musky dampness.

We cast off our dlothes and made love
With the sure and stunning working
of your mouth
on my risen
body.

It would be senseless not to say
That the evening's star-struck sky fell
And the peak's solemn sod moved
Because they did, as in a dream.

I recall that later I calmly picked up
What I thought were my mind's teeth
That had scatterred on the thick mats
of sleeping moss,
appraising them
with newer questions.

Even now, remembering, these other trees
Begin to shudder to their roots
like mountain teeth

And under the skin a portentous rising,
Once again the dropping of a night's waterfall.

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EVERYONE IS INVITED TO A CELEBRATION & READING FOR MERITAGE PRESS!

With the kind sponsorship of ACA Galleries in New York City, the arts organization Boog City has inaugurated a new reading series revolving around non-New York small presses. The series -- named "d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press in america" -- kicks off Sept. 11, 2003 with none other than Meritage Press! And Publisher and Editor Eileen Tabios shall focus the event on Filipino poetry! Here are details:

Thursday, September 11, 6-8 p.m., free admission

ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Floor
(between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City

Directions: C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.

Eileen plans to feature New York-based poets from the forthcoming PINOYPOETICS anthology edited by Nick Carbo, including but not limited to Eric Gamalinda, Paolo Javier, Joseph Legazpi. Also present will be Luis Francia, author of Meritage Press' e-chapbook a selection from A Museum of Absences . At the time of writing this, we haven't finalized the line-up, but it's bound to be a Filipino literary night so do come!! Wine and cheese and fruits for mingling afterwards. And interspersed throughout the reading shall be hauntingly lyrical music provided by Simone White!! (You can see more information and hear a sample of Simone White's music at http://www.urbanetc.com/art/white/white_s_1.html .)

This is a hip reading series curated by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum: hip, as noted by its first season's write-up below! Please come and help support Meritage Press which supports Filipino Literature!

d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press in america:
Sept. 11 Meritage Press (San Francisco/St. Helena, Calif.)
Oct. 2 The Owl Press (Woodacre, Calif.)
Nov. 6 Avec Books (Penngrove, Calif.)
Dec. 4 CyPress (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Jan. 8 above/ground press (Ottawa, Canada)
Feb. 5 Chax Press (Tucson, Arizona)
March 4 Pavement Saw Press (Columbus, Ohio)
April 1 Bird Dog magazine (Seattle, Wash.)
May 6 Oasis Press (Brunswick, Maine)
June 3 Combo (Providence, Rhode Island)
[July 1 a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada press]

For further information contact David Kirschenbaum at 212-842-BOOG (2664) or editor@boogcity.com.

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BOOG CITY HIGHLIGHTS MERITAGE PRESS

BOOG CITY is a politics and arts paper put out by the New York City-based small press of the same name, now in its 12th year (information is available in NBC's coverage of its 12th year anniversary at http://www.wnbc.com/entertainment/2373645/detail.html . In its September issue, poet Jane Sprague has written an article about Meritage Press. Here are excerpts from the forthcoming edition next month:

"Poet Eileen Tabios began publishing Meritage Press in 2001 with the intention of publishing printed matter including books, chapbooks, artist's books and broadsides while creating a performance art space to enact aesthetic explorations toward political and cultural goals. Tabios has said, "I like to mix up books with more intimate projects...I think it's because poetry, ultimately, is an intimate form." Her vision is to have as much of a multidisciplinary approach as possible....

"As a one-person publishing endeavor (and the assistance of a poet-intern) Tabios spends a year working on the production of each book. The latest Meritage book, OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 , by Barry Schwabsky exemplifies Tabios' intent for the press, which is "to publish those who otherwise may not ever be published, a difficulty beyond the general poetry threshold difficulty.

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SUPPORT FILIPINO PUBLISHERS BY BUYING WHAT THEY PUBLISH

If you wish to support Meritage Press, a good way is to buy their publications. What about taking advantage of a "SPECIAL PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT" described at the end of this offer below, and also experience the kind of groundbreaking and breathtaking poetry that Meritage Press helps disseminate? It's not Filipino literature, but this is a poetry book for poetry lovers and those who wish to read something beyond the norm:

ANNOUNCEMENT FROM MERITAGE PRESS:

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002
By Barry Schwabsky
Contact: Eileen Tabios at MeritagePress@aol.com

Meritage Press is pleased to announce the publication of OPERA , the first book-length collection of poems by Barry Schwabsky. Written over a 21-year-period, OPERA presents a compelling, often ecstatic, poetic body of work by a writer who has been more visible over the past two decades as a respected art critic. Mr. Schwabsky was first published as a college undergraduate in POETRY magazine; subsequently, he published his work in various journals as well as in two chapbooks, the last being Fate/Seen In The Dark in 1985 through the respected poetry publisher, Burning Deck. Over the last decade, however, he has circulated his poems informally or published them only as limited-edition poet-artist collaborations. OPERA now allows Mr. Schwabsky's poetry to be accessible to the larger public.

Reflecting his primarily private poetic development, Mr. Schwabsky has created a poetry that transcends the schools and categories that sprung up within the poetry world of recent decades -- also observed by various poet-critics offering advance words on OPERA . David Shapiro says Mr. Schwabsky's poems are "born of a strange encounter between American poetry and European masters such as Celan and Novalis [that] always surprises me by its exploratory investigations." John Yau says, "Imagine poems written by Sir Walter Raleigh after he has read Wittgenstein and Lorine Neidecker, listened to bands whose names weren't in the air … and learned more about contemporary art than anyone thought possible, and you might get a sense of the compactness of these poems, an airy abstract density unlike anyone else's." Geoffrey O'Brien, meanwhile, says, "These might be choruses and arias from some lost Venetian music drama of the early 1600s … transmuted over the intervening centuries of silence into a software program for a new species of lyrical electronica."

Mr. Schwabsky is a well-known art critic for such publications as Artforum (where he is co-editor of international reviews), Art in America, Tema Celeste , and the London Review of Books and the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press) as well as co-author of Jessica Stockholder (Phaidon Press), Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation (Merrell Publishers), and Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press), among others. He also works as a curator and teacher, having taught at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, New York University, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, he currently resides in London. Inevitably, Mr. Schwabsky's activities as an art critic has affected his poems as reflected in an elegant exactitude to his form: in his poems, each word earns its presence.

ORDERING INFORMATION:
OPERA's ISBN No. is 0970917929
Price: $14.00

Barry Schwabsky's OPERA will be available this Fall through Amazon.com; Meritage Press' web site (www.MeritagePress.com); and through Small Press Distribution (www.spdbooks.org). All three sites process internet sales; you also may request your favorite bookstore to order the book from SPD.

Publisher's Special Offer Until October 15, 2003:
Book orders placed directly with the publisher to U.S. locations will carry a 25% discount off of the retail price, and cancellation of the normally $3 shipping & handling charge. Orders to non-U.S. locations will receive the same discount, but the relevant international shipping charges will be passed through to customers.

Contact us first by e-mail for non-U.S. orders. For those placing U.S. orders, you may make checks out to Meritage Press ($11.20 per book) and send to

Eileen Tabios
Publisher
Meritage Press
2275 Broadway, Suite 312
San Francisco, CA 94115