May's featured poets are Veronica Corpuz and Michelle Naka Pierce who recently released an impressive poetry collaboration entitled TRI / VIA (Erudite Fangs & PUB LUSH, 2003). Their poems are contextualized (in the publishers' press release) as an “epistolary collection” exploring “a variety of questions from sexuality and gender to authorship and textual interchange, all the while challenging traditional forms and definitions of poetry.” It is a highly effective production, facilitated by a beautiful book design and attractive cover imagery by Barbieo Barros Gizzi. The epistolary context does add a welcome layer -- and partly welcome because it is such a loving layer -- to these poems. One lingers to wonder about what lies hidden in between the text about the courtship narrative, in addition to what lies within the spaces of words making up individual poems. Nonetheless, a mark of this project's effectiveness is how each individual poem resonates on its own, such as this prose poem:

Dear,

There are dildos and there are dildos of ruined whores in quasi-anaesthetized states. 3:06 a.m. The bed stretches to reach its walls -- once a small railroad apartment the size of your narrowing ankles, now swollen with largess. A digital video camera illuminates the ceiling, renders the symbolic act of desire, merely the virtual simulacrum, as sexual crime. There's a certain craftiness to strangling a lover with red silk. The principal suspect is an armless figure. In sum, to indict the suspect, one must still point the smoking gun. To think in relation to the phone call, where shadowed floor and ceiling become none. Zero, zero. Love, forty. In the beginning it was kind of them to throw the victim into the air -- light as dust particles yet enigmatic as a set of complex numbers, except no one solves this felony but you.

Poems like “Dear,” exemplify the deftness, subtle music and multilayered narratives that become distilled into moments of singular charm. It's no wonder that several respected poets have praised this collaboration, as follows:

This book is a delight. That poetry can blast binaries to smithereens and follow the road of three (or more) is demonstrated with intelligence, wit and humor. The intellectual erotics of this epistolary conversation are magnified by an eros of metamorphic, hi-lo linguistic and gender-genre play. TRI / VIA is a collaborative act of love with its light and dark forces registered through a languagescape of ancient to contemporary lit, philosophy, science, mathematics, even the ubiquitous culture of the questionnaire. It continually surprises!
— Joan Retallack

TRI / VIA is everything it says on the last page—a pyrotechnic set of meditations and variations on the epistolary, along with terrific send-ups of postmodern theoretical jargon and hegemonic style manuals and questionnaires. Michelle Naka Pierce and Veronica Corpuz know that “Every sentence begins with a new world,” and it is a very exciting place.
—Anselm Hollo

Michelle Naka Pierce and Veronica Corpuz realize that one of the things humans do when they talk with each other is pun and play and so TRI / VIA is full of loving exchanges that are both excellent and fun.
—Juliana Spahr

In TRI / VIA, Michelle Naka Pierce and Veronica Corpuz have created a courtship in the form of a book-length poem. TRI / VIA has three seers: the authors, the viewers and the words—a tri-lateral voice that begs for challenge. Skirting improvisation's surface and information's dig into your brainhole, Pierce and Corpuz ask you to bare your wit by offering con/verse/sens/ations alive with phrase, in a poetry that startles convention and breathes glitter intimacy.
—Edwin Torres

Veronica “Ronnie” Corpuz has seen her work appear in such journals as Chain, Shiny, Aufgabe and the anthology Cities of Chance: Experimental Poetry from Brazil and the United States (Rattapallax Press, 2003). Ronnie has taught and guest lectured at Kelly Writers House of University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Naropa University. Michelle Naka Pierce is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the writing center at Naropa University. More information about the book is available at http://www.publush.com/

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VAN GOGH'S EAR IN SAN FRANCISCO

The French Connection Press, VGE (Paris, France) invites you to a reading that will launch VAN GOGH'S EAR-- Issue 2 . Listen up to new work by six talents in today's international poetry scene: Bill Berkson, Mary Burger, Albert Flynn DeSilver, kari edwards, Paul Hoover, and Eileen Tabios.

7 p.m., Thursday, May 15
City Lights Bookstore
San Francisco, Ca

READERS' BIOS:
BILL BERKSON's recent books of poetry are Fugue State and Serenade . A collection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings 1985-2002 , is forthcoming from Qua Books in fall 2003.

MARY BURGER was born on 5 March 1963 in Canton, OH. She holds a BA in English Literature from Oberlin College, an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and an MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Naropa Institute. Her books include Thin Straw That I Suck Life Through (Melodeon, 2000), Eating Belief (Belladonna Books, 2000), Nature's Maw Gives and Gives (Duration Press, 1999) and Bleeding Optimist (Xurban, 1995). Burger edits Second Story Books, featuring experimental narrative works, and Narrativity , an online journal of theory-based narrative. A narrative prose work, Sonny , is forthcoming from Leon Books (Renee Gladman, editor). She lives in Oakland, CA.

ALBERT FLYNN DESILVER has published poems in numerous literary journals, including New American Writing, Zyzzyva, Hanging Loose, Conduit, Volt, Slope, Fishdrum, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Web Del Sol, Exquisite Corpse, LUNGFULL!, The Hat, Bombay Gin, Poetry Kanto (Japan), among others. He is also editor/publisher of The Owl Press, publishing innovative poetry and poetic collaborations. He is the author of 10 books and chapbooks including Letters to Early Street, Walking Tooth & Cloud , and Some Nature .

kari edwards (who does not capitalize her first or last names) is a poet, artist, and gender activist. She is winner of New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in Literature (2002) and author of several books and collections of poetry, including A Day in the Life of P. (Subpress Collective, 2002) and Electric Spandex: Anthology of Writing the Queer Text (Pyriform Press, 2002). She is the poetry editor for I.F.G.E's Transgender - Tapestry . Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. at such venues as the Denver Art Museum, the New Orleans Contemporary Art Museum, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. edwards' work can also be found in many journals and anthologies, including Blood and Tears: An Anthology on Matthew Shepard (Painted Leaf Press, 2000), Aufgabe, Narrativity, and The International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies .

PAUL HOOVER is author of nine poetry collections including Rehearsal in Black (Salt Publications, 2001) and Winter (Mirror), to be published by Flood Editions in the spring of 2002. He is editor of the literary magazine New American Writing and the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton).

EILEEN TABIOS [snip canned bio....If you're reading this, you probably know who she is! If you don't, go to the “About” section of this site.]

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PATRICK ROSAL RELEASES FIRST BOOK

Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive: Poems

Thomas Lux: “[An] astonishing first collection by a young poet of immense gifts.“

Junot Díaz: “[A] book from whose pages you'll emerge shaken, heartbroken, annealed, made new.”

Book Description:
A debut collection from a vibrant, streetwise voice. Patrick Rosal's poetry rings with the music of no-frills industrial towns of central New Jersey. Portraits of hip-hoppers and condemned men (whose misdeeds as boys forever shaped their futures) alternate with dynamic riffs on longing—sexual and filial—and on the poet's Filipino roots. Unpredictable and breathtaking as a sax solo, these poems are the indelible marks made by a world that has been simultaneously kept close and left behind.

About the Author:
Patrick Rosal has published poems in Footwork, The NuyorAsian Anthology, The Beacon Best of 2001: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures , and elsewhere. He teaches literature and writing at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.

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TWO FICTIONISTS GARNER AWARDS

Brian Ascalon Roley
Congratulations to Brian Ascalon Roley whose novel American Son has won the Association for Asian American Studies 2003 Prose Award! You can scroll through the Archives to see more information about Brian and his book.

Sabina Murray
Congratulations as well to Sabina Murray whose short story collection The Caprices (Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Company) has been selected as the winner of the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

The judges--Gail Godwin, Valerie Martin, and Alexs Pate--considered 357 novels and short story collections published in the U.S. during the 2002 calendar year from over 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. The PEN/Faulkner Award is America's largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States. As winner, Murray receives $15,000. Each of the four finalists-Peter Cameron for The City of Your Final Destination (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); William Kennedy for Roscoe (Viking); Victor LaValle for The Ecstatic (Crown Publishers, Random House); and Gilbert Sorrentino for Little Casino (Coffee House Press)-receives $5,000. All five authors will be honored during the 23rd annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library, located at 201 East Capitol Street, S.E., on Saturday, May 17, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $100, and can be purchased by phoning the Folger Box Office at (202) 544-7077.

About the Winner: The Caprices is a collection of stories set against the backdrop of the Pacific Campaign of World War II. Sabina Murray recalls her family stories of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and writes a history told through individual lives in stories that follow the reach of the United States into the heart of Asia and the pieces of war brought back through memory. Murray, who has worked as a screenwriter for Wayne Wang and others, is the author of the novel Slow Burn , and is currently the writer in residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts.