reniform

free-arm comfort of raptor shadows
splashing skin with
dusk among the dwarf pines
shaped by wind eyes
carved on the antlertipped
spear haft
remember the damselfly
sifting through mulberry fumes
the sacked
and burned
half-ring
of bones

*

crosshatch

a limping auroch rooting in bracken
a stream-infested summer
humming among lice

cold-toe scents of dead ash
talk back
to the mouth of
the dolmen the glow worm
attempts
another
approach

*

aviform

shadows walking hold the
troubled hum
of night boulders pouring in
without the gift of drain
shadows entwine leave with arrive

snow vanishing in surf once
had a name
cloudmurk gums the ears
as rain pulls worms into day nothing
heartens like the scar sulphured or
the family reek of piss

*

circle

hear again which lairmauling by
which eye-scrabbing badger
again the kestrel-ground sands
that ambush the old
again which scorpioncloud pregnancy
after fingering hoof prints
for slow breathing
warning again before smoke replaces
hands and … Read More »

Michael Romano and Kenneth Goldsmith

I.

I have a bunch of questions but they’re still pretty disorganized in my mind.

So let’s just shoot. It’ll all fall together on the editing board.

II.

I asked you something a few years ago, about whether you consider Ubuweb a work of art, and you said something interesting, but, you know, I lost the tape, and then I saw this book here, the Letter to Bettina Funcke.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Where you start off by answering that same question, and you say it is, that perhaps it’s the most significant work you’ll ever create, but then you veer off, plagiarize yourself and others, and it gets kind of crazy, and you don’t give anything like a conclusive answer. So I want to ask it again.

Well, I think Documenta didn’t really understand poetry, … Read More »

James Warner

The first account our agency landed was a fortified wine called Clouf. Roland slammed a bottle on my desk and told me to think something up before he got back from lunch. Knowing nothing about vermouth, I started to bang out a jingle on our office piano, under the impression the product was a cleaning detergent.

When Roland returned, he poured some into a six-ounce glass. “A beautiful nose,” he said, “subtly andrognynous with intimations of hyssop.”

I tried some. Clouf pretty much tasted like cleaning detergent to me. It was wine steeped with gentian root, myrrh, bitter orange peel, hops, and various secret ingredients, then fortified with brandy. It contained more glacier wormwood—Artemisia glacialis—than other vermouths, perhaps not much of a selling point.

Like field operatives, Roland and I visited the seediest Soho pubs we could find, … Read More »

Paul Scheerbart
translated by Joel Morris

The tall trees groped more and more intensely in the air with their long branch arms and could not calm themselves down; they wanted to know for certain what they once were, back when they did not yet have branches.

The asteroid Juno was a thick round disc. It resembled an earthly pancake. The diameter of this pancake measured no more than 200 kilometers; it was at most five kilometers thick, but it was only that thick in the middle—towards the edges it became thinner and thinner.

The only inhabitants of Juno were immensely tall tree creatures, whose roots entwined together in the middle of the planet. The trees reached extremely high up into the ether—in the middle nearly a hundred kilometers high—just as much on one side of … Read More »

By Marfa Nekrasova
translated by Nathan Jeffers

The word Hyperion has many possible meanings; it can refer to a book, a poem, a tree, a spaceship, one of the 12 Titans, or even one of Saturn’s moons. However, ask a Muscovite about Hyperion and the reply you will most likely hear will lead you to a bookstore. What you will find is not so much a small back-alley bookshop, stuffed from floor to ceiling with dusty books, but rather a straight up book megastore.

The fact that this bookstore is located in a former house of Culture (a Soviet institution used to host performances and other large gatherings) means it is doomed to have an enduring ‘underground’ vibe. The space of the house of Culture has been used over the past three years in an … Read More »

This first quarterly issue of the Buenos Aires Review boasts new literary works from a variety of tongues—French, Galician, German, Portuguese, Russian, and a touch of Hungarian accompany the Spanish and English of always—and locales ranging from Rio de Janeiro, México, London, Paris, A Coruña, and São Paulo, to Moscow, Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Mar del Plata and New York.

Fiction. We unravel the mystery of Bola Negra, the shapeshifting piece by Mario Bellatin that led to a film and an opera, tap the spirit(s) of Mad Men with James Warner, and winter with Rosario Bléfari on the Argentine coast, while Juan Álvarez gets tangled up with hitmen and supermodels in Colombia and Sacha Sperling—France’s latest enfant terrible—takes on literary glam & doom.

Poetry. We cut a path through Yolanda Castaño’s sensual urban pastorals and Vincent Toro’s lyric maps to … Read More »

Julián Fuks

Chamemos de mal-estar nas livrarias. Sei que não sou o primeiro a sofrer desse infortúnio, sei que não serei a última de suas vítimas. Em algum inventário de novas patologias há de estar descrito esse desconforto específico, a um só tempo intenso e sutil, que pode acometer o sujeito que vagueia entre longas estantes de volumes lustrosos e apelativos. Uma náusea, talvez, uma ânsia cuja causa é difícil de distinguir: algo na ordem excessiva dos livros, em sua prontidão obediente, algo em sua evidente hierarquia. Quanto maior a loja, quanto mais transparentes suas vitrines, mais forte o sentimento – mas nas pequenas livrarias de rodoviárias e aeroportos o mal pode alcançar dimensões imprevistas.

Estou certo de que o fenômeno se alastra por uma centena de países, mas também de que ele encontra em São Paulo uma de suas … Read More »

Ben Merriman

Costa Rica’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) is located in a disused liquor distillery in the capital city of San José. The building still looks like a factory—unlike, say, the case of the Tate Modern, little has been done to convert the building from its original purpose. The museum is not air conditioned, and like the rest of San José it is warm and humid in all seasons. Wasps buzz in the rafters and tar sweats from the beams. On my visit, I walked in past an unstaffed front desk and looked at art unmonitored by guards or proximity sensors. MADC is a national museum that is neither isolated nor protected from the everyday life of its country. It is this contiguity, along with a vigorous engagement with the styles of the historical avant-gardes, that … Read More »