Tinfish Retro Chap #7, baseball, dementia: a grab bag!

Announcing a new Tinfish Retro Chapbook, #7!

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #7

Y O U R S _ T R U L Y _ & _ O T H E R _ P O E M S
By Xi Chuan • Translated by Lucas Klein • October 2011 • $3
Design by Eric Butler

“Drink a bellyful of cold water and you'll drown all the voices in your head,” writes Xi Chuan. Harder to quiet the voices one hears echoing from Xi's new chapbook. The poet over-hears and over-sees; these poems are shards of the zeitgeist overheard through as many walls as you can construct against your noisy neighbor's television set. The title poem reveals Xi Chuan's Whitmanian reach; turn over in your bed and he will be the presence beside you. If you want to sample the work of an important contemporary Chinese poet, this chapbook provides an excellent place to start.

See here for more details.
Order for $3, plus $1 shipping, from Tinfish Press, via the website or at 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744


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The box score to yesterday's tightly fought Cardinals Phillies game is here.

While I've been unhappy with Tony LaRussa's coaching for some time, I loved the moment--as Cliff Lee struggled on the mound for the Phillies--that he put the injured (but how injured?) slugger, Matt Holliday, in the on-deck circle for as long as it took for Jon Jay (what a professional hitter he is) to get a hit, then pulled him back in favor of the uninjured Skip Schumacher. Mind games at their best. One of those moments that will never show in the box score. Marianne Moore said she loved the aspects of baseball that are crucial to the game but have no effect on its outcome. For her, it was the throw back from the catcher to the pitcher. For me, I think it will be Matt Holliday, at-deck decoy.

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Earlier this year, I wrote a post on the ownership of my mother's Alzheimer's home by the Carlyle Group. Today I got this message in my inbox:

Many care homes already provide a stimulating atmosphere that provides quality of life for people in all stages of dementia, and we should all have much higher expectations of the quality of life that can be experienced by people with Alzheimers Care Home.

If you click the link, you arrive at an ad for an Alzheimer's care provider. A quick google search reveals that the company in question is expanding, and that "The property will be sold to Nationwide Health Properties Inc., a real estate investment trust, Newport Beach, Calif., and then leased to Harbor House, which will operate the facility, Williams said."

Leave it to Beavers: Kim Koga's _ligature strain_ from Tinfish Press

As I left Obun print shop in Honolulu today with my box of Kim Koga's new chapbooks, my way was partially blocked by a back hoe. The operator waved, moving his back hoe forward. On the back hoe of his back hoe, I saw the machinery's name engraved in metal. KOGA, it read.

This chapbook marks the halfway point in our 12 chaps in a year Retro Chapbook Series. All of them are designed by Eric Butler in Honolulu. Let me write out the list so far:

#1: Say Throne, by No`u Revilla (Hawai`i)
#2: Tonto's Revenge, by Adam Aitken (Australia / Hawai`i)
#3: The Primordial Density Perturburation, by Stephen Collis (British Columbia)
#4: Mao's Pears, by Kenny Tanemura (California)
#5: Yellow/Yellow, by Margaret Rhee (California)
#6: ligature strain, by Kim Koga (Indiana / California)

I strain to find the ligatures that connect all these chaps; the point is more that there is amazing experimental work from the Pacific out there than that certain themes demand the foreground (we're saving thematics for next year). But, if No`u's chap inaugurated the series with "Tinfish does erotics" (Tiare Picard), then Kim Koga's completes its first half with a fleshy investigation of beavers giving birth. The chap is quirky. Beavers? I remember seeing a documentary about beavers where the filmmaker placed a camera inside a beaver lodge. The beavers--bless them--sat around having committee meetings in their lodge. Occasionally, one would dive out into the cold waters of the river. But mostly they talked a lot among themselves when they weren't chomping at trees. Koga gives us the beaver feminine (say with a French accent; after all she got her MFA from Notre Dame), complete with pre- and after-birth pink skin, and nursing baby beavers. It's a world like ours--full of transience, fluids (of many kinds), and "echo locations." Here's a quotation:

secure tree to give birth lined in socks of
gray and swimming pink. sound is
absorbed and the pink fleshes shock and
swarm in their sacs. echo locate. echo
locate. but. you. are. lost.

Don Mee Choi recommended Kim's work to me; it was Don Mee who translated Kim Hyee Soon's poems spoken by sometimes pregnant rats. Perhaps Kim Koga was influenced by the other Kim's use of animals to show us our own lives, our births and deaths. In any case, it's a lovely, odd little book. I recommend it to you. And here's something about Kim:

Kim Koga recently completed an MFA at the University of Notre Dame. While completing her degree she worked as Action Books' editorial assistant, co-edited two MFA publications The Bend and Re:Visions, and curated a reading series with fellow MFA student CJ Waterman.

She received her BA in Literature and Writing from California State University San Marcos where she co-founded the Creative Writing Community and Workshop, their publication Oh, Cat, the Student Reading Series, and interned with 1913 Press. Her publications include Lantern Review, Triton College's Ariel, and 1913: a journal of forms. This is her first chapbook.

You can buy the book at http://tinfishpress.com if you hit any "purchase" button and to the very end of the list. You can also subscribe to the entire series for only $36 dollars, less than a tank of gas costs. This chap alone will cost you only $3 (with $1 for postage, as we lost postage from the institution), less than many lattes at Starbucks. Or send a check to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kaneohe, HI 96744.




[Chapbook with Tortilla, the Tinfish cat]

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #2: Adam Aitken's TONTO'S REVENGE

Available May 1. The second in a series of 12.

Tonto's Revenge, composed of poems written by Adam Aitken during his term as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, is something of a Thai-Australian version of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poet, masquerading sometimes as Tonto, sometimes as Charlie Chan, meets a Sheriff; they face off over everything from tourism to nostalgia to departmental hiring. Along the way, the poet meets the Rabbit Lady of Honolulu, laments the death of Danno (James MacArthur of the original Hawai`i 5-0), and gathers in many of Honolulu's voices off buses and from the city parks burgeoning with homeless persons. "You want to shout Fuck Tourism," Aitken writes, "but that would be nostalgic.”

Adam Aitken is a Thai-Australian living in Sydney, where he teaches Creative Writing. He was born in London and as a young child he was schooled in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He has lived, worked and travelled widely through Asia and Europe, and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tinfish, Drunken Boat and Jacket. This is his fifth collection of poems.

from “The Day Danno Died (In memory of James MacArthur)"

The day Danno died

some old senators

and heroes of Pearl Harbour

last surviving ones

cried. They knew Danno

had done a lot for these islands.

The day Danno died

someone’s father entered

Harry’s Music Store

and bought his son

a Ukelele.

At Smiley’s Nails

someone mentioned in passing

that Danno had died.

Somehow, at Jimmy’s

Television Sales & Services

the owner thought

TV will never be the same,

now that Danno’s died.

Send $3 to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744 or order with credit card via tinfishpress.com (2checkout). Better yet, subscribe to the full series of 12 chapbooks we're putting out in 12 months, for $36! The first chapbook, Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, is still available for $3 or as part of a subscription. Each Retro Chapbook is designed by Eric Butler.

Tinfish Press Retro Chapbook series faces imminent launch

The first in a series of 12 retro chapbooks--made inexpensively and in short runs--is coming soon. It's Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, who describes herself as follows, "No'ukahau'oli is rooted in Maui, while pursuing her Cultural Studies scholarship in O'ahu at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa. Her palapala is based on Native women's voices and indigenous storytelling. And like her kūpuna said: 'I wai no'u.'" The designer for these upcoming books is Eric Butler.

No`u Revilla's work melds sex and sovereignty, stark detail and flat-out lyricism. The center-piece of this 16 page chapbook is the title poem, a verse play of a sort, which features a chair and a lady (clearly the Hawaiian queen). Here's a brief passage:

But salads brought you destiny. You ordered new appetities, pulling pushing Fancy chair--luxurious furniture with a capital "F" like fuck, like feed, like fiction. To your table the appetites arrived but Fancy chair fuck kept you occupied.

[occupied was occupation but not occupation that kept lady occupied]

Say Throne will be followed most immediately by a series of poems written by Adam Aitken while he served as UHM's Distinguished Visiting Writer this past autumn.

Each chapbook can be purchased for a donation of $3 to Tinfish Press; you can pre-order all 12 for $36. (Of course you're also welcome to throw in a few extra dollars so that we can send out review copies and give writers more copies of their own chapbooks.)

Our address is Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744. Our email is press.tinfish@gmail.com

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Tinfish's editor will be in Kansas for a few days, snooping around KU's English department and giving a reading in Topeka, but on return expects to be ready to send the first chapbook out. Please sign on! Support small press publishing. Hell, we just got smaller again.