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MOTORMAN by David Ohle
Available now from 3rd bed. To order, visit the 3rd bed store. |
MOTORMAN:
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For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It hadcome recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell. Books were not often spoken of so potently to me, as contraband, as narcotic, as ordnance. There was the whispered promise that my mind would be blown after reading Motorman. There was the assurance that once I read it I would drool with awe, writerly awe, the awe of watching a madman master at work, David Ohle, awesomely carving deep, black holes into the edifice of the English language.
—from the introduction by BEN MARCUS |
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from the false sun recordings
Hatraf
Auralgraph 10
Lingo (7)
Lsia
Dolphy/At the Five Spot, Vol. 1
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At a time of extraordinary displacement and global confusion, these insistently sane poems manage a remarkable interaction of viable realities, of multiple twists, turns and provisions of language's singular instrument, syntax, and the words which it puts in order. Each turn here is a possibility, an endlessly refracting multiplicity of instances. Each word takes its own step, as it must, toward recognition.
—ROBERT CREELEY
This is a book of tight, compressed poems with a big heart behind them. There are "auralgraph" poems written in homage to Vallejo, Celan and Reverdy. There are love poems to a beloved. There are poems written to contemporary poets and friends and musicians. There is a devotion in this book to the work of others, an exploration of the varieties of community made through our encounters with the poetry and music of others. the false sun recordings is distinctive, luminous, full of faith in art's transformative powers.
—JULIANA SPAHR
James Wagner is a practitioner of compactness. His poems are all exceptionally dense, in the tradition of Clark Coolidge’s word-by-word mode of literary abstraction. Yet Wagner’s poetry is a far cry from Coolidge’s—it’s more worked, more determined by possibilities of image than sound, though with an ear that is genuinely gifted. There are an exceptional number of solid pieces in the false sun recordings, lots of crunchy delights for eye, ear, and mind. It may, in places, be more lush or more tightly torqued than anything you’ve read before.
—RON SILLIMAN
the false sun recordings launches the reader into a world appealingly surreal and sharp. Its telegraphic narratives, playful pace, and delightful explosions of sound show that James Wagner knows his stuff.
—LISA JARNOT
James Wagner turns the dial for traces of human language; what's picked up is feedback from strange regions—reverb bounced back on broken solar rays. It turns out that "value is an estimate of some-/Thing un," and there is no such thing as a mirror, except the funhouse kind, i.e., language, culture, nature, history, distortion.
—ELENI SIKELIANOS |
Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
Available now from 3rd bed. To order, visit our 3rd bed store.
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from Stories in the Worst Way:
Waking Hours
SMTWTFS
Esprit de l'Elevator
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Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspring.
—Ben Marcus
Gary Lutz is, simply, one of my favorite writers. I wish I could see through skin the way he can. He tells hard truths in thrilling ways; his startling sentences are often darkly funny, and always exactly right.
—Amy Hempel
Gary Lutz is one of the rarest and purest of our treasured literary artists. His authentic language conquers any habit of speech. Let the reader prepare for the first known examples of the most crucial and intimate matters of the heart and mind.
—Diane Williams
What can I say? This is the book. These are the stories, the sentences. Get ready for awe, for envy, for love. Gary Lutz is as funny and original a writer as we have in the language. Consider this, as Lutz would say, a “household fact.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Subject Steve
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