They have dropped their price from $310 to $175, but this price is only available September 8 to 15th, so you should probably jump on this deal now!

Here is the sort of thing you are looking at – I guess the voice-over costs extra. Pretty slick in any case:

A Model Year
by Gina Myers
Coconut Books, 2009

[reviewed by Marc Beaudin]

Something profound, exciting, and almost frightening takes place when reading Myers’ A Model Year. The individual poems begin to act upon each other in that there is a certain building up of meaning, sentiment, and impact the more you read. It’s not that the poems are directly connected. In fact, “disconnected” comes easily to mind while reading – a disconnection with the small rituals that make life bearable, a disconnection with lost soulmates and soul-spaces, a disconnection with the pervading logic of language (which is a coffin lock we usually set from the inside).

On the surface, there is the connection of a narrative of a period lived in Brooklyn, and the need to return to a Midwestern hometown. But what takes place within these pages goes deeper than that. There is some subtle movement between the poems; a growing intensity that each page contributes to. Maybe it’s that each poem in this collection is a puzzle piece, one that doesn’t interlock with any other, but all part of the same image.

Searching for a new vocabulary, a way
to say exactly what you want to hear.
I’d like to give all the quiet things to you.
– from “Midwinter”

The fragments of this image never make the mistake of showing too much. They leave us with questions and empty spaces that won’t be filled by the mind only. They accomplish what, I believe, all great poetry must accomplish: to reveal the simple truth that sorrow and beauty never travel alone.

Days like this are sometimes forgotten, x’d out and shelved with
all the rest. There is an absence of birds, although at times their
wings beat against my ribs.
– from “January”

These are poems that should be read and re-read, the way you would listen to a piece of music many times, with each repetition revealing more; hurting and soothing more. The long title poem closing the book, with echoing, reverberating couplets, seems to be a microcosm of the entire book. And the book itself, a microcosm of all of our lives. The personal cum universal.

Always wanting what we can’t have, we create tension
one word at a time. Pulling the narrative away until we’re lost

& it’s lost, left behind in the restaurant or on the subway.
– from “A Model Year”

I find myself not wanting to talk “about” these poems. Not wanting to be guilty of their diminishment. The best way to tell you about this book would be to sit you down and read it to you.

Marc Beaudin is the poetry editor of CounterPunch and the author of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems. More information can be found at CrowVoice.com.

The Sagging: Spirits & Skin sings eloquent tales of loss and the big truths that are learned within small pieces of emptiness. Through these poems, Fisk lurks like a quiet voyeur into the dirt-smeared windows of a embattled collection of naked and lonely souls. There is much within these pages that will haunt you.

–Marc Beaudin

Find this and other chapbooks at alt-current.com

Marc Beaudin is the poetry editor of CounterPunch and the author of The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds. More information can be found at CrowVoice.com.

The author’s bio at the end of this book notes that this is not the magician of the same name. Yet, David Blaine, the poet, plays with words the way I imagine the other David Blaine plays with cards or silk scarves. His agile manipulations nearly defy physics and the results are surprising, mystifying, and sometimes downright magical.

Blaine revels in the double entendre: In “Guns and Butter” he describes a love affair with oil, the “hydrocarbon medusa,” as a “crude relationship.” In “Child” he says, “the remainder of you perhaps buried / as dust motes drift into a dune / across the top of some deserted windowsill” and we might not even notice the sleight of hand that connects “dune” with the desert of the “deserted windowsill.”

Extended references lurk around the corners of lines like rabbits made to disappear, yet you know they’re still there, somewhere. In “Allen and Jack,” Blaine has Kerouac reincarnated as Willie Nelson (“On the Road … Again”), then later sneaks in a line from “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”

But these pages are not merely games and verbal dexterity. You can feel the depth of thought and passion flowing below the surface of most every poem. Blaine takes on issues from the social, political, religious and environmental front-lines. Never beating you over the head, his attack is more subtle and fun to watch – like a blade eased gently through the slot in the brightly-painted box he’s put you. In “The Usual Suspects,” we hear of hands that “sign the orders,” “pull the trigger,” “deal in currency,” “swing the hammer,” “place the nails,” and perform a host of other heinous crimes. We then are given the revelation that all of these hands are ours. And with that, we are successfully sawn in half.

There’s much in the poems of Antisocial that describe an entire world sawn in half. Dead soldiers, starving children, drunks, prostitutes, saints who’ve lost their goodness, Judas’ pointing finger, Dick Cheney’s lies and vitriol, and “a thin man [who] cries so people won’t notice it’s raining.” However true all of this is, we can take comfort in the stoically existentialist wisdom of Blaine’s “Terminal”:

I have this suspicious feeling
that in the end,
at the pearly gates,
it’s all going to turn out
to be fake, worn
and shabby.
But still,
I’m trying to enjoy the trip.

And what a trip it is.

– Marc Beaudin, September 2009
CrowVoice.com

Angelo enlisted the help of Baltimore’s Creative Alliance to host the event, and partnered with U.S. Hispanic Youth Entrepreneur Education (USHYEE) and made a community event out of it.

It was a multi-media event as well, with a 20 minute video slide-show of beautiful photographs Angelo took while on his 400 mile hike from southern to northern Spain, followed by a reading and then a question-and-answer session.

The physical foot journey, El Camino, is only in part the Journey of the title of his book. It serves as a metaphor for Solera’s journey through life – from his arrival in the U.S. as a teenage illegal immigrant, through a frustrating marriage, drug addiction, divorce and recovery, through his bid for office as a City Councilman in Baltimore, and finally to the peace of mind and heart that he earned by crossing 400 miles of ancient roadways in his home country.

So, thats the book. But his event tonight was great, and I think we can all take a bit from it.

We can launch a book, and thats great. Our friends and family will come and it will be, as it should be, an end and a beginning. A celebration of the completion of writing and publishing, and a celebration of the beginning of marketing and selling.

I think that in getting the community involved, by reaching out to the Baltimore art community and Baltimore’s Hispanic community, and sharing the significance of the event in this way, he managed to celebrate both that ending and that beginning, but also something much more.

By sharing the event with two seperate elements of our community, I think he allowed both to feel a sense of ownership of his book. He allowed us to feel that he wrote the book as one of us (I place myself in the art community camp as I my polish heritage keeps me a far cry from claiming a place in the latino camp), and that in doing so, was sort of giving us a voice, and a goal, and a model to live up to.

Leaving the party, I think we all felt a sense of investment in the book and a hope that it could have life. How rare it is that this happens to a book these days.

This book is different. It’s special. I haven’t read it yet, not the final draft anyway, and not more then pieces of earlier drafts, but I already know there is something special about it. I know this because of the people it brought together tonight, the way it made us feel, the people I am sure it will continue to bring together and the way I am sure it will make them feel.

In putting his event together tonight the way that he did, Solera helped us invest in his dream.

We are all launching books, now or later. I think it is instructive how well his party worked tonight, and we might all do well to remember, instead of, “Come see my new book,” that we offer “Come share my new book.”

You can visit Angelos website for more info about the book, to read an excerpt, see some of the beautiful photos, or watch the video we saw tonight. His website is at AngelosJourney.com and you can order the book there or at AuthorsBookshop.com.

The site is being launched by Michigan Indie Novelist (and friend to IndieBookMan) Tyler R. Tichelaar.

Tyler really knows his stuff when it come to writing – particularly regional fiction. And I know from experience that he is an extremely fastidious editor. I’m placing SBR at the top of my personal list of resources for editing.

And I am glad to have another great reviewing resource to recommend.

For more information on Superior Book Reviews, visit superiorbookpromotions.com