Cooper and Cebula at the Dikeou January 9th

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to join us for the Equinox Chapbook Reading/Release party at The Dikeou Collection in Denver on Saturday, January 9th at 7 p.m.

The evening's festivities will begin with readings by Joseph Cooper and Travis Cebula, winner and runner up of the Fact-Simile Equinox Chapbook Contest. A reception and book signing will follow, during which the winning chapbooks will be available at a discounted price. Please mark your calendar for Fact-Simile Editions' first poetry event of the new year.

We hope to see you there!

Best Regards,

JenMarie and Travis
Fact-Simile Editions
www.fact-simile.com
jenmarie@fact-simile.com
travis@fact-simile.com

2010 Fact-Simile Calendar On Sale Now!

Fact-Simile Editions is pleased to announce the upcoming release of our 2010 Calendar featuring the textual artistry of Andrew Topel. You can get a sneak peak at this project HERE.

This limited edition spiral bound calendar is already selling fast, so reserve yours today!

THROUGH THE FUNERAL MOUNTAINS ON A BURRO by Charles Freeland

Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro by Charles Freeland
-Paperback: 68 pages
-Publisher: Otoliths, 2009
-ISBN: 978-0-9806025-2-4

“What follows then is a re-telling of that uncommon event. But by re-telling I mean a specific sort of invention that might be confused, by the uninitiated and the poorly fed, for myth-making. Even out-and-out fraud. I really must insist whatever opinions you form in the process should be wrung out thoroughly. And hung up with animal skins.”

-from Folly’s List of Companions

The storyteller has, until only recently, played an integral part in the development of modern civilization. The very basis of human communal discourse lies in those moments around the primordial fire in which ‘the hunt’ was both recounted and embellished for the benefit of the remaining, cave-bound, tribe. As such, the story is, at once, both historical act and performative gesture. Through stories, we impart our basic cultural values and attempt to convey the lessons necessary to ensure both the survival of our immediate kin and, by extension, the customs and traditions we hold sacred.

Over the last half-century, the role of the storyteller has been largely decentralized, displaced by mass-media conglomerates with committee-minded plot lines and focus-grouped pabulum cooked up to appeal to the lowest common denominator of our collective attention spans. A new discourse has arisen, based not on the direct experiences of disparate, tight-knit communities of individuals, but on the commercialized representations of cultural difference on an unprecedented international scale. But take comfort. All is not yet lost.

In Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro, Charles Freeland invokes that first primordial storyteller with a masterful ease of style both refreshingly new in its perspective and reassuring familiar in its anecdotal nature. The subtle, shifting tales he weaves, interspersed as they are with strange advice and questioning digressions, leave little resemblance to any myth or fable in the traditional sense. That is to say: they do not draw on a distant and idyllic past, but rather a strange and disjointed present in which all the world’s myth-systems seem to exist simultaneously alongside the commercial detritus of the 20^th century:

"We return with our heads under our arms, as if we expect at any moment to be assailed by ravens. And not the literary kind either, but those that haven’t lent their names or dispositions to so much as an ad for lawn furniture. Haven’t followed the river to where it becomes something without boundaries, something so enormous the engineers are scratching their heads."

-from Post Hostile Machine

If the pastoral appears in these passages, it is in constant opposition to a distinctly more contemporary human landscape. Indeed, the conflict of civilization with the natural world is a recurring theme throughout the text; between ravens and lawn furniture, rivers and engineers, animal skins and invention, myth and opinion; Freeland’s stories take their shape from the palpable friction that arises between these elements. They are not so much told, in the linear sense, as they are formed gradually in the reader’s mind by elliptical processes of description and diversion. The final result is a layered, multi-dimensional surface (fully enclosed) the form of which is perfectly described/inscribed but the contents of which remain a distant mystery to be, at best, hinted and guessed at. Like any good story, they demand the active and attentive imaginations of their audience.

And like any master storyteller, Charles Freeland keeps his readers/listeners engaged with a repertoire of age-old techniques presented in his own distinct and musical prose style. Through direct address and the frequent use of collective pronouns, he demands more than just complicit witness, but rather the direct interaction of audience with each passage at hand. By way of example:

"You’d think people would get sick of waiting. But maybe they don’t mean the same thing by “waiting” as we do. Assuming of course, we can come to some sort of consensus ourselves."

-from Fugue, Commencing at the Toes

Taken altogether Freeland’s collection seems to suggest and acknowledge that, while no such consensus is ultimately possible, it is nevertheless the responsibility of the writer/storyteller to strive after that ever elusive goal of communal experience. In fact, our individual and collective histories depend on it. These intricate, experiential fictions so full of strange truths, rhizomic digressions and subtle humor come humbly closer to that goal than any I’ve encountered in quite some time.

Of course, no book is perfect and Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro is no exception to this brutal rule. Its faults are, however, so small as to be easily missed or happily overlooked. For my own part, there were times when the arrangement of the overall collection felt somewhat discordant, specifically in “Small Concavity at the Base of the Neck” and “Lost Voices of Jamestown.”

Here Freeland abandons the already established form that characterizes the rest of this intricate and deliberate series of narratives. Instead of the succinct surrealist transitions framed by continuous prose blocks found throughout the rest of the collection, each of these two-page pieces is composed of numbered stanzas seemingly loosely connected to each other and their overarching titles. The brief, interjectory nature of these formal intrusions is, perhaps, intended to inject some variety into the eye’s journey through the text. However, the infrequent nature of the gesture ultimately struck this reader as more disruptive than surprising or re-engaging.

That said, this is a damn fine book full of original and engaging prose poems/stories whose leaps and connections will inspire the imagination upon first encounter and then continue to surprise the ear with each subsequent read.

Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro is available from Otoliths for $10.45 plus S/H.

-Travis Macdonald

A Sh Anthology Reading a Huge Success!

Many thanks to all our readers and everyone who turned out to listen at the A Sh Anthology reading this past weekend in Denver.

It was wonderful to see you all and to share in the amazing space that is The Dikeou Collection. We had such a great time, that we are already planning another release party reading for later in the winter...we'll keep you posted there.

In the meantime, once again: Thank You!

A Sh Anthology Reading in Denver, CO

Fact-Simile Editions invites you to join us as we celebrate the release of the A Sh Anthology Saturday, November 7th at The Dikeou Collection in Denver. The evening’s festivities will include live performances by:

Selah Saterstrom
Erik Anderson
Sara Veglahn
Andrew K. Peterson and
j/j/[pleth

Doors open at 6:30 and the reading starts at 7pm. If you're unfamiliar with The Dikeou Collection, check out their website, and be sure to arrive early so you can explore this amazing space:

Saturday, November 7th @ 7pm
The Colorado Building
1615 California Street (at 16th Street)
Suite 515
Denver, CO 80202

We hope to see you there...Oh yeah, and the A Sh Anthology will be on sale for one-time-only price of $9.99!

For those of you in far away places, stay tuned. We will be posting a full video recording of the event on our blog as soon as we get back to New Mexico.

In the meantime...

Best Regards,

Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
Fact-Simile Editions
http://fact-simile.com/
Travis@fact-simile.com
JenMarie@fact-simile.com

Commuter, James Belflower

Commuter by James Belflower
-Paperback: 86 Pages
-Publisher: Instance Press
-ISBN: 9780967985473

During an age ravaged by The Plague and other brutalities that often truncated lifespans, “memento mori” portraits became a popular mode of painting. The subjects, countered with skulls, wilting flowers and rotting fruit, reminded a viewer of his or her mortality. James Belflower’s Commuter operates in much the same way as one of these memento mori. This debut, full-length book of poetry reminds the reader that, with the 21st century's plague of terrorist bombings, death and destruction are always adjacent to the "normal" moment.

The reader begins the ride with the prologue’s color picture of a subway map. The representation of an underground system of tunnels offers an excellent visual association given that public transportation is so often targeted in attacks. On a deeper level, however, the image begins an intricate patterning of circulation that recurs through the rest of the book.

From the map, the reader is then propelled through into a network of tunnels that are really narrative passage-fragments. These fragments oscillate between moments of stability (ex. matrimony and sight-seeing) and periods of eminent danger and death (accounts from bombings). They seem to blink, tensely, the way we imagine those in the actual subway do in the immediate aftermath of violence, the way our eye blinks between the person in the memento mori portrait and the skull he holds.

Commuter’s language and typography, like a memento mori’s stark representation, reminds us that devastation is always skulking at the brink of common time - catastrophe can interrupt any day, any page, and, as evidenced by Belflower's readable redactions and parentheses that never close: any sentence.

Its passage-fragments often mimic the events the language represents and detonate upon the page: passages of stability become the lopped off limbs of larger narratives absent from the physical page, those passages of destruction are the shrapnel. The reader must tread carefully through the mine/mind field knowing the book is both the ground upon which the bomb is planted and also the bomb itself. Explosions are inevitable if one is to travel cover to cover. For example, within a few pages of one another, the reader witnesses the negotiating a wedding’s rice details:

we argued

birds

their swollen odor

if

swollen with

rice, rice, rice

and then the bombing of a pizza place:


...I tasted something in my mouth. Thick smoke. The […aroma…]

of burning flesh in my mouth...

Even the book’s layout succumbs to the simultaneity of memento mori. Two parallel lines travel through the book and the space between them forces a gap between the narrative fragments. This gap represents any of several concepts: the track that separates the two platforms of a subway hub, the strata of language, the representation of time’s passage, the pure breath of a moment of solace, or the weighted calm before calamity. Or perhaps it is the hinge of stability and collapse...the silence that rises when language fails us in moments of ultimate pleasure or pain.

Violence and death are not new. They circulate and evolve as time passes and the world transforms its surface. For a reader, or anyone for that matter, to go on, he or she must witness the atrocious, the mortal, but simultaneously locate in life's moments the wonderful and quotidian. Lucky for us, Belflower paints all of these within the same immediate frame.


Commuter is available from SPD for $15.00

-JenMarie Davis

TOUCH ME, Joseph Cooper

TOUCH ME by Joseph Cooper
· Paperback: 94 pages
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402190

In TOUCH ME, his latest release from BlazeVox Books, Joseph Cooper ignites a deft tension between the alternating frictions of electronic and visceral forces as they chew through the emotional states of their narrator.

Organizing his exploration of an amorphous and plaintively devastating love affair through the lens of the 1980’s Milton Bradley game “Simon,” Cooper invokes and desecrates both the basic machinery of flesh and the inherent humanity of mechanism. The book pronounces itself a game and, indeed, patterns itself as such. Yet the language at play here is more dangerous than a bag of vibrating knives:

Strung between paranoia and poison, sustenance feeds on organized repetition. Body of nails begins a mother-speaking being. Maternal body is nourishing, murderous, and fascinating. Serrated errantly her blouse stitched hormonal derangement. Chiropractic embraces.
-from “Difficulty Level 2”

This passage, compared to much of the text, is fairly tame, containing no overt slang references to the interaction of bodies, human or otherwise. In fact, by way of warning: Mr. Cooper’s language is aggressively pornographic at times, much of it perhaps unfit for re-publication in review before mixed audiences. And yet, this tendency for verbal transgression is immediately tempered by the simple, almost adolescent honesty of the narrator. It is as if a clever, and perhaps psychotic, twelve year old were given expert command of a diverse and disturbing lexicon of images and set loose to describe the intricacies of love against the template of an anatomical textbook. From the graphically naïve comparison of the vagina to a slice of cantaloupe (explored to its ultimately confused conclusion involving a bicycle) to the complex and x-rated adult relationship that repeatedly develops and unravels throughout the course of the narrative between the primary characters Elle and Simon.

The resulting sympathies that arise between reader and text, if not narrator, is at once tantalizing and disturbing, as if the dangerous affair described were being occasionally transposed upon the reader-writer relationship. Indeed, the frequently repeated “Dear Player” sections serve to further reinforce this effect, drawing the reader or “player” in as complicit witness to the violence and lust at hand.

Let me be clear: this book is not meant for the faint of heart or stomach. Please don’t attempt to read it if you are overly conservative, squeamish, puritan, uppity, prude, naïve, lacking a crude sense of humor or otherwise easily offended. Unless of course, you are currently in search of a cure for one of these conditions…even then, something tells me you probably wouldn’t enjoy it properly.

On the other hand, if you’re the kind of reader that likes the top of your head taken off and the depth of your most basic human fears and insecurities plumbed with alien poetic technologies, then this book is required course reading. With language that might of made Bukowski blush and Ginsberg giggle, Joseph Cooper has churned out another little-known knockout of experimental fiction in what promises to be a noteworthy body of work.

TOUCH ME is available from BlazeVox Books for $16 plus shipping and worth every cent. Check it out.

-Travis Macdonald