Repo In A (The Musical)

Back in 2008, we here at Fact-Simile Editions published The O Mission Repo [vol. 1]. This long erasure poem takes the first four chapters of The 9/11 Commission Report and processes them through various gestures of elimination and palimpsest. The final chapter of this book, titled "Repo In A" presents what text remains post-erasure over a series of musical staffs.
Nearly four years after the original publication of this text (and on the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth) we are happy to announce that this appropriative gesture has been translated into music.

Click here to listen to the full-length unedited version of "Repo In A"

Click here to listen to the edited version...

Enjoy!

Confronting Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy

China Cowboy 

by Kim Gek Lin Short 

Lyric Novel | 6"x8", 132 pp, pbk

ISBN: 9780982541685 

Tarpaulin Sky Press, June 2012

Just like the book’s protagonist, La La, who “...wears all her clothes. Her boots. All three skirts. All the shirts. The panties, many of them...” China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short is an expertly woven story told in tangled layers.

It is the story of an abduction or escape, a brutal love affair or abusive imprisonment, rise to fame or road to perdition, art installation or songbook retrospective. It is each of these things in turn or neither depending on the narrator in charge at any given moment.

Told in turn from the perspectives of each of the book’s primary characters (La La and Ren), China Cowboy is a successfully executed experiment in prosody that simultaneously braids and frays narrative timelines and expectations, bringing the reader to the brink of every sensory extreme and back again. The result is a darkly surreal adventure in perception that leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken to their respective foundations.

As a note in the lower right hand corner of both the back cover and the title page indicates, “China Cowboy is Told in Technicolor.” In retrospect, this is perhaps a content warning of sorts for a book publishing industry still as yet (blessedly) unregulated by any sort of parental advisory ratings agency.

On the other hand, to use the euphemism of a bygone era and call the language of this book “colorful” would be both a dangerous understatement and a grave disservice to the unrelentingly aggressive, continuously shifting, sexually charged and poetically crafted syntaxes that Kim Gek Lin Short stitches together with apparent ease.

Take the following lines from “American Ball” by way of example:

“It is not a ball. It is a rubber doll, but only part of her. The ass and pussy part. I decide I do not want the flashlight anymore I turn it off. I want my ball back. I lie on the ball but it is not the same. I want to scream. But I don’t.”

Faced with hundreds of provocatively conflicted passages such as this, one does not “read” the pages of China Cowboy so much as one is confronted by them and left to weigh the visceral experiences they both depict/imprint in the mind’s eye and evoke/carve within the physical body.

Which is to say: When you pick up this book (and you should) be prepared to hold both your brightest hopes for humanity and darkest emotional expectations in a precarious balance. By the time you put it down again, the scales of your psyche will never be quite the same. 

-Travis Macdonald

 

The O Mission Repo Recap

We would like to thank everyone who participated in our week long remembrance of The 9/11 attacks by taking advantage of our free downloadable ebook offering of The O Mission Repo. Over 200 of you took the time to read through this erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report.

While this limited-time promotion has concluded, you can still pick up a print copy of The O Mission Repo at our website for just $12 plus shipping.

The O Mission Repo FREE online

In honor of all who lost their lives and loved ones as a result of the September 11, 2001 attacks on America and in the two senseless wars perpetrated in response to that national tragedy, we here at Fact-Simile Editions would like to continue an annual tradition:

From this moment until September 18th, we are making The O Mission Repo, an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report available for all to read free of charge.



Sincerely,

The Editors
Fact-Simile Editions

Jess Stoner (Wigent) read by Travis Macdonald

Jess Stoner (Wigent) Read by Travis Macdonald

Travis Macdonald reading You Are Going To Die Jess Wigent by Jess Stoner (Wigent) at Robin's Books and Moonstone Art Center in Philadelphia, PA on July 29th, 2011 as part of the Fact-Simile Editions Equinox Book Release.

ALSO KNOWN AS by Elizabeth Robinson

Also Known As
by Elizabeth Robinson

-Paperback: 68 pages

-Publisher: Apogee Press, 2009

-ISBN: 0-9787667-5-7

“If I don’t give you the shirt off my back, / at least I can stand on the street corner and turn it / inside out for you. // You are invited to see the dander of the person who once / lived inside.”

-from “Beggar”

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimates that 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year. In the vast majority of cases, the theft is economic in nature. In 2009, at least 1 of those 9 million thefts was poetic.

In her latest book of poetry, Also Known As (Apogee Press), Elizabeth Robinson approaches the task of identity theft in the digital age with the meticulous physical treatments of an expert document forger; scratching away and building up surfaces, manipulating the shifting vessels of each line, each stanza, each poem with all the authority of a lonely, hyper-literate, historian. The cumulative result is a seamless (if eerily disjointed) whole in which the individual edges of authorial identity become indistinguishable from the tangible act of each poem’s performance on the page.

That identity can be represented as a surface should come as no surprise to readers of Elizabeth Robinson’s body of work; in which every object, every act, every incident consistently seems possessed of four or more dimensions. Indeed, the poet makes no secret of this particular text’s deceptive intentions, beginning as she does with an invocation of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa followed by a quote from Ricardo Reis, one of Pessoa’s many “heteronyms.”

Finishing this invocation, Robinson claims to “write in the persona of an author who was himself writing under the guise of multiple personae.” And yet, reading and re-reading these pages, one cannot help but sense a poetic depth and range beyond even Pessoa’s varied cast of characters.

With each poem, each oblique investigation, Robinson tugs from another angle at the delicate structures of identity, unraveling and re-arranging their basic threads into something resembling a self (or series of selves) intersecting. The implements of this intersection, however, are anything but delicate.

On the contrary, the poet repeatedly employs the language of abrasion as a means of releasing and revealing the inner substances of identity both overtly with poems like “as if I were getting a rash on my soul” and more subtly with “On the Yellow Stairs” in which the speaker unscrews his or her hands to serve as doorknobs, opening into the poem. This particular piece ends with the lines, “I would scratch / increments toward / a more contiguous flight of stairs / a cleaner amputation,” as if to suggest that these methods of the speaker’s excavation fall short when compared to the poet’s need for precision of language and thought.

Over the course of this series, the forces of textual abrasion are carefully counterbalanced by that same poet’s urge to contain the self within quantifiable boundaries. Just as the speaker in “Alias as Color” asserts, “I measure my own flesh for distortion,” likewise Robinson seems to remind the reader that each deception is painstakingly calculated to reveal only so much surface as is necessary at any given moment.

The result is, as the last line of the title poem “Also Known As” would suggest, “Like a series of trunks stacked one atop another.” Using Pessoa and his heteronyms as a starting point, Elizabeth Robinson has surpassed the master himself to create the poetic equivalent of a Matryoshka, in which every narrative, every surface is nested within another.

Also Known As (Apogee Press, 2009) is available through Small Press Distribution for $15.95

-Travis Macdonald

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

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

The O Mission Repo FREE Online

Exactly one year ago today, we here at Fact-Simile Editions released The O Mission Repo. Since that day, we've received some great buzz from places like Poets & Writers, Rain Taxi, and Verse.

Now, in commemoration of all who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001 and in the two senseless American wars since, Fact-Simile Editions is pleased to announce the FREE ONLINE RELEASE of The O Mission Repo by Travis Macdonald.

We might be crazy. We probably are. But we want to make this text available to as any readers as we can. We urge you all to take full advantage of our manic fancy and download your very own copy of The O Mission Repo today. Send your friends along so they can download a copy as well.

Then, if you like what you read on the screen and would like to purchase a real, old-fashioned perfect-bound copy of the book to hold in your hands, you can do so HERE.

Many thanks in advance.

-The Editors

The O Mission Repo read by Travis Macdonald

Saturday April 4th, 2009 Reading at Naropa University

I almost forgot: Travis Macdonald and Lisa Birman will be reading at Naropa University, upstairs in Shambhala Hall on April 4th at 8 pm

We would love to see you there!

-The Editors

The O Mission Repo Official Release

Today, as the world mourns the victims of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, we here at Fact-Simile Editions invite you to participate in this commemoration with your very own copy of The O Mission Repo.

Composed of the partially erased pages of The 9/11 Commission Report, this innovative text takes readers on a parallel journey through the earth-shaking events whose aftermath has largely determined the course of modern history and culture to date.

The O Mission Repo is currently available on our website (www.fact-simile.com) as well as a handful of small booksellers in the Denver area with more venues to be added shortly.

If you live in the Denver area, you are hereby cordially invited to our official release party, this Saturday, September 13th at the address below:

1258 Pennsylvania Street, #1
Denver, CO 80203

The book will be available for $2 off the cover price for the duration of this event! Doors open at 4pm...We hope to see you there. Please feel free to email with any questions.

Sincerely,

Travis Macdonald
Fact-Simile Editions
WWW.FACT-SIMILE.COM
travis@fact-simile.com
(303) 993-3932