Review of Urban Mustang, by Linnet Phoenix

I no longer like to do reviews, unless I particularly want to, so here is one, of Urban Mustang, the first full length poetry collection by Linnet Phoenix, from Impspired.  

Review of Urban Mustang
by Linnet Phoenix
published by Impspired
Urban Mustang on Amazon.

This new collection by English poet Linnet Phoenix, her first full-length anthology, is centered around poems that relate as much to nature as they do to her life, & many poems have as their setting the United States of America; hence the title, which also relates to her interest in horses. It shows the poet encountering the USA, an awareness of its nature, as part of the same nature as is the England depicted elsewhere in the book, & perhaps a heightened sense of her own import & value.

The poet uses a singularly attractive voice in this volume, not only describing the interpersonal world but the natural earth & its animals, frequently resorting to artfully & unusually matched pairs of words that she hyphenates, creating an effect that reminds me of Gerard Manley-Hopkins. This in itself makes Linnet superior to the vast majority of her contemporaries. (Manley-Hopkins went to my old college, by the way, which sort of compensates one for BoJo. Swinburne did too, so Balliol attracts the deviants.)

I feel a laughter,
a grip-growl
touch of gymnast,
hand-standing tall
about to let go.

(From “Lightning Bugs”)

The poems reveal a keen sense of nature, as noted, & there are many poems that do not have anything beyond this awareness & observation of the natural world as their apparent surface theme. There are, however, many that instead appear to have a romantic interest as their underlying theme.

Since Linnet is an equestrian, as noted above, horses provide a focus for her interest, even in the title of the book, & this is part of the American mythology, which relates the focus on the natural to the broadly American setting for much of the book.

The poems that relate to the interpersonal aspect are powerful though, with things generally seen in retrospect & depicted in a bitter-sweet fashion.

Beneath the northern stars
we danced in your snow
in my night lantern gloaming.

When lit by your spirit
I was a momentary queen,
a beautiful shotgun smile.

Our lives as magnolia petals
bloom before they fall.
I'm glad I caught the chance.

(From “This Dance”)

The horse poems are particularly strong, and there are several references, here one about a panicked young stallion, Caesar, where the language tenses itself, taut & intense, to match the passion of the agitated three-year-old horse.

Like a lithe gymnast, his muscles held taut,
he fought us, his dark eyes wild with fear,
adrenaline surging. Veins stood out stark
against the foaming white tide of sweat.

Never have I seen such beauty in anguish.
Powerful high stepping pride, ripped anger
fighting the fear of being trapped or tamed.
He had more to prove standing his ground.

(From “Caesar”) 

Maybe the relationship to Manley-Hopkins is connected to this, the sensitivity to animals in nature. Manley-Hopkins wrote of the Heraclitean fire that is nature during the Victorian Era, when cultural & societal themes were prevalent in the execrable poetry of his day. Just so Linnet, as she stands ecstatic before the execrable poetry of her day. Compounding words, as Linnet does, & the unconventional use of language relate the two writers further. If there are rhymes, these are often internal; again, proving my point. Manley-Hopkins was a Victorian poet who was to all intents & purposes a romantic poet, Linnet is a modern poet who relates to an earlier set of standards for writing poetry. Again, they are both anachronistic in that sense. Being is what poetry reveals, or should, so Heidegger tells us, & this is what happens here: we are presented with the reality of Caesar's terror, of the earth around & under us, the heavens above. Because Linnet's poetry is motivated by Dichtung, the opening up that prepares the soul to receive Being & its Otherness, the "poetizing" that precedes the event of any art, she is one of the few poets who will be published in the future by Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

For these reasons, Linnet’s poetry is unusual in the modern context, & this is part of its strength. It is not poetry that one would describe in the sad macho terms so often used to describe poetry, usually very inappropriately - "Kick ass", or whatever. It does not fit in to preconceived formulae for the construction of poems (“it’s cool to be an epigone”), & this constitutes its strength & its beauty.

I foresee a great future for Linnet Phoenix, & am pleased to be mentioned in the credits for this book in recognition of my mastery of the arcane art of spelling, & that sort of thing.

Here the book is anyway, & here the poet's Amazon page.

Tanya Rakh reads from HYDROGEN SOFI

Here is a reading of "Chicago to Paris VII" from Hydrogen Sofi, by Tanya Rakh from FB. The book is on sale here. It will be appearing on Amazon too in due course. Tanya's Wildflower Hell is also due soon, along with as yet undisclosed future work. EDIT: Here the book hits Amazon.

If you use Facebook Container you will probably have to allow this site to play the video.

 

 

 

Introduction to forthcoming book by Tanya Rakh

Soon we shall be releasing Wildflower Hell by Tanya Rakh, &, apart from editing & designing the cover, for which Rob Plath kindly gave us permission to use his awesome picture of a bee getting pollen all over her, I have written a little introductory manifesto, about the book giving a perspective on cPTSD, & nice to read for those of us with this condition. It is how Tanya handles her fire, same as me really. So I post this below, the book is coming soon enough. It will only cost $8, & I can recommend the living shit out of this book. 

EDIT. Now on sale at this link. 

An introductory publisher's manifesto

The year begins with spring, one tends to assume, because that is when the process of growth is initiated through the return of the sun, & when life burgeons. But Wildflower Hell starts in the winter, hell-set in traumatic darkness, because this is a book of healing, of resurrection, of the goddess leaving her blessings in the most unlikely places. It is a beautiful book to read, & it is a manual of sorts, if understood in a certain way.

Of course I have read these poems intently before, for I have plundered all the works of Tanya for epigraphs, a process which finally resulted in me writing, when the plundering reached its maturity, because the stars says so, the fourth book for my own beloved muse. But rereading these now, I think for the fifth or sixth time, to produce this little manifesto, I am struck afresh by the power & profundity of the words in this guidebook about how to tend & manage your cPTSD in order to produce beauty, & thereby ultimately heal yourself. The trauma does not disappear, but is incorporated productively. We start thus at wintertime, because it is de profundis that the healing begins.

This is a small book, a chapbook as they like to call them, & yet it contains so much of a life; there are worlds written in it. Don't tell me about seashells, I agree; tell us instead of the seagulls that control the skies over them, always watching out for snacks & keeping away the pigeons, some of them dressed in dove drag, all tricked out to lie to us, to make us hamsters when we could be possums & hyenas & lions & wolves.

If we sit with Tanya a while, her head full of stars, like the head of the goddess is full of fire & every universe that ever was or ever shall be, she asks us to "[p]aint with me a doorway, a gash in monotone night." This is because we create our own reality in order to exit the traumatic scar: we make our own portals, poetic & perhaps interstitial. We notice our potential lines of flight that will let us escape the rigid stratification of our role as victim. We fly to passion & intensity, as Deleuze & Guattari show us, to create a safe zone to be our animal, to become (more) beasts. We create the crack that lets the light in. The sky is cryogenic in this doorway poem, because it is part of a cold mythology of freezing things down to preserve & protect, the gently snow & the mercy of winter, freezing things to await the chance of healing, & yet it is humming there, because, under the frozen scar of trauma, life still throbs its confusion, a million healthy feelings waiting to burst out alive again.

Spring follows winter, & in spring we fuck the pain away. It does not work every time, but it can "send each recurring nightmare/ as thunder back to sky" for a while. Summer become awareness of the recurrence, it is solidified by now into always the same nightmare, love & time sleeping rigid on opposite sides of the bed, without making eye contact. But the trauma grows in the child, the ghost that you can still hear howling in the skeleton, echoing nightingale there, & maybe it she who leaves the daybroken poems there before the sun comes up. This is part of what happens in the poem "that summer", when "she" grew so much older.

The summer section represents "hell", & hell is not, pace Tanya, a desert making love to fire, that is what heaven is too. Hell is what happens in "breathe", when you apologize for everything, when you surrender yourself to shitty connections, & you breathe or you don't breathe, whatever. We are poet, the scapegoat animal that is not sacrificed, but sent out into the desert wilderness, what we sing is absolute deterritorialization & broken borders, so, as Deleuze & Guattari tell us, no signifying regime can tolerate this. They write that "[y]our only choice will be between a goat's ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests" & it is the goddess we should serve, as do I, & She needs no goddam priests. The goddess is made of love & fire, she makes us out of love & fire, our souls, & the fire is our truest home.

We come to endings, to fall. & the birbs are in the first poem. They pretended to leave early, "replaced by dynamite" & "don't even get me started on the fish", Tanya tells us. The fish, they are innocent. We are the goddam fish. Mr Fish is innocent, he does not understand capitalism but he has a wife to feed, probably little fishies too. The pain he feels is the pain we felt leaving the water so many lifetimes ago. Emma & I did the same thing, it was not easy. Now the pain is the skeleton & the other bits in us as we leave the human being behind to shift into our beast becoming, as we evolve thus, but not all the new bits fit perfectly together yet.

All the newspapers catch fire and the smoke gives way to chants, marches, hashtags . . . all those little things we like to use to distract ourselves. It's always been this way, really . . . a stone isn't always a stone isn't always a memory doesn't always carry moss. For years now it's been easier to dive into molasses but what do we have to show for it? Just ask the fish . ..
(spool)

What can one say? What matters is not all these petty squabbles, this fashionable nonsense, politics & idiots, not any ideology, what matters is the healing & the ontology, it is goddess & resurrection, what aspects of us we are to choose to affirm, & to hope that She affirms & lets them return with us for all our other lifetimes.

 

In this final fall section of the book we deal with the realization of the hell we discovered during the summer section:

like I had drowned,
and the drowning
was done,
and the rain
was over.
now my heart can
die alone
again tomorrow.

and the next day.
and all the endless days we
die alone.
(you die alone)

The horror of cPTSD is its persistence. But ultimately we realize endurance, we perdure & see that

I've lived too many years
here as a dead thing
just to die now
an alias in oil slick,
(always)

All that remains is to find the one of whom one can feel that you are together & you both know it like the ocean knows, like the seagulls tell you their truth, not the murmuring lies of the goddam pigeons:

all that always was and
all the ways we'll fly again

everything we are, and
all the ways we'll fly again
(always)

So it is with pride that we at Posthuman Poetry & Prose present to you a new & restored edition of this great work by Tanya Rakh, her second book with us.

"Hydrogen Sofi" by Tanya Rakh

As noted in the previous post, we are re-releasing the books that Tanya Rakh (a Libra & a credit to that sign) previously did elsewhere along with her future work at Posthuman Poetry & Prose. 

EDIT: To the greater glory of poet Tanya, & even of me, the designer, we have produced a new cover. This is up now. The image below is the new one, & way nicer. I have also done the cover for Wildflower Hell, which is good to go soon, & huge thanks to Rob Plath for permission to use his awesome erotic shot of a pollen drenched bee flourishing her some flowers.

Here is HYDROGEN SOFI at this link. EDIT: Here Sofi is on Amazon.

This book is a huge tribute to the goddess & the beauty of the musal function that she institutes for us, where this applies regardless of the actuality of the real muse, Sofi. It relates to the becomings of Deleuze & Guattari, where the poet becomes a pack, just as one never becomes a solitary animal. (When I say "poet", I mean rather the person who writes poems, & I here remind the reader of Dichtung & Poesie as they are differentiated by Heidegger, &, seriously, fuck "poetry". Did you know, gentle reader, that some sons of whores translate Dichtung as "poesy"? Can you imagine a less appropriate translation?) The "poet" becomes the love & the relationship between the parties, which are both parts of her. Thus the book narrates a "becoming-Sofi" in the damp decay of a cityscape, a fictional union as real as any other. (The pigeons do not want us to say any of this. At some point in everybody's becoming they must stop listening to the pigeons & heed the song of the seagulls.

This book is exceptional through the absence of any actual Sofi, since this highlights a real problem. The Other is constructed in general on the basis of egomimesis, according to an image of the beloved self, which lurks behind the myth of empathy, & all the beetles in all the fucking boxes, all frenetically cancelling out, everything real "divided by zero". Walk a mile in my shoes & you'll get athlete's foot, as Killdozer put it. But Sofi is more real than most characters in memoirs, more real than most actualized characters with whom I ever interacted. This is both a tribute to the splendid fertility of the madness that is Tanya, & also an indictment of the generic & slipshod construction of the Other.

Poesie is of the damn "poetic text". Poesie is seldom really the site of Dichtung, which is the poetic impulse to thought, the opening of thought to Being, & that which aligns real poetry (also Dichtung) with philosophy. It is the origin of thought, it is adumbrated in the play of identity and Otherness that constitutes the narrator/Sofi as real persons. This is why I am happy to publish Tanya, because Being itself plays in her texts, because she is a clearing, a place for the opening of truth. The universal truth of being becomes particular in some Chicago/Paris that never was, fuck the details, & art is dependent on Dichtung ("poetizing") qua the happening of truth, the same happening that projects these characters in their original leap into Being that makes the world of Sofi more real than alleged Gothenburg outside this window here right now.) But there are seagulls here in Gothenburg, some fine seagulls here, & they open up for me the whole of Earth. 

It is a testimony to Tanya's strength that she survived the writing of this book, where she herself creates the one that creates her. 

To return now to the book at hand, we post an Amazon review here, then the cover.

Tanya Rakh’s poetry is audacious and galvanizing. She speaks words that are the cotton candy melting on the pages in a lavender sky. Her ways of spinning luminous verse guide the reader through effervescent forests, sometimes seeming frightening, only to pull you back to safety and calm with her ardent sincerity and candid vulnerability. Rakh reaches depths of swirling cosmic oceans and the still waters of complete tranquility, all the while allowing you into parts of her that feel like dipping your feet into her personal diary of a man-made pond, tossing in countless pennies, where wish after wish seem to go unnoticed.

Hydrogen Sofi is an effulgent whisper, picturesque with such breathtakingly ravishing songs. This book makes feelings twist and turn up liquefying, marble, spiral staircases, like walking slowly on quicksand, in which you just must let yourself sink. It takes emotions yet to be named or felt and drags them through dusty trails hidden on the highest of mountains while allowing you to swim through mercury and emerge safely somehow. You will hold your breath at times.

I’ve never read any other poetry as fierce and raw with so much naked purity as Tanya Rakh’s. Hydrogen Sofi is a touch. It’s a flavor. A mood, a vibe, a taste, a smell, an image splattered on a canvas vibrating against a humid Summer sky and skipping like a stone over a lost creek where magic grows.

This book will change the way you look at poetry. There’s no way to describe it without reading it and dedicating your own poem to the book itself.

An announcement.

It is with great pleasure that we announce that Posthuman Poetry & Prose will be publishing the works of Tanya Rakh. Starting now obviously, since we are all manic here. First we shall be doing new, edited, & improved editions of Hydrogen Sofi & Wildflower Hell.

Both these books are tremendous books of poetry, so we are very excited to be working with Tanya on future projects too. The reader may be aware that these two initial volumes are the only works by a living poet that David C. McLean has used for epigraphs, for e.g. because the stars say so.

Another poet has expressed interest in McLean editing a book for her, & this will be announced in the future. This however does not mean that we will be publishing any other writers, so please do not ask. 

The horsemen of the posthumanist apocalypse are not actually real men on horses. As angels, we will not kick a horse, but we need to kick their knees. These are demons, just one being, not a horse & its rider, but one being, & all demons. The pigeons have told us. They know that WE KNOW ABOUT THE DUCKS. 

The goddess takes care of us.  

The link to the Posthuman Poetry & Prose post is here. 

EDIT: here cover to first book by Tanya we did. Thanks beautiful, wonderful Emma for being Sofi for the cover.

down in the dirt

I have not submitted to zines for a long time, but a couple of poems are due in the December 2021 issue of Down in the dirt, "baby girl wears permanent today" & "broken clock". Both are in one of the latest ones for Emma. Actually in the forthcoming she who leads the ghosts home. The zine is due out on the 1st of December anyway.