"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.