"tundra" by Tanya Rakh on Amazon

The new book by Tanya Rakh has reached Amazon. It's on sale at this link for Amazon USA, & at this one for Amazon UK. See the post below for my introduction & further information.

Amazon, being corporate scumbags, don't pay very well. So, if you prefer the artist, Tanya, to make a little more for her work, please consider buying from Lulu, at this link. They at least pay acceptable royalties, though the price is forced up by Amazon.  

"tundra", by Tanya Rakh

It is enormously gratifying that a new book, tundra, by Tanya Rakh is now available from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, with a brief introduction by me. The book is fifty numbered pages, & includes Tanya's own illustrations & cover art. I might as well post my introduction below, after the cover. 

The book is available direct at this link, & the proof has been approved so the book is coming to online sites like Amazon shortly. Feel free to buy direct though, because Lulu pay authors much more than Amazon & other major booksellers.

 

It is gratifying to publish this present volume by Tanya Rakh, a short collection of poems called tundra.

For reasons that I have elsewhere described at great length, it is not possible to capture intensity & fire in the drab garb of the natural languages, but it is undoubtedly possible to adumbrate them via negativa, or to hint at them as the unnameable that hides within the interstices of the text.

that’s the secret
you can paint
with the other side
(“quill”)

As I have previously written of Rakh, this focus on fire & intensity, on all varieties of passion, means that she produces Dichtung, not Poesie: the work thereby belongs to & reveals earth as it pertains to beast & goddess, not the paltry human world, the scientific world that relies on commensurability to describe everything in terms of quality & quantity, a world blind to intensity.

It is also most gratifying to me to note that this book clearly touches on the eternal return, & does so in a way that is entirely compatible with my own Deleuzian understanding of Nietzsche & the selective, as it were, nature of the divine attention:

yes, it’s always the end, we finally make it and the wind picks up and the mountains peel back to beginning again. how do we stay? what imprints are left after the blood tide? after all these planets close their eyes?

nothing but this, love. a wide-eyed sea. all screaming ghosts of sun flesh swimming through the open dream. a sky arched over water. soft lights twinkling past the edge of a century.

As the above quote illustrates, it is only intensity that is ultimately real, because the energy that constantly emanates from goddess to fuel this illusion that it pleases Her to construct is ultimately fire - it is the eternal & infinite fecundity that quantum physics shows is always already there instead of the grotesque & imaginary void that torments the imagination of the weak & reactive. It is always fang & fury & pain, & this is obviously nothing other than love.

The poem “sulfur” is perhaps the closest this book comes to the Mesopotamian understanding of primal goddess:

I cry my soul
into seven ancient rivers

each opens the mouth
of a burning star—

a sulfur world
that breathes our language

If that isn’t redolent of Lamaštû, the seven witches, then I don’t know who screams in the night or why.

"Global Trumpeter" interview

Here, at this link an interview I did for Global Trumpeter, a digital magazine from Delhi, where I am nothing like as controversial as I can be, for some reason. Horrid picture of me, of course, especially since it was taken before I recently started lifting weights again. 

Anyway, here's my Amazon UK page, where some offers are available. Here's the US Amazon page, with more detail.

 

Tanya Rakh, "too short a far shot"

It is with immense delight that I can announce that a new book by Tanya Rakh is going to be available as soon as one of us has seen the proof. It is with great happiness that I announce this & naturally I have done an introductory manifesto. 

This follows, as does the cover. The picture is Tanya's "spiral tree." It is now on sale here, coming to Amazon soon.

EDIT: Here is is at this link on Amazon. Here it is at this very similar link on UK Amazon too. It would be wonderful if you bought from Lulu instead, of course, because Tanya would then get much more money.

Introduction

This book is written as a purge of old ghosts, or Tanya said it was at least. It is her fourth book with Posthuman Poetry & Prose. It speaks of alienation & distances, the incommunicability of intensity. I too know how it feels when organs do not fit in this stupid human skin, & I certainly don't understand capitalism. Tanya, too, has a fish family to look after, we all have something that obliges us to engage with gross & grotesque world.

Anyway, what is purged is things that do not appertain to the now, things that are inessential & already transcended; the machinations of Maya, that what is not, what Mahadevi has done to pass Her time & entertain Herself, because eternal perfection is dull when One is wanton & grows desirous, as She says Herself that She does. Intensity cannot be expressed in any human tongue, but Kali as Matangi can show it to those She favours, so we can step sideways into the light with Her for a while. This book does this, & sings the perfection of the dirty, the impure, the “immaculate dirt”, for everything is essentially divine. The book ends with the chain of return seen as always already perfect, every fall, everything part of Mother with the “huge black eyes”.

For everything is what it is, & this book shows how to approach the essentially incomprehensible nature of what is, the cruel confusion that seemingly is, & these poems delineate a stance to take to the world that allows us to see earth behind it, sustaining & upholding it. Tanya shows that the only way to do this is to relinquish the illusions of humanism & affirm the beast.

Because goddess is always desirous, She always wants things to happen, so there is not going to be any quiescent end state, incarnation is forever, these fleshy transactions, &, like Mr. Fish himself, we shall always carry some false body around, though we are fire & formless, & we belong in Her perfection.

As Tanya points out, the animal sleeps like Maa Kali lives, naked & dressed in space, too large to ever be contained.

Naturally, I advocate the purchase, reading, & regular rereading of this book. I do not interpret it, for it is a manifestation, an expression of the emptiness & the ever-present ghosts, the hungry ghosts, the ghouls at the heart of illusion. It is a very beautiful book & I am sure that Kali is delighted, for it is fire & power, as is She.

"Alien Songs" by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru

Delighted to announce the arrival of a book of duets by Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. The poems in Alien Songs, on sale here, & on sale here at Amazon, are of the posthuman diaspora that learns to survive beyond identity. Only the divergent returns. Only what is "alien", in the sense of estranged from humanist traditions, only what is Dionysian individuation - not the I, the self, & their identity - will be validated by the posthuman naissance that celebrates the chaos of the eternal return, where the subject is the Other, & alienated, in principle, from its "self" by the Kantian "Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of 'I think' includ[ing] in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other." (Deleuze). The chaosmos goddess creates is anarchic; identities are weak, they do not return. 

& poetry just is a nostalgia for presence, for simple self-identity, for all the substantial constructs, or so Derrida tells us. But poetry needs to be the inarticulate cry of intensity, the indeterminate, that which is not concealed behind a name or a face  but dances its passion in the flame & naked. Poetry needs to capture this, per impossibile - it might scream to that which throbs an instant in the meat & cannot be measured against anything. Otherwise things play real when you look at them & words grow into unreliable maps & forget what stars there are.

Though I publish others on an occasional basis, Tanya is basically the other half of posthuman poetry, & when I return to goddess it is my hope that she will take it over. It is a privilege to publish all of her previous & forthcoming work, & a delight to see how seamless this collaboration with Ndotono is.

Tanya & Ndotono wrote this intro

Alien Songs is a fully collaborative collection of duets in verse. These duets each stand alone as individual pieces, but also join together to create an amalgamated star atlas for a breathing and multitextured extraterrestrial world.

Each of our songs embodies an aspect of this world—some echo an element, others an organ, yet others a phenomena of nature—and there are many more totems to explore. All of these pieces, separately and combined, are calls to a connection beyond the confines of everyday space and time, the heavy matter of humanity.

While the maladjusted soul may not be able to easily drag its accompanying body off this planet for a spell, it can dissolve for a while between astral wind currents when the right words are sung. These duets are incantations, oracles, scribblings on the walls of the heart. By reading them, we hope all lonely Aliens can catch a few glimmers of their home stars.

Tanya Rakh and Ndotono Waweru

The book is absolutely amazing, & the cover is below, with thanks to the brilliant photographer Shaina Sterrett for letting us use her image. Here is Shaina's Instagram where she shares her art.

Here is a sample poem online at Spillwords at this link. Alien Songs is on sale at this link. it can also be found on Amazon at this link. Note that it is better for the writers if you buy direct from Lulu.

I am looking forward to the publication of Tanya Rakh's ghost fractals soon, goddess willing. There will also be a book of visual poetry, vispo, coming from Tanya too, this will be printed with quality paper & ink, everything you do to the moon. It will be awesome.

Lulu spotlight

Here is the Lulu spotlight for Posthuman Poetry & Prose. These are the books I have available, as well as books by Tanya Rakh, Carolyn Srygley Mooore, & Linnet Phoenix, here at this link. There is now also a collaboration between Tanya Rakh & Ndotono Waweru. Lulu charge postage, unlike Prime, but this has become much more reasonable than it used to be.

All my extant books from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & some other places earlier, are there. There are three novels, all fairly weird, basically anti-novels. There are several chapbooks, & a considerable number of books of poetry. 

Themes in the books range from antinatalist & posthumanist manifestos, discussions of cPTSD & trauma, the goddesses Tiamat, Lilītu, Lamaštû, & Kali Maa, the great mother, becomings_animal, the beast, sexuality, BDSM, love, libidinal economy, the incommensurability of intensity, anarchism, diverse inequities, & psychiatric fascism. I am indebted to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Mother Juliana of Norwich, Gertrude Stein, Derrida, & others for inspiration. 

More books by me are due in the future, & all the future works by Tanya Rakh, who is half of Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & occasional books by some others in the future.

As you may know, Amazon are sleazy & try to prevent unionization so they can carry on treating their workers like shit. They also, in my case at least, frequently list books from the wrong places, like Book depository, so you have to find the Amazon version yourself. As noted, it is way better if you buy them from here, unless relying on prime for shipping. In any case, Lulu are not quite as expensive for shipping as they used to be.

Jonathan Rossignol at LFLR Network

Thanks to Jonathan Rossignol, American occult writer, for this awesome kickass podcast here on YouTube. The bit about me is chapter two of the video, which starts round 29 minutes in. The link in the first sentence starts at the right place for the shoutout to me, but the embedded video below the pigeon starts at the beginning.

 

Here is his website. 

This is great, & it's really kind of him to do this &, yes, I do actually know John Z Pigeon on Twitter. 

 

Amazon Author Page Update

Note that Amazon do not always have the books listed as first choice from them, but from more expensive sites like Book Depository, though you can generally find the Amazon version. If you want to avoid this scam, please feel free to order from Lulu, since Lulu have a shipping fee, but sell at the reasonable price that I assign. This whole sentence links to their storefront for Posthuman Poetry & Prose. In general it is better that you buy from them. Lulu pay me as writer more, & they pay quicker.

Here is my Amazon.com Author Page, at this link. I have recently updated this, approving the proof & so forth, so that all the books are available there now. The cover to the most recent book is at the top of the included pictures, & a new one is being written right now.

Here is the link to amazon.co.uk where they are also available.

All my relevant works from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & some other places earlier, are there. There are three novels, all fairly unconventional. There are several chapbooks, & a considerable number of books of poetry. I have reduced the prices on the older ones, from other publishers than PPP, to conform to my current pricing, since I think the original prices were a trifle high, & the listings on Amazon now reflect this change. 

Themes in the books range from antinatalist & posthumanist manifestos, discussions of cPTSD & trauma, the goddess, the great mother, becomings_animal, the beast, sexuality, BDSM, love, libidinal economy, the incommensurablity of intensity, diverse inequities, & psychiatric fascism. 

I am indebted to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Foucault, Mother Juliana of Norwich, Gertrude Stein, Derrida, & others for inspiration.

 

Do me a favour though, if you can, & buy from the Posthuman Poetry & Prose spotlight at Lulu, at this link. We get way more money from them, as noted, & much quicker too, since Amazon don't just fuck with their employees, they fuck with everybody. 

Here is the Amazon Author Page for Tanya Rakh, the other half of this posthuman project, where she has two books in their current versions from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. Linnet Phoenix' has published book with Posthuman Poetry & Prose which is only available here at Lulu due to the cost of better paper, printing the images, & so forth. Here is Linnet's blog though, where her other books are linked. Here is the one book with us Post-ed on Your Mirror, linked at Lulu. 

We are very excited to have ghost fractals by Tanya Rakh in the pipeline, & Tanya is going to be publishing with Posthuman Poetry & Prose in the future. 

Tanya Rakh's Amazon Author Page sorted out

OK, Tanya now has her Amazon author page ready, though I imagine more media will be added, with her books in their new approved updated versions. Here is the link.

Now, naturally, we prefer you to use Lulu & buy direct there, since Tanya gets paid way more that way, & way quicker, but if you need Prime or whatever, then buy from Amazon. Maybe you like that some of the drivers are forced to piss in bottles, you like supporting billionaires, & you hate trade unions, I dunno. But, anyway, feel free to use Amazon.

Here are the book covers:

reading from "Wildflower Hell" by Tanya Rakh

Here is a video of Tanya reading from Wildflower Hell at midnight in Texas.  Here is the book. It is also here at Amazon now.

The book is coming to Amazon soon. 

 

"Wildflower Hell", by Tanya Rakh

It is with great pleasure that we at Posthuman Poetry & Prose hereby announce that Tanya Rakh has now seen & approved the proof copy of her wonderful poetry collection Wildflower Hell, which is therefore now officially released & on sale at this link.

There is a brief manifesto/introduction by me in this book, at Tanya's request, & that appears in a post further down in this blog, which I link here too.

Both this book & Hydrogen Sofi are now also approved for the Amazon website, & both should appear there soon. The links will follow, naturally, because I shall update this post in due course when they are on sale there. EDIT: Here is the update & here is the link.

& here is the cover. Huge thanks to Rob Plath for kindly allowing us to use his awesome photograph. It's a birbcore illustration for a birbcore book.

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.

Fevers of the Mind interview

Thanks to David L. O'Nan for doing the interview linked here with me at Fevers of the Mind.

I endorse this:

"I do not write much about social issues, but I am an antinatalist & vegan. I do not want humans extinct necessarily, just a whole lot less of them. A great deal of what I do mention about society involves things that are vaguely Foucauldian; about biopower, indoctrination, & psychiatric, social, & medical fascism. Nietzsche’s “abyss” quote is about how “progressives” become fascists or worse, while allegedly fighting fascism, & the Foucauldian critique of the allegedly well-meaning “medical” fascism, disciplining unruly bodies, is much more wide-ranging."

& I agree with me about this too:

"I no longer affiliate with humanity, my allegiance lies elsewhere. Becomings-animal, in Deleuze & Guattari’s work, are very inspirational, since they show how a posthuman state can be understood like postmodernism as not a successor state, as “post” implies, but a crisis state or a reversion – the end of philosophy in the pre-Socratics, for Heidegger, while I align more with beasts than people. I am Aries with Mercury & Venus both in Pisces, & moon in Gemini. I’m sure that helps when it comes to writing."

Also include a bit mysteriously missing in interview

"I once did a lot of collaborative work about BDSM, no longer available, but some of the "poems for Emma" series became what Emma described as "deviant pornography." For some reason subs have often been aware from my writing in general that I am a dominant. I do not know how, I suppose most of them are very clever girls."

 

 

because the stars say so

New from Posthuman Poetry & Prose, because the stars say so, previously fourth part of the "poems for Emma" series & now one of the two that I have retained, is now out & on sale at this link. Blurb follows. $12 or £10 for 169 pp is not bad. It is also on Amazon here.

"This is the fourth book in the "poems for Emma" series. It is love poetry, but also songs of praise to the fire & the goddess. This book contains poems with epigraphs drawn from the marvelous books of Tanya Rakh, to whom McLean is indebted for inspiration. McLean is also heavily indebted to Emma for being his perfect muse."

See the post below this one for links to Tanya's books. The cover is below. Samples will be posted in a day or two, I am sure.  

There is more religious stuff in this book, of the goddess, Mother Juliana & her (partial) misgendering of the goddess, past lives, BDSM, eroticism, Lyotard & the libidinal, the eternal return & affirmation, Deleuze & Guattari & becomings animal, & various other things. It's the book by me that I like best.

Work available by David C. McLean

If you are looking for other writers from Posthuman Poetry & Prose they are linked here in the post in the other blog devoted to the press.

This is the restored Autoerotic Elegies, with a new URL It is the blog where I, David C. McLean, list publications & so forth. I no longer have all the links to online work,  but had a good number of these bookmarked, & have listed them in the links section. There are about 700 magazines, online & in print, where work by me has appeared. Quite a few of my earlier chapbooks & the first three full length poetry collections are also mostly omitted here.

Here is my Amazon Author Page, to simplify locating "product". As far as I am concerned it is best to buy at the Lulu spotlight linked here anyway.  There are three novels, four chapbooks, and a considerable number of full length poetry collections at Lulu. These are also now available at Amazon, where they should appear a couple of weeks at least after they are available at Lulu.

I shall begin with things written from 2020 on. Honestly, these are way better. The most recent come first.

Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother is now on sale at UK Amazon at this link. It is also available from US Amazon. See the post below for further details.

This is the latest book in McLean's series about aspects of goddess, & Lamaštû is, together with Maa Kali & Tiamat, one of the three aspects that he regards as most primal. The next will probably be about Tiamat. As always there is a lengthy prose introduction before the poems.

The depiction of Lamaštû in popular fiction & films for the great unwashed is as offensive as the scurrilous lies told about Lilītu by the devotees of the patriarchal "gods".

But Lamaštû is a primal Mesopotamian goddess who was seen as being tasked with curbing human hubris. McLean sees Her as the form of Dark Mother most suited to the modern age, when population needs to be controlled & humanism & human narcissism need to be stamped out.

 Coming to Amazon soon enough, but at present at this link, here is my Tara is the fire. Blurb & cover, then six samples, follow. Choosing some fairly arbitrary samples, not the best ones, I must say that this seems to be to be the best I ever wrote. There's quite a lot in this book about non-discrimination, intensity, incommensurability, human narcissism, & the fundamental nature of creation & cosmos, drawing on Karen Barad, among others. A lot of this was revealed to me by Lamaštû, somewhat to my surprise. Lamaštû is the subject of my next book, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, will be pretty much another antinatalist manifesto. 

This book is about Tara, the second Mahavidya.  It continues McLean's series about goddess.

Tara embodies the explosive energy of cosmos that is constantly  consumed & constantly renewed.

She teaches us how dualisms are empty, how ritual is unnecessary, & how  alignment with goddess offers us liberation.

 Today I make available divine fury: poems for Lilītu & Lamaštû from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. I am also about to release Tara is the fire, but I shall give that a separate post. Here is the first of these books on sale direct, probably coming at Amazon soon. After the Tara book, I am writing one solely about Lamaštû - partly from gratitude to Her for favours received, partly because Her role in preventing conception makes Her very well adapted to my antinatalist predilections.

In the Lilītu & Lamaštû book, with which I am rather pleased, I do deal with my usual themes: humanist narcissism, how Dark Mother has become dea abscondita, the bogus patriarchal religions with their daddy kinks, the narcissistic fear of chaos, the "bipolar" contrast between spicy forms of goddess & the more vanilla aspects of divinity, masculinism & sexism within religion & the occult, &, of course, last but not least, the incommensurability of intensity & the shortcomings of language.

I am hugely grateful to Nausicaa Morgue for the cover images & for discussion of both these aspects of Dark Mother.

Blurb & cover follow, &, since I have neglected to post samples recently, four sample poems:

This book extends McLean's series about goddess to include Lilītu & Lamaštû, & removes Lilītu completely from the fictional image of Her as a creature of the patriarchal god. She is a black moon Kali & a central aspect of Dark Mother.

Seeing Lilītu as a demon is not seeing Her in Her full bipolar divinity as goddess, with Her benevolent & "malevolent" aspects incorporated.

If we cannot accept the spicy aspects of goddess, then we do not deserve Her incalculable bounty.

 Lalita drinks too much hits Amazon (soon) at this link or at this one for US Amazon. Here it is at Lulu. Samples posted in this post.

Cover & blurb below.

This book continues McLean's series about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas & is about Lalita or Shodashi, the third Mahavidya.

The poems are preceded by a lengthy & controversial introduction, where McLean discusses goddess; the selective Nietzschean eternal return as a template for reincarnation; Kali & temporality; the imaginary ego; spirituality & narcissism; the narcissistic nature of the guru phenomenon; intensity & incommensurability; the patriarchy & fratriarchy; & the colonialism to which the tribal peoples in India are subjected.

The cover image is the Sri Yantra.

 Here is Durga sings every night, Amazon details in due course.

This book by David C. McLean is a complement to the series that he is writing on Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas. 

It contains an introduction that relates Durga to Kali, & describes the contrast between the demands of commensurability & intensity, between chaos & order, & between goddess & patriarchal oppression. 

McLean argues that the only fundamental wrong is narcissism, & describes the selective eternal return in Deleuzian terms so the ego is excluded, only the partial & fragmentary gets to be born again, only that which is incomplete & process.

There's a new book by me at the Lulu bookstore, forthcoming from Amazon etc but it's better for us if you buy from Lulu anyway. Full of massive love for Kali Maa & Her aspect Matangi. Blurb & cover follow, linked here Matangi assembles Her rejects.

This is the second book about Mother Kali from David C. McLean & it focuses on the Mahavidya Matangi, who controls art & poetry, & is the goddess of impurity. She is related to Hecate & other Dark Mothers. 

In the introduction there is discussion of Her as source of understanding of the incommensurable & McLean relates Her to Deleuze & Lyotard. He sees in Her a solution to the issue of the expression of intensity. 

We hope that this book pleases Kali Maa.

 

Finally got my new book finished after much buggering about, since I need to be comfortable with it, it being about the Divine Mother as it is. But Maa Kali cherishes imperfection & impurity, so that's something of a consolation. I am releasing it now because I have been constantly & obsessively adding to it, & want to hurry up with writing the next book about Matangi instead.

It is on sale here at Lulu, & here it now is on Amazon at this link. It is listed on  Amazon UK as well. The book is more expensive than I might wish, £12.50 or $16.50, with other currencies at corresponding rates, but blame the twats at Amazon for that, given that the book is 232 pages in length.

The book contains a 45 page introduction about Kali. The introduction does not pretend to be comprehensive but relates the scriptures about Her to posthumanism, & the selective & creative nature of reincarnation, & speaks of the ultimate eternal return after the dissolution, when Her restive & fickle nature will create again. Some of this is drawn from the Posthuman poetry manifesto & adds to that.  The manifesto is on Amazon too.) Anyway, as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa wrote, She only saves one in a hundred thousand. 

The introduction also includes much ranting about narcissism, neo-colonialism against indigenous peoples, the patriarchy, the caste system, the narcissism of many "gurus", & the disgraceful British empire.

Blurb, cover, & samples follow:

This book is the first about Kali Maa & the Mahavidyas that McLean has written. This is what he proposes to write about in the future. 

The book includes a 45 page introduction in which McLean relates the Divine Mother to posthuman themes. There will no full manifesto on the basis of this but the ideas will be developed in later books..

The cover image is Kali's yantra.

The manifesto about posthumanism that was posted previously in this blog now serves as the the introduction to my recent book of poems, everything essential. It builds upon the two previous manifestos about antinatalism & posthumanism that were included in the earlier books too much human & goddess says, Emma. But I have now released a book of prose that isn't a novel. It's a book of theory about posthumanism, deep ecology, goddess, & poetics, There is quite a lot about posthumanism, about new materialism, about Heidegger & Derrida's discussion of poetics, about deep ecology, earth & world, & becomings-animal, & about Deleuze & temporality. Also, naturally, there is much about goddess & Tiamat, prior to the patriarchal deities of Babylon & later. All this in detail in the long version that is now on sale.

 Now this is the Lulu link for the full version, A new posthuman poetry manifesto, the proof looking great. 

I have three new books of poems out now, the first since moving to the UK. From Posthuman Poetry & Prose all of them, & the third of these is everything essential. It is on sale at this link. It also contains a shortened form of the above manifesto. Themes & inspirations include nature in North Somerset; goddess Tiamat; posthumanism & postmodernism; Deleuze & Guattari's becoming animal & rhizomes; Foucault's antihumanism & antifascism; Derrida's ethics, poetics, & ethopoetics; Nietzsche in general, especially the return as the return of the dissolved self; Lyotard's intensity; new materialism; indeterminacy; goddess chaos versus patriarchal order; the Enuma Elish; & love, sexuality, & BDSM.

The book is 205 numbered pages, with a 45 page introductory manifesto that took a lot of work. I have edited this & given more attention to it than usual. It's a sort of statement. The manifesto is about posthumanism, goddess Tiamat, chaos, & posthuman poetics, & I try to enact it in the poems - the dissolution of the ego in Deleuze's reading of the Nietzschean eternal return, the intensity, the beast, the ahuman that I am become. The sexual intensity that was always there in previous series has transformed into something else & now pervades everything - from goddess to brutality, from butterflies to philosophy. Now everything essential is on sale at this link. 

 The second is skulls & dust, & it is available at this link.

This is the second collection of poems written by McLean since his return to the UK this year. It writes of how the goddess is to be seen present in the nature of Somerset. This is a book about flesh & intensity, the fire inside. Some parts are protective magic, & McLean also has issues with the ghost that has always accompanied him, but they are ultimately reconciled.

The first UK book was goddess gives sun enough. This book is on sale here at Lulu, Amazon too. This link is to UK Amazon. This link is to US amazon.com.

Blurb follows, then cover:

This book is the first written since McLean returned to England in 2022 , & follows a series of books of love poetry. As such, it shows an attempt to reorient to a life that is meaningful because of earth, nature, beast, & goddess, without any focus for the sexuality with which the flesh, as such, is instinct, & without any sense of social connection. The intensity differs thereby in its focus, though some themes are retained. These are poems about living on, & trusting in the goddess to give the fire & the words one needs to live & feel.

 

Here is because the stars say so, poems for Emma iv

A book of poems called we dance the ghost, Emma, is finished & edited & out at this link from Posthuman Poetry & Prose. I no longer have any connection with Oneiros Books.

Blurb then cover

This is the third book in David C. McLean's first trilogy of poems for Emma. McLean worships Emma, & regards her as his goddess & muse. He has never written better, & he is pretty sure that she is the best muse ever. One can see how, during the writing of this book, McLean suffered a form of nervous breakdown, but that the strength of his feelings for Emma pulled him back together, reassembled his membra disjecta. Love did that. Love heals. Additional themes, as so often, are posthumanism, antinatalism, animals, Lyotard & libidinal economy, & love always, sex & love. The title is, obviously enough, inspired by a song by the Sisters of Mercy. This book is published by POSTHUMAN POETRY & PROSE

A third novel called divinity extractor fan is now available here at Lulu, & there are also second rewritten editions of the first two novels coming, at some point, these are both complete anyway. 

Blurb then cover here:

This is a novel that became an anti-novel. It quotes extensively from Lyotard, Artaud, Nietzsche, & Burton's "The Anatomy of Melancholy". It explores the posthuman, antinatalism, overpopulation, & ecology. It is primarily an attempt by the author to identify his love for his muse, Emma, in the form of a bizarre prose poem that grew into a bizarre novel. Sacher-Masoch & St. Augustine of Hippo are sampled in & cited, with footnotes & everything. Deleuze & Guattari with their becoming-animal are fea

This is the second collection of poems written by McLean since his return to the UK this year. It writes of how the goddess is to be seen present in the nature of Somerset. This is a book about flesh & intensity, the fire inside. Some parts are protective magic, & McLean also has issues with the ghost that has always accompanied him, but they are ultimately reconciled.

tured as well, at some length.

There is another full length called too little beast, the full length follow up to too much human. It's a posthuman antinatalist manifesto. Here it is at Lulu.

Blurb then cover follow:

too little beast: too much human ii is David C. McLean's expansion & revision of his chapbook from Black Editions Press, too much human. The manifesto in the introduction has been rewritten to extend it from antinatalism to also include posthumanism. This extension was provoked by his growing dislike for humans & their goddam ideology, & his worship of another non-human, the love of his life, the wonderful Emma, McLean's brilliant muse & inspiration. This revision constitutes what is probably the last poetry book by McLean that will not be part of the poems for Emma series.

At present I also have the following slightly older books on sale at Amazon &/or Lulu. I shall give the Lulu links, you can find most of them on Amazon, the easiest way would naturally be through my Amazon Author Page, linked here.

I start with recent editions of my first two novels. Both were from Oneiros Books in 2015 but now are from Posthuman Poetry & prose. They are expanded, improved, rewritten, & corrected since I found the texts to the first two very unsatisfactory.

First Henrietta Remembers. Here it is. 

This is a revised & corrected edition of Henrietta remembers. The text is expanded somewhat & considerably improved. The book was originally published in 2015 by Oneiros Books.

The reader should not assume that Henrietta is not a real person.

The next is flesh and resurrection, here at Lulu too.

Even more fucked up than McLean's first novel (Henrietta Remembers), which makes it well better, it abandons all pretense of plot & degenerates nicely into an inchoate prose poem.

 

First of the earlier poetry collections I promote, originally from Oneiros Books, nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die, is here at Lulu. 

The eviscerating negation of a pristine surgeon, this book culminates in a collection of what represents McLean’s finest work to date. These are no bullshit poems, etched with a masterful control of both succinct language and piercing imagery, born of a restless intellect, at once at war with the within and the without. This book has the capacity to make you feel empowered in the face of the Nothing that is, and you will thank him for it…

Then my second poetry collection from Oneiros, Things the Dead Say. Also here at Lulu.  

Love hate murder sex - the boiling down of western culture to its primitive urges, horror movies as the sublimation of our self-loathing, married to a critique of the 'society of the spectacle'. Powerful stuff.

Thirdly, but from Bone Orchard Press, a chapbook, the children without guns. Here at Lulu. 

'the children without guns' is further darkly beautiful poetic wizardry from David McLean...

Fourth, my third poetry collection from Oneiros, of desire & the lesion that is the ego. Here at Lulu. This is a book of poems inspired thematically by Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.

Here are words to somewhat deconstruct your daily lives. McLean delivers sermons of a beautiful nothing(s) enriched by perceptions that pervasively cover the very lives you follow inanely day in, day out. He dissects the mundane and the superfluity of existence (if any) with a hacksaw and without much anaesthetic. His language is cutting, divisive, insightful, deploring, archaic but strong with a fleshy boldness that should and will be revered. David McLean seeks out the plastic and then tends to look underneath the plasticity of what man has made; the absurdity of god, the hilarity of societal values and the hypocritical agenda of righteous folk. The lesion of what McLean explores in this collection is indeed the nonsense that dominates us all whether aware or unaware however, after you read this blistering book, you’ll be sure to be angry at something in this dying world. Craig Podmore (Author of The Origin of Manias, Oneiros Books)

Here is the fourth poetry collection from Oneiros, the fifth book, Zara and the Ghost of Gertrude. It's not weird to be inspired by  the late Ms. Stein. Here it is on sale.

David McLean's latest and (arguably) nastiest collection so far.

Sixth we have passion is dead flesh, from Black Editions. Here at Lulu. 

this is about the positivity & pleasure that hides at the heart of all the pain & hatred like a red rose in the murderer's heart, according to Genet. it is about the shit at the heart of all literature, everything here from Myra Hindley to Bodidharma, fuck you very much

Seventh is the second full length about Deleuze & Guattari, Black Editions did this one too, of desire & the desert. Here at Lulu.

a collection of poems written after rereading Mille plateaux by Deleuze & Guattari.

Then we have a misanthropic chapbook about overpopulation and antinatalism, too much human, here at Lulu, and also from Black Editions. This is also available in the above extended version as a full length, too little beast. The chapbook remains on sale as it differs from the remake.

A beautiful hand grenade of a book that would probably serve as effective population control for the hysterically reactive and weak of heart. Throw it into a crowd of SJWs and watch them die. A.D. Hitchin, author of CONSENSUAL.