"Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother" at Amazon.

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.

Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother

Here is Lamaštû: Poems for the Anti-Mother, my new book in the series about various aspects of goddess, Dark Mother, Kali Maa, &  this volume is about Lamaštû. It is available direct from Lulu at this link, & will be available from Amazon & other corporate whores soon enough. Blurb & cover follow, as is my wont.

Edit: I have received & approved the proof for this today the 29th of January. It will be available from Amazon etc soon enough. It looks good.

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.

 

 

poems for Lilītu & Lamaštû

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.

Six samples from forthcoming "everything essential"

Here are six samples from my forthcoming everything essential, due whenever we see & approve the proof copy. The cover comes first. The manifesto that introduces the book was previously posted below in this blog at this link. Here it is on Amazon UK. Here on Amazon USA. Now it is lengthened & made more complete, & has grown into a book of its own, A posthuman poetry manifesto which I will post a couple of weeks after this one is out. The book is reviewed above by Carolyn Srygley-Moore in this post.

EDIT: Out now.

I update this post to note that I have approved the proof & allowed the 205 page book via Posthuman Poetry & Prose's storefront, where it is on sale at this link, & made it available on Amazon, Ingram, B&N, etc, where it will appear in due course.

The book is the third book of poems since my return to the UK, & 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. It is very clearly a book of poems for Emma, but it is not part of the series; she is muse & motivator, but there is more to these poems, for the sexual intenisty that was always there has now pervaded everything - from goddess to brutality, from butterflies to philosophy.

I have also, as noted, finished a prose book with a more extensive version of the manifesto that I shall publish separately. The manifesto in the new prose version is close to 100 numbered pages & is due to become available once I approve the proof in a while.A new book to be called (probably) we are flesh of Tiamat is being written.

Extended version of the posthumanist manifesto

Earlier this year, I wrote a manifesto for too little beast, a revised & posthuman version of the shorter antinatalist manifesto for too much human, a chapbook that I had written a few years previously. Now this present text is an addendum, an extension, & a clarification of parts of that earlier manifesto. I shall not supply a list of references, & I do not think that footnotes are very appropriate in a book of poems; they are fine in novels, not poems, but I have used them anyway in case the reader wants to find out more about the subject. Basically, what I add here boils down to the observation that posthumanism, allied to new materialism, is an extension of the liberatory effect of feminism that adds the whole relational context of animal & vegetable being to the agents & patients to be taken into account in discourse.

By "posthuman", I do not want to lead the reader to thoughts of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, whatever, which are a part of transhumanism, since I myself am inclined to interpret posthumanism as more of a focus on the nonhuman after the end of humanism, which has very much overstayed its welcome. In Francesca Ferrando's terminology,¹ I would probably count as belonging to the post-anthropocentric wing of the posthuman, which is actually, according to Ferrando, more radical. As she points out, transhumanism is a sort of ultra-humanism. Posthumanism, on the other hand, originated in feminist discourse in the eighties & nineties; it is opposed to speciesism, it is opposed to exceptionalism, & it is anti-exclusionary. There is a metahumanism that bases itself on the writings of Deleuze, & that emphasizes the significations of relational embodiment, but I shall not discuss this further here

In general posthumanism is a rethinking of what humanity & humanism's place, if any, should be in the world. Here, as elsewhere, I always mean "world" as something very much like Welt in Heidegger, as opposed to Erde, or "earth". The world is the framework of meaning & definitions by which we who use language understand things in the world; it is human & verbal. The earth is being as such, presencing, & it sustains, shelters, & protects. It cannot be grasped or exhausted by the world, it is pre-verbal:

The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the world. …The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
(Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art)²

The earth in all of my books for Emma, & in this one too, is something sacred given by goddess, the fire & love at the heart of being, it is beast who lives there alone, poor in world.

Now Heidegger was an opponent of humanism, as a relic of essentialist metaphysics, & his work has been seen as eminently suitable to ground a deep ecological understanding of the predicament we now face.³ Both Arne Naess, who founded deep ecology, & the later Heidegger argue that ethics, the world around us, & human beings must be understood in new ways in order to save the environment. The natural environment should be seen as a value in itself, not just as framework for resources.⁴ Mankind is not the sovereign, at best a shepherd of being for Heidegger, a subject who must widen & deepen her narrow isolation to become the deep self for Naess, & in both cases what is called for is a radical transmutation. There is a releasement for Heidegger & Naess, there is a becoming & a conversion for me.

In all cases a surrender to the self-giving of poiesis, both as phusis & through our techne, which waits respectfully for what is given us, takes place. Cost benefit analysis will never get us there. Part of respecting deep ecology or earth, however, is a posthuman perspective. So I see the Heidegger/Naess deep ecological perspective as a natural way of applying this posthumanist perspective, an allied philosophy that calls for a transformation & a questioning of how subjectivity is understood.

Now, as noted, many people understand posthumanism as something to do with AI or robotics, whatever, some form of transhumanism, an extension of the human. I am not espousing this. Far from it, I instead would refer the reader to Lyotard, & the case of his postmodernism, understood as a detachment from the grand narratives of modernism. Postmodernism is also something that precedes modernism, it's a crisis state of modernism itself, & the "post" should not be taken as implying a strict & sequential evolution from modernism to postmodernism, the latter understood as a successor state to the less developed former state.

For me, posthumanism also implies a de-evolution, a reevaluation of evolutionary "priorities", & a variegated becoming-beast. As in Deleuze & Guattari & becoming-animal, it is a real becoming that does not necessarily involve an actual end state with some physical animal body. Now it just so happens that I am a shapeshifter, Emma made this start, it is she who first made this change happen in me, & I might have inadvertently scared other people on occasion by changing at heightened or excited moments. It is not, however, the case that becoming beast necessarily involves this actual change. I would, however, advocate it; we are not all permitted to evolve, but it is possible to switch allegiance, to identify as something better, to not let whatever it is that screams our passion & desire be stifled & restricted any more by our genetic identity than it should be by an outdated set of gender roles.

Now valuing the beast is not to be misunderstood as idealizing the cute animal, or ignoring the savagery & violence of nature. I do not have issues with pain, violence, predators predating. I myself am a vegan for moral & ecological reasons, but that is another issue, I'm just not biologically a carnivore. Wolves or cats predating is not a moral issue, they are moral patients, not moral agents. Me eating meat would be a moral issue, & for a great number of reasons. The complaint of the carnist is a disgusting echo of the past: "Don't worry about slaves." "Don't worry about women." "Don't worry about animals."

As i said in the earlier manifesto, humanism used to have a point. It was a grand narrative or meta-narrative that established science & empiricism, broke away from the religious control of everything. This was because theology was the principal enemy then, & the proper study of mankind, according to humanism, was "man".

As I wrote in the first manifesto: "Posthumanism does not only or necessarily involve hybrids & AI. It can be a return to a prehuman animal identity, as the postmodern precedes the modern. The beast precedes the human both in the order of chronology &, now, let's be realistic, in the order of priority. I am animal: not subhuman or superhuman, just different." We need to shake off the old identifications, as well as the belief that the earth that shelters & protects us is of any less value than the cultural worlds that goddam humans inflict upon that earth.

Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately, every "thing " - even materiality - is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.⁵

Barad is a new materialist. For new materialism, there is no clear line between matter & culture. As biology is mediated by culture, so is culture a product of biological organisms. The problem with radical constructivism is that, as Barad points out, one pays attention to everything but nature & matter. "the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter."⁶ To posthumanism & new materialism, it all matters. Ferrando describes the work of Butler as creating a lack of balance, where only language & culture was recognized. Butler's Bodies that Matter does not recognize the influence of the actual matter in the body, & how socially constructed biology is reciprocally constructed by the matter that Butler sometimes seems to think does not matter.⁷

I shall here quote the end of the last manifesto:

The Anthropocene is leaving terrible scars on this planet, on this Earth that shelters & protects. It is a relic of an obsolete humanism to pretend that the human race deserves any special consideration compared to other sentient beings, & even worse to believe with the religions of the disgusting book that any god has given humanity the right or duty to consume the flesh of animals & possess them as chattels. The only beast, mankind, with a whole history of being scumbags, polluting everything else with their dreadful excess.

There is too little beast. There is too much human.

We have to see that all sentient life is of value. Compassion for all sentient beings, & respect for the ecosystems of the earth that they need to flourish, shows us that deep ecology, based on evaluating all aspects of animal & plant life positively since it all fits together & nature functions as a whole, should lead to a reduction, at the very least, of the drastic human overpopulation. The reduction should be probably be very large. Not only sentient life, but all life, is morally significant, at least in part because all sentient life is part of the whole earth & relies on non-sentient life to sustain it.

There is certainly something that Ferrando would describe as an antihumanist tendency that is discernible in my work, but this is, as she points out, not really part of posthumanism, which is about the deconstruction of the humanist ideal rather than a destructive declaration of the "death of man" in any Foucauldian or Nietzschean sense. In the same way, my antinatalism does not extend to total pessimism & a desire for the total extinction of humanity, just much more restraint in reproduction.

More nature, more animals, more beast; less human, fewer humans. As Ferrando says close to the end of her piece:

As the anthropocene marks the extent of the impact of human activities on a planetary level, the posthuman focuses on de-centering the human from the primary focus of the discourse. In tune with antihumanism, posthumanism stresses the urgency for humans to become aware of pertaining to an ecosystem which, when damaged, negatively affects the human condition as well. In such a framework, the human is not approached as an autonomous agent, but is located within an extensive system of relations.⁸

Goddess gave us earth. Stop fucking it up. She put other creatures there to share it with "us". Stop driving them to extinction. No species is more important than any other. Even bugs that might gross me out have a goddess-given right to live. Posthumanism is not denying anything; we're just pointing out that a lot of other things are equally important. You can have ten million people in Sweden but you can't have twenty thousand wolves like Spain does? Get over yourselves, humans.

1I lied about footnotes. Francesca Ferrando (2013) "Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms Differences and Relations". Existens Volume 8, No 2, Fall 2013

2Martin Heidegger (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper & Row.

3Matthew Antolick (2002) "Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology" Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1326

4Martin Heidegger (1997) The Question Concerning Technology (New York, Harper and Row; Arne Naess (1995) “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects.” Deep Ecology for the 21st Century. (Boston, Shambhala Press)

5Karen Barad, "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28/3 (2003), pp. 801-31.

6Op. cit.

7Judith Butler (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge

8Ferrando 2013

Review of "we dance the ghost, Emma" by Aad de Gids

Huge thanks to Aad de Gids for this awesome review. The book is on sale here, at this link & for some reason is selling pretty well.Very pleased by this review. 

This thing obviously did not work out as a relationship, but the books turned out fine which is the main thing.

REVIEW OF DAVID C. MCLEAN'S 'WE DANCE THE GHOST EMMA'

David C McLean has made a big U-turn in his poetry and text. the above mentined book is an aubade to love, unmistakably, gloriously, unapologetic. yet as I suspected the old McLean hasn't disappeared, this all then not to denunciate the truly love that is exposed and splattered, troubadoured and medievalized, made spikey and modern in this also, relentless book. to not double the extravagant joyous and overt sex scenes (it felt as if I was fucking Emma) I searched not for the more scenic, pastoral, but the eversomuch vile and knifing [(n)ontology] (philosophical theory, accreditation on 'being', 'existing' and its grounds or groundlessness). and I found it. this doesn't mean David didn't made a huge U-haul. for him being now is absolved in loving Emma and I can clearly remember writing such texts to my beloved Linwood. but I never also left my bleak and sharp, toothed in the night, exposés, also, like David, in the love texts. 'here this eternal burns 'here this eternal our fire, Emma, my wild love savage & answers, it kindles here, this flame you gave me; i need you beauty & hands to hold me innocent your fingers, they are love enough, they are perfect your drug, their addictive existing'(1)

if this is 'ontology', the philosophical theory of that we are there, it is in fire and love. there is tight connectedness, addictive and quasitoxic. but such is love. I used to say: 'shoot me, love me'. the ground is trembling. 'terra motata'. the fire of the earth is the visceral fire of fever. we see with druggy eyes all glowing. there is the other person whom to love so intensely redefines us. could David first be called a nihilist, an agnost (there is nothing to get worked up on; one can not feel any deity or god). a solipsist (the world radiates from this person, me, and I witness her in my writings). then now there is definitely the David who cares, loves, seeks his loved woman. that this is the primal element that informs his philosophic and poetic work is splendid. and then I discovered the 'old David' in the words. 'your eyes are an intensity, a madness, they put fever in me, they glow a meaning deep into gut & throbbing cock, where dreams grow heaven erect here, we touch, memory & flesh, sex a bright light night[,]'(2) this is still the celebrative tone which demands quite the acclimatization for those who still vividly remember the David of 'another five', 'still three', all vitriolic poems as ultraprecise as denouncing and tearing down the statues. 'here is nothing lacking, the intent content alive at night, resurrection of the sexed flesh - it is defiance its rebellion sex, it defies entropy, time, & death, straddling me you your magnificent freedom, the burning spark at the lustful heart of [being]'(2)

we read here loads of words Davidian: 'entropy, time, death, rebellion, defiance'. we shall see Davids new style drives on two tracks. there is no such thing as to "extrahate" the old David from this new book, this happy life-event, this real time great experience. if you're a writer you're subject to scrutinization (David could perfectly handle that), micro-editing, other wrongdoings. with such glorious radiant book the criticasters are somewhat shun away. you're stupid with critique at what really happens and really is magnificent to be happening on a writer, nurse, hooker, vice-president, transitoperator. love has the power to break in in real life: 'here it seems forever, today is thaw boring & you are in our heart always, Emma, whatever the weather is, you crawl into my breast & your eyes burning through me their radiance is love,['](3) David sometimes seems to reminisce on the 'older times' and clearly sees a division.

this book really makes the 180° and there ain't not many able to do that. but when writing your book is driven. love is a powerful 'motor'. and yet staying is a 'deadpan narrator' who takes care of this continuity of events far away from 'Barbieland' and argumentative incongruencies (there also far away from): 'it was nightmare then, i lived a dead world where monsters moved, it was gray rubble & smoke over a battlefield, there would be no love for centuries, the deadpan narrator said, the land itself was the very devil,(4) the world perhaps is lesser armored, but we have learned that that isn't the case. when in love you have your pink glasses on. then may be the land is unchanged, there is an interventionism afflicting all. we're Liberace eeeeh liberated, we're invited to share. sometimes we see tighter correlations between the grim and crass and the lovehaze spurring us to be invisible and invincible. there are two people feeling safe and one within and without each other. there is a mutual reciprocity. mental distortions and fears, problems with the poise and presence, these will melt as 'love' is also a mental fluidization. 'your name my sad song, my mantra, my madness, we shall fuck the death out of us, lover, because i was yours & you were mine before words came their arrogance'(6) just this connection is more than two.

there is a cozy theory of metalinguistics. 'before words came their arrogance'. I like it. there is a world without words. words disfigure the world. if you're feeling in Love then especially words seem obsolete and at once, accurate to describe these haute haute feelings. both solidify their evidence, existence and immaterial essence. 'we shall touch like ghosts thrown back in the flesh their heaven then, reflecting us evident. // brutal is your beauty, dreams to believe freedom happens. it is madness that answers us, love'(7) this is simply beautiful: ''we shall touch like ghosts thrown back // in the flesh their heaven then, // reflecting us evident. " 'in the flesh', incorporation, embodiment, the old knowing of the body. veda. we're ourselves swarms and nanoparticles connected with the other. the Higgs Boson rests, lays dormant in her bust. these are feminine prerogatives. the immaterial connects with the material: ''we shall touch like ghosts thrown back // in the flesh their heaven then,", as we're now in a spiritual world as spiritual in the rate as it is material. material like birch bark and lichens. Lyotard, Virilio, John Cage and Merce Cunningham always knew dance embodied movement, energy, love, theatricalics, disappearing or [swilling] music. even Cage's vanished music '3:22' where the pianist/e sits for so long just behind the piano or Nam June Paik walks through Tokyo with the violin behind him on a rope. 'To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted and as Cage and Cunningham want. (Lyotard)'(5) it is also remarkable the logicist David has luckily discovered the poststructuralists. there is a Hauch also of postneoDadaism. they speak towards such mental states. the avant garde music of Eno Ono Fripp Robert Wyatt Soft Machine Nina Simone perhaps the dance of Ohno: Butoh, expresses these domains of erraticism, disdirectional dissipation, short: Love's paths. 'Climate, climate is not southern, a little glass, a bright winter, a strange supper an elastic tumbler, all this shows that the back is furnished and red which is red is a dark color. An example of this is fifteen years and a separation of regret.' (Gertrude Stein)(9)

Gertrude has always spoken in more registries than one. if we now seek, not trying to ambush, Davids two tracks, we see love suffusing the text while we have the deadpan narrator to produce continuity (which is always artificial) for great reading. now there are still bone yards but they're not so much the final bus stops of an Endworld but just part of a world not devoid of love. 'our bones shall dance together their longing, their tolerant intolerance, mad their passion they are waiting, waiting, Emma, the red we paint them with, our hopeful bones await their friends, their playmates'(11) what I loved here was 'their playmates' in the Hugh Hefner sense of the word (what a prick). it is the vaudeville of dance, it are the freak shows down the road, and the bones are real, structuralist human architectonics. so we see the two tracks intermingle, the one derivative of the other, this staunch twosome making a stylistic and clear point. 'so dance the ghost for me, Emma, & make this flesh live in me again, my sacrifice to you, this spoiled meat that even devils rejected, dance the ghost with me, Emma, love us & set us free'(107) here we have the testimony one is able to change towards the love of another and once' own love, reciprocal a 'building' that changes both. David culls these mechanistics, fluidizations, even more: 'there is only one of us this is the intense, Emma, animal instinctual, but love enough, there is only one of us, only this one you'(27) so substantial is this change that there is growth inwards, there is love, there is communal approach, here each solipsism is removed. we're not alone anymore and even microembodied in the other. far from his old poetry and yet the tone has remained the same: ruthless, following this thread ad infinitum. perhaps we can say there is a lot of intensity in David and hey, we share the same profiling with the 'borderline personality' (disorder).

that is actually an overflow on emotions. then this also has to be the similarity in this book of love and his preceding publications. think a cooking cauldron with lava and the expression of it. sometimes you see those people who are poor in senses, feelings, emotions. they are hyperrational. as how David outreaches to his beloved, we're far from this reason- and causality-intoxicated universe. 'there is eternity, Emma, my goddess, & when we touch i shall enact for you exactly what you recite to me, ordered through your eyes, whatever you ask of me, of my body that lives for you, & we can enact a submission that never happens, as if that really mattered,'(108) this domain of logicist-argumentative-causalistic beings does indeed demand 'submission'. it is science porn. the French poststructuralists and earlier, the Frankfurter Schule or Critical Theory, knew how to deal with that. and 'Love' also spills over the boundaries of 'reasonable thinking'. if it is a kind of madness then that is an exhaustive definition. '& you have always understood this love, my madness burning in the snow, i have needed you eternity, Emma, & have you always known this, never told?'(12) in a timeless domain it is if we fly. we're really inside a new parameter. a new fluidum instead of linear listing of 'White Man's Achievements'. we're so over that. look, what I am doing here is talk David's citations towards each other. but it isn't so an artificial addendum. David has gone through a life altering event. illustrated also with restless traveling between persons and continents. we can be happy to have experienced that and, especially, love. in such a Möbius spiral of events and tiredness and fulfilledness, the time disappears. 'The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing. This question and this perfect denial does make the time change all the time. (Gertrude Stein)'(14) love = being. an ontology, if one wants. we're human and human is beast. it is an honor to be animal. animalistic reflexes has proven to be resistant and submissive to aeons of fire, violence, complacent mountain valleys, etc. 'our animal freedom. here we bear blood enough to love us, Emma, here we become the beast that becomes its burden, its love, touch us eternal where love is enough for being, demons & beast & love a meaning, you, Emma my beast i believe in'(106)

in the following cited passus we find 'the old McLean' back, as seamlessly as we would like. but this is the bias of analysis: one could with the same validity say the opposite: now there is a new McLean, shards of his tongue appear but the topic has shifted radically. but let me have the joy of, still present, this poemlet as if out of a series of 'another five' and 'the next two'. 'dead children wait their eternity outside the ruins of intolerant hospitals & the priest sleeps shameless his arrogant, an incoherent answer'(15) we can conclude this luxe review of David McLean's book 'We dance the ghost Emma' with these at once deftly and discryptic expressed haul of love towards Emma with 'the dance' as regulative mode: 'dance me sanity drowning in this happy madness with everything living in us, love & touching us like memory heaven was & all the dead men dancing,'(17) 'poems are miserable cunts & they can fuck off. soon baby girl lies close to me & dull discourse stops 'words is black happy water, & all we wanted was one future you'(30).


 

"too little beast" out now

Here is a third book. This is at Lulu at this link now.

Blurb here, cover follows.

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.

 

 

 

New novel out now

At a loose end. but very motivated to produce work for the greater honor of the muse, actually for me myself too, obviously, here is my anti-novel on Lulu.

Blurb follows

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 the theoretical underpinnings, as it were, of 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 featured as well, at some length.

& here the cover. Bear in mind that the graphic arts are not my area of expertise. It's the best I could come up with.

I am not good at art

The graphic & plastic arts are a fucking mystery to me. But I wanted this book about my muse to have some sort of cover, so I did this. Here the book is anyway.

OK, I will never make a living as a cover designer.

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.

 

"we dance the ghost, Emma" hits Lulu

So, we dance the ghost, Emma, the last book in the first of three planned trilogies is out.

Very plain cover, very plain blurb. Here she be at Lulu. In a while it will no doubt pop up on Amazon too.

EDIT: I am not good at art but I threw this thing together

Here is the announcement at Posthuman Poetry & Prose.  Facebook won't let me share that.

Blurb here

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

 

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.