"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.

New book by Carolyn Srygley Moore

 We all have a past, Watson. Ghosts. They are the shadows that define our every sunny day.

// Sherlock Holmes;
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We have just completed a book called For All of My Beautiful Ghosts by awesome American poet Carolyn Srygley Moore. Carolyn actually writes real poems, which is enormously unusual nowadays, & we have done this book for her with higher quality coloured ink for the 177 numbered pages, since it also contains photos.

EDIT: It printed fine &, after final edits, here it is at Lulu, For All of My Beautiful Ghosts. Because of the ink, it's more expensive, though, to cut costs for the buyer, we did at first not sell it from corporate scumbags Amazon we have now made it more expensive & moved it to distribution through Amazon. This is because people are prepared to purchase it there, & evidently prefer to spend more rather than less. The Amazon link is here & the book is now available there. I would prefer that you buy it from Lulu though, since this gives Carolyn a lot more money, ten times more, because Amazon are bloody robber barons, & she deserves it.

I shall almost certainly review it later, but I am currently reading about Kali Maa & finishing my book about Her as primal goddess in the Mahavidyas. Carolyn sets a bloody high bar for me with her wonderful book, but I want it to be my best ever.

Cover, featuring a collage by Carolyn herself, & my blurb follow:

Posthuman Poetry & Prose is delighted to release this book of poems by Carolyn Srygley Moore, a poet & artist resident in New York State.

These poems tell a life, & they are of ghosts in the sense that what one relates to is ghostly; it is the poematic impulse, which is to capture the past, to prove that it was real & that it still is, to produce "a photograph of the feast in mourning", as Derrida so aptly puts it, so there is always poem when the ghosts fade at sunset & earth is there, sustaining the futility that is world.

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.

"Post-ed on Your Mirror" by Linnet Phoenix out now

I am pleased to announce that Post-ed on Your Mirror by Linnet Phoenix is now on sale at this link.

See my review in the previous post. The cover is posted below.

Forgot about this

Found some more old work online. Huge thanks to Angela d'Ambra for translating these ages ago for El Ghibli. Poems at this link.

They also include the English originals here.

Phantom Kangaroo

A very long time ago, i appeared in issue one of the online zine, Phantom Kangaroo. This zine vanished after as while, but the lady in charge has recently revived it, so here my poem is, restored to life. 

Huge thanks to the editor in charge, Claudia Dawson, for restoring the zine & including my poem in their anthology, available here at Amazon. Not cheap, but a big book with a lot of great work in it. 

Not to forget book and so forth. To hell with Amazon for my stuff, on account of how they treat their workers, solidarity & all that, & Lulu now let me edit the whole of my storefront for Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & it is at this following link all the work currently available by me that I consider worth buying.

Five latest books. Boycott Amazon by the way.

As everybody knows, Amazon are scumbags who do not allow unionization & treat their workers really shabbily. I don't want scabs reading my work, but I shall leave the Amazon links as they are, while I post here the five links to Lulu for the last ones. Later I shall post the Barnes & Nobles links when these are back in distribution. I feel that it is way better to get them from Lulu direct, or B&N.

Here the three about Emma.

pig correspondence at Lulu.

pig correspondence is a collection of poems that deal with McLean's relationship with time & temporality, his nihilistic axiology, moral issues, & a general critique of western values; all of these things seen through the lens of his feelings for Emma, the love of his life. The book was written before McLean took leave of his senses, left her & Sweden in 2017 for a brief interruption in the USA, which is the devil, at page 116. The last few poems were written very recently & represent both resurrection & a return to where one belongs, to Sweden his home, & the home of his biological family & of his Emma, & also a realization that, with her in his life, he & his life were better, & the insane faceless goddess was with them.

 ghosts go home at Lulu.

ghosts go home is David C. McLean's second book about his distaste for temporality, the insane goddess who refuses prayers, & his great love for Emma. There is more of a BDSM theme to this book, along with age play, pop culture references, less philosophy than usual, more sex. Inspiration, apart from Emma, is drawn from Roky Erickson, de Chirico, the Sisters of Mercy, Joakim Thåström, Gertrude Stein, phenomenology, & spanking. 

McLean himself manages to just avoid pornography, although the lady for whom it was written states "The poems are becoming pure deviant pornography. Let it happen."

we dance the ghost, Emma at Lulu.

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.

Here is my anti-novel, divinity extractor fan at Lulu.

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 featured as well, at some length.

& here an extended reissue of an older chapbook, this is called too little beast - too much human ii.

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.

Anyway, solidarity with the unions, you little shits, no Amazon please. Not just for that one week, but do not use large multinationals if you can avoid it; use your local mom & pop store, or buy things direct from Lulu or the publishers wherever possible.

If you have to use Amazon, check my author page. None of these five is there now, but they will be there in a few weeks at most.

Here is a link to all the books at Lulu, at the spotlight for Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

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.

 

another sample from "we dance the ghost"

Here's a second & last sample from the third part of the poems for Emma trilogy, we dance the ghost, Emma. This is the last poem in the book, &, as with the other sample, it may not be the best thing I have written but seemed like a good idea at thw time.

Anyway, I slept a couple of hours tonight then woke at midnight to finish the final edit of this one, & it is done, finished, & published now by me at Posthuman Poetry & Prose.

Here it is at Lulu. It will be never be on Amazon.

from "ghosts go home", next book after "pig correspondence"

I am still writing and include here a sneak preview from a future book. I do it as a couple of probably illegible images of freshly written things, just to be an asshole. It is a plausible year now, or whatever they say. Last year was a year that was weird, then grew weirder, but ended with my coming home, in many senses.

Found several "new" old things

Here is The Kitchen Poet, from Underground Books, no idea who the model is, but great pics.

 

Here we have Acappella Zoo. & here some weird shit from Green Integer Review where my obsession with the goddess, Magna Mater the nameless & faceless, lets a little God's Mary creep in, dammit. 

There's a couple of others I noticed today also linked to the right there.

Full of Crow

Oh, I forgot all about this, from 2017. Here are three poems from Full of Crow. I like these. 

These three poems are appearing somewhat rewritten in ghosts go home: poems for Emma, which is the next book I am going to be doing after pig correspondence, which is coming soon from Oneiros Books. I think that ghosts go home is easily my best work.

passion is dead flesh

Next comes a chapbook from Black Editions Press, passion is dead flesh. Here it is at Lulu, and here at Amazon, though out of print, allegedly. EDIT: Now back on Amazon.

Sen här finns den på Bokus, fast den ska vara slutsåld. Detta ska åtgärdas snart. RED: Har åtgärdats

Both these latter sites shall be fixed soon, but for now the bugger is still on sale at the above link at Lulu.

Here's the blurb:

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 Bodhidharma, fuck you very much.

Anyway, here are two poems from the thing

corpses & holes

& world becomes corpses & holes, a terrible amphetamine we never even bothered waiting a maybe. here is refrigerator ineffable, vulgar the reflux. the sower is not an answer unwritten a chance or even an absence it is the terrible seed groping at nothing, incessant perversion their religion is. ghost is vegetable refreshing her missing things, where it was the dead woman lived. i have forgotten her the melancholy vampire sleeping her abyss inside me, here is blood enough and insipid dreams to be
 

blueberry orgasm

the road is blueberry orgasm, tiny suicide is smelly their heaven. the laboring saviors are broken again, boring. we have a wall to stare at once, like Bodhidharma did, but are less than him

the best of them were always already dead & nothing isto be forgiving or forgot where suns come up, where moons are in us still enough the bone is abject & smoke rising over a battlefield is pointless ecstasy we cannot appropriate as easily as fish burn in insolent waters poorly

there might be flowers or razors, abject their answers are, here is tepid absolution & fuck me a forgotten

i do not care that i do not know the number of insects, or even if it might be odd or even, specific boundaries might make it indeterminate, or heaven again, skin & sullen business so memories are sex & bruises, where i am my meaningless

 

of desire & the lesion that is the ego

Next comes this one, my third from Oneiros Books, based on a reading of Anti-Oedipus. Now, I am more inclined to write in terms of libidinal energy & its folds of perverse intensity than the philosophies of desire per se, but I like this idea too, anyway. These poems were actually better than I remembered them.

This book, of desire & the lesion that is the ego is here at Lulu.

We find it here at Amazon too. Och, som utlovad, här får vi köpa den på Bokus, i vanliga fall, fast den står nu som slutsåld. Återigen, ska detta åtgärdas så fort jag kan. Och då kommer den stå som tillgänglig på AdLibris med. EDIT: Nu finns boken tillbaka på Amazon

Blurb follows

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)

 

Again, thanks to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover.

Here's some free samples, chosen at random.

indeterminate date of ever present death

it is indeterminate
so only a wicked old man with sharp swords
has all the answers,

cold as his fingers
he never touched with yet,
not with this flesh

straw and meaningless

You're a ghost on the highway
you're trash and meaningless
(The Gun Club)

and the honest rock we are
their words never moved an inch -
it remains this dreadful empty

skin shaking under sexual suns
and bowing down before nothing
their stupid forgiveness

is the inessential remembered -
not the decent murderer
and her dismembering:

this means nothing and no time
is left us, just one second
and it is heaven

stepping out

the ghosts have fallen outside where skin is
leaving the children we have never been
naked within us, a strange beast made of distances
and the insubstantial

staggering off to some scuzzy Bethlehem
to be ambitiously aborted, manky
matrix where little lives; and here is
meretricious potentiality, acne

and masturbation so dead god
is not even insane, just perverted
priests picking the flesh of children
from their dreamless teeth,

the ghosts are stepping out today
we are pretending not to live;
there is sufficient sin to simulate
and nothing to forgive

EDIT: Very grateful to Aad de Gids for the following review

of desire and the lesion that is the ego

review by Aad de Gids

the best yet rather difficult notion derived from:
Capitalisme et Schizophrenie I: L' Anti-Oedipe
Capitalisme et SchizophrenieII: Mille Plateaux,

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is, that there wasn't an ontology displayed here. here we found not a theory of being,a philosoohy of being,an art-text of being, rather a toolbox with elements of "what there is" (as such they summarized it), that left pretty much out all of the fucking theoremas about psychoanalyse, psychology, (conventional) sociology, (conventional) psychiatry, conclusivist Nietzscheanism. they said they were dead now, "we ourselves are already old", fuck them all and look at how all is suffused with machines of desire. dichotomy of sexuality is bullshit, there is a "microscopic transsexuality". instead of the "ego" (which is always Freud's ego,or Marx's,or Nietzsche's), we have a "pack of wolves". to system theoreticians they said: "there isn't a system that doesn't leak on all sides". with "corps sans organes", body without organs, they meant, avant la lettre, for instance Fukushima, Soudan, the machinations around (and from) Iran,this "multitude" of disinformation and profitist background politics of the elite countries (US, France, England, Germany, perhaps Japan, Russia and China) who fuck up the so called "news" (like the American conservatives do) and make it a sleek glacis upon which all falters and stumbles and get disdirectional and wrongly proportioned. this, in short about d-g.

David McLean is deeply informed by these insights, and has written a "hybrid" book filled with "postpostmodern" and "postpostpositivist" poems and longer text to again break the codes in the sense of really breaking all conventionalist and societal and poetic-theoretical, codes, even the poetic codes, to nevertheless come up with a formidable and fun and challenging book.

_______________________________________________

enfolded

we are enfolded in the broken wings of time
stretched sad pinions holding birth and nothing

together, resolute and useless we are this inutile
futility – raging and permanence imagined
like bizarre statues insane on a shore
where inadequate birds swim a sickness
over us

we are enfolded in the nothing the soul sweats
instead of love, nothing is as nothing does

_______________________________________________

i think the poems of David also do not found or postulate an ontology rather they point at "what there is" as i notably still remember in a poem of his an old computer standing in the surf. "meaning" somehow erodes here, while the artefacts do still hold contingent resemblances with objects that "define" our world now, or at least we assume they are defining us. i think David's poetry kind of sits in between this post-Adornean and post-Wittgensteinian position where they said, respectively: "um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann, während es doch nur von der Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht sagt" and "wovon man nicht sprechen kann darüber soll man schweigen". i have always believed the ensharpened differences between these two adages in fact were overrated and one could detect a common ground here. there is definitely an affirmation of "world" in both and they wanted to make sure its expression wasn't fucked up. i think the poets of our generation do just that. we're not so much indebted anymore either to the old whores Freud-Nietzsche-Marx, nor to the somewhat newer theoreticians of the Frankfurter Schule, French post-structuralism or even Rorty-Apel-Searle-Habermas-Dennett-Žižek.

_____________________________________________

all the mad grannies

and it was all the mad grannies, dozing depressive at home and sewing psychosis, little mittens to cover the fingers that are not so very innocent today, and a strange fern smelling occidental and time travelers, the Victorian answer, guns and butter.

the houses are made of gray and tomorrow foreclosed by the nightmare wait of history. all the mad grannies chasing wicked cats that come through angles and corners, the homeless evil that needs bodies to be in it, essential freedom and all the generations hopeless psychosis needs to grow healthy enough to upset a doctor or some other moron, all the deep fried suicides and god in every little wooden box a granny's granny once forget when a more serious sort of history was, and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy and erect beside them; all the mad grannies have Valium to believe in – they do not need men or gods or the superfluity that is feeling, they have overdosed on the weight of Being; they have drugs but they do not really seem to need them – anything is better than freedom

_____________________________________________

now, after David's sublime writing, it is obvious a lot of things became superfluous.
exactly this could be of weightless liberation,to have dumped all lexicological offal: "and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy".

Things The Dead Say

They say all sorts of stuff, obviously, but  a few of their standard cliches are here. The book is here at Lulu, and also here at Amazon.

Som jag har tidigare hotat, här ska jag säga hur man ska köpa dem i Sverige, men Bokus påstår att denna är slutsåld och Adlibris hittar den inte. Ska åtgärda detta så fort jag orkar. Man kan beställa till Sverige genom Amazon i alla fall, eller allra helst Lulu ju.  RED: Här finns den på Adlibris nu.

The blurb says 

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. 

There are two sections about horror franchises, a section of "diverse poems" and a section of Bodhidharma poems. 

Here's a couple of pieces from the latter category. 

many dharmas

there are many dharmas
and none of them matter,
none but cleaning and slow reason
where there are eons between us
immeasurable,

night is a timely toilet
nothing sticks
 

they looked for god

they looked for god once
because they assumed a meaning
behind life, did not know
what the relevant questions were
for slightly defective epistemic
engines. they wanted a heaven
and resurrection and death,

or maybe just Nirvana,
but they did not know
when to let blood-stained
Buddha go, did not know
there is no eternity,
and the enlightened wise
live their pointless lives the same

after satori, down to the tiniest details,
they are just as thirsty for non-entity
as any sexy suicide, they did not notice
that nothing at all constitutes heaven
or Nirvana, smelling like razor blades
and bitter almonds or a bullet
in the stomach,

all that should count for humans
is fucking and love and knowing
what's happening - being smart
and happily finite rutting animals,
devils, or an enlightened person,
a saint - it's exactly the same thing,
living innocent and cruel

and selfish like children -
but they looked for god,
these healthy men
because inside them
they were pitiful, inside them
they were cripples, a world
that did not listen 

without seeing the silk

and we are cutting holes in space
following orders blind,
with the inebriated mindfulness of snails or priests
or any other policemen

swallowing the moral not: here are whole eternities
i have forgotten, stretched over a cold afternoon in ’77,
but fuck them as well - they have done being heaven;
without having seen our own silk

we are dead men, dead as them

nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die

I count this as effectively my first poetry full length, though there are, strictly speaking, three that precede it. Here is nobody wants to go to heaven, but everybody wants to die at Amazon, from Oneiros Books.

Som utlovats tidigare, här förekommer skiten på Adlibris i Svea Rike, där titeln klingar lite mindre jävla falskt, faktiskt. I synnerhet med en sådan svidande nerstängning av allt som vi bemötts av nu. Vem fan vill leva utan Mellandagsrean, liksom 👅😂 Samt så "rekommendationer" om ansiktsskydd. Herregud. Vem kan motstå statliga rekommendationer om kollektivtrafiken?

& here it is at Lulu, where it is nicer for me if you were to buy it. 

From the Amazon reviews

This is not poetry for people who like things simple and easy to understand. It is for readers who are prepared to work at it. A very dark view of life and death and all that goes between with no room for easy sentiments. This is cruel beauty.
Reuben Wooley

The poet David McLean strikes me as an aggressor. One whose power is to shrink himself when one is looking upward. While one yells at God, McLean whispers a speck of dust into a dog's water bowl and waits for the silence of God. I've used the words in this book often, and any story my narrator leaps from may begin and end as such
Barton Smock

So buy this book, the cover by Michael Mc Aloran is below, after three samples, added 10th February, 2021.