The poems in Invisible Cities mix iconography of local commerce and artifacts with the sordid universality of online interactions to create an assumed familiarity and community with the reader. Hand-sewn Japanese stab binding with pink, green, or blue twine (chosen at random). Printed on appropriated corporate letterhead with a metallic-pearled white cover. Limited edition of 50 copies. … Continue reading Invisible Cities by Paul Vogel, 2015

The Alphabet Sonnets immediately breaks the structure of its titular form, while simultaneously reconstructing the language of the poems through alliterative phrasing. As the sonnets progress, the language becomes more and more objectified, until it literally vanishes into the structures of the poem and then further still to the symbolism of that structure. The sonnets are … Continue reading The Alphabet Sonnets by Andrew Wright Milam, 2020

I Hate Poetry goes past the (recently and inexplicably controversial) ars poetica to question the reason for even being a poet. It is a refreshingly materialist answer to the tedious mysticism of the poet-as-seer trope. Yet, once that trope is removed, what does remain? Given the obliviousness of poetry in the general world and the more-specialized … Continue reading I Hate Poetry by Thom Donovan, 2020

Tropospheric Clouds gives fragmented images that seem to be dispatched from a larger and elaborate narrative world. The poet is a multiplied character separated from the world. Rather than being presented in the Romantic cringe mysticism, but here the separation of the poet is seen as a cloistering or perhaps a sense of imprisonment by … Continue reading Tropospheric Clouds by Michael Begnal, 2020

Deep Acting travels from the very-online to the tangible. In the poems there is the siren-call of online community—“finding myself of social podcasts” “in this golden age of leftist periodicals”—set against an IRL loneliness of daily survival in a dystopian hellhole. A siren because the sense of community devolves into a tournament of “holding court … Continue reading Deep Acting: Poems 2019 by Caleb Beckwith, 2020

Sad Boi Merzbau creates installations of the self, housed within body, housed within context. The titular Sad Boi is streaming connection through bombardments of the world and presentation in return. This sequencing is shown early with American Football and Black Bloc placed together, combining the social and political into the mass panorama of the scene. Community, … Continue reading Sad Boi Merzbau by Jamie Townsend, 2020

Flammable Water builds a sensory-overload collection of language that spans centuries and intentions of capitalist bombast. Sections large walls of text that evoke the washing-over language of political/corporate-speak through jargon, unexplained acronym, and an upsetting level of positivity/opportunity. Line-broken sections create a relief of formal structure, if not by content. The texts evoke the constant stimulation … Continue reading Flammable Water by Mike Hauser, 2020

“This book is the fulfillment of a long promise. About twenty years ago, Peter Burzyński began giving readings at Woodland Pattern. We eagerly looked forward to his participation in the annual marathon, a mounting recollection of years. He used the store in a way that only a select few used it, as a reading means … Continue reading A Year Alone Inside of Woodland Pattern by Peter Burzyński, 2022

Igo Gruden (1893-1948) was born in Nabrežina in the Karst region, in the Kingdom of Italy, to a Slovene minority class, at the witching hour of Mediterranean ethnonationalism, on 18 April 1893. In Summer 1914, Gruden conscripted into the Lower Styrian 47th Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Common Army and mobilized to Maribor. November 1916: … Continue reading Padova by Igo Gruden (translated by Matthew Moore), 2022

Isotope/Autobitchography were written from 2012-2014 and were never published. Isotope brings in the self behind the poems. The human body is placed in interaction with scientific, medical, and poetic fields. While each of these is working to dehumanize the body through their objectivity; the self repeatedly breaks through emotionally. The Rosenbergs fight through history, the human body … Continue reading Isotope/Autobitchography by Alice Ladrick, 2023

Darkness and Light charts points of hope within times of misery, and in doing so opens the speaker from an initial isolation to community. The poems are rooted in songwriting and carry a lyrical tone reminiscent of ballad form. Instead of hearkening to the past with a toxic nostalgia, the poems bring that communalist impulse forward. … Continue reading Darkness and Light by Caleb Westphal, 2020

Remember Men is both a list poem and an epic poem. It narrates the speaker’s sexual history through quick, liturgical snapshots of acts, desires, descriptions, and, occasionally, names. There is no timeline or chronology, no sense of beginning or end. The poem creates a self-portrait of the speaker and a portrait of the world around them … Continue reading Remember Men by Shane Allison, 2020

Mike Hauser’s poems are simultaneously droll and emotional. Red & White Balloons documents the poet as they remain through the crushing necessities of living and work.  Hand-sewn pamphlet stitch binding with red cotton thread. Printed on 24lb white paper with screen-printed and embossed cover. Limited edition of 50 copies. 32 pages. Mike Hauser lives in Milwaukee, organizing … Continue reading Red & White Balloons by Mike Hauser, 2015

The poems in this book are swampy mystery. The book uses the supernatural as a means of exploring the local—the lyrical poems combine with supernatural subject to create a sort of new mythology of place. We’re in a swamp and ghosts come out of the loamy water and aren’t our enemies or our friends. They … Continue reading Rhabdomantics by Beth Towle, 2016

SPHERES is essays on music produced as a zine, complete with stolen paper and borrowed copier. The covers are calligraphed gold text over Kinkos. Self-portrait takes inspiration from Ashbery, and also Clark Coolidge’s The Crystal Text and Craig Dworkin’s reboot of The Crystal Text, the poems show a writer placing themselves inside the larger implications … Continue reading Spheres + Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror Projected on My Wall by Jonny Lohr, 2016

don’t read this… is sustained meditation within fluorescent-glowing bleakness. Notes jotted down between eavesdropping on one sided phone calls and whispering back their traumas. Alice Ladrick’s poems notate a long and grey winter spent working as a transcriptionist, a winter of accidental deaths, ignored bomb threats, and further corporate dehumanization. The winter is met with wit, … Continue reading don’t read this if you already want to die by Alice Ladrick, 2016

PINKpoems creates a subject that is simultaneously objectified and personified. A meditation on a burning Barbie figure; the body is dolled and further reduced to pieces and chemical reactions. The doll is recreated to humanity as the distorted body image the Barbie inspires. This cycle repeats, building to a final ecstatic refrain. Hand-sewn, using hand-dyed thread … Continue reading PINKpoems by Jayme Russell, 2017

Mall is LostHolly Raymond, 2018 Mall Is Lost is the epic poem on our lives housed within the structures of retail economy. The reader is removed from time with constant anachronisms of language, imagery, and characters; creating a flattened chronology of capitalism from the late-Medieval town structures to the decaying spectacle of centralized consumerism. This book is handmade … Continue reading Retail Labor Series

True to its name, Squibs is a collection of Jim Chapson’s short, satirical work that strikes and illuminates. Chapson’s poems lampoon the demented greed of the royal family and scoffs at the vanity of the wealthy scholar, with appearances from important poets throughout the centuries. He also exposes the humanity lost to these arrogances; the grand violent … Continue reading Squibs by Jim Chapson, 2019

Infinity Heart seems to come on as an introduction or setting, creating a sense of normalcy to the poems though they speak through a dreamy surrealism. Filmic language, both photography and movies, is present throughout and poems shift between narrating outward to an observer and playfully layering upon its internal language snapshots, asking the reader to … Continue reading Infinity Heart by Stacy Blint, 2019

Same Here is a collection of Zack Pieper’s short poems written over the course of national economic collapse, among other things, which operate as snapshots of Midwestern working class resignation. Poverty and student loans are there, along with Catholicism, because that’s daily life, not because it matters. Like Lunch Poems cut to a smoke break, … Continue reading Same Here by Zack Pieper, 2019

Milwaukee Liddy Hagiography places Tyler Farrell’s poems with letters from poet James Liddy, with photographs of their friendship interspersed. Farrell’s poems create a lyrical zooming out of a map, beginning locally in a Milwaukee corner bar and ever expanding through the scenes and histories of poetry. Juxtaposed with the artefact of Liddy’s correspondence, the poems … Continue reading Milwaukee Liddy Hagiography by Tyler Farrell, 2024