Recently received:

A Teeny Tiny Book of War by Sandra Simonds
http://www.teenytiny.org

A little series made up of eight short 7 to 10 line poems, engaging the war on all fronts from Iraq to consumer culture and our own complicity. Each poem takes its title from the name of an eye shadow or lipstick that happened to be in the author's purse during a vacation. Here's a sample:

Russian Red

I wasn't allowed to join troop 516
(girl scouts). Instead, I was
told to construct the interior
of a toy ambulance from
skin flakes scratched
off a balance beam. Gym-
nastic vowels contract
like the flesh around
a fresh bullet shot.

Free and Golden Lights by Amanda Laughtland
http://www.teenytiny.org

Two more from the Teeny Tiny chapbook series, both by series founder and editor Amanda Laughtland. The first is influenced by a biography of Dusty Springfield and a book about women in the early days of Hollywood. The product of such reading are short poems imagining women living lives "Like Dietrich, Like Garbo." A sample:

The Next Big Thing

I erased the heaviness
of my face, went blonde enough
to draw looks and complement

my eyes, outlined in black.
Everyone else was an actress--
I only learned a bit

about camera tricks, forgetfulness.

In Free, Laughtland borrows the language of Craig's List free postings ("Cheap / to begin with but always well-loved") to create concise poems that are humorous in their earnestness & straight-forward language ("but it's clean, it's a bed and it's free"). Here is a sample:

Free Reading Pillow

I think they call these husbands.
I'm not certain, but this pillow

is comfortable and made of courduroy.
I paid forty dollars for it and now

I want you to take it. I never
have time to read in bed anymore.

Hotels by Andrew Mister
Fewer & Further Press

You can read the poem "Holiday Inn" at the above link. Each time I read this I have a different favorite poem, my current is "Hotel Godard":

Photographs of the countryside moved past
the passenger-side window, a scene of the scenery.
We were compiling notes toward the spectacle.
So far, we didn't have much.

Each thing stands for itself. The sign read:
You are now entering The Republic of Images.
The streets were named after famous directors:
Herzog Avenue, Sirk Street, Cocteau Court.

We were trying to stay lost
but kept placing ourselves on the map.
"It's like looking down at the world from heaven."
There's a difference between being placed

and being there. "Let's see if we can find that tree."
And there it was, another abstraction taking the place of nothing.

Asterisk 4 - poems by Anthony Robinson
Fewer & Further Press

The seven poems presented here are a continuation of the project we were first introduced to in Tony Robinson's Brief Weather & I Guess a Sort of Vision (which I previously wrote about here), a project which I believe is leading up to 81 nine-lined poems. Like the poems that have preceded them, these poems are fragmentary & associative, bubbling with life and daily observations, and populated by the people who pass in and out of the author's life. I previously complained about the notes that were included in the Pilot chapbook, but there are no notes included here. One poem reads almost as if it is a note, an afterward perhaps, the final poem with its meditation on finality or stopping: "I stopped writing sonnets years ago, stopped loving Laura last week, / Stopped loving Michele in 2001, stopped loving Marci tomorrow, / Stopped throwing stones across ponds at age eleven, stopped smoking // Cigarettes once. . . ." A lot of the cleverness lies in the ambiguity of particular lines, for example, "if // we do this thing right it will contain a certain bitter component," which is perhaps a comment on the recipe that is being prepared or perhaps a pessimistic view of relationships, and really it is both and maybe more. Unfortunately I am not able to format for shit in blogger, so I won't attempt to reproduce one of Tony's poems here. Pick up Asterisk & if you don't have the Pilot chapbook yet, I recommend it. I am anxiously awaiting the release of the second half of the 81 poems project.