June 28th at McNally's: Back Room Live

In a semi-dramatic, semi-minimalist effort to lighten my load before I move to Pittsburgh, I recently traded in the motorbike for a heavy, aerodynamically challenged, highlighter-yellow bicycle. It's kind of like riding a cast-iron can opener through very wet, very deep sand, and yet it took me down to McNally's Pub for Ms. V.E. Grenier's reading series a couple Wednesdays ago.

It's probably been about a year or so since I've seen an episode of Back Room Live, but I made the trek for the sake of seeing Gillian Hamel, Jenny Drai, Achiote Press co-editor Craig Santos Perez, and Sara Mumolo. Jenny Drai - the only person with whom I was previously unacquainted - finished her reading with a great auto-apostrophic poem about Kung Fu and hiding a bottle of good whiskey from the person who helped pay for it. Unfortunately, she claimed that she was going to retire it after this reading, but at least I was there to see its last (and first, I think) performance. I'm definitely not too proud to admit that I cherish scarcity.

Speaking of limited supplies and hopelessly steep demands, I also picked up a copy of Mr. Santos Perez's new chapbook "Preterrain" from Corollary Press, which is printed in an edition of 150 copies. Included are eighteen single-block poems interspersed with backslashes, as if the process of lineation has been reversed or, alternately, as if each poem's appearance becomes the altered facsimile of an original source text. I hadn't planned on writing a review here, but I will add that the title serves as a wonderfully understated binding material for the poetry that follows by suggesting an impossibly pre-"terra" and pre-"rain" landscape. It raises the question of perspective via this equation of pre-cartography with the non-existence of both land and atmosphere and, in this context, the poems offer a multitude of maps/lineations that resist the notion of a single, architectural authority. I'm mostly thinking of the untitled poem "vii," which I'm including here in its entirety:

lighting the architecture of every dwelling / we lose more
and more / representative of all they surveyed, every
nerve / the sense of inclusion in english, in one context /
they used to make compasses based on ocean currents /
imagine an anchor used to measure distance / imagine
an anchor as conduit, translating waves that touch into
direction / water worn lines rise toward the named shore

It looks like Corollary is selling them for $6. Groovy.