CUNEIFORM PRESS: WHAT YOU WILL (REVIEW)

BUMPERS

Poetry. Art. On average, 120,000 vehicles drive over the Brooklyn Bridge every day. What if each displayed a poem that could be read by the 4,000 pedestrians and 2,600 bicyclists that cross the bridge as well? BUMPERS suggests that an alternative medium has the power to bring poetry to the streets.

BUMPERS is a collection of twelve genuine crack-'n-peel bumper stickers designed and printed letterpress by Kyle Schlesinger with the assistance of Hannah King in two or three colors each. Contributors commissioned to compose poems specifically for this project are David Abel, Bill Berkson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Michael Gizzi, Michael Gottlieb, Ted Greenwald, Dorothea Lasky, Hoa Nguyen, Tom Raworth, Kit Robinson, and Carolee Schneemann.
$50 USD + S&H

HANGING QUOTES by ALASTAIR JOHNSTON

Conducted over the course of four decades, HANGING QUOTES is a landmark oral history project comprised of nineteen interviews with pioneer book artists, typographers, and poets. Alastair Johnston's thoughtful questions evoke fascinating new stories and information from luminaries as diverse as Nicolas Barker and Robert Creeley. He discusses the transition from cast metal to digital type with the prime movers in the field: Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, and Fred Smeijers; and he takes stock of the field of artists' books in wide-ranging conversations with Sandra Kirshenbaum and Joan and Nathan Lyons, while his groundbreaking interviews with Dave Haselwood, Holbrook Teter, Bob Hawley, Walter Hamady, and Graham Mackintosh shed new light on the history of the book in the 20th century.
$22 USD + S&H

PUSHING WATER by CHARLES ALEXANDER

"'[T]hrough the tunnel pushing water': the first appearance of this image in Charles Alexander's serial poem arises as if in a dream, and that sense of dream persists throughout this long and complex work ('the dream pushes up from under the water'). Yet, 'pushing water' also becomes a metaphor of body, of breath, of heartbeat, blood and brain, of consciousness itself, time and history, rendered in diverse poetic forms. Alexander embraces language and the bodies of work that comprise the touchstones of English poetry from the 'word hoard' of the Anglo-Saxons through Shakespeare and Greville, Dickinson, and Williams, Olson and Creeley. Without having done an actual word count, 'love' and 'syllable' (the beat or rhythm of the word) seem to me to be the most frequently used in this poem of love, language, and love of language."
— Beverly Dahlen
$20 USD + S&H

CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Edited with an introduction by Kyle Schlesinger. Foreword by Basil King. In the spring of 1962, poet Charles Olson descended upon an experimental college in rural Vermont to read from The Maximus Poems and The Distances, and to lecture on Herman Melville. His captivating performance sparked lively debates with the audience on the nature of myth, history, etymology, narrative, knowledge, and sexuality. CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE is an enthralling and indispensable annotated transcript that celebrates the intersection of Olson's poetics and a hopeful moment in American education.
$17.00 USD + S&H

DETERMINATION by KIT ROBINSON

"Kit Robinson is the author of The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009), Train I Ride (BookThug, 2009), The Crave (Atelos, 2002) and 16 other books of poetry. A co-author of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980 (Mode A, 2006-2010), Robinson lives in Berkeley, California, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahia Son.

Of Determination, Ted Greenwald wrote: "For anyone wonders what’s it doing out, don’t stick a head out the window, open, stick a nose into, Determination, is an end result where language’s weather swings ear in and ear out in Kit Robinson’s daily great expectations works’ beauty elegant in its math, and after, as ever."
$16.00 USD + S&H

TED BERRIGAN by BILL BERKSON & GEORGE SCHNEEMAN

Ted Berrigan is a classic collaboration between Bill Berkson and George Schneeman, and an homage to the poet and painter's mutual friend produced as a unique book in real-time at George's studio on St. Mark's Place on March 5, 2006. Continuing in the tradition of New York School collaboration, Schneeman and Berkson's Ted Berrigan is a high-quality reproduction comprised of eight spreads where image and text fuse, bleed off the page and cross the gutter. Includes an afterword by Berkson and a note from the publisher.
$20 USD + S&H

SUDDEN ADDRESS by BILL BERKSON

In this stunning collection of lectures spanning twenty-five years, poet and critic Bill Berkson addresses subjects as various as Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, Philip Guston, Dante, and the Sublime. Ron Padgett writes: "Bill Berkson's writing is witty, musical, daily, and deep, underpinned by a bracing integrity and shot through with gorgeous abstraction and other brilliant hookups between eye, ear, mind, and heart."
$15 USD + S&H

THE BOOKS TO COME by ALAN LONEY

Of Alan Loney’s long-anticipated collection of essays entitled The Books to Come, Johanna Drucker has written: “Few people have mused with such imagination on the topic of the book as Alan Loney does in this volume. His reflections distill a lifetime of practice and reading, of knowing books and living with and around them. His thoughts about libraries, writing, texts, the codex, printed books, the artist’s book, fine press traditions, and bibliography are at once philosophical and poetical. Though writing in the tradition of Mallarmé, Jabès and Blanchot, Loney’s sensibility is contemporary and original, informed by his practice as a printer and a profound engagement with books as expressive objects and objects of contemplation." Foreword by Jenni Quilter.
Hardcover out of print. Paperback forthcoming.

TO ORDER

Purchase books at Small Press Distribution (www.spdbook.org), or by sending a check made out to "Cuneiform Press/UHV" to Cuneiform Press | School of Arts and Sciences | University of Houston-Victoria | 3007 N. Ben Wilson | Victoria, TX 77901-5731.

Be sure to include $5 for domestic shipping and $15 for international.

Looking for something that isn't here? Small Press Distribution has copies of: Ted Greenwald's 3; Dan Featherston's The Clockmaker's Memoir; Susan Howe's I Have Imagined a Center Wilder Than This Region; Ted Greenwald and Hal Saulson's Two Wrongs; Mimeo Mimeo, ON and more!

Kyle Schlesinger, proprietor of Cuneiform Press (est. 2001), publishes and lectures on topics related to poetry, visual communication, and typography. He is the author of six books of poetry and three critical works, most recently, Poems and Pictures. He is an assistant professor of Communication Design and English at the University of Houston-Victoria where he designs Cuneiform books with the graduate students in the MS in Publishing Program. For information about guest lectures or letterpress tutorials, please contact: schlesingerk [at] uhv [dot] edu

11.30.2011

WHAT YOU WILL (REVIEW)

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BUMPERS

HANGING QUOTES by ALASTAIR JOHNSTON

PUSHING WATER by CHARLES ALEXANDER

CHARLES OLSON AT GODDARD COLLEGE

DETERMINATION by KIT ROBINSON

TED BERRIGAN by BILL BERKSON & GEORGE SCHNEEMAN

SUDDEN ADDRESS by BILL BERKSON

THE BOOKS TO COME by ALAN LONEY

HAECCEITIES

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