£5 UK postage included; ROW £8 postage included (provisional). Photos of the book at www.hizeroreadings.tumblr.com. Gmail contact hizeroreadings.

There are slight amendments to our earlier announcement in that the issue is extended to 80 pages with an additional contribution, Michael Haslam, and a change to Keith Sand’s Mandelstam contribution.

The roster is now prose and poetry by Michael Haslam, Rosa van Hensbergen, Peter Hughes (Petrarch), D S Marriott, Alistair Noon, Joseph Persad, Denise Riley, Peter Riley, Keith Sands (Mandelstam), Nick Totton, Juha Virtanen, Nigel Wheale, James Wilson.

Other contributions are an etching dated 1975 by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange and a 1983 letter by J H Prynne substantially about Paul Celan and translation; music scores by India Cooke, the late Leroy Jenkins, Dave Soldier; film, photography and other work by Sung Hee Jin, Alexis Nishihata, restaurateur Alex von Riebech, Aya Toraiwa; and a drawing of Hélène Cixous reading at the 1979 Cambridge Poetry Festival. We also have a Snowgo by Fiona Allardyce.

SNOW is available only direct from the UK publisher. Issue 1 is priced at £10 incl. mailing or euro12 or US$19 incl. airmailing. Payment can be made to PayPal ID ab@abar.net or by sterling cheque payable to Anthony Barnett and purchase is recommended before all the copies melt away.

The ring road rests, and frost settles over the meadow […]

Where shall I walk now, if not into darkness and silence?
Where shall I walk so as not to be drawn by the lit
emblems and tokens, the winning array? All the new gifts
stand in the windows awaiting a look or a purchase,
stand in the flood of illumining phosphors and glass.
While they are there they are not there: they are in suspended
transvalued inertia, lacking a use, and their properties
face them with magical attributes, turning them blind
just where they stare at us, holding their eyeless fixation
into our faces, these eyed ones, these equally blank
caverns or sockets, these natural organs, surrendered
up to this table, these miniature plinths in the window

folded in silks or in velvets and holding their grimace
towards the indifferent or longing beholder who fears not to
pacify each of their hatreds, fears their concerted displeasures.
Each knows us, sees us. Although we can never believe it,
under this laboured neutrality works a persisting
terror of scorning them, terror of giving offence to them.
We must buy gifts; we must come to the store,
leaving our monoglot offerings there at the checkout,
leaving with objects apparently filled up with life.
How they can sing, can wheedle and tick and can rhyme
winningly to us, as though all we lose for them were
well lost, and given us only to lose in this way. […]

“What sounds in this underground is that which is heard only as noise, as howling, as the sound of the poem’s opening swarm who rush blinded into the sun, unused to the light. One recalls Dante’s swarm of lamenting damned, whose resounding sounds of lamentation are likened to “grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows” (viz.: “in sand you hear dead / noise”). In ‘Pulse Demons‘, named for a Merzbow album (more noise!), Eugene Thacker connects this Dantean swarm to the horde of demons whom Jesus drives into the herd of pigs (‘my name is Legion, for we are many’) interpreting both as symbols of the rebellious, virus-like horde, of how it appears to those in power, as the force of disorder, of multiplicity, of that which will not be contained in the one, the singular, the class that takes its interests to stand for those of all, that lie of universality. Michel Serres, from ‘Genesis’: “these demons are nothing but the calls of the world, or the moans of the others who are crying for help. Would you be frightened by this wailing?””

Full blog post at STREAMS OF EXPRESSION.

SHOUTS FROM OK GLAMOUR by Ryan Dobran. Paperback, 54pp. £8 plus postage from Barque.

“Patricia Farrell’s latest collection engages in an extended thought experiment to test the philosophical veracity of language. Needless to say, language is found wanting, yet in these extraordinary enquiries something desirable is recovered. If ‘the things I see when I read aren’t real,’ this investigation into subjects as diverse as scale, orientation, colour, light, time, animals, angels and death offers a complex and sceptical vision of a world in which ‘there is only movement.’ Via encounters with the troubadour poet Guillaume of Poitiers, Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith Jivan Astfalck, Farrell offers ‘new solutions / new songs,’ whilst ‘provoking new lines of thought.’ This challenging work might make us feel ‘hardly more than poets and not who we really are’ but who cares when ‘tongue play makes sense like this’?”
—Scott Thurston

Patricia Farrell lives in Liverpool. She is a poet and visual artist. She co-organised the SubVoicive reading series in London in the 1980s and was a member of the arts group New River Project. She has collaborated with other writers and artists, most notably Robert Sheppard, as well the installation artist Jivan Astfalck, on the project B*twixst, and with Jennifer Cobbing, and Veryan Weston on the dance piece, A Space Completely Filled with Matter. Her work is published in a range of magazines and collections, including A New Tonal language in the Reality Street “4 pack”‘ series, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, Seven Bays of Spirituality (Knives Forks and Spoons Press). She completed a PhD thesis in 2011 on poetic artifice in philosophical writing.

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/farrell.html

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Matt Robertson writes:
“This visual poem was the unplanned result of an afternoon spent shredding boxes of unwanted printed matter. Refuse bags were filled with a farrago of splintered mail, letters, statements, invoices, newspaper clippings, advertising and other ephemera. Some of these small thin shards, with their abstract and concrete marks, fell to the floor. On closer inspection it became apparent that they could be recycled for poetic purposes. Soon 128 individual strips were randomly salvaged and collaged into a single cut-up composition. The resulting score is to be read and vocally sounded in its complete form, in quarters and/or overlaid versions.”

Matthew Robertson is a graphic designer and poet. He is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Bath School of Art and Design. He has previously published his work in Pocket Litter. He has work in the forthcoming issue of Sugar Mule # 42