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Scary Topiary is a tiny press spun-off of SATELLITE TELEPHONE magazine, that will publish a focused yet eclectic list of literary chapbooks and broadsides. The series is edited by Robert Dewhurst, and is currently published from my home in MacArthur Park, the Champs-Élysées of Los Angeles. |
no. 1
ARTHUR ECHO by CAConrad and Thom Donovan
A (Soma)tic collaboration, ARTHUR ECHO documents a Winter 2009 day Conrad and Donovan spent listening to cellist Arthur Russell's WORLD OF ECHO on a twelve-hour loop in a five-story Philadelphia house. This chapbook appropriately inhabits the pop music tradition of the split single, as both poets tune into Russell's masterpiece to generate separate sets of notes on occult topics like angel milk & rock salt, the nutritive body, ecophenomenology, and lyric poetry. A unique tribute to Russell that conjures a reverberant portrait of close-listening and vital friendship from perceptual flux. (Review by Eric Baus at Jacket2.)
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no. 2
AMAZING WEAPONS by Marie Buck
Buck explores vividly atypical lyric states like armament, dispassion, sarcasm, catamenia, redundancy, and debt in this dark new suite written from post-Fordist Detroit. Exquisite and blunt poems that nimbly chart the emotional life of an administered world. (Review by Brandon Brown at Jacket2.)
| no. 3
FLUSHING MEADOWS by Todd Colby
NYC is rendered all brilliant, "sparkly, and sad" in this new series from Colby. FLUSHING MEADOWS takes place on the edges, F trains, & bedtime pillows of the city, where expansive feelings like longing, desire, & nostalgia are toppled daily by the equally radiant & ridiculous debris of the present.
| no. 4
GEORGIA by Andrew Zawacki
A long poem in the myriad traditions of Philippe Soupault, Charles Olson, Carson McCullers, Jacques Derrida, et al., GEORGIA is a bereaved "insomiateque"--part incantation, part invective, part lullaby. "It's a vertical work, which is what leaves us feeling falling . . . This poem keeps a swoop, a careen unsettled on the edge between the beauty of its sound and the heartbreak of what it's actually saying . . . [There's] a vertiginous desire to leap into this vibrant disaster, which is Zawacki's way of explaining how America could possibly have gotten into the position and condition it's in." -- Cole Swensen |