Claudia La Rocco
Claudia La Rocco is the author of Drive By (Smooth Friend); Certain Things (Afternoon Editions); Quartet (Ugly Duckling Presse); The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited); and petit cadeau, published in live, digital, and print editions by The Chocolate Factory. Her collaborators include visual artist Anne Walsh, choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and musician/composer Phillip Greenlief, with whom she is animals & giraffes, an experiment in interdisciplinary improvisation that performs across the US and has released three albums. She was a critic for The New York Times (2005-15), editorial director of Open Space (2016-21), and now edits The Back Room at Small Press Traffic.
Moon Cherries by Wanda Coleman
What a thrill to hold anything that holds Wanda Coleman’s signature. To shake her hand through the paper that bears her words: you are what was/so dearly paid for. you are the gas pedal/to the floor. Yes, please. I had the privilege of spending a few days with Wanda toward the end of her life, when we were co-panelists for a literary award in Detroit; she was (she is, she always will be) elegant, witty, sharp. Beyond cool.
Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World
The Back Room published a conversation between Amy Trachtenberg and Jeffrey Miller in which Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World was mentioned; Amy was “visual artist for stage, props, and costumes.” Performance disappears so fast; I remember attempting to fact check the title and finding it rendered in several variations online (I chose a Subworld rendering, just corrected). To have official, tangible documentation pleases to no end. The humble invitation carries so much information.
Distance Without Distance by Barbara Einzig
“A slight fluttering of panic, maroon, cerise, the seriousness of leisure” is a line in Barbara Einzig’s Distance Without Distance. And this: “The child thought for a long time about where the sky began.” A friend gifted me the book shortly after I moved to the Bay, and that first line became my first response to working in the corporate art sector; the second line was pinned inside my cubicle, talisman-like, reminding me that the sky did indeed begin.
AMERARCANA SHUFFLE BOIL
Bird & Beckett is one of my favorite places in the Bay, bookstore & music venue all in one. Here’s to the power of crosspollination, as evidenced in AMERARCANA SHUFFLE BOIL, guest edited by Steve Dickison and David Meltzer, and featuring such luminaries as Nathaniel Mackey, Oliver Lake, Bill Berkson, Ted Joans, David Boyce, and Ornette Coleman.
Expensive Magic by Cedar Sigo
For awhile, I was keeping Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings (UDP, 2005) in my back pocket. “I am wound up, bored,” he writes in “$$$Expensive Magic$$$,” “we are only strangers on our way.” Yet what good company he is, rocketing so casually from movement to stillness and back again, a romantic cynic of the best kind.
The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
“Got tired of being a house on fire,/so I became a poet.” An excellent development for the world. The Easy Body was Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s first book, combustible and explosive in all the right ways.
LIPSTICK ELEVEN, No. 3
One evening years ago, I found myself under the stars, in a hot tub with Anne Walsh, Jocelyn Saidenberg, and Camille Roy — who is, incidentally, a contributor to this journal. It’s a vivid memory: boobs floating to the top, where cool air met hot water, laughter and a delicious sense of being at home and in community. We’d just had a clothing swap; I still wear one of J’s sweaters. Home is where the hot tub is, indeed.
The Jessica Rubicon by Tisa Walden
This is my wildcard pick. Tisa Walden came to my attention not as a poet but a photographer, through a show at Cushion Works; her San Francisco in the 21st Century (Loosestrife Editions, 2011) is a visual poem wandering in grief and love through the exalted, everyday city. “Fears are triggered in the Psyche,” she writes in The Jessica Rubicon, “by Lovelessness & by too correct/an observation of Reality.”
