I hope you’re feeling suitably social, my dears, because it’s time to meet another esteemed member of the Malvern mob. Today we’re saying hello to Taylor Jacob Pate, whom you might remember from our Grand Opening festivities.As well as performing assorted Malvern duties, Taylor is editor-in-chief of smoking glue gun and the art director for Bat City Review. And today he’d like to introduce you to one of our all-time faves, the artfully alarming Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik.
Hold on to your face and dance around wildly while you still can. Holy Land is a smash and grab job that will slam your heart in and out of human tenderness and violence. In this dreamy world everything’s gleaming and bloody like smashed glass in the light of the moon. Klassnik’s language is swift, direct and brutal as he darts from the domestic to the cosmic to the afterlife to the ditch by the side of the road.
And so, we stood before him at last, our ribs shining through like painted blood, and he shook his cage, there in the center of the universe, howling, till we gave him a cigarette and he leaned back, his eyes a newborn child’s. It isn’t hard to kill. The beauty of a dove trapped in a circle filled with smoke.
It’s about time you met another Malvern! You’ve already made the acquaintance of Dr. Joe, Katherine, and Tyler (who you can also get to know a little better via our sparkling new YouTube channel)—now allow me to introduce the delightful Polly Monear, our visual merchandising expert and lover of fine poetry. Here’s what Polly has to say about one of her recent discoveries, The Roads Have Come to an End Now, by acclaimed Norwegian poet Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994)…
WOW—I’ve read this book three times in the last week, and I can’t wait to read it again! I love the crisp, clear language of Jacobsen’s poems. Buses, snails, telescopes, loss—Jacobsen can find value in it all. This collection is beautiful, accessible, and definitely worth multiple readings. One of my favorite images is from “Morning Crows”:
It’s the crows that wake the countryside
with their tiresome racket over the fields,
like zinc buckets rattling in the gray dawn.
Happy Thursday to you, Malveroos, and a very happy birthday to renowned existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Krantz (the google doodle goes to Ms. de Beauvoir). Because a random post should begin with a random introduction!
On our assorted-bits-and-bobs list this week:
If you’re curious to learn more about the trials and tribulations of opening an indie bookstore, head over to The Bookseller and check out this blog post by our very own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe!
We have the new issue of everyone’s most beloved journal of poetry, cooking, and light industrial safety in stock. Yup, Forklift, Ohio #27 has landed, and it features Malvern Books’ favorite Pates, Blake Lee and Taylor Jacob. And the carnivores amongst you will be delighted to hear that this particular issue is packaged like a slab of butcher’s meat.
If you’re looking for winter amusements, there’s no shortage of events at Malvern. Next Wednesday at 7pm we have the inaugural reading in our Everything is Bigger poetry series (featuring the aforementioned Blake Lee Pate, along with Dean Young and Vincent Scarpa), and the following Tuesday (the 21st) we’re introducing another new series, W. Joe’s Poetry Corner. W. Joe’s first guest will be poet and visual artist David Thornberry (check out his awesome chapbook covers below), who will give a reading and also sit down for a chat with our host. As always, our Events Calendar has all the details (and we like to keep y’all informed on our Facebook page, too).
Finally, computer boffins at Stony Brook University in New York have developed an algorithm that can analyse and compare the language of “successful” and “unsuccessful” novels—and they’ve discovered several trends:
Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and relied on words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as “wanted”, “took” or “promised”, while more successful books favoured verbs that describe thought processes such as “recognised” or “remembered.”
Here’s a sterling book recommendation for you from Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe:
Fans of Robert Walser have a tantalizing treat in store for them in C-F Ramuz’s short novel The Young Man From Savoy. Flux, madness, suicide, murder: all in a scenic Swiss town on the shore of Lake Geneva. The world seems so ordinary. There is progress, love, youth, old age, but Joseph has been to the circus. Once he has visited Indonesia and the North Pole within a circus tent, and seen the aerialist Miss Anabella, his world will never be the same.
Ramuz, most famous for the libretto of Igor Stravinsky’s “Histoire du soldat,” takes readers into the minds of mountains, clouds, dogs, horses, and humans in a tale that centers upon a troubled young Joseph. Joseph wants to experience the permanence in things, but his is a world of flux with ever changing light and shadow.
Must we love what is, the way it is? Or instead, should we love a thing because it isn’t, because of its greater beauty? Or is there a place even, where in the end what is and what isn’t turn out to be in agreement? He’s the young man from Savoy: he is a strange young man.
Meticulously translated from the French by Blake Robinson, The Young Man From Savoy is a calm stroll through madness visited upon us all by an ideology of progress.
We love to fill our Malvernian shelves with poetry and fiction from across the country and around the world, but we’re also rather partial to a little local lit. Below, a few of our recent Made-in-Austin poetry acquisitions…
Until You Electrocute Everyone and Into The Ropes by Deva Haney. Two candid, funny, and ferocious collections that demand to be read aloud. We’re also pleased to note that Haney is a friend to pirates.
Diamond Plate by W. Joe Hoppe. Coolly contemplative poetry that pulls off the tricky task of being both boldly experimental and instantly accessible. Hoppe teaches creative writing at Austin Community College, and he sounds like a bloody inspiring bloke.
Restless Astronomy by Michael Gilmore. The peripatetic Mr. Gilmore has lived in China, New York, and Iowa, but now calls Austin home. With startling imagery and sly asides, Restless Astronomy deftly lures the reader into an imagined world that feels both intensely personal and hauntingly familiar.
Only three more sleeps till Saturday, when you can stuff your alarm clock in the back of the closet and sleep until the cat drools in your eye! Hurrah! Meanwhile, the very best accompaniment to the midweek blues is an existentially terrifying poetry collection, and we have just the thing: Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik.
Holy Land is a surreal and startling collection of short prose poems by a writer who describes his oeuvre as “dark, sexual puffery, blah, blah.” HTMLGIANT’s J.D. Scott writes that each Klassnik poem is like “a tiny, dimly lit room with the air running out,” and this is an apt description: Holy Land is most definitely not for literary wusses. If you faint at the mere mention of blood (or children in ditches or amputated feet), please return to your Improving Verses About Flowers and leave Holy Land for those folks who like their poetry to give ’em a short, sharp kick in the soul.
Here’s a review from Goodreads that rather proves this point:
I don’t really understand the poems included in this book. … These poems make me think of dreams, bad dreams, the weird, dark, disturbing bad dreams I start having in summer when my bedroom gets too hot at night. These poems make me uncomfortable in the same way heat induced bad dreams make me uncomfortable. Shudder!
I concur with this poor, swooning reviewer in his/her assessment of heat-induced bad dreams—shudder!—but I disagree vis–à–vis disturbing poetry. There’s something comforting in the sharing of a literary nightmare, and disturbing poetry, when it’s good, is very good indeed. And Holy Land is very good. Exampleatron, hook us up!
His voice is a tiny flash of light. A lighthouse pulsing. An orchid hanging. Waterfalls and almond trees. The sky’s pressed down: one eye blue, the other pink. He’s been dead for months. Hard black fetal skin. His voice dogshit white.
I’m on a cloud floating by and I’ve gone mad but madness flows away in a tall shining work of Art and I’m standing in front of a fountain and the world’s ringing down through me and there are no fields of migrants mixing hair and bone into concrete. Trucks lined up and ready. Cups of cold coffee, a Rolex and a crucifix. A girl on a payphone begging.
Talking to God’s like jerking off. You strain in the dark for years, but then a fuse gets lit, and people come screaming out of the fire. They land in the streets, their arms and legs blown off. A man on a horse tips his hat. Marilyn holds down her dress. In the charred air, angels hang.
Thanks, Exampleatron! But I’d prefer to hear from the author himself, preferably while he’s sitting in a bathtub with a pink wig on his head…
Nice work! If you like what you hear, stop by 613 West 29th Street and we’ll hook you up with a little midweek Klassnik. Final word goes to this lady:
Here’s a sterling book recommendation for you from Malvern’s own curmudgeon-in-chief, Dr. Joe:
Holy Land is a surreal and startling collection of short prose poems by a