An excellent review of Marie Buck’s AMAZING WEAPONS, written by Brandon Brown, appeared in Jacket2 yesterday.

For Buck’s book to achieve its maximal effect we’d have to be living in the most debased time in history and “luckily,” we are! It’s a time in which “terror strikes / in the home of my dead sisters.” It’s a time in which all previous systems of transcendent relief have gone Darth Vader at best . . . The lyric speaker of Amazing Weapons manifests agency’s inversion by the stoic, hyper-bored way in which her body becomes the object of consumption by others . . . Like any great paratactic writing, the [book's] side-by-side propositions point to the breach between them. Buck exults in those breaches, inside of which are the real broadcasts from amazed life, from life enduring regimented mazeness. And part of the reality of that life, the everydayness of that life, is the articulation of “minor” desires and needs at the same time as major demonstrations by capital’s army attempt to crush formations towards autonomy, “I anticipate complete and utter destruction / And I want a maxi pad and I need a maxi pad.”

Read the rest here: “The Architecture and Ambience of the Maze.”

A few copies of AMAZING WEAPONS are still available!

Just in time for the Christmas season, the third release from Scary Topiary press: FLUSHING MEADOWS by Todd Colby. $10, ppd. Details here.

As summer nears its triumphant close, I’m releasing an exclusive special mix of the ten songs I listened to most the past few months. I played these ones over and over, almost always in the car. They’re all kind of anthems. I listened to these songs in Orono, Gloucester, Greenpoint, Syracuse, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and places in between. This is mostly for Damian, Sunny, & Grace, if you’re out there ♥

1) “Threnody” — Veronica Lake
2) “Mood Ring” — P.S. Eliot
3) “Angel of the Morning” — Merilee Rush & the Turnabouts
4) “Alaska” — The Softies
5) “Cast a Shadow” (Beat Happening) — Cub
6) “Last Time Around” — Buffalo Springfield
7) “Untitled Melody” — Orange Juice
8) “Going to Spirit Lake” — The Mountain Goats
9) “Apistat Commander” — Xiu Xiu
10) “The First Cut is the Deepest” (Cat Stevens) — P.P. Arnold

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