Toni Simon: Earth after Earth, Lunar Chandelier Press

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Earth after Earth

By Toni Simon

With drawings by the author

 

Launch of Earth After Earth

Anne Noonan (of Soho Letter Press) designed EAE, which includes twenty-five "drawings by the author" (as Lewis Carroll wrote on the frontispiece of his book about Alice's adventures underground) and a gorgeous, tinted cover drawing by Toni Simon.

Visitors who stopped by the Lunar Chandelier Press table at the book party included  Susan Bee, Jackson Highfill, Mitch Highfill, Nick Piombino, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Vyt Bakaitis, Barry Schwabsky, Richard Hell, Uche Nduka, Anna Moschovakis, James Sherry, Donna Brooks, Joel Lewis, Deborah Thomas, Charles Bernstein, Matvei Yanklevich, Nora Ligurano, and Marshall Reese.

Jerome Sala wrote this about EAE:

Toni Simon’s Earth After Earth, like classic apocalyptic writing, not only offers oblique prophecies of what’s to come, but captures the present, through the perspective of its alchemical, twilight language and dreamlike art.This verbal/visual text portrays a midnight world full of psychic threat, yet how beautiful its demons and angels, its “forest people”, “clairvoyant asteroids” and other denizens appear as they glow fiercely within its Dante-esque, black lit landscapes.The end may be nigh, but it’s sublime.
Kristin Prevallet commented:

"In her little book Earth AfterEarth Toni Simon has created a universe that quietly reveals itself, as when in the solitude of dreaming we fracture emotions into condensed images and wake to interpret them, only to find that they've already changed shape. Each sentence is a revelation, as when in the mind of reading we imagine sentences forming that take us to another place. When mind, time, and eyes converge at a point of knowing then you can be sure that "even in the dark we know ourselves to be inhabited."

Anne Noonan (of Soho Letter Press) designed EAE, which includes twenty-five "drawings by the author" (as Lewis Carroll wrote on the frontispiece of his book about Alice's adventures underground) and a gorgeous, tinted cover drawing by Toni Simon.

Visitors who stopped by the Lunar Chandelier Press table at the book party included  Susan Bee, Jackson Highfill, Mitch Highfill, Nick Piombino, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Vyt Bakaitis, Barry Schwabsky, Richard Hell, Uche Nduka, Anna Moschovakis, James Sherry, Donna Brooks, Joel Lewis, Deborah Thomas, Charles Bernstein, Matvei Yanklevich, Nora Ligurano, and Marshall Reese.

Jerome Sala wrote this about EAE:

Toni Simon’s Earth After Earth, like classic apocalyptic writing, not only offers oblique prophecies of what’s to come, but captures the present, through the perspective of its alchemical, twilight language and dreamlike art.This verbal/visual text portrays a midnight world full of psychic threat, yet how beautiful its demons and angels, its “forest people”, “clairvoyant asteroids” and other denizens appear as they glow fiercely within its Dante-esque, black lit landscapes.The end may be nigh, but it’s sublime.
Kristin Prevallet commented:

"In her little book Earth AfterEarth Toni Simon has created a universe that quietly reveals itself, as when in the solitude of dreaming we fracture emotions into condensed images and wake to interpret them, only to find that they've already changed shape. Each sentence is a revelation, as when in the mind of reading we imagine sentences forming that take us to another place. When mind, time, and eyes converge at a point of knowing then you can be sure that "even in the dark we know ourselves to be inhabited."

Vyt Bakaitis in EOAGH

Tom Beckett Interviews Lynn Behrendt at Galatea Resurrects

Lynn Behrendt

Tom Beckett

Mark Asch of L Magazine interviews Lunar Chandelier

Lunar Chandelier Press Books

                         
Lunar Chandelier Press Books

                           

Deliberate Proof

By Vyt Bakaitis

Pub Date: 11/23/2010

Pages: 131

Design: HR Hegnauer

Cover photo: Jennifer Witcher

Price: $15.00

    

petals, emblems                     

by Lynn Behrendt

Pub Date: 11/23/2010

Pages: 61
Design: HR Hegnauer
Cover photo: Lynn Behrendt
Price: $15.00



Homework       

by Joe Elliot

Pub Date: 11/23/2010
Pages: 118
Design: HR Hegnauer
Cover photo: Jennifer Witcher
Price: $15.0


Deliberate Proof is Vyt Bakaitis’ long-awaited second collection. Poet and Brooklyn Rail poetry editor Anselm Berrigan wrote of Deliberate Proof: “The voice deployed by the poems in Deliberate Proof has this mesmerizing surface of tranquility that belies and makes shimmer the possibility that ‘Wonder may well be all that’s left to us / when a starless night flowers in kisses.’ This voice is musical, adaptable, wise, urban (in its nether stream of quickness), and sly, particularly via its engagement with paradox as a condition of perception. I once heard Vyt Bakaitis respond to a question as to whether he dreamed in English or Lithuanian by pausing then saying, ‘I do not know that I dream or think in language.’ The poems in this book feel to me, then, as if made of the turn’s dreams and thoughts might take on their boundary-crossing ways to become astonishing and valuable poetry.”


Vyt Bakaitis, a native of Lithuania, has been living in New York City since 1968. A book of his
poems City Country appeared in 1991 (Black Thistle Press, NYC), and con/structs, his book of
visual poems and photographs came out in a limited edition in 2001 (Arunas K. Photo+
Graphics, NYC). Vyt Bakaitis has also published translations of poetry from several languages,
including his anthology Breathing Free: Poems from the Lithuanian. His translations of the
poems of Jonas Mekas were published as There Is No Ithaca (Black Thistle Press), with a
foreword by Czeslaw Milosz, and as Daybooks (Portable Press at YoYo Labs).


petals, emblems by poet Lynn Behrendt is her long-awaited first collection of poems. Brenda Coultas, author of The Handmade Museum wrote of petals, emblems: “At turns both delicate and demanding, Lynn Behrendt’s remarkable first book, petals, emblems is an organic and dangerous work constructed from within and written with a fierce intelligence. Our guide may be a disembodied sorceress, or mere mortal, but we know for sure that she is a powerful and grieving guide to an underworld, constructed with language and light.”


Poet Robert Kelly commented: “Lynn Behrendt wields like Shakespeare an exuberant dismay at the wretchedness of life, and smites us with joy by the muscular way she says so. Sometimes you want to reach over and shake her out of it, and then you realize she’s shaking you awake. Growl of body, blade of mind.”



Lynn Behrendt grew up in Pearl River, New York, and Chester, Vermont, and graduated from
Bard College with a BA in Creative Writing. She is the author of four chapbooks: The Moon
As Chance, Characters, Tinder, and Luminous Flux. She co-edits the Annandale Dream Gazette,
a chronicle of poets' dreams, as well as Peep/Show Poetry, an electronic journal of innovative
serial works. She publishes limited edition handmade books under the Lines Chapbooks imprint
in Red Hook, New York, where she lives and works as a freelance writer and editor.

Homework follows up on Joe Elliot’s debut collection from Subpress. Poet Ann Lauterbach has this to say about Homework: “Skepticism is at the heart of modernity, at odds with all blind faith. But for Joe Elliot, doubt is a flexible, porous scrim through which the vagaries of human knowing pulse andstretch toward the great quotidian ensemble of unknowns….”

Author, collagist and blogger Nick Piombino commented about Homework: “Poets who avoid capitulation and pay the price with a lack of prominence may be heard from less often but have things of great urgency to tell us. As Joe Elliot puts it: ‘Any project, conceived of as a kind of campaign /(political, military or otherwise), with its attendant / arm-twisting and compulsive positioning, makes one unfree / and to that exact un-monosyllabic degree, unhappy.’ This is important news for an era of poets worried about their art's relative invisibility in an age obsessed with the bottom line rather than the truth. With these spare, yet eloquent poems, Elliot is inviting us instead to ‘escape back into the world,’ a world ‘fabricated by a variety of voices, that are all solitary, all inevitably yours.’”



Joe Elliot ran a weekly reading series at Biblios Bookstore in New York City for many years. He
co-edited two chapbook series: A Musty Bone and Situations. He is the author of numerous
chapbooks including You Gotta Go In It’s the Big Game, Poems to be Centered on a Much Much
Larger Piece of Paper, 15 Clanking Radiators, 14 Knots, Reduced, Half Gross (a collaboration
with artist John Koos), and Object Lesson (a collaboration with artist Rich O’Russa). Granary
Books published If it Rained Here, collaboration with artist Julie Harrison. He has had poems in
Ocho, Hanging Loose, The Poetry Project Newsletter and Boog Lit Reader #2. His long poem,
101 Designs for the World Trade Center, was published by Faux Press e-mag, and subpress
published a collection of his work, Opposable Thumb, in 2006. Sharon Mesmer wrote in The
Poetry Project Newsletter of that book: “Elliot’s artful poems present opposition as the pivot
into an understanding (but not necessarily acceptance…) of the workings of duality.”