A review of Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity in Eye Magazine

& of Cathy Wagner’s My New Job at The Rumpus

& Fence Books’ author Macgregor Card, guest-blogging for/at the Poetry Project

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Also, how about this deal?!

Subscribe for two years and get a free copy of A Best of Fence, volume of choice. Select the volume you want from the pull-down menu. A classic!

Good morning. Fence has over the past recent years been implicated, or included, in a number of references to some kind of idea of “hybrid” form in poetry or of a “third way,” for example here (post dated 3/22, toward the end of it). The problem with relating these notions to Fence lies in that they are prescriptive, and proscriptive, and Fence is never that, is none of that, will have no part in that. A hard thing to articulate about Fence–but it is done in slow motion throughout our under-read collection A Best of Fence, if you’re interested–is that while Fence has functionally represented writing from the proposed two-party system, acting as a kind of vessel of containment–or more obviously as a fence upon which it all can sit together–really the positivist support Fence wishes to give is not to some new “third” or hybrid kind of writing but rather to the continuous impulse that has been there all along and has shown itself throughout centuries, in various landscapes and cultural productions, to write however the F**K one feels like writing, free from overdetermining forces. Of course, the way one feels is determined by all sorts of forces, including the personally historical, the socially ideological, how late one stayed up, and the poetry one read. But remains inviolable for all that. Not to be denied. And that’s how the beautiful subjectivity lives on, holding hands with the stunningly tumescent cultural materiality.

Just back from AWP, and dealing with the strong desire to continue putting books in people’s hands that way forever. Subscribe for two years and get a free copy of A Best of Fence, volume of choice. Just select the volume you want from the pull-down menu. If you want both volumes, email us at fencesubscriptions at gmail.com and we’ll talk.

REVIEWS of FENCE BOOKS!

Laura Sims’s Stranger reviewed by Jacqueline Davis at Bookslut

Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton reviewed by Ed Skoog on www.ronslate.com

(I’ll save you the scrolling; it’s pretty far down.)

Douglas Kearney culture-jams his pages to a visceral, wild life in The Black Automaton, which, through its typographical mapping of mumble and shout, seems as much a book of graphic design as a collection of poems, but what great poems they make, engaging the reader’s eyes, ears, and understanding. These visually signaling poems, destinations themselves, serve in the book as transitions between more conventional-seeming poems and sequences, like graffiti between storefronts perhaps (graffiti by many hands, full of allusion and call-backs) (these poems are almost 3-D; one might need crazy glasses to read them). These intervening poems are built-to-last desolations and joys. Joy at making poetry & music & art is ever-present in The Black Automaton; the desolation is a city desolation, cities of “searchlights and dead cats” and cruelty that are at times Los Angeles and New Orleans, at other times more conceptual cities, including the community of “washed offices” where cover letters declare “I should like to publish in your little magazines.” It’s a wild book, a direct challenge to contemporary poets to speak up and not succumb to merely over and over doing the robot.

Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity reviewed by John Olson on his blog, Tillalala Chronicles

& a review of A Best of Fence: The First 9 Years, by Ann Dewitt at The Faster Times

READING!

Macgregor Card, Karen Weiser, and Lucy Ives TOMORROW, April 1st, at Bar 82 (136 2nd Ave, right between St. Mark’s Place and 9th Street) as part of the St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading Series

AWP!

FENCE will be stationed at Table J26 in Hall A at the Hyatt Regency, so you’ll find us (and our miraculous book & subscription deals) there, from Thursday morning through Saturday afternoon.

FENCE BOOKS & 1913: a journal of forms are hosting a happy hour, Saturday from 5-7, at Mario’s Double Daughter’s Salotto, 1632 Market Street. Readers include: Macgregor Card, Bruce Covey, Ben Doller, Brandon Downing, Adrian Kien, Aaron Kunin, Richard Meier, Josie Sigler, Edwin Torres, Cathy Wagner and Lynn Xu.