Kathleen Fraser

"Discrete Categories Forced Into Coupling is consummate masterwork by a singuarly perceptive and articulate poet. Deceptively quiet in manner, its intimate foci and tone make clear the ground of our contemporary lives, our 'being together' despite the distances of isolating thought. I love Kathleen Fraser's extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too"—Robert Creeley.

"Here is a language of poetry that recognizes, beyond its intimacies, the intellectual and elusively sensate aspects of visual and literary aesthetic connection"—Carla Harryman.

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.

A Community Writing Itself features internationally respected writers Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Mackey, Leslie Scalapino, Brenda Hillman, Kathleen Fraser, Stephen Ratcliffe, Robert Glück, and Barbara Guest, and important younger writers Truong Tran, Camille Roy, Juliana Spahr, and Elizabeth Robinson. The book fills a major gap in contemporary poetics, focusing on one of the most vibrant experimental writing communities in the nation. The writers discuss vision and craft, war and peace, race and gender, individuality and collectivity, and the impact of the Bay Area on their work.

Sarah Rosenthal grew up in Chicago and lives in San Francisco. She is the author of three chapbooks: How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), SITINGS (a+bend, 2000) and not-chicago (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 1998). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in BAY POETICS (Faux Press, 2006) and hinge (Crack Press, 2002). She has taught creative writing at Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. She has edited a collection of interviews entitled A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area. She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Award for Fiction and grant-supported writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Ragdale Foundation.

Robert Glück's new book I, Boombox is a long poem fashioned from the author's misreadings. In that sense, it's a queer autobiography in which Glück dreams on the page.

"Rimbaud infamously claimed that I is an other, but for Bob I is a flicker of error, or a wandering ear that invents. He has made a home for several decades of errant listening in this sinuous long poem, which light heartedly teases the modernist tradition it also subverts. In true mock-heroic manner, Bob reveals from his gay marble desk how God's laughter glides in and out of garden festival, action film, and sublet alike. I have been waiting for this book for years and it sweetly exceeds all of my hopes."—Lisa Robertson

"In I, Boombox, Robert Glück makes it clear that dreams are as real as the spurts of sentences we use to discover them. Scoring the 'umbilical/indescribabilia' that accompanies unconscious feeling into a thin strip of thickly montaged verse, the 'invisible speakers' that populate Glück's poem—their misreadings and cant half-truths, their headlines and lies—turn dream's content into poetic foam. In this mind's eye—the 'suburb' is blithely rendered into a thing 'superb, ' and 'loneliness' roars with the face of a 'lioness /and intimacy.' I, Boombox is a poem of frothy divinations tempered by the slapstick of speech. It suggests that desire without sense is desire nevertheless—and this is a delight to understand."—Shiv Kotecha

Winner of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English.

Robert Glück served as director of San Francisco State University's The Poetry Center, co-director of Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. His books include two novels, Jack the Modernist and Margery Kempe, two books of stories, ELEMENTS OF A COFFEE SERVICE and Denny Smith, a book of poems, Reader, and with Kathleen Fraser, a book of prose poems, In Commemoration of the Visit. With Bruce Boone, Glück translated La Fontaine for a book of that name. With Camille Roy, Mary Berger, and Gail Scott, he edited Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück prefaced Between Life and Death, a volume of Frank Moore's paintings, and, with artist Dean Smith, made the film Aliengnosis, based on readings from I, Boombox. Other books include Communal Nude: Collected Essays, and Parables, an editioned artist book with Cuban artists José Angel Toirac and Meira Marrero D'az. Margery Kempe was republished by NYRB Classics in 2020 and his novel About Ed by NYRB in 2023.