I want to give a mention to three fine books that have found their way to Ahadada East during the last few weeks. Two are from BlazeVox books (www.blazevox.org,) and one from “Country Valley Press,” (www.web.mac.com/countryvalley) a publisher I’ve never heard of.

Eileen Tabios’ The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys: Her Biography Through Your Poetics is a self-portrait done, not in pastels, but in various critical takes on the poet and her work. I can’t say too many good things about this book because my response is there too. All I can add to what appears on pages 86–87 is that I meant every word of what I wrote. Eileen Tabios is an adventurous writer; a virtuoso of language and an inventor of forms that she increasingly ties to her own ethnic roots and the history of her family. This book is indeed a bunch of “keys” to what she does and what she is. Ron Silliman, Thomas Fink, Barbara Jane Reyes, and Leza Lowitz are names among the key-makers that I recognize.

Skip Fox’s For To, with a dark cover that evokes a geological rift, is full of accumulations of intelligence; an extended monologue spoken by someone part Hamlet, part rock-hound, part hustler perched, precariously, at the top of a heap of words of every shape, size and variety. Fox is the Minnesota Fats of post-post-modernity running the table while the yokels oggle. He can do every game anyone’s invented, and then some. “You want Nietzsche? Here’s Nietzsche.” “You want Wittgenstein? Here’s the towering W.” “You want Olson-speak?” “I want speak Olson.” “Voila! Olson it is!!!” You want quantum zaps of freshperson-blush-inducing scatology? Here you’ll find more curlicues of cork screw coproliths than any Colorado outcrop can net you at sun-down, and he can give you the history of each nodule, you betcha. He comes up to you like a masked magician shouting, “pick a form, any form! I can deliver.” And he does with astonishing facility. In short, Skip can fart onto a strawberry shortcake and quantify the result. (Seriously.) Bad jokes abound; groaners turn into screams. There must be some kind of music that these lyrical meditations could be set to, but it would have to be the same drones and pluckings that seem to emanate from those odd figures, part bird, part reptile, part anatomy chart, that populate Bosch’s vision of hell; or rather, let me rephrase and relocate that: these fulgurations fit the stale environs of an academic meeting room. These are the dead-end zingers that some Wilson scholar at the end of their patience might wish to hurl at the dean after a day of endless discussions of nothings divided and multiplied by nothings. (And perhaps will someday!) Isidore Ducasse was transmogrified into Lautreamont by a lot less.

Every dog has his day and Ed Baker has had his with the beautiful production of Restoration Poems 1972–2007. This is Ed before his discovery of “Stone Girl” or whatever the heck he calls her.

The
poems

are
thin

slivers
of syn-

tax
that

end
with

some-
thing

a-
bout

fashion-
ing

some-
thing

with
your

hands.

Honest workmanship abounds in these pages as Ed goes about restoring an old house (John Penn’s 1723, near Hanover, PA. I used to drive past it when I lived near there.) to its original integrity. Good stuff, I’d say, though if I were designing the book I’d give more context to the series. A brief introduction by Sir Ed would have done the trick.

the
skinny

poems
get

a
bit

re-
dundant

in their
tele-

speak. I
would

have
wished

for more
variety,

but then
again

who
am

I

to
tell

Ed
how

to
write

a
skin-

ny
po-

em

?