Ahadada Books is pleased to announce the publication of Eye-sensing by David Jaffin. This title will shortly be available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and is now available direct from the publisher.

About David Jaffin

What others say about David Jaffin 

‘David Jaffin is a scrupulous weigher and weighter of words—by which I mean a poem is, for him, always a matter of collaboration with the true spirit of the language. Every word is given its value, neither more nor less.’
                —Edward Lucie-Smith

‘David Jaffin’s Preceptions is a fine book. Jaffin’s poems, slight on the page, entice, engage, amuse. Yet their brief touchings often reach wholeness, and they are poems of philosophical consequence out of keeping with much of modern poetics. The poems catch perceptions in the act of happening, to be, the short-line verse appropriate to what becomes.’
                —Paul Ramsey, The Sewanee Review

‘Jaffin’s poetry is as ‘modernist’ as abstract painting while still poetry in the traditional sense, whose purpose is the verbalisation of basic human experience and whose form derives from a serious exploration of language... it is remarkable what depth of experience Jaffin manages to relate through his severely limited vocabulary and imagery.’
                —Victor Terras (Brown University)

‘Mr. Jaffin uses words with a real fineness of diction which emphasizes a characteristic understatement of emotion. One recognizes a cultivated sensibility. He adopts a theme and mode which one cannot help but admire. He writes very well indeed.’
                —The late Norman Holmes Pearson (Yale University)

‘Jaffin’s Through Lost Silences offers a rare display of manifold poetic variety. Succinct and challenging enforcers of new insights and deeper understanding, his poems soar in far higher realms than those of prosaic description and rational analysis.... There is sincerity and conviction in Jaffin’s crisp, multi-sensory poeticisation of ideas. Existential and philosophical shapings of language, simple and complex at the same time, draw out the true nature of his chosen subjects in an original way overwhelming the faint echoes of older poetic traditions and leaving behind a profound aftertaste of experiences lived through for the first time.’
                —Edward Batley (University of London)

‘David Jaffin is a master of the restrained but purposeful statement. If his poems do not have quite the briefness of the haiku, they have a good deal of its light-dark inflection and rounded perfection of form... Jaffin’s poems almost always give an impression of ‘light reflecting light’. The fact is, that if one wants restraint and elegance, he will find it in abundance here. Jaffin’s subtleties are, in short, dazzling.’
                —The Library Journal on Conformed to Stone

Eye-sensing (2008 / 100pp / $14.95 / softbound / 978-0-9808873-6-5) is published by Ahadada Books. It is available from Small Press Distribution, in better bookstores and direct from the publisher.

Click here to order from Small Press Distribution.

About Yoko Danno

Ahadada Books is pleased to present Bela Fawr's Cabaret by David Annwn. You may order our newest title by clicking here. It's now available from Small Press Distribution, please click here!

Writes Gavin Selerie: "David Annwn’s work drills deep into strata of myth and history."

He continues:

...exposing devices which resonate in new contexts. Faithful to the living moment, his poems dip, hover and dart through soundscapes rich with suggestion, rhythmically charged and etymologically playful. Formally adventurous and inviting disjunction, these texts retain a lyric coherence that powerfully renders layers of experience. The mode veers from jazzy to mystical, evoking in the reader both disturbance and content. Bela Fawr’s Cabaret has this recognisable stamp: music and legend ‘Knocked Abaht a Bit’, mischievous humour yielding subtle insight...

On earlier books by David Annwn

Annwn’s turbulent//boundaries forces the limits of boundaries by making them jostle and ultimately confront each other ... bacchanalian feast of pagan rite meets media hype ... ancient meets modern and languages of nations meet each other head-on with delicious abandon and undiluted energy.’
    —Geraldine Monk

Blake’s Kayak: ‘This “descriptive catalogue of pictures, poetical and historical inventions” maximizes Blake and Blake, simultaneously emphasising similarities yet focusing on strategic particulars, hence the “Rob Roy canoe” informs us that “Blake wasn’t a swimmer” though for both writer and reader “the effect is that of looking through water / down into wondrous depths”. Annwn’s project is one of temporal range and linguistic complexity, informed by an incisive historical lens, uniquely evoking a provocative mapping beyond any “geographic”.’
    —Karen Mac Cormack

About David Annwn

David Annwn is a poet and critic who lives in Wakefield, Yorkshire, UK. He lectures for the Open University in Manchester. He is a recipient of the Cardiff International Poetry Award and a Ferguson Centre award for African and Asian Studies.Most recent amongst his books are the collaborations: It Means Nothing To Me, (with Geraldine Monk), and The Last Hunting of the Lizopard, (with Alan Halsey.) One of his poems has been made into a book of calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire for the San Francisco Libraries Collection.

Ahadada Books is pleased to present Age of the Demon Tools by Mark Spitzer. You may order our newest title by clicking here. Check out more about Mark Spitzer by clicking here.

Of the newest title from Mark Spitzer and Ahadada, Ed Sanders writes: "When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century."

Mark Spitzer (poet, novelist, literary translator, essayist and muckraker) grew up in Minnesota and lit out for the University of Colorado, where he earned his MA in1992.  He then ended up as Writer in Residence at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where he translated manuscripts by French criminals and misanthropes.  After a few years being Bohemian, Spitzer went back to America and the big old ugly fish he loves (ie, eely bottom feeders, primitive gar and monster cats) and got a job as the Assistant Editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse (which, ironically, had forced him to assume the guise of bastard child of American avant-garde letters just a few years before).  He then goofed his way through an MFA at LSU, got a professor job up in Missouri, and taught creative writing at Truman State University for five years.  He is currently a professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Toad Suck, AR. 

What Others Say about Age of the Demon Tools

Ahadada Books is pleased to present Torque by Alison Croggon. You may download it by clicking here:

 Torque by Alison Croggon (145 KB )

Check out all of our Ebook offerings in our catalog by clicking here. Read more about Alison Croggon via her author profile.

Torque is the third release in the Ahadada Books Online Chapbook series edited by Catherine Daly — it's the eighteenth online chapbook offered by Ahadada.

Born in 1962, Alison Croggon is one of a generation of Australian poets which emerged in the 1990s.  She writes in many genres, including criticism, theatre and prose. She is Melbourne theatre critic for the national daily newspaper, The Australian, and keeps a blog of theatre criticism, Theatre Notes.

Her poetry has been published widely in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. Her most recent poetry publication is a chapbook, Ash (Cusp Books, Los Angeles 2007). A new full collection, Theatre, is forthcoming in 2008 from Salt Publishing. Other titles include November Burning (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series, Sydney, 2004); Mnemosyne,  (Wild Honey Press, Ireland, 2001); The Common Flesh (New and Selected Poems) (Arc Publications, UK, 2003) and Attempts at Being, (Salt Publishing, UK, 2002).

Read more about Alison Croggon here.