Action Books

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Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity
Edited by Jed Rasula and Tim Conley
$25

Poetry. BURNING CITY acts as a "multisensory Baedecker" to the many incarnations of international modernism from 1910-1939. Inspired by the abandoned plans of the early avant-garde poet Yvan Goll to write a history of modernity through the poetry of that era, scholars Jed Rasula and Tim Conley have carried out Goll's project, scouring the small journals and magazines of the period for both lost and seminal texts. BURNING CITY is organized not just according to the cities which inspired the texts—Paris, Cracow, Buenos Aires, and so on—but according to such icons of the modern urban experience as "Cineland," "Music Hall," "Electric Man." BURNING CITY makes a new contribution to anthologies of both poetry and modernism by its thematic focus on city life, by its inclusion of poets from languages and nationalities seldom represented in standard US surveys, and by its preservation of the typographic versatility of the this feverishly innovating period.

Praise for Burning City:

"Truly global in its reach, yet local in its exacting particularities, Burning City breaks down the old familiar isms and genre divisions, introducing us to writings we've never seen before, printed side by side with our favorite poems by Huidobro and Musil, Mayakovsky and Mina Loy. In a nutshell, the map of modernism will never be the same!"
- Marjorie Perloff

"This wonderful anthology, unprecedented in its reach, at least delivers on the promise of global understanding of modernity. Anyone compelled by film, urbanism, poetry, and the technologies of travel and communication will be enthralled."
- John Wilkinson

Skin Horse
by Olivia Cronk
$12

Poetry. Like a secret date with Lizzie Borden, these moody lyrics thrill as they incriminate. SKIN HORSE shows that history is a crime scene, and that crime is theatrical, rife with costumes, masks, hats, props, weapons, scripts, dialogue, wooden scenery and dreamlike reenactments. These poems are anachronistic yet uncannily alive, furtive yet frank like an incriminating note forgotten in an apron pocket. Cronk locks words together like a lace collar which flutters attractively even as it tightens at the reader's throat. She writes, "with velvet trim / in the whistle of seeing." She writes, "Is it too untoward to say Please Go Back to Normal Life?" She writes, "Gotta nest of woe a nest of wail / and pardon my tied-on prom."

Praise for Skin Horse:

If the wind cries Mary sounds to you more like The ring pulsed maria then you have your ears tuned to Cronk's indiosyncratic sonics. You can't be overtly prepared for Cronk's directions, all you can do is gladly, if a little hesitantly, follow the paths her word combinations offer: Back to the city in chains............trees typewritering...........I am indeed a nurse. SKIN HORSE will stimulate some neurons to try some new actions, to scare up some gathering, to be thrilled to be amongst her magnifications.

-Dara Wier

SPECIAL: Buy Skin Horse together with All the Garbage of the World, Unite! for only $20.

All the Garbage of the World, Unite!
by Kim Hyesoon
translated by Don Mee Choi
$12

Tonight I send my regards to you, an electric current

Hello Mr. Scream!

All the Garbage of the World Unite! is the latest book in English translation by Kim Hyesoon, one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets. She lives in Seoul and teaches creative writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Kim was one of the first few women to be published in the literary journal, Munhak kwa jisông [Literature and Intellect]. During the 1970- 80s, this journal and Ch’angjak kwa pip’yông [Creation and Criticism] were the two leaders of the intellectual and literary movement against the U.S.-backed military dictatorships. Since then, Kim has steadily published poetry as well as criticism and received numerous prestigious literary awards. More translation of Kim’s poetry can be found in When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish 2005), Anxiety of Words (Zephyr, 2006) and Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action books, 2008). Some of her poems are also available in Spanish and German. Kim has recently read at Taipei Poetry Festival, Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, and Poesiefest Berlin.

Don Mee Choi is the author of The Morning News is Exciting (Action Books, 2010). She lives and works in Seattle.

Praise for Kim Hyesoon:

“Kim Hyesoon writes flowingly and choreographically a panorama of hovering hatelove for the birthing body, for cruelty and existence and for the expansive thinking and dizzyingly borderless universe-geography. Kim Hyesoon writes hatelove as a stone-hard feminist life-and-death dance. As garbage, love and death accumulate in her poems, your world will be changed for real!”

-Aase Berg

“Miraculous weaponry! Miraculous translations! This kind of undomesticated engagement and lawlessness and risk and defiance and somatic exorbitance posits a world and a relation to the world where everything excluded is included—the animal and the vegetal, the molten and the mineral, the gaseous and the liquid, not to mention shame, disgust, failure, terror, raunch. The final poem “Manhole Humanity” deserves its place alongside Césarire’s “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” or Ginsberg’s “Howl” or Inger Christensen’s It. Kim Hyesoon’s new book is armament and salve, shield and medicinal chant. It’s here to protect us.

-Christian Hawkey

SPECIAL: Buy All the Garbage of the World, Unite! together with Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers for only $20.

____________________________ Recent Titles ____________________________
	Privado ISBN 978-0-9831480-0-5 60 pp, $12 Daniel Tiffany's second and third books of poetry, Privado (Action Books) and The Dandelion Clock (Tinfish Press) were published in 2010. His first volume of poetry, Puppet Wardrobe, which appeared in 2006 from Parlor Press, was named a "must read" for National Poetry Month in April 2007. His poetry, which has received the Chicago Review Annual Poetry Prize, appears in journals including Tin House, Boston Review, jubilat, New American Writing, and the Paris Review. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. In addition to his work as a poet, Daniel Tiffany has published translations of Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. He is also the author of three books of literary criticism and theory, including Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named one of the “Best Books of 2000” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Radio Corpse (Harvard University Press, 1995). More recently, Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance was published by the University of Chicago Press and named the best book of poetry criticism of 2009 by Don Share, senior editor of Poetry magazine. Tiffany's critical essays on poetry and poetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Semiotexte, Modernism/Modernity, and numerous other journals. He has given numerous readings of his poetry and delivered invited lectures at Princeton, Cornell, UC Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge University, as well as the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of London. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Wundercritic Daniel Tiffany’s third book of poems. A sphinx made of soldier and siren, of secrecy and prophecy: a killer serial poem. “Already I buy it. I am confidant. I feel spokem for.” -Catherine Wagner “The poems in Privado show how the drab style and the golden style go together.” -Aaron Kunin “a storm is now upon us.” -Kevin Killian
	Helsinki by Peter Richards ISBN 978-0-9799755-5-4 $12 Helsinki:part erotic, part nuclear, entirely mutagenic, dangerously Sublime. Helsinki: a fort, a hospital bed, an escape pod, the mind, and memory itself. Praise for Peter Richards: “a word chain peppered with strange, colorful ciphers” —Boston Review “nutshell-autocracy” —Perihelion “a terrible loneliness lurks” —Ploughshares
	Songs For His Disappeared Love by Raúl Zurita $12 “Raúl Zurita is, with Nicanor Parra, Chile's preeminent living poet,and his "Canto a su amor desaparecido," here in Daniel Borzutzky's superb translation,is a shattering cyclotron of compact epic. Written in wake of the poet's experiences of imprisonment, torture, and underground resistance, Zurita offers, in the poem's opening half,stuttering, heart-wrenching testimonies of political and personal loss, followed by a tour de force sequence continental in scope-- a kind of Canto General "in negative," drained of any of the consoling teleologies. It is a brave work that conjoins the major and the minor, the vatic and the humblest--and most courageous--orders of the quotidian. Giving no quarter to abstract aesthetic, it's a poem whose traumas jolt us awake and demand we remember.” -Kent Johnson
	Hank by Abraham Smith $12 "In an era of overpolished workshop poems and vague, bloodless experiment, Abraham Smith's Hank risks a caterwauling quagmire both epic and lyric in scope, replete with 18 kinds of loneliness. A folk paen to Hank Williams, Sr., its excess is astonishing, its unpunctuated, puncturing burble is propulsive, funny, unforgiving , and raw. Hank is an "elegy for gravel" along the lost highway we've been hunting for. It belongs only to the future of American poetry." -Joshua Marie Wilkinson
	The Morning News is Exciting by Don Mee Choi $12 "Cameraman, run to my twin twin zone. A girl's exile excels beyond excess. Essence excels exile. Something happens to the wanted girl. Nothing happens to the unwanted girl. The morning news is exciting." A debut volume from poet, translator, artist and activist Don Mee Choi. Here translation, aberration, mobility and movement corrupt the would-be verities of the world's hegemonic codes. "Choi translates feminist politics into an experimental poetry that demilitarizes, deconstructs, and decolonizes any master narrative." -Craig Santos Perez "A Journey from Neocolony to Colony" (in Action,Yes)

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