Action Books - Catalog



Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg translated by Johannes Göransson with an Introduction by Daniel Sjölin ISBN 0-9765692-0-5 Release date: October, 2005 In the shell the nerves’ thin ghost clears time for fat it will take many thousand years to raise fat —from Transfer Fat
Remainland showcases poetry from four volumes of poetry by Aase Berg, one of Sweden’s most celebrated and subversive young writers. From the wrecked fairy-tale-scape of With Deer to the pregnancy allegory Transfer Fat, from the sci-fi naturalism of Dark Matter to the catastrophic oasis of Uppland, Berg works language into miniature grotesques which invert the truisms of contemporary society. Her compulsive inventiveness provides an excoriating challenge to all cultures of complacency. This book costs $12

You go the words by Gunnar Björling translated by Fredrik Hertzberg Action Books Scandinavian Series #2 ISBN: 0-9765692-5-6, ISBN 13: 978-0-9765692-5-1 Release date: August 1, 2007
Gunnar Björling’s singular and independent language and rhythm has influenced generations of Swedish poets. These are overjoyous, unnatural and crazed poems. To read Björling is to eat language. —Aase Berg Fredrik Hertzberg's revelatory translations make palpable the syntactically sprung, emotion-rent verse of one of the great Scandinavian Modernist poets. Hovering in an aesthetic space somewhere between Dickinson and Celan, Oppen and Creeley, Gunnar Björling is a poet of the everyday and its words, as if the abyss between souls could ever be ordinary or ever anything else. —Charles Bernstein Du gar de ord, the last collection of poems by the great Finland-Swedish Modernist poet Gunnar Björling, here superbly translated and introduced by Fredrik Hertzberg, is a milestone in the annals of experimental poetics produced in our century. Björling’s lyric is one of extreme reduction and syntactic dislocation: “Cut out, cut / you, your word/ cut our your / contour, that you cannot /explain,” wrote this poet in 1938, insisting that every word, indeed every morpheme and letter count in a densely Heideggerian poetry of being. Like his American counterparts George Oppen and Robert Creeley, Björling prefers the “small words” – if, and, as, that, like you, the, it–; like theirs, his “minimalism” is conceptually and erotically charged. Reading You go the words is a great pleasure. —Marjorie Perloff This book costs $12

Telescope by Sandy Florian ISBN 0-9765692-4-8 Release date: November, 2006
“In her marvelous debut, Sandy Florian tackles the “clang and bang” of our inattention with a linguistic instrument so fine the pages appear to have been etched. Think Dürer offering up the bits and achingly rich pieces of his Melencolia I, or Schongauer filling the air with his intricate demons. Through the unfurling of its “ellipses and et ceteras,” its “ostinato poundings,” its “serrated anima,” Telescope will teach your eyes something new.” —Laird Hunt “A wondrous book, filled at every turn with pleasures and astonishments. It makes one love the world all over again." —Carole Maso This book costs $12
The Tree of No by Sandy Florian Release date: December, 2008 "Beastly I fall at Adam under the shade." Sandy Florian's second book dilates under Milton's Forbidden Tree, plumbing God's unjustifiable ways, and Man's. In a world made from scratch, eros and artifice, thanatos and theology give off mixed and exquisite signals, here buckled in Florian's bejeweled and rigorous sentences: "words like chords like emerald snakes, words like lords like humble smoke." Florian's intellect blazes in this bold, ambitious work: "I have a war with history."
This book costs $12
The Hounds of No by Lara Glenum ISBN 0-9765692-1-3 Release date: October, 2005 I slit the throats of the Choirboys of Anguish :: I set the flocks of Emergency free :: —from ::Out of the Coffin I Leap::
In this entirely unheimlich debut, Lara Glenum enters the stage of American poetry like a Fritz Lang glamor-girl-cum-anatomical-model, swinging a string of what might be pearls.... The operating chamber is an operating theater, the stage set of the body indistinguishable from the other institutions that make our provincial village hum: mental hospitals, martyrs' shrines, finishing schools. In an era where the term "surreal" has all the potency of a wink and a nod, Glenum recovers the political intensity and daring of the Surrealist project. This book costs $12

Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum Release date: December, 2008 Get minky in the momodrome with Lara Glenum's second book, Maximum Gaga. In scenic Catatonia, the Normopath snoozles, the Cherubim applaud, King Minus lies face-down, the Visual Mercenaries burst in, Icky and his school-boy minions race past, and the Queen Naked Mole Rat climbs inside the miraculating machine. Reworking the tabloid maximalism of Jacobean drama, this book investigates the politics of aesthetics and prosthetics, gender and power.
This book costs $12
My Kafka Century by Arielle Greenberg ISBN 0-9765692-2-1 Release date: October, 2005 Go through the window and you become an animal and are so happy to lie in your little round bed, stuffed with cedar —from "Shirley Temple, Black"
In My Kafka Century, Arielle Greenberg raises the gothic, European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture. Trying on the sometimes hilarious, sometimes discomforting guises of Jewish folk humor, pop eroticism and kiddie epistemology, she reveals and revels in the cracks and contradictions of a bristling, brainy Babel. This book costs $12

Thaumatrope by Brent Hendricks illustrations by Lisa Hargon Smith ISBN13: 978-0-9765692-9-9
Dear Reader: This wonderful book you hold in your hands (are those your hands?) holds your fortune. —Gillian Conoley Ante up. Brent Hendricks's Thaumatrope works like an ideogram thrown by a cardsharp, a decapitated allegory set in "the golden age of little bars.” —Daniel Tiffany This book costs $12
Port Trakl by Jaime Luis Huenún translated by Daniel Borzutzky ISBN13 978-0-9799755-0-9
In these recent poems—published in 2001 in Chile— Huenún invents a setting influenced by Melville’s vivid scenarios, Coleridge’s languid morbidity, and George Trakl’s silences and darkening seas. Borzutzky’s English version is as haunted, brooding, and terrific as the original. —Forrest Gander This book costs $12
Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi ISBN13 : 978-0-9799755-1-6
“by far the most imaginative poet in Korea today" —Bruce Fulton “Kim's animals, like her implicit human subjects, exist within a “book of pain,” victims of violence from without and within. Bodies fail to protect, and there is no protection from bodies themselves […] These dark allegories are beautifully rendered by Don Mee Choi, herself a fine poet." —Susan Schultz This book costs $12
Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito translated by Jeffrey Angles
I want to get rid of Kanoko I want to get rid of filthy little Kanoko I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko who bites off my nipples. "KILLING KANOKO is a powerful, long-overdue collection (in finetranslation) of poetry from the radical Japanese feminist poet, HiromiIto. Her poems reverberate with sexual candor, the exigencies anddelights of the paradoxically restless/rooted female body, and the visceral imagery of childbirth leap off the page as performative modal structures--fierce, witty, and vibrant. Hiromi is a true sister of the Beats." -Anne Waldman "Father's Uterus, Or The Map" This book costs $12
you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin ISBN 0-9765692-5-6 Release date: November, 2006
Reading Tao Lin is like looking the wrong way down Frank O’Hara’s ear trumpet at a 21st century Mayakovski IM-ing Lili Brik. This book is fun, smart, manic and ecstatic; it puts on a clean shirt before it loads the gun. “you are a little bit happier than i am has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting.” —Deb Olin Unferth This book costs $12

Edge of Europe by Pentti Saarikoski translated by Anselm Hollo ISBN 0-9765692-6-4 ISBN13 978-0-9765692-6-8 Release Date: September 2007
In the mid-to-late seventies, Saarikoski had withdrawn from the limelight of two decades of being an only too enthusiastic big fish in a small pond. With his partner, Norwegian-Swedish writer Mia Berner, he established himself in an old house on an island just off the west coast of Sweden and cultivated his own backyard in a typically troll-like way, superimposing the rich and various, wild and woolly landscape of his mind on the surrounding countryside with its mountain ridges, petroglyphs, caves, and harbors. Travels along the western “edge of Europe” with sojourns in Stavanger, Norway, Brittany, and Dublin frame his meditations on language(s), places, animals, humans (and their male and female tyrants) in rambling tongue-in-cheek or deadly serious but never earnest prose. —Anselm Hollo, from the Introduction Pentti Saarikoski's The Edge of Europe is one of those novels often imagined but rarely realized: a novel that is as moving as it is funny, a book that is as thoughtful as it is kinetic, as timeless as it is specific to the narrator's apartment with its entrance hall in Dublin, its living room in Paris, its bedroom in Rome, its office in Budapest, its kitchen in Athens, its sauna in Kerimäki. Anselm Hollo's translation makes this fluid novel read as though it were written by one of the finest poets in English, not just Finnish, telling a story in language that surprises not just line by line, but often from the start of one sentence to its end, as it effortlessly sweeps across literature, architecture, rusted cars, trees, nations, beer, history, jogging-life-until it finally, in the finest sense of Ulysses, brings us home again. —Steve Tomasula, author of The Book of Portraiture This book costs $12

whim man mammon by Abraham Smith ISBN13: 978-0-9765692-8-2
If Frank Stanford got up from the dead to slam (and slammed to win), what he would say might well resemble the poems in whim man mammon. —Graham Foust Mash Gertrude Stein with agrarian folk and you have the unholy matrimony of Abraham Smith's debut, "Whim Man Mammon." —Cathy Park Hong This book costs $12
lip wolf by Laura Solórzano translated by Jen Hofer ISBN 0-9765692-7-2 ISBN 13 978-0-9765692-7-5 Regular Price $14 Website Special: $12 Release Date: August 1, 2007
“Readers beware. You are about to go into the lion’s den. […]There’s no room for nonsense: Solórzano seems to have no interest in dazzling the reader with her prodigious linguistic performance or her defiance of challenging self-imposed constraints. Her diction is unerringly original yet it is also continues the often forgotten legacy of some of the masters of the Latin American historical avant-garde such as Oliverio Girondo, from Argentina, and the Mexican Xavier Villaurritia. How fortunate is she to have her poems be in the hands of Jen Hofer, as judicious a translator as anyone would ever hope for. Her account of the never-ending process of translation evinces just how much thought goes into every one of her choices. And how fortunate are we: she’s been brave and generous enough to venture into the lion’s den just for the sake of sharing this striking work with English-language readers.” —Mónica de la Torre This book costs $12