… in a brilliant French translation by Bertrand Grimault.
Search Results for: cold turkey press
World of Trouble
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The epigraph (“I’ll do penance with farts and groans / Kneeling on my marrowbones”) comes from a poem by James Joyce. The folio includes four deformed sonnets (“Cursed,” “Her Days All Flee,” “World of Trouble,” “Mirage”) and a poem (“After Carl”).
‘Runaway’: New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
Great beauty from great despair unbends the mind. In a pointless hostile universe that is every poet’s goal.
‘Unnatural Light’ from Cold Turkey Press
‘The eyeballs of an overpaid narcissus
begin to leak all sorts of nothing
and you smell the auric waste
of the languidly famous …’
—Jay Jeff Jones
New Folio from Cold Turkey Press
The stone lion at the gate
wears a mask like mine.
This is where I used to wait
for books that bind,
that put my mind at ease.
Pandemic Poems From Cold Turkey Press: Mistress Death
This handmade, 16-page chapbook is not about Covid-19, but the virus is present in every line.
Cold Turkey Press: ‘Another Pair of Sonnets’
My sonnets don’t usually come in pairs, although looking back on them I can see them being paired sometimes as sequels or cousins. Paradoxically, these two came as a pair because they are so different from each other. The darker mood of the one that came second (“Clocking In”) rebukes the lighter mood of the one that came first (“Kings”). Why I should have objected puzzles me now.
Cold Turkey Press: ‘A Pair of Sonnets’
‘Both belong to a cycle of nine, mostly written during my stay in the rural Connecticut countryside to escape the Covid-19 pandemic during the Spring and Summer of 2020. Both are addressed to writers I admire. “Last Breath” begins the cycle. It was written while remembering my late friend Carl Weissner, before the pandemic began. “The Way the Lines Break” ends the cycle. It was written toward the end of my stay and is addressed to Théophile Gautier, whose poems and stories I was reading thanks to the suggestion of my friend Gerard Bellaart.’ — JH
Poems Midwifed by Cold Turkey Press
“an unknown power / the glass bell of midnight / neither sends nor tracks / whatever the hour / the quivering eye / everything human / the nearness of clouds / bright sun in blue sky” — J.H.
“Pay no heed to society. Wear the mask / of the beast over your animal face. / … Breathe through the nostrils of the dead / and witness how the evening mountains / devour the entrails of the sky.” — M.R.
Folio designed by Gerard Bellaart, with detail of a painting by Constable.
Cold Turkey Press: ‘Ikkyū Sojun Nine Poems’
The Rinzai Zen master Ikkyū Sojun (1394-1481) was a poet, musician, artist, and rebel. He led a life of whoring and drinking. “Sex became a transcendental and sacred act,” Malcolm Ritchie writes in an afterword to this chapbook. Ikkyū’s poems —”often erotic, argumentative, contradictory, judgmental, self-doubting, and occasionally shaded with guilt”—are still as startling as the day they were written.
Cold Turkey Press: A Bibliography
I don’t know exactly how many chapbooks, folios, broadsides, and poetry cards Cold Turkey Press has published. I never counted. But it must be in the hundreds. All of them—produced in handmade, illustrated, and limited editions—are unique manifestations of their publisher’s mind: scholarly without being academic, exotic but not obscure. They constitute an archive that […]
Tribute to John Bryan from Cold Turkey Press
John Bryan published so many underground papers and magazines over three decades — beginning in 1962 with renaissance, a San Francisco literary journal inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception (which John said he read “half a dozen times,” and which turned him onto LSD) — that Warren Hinckle called him “the Peter Zenger of […]
New from Cold Turkey Press: ‘Of Dylan and his Deaths’
A writer as prolific as Heathcote Williams runs the risk of having his poems and prose taken for granted. But this essay — a memoir so rich in personal history, so evocative of his first inspiration, Dylan Thomas, and so indignant about the cultural theft of Thomas’s identity by a famous imposter — merits attention […]
Another Sonnet Maudit from Cold Turkey Press
More conventional but still not Petrarchan, Spenserian, or Shakespearean. And not in Ted’s style either. Best of all, it’s presented with Gerard Bellaart’s ‘Morose Delectation,’ chosen by my staff of thousands.
Two New Cards from Cold Turkey Press
My staff of thousands insisted on this posting. Postscript: And before I forget — 9/11: THE DAY OF, THE DAY AFTER, THE WEEK AFTER.
Cold Turkey Press Does a Nelson Algren Fight Card
I was having such a great time re-reading one of Nelson Algren’s “lesser” books — Who Lost An American? — that I scanned a little excerpt from the second story, “Down With All Hands,” and sent it to Gerard Bellaart. It struck a nerve. He sent back one of his choice Cold Turkey cards. In […]
Cold Turkey Press Publishes Portrait of Nelson Algren
This is a byte of self promotion. A byte? Haw. From the jacket blurb: Who could resist a study of a writer that begins, “if his writing had taken a flying fuck into a deep canyon, it was always balls-to-the-wall”? Jan Herman has borrowed the ghost of Algren’s golden arm with which to write this […]