Three new books from Junction Press, and a big sale. See the website, Junctionpress.com, for more details about the books.

Note: all books are discounted below US discount prices, to help offset the postage, about which I can't do anything.

Jerome Rothenberg, Retrievals:Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010. Discount price L9

A central figure of both the "deep image" and ethnopoetics movements, and a pioneering experimentalist, Jerome Rothenberg is the author of over eighty collections of poems and ten volumes of translations and editor of nine ground-breaking anthologies. He here assembles, out of poems and plays unpublished or obscurely published, the first representation of the full trajectory of one of the most important careers in American poetry of the past fifty years.

"Jerome Rothenberg has done as much as anyone over the past half century to shake up received ideas of what poems ought to be like, by demonstrating or suggesting an endless profusion of other pathways, other shapes, other stances, other contexts: as if to say that it is always possible to begin over, to invent new rules for the most ancient of games, not once but over and over. Now to the rest of his poetry--a body of work still underrated, in part because his extraordinary work as editor and translator may at times have overshadowed it--is added this bonus: half a century of work previously uncollected, spilling out in profusion from the interstices of all the previous poetry and revealing multiple layers of exploration and invention. Here are baroque sonnets, gnostic hymns, language games, parables, elegies, conversations, landscapes inner and outer, dream poems, poems noisy and nearly silent, poems mournful and ecstatic and uproarious, poems in dialogue with other poems from the Bablyonians and Toltecs to today or the day after, by way of Oppian, Lorca, Pound, Duncan, Mac Low, and culminating in a starkly pared-down suite of Ikons & Altarpieces. Retrievals is the book of a life, and the book of an era."
    - Geoffrey O'Brien, editor-in-chief, The Library of America


Rochelle Owens, Solitary Workwoman. Discount price L9

"Rochelle Owens' writing...is sui generis. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce Andrews and Ron Silliman. But Owens is angrier, more energetic, and more assertive than most of her Language counterparts, male and female, and she presents herself as curiously non-introspective. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and uncompromising judgement: it is imperative, in her poetic world, to face up to the horror, even as the point of view is flexible enough to avoid all dogmatism."
    - Marjorie Perloff

“Sharp & visual, Owens combines a landscape with a poetics, the domestic with the mythic, machines with the organic living world--from which arises a construct & a fused vision: poetry & life."
    - Jerome Rothenberg

“Owens goes cold turkey on the agony and delight of living in this century. She is the Shaman-genius exploring deeper realities in the psychic realm. She reaches down into the living, breathing mystical core and pulls up the forces of chaos spitting and kicking: she gives us back the hungry power of our own imaginations."
    - Maureen Owen

A central figure in the international vanat-garde for fifty years, Rochelle Owens has published 16 previous volumes of poetry, including New and Selected Poems: 1961-1996 and Luca: Discourse on Life and Death (both Junction Press, 1997 and 2001). She has been the recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and Honors from the New York Drama Critics' Circle for her plays. Her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Ukranian and Japanese.


Polkinhorn and Velasco, Caló: A Dictionary of Spanish Barrio and Border Slang. Discount price L9

"This dictionary is a much-needed update of the slang of California's border region. While Chicano caló has been recognized as a youth argot since before World War II, when its speakers were known as pachucos, each region and generation has added new words and phrases, its speakers adapting the dialect to their current reality. By using it, Chicano youths and other insiders sometimes hide their true intent, playing with language and at the same time paying homage to the camaradas who have gone before them. Caló: A Dictionary of Spanish Barrio & Border Slang allows the uninitiated into a world of living on the edge. It will be invaluable to readers who have learned Spanish in school but want to know how it's spoken on the street."
    - MaryEllen García, PhD, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, The University of Texas at San Antonio

"Caló is a vibrant and often joyous explosion of linguistic tricksterism. Depending on the listener, it can either be delightful or intimidating--sometimes both at once. This book is fascinating and hilarious. So put on your best calcos, grab your weesa, and take the ranfla out for a cruise--and keep this volume in the glove box."
    - Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North, The Devil's Highway, and The Hummingbird's Daughter.

"Polkinhorn and Velasco have busted the borders of linguistic analysis and Chicano talk assumptions. I hear the voices of my uncle Beto from El Paso in the 30's, the new multi-vocalities of the "¡Orale!" generations of Latin America and the ever swashbuckling cross-cultural speakers and singers of the world. This is the unchained rap of the people! Tune into its poetic-love, community-renaissance and heart-rhythm dance. A twenty-first century ring-tone. ¡De aquellas! Right on!"
    - Juan Felipe Herrera 


Order direct from me for a discount. Each retails for $21, but is discounted to L9 for list members. Order all three for L26. Add L5.5 for one book for shipping within the US.

Still more ways to save money. Junction Press is digitalizing its older books and needs to unburden its warehouse of remaining copies of books printed offset. The digital copies will be significantly more expensive because of increased paper costs. So,

Pay full price for Solitary Workwoman (L13) and I'll include Owens' New and Selected Poems 1961-1996 and Luca: Discourse on Life and Death gratis (each retail for $20). 

Buy any of the new books at full price (L13) and select one of the following gratis:
Richard Elman, Cathedral-Tree-Train
Luisa Futoransky, translated by Jason Weiss, The Duration of the Voyage
Mark Weiss, Fieldnotes
Ira Beryl Brukner, Questions, Short Poems, Water & Air
Susie Mee, The Undertaker's Daughter
Stephen Vincent, Walking

Finally, Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (bilingual, edited by Polkinhorn and Weiss), L9 (retail price $25).

All of these offerings are only available backchannel to me.