Poems by Brannen, Kasimor, Folz in Honor of Chapbook Launch Feb. 1

TheAlteredScalePress Triple Chapbook Launch

Fri., Feb. 1

The Bookhouse in Dinkytown

429 14th St. SE, Minneapolis, MN.

USA

Jonathan Brannen-(2 titles) 

                              —SWAY

                             —TURNING POINT
Mary Kasimor—DUPLEX
Terrence Folz—DEAD PARROTS

Jonathan Brannen has published about two dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, prose, and visual poetry over a long career. He is best known for deaccessioned landscapes (Chax). He is also a perceptive country music songwriter, with an excellent cd "time stained streets."

Mary Kasimor has published three full-length poetry collections, including & cruel red (Otoliths). This is her second chapbook, the first being the electronic cruel red (ensemble jourine).

Terry Folz is seeing himself in book form for the first time. He has supported and participated in the Twin Cities' open mic scene for years. 

Purchase books here: TheAlteredScalePress

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House Warming

by Jonathan Brannen

         They had faded into the traces of a modest life but today the police are at the door and no one is smiling. There is a certain strength here, there is the clatter of wooden hearts, there is no convincing form of advertisement. An overt sky descends upon the window as if what's ordinary always makes the impression of ordinariness. There's a resemblance between light and years to someone who's only passing through. In the background, leaning against the blind wall, sleeping guitars and somnambulant musicians are performing some function, perhaps a memory which can't be shaken. What's natural to say in other surroundings, may be unnatural  if said in isolation. And even if this is only conditional, it does say something about the past.

in egg land

                 by Mary Kasimor

fish rust belches out the pacific wearing

a sole of foot  that grew from

bed monsters’ weird

scarce rotating water a soul scape

washes & nibbles & sorry never

not from the view

from thinking large is larger & life

is a hole in the fence

a view & a hole in

the heart between fingers a marble rolled

down a sidewalk be fearless & wary

of chalked philosophies

plato’s tongue unwinds

he spat into the wind

it didn’t talk back 

escape in symbols

the drummer donates the heart

to body bursting

enlightenment a dim light heart

in hallways at night blood

& darkness blue in light

non-oxygen from

hard times flaming in decision

& gun fluorescent a totemic

tree blazing lawn lingering

inside curtains gigantic tale of

small hands & feet tongue stuck

to a tree growing into the bark

another baby missing

bird got away 

Untitled

by Terry Folz

I.   Dead letter carry-on.

     Pigment parcel mandate.

     Genuflect.

     And spit conniving

     picture-paint spatters.

     Beefhearts feed cast members.
     And no one goes home alone.
     Pray for the parrots
     in the rectory.
     Telegram edicts paper the windows.

II.    Lapdogs.
       I am isolated in box fear.


III.  Joggers on the treadmill.
       Manuscript for radial pain.
       I fold dilapidated picture postcards
       inside the pages of a temperate rain magazine.
       Calling cards optional and extraneous.


IV. I kick my way through
       broken puzzle cardboard.
       Sitting white and cold.
                                                        2012

Changing Latitude

               by Vernon Frazer


stranger harmony
exchanged carpet margins
excess struggle
white whiskers
wait till midnight central
*
to return home
the fire so surprised
serpentine shaking
company of gold
his warranty means that
*
glimpses declared
goodness or the barn yard
saw horse
big beast
roller coaster some distance
*
lonely road
prompted ambitious disappearance
bell groaned
coming mood
swimming new borders peacefully

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Vernon Frazer is a regular contributor to this blog. He appears in AlteredScale.com 1 & AlteredScale.com 2. He will also appear in the next issue, coming out in the spring.

Pray by Julianne Davis

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Julianne Davis will appear in AlteredScale.com 3, out this spring.

Artist Statement: I am a self-taught artist from the UK. I enjoy writing, art, and I sometimes make short films. I have two children, both feral.

if could be

(Click to sharpen.)

Parochial Historiography

18 – 20 Dec 2012

by Dan Ryan

Sat down at the table to read a holy book

Talking about a standard textbook of US History
a perfect hypocrisy in which
nothing is as its given or told as it was
a mythologistical and methodological book of lies
held up to be sacred scripture by
many a proud white American patriot
innocents mostly
with no sense of their whitewashedover eyes
misperceived perceptions of a real unreality
a desperately advertised history desperately pitched
and barrel – rolled
by stoned sky pilots flying on fictitious fictions
stoned on the meth of the great myth
innocents mostly
innocently perpetrating unto others
what was perpetrated unto them
dropping bombs of imaginary history on
an unsuspecting and unconcerned populace
all participants involved blinded by the
opaque smoke of myth
that great nauseating myth
getting high on the nausea and digging it
blind leading the blind down the back staircase of
time and memory
stumbling over loose and sometimes missing altogether treads
along hallways of uncomprehended responsibility
lined by doors of denial offering sanctuary from
unacknowledged atrositites
against oh so many that we speak of not
but of one - just one - I feel compulsive necessity to so do
if only to clear my mind heart and spirit of emotional congestion
the cause of which being the indecently faithful not – so innocents
continuously and all the while quoting chapter and verse from
the holy book of lies the pages empty of any mention toward
mentioning the selfishly selfish exploitations implicitly implicit in
the pioneers’ entry into Indian lands
the intentionality of their intent being to destroy in whole or
in part all things Indian
insanely and certifiably convinced of their cultural and
racial superiority
waving manifold manifestos of manifest destiny
in frantic franticness pushing Indians out of every and all portions
of the western hemisphere
aided and shamelessly abetted by an American government
honoring virtually and absolutely almost none of the treaties it signed
in disappearing and invisible ink the Indians’ Indian-ness dying
from an excess of death

I could go on and on and fucking on but in the ending reality
nothing is sacred

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Dan Ryan is a regular contributor to this blog. A poem by him will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Purgatory Hill's melaniejane

Purgatory Hill just released their second album, the magnificent Invisible Pistols. There is no doubt that pat mAcdonald—famous for "The Future's So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades," a mid-80s hit he penned for his then group Timbuk 3—leads the band with his raucous Lowebow guitar playing, piercing harmonica, foot stomping, and strangely mellow vocals. He also writes most of the songs. However, the band would not be what it is without its only other member: melaniejane. She plays small percussion, cello, keyboard, and provides backing vocals.

In spite of his fame—mAcdonald has opened for Bob Dylan and memorabilia from Timbuk 3 are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—Purgatory Hill usually plays before tiny crowds in very small bars and clubs. On January 18 I saw them for no cover with about 50 other people at Frets in Green Bay, WI. After the show, melaniejane and I found the quietest, well-lit spot in the tiny place to conduct an interview. She talks about playing cello, tambourine, and other assorted things. Below are links to melaniejane playing both cello and tambourine.





melaniejane on cello (solo, covering "Come Together" by the Beatles)

melaniejane on tambourine (Purgatory Hill)

melaniejane on cello (Purgatory Hill)

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Purgatory Hill appears in AlteredScale.com issue 1 and pat mAcdonald will appear solo in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

See "Growing Up with the Music of pat mAcdonald, Part 1" on this blog. Part two will appear in April of this year.

pat recently published Space Kitty Blues. Check it out at the Purgatory Hill website.

melaniejane's website

He Said, She Said

by Susan Lewis

                Tell me everything, he coyly clamored. After which? she parried, pulling a muscular pirouette on the head he’d hoped to nail. Which put a certain crimp in their love & let live. They sampled cloisonne, Kama Sutra, & sous vide, but none raised the frisson of those (pre)historic misfires.  So they scuttled speech & met for froth & frolic beneath the smiling visage of the Dalai Lama & his Mischievous Monkettes.  But neither foul nor fair was the musk-laden air; no one knew what to toss and what to spare.  So on they siphoned nirvana & need, spinning their score with high-voltage static & copious doses of the sweetest, literal & figurative, statistically significant regret.

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A regular contributor to this blog, Susan Lewis is editing a gallery of textual poetry for AlteredScale.com 3. Her poetry will also appear in another gallery, edited by Mary Kasimor.

Susan is the author of  How to be Another (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming 2013), Commemorative Edition (White Knuckle Press, forthcoming 2013), At Times Your Lines (Argotist e-Books, 2012), Some Assembly Required (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Commodity Fetishism, winner of the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Poetry Award, and Animal Husbandry (Finishing Line Press, 2008).  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in a great number of journals, including Atlanta Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Boog City, Cimarron Review, Eclipse, Fact/Simile, Monday Night, The New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Raritan, Seneca Review, Verse (online), and Verse Daily.  She is Editor of MadHat Press and Managing Editor of MadHat Annual and MadHat Lit. Her website is www.susanlewis.net.

stopgap

by Jefferson Hansen

perceived
finality
& affective
memories roll,
snapping synapses
into radical
new orders

the end is
merely 
stretching

A Quick Note on Thaddeus Rutkowski's HAYWIRE (Starcherone)

by Jefferson Hansen

This coming-of-age novel begins when the Chinese-Polish narrator, who lives in Appalachia, is in about junior high. It ends with him as a married man in his mid-20's or so. Obviously, his character changes as the book unfolds. Rutkowski presents this change in the typical fashion: our main character behaves in a progressively more grown-up fashion, he responds to people in a different way, he understands his feelings better, he is more responsible. However, Rutkowski also charts this change in another way, the way that interests me: the very texture of the language alters. In other words, Rutkowski has his narrator inhabit and use language differently the further we go into this novel. This does not always happen in coming-of-age novels: here, the very terms of the narration alter.

This passage occurs fairly early, when the narrator is about in junior high:

"Reluctantly, I pushed a button to open a circuit between the car battery and the rocket engine. A hot copper thread ignited the solid fuel, and the homemade projectile left the ground with a hiss. Almost immediately, the missile went haywire. It started to corkscrew through the air. A couple of hundred feet up, it began to pinwheel.

A second charge deployed the parachute. Wind caught the thin material and carried the rocket away. My brother and sister and I ran after the brightly colored swatch but covered only a few dozen yards before we couldn't see it anymore."

In the above passage, what interests me is the emotional flatness of the narration. The only emotion we get is the word "reluctantly." The rest is pure narration, with all emotion implied. But it's not the rock hard, just-the-facts such narration that we see in Hemingway. This boy is tender, but can't express it. There is a sense that he cares for the rocket, wants to find it and the parachute just for the sake of having it, that he does so with his brother and sister because he cares for them. This is a flat narrativity on which everything hangs. He emotes outside himself, unlike most of Hemingway's characters, who seem absorbed.

Here, we see more direct emotion and a slightly different vocabulary:

"I moved from the small city to a big city. On the way, I stopped at my parents' house. There, I gave my car to my sister, who was just old enough to drive. When I left, the car was running fine. The rear wheel held by four bolts instead of five was tight as a drum. The car cruised without blowing steam. The radio played within five miles of any transmitting station" (153).

Again, the emotion is for the most part implied, but not as much. First, we can see how much he cares for his sister because he not only gives her the car, but makes sure it is in good working order. He wants to give her something good, that works well. The flat humor of the last sentence is also characteristic. In the first quoted passage, the emphasis is almost wholly on the technical, with the implied emotion very distant. In the second, the emphasis is still on the technical, but the emotions are closer to the description.

Finally, in the second passage the vocabulary becomes a little more engaged. The phrase about the sister being "just old enough to drive" speaks volumes, as does "when I left." It reveals how he feels, what he is thinking, and so forth. With some people that age, the phrase would be, "my mom made me give the car to my sister." Here, the texture of the language reveals character—namely, a deeply caring, sweet one.

"I move with my family to a new place. It's a storefront, and it's large, compared with our old place. But it's far from the center of town. It's so far I can't place it geographically, in my mind.

The ceiling looks high, maybe fourteen feet, but when I reach up, I can touch it with my hand. My reach is about seven feet, so the ceiling must be quite low. I can't believe this, so I try again, and my hand touches solid plaster.

I notice that we've left a side door open, maybe for weeks. Anyone could have come in. But there's no evidence of illegal entry. I guess the door must have been hidden behind trees or leaves (295)".

Phrases such as "in my mind" usually don't happen early in the book. The description also becomes more deeply rooted in wonder and fantasy—a place we all often live—and moves away from the facticity of the early part of the book. The part about the ceiling seeming higher than it is points to this. Notice also the phrase "can't believe," which also points to self-consciousness. As the book moves to a finish, our narrator gets married, has a daughter, and begins to develop a deeper understanding of the world, and this is tracked, in part, in the very warp and woof of the language itself.

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Thaddeus Rutkowski webpage

Haywire is published by Starcherone books, run by Ted Pelton. A story by Pelton appears in AlteredScale.com 2.

Throttle Incursion by Vernon Frazer

Poetry recitation with improvised musical accompaniment and animated text
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Vernon Frazer posts regularly on this blog. His work appears in AlteredScale.com 1, AlteredScale.com 2, and he is editing a jazz/poetry video gallery for AlteredScale.com 3.

Here to Stay: Thomas Chapin’s "Never Let Me Go”

A Posthumous Release from one of the Great Ones 

review by Vernon Frazer

While waiting for my copy of Never Let Me Go, a 3-CD box set of Thomas Chapin’s quartet recordings, I realized that I’d heard Thomas play primarily in quartet settings, usually on the several times a month he played in Connecticut jazz clubs in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Late in 1980 or early in 1981, the freshness of his music helped bring me back to the jazz scene after a three-year hiatus that came because I found myself anticipating the soloist's next “sound of surprise” too frequently in clubs and concerts. When I heard Thomas play a familiar pattern, he'd spin it in an unexpected yet unerringly logical direction. I couldn’t anticipate his next line, even when I tried. His love of making music generated a contagious exuberance that led his rhythm sections to transcend themselves or risk falling behind. On more than one occasion, the healing power of his music lifted me from the funk of a foul day into the ecstasy of the moment. The music on these recordings characterizes the transformative powers of Thomas’s playing. Simply put, it features some of his finest playing on record. If you’ve never heard Thomas Chapin before, Never Let Me Go will introduce you to the music of one of the most accomplished and innovative saxophonists and flutists of the 1980s and 1990s. 

At the time Never Let Me Go was recorded, in 1995 and 1996, Thomas had achieved a technical mastery of his instruments that allowed him to express his ideas with a facility almost as natural as breathing. Playing at the peak of his creative powers, his work on this box set should put to rest any remaining attempts to categorize him as mainstream or avant-garde. Those who followed his music knew he was both---and much more. Thomas didn't straddle two worlds; he embraced them as part of one vast spectrum of music. He was a musical omnivore whose passion for ethnic music led him to play many wind and percussion instruments from other cultures. He performed punk rock, tango, and classical music, and backed poets, always playing his distinctive style with an spot-on sensitivity to the musical context. His intellectual and emotional capacity enabled him to to synthesize his broad musical vocabulary into a core expression appropriate to the musical moment. This box set doesn’t pretend to present the full breadth of his musical vision, but it presents him in one of his most comfortable, familiar and accessible formats, the quartet. 

Never Let Me Go emphasizes the jazz at the core of Chapin’s sensibility, and offers a musical stew with more than enough spice to heat and flavor it. The repertoire itself reflects Thomas’s taste for challenging material. His original compositions reveal the passion of his lyricism (“Sky Piece”) and his willingness to improvise within complex structures, as well as create open-ended structures that afforded him maximum creative freedom. In the fare offered here, we see the choices of material that made Thomas unique among his colleagues. In addition to his own compositions, he chooses standards you don’t commonly hear. Chapin devours the changes of the opening tunes, “I’ve Got Your Number” and “Moon Ray,” with joyful passion. On the latter, he risks playing an extended interpolation from “Nature Boy” beyond “Moon Ray’s” harmonic structure, but deftly ends the phrase within the structure and refers to the passage several choruses later during a climactic build. On the bop classic, “Red Cross,” Chapin devours the changes, incorporating pianist Peter Madsen's substitutions and building to shrieking climaxes that stretch but retain their ties to the tune’s harmonic structure and tonality. He also delves into popular music that I’ve yet to hear any other jazz musician attempt: Ray Charles’ 1962 hit, “You Don’t Know me” and the 1960s hit “Wichita Lineman.” In a live performance, he once gave “Red River Valley” a decidedly urban interpretation. Thomas also recorded several lesser-known Thelonious Monk compositions, capturing their spirit with sensitivity while adding the distinctive Chapin interpretation, a gesture of respect deeper than mere imitation. Disc 2 of this box set opens with Chapin and pianist Peter Madsen rendering Monk’s seldom-played “Ugly Beauty” as a sensitive duet. 

The other members of the rhythm section aren’t as familiar to me as Madsen. In conversations, Thomas had mentioned touring Japan with bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara, but never mentioned the quartet to me as a working unit. Thomas usually spoke in very general terms about his projects, I assume because any new artistic undertaking carries as much uncertainty as enthusiasm. But Fujiwari and Scott Colley, whose work I’m hearing for the first time, accompany Chapin with drive and empathy, as do drummers Reggie Nicholson and Matt Wilson. Among the drummers I’ve heard with Thomas, Nicholson and Wilson tend to play the deeper tones of their trap sets, compared to Michel Sarin and Steve Johns, whose work I’ve heard more frequently. 

In addition to releasing excellent and unheard material from a voice gone too soon, Never Let Me Go underscores the brilliance of Thomas Chapin’s work and reminds us that nobody in the past fourteen years has surpassed him. That he is irreplaceable is a given. Another given is that Never Let Me Go is a keeper.

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Vernon Frazer is a regular contributor to this blog and has appeared in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2. He is currently curating a jazz-poetry gallery for AlteredScale.com 3.

Tom Cassidy — Untitled

(Click to enlarge and focus.)

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Tom Cassidy will appear in AlteredScale.com 3, out in March.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

Leigh Herrick Interview

Leigh Herrick discusses poetry and her new book, HOME FRONT: Poems of the Bush II Years, with Tom Cassidy. They make a number of references to Minneapolis and the Twin Cities, MN, USA, for those of you not familiar with the area.








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 Leigh Herrick and Tom Cassidy are both regular contributors to this blog. Both will also appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Tom Cassidy's written and drawn works have appeared in hundreds of smallpress and mainstream publications, as well as galleries and museums around the world. His works are archived in dozens of art institutions, often under his own name. With John Bennett and Scott Helmes, he co-edited Vispoeology (2007), an international anthology of visual literature for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where he also co-curated None of the Above in 2009. In 1976, Tom co-founded the Portland performance poetry troupe The Impossibilists, who were reunited in April, 2008, for a series of shows by the Oregon Heritage Commission. He is currently a board member, performer, and curator for Cheap Theatre and Patrick’s Cabaret.

Leigh Herrick is an engaged poet, writer, and recording artist who trains in Middle Eastern and Afro-Caribbean hand drumming.  She has produced two CD's: JUST WAR and MONOCLE MAN, and is at work on a third.  Herrick ’s poetry has won numerous awards and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee.  Her newly released book is HOME FRONT: Poems of the Bush II Years.  For more information please visit www.LeighHerrick.com 

Leigh Herrick — Joe Hill (On Life Support)

Below is a link to Leigh Herrick's electronica and vocals rendition of a new song she wrote, in honor of  workers and Unions. Go Union!

Joe Hill (On Life Support)

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Leigh Herrick will appear in AlteredScale.com 3.

She is a poet, recording artist, and filmmaker who lives in the Twin Cities, MN, USA. She is a regular contributor to this blog.

Leigh Herrick Webpage

Crack, Crack by Julianne Davis

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Julianne Davis will appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March.

Artist Statement: I am a self-taught artist from the UK. I enjoy writing, art, and I sometimes make short films. I have two children, both feral.

Review of Michael Boughn's "Great Canadian Poems for the Aged Vol.1 Illus. Ed." (BookThug)

A nominee for Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award, poet and hockey buff Michael Boughn sends the puck into the pocket with this book.

Each poem begins with a photograph, then the language riffs off its content, often hilariously. It usually begins with a kind of description and then digresses into puns, weird associations, and tangential reveries—only to come back to the photo.

The pictures and poems almost exclusively relate to Canadian nationalism and country pride. Boughn delivers a politcally-tinged irony to Empire, Canadian smugness, and patriotism. However, there is also a resignation here, a sense that poetry can laugh at such silliness, but hardly overcome it. I sense no anger, no disgust, no feeling that the cultural work of writing can undo the ridiculous ether contemporary Canadians (and the rest of us in different realms) live within.

                    the nation can claim
     no greater invention than its own
     quicksand anchorage (71)

     riparian outcomes in geographies
     of unassociated sumptuous

     norths (32)

                    Johnny Canuck and Miss
     Canada, proclaiming the virtue


     of porridge seasoned with salt, hit
     the road. (8) 

One of the photos is of a North American map, in which Canada is huge—Boughn describes it as a whale—and the USA is small. While Boughn, thankfully, displaces the USA from its centralized position, he refuses to do so in a way that celebrates the new center: he decenters and then ironizes the new center—not only funny, but a little dizzying. Boughn mentions, sometimes repeatedly, “Canadian-associated” words such as moose, grizzlies, bears, mounties, geese, flies, hypothermia. 

The playfulness also operates at the level of grammar and semantics. While Boughn renders the poems in “correct” sentences, sometimes usage becomes gnarled. Words function ambiguously— a noun? adjective? gerund?  For instance:

    Nuances of extinct species extrude


    grail vision’s perfect handful of matter,

    however fleeting imbibed opportunities

    scatter, and yielded dimensions pour forth

    in frothy offerings old time revelations


    of amber bulletins rendered perfectly

    intelligible in the light of recalled
laughter. (23)

This sentence does stand up grammatically: Subject — “nuances”— verb—“extrude” — for the first independent clause and, in the second such clause, subject — “dimensions” — and verb —“pour.” That said, given the strange semantics, the “however” clause feels as if it could be independent, making “yielded dimensions” not so much a subject of an independent clause as a continuation of the “however,” suggesting that everything coming after that word serves as a qualification for the first independent clause. The result: un-ease at the grammatical level, leading to semantic scattering, seedlings of meaning taking root in a variety of ways around and within the sentence. Witty, smart-ass, mischievous, silly, sophisticated:

      

                                       Once outside

     Winnipeg the seams of night came undone
     releasing secretly held fire in cascades

    of relentless revelations of nothing

    more than night. (48)

Bough also plays with the collaging of vocabularies:

     faces known to be under surveillance
     but determined to keep the exchange
     in motion as long as the joint stays open. (68)

“Re-present” is high theory, “but determined” almost sounds like self-help, and “joint” goes way down and out. The silly internal rhyme in the last line adds to the revelry. This collage throws the irony—so often aimed at Empire—into the comic sphere, where there is no bottom line, where everything is up in the air and being juggled and tossed and turned. The motion is the meaning.

In only one place did I sense Boughn getting angry:

                     Levellers and Diggers

     dangle from the wrong end of a rope looking
     bemused at the hue and cry, but the church,
     fastidiously rejecting spilled blood,

     leaves heretics to the fire as if it all comes down

     to how many world’s you want to count
     with your eyes closed in spite of auto-da-fé’s
     spreading pall over vistas of unrestrained
     generosity and native intelligence. (40)

Even here, he doesn’t get too worked up. After all, there are hockey games we need to get to.

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See interview with Michael Boughn.

Michael Boughn appears in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2. He has also published on this blog. I am grateful to him for his generosity and the interest he has shown in this project.

Michael Boughn, on the occasion of being shortlisted for Canada's Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2011, was described in the Globe and Mail as “an obscure veteran poet with a history of being overlooked by the mainstream." He is the author of H.D.: A Bibliography 1905 - 1990 (University of Virginia, 1993) and co-editor (with Victor Coleman) of Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book (University of California, 2011), as well as being editor of Narthex and other stories by H.D. (BookThug, 2011). His recent book of poetry, Cosmographia - A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (Book Thug, 2010), was shortlisted for the aforementioned Prestigious Prize at the same time his mystery novel, Business As Usual, was published by NeWest (Edmonton).