KFB THIS SATURDAY 3PM

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My book THE RITUALITES is out today from @bookhug_press ! . . “Nardone’s poetry unsettles territories as it roves through the continent, documenting the neon signs and the billboards, the dinner table conversations, and the overheard terrors of everyday Americana. The book orchestrates unlikely and compelling movements between abstracted, parodic narrative and lyric elegy, which Nardone writes as modulated, cerebral laments for an era’s failure to reach utopia. The poems map what we drive towards, driven mad, driving round the bends in form and through the American landscape— from Pennsylvania to South Dakota to Nevada. Witnessing geographic movement as a kind of living trespass, The Ritualites impressed upon me the need for re-tuning poetry’s ethnographic ear, for transposing attention away from calcified ‘identity’ and toward living, throbbing practices of civilian life across the United States. Nardone’s verses seem to take their cue from Muriel Rukeyser’s citational, attentive documentation of the embodied devastations of corporatized and industrialized belts. In his parodic, aloof prose, the critical lathe seems poised to spin Lisa Robertson’s claim in her succinct poem “Envoy”: “analysis too is a style of affect.” Episodic and variegated, the book’s many voices are by turns ventriloquial and verisimilitudinous— sometimes welcoming a careful and attuned ear, sometimes shunning it; sometimes asking for sympathetic leaning, sometimes ironic distance. This is a book that wants the reader to be many-splendored and nimble. My hope has always been for poets to subscribe not to movements or schools of aesthetics, but to be the bearers of urgent form— form as a thing to be broken and held close, at once. Nardone’s collection seems to carry that urgency, seems to know artifice for what it is—a holding pattern for thought’s flight, so it can land in a stranger place, further, always, from the comforts of habit and home.” –Divya Victor, author of Kith

A post shared by Michael Nardone (@mdnardone) on Dec 4, 2018 at 8:03am PST

“My hope has always been for poets…to be bearers of the urgent form. Nardone’s collections seems to carry that urgency, seems to know artifice for what it is—a holding pattern for thought’s flight, so that it can land in a stranger place, further, always, from the comforts of habit and home.”–Divya Victor, author of Kith

Shiv Kotecha does for the word fucking what Catullus did for the word kissing. In The Switch, desire travels everywhere to its surprisingly specific destinations—to body parts aroused in their fashion, like a saint’s skull or a cock. Here love is as artificial as a courtly dialogue, and deeply felt, even spiritual. Here the arousal of the fragmented body is contemporary practice. Is one allowed to write such a book? Among the spectacular effects and turns and startling intimacies in The Switch, the most daring is its no-holds-barred pursuit of love.—Robert Glück

“I had been oscillating between focusing on writing or visuals, and somehow arrived at the point that I didn’t have to choose one over the other,” says Vancouver artist Tiziana La Melia of her digressive approach. “Writing was never something I felt especially strong or good at, but it was something that felt necessary to my sanity.” It’s also an extension of her visual work, displaying different aspects of her research and thought process. La Melia’s writing blends correspondence, intimacy and incantations in an attempt to better understand desires and gripes. Nice Poem (2017) makes an indexical study of flattery, social instrumentalization and liberal feminism; she explains that “these works have been very direct and emotional, and document tiny instances of structural violence, ulterior motives, narcissism and so on.” Candian Art Magazine