(Elinor Frey on the piano)

My top ten favorite books of poetry, not by what I determine to be important to you, to us all, but by what I believe is most formative for me, and most impressive to me, from what little I have read, at my age now, which is 31 and a half:

1. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford

2. The Tunnel by Russell Edson

3. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

4. Memoir of the Hawk by James Tate

5. Short Talks by Anne Carson

6. The Blue Notebook by Daniil Kharms (trans. Matvei Yankelevich)

7. The Shirt Weapon by Brandon Downing

8. Poems 4 by Alan Dugan

9. The Most of It by Mary Ruefle

10. As in Every Deafness by Graham Foust

I got a new pair of glasses yesterday. They look just like my dad's old glasses. His name is Bruce. This is my dad wearing the glasses in 1968. This is me wearing the glasses in 2008.

My two favorite blogs this week:

Maya Angelou Reviews

&

Ron Silliman Update

The Undersleepbook launch tour begins next Saturday:

Saturday, August 9th
Brooklyn, NY: The Melville House
Julie Doxsee
Reading with Matvei Yankelevich
& X-ing Press poets Justin Talyor & Jeremy Schmall

Portland rock shows I want to see this fall. 

Tonight: Wolves in the Throne Room

8/27: The Walkmen

8/29: Bon Iver

9/2: Antony and the Johnsons

9/5: Matt & Kim

9/12: Damien Jurado

9/19: Okkervil River

9/23: Dr. Dog

9/30: Silver Jews

10/8: Stars

10/21: The Mountain Goats

11/20: Of Montreal

My boy, Brandon Shimoda, made the back of the new DQ. 

Have you checked out PressPressPress lately? I found something to spend my last few dollars on. 

O Moscow, Idaho

I am working on my comprehensive exams. These are the books I checked out at the public library today:

Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke

Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd

Rene Char. This Smoke That Carried Us

Tristan Tzara. First Poems

Stephan Mallarme. Collected Poems

Apollinaire. Calligrammes

Apollinaire. The Self-Dismembered Man

The Poetry of Boris Pasternak 1917-1959

Rimbaud. Complete Works

I bought a helmet. I am going to go for a walk in my helmet now. 

Two videos I took at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. 

Julie Doxsee's Undersleep on those shelves near the front of the store in Open Books. 

A poem of mine from The Man Suit, "The Things That Surround Us," was translated into Italian by Francesca Matteoni and Italians are reading it now on Nazione Indiana. This is a fact. Also, they posted this picture of a beluga whale along with it. 

Undersleep by Julie Doxsee

Octopus Books announces our first full-length poetry book:

Undersleep by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
$12

Buy it here: www.octopusbooks.net



In her debut collection, Julie Doxsee's finely wrought lyric poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language.

Born in London, Ontario, Julie Doxsee is a professor of writing and literature at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of the chapbooks The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press). Forthcoming publications include the book Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean) and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books).

Praise for Undersleep:

Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time, Julie Doxsee is a surprising and deeply gifted poet, and this, her first book, glows in the dark.
—Cole Swensen


These are the secret nighttime children's tales that parents aren't allowed to read, the winking sparks sent up from the bonfire. They flicker into a vast vaulted space where all is black around. Here, the body of language is stripped of its flesh. And the poem-bones begin to dance—the joints of human language and its articulations. It's a little bit scary.
—Eleni Sikelianos

The debut full-length poetry collection by author Julie Doxsee, Undersleep features a fluidly brief economy of words that nonetheless evoke ripples from the reader's unconsciousness. Touched with the emotional longing, Undersleep shines with the brilliant promise of a half-formed dream. "Peripheral": Paradise is not a thing to keep. / Shadows are little nighttimes / for pronouncing / night's hymn. // Night's hymn / cannot contain / doses of / Paradise. Sleep / is a movement through not. // Undersleep thickens want as it prods. / Make the proper substitutions above.
—Midwest Book Review


***


Forthcoming from Octopus Books this fall:

Eric Baus' full-length book Tuned Droves
Matthew Rohrer's chapbook They All Seemed Asleep

***

Julie Doxsee will be in America during the first weeks of August, giving readings

Minneapolis & Chicago readings: Details TBD

Saturday, August 9th
Brooklyn, NY: The Melville House
Reading with Matvei Yankelevich
& X-ing Press poets Justin Talyor & Jeremy Schmall

Sunday August 10th
Richmond, VA: Chop Suey Books
Reading with Sommer Browning, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina

Monday August 11th
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Wednesday, August 13th
Washington, DC: The Washington Literary Salon
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Thursday, August 14th
Providence, Rhode Island
Reading with Mathias Svalina

Friday, August 15th
Amherst, MA
Reading with Betsy Wheeler & Mathias Svalina

Saturday, August 16th
Boston area: Brookline Booksmith
reading with Janaka Stucky, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina


***

Octopus Magazine will be accepting submissions during the month of August. Email a friendly amount of poems and a brief cover letter to octopusmagazine@gmail.com.

We are still reading reviews and recovery projects for the upcoming issue of Octopus.