This just in from Michael Magee at Combo Books:
Hi everyone,
It is my distinct pleasure to announce the publication of
the latest Combo Book,
ALSO WITH MY THROAT I SHALL SWALLOW TEN
THOUSAND SWORDS: ARAKI YASUSADA'S LETTERS
IN ENGLISH.
Written under the pseudonym (or hypernym) Tosa
Motokiyu, edited by Kent Johnson and Javier Alvarez,
beautifully and painstakingly designed by Christian
Palino and Prototype Syndicate, perfectbound with a
gorgeous cover involving UV spot-lamination and other
things I don't understand, you must get your hands on
this book!
It will be available momentarily from Small Press
Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org but you can also
order it (and put significantly more dough in the Combo
Books coffers!) by sending cash or check to:
Combo Books
c/o Michael Magee
7 Old West Wrentham Rd.
Cumberland, RI 02864
The price of the book is 12 dollars.
Here are some examples of advance praise for the
book and/or the Yasusada project generally:
"(The Yasusada Author) has done a brilliant job in
inventing a world at once ritualized and yet startlingly
modern, timeless yet documentary, archaized yet au
courant -- a poetic world that satisfies out hunger for the
authentic, even though that autentic world is a perfect
simulacrum...Like Pound's Homage to Sextus
Propertius, the Yasusada notebooks force us to go
back to the 'originals' so as to see what they really were
and how they have been transformed."
--Marjorie Perloff
"These pidgin English fantasies of poetic mastery are
awful and incredible. Like Frank O'Hara's 'poem in
blackface' they give us pause by giving delight. The
delight, dear reader, is a ruse.It's the pause that
constitutes their gift."
--Ben Friedlander
"Here in America, where even our best experimental
writers seem to be constructing gigantic monuments to
their own talents and are eager to lie beside
Wordsworth in some canonical garden, (the Yasusada)
project, whatever it ultimately is or ends up having
been, strikes me as either the most moving, unsettling
and important thing going on right now, or as the most
egregious and dangerous self-delusion in American
letters."
--Tony Tost
"Joyce and Stein gave us an idea of how the ego talked,
Mallarme and Proust the superego. Now, for the first
time in our era, an unearthing of Araki Yasusada's
shattering letters and sublime
poem-fragments...shows us how ego and superego
would talk to each other, if only they spoke the same
language."
--David Rosenberg