Sixth entry in the Ravenna series that brings together three similar or dispirit writers in one volume.  This time Lindsay Stern takes us on a tour of the Cambodian Dictionary; Philip Quinn transports us poetically into the spirit of the Minoan, Jefferson Navicky instructs us with fictions on the uses of a Library.

In his third book from Ravenna, Gregory K. Cole writes some of his most emotive poetry.  His style of tight poetry plumbs for the soul of words in their combinations.

Says Cooper Renner:  The emphasis on the music of words…demand that one grope through them, into their depths, to puzzle out their “sense.”  Taut, clever, occasionally playfully deceptive if one is not as careful in reading as Cole is in writing, these poems display an individual voice and sensibility at variance with almost everything current in our literature…it is a rarefied intellect at work here.

Often dividing his work into the Digital and the Static, Ron Starr experiments poetically in the company of the famous Oulipo group (see note at bottom), The Workshop for Potential Literature.

“Starr aims at “developing new forms,” because “forms are heuristic, exploratory, each revealing new areas and new limits.” These poems he has created are delightful, intriguing; anything but sterile. Consider State of Myself, a “computer-assisted merging” of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and one of Bush’s State of the Union addresses: “I celebrate mothers and sing terrorism, and what I assume you shall assume…” (Jason B. Jones)

[The Oulipo (Ouvroir de la literature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature) group was established by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, and has been associated with Georges Perec (A Void), Italo Calvino, and Harry Matthews. (Drunken Boat has recently hosted a massive and very useful online feature on Oulipo and Oulipo-inspired work.]

In an expansive follow-up to his earlier Ravenna title, The Moodier Could of Being, Cole takes us into the interior fluids of language and shows us our community and our solitude. “It is a rarefied intellect at play here, something perhaps that Borges might have imagined if he had combined his languages rather than keeping them separate. The emphasis on the music of words might suggest Dada, but Cole’s musical words demand that one grope through them, into their depths, to puzzle out their “sense” (from the Introduction to Frases To Or.)