The Lands Betweenby Faruk Ulay is a unique and intelligent book reminiscent of Invisible Cities by Calvino and Beckett’s late prose.  It collects 33 short observations by this artist, writer and Turkish émigré living in the Los Angeles area, that examines the world with bafflement, desire, rapture and despair—a cosmography of delight and dismay that, for all its strangeness in these short tales, bears on our own world to a disturbing degree.

Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957.  He moved to the United States in 1982 and lives in Pasadena, California. He is the author of fourteen books–eight collections of short fiction, two novels, and several volumes of non-fiction work. His independent publishing project Locus Novusfocuses on interdisciplinary experiments that incorporate both visual and the textual elements, the results presented as artist’s books.

Sample:

This place is not a desert. It is the Land of Uncertain

Things. Even the rocks and earth are uncertain here. One

sleeps and awakens in an endless twilight. The days are

a woven wall of mist. The roads zigzag, but the sharpest

curves can be taken without touching the brake pedal.

Outside the doors of the houses, starched tablecloths lean

against the wall. Tasteless meals are eaten at ironing boards.

The wine is the shade of water….

Find a river. Lean into it. Let it scratch and soften your

skin. Did you ever think that blood flows through your

veins to scratch its itch? You will capture this sense the

scratching awakens as the river rubs past you. If you treat

life gently, you’ll notice that it too rubs your temperaments

in this way. I know. You are as far away from living, as

you are from the river. First, find the river. You will then

capture life. The water guards its beauty with its flow.

“Lovely, clever and strange,” a full-color art book documenting assemblages made from items found in thrift stores, reminiscent of Cornell, but largely emerging from the framing box — given titles and poetic captions which speak to the “plaintive aura of lives outlived by objects.”  Declared “Beautiful, witty, tragic and basically holy-*-great” by Open Books: A Poem Emporium, Seattle (where it is available.)  70 pps, 2014.  ISBN:  978-0-9905265-5-1.  First in a series of three books.

Samples:

Edited by John Thomas Allen, this collection of modern Surrealist poetry carries, as Andrew Joron has said, the revolutionizing force of Surrealism into the twenty-first century, offering a stellar gathering of writers that includes Julian Semilian, Lee Ballentine, Adam Cornford, Mark Statman, David Lehman, Joseph Lease, Peter Cherches, Allen Parmenter, John Olson, Christina Zawadiwsky, J. Karl Bogartte, David Shapiro, Donna Snyder, Bruce Boston, Brian Lucas, Marilyn Kallet, John Yau, Sutton Breiding, Kathryn Rantala, and the editor.  An extensive historical and philosophical introduction by the editor provides insight into the birth of this anthology as well as relevant biographies for the contributors.  Onward Surrealists! (Christopher Merrill)

See the long but interesting review from The Fiend Journal, Blackpool, England:

A witty, wide-reaching, entertaining and straight-out strange collection of poems that are as described:  for the recently deceased, but as a considered class with practical issues, rather than specific individuals.

A portion of “Caveat of Being the Recently Deceased”:

however, there will be storms,/ roiling like churning stomachs;/ ensuing pangs of now-ness./

Teeth will become/

lost with keys and memory;/ you might lunch with bums;/ surely you /

will lunge with lungs….

“Lora and The Dark Lady” takes two of poetry’s most compelling figures, the heroine of Petrarch’s sonnets and Shakespeare’s mysterious mistress, and re-imagines and re-configures them as characters in a disturbed and technologically-threatening world.

In the tradition of Ben Marcus, Matthew Derby, and David Ohle, Daniel Borzutzky’s fictions mine the fables that comprise our understanding of ourselves: the tales that are woven up so intricately with us we cannot tell where we begin and our histories end. He turns these stories inside out and makes them new. He frees us from them so we can weave them back again. This is his first collection and it met with considerable positive comment.