Miscellaneous

he cover of Cosgrovia does not introduce the work so much as it performs it in miniature. At first glance it looks provisional, almost apologetic, a slab of grey foam board cut at an angle, a crude pink form protruding from it, the whole thing photographed without drama against a neutral ground. But that first glance is already wrong. The image is not casual, and it is not illustrative. It is a trap. It sets up a series of expectations about use, scale, touch, and intention, and then quietly refuses to allow any of them to settle.

The object is simple. A small book, the record of another book, with plants pressed between pages and the signs of care noted one by one. The originating volume concerns natural history. The personal copy belonged to Sonia Campbell Penney. It held eleven sheets of pressed plants, blotting paper, pencil titles, a place name and date, Aviemore, May 1961. The new book takes those traces and looks at them. It looks again, and then again. It notes the tape, the alignments, the spelling, the thinness of paper, the way a petal tries to lift, the way a stalk lies flat because time and weight have trained it to lie flat. Nothing more is promised. The promise is kept.

Bobby Joseph’s My Dad Fights Demons! feels like an encore and a street party at the same time. The book is loud and giddy and also tender and attentive. The pages move with the snap of stand up, domestic muddle giving way to portal mayhem, a quick flare of feeling, then another laugh that lands exactly where it should. The energy is familiar to readers who remember the long conversation at 3:AM about Joseph’s work.

There is a sickness in the body of modern yoga and Stewart Home wants us to see it for what it is: not a late-stage infection brought on by QAnon, Trumpism, or pandemic conspiracies, but a long-standing condition baked deep into the cultural and political marrow. A review.

The three poets are working to link the high flown to the ground using bits and pieces – words sure, but also stuff and performance and lacerations of constrained postulates. They might be humorously characterized as boisterous pre and ante textual presences. All are within the invisible high pressure atmosphere of Poem Brut, a London based but international poetry movement inaugurated by SJ Fowler. This is where, say, the swan becomes a haggard falcon. The haggard falcon cannot be tamed, or is decapitated or as virtual as the embryo in the egg, the woman’s hand or the sails of a mast. It finds no partner in that it sheds artistic trappings and deceits. Or finds new deceits, other trappings. In this cosmos usual orders are reversed.

She is the novelist of filth gone far from home base and the ivory towers of holes, missing time, fucking and masturbation, leather partying, whips and furs and all that insignia . She lowers the tone. She has her powers of subjection and all the disturbing elements. She is masterfully repetitive. She casts time and the body to the outside. Her essence is the canceling of natalist fantasies. She is the living writer (before her there have for sure been dead ones) who destines people to higher things than growth. Tick tock is to no avail.

How to frame Torset’s coordinating metaphors, structures and orders? The poems are scattered like yellow petals of an anguished rose strewn over the feast table. First and probably last word: these are poems after the catastrophe, whose ‘shadows/ are deaths or depth traps.’ The rest is speculation. And do we have to do that, speculate and expose? As she herself says, ‘Writing do I have to spell it out I extract myself/ and wonder how little is needed before peeling/ the self centred onion not concerned with weeping…’ Well. A review.

What Pinnarco conceals, and Finbow allows (for what reason we can only speculate or else leave well alone here – although there must be a reckoning at some point for sure - is the Philosophical ☿ which will dissolve the artist di Mescolano of self and congeal his many bodies. In other words, we’re on the cusp of the hallucinatory abyss where the boundaries of reality unravel and the elusive specter of nothingness beckons, and where lies a curious intersection—a tantalizing juncture - where the realms of fiction and magic intertwine.

Home has written another Sadean revolutionary novel of perverse jouissance and unhinged hard-core from the dark Enlightenment . It places Home, yet again, in the company of modern Utopian art practices in a tradition ‘running from the Free Spirit through the writings of Winstanley, Coppe, Sade, Fourier, Lautreamont, William Morris, Alfred Jarry, and on into Futurism and Dada--then via Surrealism into Lettrism, the various Situationist movements, Fluxus, ‘Mail Art’, Punk Rock, Neoism and contemporary anarchist cults’. Richard Marshall reviews.

Torset is a poet caught in the act. In this sequence of miniaturist works she divides and simulates, and begins by offering both the certainty and uncertainty of objects … ‘ a cow is something like a horse…’ with the prosthesis of a drawing as if to prove the first poems’ fathomable gap: ‘ it just doesn’t look right.’

Alex Rosenberg asks for an explanation of why I’m not worried about the “invisibility” of money in “economic theory”. I’m not entirely sure why he thinks there’s something here we should be worried about. He clearly seems to think that the absence of money in some leading macroeconomic models has produced false predictions, specifically of recent bouts of inflation in the US that didn’t happen. Don Ross responds again to Alex Rosenberg

I’d be grateful for more attention from Professors Ross and Coyle. Their dissent from my observations about mainstream economic theory invites a response, at least to get them to focus on my actual subject, the role of money (or the lack of any role) in the theory economists employ. Alex Rosenberg responds to his respondees about his money problems.