OH HUNGRY PLANET!

And, again, if you want to keep relishing MOI, I have a new "List as Autobiography" project that I'm blogging over HERE -- the list of my daily snailmail. Among other things, it's a convenient way for you to know whether I would have received your review copy(ies) for Galatea Resurrects (though you also can always check GR's List of Review Copies).

It's interesting how some lists work and some lists don't. My Garbage List was quite fruitful (it helped generate SILENCES and POST BLING BLING); one critic out there is writing a review on SILENCES specifically because of the Garbage List section ("innovative," daw. Hee.). My POET TIC THOUGHT List, however, hasn't done much beyond its blogged self, though there's a certain poignancy that it ended with kari edwards' name....

All right. Time to relish Others. Thanks to Jack Kimball for reviewing Tom Beckett's Tiny Book, STEPS: A NOTEBOOK. Click here for his blog (Sept. 12 post), but I like his write-up so much I'ma gonna reprint it in full below:

A counterminimalist design ethos eggs on Steps A Notebook by Tom Beckett. It's one in a set of Tiny Books from Meritage Press. Publisher Eileen Tabios accompanies her poet as graphic alter ego, supplies drawings and indeed handwrites his text, a duo then stepping onto their small stage in their shared regalia to participate in what I might describe unsneeringly as an intense art dealership. The poems come inside a little page-turner, tiny even in chap terms, a 1.5-inch square thumbnail sketchbook with a cover jacket in multicolored (Navajo? Tibetan?) fabric. The poems come forward, sideways, and upside down in one or two words per line, mostly three lines or fewer to the page. They address the ambiguities of their being composed, seeming parenthetical, always germane, or as one page smack in the middle of the text inveighs: "In / the moment / (be right there)." The poems constitute a bisexuality of sketches, suave quotations, and facts on writing, both as text and process, positing that poetry writing is like composing a music made of temporary flaws ("smudged work of Arias") or like writing on a blackboard, "Looking / at blackboards / how many Ways?" Skepticism -- "Advancement / is a kind / of ____" -- abounds. If poetry is prayer, to paraphrase, prayer is programming of thought that's overexposed and torn. To get beyond the conundrum of prayer, programming, etc., the dealers work on each other and together. Tom's Eileen accommodates the torn thought idea on a ripped page and calms prayer down with a vapor of slants, blank lines, and empty boxes that enforce a silence. Eileen's Tom returns, though, with a new quiet-breaker, "A / poetry of questions / (one answer)." To clarify, he qualifies, "When / I was / a young man." Next page, "When / I was / a little girl."

The cover fabric is Guatemalan, dear Jack. And click HERE if you want info on ordering Tom's or other authors' Tiny Books!

Then, I must say that, from recent reading, Hungry Planet is the most enjoyable work of nonfiction I've read. (And according to its survey, which is not scientific but still enjoyable, Germany spends more on food than any country.) And here are the others in my latest list of Relished W(h)ines:


PUBLICATIONS:
COMPLICATIONS, poems by Garrett Caples

AMIGO WARFARE, poems by Eric Gamalinda

WORDFLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Michael Heller

MILLENIAL HARVEST: THE LIFE & COLLECTED POEMS of Charles Greenleaf Bell

WANTON TEXTILES, poems by Reb Livingston &Ravi Shankar

FREE, poems by Amanda Laughtland

from I MEANT TO SAY, postcard poem by Amanda Laughtland

NO MATTER, poems by Joel Chace

SELECTED WRITINGS, poems by Cedar Sigo

APOSTROPHE, poems by Elizabeth Robinson

FINALMENTE / FINALLY, English poems by Hugh Fox translated into Portuguese by Glenna Luschei

ARMORED ELEVATOR, poems by Ryan Daley

) ) ), poems by Samar Abulhassan

SEDNA, poems by Michael Helsem

HOMEMADE TRAPS FOR NEW WORLD BRIANS, poems by Evan Willner

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITHOUT US? THE VOICE AND VISION OF KENNETH PATCHEN, monograph of picture-poems by Kenneth Patchen with an Afterword by James Laughlin

THE PASSIONATE SPECTATOR: ESSAYS ON ART AND POETRY by John Yau

"BURNING INTERIORS": DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS, critical study Edited by Thomas Fink and Joseph Lease

PUBLIC ACCESS #1, literary journal edited by Nicholas Grider

TEENY TINY, March 2007, Series #10 edited by Amanda Laughtland

HUNGRY PLANET: WHAT THE WORLD EATS, photographs, essays, recipes written or edited by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio

A PIG IN PROVENCE, memoir by Georgeanne Brennan

THE TREMENDOUS ADVENTURES AND THE MIGHTY DEEDS, RISE, DOWNFALL, LIFE AND DEATH OF A. JACKS (1855), novel by Henry W. Faxon and edited with a brief commentary by Jesse Glass

ASTRID & VERONIKA, novel by Linda Olsson

SIGHT HOUND, novel by Pam Houston

VOWS, novel by Lavyle Spencer


WINES:
2004 Grifolo Poderi San Lazarro Marche
2005 Kistler chardonnay
1999 Robert Hunter Brut De Noirs, Sonoma Valley
2005 Monticello Estate, Pinot Noir, Napa Valley
2004 Matchbook Syrah, Dunnigan Hills
1999 Tokaji Aszu, 5 Puttonyos, Royal Tokaji
2003 Longwood Shiraz "The Sheep Shearer"

Speaking of Whines, Karri Kokko guesses at The Secret to Happiness. Is it, he asks,

               SOAVE

What a Cheeky radiant Finn.