Join Us in Celebrating 35 Years of Kelsey Street Press!

KSP is having an anniversary extravaganza—a reading and party on January 28, 2010.

The event will begin at 7:30 at Books and Bookshelves, 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco.

In addition to snacks and bargain KSP books, the following KSP friends will each read from new or previous works for a few minutes.

Susan Gevirtz

Frances Phillips

Dale Going

Laurie Reid

Laura Moriarty

Elizabeth Robinson

Thaisa Frank

Jocelyn Saldenberg

Norma Cole

Nellie Wong

Rena Rosenwasser

Hazel White

Pat Dienstfrey

Tiff Dressen

Ramsay Breslin

Amber DiPietra

Val Witte

Michelle Puckett

Lauren Levin

We look forward to meeting new friends while reconnecting and recollecting!

Humanimal lives!

Now available from Kelsey Street Press

Humanimal, A Project for Future Children

Bhanu Kapil

Order with free shipping http://www.kelseyst.com/publications/humanimal.htm

In this new prose document, Bhanu Kapil follows a film crew to the Bengal jungle to re-encounter the true account of two girls found living with wolves in 1921. Taking as its source text the diary of the missionary who strove to rehabilitate these orphans—through language instruction and forcible correction of supinated limbs—Humanimal functions as a healing mutation for three bodies and a companion poiesis for future physiologies. Through wolfgirls Kamala and Amala, there is a grafting: what scars down into the feral opens out also into the fierce, into a remembrance of Kapil’s father who survived a brutal childhood in rural India to become the headmaster of Beaconsfield Primary School in Southall, Middlesex. The humanimal text becomes one in which personal and postcolonial histories cross a wilderness to form supported metabiology. “Lucidly, holographically, your heart pulsed in the air next to your body; then my eyes clicked the photo into place. Future child, in the time you lived in, your arms always itched and flaked. To write this, the memoir of your body, I slip my arms into the sleeves of your shirt. I slip my arms into yours, to become four-limbed.”

Bhanu Kapil has written three full-length prose/poetry works: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), and Humanimal, a Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street Press, 2009). Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu lives in Colorado , where she teaches in The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also maintains a blog, devoted to quotidian and hybrid behaviors of all kinds.www.jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com

What are the limits of cruelty in what passes for love or civilization? The implications of even asking these and other questions are fully explored in this startling and informative text. Bhanu Kapil’s artful combination of documentary, poetic and narrative genres into an anatomy of human wildness is absorbing. This book is compassionate and savage; a physical act, filled with risks and satisfactions. “Each feral moment is valuable.”

-Laura Moriarty

In the famous story of the “Bengali wolf girls”—Kamala and Amala, found running wild in 1921 and “recuperated” to Indian society—poet and novelist Bhanu Kapil has found her ideal subject. To recreate a vanished era of colonial rigidity, Kapil travelled to Midnapure with a camera crew, and revisited the sites of the girls’ capture and torturous domestication. Can one reach back through time? Can one move forward after such horror? If you stick a girl in a dress, can you eradicate her animal?

-Dodie Bellamy

News from KSP, Links for the arrival of Humanimal

Humanimal, A Project for Future Children

From Kelsey Street Press

Mid-June 2009

In anticipation of Bhanu’s newest “prose document”, I wanted to take a moment to invite KSP readers to check out a couple things on our web site.

Go to our podcast page to hear Bhanu reading a special, altered version of Humanimal. www.kelseyst.com/listen/2009/05/28/humanimal-bhanu-kapil/

On our blog, find a link to Laynie Brown’s recent article for the Poetry Foundation on voice in Bhanu’s work. www.kelseyst.com/news/2009/05/28/into-the-wild/

Stay tuned to order Humanimal (with free shipping)!

Kelsey Street Press has been publishing innovative work by women writers and artists since 1974. To explore our catalog or sign up for this mailing list, visit www.kelseyst.com

NONSITE Event || Norma Cole and Amber DiPietra: Poetics of Disability (Aesthetics as Somatic Practice Curriculum) on 5/23/09

As a continuation of the Nonsite Collective's Aesthetics as Somatics Practice investigation (Poetics and Disability thread), Amber DiPietra will host;

That Same Nowhere: a Talk with Norma Cole
May 23, 2009, 3:30pm
935 Natoma, btwn 10th and 11th,
and btwn Mission and Howard
Close to Van Ness and Market (Muni)
or Civic Center BART
This event space is wheelchair accessible, with the exception of the bathrooms. We welcome input in our search to find more accessible venues.

See nonsitecollective.org for more info

(This event follows the May 16 Poetics and Disablement event with Robert Kocik. Stay tuned for more in this series with Michael Davidson and Sue Schweik on June 6, 2009)

Six years ago, Norma Cole experienced a stroke that resulted in aphasia, apraxia and right side involvement. She cannot use her right arm and hand, has difficulty with balance and walking, and motor problems with speech. I approached Norma some months ago with questions as to how this shifted embodiment affects her writing and her work as a translator and teacher of poetics. I have been interested in how such a shift may come to bear on everything from use of white space on the page to the actual taking up of pen and paper. Having been focused on the basic logistics of recovery in relation to this subject, Norma now begins to explore the space that writing and the complicated body must negotiate.

This is an interview of sorts, but also a group experiment in aesthetic somatic practice. Please bring your thoughts and questions as they relate to Norma’s work, to rehabilitation, physical regimens and routines, poetics and more. Check out the Nonsite workbook page for the Poetics and Disablement series

http://nonsitecollective.org/node/632.

Previous interviews with Norma appear there as well as keywords related to our upcoming talk (somatic practice, the phantom self, here-to-there) Please consider and contribute to our provisional definitions.
- Amber DiPietra

Bios

Born in Toronto, Canada, Norma Cole received an MA in French from the University of Toronto in 1967, moving to France in time to absorb the revolutionary atmosphere of the May '68 general strike. Returning to Toronto in the early '70s, she migrated to San Francisco in 1977, where she has lived ever since. A member of the circle of poets around Robert Duncan in the ’80s, and a fellow traveler of San Francisco’s language poets, Cole is also allied with contemporary French poets like Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Emmanuel Hocquard. Her translations from the French include Hocquard’s This Story Is Mine (Instress, 1999), Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000), Danielle Collobert’s Notebooks 1956-1978 (Litmus, 2003), and Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen (Post-Apollo, 2004). She has taught at many schools, including the University of San Francisco and San Francisco State. During winter 2004/05, Cole could be seen inhabiting a 1950s living room as part of the California Historical Society’s Collective Memory installation series. More recently, she curated a show by Marina Adams at the Cue Arts Foundation in NYC. Among her many books of original poetry are Collective Memory (Granary Books, 2006), Do the Monkey (Zasterle, 2006), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn Press, 2002) and Natural Light (Libellum, 2009). Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008 appeared from City Lights in April 2009.

Amber DiPietra is a San Francisco poet who lives and works as a member of the local disability community. She tracks the body in real time at http://adipietra.blogspot.com/ and is resource specialist for the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Most recently, her work appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Tarpaulin Sky and (in the form of a hybrid essay) as part of a symposium on the Poetics of Healing: creative investigations in art, medicine, and somatic practice—a project curated by Eleni Stecopoulos and the SFSU Poetry Center. Amber is also an editor and blog curator for Kelsey Street Press.

--

New chapbook by Tiff Dressen

And an answer to my recent mermaid post?

/a song for the body water chamber/

a pair of salt water/lungs for the under water/choir

[not original spacing]

Tiff Dressen's life long goal is the synchronization of her left and right brain. When not consumed by this you can often find her peregrinating between Oakland and Berkeley . She is the author of a chapbook Keeper (from Woodland Editions) and two chapbooks books of poetry As deer in aurora Borealis and other poems from the astral bestiary and Fugue: for Alan Turing (from Jaybird McQueen's, stealthy elf press). Some of her poems, reviews & essays have appeared or are forthcoming in 26: a journal of poetry and poetics, Five Fingers Review, Xanthippe, New American Writing & Outside Voices Anthology. She is one of the curator's of the Canessa Park Poetry Series <http://canessa.blogspot.com/> , travels to the Cyclades as often as possible. During the day Tiff works for a physical chemist in UC Berkeley's Institute for Quantitative Biosciences <http://qb3.org/index.html> . She's member/editor at Kelsey Street Press.

Kelsey Street's Vertical Questions Project

In the years since Vertical Interrogation for Strangers was published, Bhanu Kapil has received dozens of letters and emails from readers who have taken the questions that foreground the book’s structure and answered them in their own way. Listen to Bhanu say more about this here.

One such reader is the poet Jean Valentine. A section in her recent collection, Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), offers poems in response to the Vertical queries. Here are a couple of my favorites.

What is the shape of your body?

Staunch meadow for the children
reservoir

Reservoir
your thin ghost-body

Whatever kind of eyes
you have now, lend to me—

How will you/have you prepare(d) for your death?

quiet ready
the wires inside the walls

and when no wires
and when no walls

—with you it wasn’t flesh & blood, it was under:
I know you brokenheart before this world,
and I know you after.

Kelsey Street Press invites you to send us your answers to the Vertical questions.

Tell us how they have let you in to your own questions. Use them to interview someone else, as a tempate for a new investigation, as a writing assignment for youself. Teachers, have you used the questions with your students? How?

KSP publishes books by women, but we hope to have readers/bloggers of all genders contribute to this engagement.

For me, the questions will be one of several ways into a study of disability culture and aesthetics. The questions will serve as a thrid surface, something neutral (not made by me) between a body’s investment (my own and those I will talk with) in such a study and the body of work that might be arrived at. I hpe to present some of the questions to clients and staff at the LigtHouse for the Blind and teen girls at an annual Juvenille Arthritis retreat, among others.

Anything you send (writing, visual art and sound welcome) will be archived on this page. This project will be ongoing.


Twelve Questions from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

1. Who are you and whom do you love?
2. Where did you come from/How did you arrive?
3. How will you begin?
4. How will you live now?
5.What is the shape of your body?
6.Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?
7. What do you remember about the earth?
8.What are the consequences of silence?
9.Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
10.Describe a morning you woke without fear.
11.How will you, have you, prepared for your death?
12.And what would you say if you could?

-Amber

Preview of Humanimal, forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press

(In honor of National Poetry Month, Poets.org has posted pieces from recently publsihed poetry or soon to be realeased poetry.)

4. Feral children are fatty, complex and rigid. When you captured the two children, you had to brush the knots out of their hair then scrape the comb free of hard butter. Descent and serration. No. I don't want to ask primal questions.

5. Kamala slips over the garden wall with her sister and runs, on all fours, towards the complex horizon between Midnapure and its surrounding belt of sal. The humanimal mode is one of pure anxiety attached to the presence of the body. Two panicked children strain against the gelatin envelope of the township, producing, through distension, a frightening shape. The animals see an opaque, milky membrane bulging with life and retreat, as you would, to the inner world. I am speaking for you in January. It is raining. Amniotic, compelled to emerge, the girls are nevertheless re-absorbed. I imagine them back in their cots illuminated by kerosene lanterns. I illuminate them in the colony—the cluster of residences, including the Home—around St. John's. No. Though I've been there, it’s impossible for me to visualize retrieval. Chronologies only record the bad days, the attempted escapes.

d. I was almost to the gate. I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O. The next day, I woke up with a raw throat. The cook gave me salt in warm water. I waited until she was gone and then I bit it. I bit my own arm and ate it. Here is my belly, frosted with meat. Here are my eyes, bobbling in a tin.

6. It's Palm Sunday and Kamala, with the other orphans in a dark, glittery crocodile, walks from Home to church. Her two arms extend stiffly from her body to train them, to extend. Unbound, her elbows and wrists would flex then supinate like two peeled claws. Wrapped, she is a swerve, a crooked yet regulated mark. This is corrective therapy; the fascia hardening over a lifetime then split in order to re-set it, educate the nerves.

e. The cook fed us meats of many kinds. I joined my belly to the belly of the next girl. It was pink and we opened our beaks for meat. It was wet and we licked the dictionary off each other's faces.

7. Is this the humanimal question? No, it’s a disc, transferring light from corner to corner of the girl's eye. Like an animal tapetum. The way at night an animal. Animal eyes, glinting, in the room where he kept her, his girl, deep in the Home.

From Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil. Copyright © 2008 by Bhanu Kapil. Used by permission of Kelsey Street Press. All rights reserved.

Bhanu Audio on Kelsey Street Blog

4/08

The first sound file in what is to be an ongoing series of recordings has been added to the KSP web site. It is Bhanu Kapil reading from Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. She has a book forthcoming from KSP, Winter 2008. The press will be adding other author audio in the upcoming weeks and eventually, interviews and informal conversations about press history, poetics, and more.

The blog entry that accompanies this recording:

In “thinking about who I was when I wrote this book”, Bhanu reads from her notebook by way of a detailed introduction;

I was still dreaming/fulfilling the break. Preprostheses, pre-healing, pre-everything. That’s when I invented this form. A sacred space for voices. I interpolated them into and through my own documents, my own poems, my own answers. It was an intuitive decision. There are about 10 or more notebooks that I have at home that contain the dense, complete answers, the descriptions of the women, where I met them and so forth. The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers contains words, lines, sentences, fragments, stories, phonemes and images taken from those notebooks. I think of them as red threads I tied on to my coat, its hem and buttons. I have done this for years and years. Come upon a scrap of red wool or cotton on the sidewalk and tied it onto whatever I am wearing.

Listen here.

PennSound

Multiple readings by Bhanu here. These are from various reading series in Boulder and Hawaii.

Naropa

Hear Bhanu speak about the body and border crossings. She is joined on this panel by Renee Gladman and Laird Hunt.

Renee Gladman reading...

Renee Gladman reads and gives a talk at the University of Minnesota on Wednesday, December 5th. See more details.

This week, Renee's Newcomer Can't Swim came out from Kelsey Street Press. Stay tuned for news of the book on KSP's new web site and blog!

U of Minnesota's event is part of the Voices from the Gaps project.

Shunned in mainstream academic literary discourses as a "hot air balloon" that can conveniently be turned into meaning anything, identity remains a more resilient term when it comes to marginalized writers' voices, such as the voices of the women of color writers featured on the Voices from the Gaps site: identity becomes a starting point for political awareness and analysis of what it means in this day and age to be a woman of color -- and to write...http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/our_project/index.html

Reading Bhanu Kapil

1. Bhanu Audio at KSP, PennSound and Other Sites

2. Preview of Humanimal, forthcoming from KSP

3. Reading Bhanu Kapil 1
http://adipietra.blogspot.com/2007/07/kelsey-street-press-has-charged-me-with.html

4. Reading Bhanu Kapil through Ajit Chauhan
http://adipietra.blogspot.com/2007/07/ajit-chauhan-reading-bhanu-kapil.html

5. Other Books By Bhanu Kapil
http://adipietra.blogspot.com/2007/09/from-corollary-press.html’

6. Bhanu's blog: Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?

7. Vertical Questions Project. A kelsey Street blog project.

8. Lisa Birman interviews Bhanu for Trickhouse.

9. Humanimal lives!

Reading Bhanu Kapil

Kelsey Street Press has charged me with the task of seeing their newest book to print, Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil. Hardly a task, I have been forgetting myself, immersed in Bhanu's world, or at least, whatever simulacra of it that lives on the Internet. So I offer this evolving post as a kind of shared reading notes/google hunting for other readers who embark upon similar journeys when they find a writer that has something to tell them. Ths will also serve, hopefully, as promotion for the book, since blogging is a way to do that for new boks in the innovatie poetry realm and I am the memebr of the press who does the most blogging. Check back now and then by clicking on "Reading Bhanu Kapil" in the left menu.. Much of what is placed here will be more tangential than average, snippets, simply links to follow toward conversation.

On Collapse

http://weirddeermedia.com/2007/03/correspondence/#more-26
a blog post on Weird Deer about an annoying whistler, the brick wall that is Phillip Roth and the red dust that is Kapil's newest, Incubation, A Space for Monsters.

About Weird Deer:

"The culture we create leaves traces as it passes through us, between us, overhead. The traces are a kind of ecstatic evidence. This is a space to engage that evidence by exploration rather than explanation.
We don’t know. So we correspond. The private conversations we have, or want to have, with those around us about the cultures that stimulate growth–ours and the organism’s. Let’s talk about it in whatever form manifests itself best–an interview, a video diary, a letter, an email, a poem, a story, a lie, a text message, an image, a book, a matching piece of trash, whatever."