Father | Genocide by Margo Tamez

On the night before he “walked on,” Margo Tamez’s father recorded two questions onto a cassette tape: Where did all the good men go? Where did they go? Two decades later, Tamez reconstructs her father’s struggle to be a man under American domination, tracing the settler erasure, denial, and genocide that he and preceding generations experienced. She reclaims stolen territory in the felt and known history of colonial Texas through Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] place, memory, and poetics of resistance.

“I was raised up in American violence,” Tamez writes, “and I have to explore all of its possibilities.” Her poetry brings out those possibilities by “timebending,” with a poetic form Tamez calls Indigenous fusionism-Indigenous futurism, a union of pastpresent, bodyknowing, intertext, bent tradition, landguage, and familial blood-knowing.

Father Genocide reveals why impunity on the Texas border is the key to understanding American identity violence. Her lightning poetry strikes the nested seeds and unburies the truth of these bitter lands.

Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World by David Trinidad by Ed Smith

The irreverent, tweetable, ludicrous, painful, wondrous work of the L.A. punk poet—widely available for the first time.

In Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World, David Trinidad brings together a comprehensive selection of Ed Smith’s work: his published books; unpublished poems; excerpts from his extensive notebooks; photos and ephemera; and his timely “cry for civilization,” “Return to Lesbos”: put down that gun / stop electing Presidents.

Ed Smith blazed onto the Los Angeles poetry scene in the early 1980s from out of the hardcore punk scene. The charismatic, nerdy young man hit home with his funny/scary off-the-cuff-sounding poems, like “Fishing”: This is a good line. / This is a bad line. This is a fishing line.

Ed’s vibrant “gang” of writer and artist friends—among them Amy Gerstler, Dennis Cooper, Bob Flanagan, Mike Kelley, and David Trinidad—congregated at Beyond Baroque in Venice, on LA’s west side. They read and partied and performed together, and shared and published each others’ work.

Ed was more than bright and versatile: he worked as a math tutor, an animator, and a typesetter. In the mid-1990s, he fell in love with Japanese artist Mio Shirai; they married and moved to New York City. Despite productive years and joyful times, Ed was plagued by mood disorders and drug problems, and at the age of forty-eight, he took his own life.

Ed Smith’s poems speak to living in an increasingly dehumanizing consumer society and corrupt political system. This “punk Dorothy Parker” is more relevant than ever for our ADD, technology-distracted times.

The Marble Bed by Grace Schulman

Grace Schulman rises to new heights in these poems of lament and praise. In The Marble Bed, a couple dances on a shore that is at once a shining turf and a graveyard of sea toss, of cracked shells, a skull-like carapace, and emerald weed. Here things sparkle with newness: an orchid come alive when rescued from a trash bin; the new year hidden in an egret’s wing; Coltrane’s ecstatic flight; a seductive, come-hither angel; a meteor’s arc; a rainbow’s painted ribbons; a glacial rock that glowers in moonlight. Even the tomb sculptures in an Italian cemetery sparkle with vitality. Schulman, grieving for her late husband, believes passionately in the power of art to redeem human transience. Her faith in art enables her to move from mourning to joyful wonder of existence as she meditates on an injured world and concludes: “Because I cannot lose the injured world / without losing the world, / I’ll have to praise it.”