Heading into Dali's arsehole

Launch of pushing from the riverbank and Light and After, at Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg

Kobus Moolman and Alan Finlay

Alan Finlay

Alan Finlay

Alan Finlay and Kobus Moolman

Arja Salafranca and Myesha Jenkins

Kobus Moolman

Owen Early and Khulile Nxumalo

Richard Fox and Eva Kowalska

Myesha Jenkins and Lionel Murcott

Forthcoming publication from Dye Hard Press: The Edge of Things

ISBN: 978-0-620-49506-6

The Edge of Things consists of 24 South African short stories selected by Arja Salafranca.

The authors are Jayne Bauling, Arja Salafranca, Liesl Jobson, Gillian Schutte, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Jenna Mervis, Jennifer Lean, Fred de Vries, Margie Orford, Aryan Kaganof, Bernard Levinson, Hamilton Wende, Pravasan Pillay, Beatrice Lamwaka, Hans Pienaar, Rosemund Handler, Tiah Beautement, Angelina N Sithebe, Jeanne Hromnik, David wa Maahlamela, Perd Booysen, Gail Dendy, Silke Heiss and Dan Wylie.

280 pages.

Publication is scheduled for April. Will be available in bookstores countrywide.

Pricing to be confirmed.

Fly me to the moon

Waiting in the earth's womb

Review of Who was Sinclair Beiles? by Christopher Nosnibor

Sinclair Beiles was a friend of the Beats, lived at the Beat Hotel when it was all happening, had a hand in editing William Burroughs’ seminal novel Naked Lunch, was a prolific poet and led an eventful life. Yet strangely, he remains largely unknown. Who Was Sinclair Beiles? attempts to address this matter. This volume may be slim, but plugs a very big gap in the coverage given to the criminally underrated poet Sinclair Beiles...Read more here

Invitation to the launch of pushing from the riverbank by alan finlay, at Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg, February 22

Ingrid Andersen: the literary shift from print to pixel

Ingrid Andersen was born in Johannesburg, read for a degree in English literature and film and theatre criticism at the University of the Witwatersrand, and is currently completing her master's degree. Her work has been published in poetry journals for 16 years. Excision, her first volume of poetry, was published in 2004 and her second, Piece Work, was published by Modjaji Books in 2010. She is the founding editor of Incwadi, a South African journal that explores the interaction between poetry and image...Read more here

Making Love To The Rain by Catfish McDaris, published by Propaganda Press

Making Love To The Rain is the 20th chapbook by US poet Catfish McDaris, and published by Alternating Current imprint, Propaganda Press. A small format collection of poetry and prose, McDaris's work is reminiscent of Charles Bukowski but more sensitive and surreal.

One of the poems is:

Miracles Never Cease

I was reading this book
about a man in Russia
who wrote stories and poems

The KGB came and knocked
him around but didn't kill
him they sent him

To Siberia and stole his
bag containing six onions
then my doorbell rang

There was my aunt
bringing me six onions
and a bottle of vodka.

Making Love to the Rain can be ordered from Alternating Current.

Ophelia on the run from the ghost who is her father

The Streets, The Bubbles of Grass by Subhankar Das

The Streets, The Bubbles of Grass is the latest collection of poems by Subhankar Das and is published by Graffiti Kolkata.

While Das may have abandoned the Burroughsian cut-up techniques of his earlier work and embraced an indigenous approach to language - turning more to the influence of Jibanananda Das - there is still an unmistakable post-modernist approach at play, whether in prose poems such as That Boy, Old Rust and Sailor's Song, the mixed forms of City Blues, or the longer verse works such as A Little More Than The River Khorkai.

As Santanu Roy writes: 'Subhankar's style departs from the conventional wisdom of poetry and anti-poetry. All such margins are being challenged and the reader is finally led to the magic stairs of open text.'

For order details, visit Graffiti Kolkata.

You can read a Dye Hard Interview with Subhankar Das here.

Postcard reproduction of A Butterfly's Dream - Bruno Sourdin

Bruno Sourdin is a French poet and collagist.

Bleeding on to the page: a review of pushing from the riverbank by alan finlay and an interview by Janet van Eeden with the author

pushing from the riverbank is Alan Finlay’s latest collection of poetry. It deals with, amongst other things, the sensitive underbelly of a life in transition, of a man in the fluid space between identities as partner, father and writer. As such, the poet resonates with universal emotions, dealing in his poetic exploration with the intransigence of his own role as it moves into territories which are not so much unformed as they are unexplored....Read more here

The sun's razor, above the trees at midnight

Blowing Mouth/The Jazz Poems 1958-1970 by Ray Bremser

Ray Bremser (1934- 1998) was one of the great unrecognised US Beat poets. His street-wise, jazz-infused surreal work is included in about six volumes: Angel, Poem of Madness, The Dying of Children, Drive Suite, Blowing Mouth/The Jazz Poems 1958-1970 and The Conquerors.

Blowing Mouth/The Jazz Poems 1958-1970 was published by Cherry Valley Editions in 1978.

Illustrated book covers: Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller

Illustrated cover of a 1962 Pan Books edition of Jack Kerouac's collection of short prose, Lonesome Traveller. It is the only edition of a Kerouac book in my possession that was printed while he was still alive.

For more (old) illustrated covers of books in my collection, click here.