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HELEN ADAM READER is finally available from the National Poetry Foundation...
and I am finally free! (Read the book if you think I'm not being serious
about Adam's weird powers.) The publisher is not making the book available
from Amazon or other mainstream bookstores, so please order it from Small
Press Distribution, or ask your local bookstore to order it. And feel free to write and let me know what you think.
It
includes 492 pages of ballads, lyric screenplays, a ghost story, and
correspondence. It comes with a DVD which features a film, singing,
excerpts from all three versions of San
Francisco's Burning, and a gallery of collages. It also includes
my introduction, and notes. All this (and more)for $29.95!
Don Share (ed. Poetry) selected it as one of the top 10 book
of 2007:
On the condition that someone else
already will have chosen Tom Pickard’s Ballad of Jamie Allan,
I’m going to go with A Helen Adam Reader. As eerily powerful
as Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” as polemically anachronistic
as Spenser’s “Faerie Queen,” yet as contemporary-sounding
as Charles Bernstein, Adam’s fiendish ballads are an off-kilter
connection to an ancient poetics that still turns out to have lots
of life left in it. As Robert Duncan said of her, “Long ago?
and far away? So all the old stories say it. But the dolls and mirrors,
the stricken children and monstrous consorts of these poems, these
sorceries of desire, are as near to the real as they ever were.”
And
Richard Price, head of Modern British Collections at the British Library,
reviewed it for the TLS (July 25, 2008):
A
Helen Adam Reader should now place her poetry firmly back into both
Stateside postmodern literary history and the post war poetry of Scotland...
If you're in the
NYC area, join us for an evening of ballads and other enchantments:
Wednesday, October 29, 8:00pm
A Helen Adam Halloween
Edmund Berrigan, Charles Bernstein, Lee Ann Brown, Bob Holman, Susan
Howe, Serena Jost, Dan Machlin, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet &
Cecilia Vicuña
Let the spirits move you to this musical and spoken word happening in
honor of San Francisco Renaissance balladeerHelen Adam.
@ The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church
131 E. 10th Street (at 2nd Avenue)
$8, $7 for students and seniors, $5 for Poetry Project members
Free to Poets House members
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