Gabriele Frasca, whom Geoffrey Brock has rightly called an "experimental formalist," is a Neapolitan poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and radio dramatist. He has published several books of poems, with titles indicating both his serious playfulness and commitment to an edgy minimalism: Rame, Lime, Rive, Rimi, and Prime. Samuel Beckett has been a major touchstone for Frasca, who has translated and written extensively on his works, and he has also been drawn to writers as diverse as Philip K. Dick, James Joyce, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Dylan Thomas. The sequence "phenomena at the fair (the transtelegenics)," riffing on the freak show celebrated in an album by The Residents, comprises a series of encounters with hybrid beings, such as journalists-pleistocene, a boy-stadium, a man-tube, and a reviewer-broth.
Douglas Basford's poetry, translations, and critical prose can be found in Poetry, Subtropics, Narrative, Zymbol, Ambit (UK), H_NGM_N, Diagram, The Tampa Review, Two Lines, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships, prizes, and honors by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, New England Poetry Club, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, Paumanok Poetry Awards, Robert Frost Foundation, and other journals and organizations. He teaches at the University at Buffalo, co-edits the online journal Unsplendid, and is Italian language editor of the new translation venture Coeur Publishing.
Douglas Basford's poetry, translations, and critical prose can be found in Poetry, Subtropics, Narrative, Zymbol, Ambit (UK), H_NGM_N, Diagram, The Tampa Review, Two Lines, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships, prizes, and honors by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, New England Poetry Club, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, Paumanok Poetry Awards, Robert Frost Foundation, and other journals and organizations. He teaches at the University at Buffalo, co-edits the online journal Unsplendid, and is Italian language editor of the new translation venture Coeur Publishing.
the man-tube
the thing-academy
the woman-career
the man-tube
I know every form breaks up in the distance in a shadow that buckles up as by design a guy once told me while making a sign towards the middle of a room where a screen was and if I snub the body favoring this outline you would know that real life doesn't really exist that your fingers aren't sticky with jelly and all of what appears to belong to us with something like ink blacks up our faces and flies off leaving us to deal with turmoil with neither the view nor a remote control to guide us back to finality
the thing-academy
if you think it through the whole universe the purpose is to spread our seed out thither and so if I put sons and lovers together to contribute fit and correct in my verse it's because this law you know doesn't quiver if among our people some denial goes amuck I was told once by an effervescent muck who said more and occupied more space and if you believe that we have made waste of this our highest most noble mission you'd be better off changing your profession because the transmission of power knows more of how it knows every how there is so for sublimest for the most part sense of it all lovers and sons in their continence will with their father make many a trinity
the woman-career
if these fortresses are all masculine where if I storm them I am a prisoner I was told by one going into a career from my body I'll make the body fallen and be the sponge or else the zipper where my boss breaches the codes to stash me away in what he imposed so I will being my own worst rival be rehired in servitude near medieval liberated at long last from liberty
