Listen to the reading...

Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows, by Leslie Scalapino, is published by Starcherone, February 2010, 168 pages.

The extraordinary range of imagination on display in this slim gem engages as many wildly disparate and imaginatively scenes and situations as a massive Pynchon novel -- miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more. These narratives or moments of riveting meaning arrive out of inchoate states--an alexia where unknown words create a future--and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's dazzling gifts with language and the seemingly endless paths and potentials she has exploded in Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows.

In Space in Situ a book of Amy Evans McClure's art, is published by O Books. Thirty-four color photographs of ceramic sculptures, with an essay by editor for Art in America, Michael Duncan, and poetry by Michael McClure. Evans McClure's sculptures, such as horse heads (one can whirl, some are on wheels), tall winged Stelae Furies the parts of an outdoor installation, figures of Hathor and of a seated Egyptian scribe (installed in the Bancroft Library), abstracted features like vitalism in dreams, led Michael Duncan to compare Evans McClure to "fellow contemporary image-builders" Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois. Her figures are as if silent containers of language, a relation then supplied by the essay and by Michael McClure's poem citing the ceramic forms as containers of her immediate actions: "THEN YOU GLAZE / these shapings from long, / sudden childhood memories."