Emergency Press is the imprint of the Emergency Collective.

A New York non-profit organization, the press is also a member and grant recipient of The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, and a participant in the Green Press Initiative. Every year the press requests manuscript submissions from collective members who published work in The Emergency Almanac the previous year. A voluntary group of judges composed of collective members then selects one or more of the manuscripts for publication in the following year.

Emergency Press Catalogue

— 2006 —

Six Trips in Two Directions Jayson Iwen	The Border Will Be Soon Chad Faries

— 2005 —

Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds Bryan Tomasovich	Virga Scott Zieher
interview with Bryan Tomasovich the Ouisconsin 'primer'	interview with Scott Zieher

2006

Jayson Iwen

Six Trips in Two Directions Co-Winner of the 2005 Emergency Press book contest. Six Trips in Two Directions is a smart and arresting account of Jayson Iwen's first years teaching and living in Beirut during renewed political upheaval in Lebanon and the onset of the second Iraq war. Six Trips alternates between a rare lyrical grace and straightforward, dire dialogue punctuated by dark humor. The result is a journey across borders and between worlds rooted in the poet's best kind of travel—that of the lost philosopher seeking some kind of sense in the present, and for the future. Iwen combines well measured, discursive forms with a rendition of the traditional Arabic Zajal, giving readers multiple angles on global debates over identity, economy, religion, and science.

"Jayson Iwen's Six Trips in Two Directions is a stunning first book, joining private and public experience more effectively than any volume of poetry I've seen. This is just the sort of wide-ranging and lyrically astute writing that is needed in our post-911 period. It tells the truth on the personal and historical levels with grace and unrepentant openness, with the vitality and sass of Iwen's own true witness. Six Trips is an astonishing tale of living history in real time, in a dangerous and ancient place. It opens to history in a way that makes a purely lyrical poetry seem puny and irrelevant."

— Paul Hoover

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"In Jayson Iwen's rich and absorbing Six Trips in Two Directions, fragments of perception and thought, shards of philosophy, science and mathematics—Wittgenstein, Newton, Aristotle, Kuhn, Leibniz, Mill, the disorientations of the desert and the chaos of Beirut—are fused together by the forces of both attention and inattention into a powerful monument to the experience of passing time."

— John Koethe

Excerpts from Six Trips in Two Directions appeared in a number of issues of The Emergency Almanac. Elsewhere, Iwen's work has recently appeared in New American Writing, Clackamas Literary Review, KNOCK, Fence, The Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, Poetry Motel, Southern Indiana Review, Onthebus, The Marlboro Review, Third Coast, and REED. Iwen teaches at The American University of Beirut.

September 2006 / paperback / ISBN 0-9753623-2-1 / 5" x 8" / 120 pages / Poetry / $15.00 (U.S.) $18 (CAN)

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Emergency Press will donate 10% of the proceeds of this book to the Young Women's Institute for Global Studies.

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Among many, Emergency Press would especially like to thank Stephen Bitterolf, Nellie Bridge, Chad Faries, Chris Fink, Kevin Gallagher, Steven Gillis, Jason Gitlin, Christopher Grimes, Tom Hansen, Anastasios Kozaitis, Ernest Loesser, Jerry McGuire, André Pretorius, Francis Raven, Dayana Stetco, Bryan Tomasovich, Henry Williams, and Scott Zieher for helping to make possible the publication of Six Trips in Two Directions.

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from Six Trips in Two Directions...

44

they're not going to kidnap                this time jo says
staring off to sea                              as if the sniper's bead

rolls through her memory                 washington wants us to leave
for protesting their policy                  we're on esbat al ansar's
death list they say                            who the hell are we
safe as arabs in america                   but someone everyone

                                wants dead sometimes

45

war is over they say                         seems i heard this before
the world was unmade                      by scrim of spectral cloud

before light or word                          arrove what they replaced
my muscles tick off the seconds         till they seize their final form
says abu hasan                                handsome boys surround me
raise your cups to charity                  says ibn iwen

                                hold this pose forever

46
Run Like Hell

I start back up the alley

Unfocusing into the evening sun

When I spot a cop

          He points in my direction and shouts to someone out on the street

Here he is, over here

I turn and start running

I remind myself

         'To run a mile takes about 1,600 steps, at a cost of about 100 kilocalories for a human weighing about 150 pounds'

That's half a cup of rice

Half a cup to freedom

The most egalitarian of escapes

I tell myself

Everyone's after you

Everyone's out to nail your ass to the wall

Everyone

Repeat after me

I run to save my skin

I run to realize the dream I'm in

To realize the human instant

To keep all spacetime between us

No

Breathe in four strides

Breathe out four strides

I say

         Aristotle says motion is the mode in which the future belongs to the present—the joint presence of potentiality and actuality

The friction, I become part of it

The resistance, I become part of it

The struggle, I become part of it

The revolution, I become part of it

        The end of the alley seems an eternity away and my footfalls infinite divisions of that eternity, and I run faster than I thought I could, to prove I can get to the end

In this I am the intersection of thought, action, and will

All dualities reunite in me

The sunset, I become part of it

The sunrise, I become part of it

The mountains floating on the horizon

The apogee and perigee and every position between

The constant and the flux

I am complete in my escape of completion

I am my body

I am the street and the rain

And my corpse, I become part of it

And my flame

(continued…)

Chad Faries

The Border Will Be Soon:   Meditations on the Other Side Co-Winner of the 2005 Emergency Press book contest. In The Border Will Be Soon, Chad Faries leads us through the wars in the former Yugoslavia while dismantling the friction and growth that are born from any major conflict. Faries pits the sentimental against the profane, art against survival, the unfamiliar against home, and love against violence while navigating private and public history through formal stanzas and contemporary—almost futuristic—prose poems. The core events of The Border Will Be Soon unfold with a blend of words that come from witnesses, activists, and perpetrators. One moment, Faries give us a clear picture of the desperation inherent in Nationalism. The next, the coverage of fascists and the divisions they make is replaced by artists surviving the present, and charting the route of a collective future.

"The Border Will Be Soon is a compelling meditation on the ways in which the wars in the former Yugoslavia have seared themselves in the modern consciousness. Varied in its formal schemes and rhetorical strategies, bold in its approach to material distant form the concerns of most American readers, and surprising in its depth of understanding, this book announces the arrival of a strong new voice in contemporary poetry."

— Christopher Merrill, author of Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars

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"Faries opens himself to the land he's from, the land he goes to, and the swollen, sharp, and lovely words he learns and becomes in between. Urban sounds scrape against remembered bird calls, while the embodied tectonics of culture shock, human gentleness, and unassimilable sights are held together by a strong prose-poetic energy and vulnerable attention."

— Lisa Samuels, author of Paradise for Everyone

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Faries's poems, essays, photographs, and interviews have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Post Road, Mudfish, New American Writing, and The Cream City Review. He has lived and taught extensively in Central Europe.

September 2006 / paperback / ISBN 0-9753623-3-X / 6" x 9" / 92 pages / Poetry / $15.00 (U.S.) $18 (CAN)

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Emergency Press will donate 10% of the proceeds of this book to PEN International.

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Among many, Emergency Press would especially like to thank Nellie Bridge, Chris Fink, Kevin Gallagher, Steven Gillis, Jason Gitlin, Christopher Grimes, Tom Hansen, Jayson Iwen, Anastasios Kozaitis, Ernest Loesser, Jerry McGuire, André Pretorius, Francis Raven, Dayana Stetco, Bryan Tomasovich, Lisa Torrens, Henry Williams, and Scott Zieher for helping to make possible the publication of The Border Will Be Soon.

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from The Border Will Be Soon...

14

LOVE POEM
8/14/99

We prepare our cameras by cutting out this special film and fit it over the
lenses. We walk outside. Nobody’s driving in the streets. The sky is nervous about time. The people here are superstitious. An eclipse after a recent war has to mean some kind of an end. To me it means squinting past the light to see a hole I might adhere to. Stuck to that dark I might be able to escape my tense. That’s what god did. He created an amalgam of past, present, and future, which may be the only reason I would ever pray to him.

Now I tell you I am in the moment staring at the sky above Lake Palic. A couple is making love in the water, and they mean it, treading right above a charged bomb stuck in the lake's bed, and among a half eclipsed sun's gray light, I think it's the best thing I've ever seen. The ripples are tracking me down. It's getting darker. Two partisans sit on stone pillars debating, shaking their fingers at each other. Dušanka has a welding mask at her face staring into a lesion of sun. Darker. The young girl with the Sex Pistols t-shirt on her own pillar. And the streetlights are coming on now. The light of the sun is circumcised and all that remains is a brief halo of foreskin. I am on my back near the shore with my legs spread shooting with a wide-angle lens sodomized by light escaping from behind a black moon and you wouldn't believe how I am writing this down.



15

Figure with Welding Mask in B&W at the Shore of Lake Palic, Yugoslavia
8/14/99

Colors dissolve in the mouth of black noon. One huge square eye dominates the composition. A frame within a frame and in that dark eye I can see god. The mask suspends her and she is holding on, her knives all flashing. The cutlery of her hands, basked in the light of an obscured moon, claw at halogen. Her wrists are the texture of a waxed swan wing, waterproofed with that frightening neck, twisted back, buffing feather with an oily bill. A half knot of beauty. Oh to look so good and clean after an immaculate war.

My grandmother always told her daughters “You can be poor, but you don’t have to be dirty. If you have to wash your ass in the bathroom of a gas station, then that's what you have to do.” This rogue light defines her. Something exquisite and singular. The warped pinstripes of her tight tee dizzy at the verve of her chest—a superhero pride—and at the discourse of those breasts old men have wept and thieved. A male gaze rips them right off the print. It could be my gaze.

Sitting here at a table with battered zucchini squash and boxed milk, this is my steal and my kill, but I have yet to define the background blur of the burnt trees. What has this body-politic been cut from? And under that mask, in that gaze at a sun eclipsed by a moon, opalescent sentences disappear and Dušanka is remembering the dismembering in a squint.

2005

Bryan Tomasovich
Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds Winner of the 2003 Emergency Press book contest. A poetic investigation of the public history of Tomasovich's homeland, fused with a lyrical memoir of his family's struggles to become American.

"Ouisconsin is not straight poetry; it is neither narrative prose nor dreamy, lyric riffing. It is a beautifully realized piece of deep history, showing how the vectors of family, legend and national history intersect."

— Barry Wightman, Vital Source Magazine

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"By weaving fragments culled from the land, from the sky, from myth, Bryan Tomasovich has given us an immigrant's song of America. Read these incantatory poems to trace the arc of poetry from Whitman to Ginsberg to now, and be dazzled."

— Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Blind Huber, and Some Ether

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"These poems—this one long poem, perhaps—are lovely and sustained, a luminous feat of literary archaeology. Ouisconsin is an investigation of sky and ground, place and history. Not entirely verse nor journalistic chops, this collection hovers attractively between poem and essay, between innovation and the mining of tradition, or possibly beyond all of this genre wrangling. It is something new and good. There is much pleasure here."

 — Ander Monson, author of Other Electricities and Vactionland, and editor of DIAGRAM

Poems from Ouisconsin appear in the summer, 2004 issue of The Emergency Almanac. Elsewhere, Tomasovich's poems can be found in The Massachusetts Review,ISLE, 5 Trope, DIAGRAM, Jubilat, and Nimrod. He teaches at Antioch University Seattle, where he is faculty editor of KNOCK.

February 2005/ paperback / ISBN 0-9753623-0-5 / 6" x 9" / 120 pages / Poetry / Author portrait: André Pretorius. Cover painting: Gregory Klassen / $15.00 (U.S.) $18 (CAN)

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Emergency Press will donate 10% from the sales of Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds to the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation. This contribution is part of a larger initiative at Emergency Press to give a portion of our sales to progressive organizations that align with the central theme of each book we publish.

In as much as Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds reports on immigration, we wish to promote the work carried out by the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

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Emergency Press would like to thank Lorna Belkin, Michael Belkin, Aaron Belz, Jason Gitlin, Christopher Grimes, Jayson Iwen, Gregory Klassen, Ander Monson, André Pretorius, Scott Zieher, and Henry Williams for helping to make possible the publication of Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds.

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from Ouisconsin: The Dead in Our Clouds...

MILWAUKEE ROAD

Milwaukee is connected to Chicago and St. Paul. The name
of the railroad tells us so. The big man on the tracks, lying
in his stocking feet could be a stranger, then.
His socks, however, are worn at the balls of his feet
by brown leather, as are every man's.

I approach the big man from the direction of his feet;
they are upturned, heels
rooted into the ground. His pants legs are ripped at the seams
and his belt is ripped from its notches.

The man's chest, no matter how large
would not hide his face, not at this distance, if his head was intact.
Here is candor, then. This man will never suspect
where his shoes flew to.

His hair and brain tangle in one another,
one a dam, one a glue. The blood

cannot soak into the inadequate scalp and the bloodied hair
saturated as it is
will not be made equal to the wind. A decapitated head is a nest
a living turbine curled up one last time, and turns
into nothing but patches on the railroad ties.

But I am the interpreter here. When I mention the blood, the picture
becomes far too calm. So I go back to the shoes, at his sides.

I mean to tell where I spent a minute
of my life, when it joined anxiously
with a mechanized suicide. A planned wreck. A path and a lost head.

There was none of my saliva in anything I tasted: instead, the shale dust
upset yet in the circumference of the body's site
the hot leather smell of thrown shoes,
and the outburst of a body that is done feeling down
to the bones, this strict inanition.
What I taste is need for more people
to take this man a way...this wreck on purpose.

I carry a heavy hardbound book
and it reminds me that this man and me, we need company.
Before that, we had just death and life, suicide and life
and at the center I rock
on my toes and heels, gaining and losing that sparse distance.
I go pale and flush, and staring
at this stranger, this is a difficult luxury.

I am tired of the direction I took to meet with a mangling such as this.
I am tired of holding the book. It is extremely compact, so much so
I know it first as pure weight, an anchor
but then the strain of holding it
brings me back to the emergency. The book is my only reminder
that I cannot take care of this man, this extraordinary
accident, this mess.

Because, in the book Odysseus rests
for a moment with a man just killed.
Then, he moves on because he is in the middle of something.
If we witness Odysseus grieve
that means we are not him.

                                            Big man,

I once rode the knees of other big men...
my grandpa, my dad, my brothers.
I straddled the backs of them, too, until my feet touched the ground.
Now, I am not a kid, and men I do not pretend are horses.
I'll say that before the end I wanted a horse
to be shot out from under me...
a spectacular sacrifice of horse, dying without a scream
same as the Indian rider, joined finally, living up to one brave death.

But I'll not touch this invitation, this man's body
once so perfect for a kid to ride.

Start at the man's feet. They seem two levers that released his bowels
and thinned his head to a mirage gone down the tracks, challenging me.
Now, with Odysseus on the Milwaukee Road
go back to the shoes.
The force that jolted through this man
and landed at his side, I live in the middle of that.

MANZELKA

My wife

will call out to our child with the right accent, for its name
will not be American.

I would need to travel back in time to pronounce it just so

but the language the child knows from birth
in the Old Country
will shape its jaw

and the countenance of those ancestors
in the clouds will come alive.

Great-Grandpa Krist...his first wife, before Katerína, died in childbirth
with the baby. I'm sure he would have chosen to die. Instead, he
set out for America.

Day by day he watched his wife
become a mother.
Then, he abandons home. How not to?

Somewhere in Milwaukee lies a rotten hull of a ship
where my great-grandpa forced hope
on himself, then struggled up to the island
that is America.

My wife asks me to feel the baby inside
and to listen. Sometimes, when her belly is quiet, I think
both have died.
That they will go on expecting right into the dark.

Then a beautiful rain of hiccup
and heartbeat comes and I know a new home is ahead.

Krist, I got a family coming now, and we are going
against wishes.

What was your baby's name to be? You brought danger
to your wife. We all do. Babies come out, we know that one thing.

Even now we are warned
about ways our baby could die. Reminded

of how bad people
have it outside America.

They have in mind, Krist, us godforsaken immigrants.

Scott Zieher

Virga Winner of the 2004 Emergency Press book contest. In the spirit of the flâneur, Zieher captures countless, fleeting glimpses of the grit and bliss of New York City that, as the poem's title implies, typically evaporate as they pass before the viewer's eyes. Committing these fragmentary images to the page the author has created an indelible snapshot of this daunting landscape and its boundless possibilities.

"Scott Zieher's long poem, Virga, is a compelling long poem and an exciting first volume of poetry...we will likely witness Zieher develop into a formidable poet."

— Milton L. Welch, The Believer, August 2005

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"Zieher makes hundreds of precise, tiny licks of sense in so-crazy-it's-sane Virga. Intellect, sensation, music, grief and rank beauty connect and detach repeatedly in these strange linked cells. Encrypted emotions zip to the surface and find a wormhold into expression. Light as air and as heavy as six feet of earth. Chase this book and see how it runs. "

— Brenda Shaughnessy, author of Interior with Sudden Joy

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"Virga is at once a gregarious, elegiac, and noble book...a poetry as in love with yesterday's details as it is overjoyed by tomorrow's probabilities. Zieher is sensitive to a long urban memory, a very American poetic memory. Every street, sparrow, and brown river serves to reminds the reader of what was lost to gain these words. Name it: Woebegone manhood; the end without resolution; of flesh to the ether-that's where art, after all, is born."

 — Lee Henderson, author of The Broken Record Technique"

An excerpt from Virga appeared in the winter 2004 issue of The Emergency Almanac. Elsewhere, Zieher's poetry has recently appeared online at Eleven Bulls, Flaneur, Slurrymagazine, and DIAGRAM. He and his partner, Andrea Smith, own ZieherSmith Inc., a contemporary art gallery featuring artists in all media and located in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

April 2005 / paperback / ISBN 0-9753623-1-3 / 5" x 8" / 96 pages / Poetry / $15.00 (U.S.) $18 (CAN)

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Emergency Press will donate 10% of the proceeds of this book to the ALS Association in the name of Sally LaVonne Zieher.

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Emergency Press would like to thank Derek Ayres, Chad Faries, Chris Fink, Jason Gitlin, Christopher Grimes, Jayson Iwen, Jeff Ladouceur,
André Pretorius, Bryan Tomasovich, and Henry Williams for helping to make possible the publication of Virga.

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from Virga...

High bells, highballs, tall trees

                                         thumping the doozie dry

As does the tenor’s tone  

                                        so does the noodle in glasses 

            on the telephone at the end of the bar that curves in wallops 

(Keeping us all corrupt and belly up)

With a seamless stride and trumpet and drums 

(The trio ends unfinished)

as ever  

Whence to stare?  

(There is no wind herein)

only dust all abustle  

And men who’ve painted our corner pink 

         (just bodega-colored now flesh-tint and garish as before) 

Summer unofficially prances into prominence 

(turning off the spout-bright sprinklers)  

Rain falls on cicadas in Kansas City 

(whence the quince tree?) 

Where did he go that little ray of Idaho? 

         (rain falls on under-muscled orioles in Baltimore) 

Old ice is replenished with new ice

 (radio plays something Spanish)  

Diamond shapes erase a trace of dust on dormant doorsteps  

The Detroit radio laughs again Calypso-toned  

And as for today, this day

are we hearing voices

Or seeing things?  

Look anew (at least) at the tallest building in view 

While cocktails clank on a tenement toilet tank 

                                     (atop the porcelain pater familiar) 

Mason boys mumble many strains of wheat and small-worn graces  

Enter the Baron with snap white shoes and an Arizona haircut, tantrums  

And thrums past good gams, heels and high hat 

beer sign, bass line, solid dollop solo 

                   (a little more in the middle) 

The girls are as bare and buxom as the boys are dapper and handsome

Bald guys, big girls, everybody shivering 

(goodwill in arrears)  

Shanghai talks to Fredericksburg regularly 

(essence of lemon)  

Metropolitans drop to their concrete knees 

(nothing is not not there)

That explains the static  

(Olive ribbons and fruit-hung harvest boughs in antiquated corn)  

All the thirsty students with Longfellow haircuts 

giving language leave  

Broom stick, book brick and deliberate blue ribbons  

The day turns raising neck hairs and back bumps

              (goose alphabets through city drizzle in sunshine)  

The day is a river

refreshing—however brown and unbecoming 

However paisley green with spots of algae and mossy

Rocks on which undesireables and maidens cut their feet in fables 

                                    (we swim with a fist) 

And walk west 

Strong brown train of a river belches as heaving cemeteries pass  

Geese pass, dead as a hardware factory backside                

Outside Skyline Chops

(outside Greek delirium)

     Hebrew Jubileria and Louis Prima  

Did there come a time whence we witnessed the warm, soft glow

Of vernal goodness encroaching across the rain-smeared macadam?

Or tasted world-famous tomato aspic with home-made mayonnaise? 

(exit the Baron again)  

Fluid draining down the spine, soft as feldspar   

Hard knocks in slow report smeared 

Beckoning bells and tropical nimbus clouds on fire across the river heavily traveled under  

That platinum blast  

(worthy of a ballet bullet)  

Near a billion men marching north to Larchmont, Yonkers, Bronx  

Here is the steel skeleton and the smell of fish oil  

This is the box that makes the chest a heart 

               (this is the rounding that mixes up a face upstairs) 

                         (this is the wiggly perimeter edge-wiped) 

Sweat-puckered fingers clutching green quart bottles 

magenta napkins flapping along the avenue  

Jackpot rattling with charcoal 

beats of two ton tom toms 

Genuine men in Chinese tee shirts 

(the pounding window pauses) 

Bangles, tambourines, tangles  

Cocktails or highballs, the long and short of it—  

We end as fog

God bless this obnoxious country