Puma Perl - Retrograde

With Retrograde, Puma Perl goes back in time in order to move forward­­—and what a trip this proves to be. This is a journey of living and survival among the ghosts and dreams of a past captured with full honesty and sharp humor (sometimes self-deprecating, other times pinning the tail on absurdity. Funny, smart, dirty yet tender, Puma Perl brings the descriptive eye of Lou Reed to her apocalyptic rock and roll vision of the world.

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Reviews

For Retrograde you'll need your seats in the upright position and you'll certainly need your seat-belt. Some of you will need helmets. I haven't felt this way about a book of poems or a poet since the first time I read Charles Bukowski back in the 70's...This is one of the strongest, most surprising, and sublimely splendid collections of poetry I have ever read. It comes on like a sledgehammer breaking down your front door. Sublime yes but this is never subtle, Perl grabs the reader by the collar or the hair, whatever she gets a hand on, and pulls you into her world. And there is no boundary she won't happily piss on just to see the splash.—Michael Dennis, Today's Book of Poetry Full Review

Puma Perl is a remarkable poetand an exciting performer. Her works in verse are packed with riveting details of modern life and chronicle her unrelenting resistance to the way things are or meant to be.Retrograde is a true contemporary masterpiece. —John Sinclair, poet, jazz and blues historian, former manager of the MC5, radio host, and political activist

*

Perl reminds me in some ways of Ginsberg. Both weave the immediate into their work as documentary evidence. Both have a desire to somehow sing to an audience of their peers. Both have motifs…talisman symbols that speak to core experience. Ginsberg returns again and again to his "clock of meat": Perl returns to her knives, honed and handed over in tiny, sharp cuts of poems ("Do not believe / my spoken word, / read my scarred / letters, they crawl / down my arms / like predators") and to the vital squalor of LES apartments ("I don’t sleep on the floor any more. I'm too old to crash on moldy blankets, bodies of strangers on either side, sounds of wet fucking, smells of beer, blood and vomit.")—B.A. Goodjohn, Mom Egg ReviewFull Review

*

Absolutely gut wrenching, achingly beautiful. bittersweet and painfully true. Puma seems to have written this in her own blood not from what bled out but from what she ripped out from deep inside. You will recognize yourself in this book. She makes no observations, she relates experiences. She runs the gamut of hustling, scoring, cooking and shooting, the beauty and ugliness of the high and fall, and you begin it all again but never told as a victim only as a survivor and winner. - Guido Colacci, Steel Notes Magazine    Full review

*

Retrograde is a true rush...An extremely authentic and unsentimental look at the gritty and dangerous New York that has since been glamourized, mourned and burnt beyond recognition into the realm of cultural mythology.  - Scott Stiffler, The Villager. Full review

*

The book is for those who do not wake up screaming, but

wake up wanting to scream

...The poems span everything from years of addiction, long ago, to the now where there are “social media” and cell phones. It is a a world where “it is always sometimes, never forever”: as it has always been, it's just a world where it is more glaringly obvious. -

David McLean, Autoerotic Elegies

Full review

*

Puma’s writing shoots straight from the hip or straight to the lip, powerful, honest and to the point. Her writing hits home, and often conveys things most people are too unaware or afraid to admit.Puma pulls no punches, telling tales of self-destruction as a celebration of life until way after the party is over, and somehow being graced with a second chance to survive. Don’t try this at home. — Iris Berry, publisher, Punk Hostage Press

*

The collection moves through time, whether it’s looking toward a dangerous past, a muddy future, or a bleak present; it is a study in how humanity changes yet stays stationary. Perl draws divine inspiration from Elizabeth Bishop, as the sense of loss permeates between every line, syllable, and period...The book is void of bullshit, portraying American city life in all its unglamorous, gritty glory. — Joanna C. Valente, Luna Luna

*

There is regret and deep disappointment in these pages, lurking but not hidden beneath the swagger of gritty urban attitude, the haze of cigarette smoke, and the back-of-the-water-bill list of pointless sexual encounters with boys who think they’re badasses…Retrograde is a brilliant title for this book, referencing that relentless forward motion that seems to sometimes reverse in both appearance and reality." —Eric Paul Shaffer, The PedestalFull review

*

Withwords that hit like hammers, these poems bring us into a New York City of speedballs, broken windows and fast encounters. There is also ginger tea, soft sleep and yearning. You may have been here—I know I have. And if you haven’t, the raw emotion in Puma Perl’s free verses will transport you. —Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of "Haywire", "Tetched" and "Roughhouse"

* 

These poems make me cry and want to punch a wall. They bring me to that place inside where the darker hours loom. Puma Perl takes us on a trip through our interiors piecing together the moments we wanted nothing and everything at the same time. Her mastery shines when suddenly a word or phrase sparks a laugh, daybreak comes, and she (we) steps outtriumphant. — Nicca Ray, writer

 *

Puma Perl writes with dagger to the heart directness. Dreams merge as she borrows from pain to understand her strength and purity. This warrior leaves me grinning and a little wiser. —Zoe Hansen, writer / artist

 *

BIO:

In the mid-70s, Puma Perl happened by the Nuyorican Poets Café on its second night of existence. Along with countless other Lower East Side residents, she discovered that the transformative power of poetry and performance was accessible to her, regardless of class and academic achievement. Decades later—still living in New York City—she is a widely published poet, writer, performer, producer, and photographer.

Puma is the author of two chapbooks, the award-winning Belinda and Her Friends and Ruby True, and the full-length collection knuckle tattoos. Her poetry and short stories appear in numerous journals and anthologies including It’s Animal but Merciful (great weather for MEDIA, 2012), The Understanding between Foxes and Light (great weather for MEDIA, 2013), Maintenant, Rattle, The Chiron Review, Have a NYC (Three Rooms Press), and Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis. Recently she was awarded a 2016 Acker Award.

She was the co-creator, co-producer, and main curator of DDAY Productions which mounted shows in many New York City venues and highlighted emerging artists. Her newest venture is Puma Perl’s Pandemonium, which brings together poetry with rock and roll. As Puma Perl and Friends, she performs regularly with a group of excellent musicians. She continues to be transformed.

Retrograde, Puma Perl

Publication date June 1st 2014

$16.00

ISBN: 978-0-9857317-2-4

Purchase through IndieBound, amazon, Barnes & Noble, or order online or in person at your favorite bookstore such as McNally Jackson. For international orders, all great weather for MEDIA books are easily ordered through any local online or bricks-and-mortar store.

Also available through the wondrous Espresso Book Machine. Like an ATM for books, it will print you a copy in minutes. Find it at McNally Jackson (NYC), the Harvard Bookstore, and Tattered Cover (Denver), and many other stores.

The Understanding between Foxes and Light

"[BEST BOOKS FOR SEPTEMBER READING]The Understanding…offers a cross section with new American poets to meet at every turn. The prose pieces are poetic without capsizing their genre.” – Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books

The Understanding between Foxes and Light is an exhilarating and diverse collection of contemporary poetry and short fiction by established and emerging writers from all across the United States plus Barbados, Northern Ireland, France, and Canada. This is essential reading for everyone looking for the innovative, the reflective, and the fearless. The anthology also has an interview with Pushcart and Robert L. Fish Memorial Award winner Patricia Smith.

Contributors: Joel Allegretti, Hala Alyan, Todd Anderson, Augustus Arps, Michael Bagwell, Michelle Bonczek, J. Bradley, Billy Cancel, John Clinton, Abby Coleman, Dana Beardsley Crotwell, Steve Dalachinsky, Linda M. Deane, Donald Dewey, Stephanie Dickinson, Gabriel Don, John Dutterer, Robert Evory, Ellen Factor, Rich Ferguson and Crystal Lane Swift, Kofi Fosu Forson, Brad Garber, Kat Georges, Christian Georgescu, Robert Gibbons, Jeffrey Greene, Janet Hamill, Thomas Henry, Aimee Herman, Matthew Hupert, Giuseppe Infante, Ted Jonathan, Lydia Kang, Kit Kennedy, Sarah-Jean Krahn, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Jane LeCroy, Wayne Lee, Jean Lehrman, Christopher Luna, Kathryn Howd Machan, Mary Mackey, Jerred Metz, Lecco Morris, Rick Mullin, Larry Myers, Ngoma, Thomas O'Connell, Emily Palmisano, Mariel Pauline, Puma Perl, Lynette Reini-Grandell, Karl Roulston, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Frank Simone, Mary McLaughlin Slechta, John W. Snyder, Sherre Vernon, Julia Vinograd, Ocean Vuong, Michelle Whittaker, Gina Williams, Amy Wright, and Kirby Wright. Plus interview and new poem from Patricia Smith.

**Buy online, buy indie through IndieBound

MICHELLE WHITTAKER

Hunt

You think I am lovely hunt, but there is a no in my moan, there is wanted rest from my soothsaying my oh my trailing thigh off in your mouth.

KARL ROULSTON

Plucking the Yew

It's you and your precious plans, all yellow as yesterday's camembert. All yes or no questions and camouflage.  ou and your cadmium, all of it catalogued. Everyone squinting and everything squashed. Everyone squatting in somebod's Quonset hut, the canopies covered in canapés. You and your queen-sized cot. You and your king-sized sheets, stiffly starched, and me in my marching boots. Me in my Martian hat stuck on with masking tape and you in a sailor suit, a souvenir, your jaundiced eye jammed in your putty-colored camera. You in the shoes you threw at the shaman who sold you his seat on the shuttle and me in a loose burnoose. Both of us woozy. Everything wavy. Pumice-scented suds in puddles shaped like poodles and somebody waxing polemic. Should we smother a laugh in a cough in a kerchief and saunter our way to a sojourn? I can see it now. All of the canes in racks and all of the racks in rows. All of the olives with eyes for the egrets and all of the octaves glued to the flutes. You with a tuning fork, fixing a tuna melt. Me timing goose eggs.  Both of us loaded for bear, raring to bolt.

MARIEL PAULINE

There Are More Subtle Ways For a Body to Rebel

I pray him dead every thirteenth heartbeat, marking the anniversaries since his tongue went on holiday after learning fists are harder to ignore. He was born believing my name is Sin.

Since his tongue went on holiday— dissociate has come to mean survival. After learning fists are harder to ignore when well-placed against temples

dissociate has come to mean survival. I changed his name to Bloodhound. When well-placed against temples, my atheist soul hunting fragments of familial normalcy,

I changed his name to Bloodhound. Tangled eternally, my spiced wickedness, my atheist soul hunting fragments of familial normalcy— I cannot bring myself to sift through his rubble.

Tangled eternally, my spiced wickedness, no match for his dead eyes. I cannot bring myself to sift through his rubble without glorifying every punch. My ache,

no match for his dead eyes, after learning fists are harder to ignore. Without glorifying every punch, my ache, I pray him dead every thirteenth heartbeat—marking the anniversaries.

The Understanding between Foxes and Light great weather for MEDIA 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9857317-1-7, $15.00

All our titles may be purchased via IndieBound, amazon, and Barnes and Noble, or order in person or online through your favorite bookstore. For international orders, all great weather for MEDIA books are easily ordered through any local online or bricks-and-mortar store.

Our books are also available through the wondrous Espresso Book Machine! "Prints a book faster than you can make a cup of coffee!"

Not Just Any Day in the Life of America’s Chief Angel-Headed Hipster

By George Wallace

It's tough for even the most insistent ecstatic visionaries of 20th century America to maintain his sense of wonder, when he's slammed in the face with a national trauma of tsunami proportions. 

That's a big message to draw from Allen Ginsberg's poem Nov 23, 1963: Alone.

The poem has returned to the limelight this year, plucked from the canon of Ginsberg's collected works -- handset, letterpressed and handbound by Bottle of Smoke Press for an event organized by Three Rooms Press, marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

The poem makes for a compelling, if sobering read, as it takes us through Ginsberg's spiritual ruminations the day after that assassination.

In essence, we find Allen Ginsberg in a house at 1403 Gough Street, San Francisco, 'confused, shock-fingertipt' on a rented typewriter, the weekend after Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.

Over three pages and 34 lines, the reader re-experiences the poet's attempt to sift through his demystified world -- populated with literary hopefuls, hangers-on, meth heads, suicides and arrivistes -- stripped of the ecstatic character he might otherwise have invested in that world.

The man who had become famous by decrying his sense of alienation and aloneness in dominant American society -- and who helped magnetize an alternative community of self-described Angel-headed hipsters who sought to communally ward off that alienation -- finds himself alone again, in the cold light of post-assassination morning, confronted with a cadre of quite unmagical friends and associates.

Here's Charlie, muttering in his underwear-strewn bedroom. Here's Lucille, talking to herself. Anne is mourning her pockmarked womb. Lance, with his crummy painting, is smiling and wan. This one proclaims horses' teeth metaphysics. That one, fat with child, grieves her adolescent backseat romances. A weak whitehaired fellow is chewing on his teeth, lost in his own pointlessness. A gaptoothed poet has a bandaged tendon. Someone's trying to making a big deal about courtesy over the kitchen linoleum. Someone else has made an insulting collect call from back in New York.

There's blood in the furnace. "Go to Hell" is spoken on the street corner. Untrustworthy strangers appear at the door, trying to score. Obscure novels and magazines of beat writers (“Happiness Bastard, Sheeper…Soft Machine, Genesis Renaissance, Contact, Kill Roy, etc.") are strewn through the room.

At best, it is an unglamorous recitation. Where's the ecstasy? Where the celebration? Where the transformative power of camaraderie and visionary impulse?

In the last line, Ginsberg offers up a glimmer of hope that there is some direction in which to go. He declares that he will break off from the news of the world -- and from the tawdry, hangover-grim crowd which surrounds him -- and go into another room, 'where Adam & Eve lie, to get my hair spermy.'

Are we to buy it? Are we to take it as self-irony? Or as a legitimate assertion by Ginsberg that it's actually possible to rekindle the psychic self, to reignited the magic in our lives and in the lives of our Angel-headed hipster associates, through some frank sexual engagement, in another room, with the origin-myth figures of the Judaeo-Christian bible.

Before jumping into the sack with the folks from Eden, I for one would like Ginsberg to have given us a better clue as to just where this 'other room' is located -- the place to which, when the world has been demystified, we may vicariously lie with Adam & Eve, bathed and renewed, hair spermy in the original grace and innocence of their sexual congress.

Ginsberg does not address that question in Nov 23, 1963: Alone. What he does say, in abundance, is that even for hipsters and mystics, there may come a moment in our lives when the world shockingly intrudes, and we find ourselves alone -- locked in the same lonely self where we have always been -- stripped of the ecstatic vestments we have conferred upon our lives and our relationships.

What will we do?

A good way to start is to visit with Allen Ginsberg and the Gough Street crowd, through this exquisitely produced limited edition letterpress rendering of his poem.

120 copies of Nov 23, 1963, designed, printed and bound by Bill Roberts at Bottle of Smoke Press in Dover Delaware, were distributed gratis at Three Room Press’ JFK/NYC/OMG event in New York City on November 22, 2013. The poem may be found in COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1997, by Allen Ginsberg (HarperCollins 2006).