BAX 2015: Best American Experimental Writing

by Seth Abramson (Editor), Jesse Damiani (Editor), Douglas Kearney (Editor)

Overview

BAX 2015 is the second volume of an annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest edited by Douglas Kearney, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors—like Dodie Bellamy, Anselm Berrigan, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, Aaron Kunin, Joyelle McSweeney, and Fred Moten—as well as emerging voices. Best American Experimental Writing is also an important literary anthology for classroom settings, as individual selections are intended to provoke lively conversation and debate. The series coeditors are Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819576095
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Series:	Best American Experimental Writing
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	8 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Guest editor DOUGLAS KEARNEY is a poet, performer, and librettist. He is the author of Patter and The Black Automaton. He lives in Los Angeles. SETH ABRAMSON is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and author of five books, including Thievery, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, and Northerners, winner of the Green Rose Prize. He will be teaching at the University of New Hampshire in the fall. JESSE DAMIANI was the 2013–2014 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Fulbright Commission. He also lives in Los Angeles.

Seth Abramson, an assistant professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, is the author of fourteen books. His most recent works are the New York Times bestsellers Proof of Conspiracy and Proof of Collusion.
Jesse Damiani is Deputy Director of Emerging Technology at SNHU and a Forbes contributor. He lives in the Greater Boston Area.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

WILL ALEXANDER

[To electrify the abyss]

from The General Scatterings and Comment

To electrify the abyss from my own substance ignites a sudden means through osmosis. Inhabiting this state, I know its heights, its anterior glossolalias. These being nothing other episodes that cross the sidereal. This being the case I am always perceiving the transparent within texts, uranian with complication.

* * *

Language-by means of imaginal vivacity has no other motion than to open itself to "sidereal immensity."

* * *

Carrying spirits on a gurney of prisms, the magician remains tilted, so as to cultivate his viewers, lighting their blood with inscriptions of vertigo.

* * *

Challenged by the in-medicinal, I create a sort of antidote, a blind circle, a mis-numbered square, so that my mind can gain its strength by roaming the indefinite.

* * *

For the past 500 years, the Occident has paraded Saxon superiority, with its odes to comfort, with its assumptions concerning wares and opinions. And now, it has extended itself to the massacre of the spirit. Asian mastery raided, Algonquian value beveled and mistrusted. As for Africans under its watch, mortal struggle always ensues. This being our present era, apocalyptic with distrust and mortality.

* * *

As poet, I am a ghost in a village teeming with certitudes and hatchlings. Its cohabitants always distracted by pedestrian fate, always kinetic with reversion and procreation.

* * *

See, I've fed myself on leper's bodies, on certain forms of dwarfs, making alien into good. True, I am open to reward, but not in a niggling sense, traveling as I do across igneous beds, void of sumptuous land and soil.

* * *

"The Dogon say that Po Tolo, Sirius B ... is the most important star" in the heavens. "It is the egg of the world, the beginning and ending of all things seen and unseen."

* * *

Being witness to the flow of stone, to its tincture of anonymous monads, I understand the way architects blend light by imagination. Thus, the material world becomes a tracery of inner lightning. For me, the latter being crystallized inscription as balance.

* * *

As for psychic fuel there is always rotational timing, aleatoric transmixing, rapid fire as occurrence. As interval, it rotates as absence derived from the absence of absence.

* * *

I liken the human state to the thinnest layers of oxygen surviving at the cusp of the atmosphere. It is by means of this metaphor that the plasticity of human potential is magnified, capable of shifting and transmuting through internal alchemics. Thus, the human state is a variable one, containing in its present depth cryptographic possibility, a shadowy seed portending, form in higher states of awareness.

* * *

Roaming through various cellular infernos, the body then tends to consume itself as a cyclone of meteors.

Other zodiacs?

Flares from eyes of un-harvested squid?

Implication from other planes?

Perhaps light in this range is unequaled semaphore, its cells being fortuitous effectors, apocalyptic sending and re-sending signals no longer entrapped within the range of lateral encounter.

* * *

As for American insouciance concerning climatological decohesion — it remains a vile and damaged liberty.

* * *

Under a raised copper partition, there are children risking themselves, playing with cyanic particles of ice. As if scattering carved salt at play. Thus, they are porous, healthless, damaged beyond what is considered splendours of evil.

* * *

Crossing the fractured rotations of Pollock, we experience the vertigo which empowers the spontaneous, their counter-rotational clauses spinning as tumultuous resistance. Volatile stationary wheels exploding as reversed and suddenly transcendent current.

CHAPTER 2

EMILY ANDERSON

from "Three Little Novels"

Silver

VISITOR

A strange woman, ashamed, untidy, wrapped in quilts, shorn head, turning her ear — hunted by hoppers, debt, and doctors — the strange woman, ashamed and limp, told the news. Her eyes were big and scared: "The horses, the horses!"

HORSE BLANKET

Laura had always been safe from wolves, cows and rabbits, but now she heard a faint hum. Laura had to hold on to Mary. A roaring came rushing, swelling. Bumps, velvet, chunks of velvet, plump, springy velvet, jerked & jolted — slid the depot, moved the lumberyard and the church.

That was the last of that town. Horses!

There had never been such wonders in the whole history of the world. The horse, so wonderful and dangerous, bigger than Pa! Overhead, horses! Farther west, horses!

LAURA SAID

I thought we were going west.

We are going west, Pa said, surprised.

Jolt. Jolt. Jolt. Jolt. Horses kept turning the stars overhead. Far ahead there was a little twinkle. The tiny twinkle twinkled larger. It began to shine. It's a horse!

CAMP

Aunt Docia said, "Well, Lena and Jean, aren't you going to say anything to your cousins?"

"How do you do," Lena said. Lena was a horse. "Come on, Laura! We're going to sleep!" Lena flopped down right away. Laura mumbled sleepily,

"Don't we undress?"

"What for?" Lena said.

From the huge blackness of the night came a wild, shrill howl. Lena said, "It's ponies!"

PONIES

Grass ponies, with blowing manes and tails, grazing on homesteaders! The ponies' mouths clasp warm necks, the ponies' tails whiffle, bug and dip — grass, but faster. The ponies squeal. Bugs flap behind the running grass. Take care! Ponies touch noses and the wheat stacks hustle.

Lena tossed her black head and said, "I'm going to marry a railroader and keep on moving west." At that instant, the ponies touched noses and squealed: Yi, yi, yi, yip-ee! The prairie was galloping! Its mane sailed up from the ground.

A mass of pony, moving rapidly, elbows and knees jolting the ground, smoothed into the smoothest rippling motion. Motion went through pony like music.

Lena wanted fun. Lena's head, made from sharp grass, was running, ponymad, to supper.

THE WEST BEGINS

Grass horses shone silver, rolling down a low bank to the river. Laura began to see out loud for Mary. "There aren't any trees; just the sky and horses, stopping to drink." Mary objected. "Grass? Silver? No. We should always be careful to say exactly what we mean."

"I was saying what I meant," Laura protested. There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying "Sioux."

Dakotas could munch grass.

Pa would be the storekeeper.

He would be paid fifty dollars every month. He said thousands of buffalo had grazed over this country. They had been the Indians' cattle, and white men had slaughtered them all. The song he sang oftenest was "Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm."

THE PRAIRIE SWELLS

A white horse wore a red shirt. (The white horse was a half-breed, French and horse). Ma said, "Hullo, snow white horse!" Ma held Grace snugly on her lap.

"Honk! Quanck? Quanck. Quanck," said Pa's spirit.

Pulsing in crimson, the horse glittered in a dazzle of light.

Pa had eaten grass.

Pazoiyopa.

Pa, in a duck, flew screaming.

Mary said, "Such a clamoring of wild birds! Like bedlam!"

Ma smiled. "Well, girls, we have a busy day before us!" She brought yards of calico and hung it across the horse — a striped blue-and-white shirt.

Pa, in a duck, exploded in squawking, quacking, quonking: tigers stood by the doorway!

Mary said, "What a racket."

The tigers — horse thieves — looked at the half-breed. The horse's shirt was blue and white. They'd shoot him, bushwhack him!

The white horse (silver and velvet) put on his coat. He buttoned it all the way up and turned up its collar so that his shirt did not show. A quacking duck rose. "Ma, let me go out and find pa," Laura whispered.

"I had lovely long hair when your Pa and I were married," Ma said. "I could sit on the braids."

The white horse was dressing behind the curtain. Laura heard him say, "There'll never be a horse stolen, never a horse stolen." But cows ate grass, and milk streamed into tin pails. Cows' cuds & milk were prairie ponies, sod horses; the railroad runs on horses, on cake and silver.

The duck was using swear words. The white horse reared and whirled and reared, went streaming away and was gone. "Well!" Ma said.

BY GUM, THE DEVILMENT

Pa, chuckling, said, "There's a riot! Everybody's flocking here."

Ma was quiet.

The crowd was breaking down the store door with neckyokes.

"Discretion is the better part of valor," Ma murmured. She could hear the fierce sound of that crowd's growl and Pa's voice — a duck's. Winter was driving them, and winter was a great, snow-white bird.

"I'll pluck its feathers and you skin it," Carrie said and opened the long bill. Dead fish fell out, so Ma shot ducks and geese for dinner. Wings made Laura want Pa.

Pa had said, "You and I want to fly like the birds, but I promised Ma that you should go to school." Laura looked at Ma and saw a dishpan. She could not disappoint Ma.

Often at sunset a flock talked anxiously. Lena and the ponies, wicked and bold, chanted: No cooking! No dishes! No washing! No scrubbing! Good-by! Lena was going out west. Ma said, "Maybe next summer I can get a job to pay for the lumber to build us a shanty." It was so hard to get ahead.

Ma mended the wagon-cover and cried. "It's good, sound, weather-tight," Ma said. "Providential." She felt her blood thin. The earth was hard and rough.

NEIGHBOR

The winds blew bitter and a wolf put on overcoat and mittens. She was bound and determined to stick to the prairie cure. It was the one cure the doctors recommended. (Prairies are about the only thing that cures consumption.)

After breakfast the wolf got up and pretended to laugh. She went on, breathless and hot, then, shivering, howled. "Health," she panted. The wolf gasped and gulped, catching her breath.

This wolf, all out of breath, whispered a howl. Poor girl; the wolf could hardly swallow an oyster. This wolf wanted a melody of grass and flower — a horse, a horse! A horse to drift over the slough, contagious with prairie & shining gold and silver.

1880

"The seventies haven't been so bad, but it looks like the eighties'll be better," Mr. Boast agreed. "Dakota land! No body'll be there quicker than I'll be! I ought to show up at the land office bright and early! Don't worry about the homestead, Mrs!"

Mrs. Boast said, "Hurry up so we can read!"

A BEAUTIFUL LADY, LOST IN THE WORDS

But at the most exciting part, she came suddenly to the words, "To be continued."

"Oh dear me, we will never know what became of that lady," Mary lamented. "Laura, why do you suppose they print only part of a story?"

They wondered what would happen next to the beautiful Mrs. Boast. Mrs. Boast, made of paper — folded, pressed smooth — overlapped Ma and talked mostly about homesteads. She said Ma need not worry; she would teach school and whatnot.

PILGRIMS

The fiddle squawked & dropped on the table. Pa's spirit! Ma took hold of the edge. Her face startled Laura. "I will make ... inquiries!" she said. Pa fluttered fast. "Trust in the Lord!" said Ma. "Talk, Pa!"

"Would you mind writing it down?" said Pa.

Ma got her little pearl-handled pen and the ink bottle and wrote; no one wanted to lose the opportunity to hear Pa fiddle in French. "No music," said Pa. "Day after tomorrow. Strangers. Huron. Put them up for the night."

The Huron men cleared the table and washed dishes. A young man pleasantly urged Ma and Ma could not refuse because she wanted that fellow. The fat was in the fire, then! Caroline's long, catamount screech curled against the walls. Ma yelled like a wildcat from Tennessee, tried every persuasion & filed on a claim south of here. Golly!

BOOM!

New grass was starting silver; the horses stretched and shone. Mary dreamed of wolves' howling and sunflowers, her petticoats a snowdrift in the long room. The prairie grass pulled a street to fidgets; the street fidgeted so that men sat down.

"There's murder south of town! A claim jumped," Ma said. "We better get onto our claim before it moves."

"It's moving! Quick! The homestead's moving!" They stuffed chimneys with paper and wrapped them in towels. Ma exclaimed, "Laura! This wind will ruin your complexion!" Suddenly, green horses gleamed in the sunshine, their necks arched and their ears pricked up.

"Oh what beautiful horses!" Laura cried.

"The horses've taken up town, by George!"

To coarse grass horses — manes and tails marshy and silver — the shanty looked like a yellow toy on the great rolling prairie covered with rippling young. All over the prairie the blossoms were dancing; the whole enormous prairie was a green carpet of flowery colts.

In the shanty, tigers wagged to and fro, beside the clock and dog and bread-sponge.

The horses dumped the wagon and stamped the shanty.

"I can't find Grace! Go look for her!" said Ma. Laura ran. She could not see Grace anywhere. The silver prairie grasses stood higher than Laura's head, over acres and acres, for miles and miles. "Grace! Grace! Grace!" Laura was dizzy.

There — Grace!

Grace on the grass brutes that paw up the biscuits and the china!

The horses sang.

WE TRY TO LIVE PEACEFUL.

FRIENDS!

KEEP A HORSESHOE.

IT WILL BRING YOU LUCK.

"It sounds rather heathenish to me," Ma said.

GRASS GRACE

Gently, in the shadows, moonlight shone and touched Pa's fiddle. The bow moved over the strings. It was just the night for fairies to be dancing. Green buds were swellin' on Grace, and she fell asleep thinking of land.

CHAPTER 3

AARON APPS

The Formation of This Grotesque Fatty Figure

Figures ever new Rise on the bubble, paint them how you may; We have but thrown, as those before us threw, Our shadows on it as it past away.

— P. B. Shelly

fig. 1)

I started to expand. If I could pin down a memory of when I started to expand, if time were more geographic in its archived elements like fatty brain tissue pressed down into a surface, like a google map, excessively pinnable, I might unfold an idea of what this fat is, one idea among many, one disemboweled ghost unfolded from its kitschy origami amid a thousand thousand pages of tactile matter, all of it dripping with lard. But even here, fat isn't tactile in a graspable way, it expands when grasped and confounds the situation. Fat is prolific and material. Fat enters the hand grasping it, as fatty things, and becomes the hand, the hand that is a diseased hole through which fat can enter, that is, be grasped. Here, the hand is a sinus, which is to say any cavity within bone or tissue, a general hole in the flesh. The fat enters the sinus and is grasped. The hand as a hole in the mind. Fat atoms enter the thing grasping them, as fat things, and become the thing, expanding the body with its corrupted sinuses, bloating it full of fat matter, twisting it into a dying pleasure. And this is thought, thought formed and informing the body as matter, and any body driven into disease understands this movement of the outside in, this fatty osmosis.

fig. 2)

In this slippage across borders I became larger and larger. I started to expand. Within that expanse, ever growing, the sinus eats, eats soil, candy necklaces, wet grass, tubs of canned gravy, eats butter pickles, thin strips of preserved meat, and various mashed vegetal tubers. The sinus eats excessively from the excess uncontrollably. Someone once told me not to use too many "-ly words" when I write, no unnecessary adverbs or adjectives, and I've told this to students too, but the sinus eats with such suffixes in mind, and in the way that it eats, there is a truth in the suffix ly, a suffix that literally means having the body or form of, that implies duration, implies moving outside of oneself into a god. It's an odd suffix used excessively, but it's a suffix that sings in its root to the bloated, broken truth of the grotesque matter. Fat is a god, and fat enters in durations, food object after food object, into the sinus of the mouth, and that too is something we might call thinking. Excessively I am in this body of thought. And there is much thinking in this small folded world. Each sinus is a hole in a fold and the folds expand until new sinuses are formed. And mucus secrets, or vomits. And the fat body that is material slime over the whole world is grotesque. And I started to expand before I or my sentient fat can remember.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "BAX 2015"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Wesleyan University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Guest Editor's Introduction, Douglas Kearney
Series Editors' Introduction, Seth Abramson and Jesse Damiani
Will Alexander, To electrify the abyss from The General Scatterings and Comment
Steven Alvarez, tape 3
Emily Anderson, from "Three Little Novels"
Aaron Apps, The Formation of This Grotesque Fatty Figure
Dodie Bellamy, Cunt Wordsworth from Cunt Norton
Anselm Berrigan, rectangle 71
Jeremy Blachman, Rejected Submissions to "The Complete Baby Name Wizard"
Shane Book, Mack Daddy Manifesto
CM Burroughs, Body as a Juncture of Almost
Rachel Cantor, Everyone's a Poet
Xavier Cavazos, Sanford, Florida
Ching-in Chen, bhanu feeds soham a concession
Cody-Rose Clevidence, [X Y L O]
Cecilia Corrigan, from Titanic
Santino Dela, This is How I Will Sell More Poetry Than Any Poet in the History of the Poetry – Twitter Feed (The YOLO Pages)
Darcie Dennigan, The Ambidextrous
Steven Dickison, from Liberation Music Orchestra
Kelly Dulaney, Incisor / Canine
Andrew Durbin, from You Are My Ducati
Thomas Sayers Ellis, Conspiracy Smile [A Poet's Guide to the Assassination of JFK and the Assassination of Poetry]
Bryce Emley, The Panthera tigris
Adam Fitzgerald, "Time After Time"
Sesshu Foster, Movie Version: "Hell to Eternity"
C. S. Giscombe, 4 and 5 from "Early Evening"
Renee Gladman, Number Two of the Eleven Calamities
Maggie Glover and Isaac Pressnell, Email Exchange – Like a Flock of Tiny Birds
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, "Black Studies" and all its children
Elizabeth Hall, from "I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris: A History of Small Things"
Brecken Hancock, The Art of Plumbing
Duriel E. Harris, Simulacra: American Counting Rhyme
Roberto Harrison, email personas
Lilly Hoang and Carmen Giménez-Smith, from Hummeltopia
Cathy Park Hong, Trouble in Mind
Jill Jichetti, [Jill Writes...]
Aisha Sasha John, I didn't want to go so I didn't go.
Blair Johnson, The overlap of three translations of Kafka's "Imperial Message" – I consider writing (a love poem)
Janine Joseph, Between Chou and the Butterfly
Bhanu Kapil, Monster Checklist
Ruth Ellen Kocher, Insomnia Cycle 44
Aaron Kunin, from "An Essay on Tickling"
David Lau, In the Lower World's Tiniest Grains
Sophia Le Fraga, from I RL, YOU RL
Sueyeun Juliette Lee, [G calls] from Juliette and the Boys
Amy Lorraine Long, Product Warning
Dawn Lundy Martin, Mo[dern] [Frame] or a Philosophical Treatise on What Remains between History and the Living Breathing Black Human Female
Joyelle McSweeney, "Trial of MUSE" (from Dead Youth, or, The Leaks)
Holly Melgard, Alienated Labor
Tyler Mills, H-Bomb
elena minor, rrs feed
Nick Montfort, Through the Park
Fred Moten, harriot + harriott + sound +
Daniel Nadler, from The "Lacunae"
Sunny Nagra, The Old Man and the Peach Tree
Kelly Nelson, Inkling
Mendi + Keith Obadike, The Wash House
Lance Olsen, dreamlives of debris: an excerpt
Kiki Petrosino, Doubloon Oath
Jessy Randall, Museum Maps – Dominoes
Jacob Reber, Deep Sea Divers and Whaleboats – Camera and Knife
J D Scott, Cantica
Evie Shockley, fukushima blues
Balthazar Simões, [Dear Emiel]
giovanni singleton, illustrated equation no. 1
Brian Kim Stefans, from "Mediation in Steam"
Nat Sufrin, Now, Now Rahm Emmanuel
Vincent Toro, MicroGod Schism Song – Binary Fusion Crab Canon
Rodrigo Toscano, from Explosion Rocks Springfield
Tom Trudgeon, Part 2/21/6 from Study for 14 Pieces for Charles Curtis
Sarah Vap, [13 untitled poems]
Divya Victor, Color: A Sequence of Unbearable Happenings
Kim Vodicka, U n i s e x O n e – S e a t e r
Catherine Wagner, Notice
Tyrone Williams, Coterie Chair
Ronaldo V. Wilson, Lucy, Finally
Steven Zultanski, from Bribery
Aaron Apps, "You are only a part of yourself, collected in tangles"
Matthew Burnside, In Search of: Sandbox Novel
Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford, Egress
Lawrence Giffin, from Non Facit Saltus
Tracy Gregory, For Mercy
Tina Hyland, Google the Future
Kaie Kellough, creole continuum – d-o-y-o-u-r-e-a-d-m-e
Joseph Mosconi, from Demon Miso/Fashion in Child
Dustin Luke Nelson, [Everything That Is Serious Can Have a Filter]
Jeffrey Pethybridge, Found Poem Including History
Acknowledgments
Contributors

What People are Saying About This

Elizabeth Robinson

“Whether oath, tweet, conspiracy simile, or tour of Hummeltopia, this anthology swings with verve and nerve from CM Burroughs’s ‘juncture of almost’ to Roberto Harrison’s ‘contaminate network of paradise.’ The experiment lives! It exists, Lance Olsen writes, ‘the same way, say, future dictionaries exist.’”

From the Publisher

"The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real."—CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance

"The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real."—CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance

"Whether oath, tweet, conspiracy simile, or tour of Hummeltopia, this anthology swings with verve and nerve from CM Burroughs's 'juncture of almost' to Roberto Harrison's 'contaminate network of paradise.' The experiment lives! It exists, Lance Olsen writes, 'the same way, say, future dictionaries exist.'"—Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts

CA Conrad

“The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real.”

Editorial Reviews

"The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real."—CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance

"The permission is on every page here. The best annual experience where space is held for radical experimentation is in this book. Thanks to the editors for really keeping it real."—CA Conrad, author of Ecodeviance

"Whether oath, tweet, conspiracy simile, or tour of Hummeltopia, this anthology swings with verve and nerve from CM Burroughs's 'juncture of almost' to Roberto Harrison's 'contaminate network of paradise.' The experiment lives! It exists, Lance Olsen writes, 'the same way, say, future dictionaries exist.'"—Elizabeth Robinson, author of On Ghosts

From the Publisher