news | Monday March 6, 2017
Our first poetry collection of Spring 2017 is now available!
Same Diff ($16.95) by Donato Mancini meets at the intersection of contemporary poetry, art, and current politics. Influenced by documentary cinema such as the films of Frederic Wiseman, Dada poets, montage techniques, and a range of modern poets, Same Diff explores the way social and economic histories become imprinted within language itself. Each poem introduces a dominant motif that develops through repetition and incremental variations, sourcing language from newspapers, online sources, and overheard conversations to create an emotive effect, as felt in music.
About Same Diff, Jordan Scott has written,
What a necessity it is for me (and most certainly for you) to unfurl into such work, to experience how the most minimal gestures within language can bring such soul-gasps of rage, love, and revulsion. I want to ask: How can I live without everything this book contains? I want to thank Donato for even knowing how to ask.
And Jaleh Mansoor has written,
Mancini re/sets [mostly found] language into orbit, mobilizing it in a way that captures back, gleans, and telegraphs the moving urgency and searching reach of longing that was once the particular capacity of lyric poetry. This feat is done deftly, stepping lightly and swiftly over a contemporary linguistic landscape of rubble, in which the sign is all but evacuated of meaning. Mancini’s constellation of language feels almost like a kind of improbable but healing reversal in the order of words and things, a way to tear meaning back from the maws of the desert-market of banality.
Order your copy today! If you’re in California, Mancini will be going on tour near you in late March. If you’re in Vancouver, BC, come out to the Talonbooks Spring Poetry Launch in late April to hear Mancini read from Same Diff.