Jennifer Karmin's aaaaaaaaaaalice

ISBN 978-0-9790888-3-4
112 pages, 7x9
$16 (+$4 shipping & handling)

or:

Send a check for $20 to:

Flim Forum Press
418 Brown Street, #17
Iowa City, IA 52245

Query: klane at flimforum dot com
flim forum press

___


"This book, a score, is full of information both literal and (im)possible. Do dip in; see what you come out with."

—Bernadette Mayer


"Jennifer Karmin brings an openness and generosity to these poems of public address and private insistence. Aaaaaaaaaaalice's buoyant charm calls out for new listeners."

—Charles Bernstein


"I like tightly proposed structures in which anything can happen & does because the more tightly controlled the structures, the more explosively the language will implode, disseminate, fold in or out or whatever it is it needs to do to loosen up or reverse direction & meaning. And that’s the fun of Aaaaaaaaaaalice, lithe row of straight a’s followed by biting animal commentary."

—Pierre Joris


"Alice and anime, Asia and uncertainty, we do so want our sounds to make sense, our textual travels to have a guide, even if that guide is the white rabbit that will hide. Aaaaaaaaaaalice is the sound and sight of the disappearing rabbit, the one with a hat, the one who pops up with regular unpredictability whenever we go somewhere not here, and while words will swivel around us like our very own heads, making the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar, making no sense but nonsense and non-sense sense, like in this very text, what’s moreover curious, as Karmin rightly notes, is that 'yesterday a man was walking.' "

—Vanessa Place


___


Jennifer Karmin has published, performed, exhibited, taught, and experimented with language across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets, including Betalevel (CA), Links Hall (IL), the French Broad Institute of Time and the River (NC), the Poetry Project (NY), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI), and Woodland Pattern Book Center (WI).

A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. Her poems are widely published in anthologies and journals, like A Sing Economy (Flim Forum Press), Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press), Not A Muse (Haven Books), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books), Bird Dog, Cannot Exist, Delirious Hem, MoonLit, Otoliths, and Womb. She is the Community Aesthetician for Les Figues Press at Give A Fig.

In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools. She earned her BA in the Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo and MFA in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Past grants and residencies were funded by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Djerassi Program, the Joseph Kellman Family Foundation, the Poetry Center of Chicago, Poets & Writers, Rochester Community Savings Bank, Summer Literary Seminars, and the Synapses Foundation.


___


Read some early reviews of Aaaaaaaaaaalice selections here, and of Aaaaaaaaaaalice in performance here and here.