New from O Books
(available from SPD:1341 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA 94710. Or from O Books: 5729 Clover Drive, Oakland, CA 94618)
Brenda Iijima's AROUND SEA is $12.00, ISBN # 1-882022-51-3.

Jackson Mac Low says about her book: *Brenda Iijima's AROUND SEA is a substantial, beautiful, and manifoldly interesting book of poetry. Her focus shifts smoothly from sonic word-play to informational passages drawn from natural sciences and even metallurgy to ecology and passionate urban sociology, and onwards. Her forms often change radically from one section of a poem to another and her rhythms are constantly chaning. Readers are happily kept on their toes.*

Anselm Berrigan says about the book: *Elements, moods, poisons, obstacles; Brenda Iijima's poems make use of all four, particularly elements, in forming the core of AROUND SEA. There is a strange, welcoming warmth to these poems that has nothing to do with forcing a personscape onto the land (though Iijima is starkly aware of that force's inexorable severity): -a terrestrial in the face of extra.- I feel calm during and after reading AROUND SEA--not abducted, but included, as if presence could override fate through seeing, and getting it down onto the page.*

Fanny Howe says, *A brilliant visual and musical work, where the techniques of our times are perfected and abandoned one by one. What goes up, comes down, until the only way out is with it.*