This week, Mike Corrao (author of Surface Studies) has shared with his favorite titles from the Action Books catalogue with Assistant Editor Miharu Yano:
Flowers Among the Carrion by James Pate
The Salvo Series has hosted some incredible pieces of critical writing, and really any of them could take a spot here, but James Pate’s Flowers Among the Carrion would have to be my standout. The way that it talks about the gothic—how it remaps what has often been viewed as this sentimental and melodrama genre into a virulent and bubbling necropastoral—has given me a lot of inspiration in the years since reading it.
Third-Millennium Heart by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen (her whole series at Action)
This was my introduction to Ursula Andkjaer Olsen’s work and once I was finished, I immediately needed more. And her follow-up collaborations with translator Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Outgoing Vessel and My Jewel Box) do not disappoint. Olsen’s poems are ecological, violent, self-determined, mean, funny. The voice of Third-Millennium Heart drags the reader by their ankles through its pages. Poems chanted by a castle of rage.
Death Industrial Complex by Candice Wuehle
Death Industrial Complex is a beautiful, ethereal collection. It’s in large part an ekphrastic text in conversation with the works of photographer Francesca Woodman. Even not knowing much at all about the artist beforehand, her presence lingers in the background like a phantom. Wuehle’s writing weaves so seamlessly through its subject matter that it feels like they never existed apart from one another. And the book’s design—its faded overlays of text—appears simultaneously organic and architectural. It is a deeply compelling work in its own right, but also a great introduction to what poetry can accomplish once it sheds the formalities of conventional typesetting.
Mike Corrao is the author of numerous works including Gut Text (11:11 Press), Under Reef (Onomatopee Projects), The Persimmon is an Event (Broken Sleep Books), and Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle). His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object. As an artist and designer, his work has been featured in the catalogs of 11:11 Press, Fonograf Editions, Milkweed Editions, Apocalypse Party, Inside the Castle, and other presses. As an editor, he operates CLOAK.wtf.
Stockroom Picks is curated by Miharu Yano