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Newest Reviews of Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones

 

By Remy Jansen

I begin with Halvard Johnson's Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones (Hamilton Stone Editions) because there is no other American poet who writes so thrillingly of the present and with such imagination and craft. This volume, his 13th, is a metrical vortex, dazzling in its constructions.

                                                     in  The Bloomsbury Review, November/December 2007, p. 30.

 

By Jorn Ake

Halvard Johnson's book Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones represents the work of a quiet pluralist who is by equal measure amazed by the world and dismayed & angered by those who would control it. The poems here range from abstract musings (or amusements) on relationships to ironic assaults on the hypocrisies that run through the current political landscape. Throughout, Johnson uses the fungibility of language to say at least two things at every opportunity, one of them literal and the other ironic or whimsical. There is an aspect of jesterism or merry prankster in each poem, though at the center of the book is an optimism that our "better natures" still reside in us somewhere and that eventually, perhaps through the application of poetry and intelligence, they will rise to the surface, if only just in time. A solid book recommended.

 

By Judith Jenya 

To read Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones, the 13th book of poetry by San Miguel poet Halvard Johnson, is to have the experience of arriving at thought and words through feelings and images at once bizarre and astute. The title poem probes our contemporary life and mortality in idiosyncratic and elegant language. Johnson’s poems are  highly crafted, obscure, political, and serious, with irony and humor that let the clarity and insights in the poems take the reader to unexpected places. His dour Swedish roots commingle with a somewhat riotous, rather surrealistic take on life, people and contemporary events in this very intelligent and original look at the human condition today. 

Johnson  grew up in the Hudson Valley and NYC and has gathered his images, thoughts and experiences in world travel and while living and teaching in Europe, Asia, and the US. He has received grants from  the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and Baltimore City Arts. He is the poetry editor of the online literary review Hamilton Stone Review and has written for numerous national journals and magazines. He has collaborated with James Cervantes, another San Miguel poet, on a collection of poems written online over a period of several weeks a few years ago. He is collaborating with his wife, prize-winning writer and visual artist, Lynda Schor on a new work of fiction. 

Many of Johnson’s poetry collections are available online. His first four collections can be found at http://capa.conncoll.edu/. An online press called Vida Loca Books (founded by Johnson and Schor) has issued his 14th collection, called Tango Bouquet. To receive a copy via email, send a request message (with Tango Bouquet) in your subject line to him at halvard@earthlink.net.   Pre-publication copies of Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones are currently available at La Tienda in the Biblioteca Pública, Insurgentes 25 and Café Etc., Reloj 37. 

Johnson, while he thinks it is best to read poetry in solitude, in the dark and still of night, has given public readings of his poetry in San Miguel and threatens to do so again.

                              in the Atención of San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico

 

By Douglas Barbour

I received Halvard Johnson's Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones yesterday, & a bright bitter sardonic tonic it is.  Many sonnets appear here, but there are also longer poems, poetic sequences, in various forms. Many harvest various texts, dialects & discourses, all to undermine expectations. Sharply etched, & often beautifully illustrating the vagaries of the 'I', these poems exemplify a USAmerican surreality crashing into the politics of being here, now. Certainly a book worth tracking down...."

                                                      Douglas Barbour, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

 

 

 

 

Coming in early 2008
Eva Kollisch's Memoir
The Ground Under My Feet

Eva Kollisch is a professor emerita at Sarah Lawrence College where she taught German, Comparative Literature and Women's Literature for many years. She is the author of Girl in Movement, a memoir. Her new book is a collection of stories and personal essays dealing with the themes of anti-Semitism, uprooting and outsiderdom. She came to the US as a Jewish refugee during World War II and has been politically active at various times in her life as a Trotskyist, anti-war protester, feminist and lesbian. She has joined a small international group that engages in “dialogue with the enemy” and is interested in all efforts promoting non-violence.

Guide to the Tokyo Subway wins Poetic Diversity Award North American poet.

Halvard Johnson (born 1936) also writes narratives, which are absurd fragments of chaos rather than elegant aesthetic forms; yet in energetic bursts of wit they exhibit uncanny control.

Guide to the Tokyo Subway begins with the title poem that closes: "I'd always thought/ that if I positioned myself/just so,/as the train pulled/into the station/certain forces would come/into play, changing/my outlook on things/in surprising ways/the train would transport me/to a distant station/with an unfamiliar name/in an unfamiliar script/and I would get off/happy to be alive/not knowing which way to turn."

This mock guide intends to keep us off track, since our narrator's Tokyo cannot be trusted any more than his maps of Egypt and Baltimore or dissertations on placebos and white lies.

Johnson casts these clever shadows to the edge of nonsense where media glibly flash the surreal and enduring concepts get devoured in sound bites.

Toward the end of Johnson's 12th book of poems, we read in "Poem" that "The poem begins with the poem/begins with and continues on to say/and continues on to say ... The middle/of the poem consists entirely of the/middle of the poem consists entirely/of the middle of the poem. The poem/ends with the poem ends with a bang."

While Johnson artfully plays with the shape of narrative, Christensen subtly reaffirms its psychic form. Read them to the end.
          -- Robert Bonazzi in ther San Antonio Express-News (Feb. 11, 2007). See the whole article.

 

Temporary Meanings by James Cervantes was listed as a "Pick" for March and April 2006 by Small Press Review.

 

Sally Van Doren, whose poetry appears in the Hamilton Stone Review #11  has won the WALT WHITMAN AWARD, one of the most prestigious book contests in the country. It brings book publication to an American poet who has never before published a book of poetry and distributes the book to members of the Academy. The Whitman Award also carries a $5,000 cash prize and a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. She the Award for her book-length collection of poems Sex at Noon Taxes, which will be published in the spring of 2008 by Louisiana State University Press.

 

Praise for Guide to the Tokyo Subway by Halvard Johnson:
Many poets send me their books, but few I've received are as fine as Halvard Johnson'sGuide to the Tokyo Subway.  I have at least fourteen favorite poems, including "Morning Calm," "Paris in Old Photographs," "La Violencia," "How to Write Your Own Obituary" and "Take Me to the Water."  And for sheer delight, "Thirteen Variations on a Line by Robert Frost." In just about all of the poems there's something fascinating—an image, a tone, a total consciousness (often an achieved calm), an experiment with sound or phrasing.  I found myself re-reading many of the poems, so many are "locked" and provide complete satisfaction. It’s also the wide range of Guide to the Toyko Subway that I greatly admire, the complete interest Halvard Johnson brings to so many things, the expansiveness of these poems even while they're leading us to still moments. I've never seen another poet acknowledge the nuclear power plant, include it in solid lines, and then, in the same poem, move beyond it out to the Zen-like horizon in that unique "bomb and calm" style which is all Johnson's own. -- Dick Allen

 

Praise for Drivers and an Interview with Nathan Leslie at Http://www.ghotimag.com/InterviewLeslie.htm
http://www.ghotimag.com/ReviewLeslie.htm
http://www.percontra.net/dbr.html

Praise for View to the North :

 

"... a woman's life journey from youth to middle age, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and lover. The narrative alternates between moments of "then," times past, and moments of "now," living in the present, and confronting the future. Bisexual themes as well as the universal conflicts and self-reflections of a parent watching her chidlren grow up and grow more distant add a poignantly human tone to this introspective story."

Midwest Book Review

Praise for Dwight's House:

"In Dwight's House and Other Stories, Meredith Sue Willis's eclecticism and layered prose releases us from the moorings of "regional fiction." This is a significant book from an accomplished author much deserving of a wider readership."

Main Street Rag, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2005

 

"Willis regards all of her characters with unsentimental compassion. Her fiction leads us by the hand into dark places, and then leaves us on our own to find our way out."

-- Margaret Quamme, American Book Review, March-April 2005 Issue

 

 

More Reviews on the Catalog page

 

 

Submissions

Book submissions to Hamilton Stone Editions are not open at this time.

Submissions to The Hamilton Stone Review are open:   We publish three times a year: in June, October, and February. Please send 1-7 poems in the body of your message and/or in ONE attachment; one story or up to three short shorts per message and/or attachment, please. Send bios with submissions.   No snailmail  submissions will be read.
Poetry submissions should go directly to Halvard Johnson at halvard@earthlink.net.  Send fiction to Lynda Schor at lyndaschor@earthlink.net.

 

 

 

 

Our Table at the 2008 AWP Conference in New York

Edith Konecky                                              Meredith Sue Willis

Rochelle Ratner                                                                                          Edith Konecky

Photos from top, left to right: Hamilton Stone table, Hal & Lynda; Nathan & Hal; Jim; table; Nathan; Books!

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