Michael Basinski: Barstokai--Meow Press, 151 Park, Buffalo NY 14201. 22 pp., $3. A beautiful little booklet of infra-verbal texts that seem mere automatic writing but are short enough to find the (poetic) logic of. Take, for instance, the very first strophe. There "ice" (after "Malpractice") gives its "c" to "caVka," which is followed by "Vern" to make "cavern"; "Vern" mutates to "Vesmus" to "(venusK," (odors--like musk--always important to Basinski), then after several other musicks to "VvenoIs OL iceveliger," and with "s OL ice" we're simultaneously into Sol and back to ice, with also a return to (Venus's) "soliquids," a word appearing between "(venusK" and "VvenoIs." And from there we move into human beings', life's, and the universe's reproductive cycles with a lyric intensity equaled by almost no other current poet I know.

Susan Smith Nash, Liquid Babylon--Potes and Poets, 181 Edgemont Ave., Elmwood CT 06110. 54 pp., np. 29 "authorless" texts full of erudition (among the names that pop up: St. Augustine, Boethius, Wittgenstein, Lessing, Fritz Kreisler, Edith Piaf, Wilde, Schubert, Spenser, Poussin, Rousseau, Renoir, Rodin, Locke, Angelus Silesius, Goya--but also the Seven Dwarfs), and self-referential at times, but seething with knowledge that she has "gained on Icarus' waxed-stained feathers" and "glue(d) upon (her) foolish, lonely skin," and sufficiently hormonally-active (about, for instance, eyes in which "the wind ruffles Adirondack white-water," and "your smile [which] flushes me stylish with spray & lilies/ left in the rain--") to refute the final words of the collection's afterword that "the poem, in the end, is doomed."

Lexical Obelisk--Jesse Glass, ECD, Fukuoka J. Gakuin College, 2409-1 Ogori, Ogori-shi, Fukuoka-Ken, 838-01, Japan. 70 pp., $8. In his introduction to this 1990 book, Robert Peters tabs Glass "a son of Lautreamont, Blake, and Whitman"; to that I add the Keats of "Lamia." Lots of otherworldly grotesquerie here, always in workmanlike (or better) free verse. "Gnosis M" seems characteristic. "The female won't nurse those that can't pass/ her postpartum nuzzle. She counts nascent/ eyes, legs,// & will not pop the birth bags of the odd ones/ with her teeth," it begins, then whispers of hideous mutants waiting in wombs for "a man's wrong move/ to unlock (them)," following that with a story of a forlornly-squealing six-legged kitten drowned as a monster by the protagonist's mother.

John M. Bennett: Just Feet--3760 Cedar Ridge Dr., Norman OK 73072. 19 pp., $6. More Bennett poems, this time with essays by me and Jake Berry. In mine I refer to Bennett's use of the phrase, "of's lover," not only to say "of his lover" but also "lover of of "--the lover, in other words, of the possibility of possession. When the book was printed, though, the second "of" of "lover of of" was accidentally dropped. I'm pointing this out now to make sure my point about Bennett's ever-subtle multiple expressiveness gets out--because, frankly, I'm proud of it!

Henry George Fischer: More Timely Rhymes from the Sherman Sentinel--The Sentinel, Box 64, Sherman CT 06784. 68 pp., $6.59. I agree with blurber X. J. Kennedy who calls Fischer "one of the deftest living practitioners of the much-maligned form of light verse. How can one otherwise describe a man who, in a poem about puns (which, groan, is called "Once A Pun A Time"), claims that "A rebus pun/ Was prized so much an-/ oble put one/ On his escutcheon?"

Harry Polkinhorn: Mount Soledad--Left Hand Books, Station Hill Road, Barrytown NY 12507. 100 pp., $9. An autobiographical prose-collage that is close enough to many definitions of poetry for me to review it here. It's about a failed affair that requires a lot of effort from the reader, for it's all paragraph-long, minimally-punctuated sentences that--well, here's a random sample: ". . . a windswept zone where yellowing documentation springs a hard-on foolish with youthful hopes when you know full well your children need you sacrificial plants . . ." Absorbing material once you get into it, first as a hate-poem shrapneled with love; then as a portrait of (chiefly) woman-as-love-object/ woman-as-glazedly-obsessed-marketeer, and of the world as a system of endless, petty money-flow; and, finally, as a love-poem shrapneled with hate--to put it all very tentatively as this is a book to be read multiple times, and I've only had time to go through it once.

Karl Kempton: Tassajara: Where the Meat is Hung to Dry--tel-let, 1818 Phillips Pl., Charleston IL 619209. 9 pp., $3. 8 textual poems inspired by a trip to India and full of the "rock/ back/ and/ forth" of "feminine receptivity and methodical arrangement" in their efforts to find a proper balance. But "feminine receptivity" generally has the upper hand, as in the collection's third poem: "Water side of sycamore leaves/ creek writes ten thousand suns" Each of these masterful poems is a "waiting pushed against// The rigid pattern to slip through/ free/ in the mystery."

House Organ--(#16, Fall 1996), Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Ave., Lakewood OH 44107. 24 pp., cost: SASE. One of the few regular litzines around. This issue features a charged take on the paintings of Francis Bacon whose "screaming mouths/ are mute, frozen,/ blocked tunnels./ not-orifices./ they appear/ without heads./ As if the body is/ a toothed sewer/ that can manifest/ in any of/ its members.// or mouth as/ manhole,/ without cover." Also criticism about, and a poem for, Bob Kaufman, by, respectively, Kenneth Warren and A.D. Winans. A stand-out discussion of Robert Duncan by Dennis Formento, too. Much else.

HouseOrgan--(#8, Fall 1994), Kenneth Warren, 1250 Belle Ave., Lakewood OH 44107. 20 pp., cost: SASE. I continue to admire this publication for including long serious takes on poets, especially contemporaries, like one here by Kenneth Warren on Hugh Seidman--after, and with, samples of Seidman's work, such as "Composition: T Rex": "finally unearthed/ dwarfing men/ 65 million years/ up/downwind" A second essay, by Robert Yagley, cogently tries to persuade me Emily Dickinson's love poetry was not as cloistered as her life, and fails to. Many fine poems are also here, like Joe Napora's easy-to-quote "sore eros": "tOUCH." Plus a moving short story by Robert Buckeye about a last visit, with his father, to his uncle.

John Byrum: ORANGE--Generator Press, 3203 West 14th Street, #13, Cleveland OH 44109. 28 pp., $2. One of Byrum's minimalist white-letters-on-black poems. Minute changes in typography, or letters' size, or number of lines per page, or where words or lines end take on huge expressive value as they carry us weightlessly or stop us dramatically in the amazing full glow of thought between "or/ an/ ge" and "pla/ ceh/ old/ ers," the texts on Byrum's front and back covers. Here's an excerpt from one of the inner texts: "signshoulderfortheun/ cannyhasbeenitwhichsho/ uldtheasityouareofrecei/ vingweandifgrammar . . ."

XIB (#7, Summer 1995), XIB Publications, Box 262112, San Diego CA 92126. 64 pp., $5. One of my correspondents sez I and Mike Basinski should just call the main kind of poetry in this and similar publications "white trash poetry" instead of looking for a name that'll get academics to take it seriously and maybe he's right. Whatever it is, solid samples of it are here, classed up (or down) by a poem by Bennett that starts, "No but's drunk in the after-exhalation, altared . . ." And much here flows in loftier regions, though not Todd Moore's effort on his grandmother's teaching him how to spit.