Books published by Eyecorner Press

Pulverizing Portraits provides the first book-length study of contemporary American poet Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's poetry is significant because it situates itself in relation to current debates about the state of poetry, creative writing in the academia, and the importance of drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to poetry via visual aesthe-tics, poststructuralist literary and theoretical perspectives, and philosophy. Camelia Elias takes a look at what characterizes contemporary American prose poetry, namely an intensified awareness of being close to something. Poets such as Lynn Emanuel have been increasingly concerned with poetry as a tool for cultural criticism which constantly redefines our poetic discourse. Elias traces the power of Emanuel's writing and looks at her subtleties in combining intrinsic and formal constraints in poetry with extrinsic and socio-historical methodologies. Elias's analyses of Emanuel's poetic genius culminate in a plethora of references which bring together painters, philosophers, poets, critics, and actors. Thus, the poet's father, the painter Akiba Emanuel, meets Giorgio Agamben, Charles Simic, Gertrude Stein, and Sharon Stone. They all contribute to voicing the world's "interminable speeches."

Night Café is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Café brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others. "These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sørensen) "When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Café, after inspecting the menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concave receptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination, reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafés of Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills are desirable & free!" (Robert Gibbons)

This book is a reading of the arabesque tales of Edgar Allan Poe, focusing on the main themes of love, identity, and reason as they are played out in a core set of four love stories bearing the names of beautiful undying ladies. Included are chapters on structural plot analysis, the doppelgänger motif and close readings of thematic features in the four Poe tales. The book also offers a categorization of Poe's entire fictional oeuvre using the terms arabesque and grotesque, as well as a discussion of love's psychology and tellability.