Apostrophe Books is pleased to announce the book chosen from our 2015 reading period: The Green Record, by Carlos Lara, sections of which have previously appeared in NOÖ Weekly, Lana Turner, and Entropy. Lara describes the book as a project of “metavocal English,” “allowing common words to mutate, hybridize, disintegrate… to fill up each page entirely with audiographic data via intentional mishearing.” Recalling Lautreamont’s famous “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and umbrella,” this book-length poem enlivens the Surreal tradition for our self-absorbed, apprehensive moment. Lara reads our everyday reality as a relentless sequence of misprision which at times, in our most adaptive naïveté, we accept as self-affirmation: “a plain begging for more tomorrows and tomorrow’s skin for the sake of more skin.” Or, in other moments, the concealment, erosion or even disappearance of what is known or can be known is irrevocable and complete: “I didn’t think about the office or god for a month / which was actually a cradle or maybe a Manchurian mirror / it was all whalebone electronic / the stars’ manifesto.”
Author Bio: Carlos Lara is the co-author, with Will Alexander, of The Audiographic As Data (Oyster Moon, 2016). His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Lana Turner, Lana Turner, and Lana Turner. As an original member of the Fam School, he cut his teeth on illegality, desire, sleeplessness, and excess. Stephen Yenser convinced him not to drop out of UCLA. CD Wright convinced him not to drop out of Brown. He owes everything to his friends. After all the waves, after all the facts on facts, he is silently disappearing, for now, in Brooklyn. Sites: carlosrichardlara.com & anonymousenergy.com.