Dog Park Audio Magazine

Fetch is Dogpark Collective’s new audio magazine project, hosted by Kate Robinson, Caleb Beckwith, and, of course, Fran-the-dog.

Featuring:

Alana Siegel, “Twitter” 2:10
Turner Canty, “Martial Arts” 2:42
Suzanne Stein, “Lighted Moving Message,” fragment from a text commissioned by SFMOMA’s Open Space 5:53
Lindsey Boldt, “Skullface Malone,” featuring Steve Orth 9:30
Alli Warren, “Everybody sleeps in royal blue satin sheets like cucumbers in a box of snow,” from Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia 10:42
Jacob Kahn, “Telos is a Feature” 14:10
Claudia LaRocco, “Remnants from an improvisation” with Dylan van Der Schyff as part of The Retrospective Room at the Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne, Australia, March 2020 15:55
Next Expanse/Nich Malone, “Like an Extra” 18:32
Ellis Martin, “Ave Maria” with Jascha Ephraim & Candace Lazarou 21:21
Jamie Townsend, “Occasional Poem” 25:22
Paul Ebenkamp, “Song” 30:02
Brandon Brown, “A Love Faraway” 34:19
Steve Orth, “My Dog” 9:30
Jeanne Vaccaro, “Carpet Care Los Angeles 4” 38:56
J.J. Mull, “March 25th, 2020” 43:31
Laura Moriarty, 3 poems from Non Death Diary 46:07
Ivy Johnson, “First Song” 47:40
An announcement 49:50

Precious Moments

My new chapbook, Precious Moments is now available through Sky Trail Press!  It’s an excerpt from a memoir project that I’m currently working on which speaks to the the traumatizing effects of social darwinism and capital on human psychic and social life.     They’re just $5 including shipping.  If you’d like a copy, email me at ivy.m.johnson@gmail.com.

Born Again

I’m so excited to announce that my book, Born Again, is now available through The Operating System!  If you live in The Bay Area, you can also pick it up at Moe’s, E.M Wolfman, Green Apple Books, or Alley Cat!

Born Again is a book about the redemptive power of the singular voice, arising from the mixture of a multitude of voices, coming together as a single flame to light the way through a landscape of sorrow, evil, extreme beauty, and extreme feeling. Ivy Johnson is a poet who believes that the I and the spirit are intertwined forever in the act of the poem. She gives the poets of today and tomorrow the permission to gain strength from the force of the persona, with its ability to surround trauma and alchemize it into the sort of language that sustains. Johnson tells us: “I am free I am free/ Believe me I am.” And we do believe she is free. And we believe, in her poems, we are, too.   -Dorothea Lasky

Born Againis an ecstatic disquisition on the psychic, sensual and cerebral power of religious experience. In a crucible of direct encounter with the Holy Spirit, towering and oppressive mental structures are deranged and reshaped into a dynamic feminist recourse of audacious openings: borderless, raw and alive. Expressing volatile, febrile and point blank composure Ivy Johnson redefines (fathoms) what it means to be enthralled as she unburdens the epic weight of judgment and spiritual peril in a veil of viscose corporeality. The erotics of immanence are emancipatory and miraculous here, now. – Brenda Iijima  

Are you “more Medea than Oedipus”? Are you Jesus?  Have you arrived to Ivy’s poetry to experience the revisitation of rape or an abstract “ecological armageddon” of language or the orifice of a poetic body? Here, we become her wakeful marigolds. We sit across from her like pages of membranes, trying to eat as fast as we can off the hypnotic fluency of her literary fingers, twisting and turning with her as we unlock the “locomotion of a tautology,” the constant lips and thighs and gurgles or shareholders of her text. And we don’t die happily. -Vi Khi Nao