publishing
To The Cold Heart by Clark Coolidge is the first book published by Fenrick Books.
Quoting Clark, To The Cold Heart "is a retranslation, in the loosest sense, of the Han Shan Cold Mountain Poems, all three hundred and whatever of them".
Written in 1990, only a small excerpt has ever appeared in print.
Clark Coolidge is an American poet and musician associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and the New York School. His work, often concerned with the musical and rhythmic qualities of language to the exclusion of literal meaning, can be both beautiful and opaque. The author of a dizzyingly large number of books, Clark does not use the internet. He is a resident of Petaluma, California.
Charles Bernstein on To The Cold Heart:
"Clark Coolidge’s To the Cold Heart is an adventure of mind’s reassociative play with words, tipsily tripping on tongue with an improvisatory exuberance the age demands. Like Parmenides doing a polka, Coolidge blows the tune at every turn."
Peter Gizzi on To The Cold Heart:
"In these wonderfully concise poems, inspired by Hanshan, the Cold Mountain poet, there is a delicacy to be discovered from line to line, poem to poem. There are also enigmas questing for meaning to be found. This may be Clark Coolidge’s most quiet and intimate book where the reader finds space in small things, vitality in wonder."
Thurston Moore on To The Cold Heart:
"Regardless of when, Clark’s poetry is always in the moment of timelessness—like the scurrying bop keys of Horace Silver, the vocabulary is centered in rhythm, in music at play with thoughts derived from the spaces between the notes. New every spin."
Release date: June 8, 2021
Format: 112 pages. 6x9. Perfect bound. Letterpress covers by The Circadian Press.
Cover art: Maya Strauss.
Edition: 500 including a special edition of 50 with hand altered covers by artist Maya Strauss, signed by both Maya and Clark.
Regular edition $20. Special edition $50.
