In Sandra Doller's vivid, syntactically knotty new book, Not Now Now, the reader revels in a tangle of music, make-believe, motherhood, and the convolutions of collective entanglement. These poems are funny and forceful, disrupting temporal and structural expectations with an insistence on a single word's potential to shift the mood or rev a line's engine. Not Now Now interrogates the often-pernicious language of ordinary forms: "A paragraph is not a problem / a poem is," she writes, "It's not like I sit around / yesterday's news." The three sequences that comprise this exciting new collection underscore Doller's continued assertion of wonder as ethos amid chaos.
Sandra Doller is the author of several books of poetry, prose, translation, and the in-between from the most valiant small presses. Her work has recently appeared in magazines such as Fence, Harp & Altar, Pamenar, and Action, Spectacle. Doller is the founder of an international literary arts journal and independent press, 1913 a journal of forms/1913 Press, where she remains l'éditrice-in-chief. She lives in the USA, for now.
"'[A] thinking thing is not a writer,' according to Sandra Doller, but Not Now Now is an assemblage of odd thinking things, of poems mid-thought, of baby speak beside Stein/Scalapino speak, of musings on motherhood, of pure pleasure experiments grounded in the freedom of abstraction. Every word is plucked and stretched, every self broken down. The speaker inside these poems is like a mechanic, tuning them up and tricking them out for our entertainment and bewilderment. What I do know now is that I loved being trapped inside the logic of these poems." — Paola Capó-García
"Not Now Now is the baby that won't go to sleep. It's the vibrating vibrator in the carry-on luggage, the alarm clock that keeps getting snoozed, the funhouse mirror that shows us ourselves, anew. An expansive, multifaceted take on contemporary times, Doller flips the script on our boring words and phrases—'Pray for me mister for I have thinned'—opening up language and speech patterns as a way to mine our commodified, patriarchal surroundings. This book will chew you up in its crunching gears, but it won't spit you out. If Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer, and Eileen Myles had a baby, they'd be lucky to have Sandra Doller." — Lauren Shapiro
