Now Available: Christian Peet's Big American Trip

Big American Trip
Christian Peet
Shearsman Books, March 2009
Paperback, 80 pp., 9x6ins, $15 / £8.95
ISBN 9781848610156
Available from Small Press Distribution, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Shearsman (UK)

We are pleased to announce our own Christian Peet's Big American Trip, now out from Shearman Books. Assuming the form of postcards authored by an "alien" of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, John Barr, et al), Big American Trip is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice behind these texts is at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.

+ Big American Movie(s)! Manifesting the vision of Big American Trip, a diverse group of activists, actors, artists, musicians, writers, et al, have collaborated with Christian to create a polyvocal series of video readings / interpretations of individual postcards: experience YouTube awesomeness from the likes of Jenny Boully, Ana Božičević, Blake Butler, Sandy Florian, Elena Georgiou, Bhanu Khapil, Amy King, Kristen Nelson, Noah Saterstrom, Juliana Spahr, Amanda Jo Williams, and who knows. (Have the technology to shoot a video? Email christianpeet[AT]gmail[DOT]com)

In Big American Trip, Christian Peet rejects the idyllic dream of a post-national freedom, instead going back to those two archaic, fundamental tools of American nation building—the highway system and the postcard—not to find an imagined national community but to reveal the strangeness, violence and noise that results from the U.S. clashing with other cultures, languages and nations, and—just as importantly—clashing with itself.
—Johannes Göransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place and Pilot, co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes

The complexities of alienation hybridize the mouth, double the tongue. Derrida writes, “What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are…instead of reaching you it divides you…it leaves you, it gives you.” Christian Peet’s Big American Trip embodies the enigma of the postcard—writing that is at once private and public—and like all letters, these maintain a sense of internal drifting that requires us to question our own sense of identity and location. The logic of Peet’s syntax and juxtapositions gives us the poetry of the divided tongue: in the space between multiple languages, we are invited to trespass our own borders that we might hear (and learn to speak) radical loss. A whole new spin on the classic postcard message: “wish you were here,” Big American Trip is a remarkable, necessary book, and a wonderful achievement.
—Selah Saterstrom, author of The Meat & Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution

Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela is a sad and hilarious book full of devastating social commentary about money, power, sex and British social mores. A couple centuries later, Christian Peet has updated poor Pamela's well behaved letters into blistering postcards dashed off by a nervy, distraught human being of indeterminate gender who is both losing and finding him/herself in and across a terrifying pre-Obama America. Stamp this one with approval.
—Rebecca Brown, author of The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, and others

The author of these postcards has transcribed this alien’s heart. Peet drives through the US landscape (circa early 21st century), offers us the hijacked language of a nation, and through this text asks: and what words have been left for you to use, honestly?
—Elena Georgiou, author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrant and mercy mercy me

Visit the author's website.
Email christianpeet[AT]gmail[DOT]com for review copies.

Recently Received

Most of the titles that follow are available as review copies, except for titles marked with an asterisk, which are hand-bound or otherwise short-run editions and are limited, if still available at all.

Walter Abish, 99: The New Meaning (Burning Deck, 1990)

* 6x6, Issue #17 (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)

Marianne Apostolides, Swim: a novel (BookThug, 2009)

Eric Baus, Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2008)

R.M. Berry, ed., Forms at War: FC2 1999-2009 (FC2, 2009)

Jenny Boully, The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, 2007)

Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop, Rosemarie Waldrop, eds., One Score More: The Second 20 Years of Burning Deck 1982-2002 (Burning Deck, 2002)

Joshua Casteel, Letters from Abu Ghraib (Essay Press, 2008)

Norma Cole, ed., trans., Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000)

* Ellie Ga, Classification of a Spit Stain (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)

* Lawrence Giffin, Get the Fuck Back Into That Burning Plane (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)

Albert Goldbarth, Griffin (Essay Press, 2007)

* Regan Good, The Book of Nature (Ugly Duckling Press, 2009)

Anne Gorrick, Kyotologic (Shearsman Books, 2008)

Jean Grosjean, An Earth of Time, Keith Waldrop, trans. (Burning Deck, 2006)

Carla Harryman, Adorno's Noise (Essay Press, 2008)

* Jared Hayes, from fiftyfarms (Caribou Press/Dusie Kollectiv, 2008)

Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 3rd ed., 2008)

Elizabeth MacKiernan, Ancestors Maybe (Burning Deck, 1993)

Jill Magi, Torchwood (Shearsman Books, 2008)

* Linnea Ogden, Another Limit (Projective Industries, 2009)

Kristen Prevallet, I Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press, 2007)

* Gretchen Primack, The Slow Creaking of Planets (Finishing Line Press, 2007)

Zoe Sköulding, From Here (Ypolita Press/Dusie Kollectiv, 2008)

Ulf Stolterfoht, Lingos I-IX, Rosemarie Waldrop, trans. (Burning Deck/Anyart, 2006)

Donald Wellman, Prolog Pages (Ahadada Books, 2009)

Dallas Wiebe, The Vox Populi Street Stories (Burning Deck, 2003)

Notes for 16 March 09

1. We have finally made it through all full-length manuscripts and will announce new titles within the week.

2. Cynthia Reeser reviews Mark Cunningham's "beautifully designed" (thank you, Ms. Reeser) Body Language and interviews Mark (wherein he discloses what we've always suspected: "the book as a whole has for its ideal readers curious children and space aliens") at Prick of the Spindle.

3. Craig Santos Perez reviews Jenny Boully's one love affair at Rattle.

4. "Hypocrite Lecteur" Tim Marcuson, new to blogging, commits an early post to kind words about GC Waldrep's chap, which, it so happens, has now officially sold out.

5. And TSky has posted new reviews as well:

a. Sidebrow#2 reviewed by AD Jameson
b. Denise Newman's Wild Goods, reviewed by Aidan Thompson
c. Anne Blonstein's memory's morning, reviewed by Kathrin Schaeppi
d. Dmitry Golynko's As It Turns Out, reviewed by Eireene Nealand

6. Justin Mark's new chapbook, Voir Dire, is now available from Rope-a-Dope Press. Letterpressed in an edition of 96, one would be hardpressed to spend $8--which includes shipping--more wisely.

7. Shampoo Issue 35 features a section of poetry from Germany (in German with English translations) brought to you by Guest Editors Ron Winkler and Christian Lux, as well as a special section from Guest Editor Ronald Palmer. Poets & translators include Stephanie Young, Uljana Wolf, Jan Wagner, David Trinidad, Thien Tran, Barbara Thimm, Mark Terrill, Brian Teare, Gary Sullivan, Ramsey Scott, Tom Schulz, Katharina Schultens, Sabine Scho, JD Schneider, Ulrike Almut Sandig, Andre Rudolph, Jan Volker Röhnert, Lawrence Rinder, Nikola Richter, Kevin Prufer, Georgina Paul, Ethan Paquin, Danielle Pafunda, Peter Nickowitz, Daniel Nester, Steph Morris, Sara Larsen, Norbert Lange, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Killian, Ernst Herbeck, Duriel E. Harris, Catherine Hales, Matthias Goeritz, Jane Gibian, Iain Galbraith, Johannes CS Frank, Michael Farrell, Daniel Falb, Carl Christian Elze, Peter Covino, Ann Cotten, CAConrad, Jenny Boully, Jennifer Blowdryer, Nico Bleutge, Mark Bibbins, Susan Bernofsky, Dodie Bellamy, Toby Axelrod & Shane Allison, with scratch&sniff ShampooArt by Otto Chan. Edited by Del Ray Cross.

Trickhouse Vol.4

Trickhouse Vol. 4 has been revealed:

Visual Artists: Michael Paige Glover & Laura Krifka
Writers: Noah Eli Gordon, James Belflower & Anne Heide, Danielle Dutton
Guest Curator: "Food Signs of the United States" by Noah Saterstrom
Sound: Michael Renovich
Video: Lisa Leaverton & Nancy Andrews
Correspondent: Robert Eshelman
Interview: Lisa Birman with Bhanu Kapil
Experiment: Doug Nufer