ISBN: 9780982541630
Fiction | 6"x8", 144 pp, pbk |May 2010$15 Special pre-order price: $13 includes shipping
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"Clever tales . . . understated humor and irony . . . a playful, experimental appeal. . . ."—Publishers Weekly
"This is a marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark, Man’s Companions is not to be missed. "
—Brian Evenson
"Reading this work I imagine what it must have been like for people reading Donald Barthelme for the first time, that fully formed stylist suddenly sprung as if from nothing, this vision or version of the world that is our world and also isn’t—it’s wonderful and peculiar and radiant and much funnier and maybe a little bit sadder. Each of Ruocco’s tales is its own little triumph."
—Danielle Dutton
For the characters in Man’s Companions, the self is a degraded version of someone else. Fantasy is stymied by performance anxiety. Delayed gratification phones in a last-minute cancellation. Thee fictions in this collection are mongrel, troubling the genus of story with miscegenations and mutations, and at the heart of the book is the figure of the anima non grata, the unwanted woman, a degraded version of man. Using language by turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, Man’s Companions manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes.
About Joanna Ruocco
Joanna Ruocco is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
Shelly Taylor
Black-Eyed Heifer
ISBN: 9780982541647
Fiction/Poetry | 6"x8", 88 pp, pbk |May 2010$14 Special pre-order price: $12 includes shipping
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"There’s a fine density and intensity to this work, the ‘thinginess’ that informs our actual lives, and a radically innovative use of language. I kept thinking of the alabaster bear and petrified whale vertebrae on our mantle, these fabulous memories of life."
—Jim Harrison
"Black-Eyed Heifer is a mighty anthem to down home local culture—the deeply rooted—the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land. These lyrical prose poems sing a ‘rampant fire’ tune ‘to yesterday’s hands-up hinterland’ and the fact that ‘there were horses, there always are.’ There is abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty in Shelly Taylor’s contemporary Georgian eclogues, ‘all the while mindful of the color turn’ and ‘silent footwork & news.’"
—Brenda Iijima
"The prose poems of Shelly Taylor’s first collection create stories that poke through your eye & go straight through your head. Ms. Taylor makes up words in ‘holler time,’ language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent. I can tell you that she ‘put me ripened there,’ into a three-dimensional South of horses, fields, and characters. Her poems are hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category".
—Jane Miller
About Shelly Taylor
Shelly Taylor is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). This is her first full collection. Born in southern Georgia, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
