Lambda Literary Award Finalist: Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute

Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2009) is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Go, Ana!

The Lambda Literary Foundation announced its preliminary picks for the twenty-second annual Lambda Literary Awards. Eighty-two judges selected as finalists works of fiction, poetry, and memoir, as well as GLBT studies texts, anthologies, young adult literature, and books of drama, erotica, and genre fiction from a pool of 462 books—about 10 percent more than were nominated by publishers for last year's prizes.

The finalists are listed below by category. Winners will be named at a ceremony on May 27 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.



Lesbian Poetry
Bird Eating Bird by Kristin Naca (HarperCollins)
Gospel by Samiya Bashir (Red Bone Press)
Names by Marilyn Hacker (W.W. Norton)
Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Gay Poetry
Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann (University of Chicago Press)
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me by Brent Goodman (Black Lawrence Press)
The First Risk by Charles Jensen (Lethe Press)
Sweet Core Orchard by Benjamin S. Grossberg (University of Tampa Press)
What the Right Hand Knows by Tom Healy (Four Way Books)

Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Creamsickle by Rhiannon Argo (Spinsters Ink)
The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund (University of Georgia Press)
Land Beyond Maps by Maida Tilchen (Savvy Press)
More of This World or Maybe Another by Barb Johnson (HarperCollins)
Verge by Z Egloff (Bywater Books)

Gay Debut Fiction
Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal (Kensington Books)
God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeneys)
Pop Salvation by Lance Reynald (HarperCollins)
Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories by G. Winston James (Top Pen Press)
Sugarless by James Magruder (University of Wisconsin Press)

Lesbian Fiction
Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon (HarperCollins)
A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone (Bywater Books)
Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory by Emma Pérez (University of Texas Press)
Risk by Elena Dykewomon (Bywater Books)
This One’s Going to Last Forever by Nairne Holtz (Insomniac Press)

Gay Fiction
Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre (HarperCollins)
The River in Winter by Matt Dean (Queen's English Productions)
Said and Done by James Morrison (Black Lawrence Press)
Salvation Army by Abdellah Taia (Semiotext(e))
Silverlake by Peter Gadol (Tyrus Books)

Lesbian Memoir and Biography
Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life by Mary Cappello (Alyson Books)
Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway (Beacon Press)
My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement by Alix Dobkin (Alyson Books)
Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag by Ariel Schrag (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Fireside)
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)

Gay Memoir and Biography
Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back by Reynolds Price (Scribner Books)
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960’s and 70’s by Edmund White (Bloomsbury USA)
Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division by Jon Ginoli (Cleis Press)
Once You Go Back by Douglas A. Martin (Seven Stories Press)
The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief by David Plante (Beacon Press)

Transgender Literature
Bharat Jiva, a poetry collection by Kari Edwards (Litmus Press)
Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show, a humor collection by Lynn Breedlove (Manic D Press)
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, an essay collection by S Bear Bergman (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Transmigration, a poetry collection by Joy Ladin (Sheep Meadow Press)
Troglodyte Rose, an illustrated science fiction book by Adam Lowe (Cadaverine Publications)

Monday Roundup:

Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, forthcoming, May 2010): "Thirty-one brief, clever tales from the author of The Mothering Coven employ traits from the animal kingdom to underscore absurdities in the human species. 'Lemmings,' for example, features a desultory dialogue between two lovers who debate the better 'iconic' location to jump from—the Space Needle or the Empire State Building. . . . Satisfyingly developed, such as the nuttily obtuse 'Flying Monkeys,' featuring a rarely intersecting conversation between two women onboard an airplane that reveals how the women—former best friends who happen to sit next to each other—can't stand each other. . . . Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal. Click here for the fill review.

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The Rumpus reviews TSky Press publisher Christian Peet's Big American Trip (Shearsman Books, 2009).

Says reviewer Angela Stubbs, "Big American Trip addresses all of our insecurities as artists, as lovers, and as citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak. Peet allows us to look closely at our limits as humans and as Americans in a world filled seemingly with so many opportunities to connect." Click here for the full review.

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Transversalinflections reviews Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009), comparing Bozicevic's work to a variety of other things we love, such as Jack Spicer, Jean-Luc Godard, and snowglobes: "I would like to think of the whole book and its sections and its individual poems as a snowglobe that has been shaken up, and where not snow, but objects are floating around in varying connected but wondrous configurations. . . .The poems are no longer primarily linear, but are constellations of ideas that have body and dimensions as well as being open and porous." Click here for the full review.

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At long last, Peter Money's novella, Che, is now available, thanks to the ongoing greatness that is BlazeVox Books.

Say the peeps, of Che:

"Epic"--Christian Peet

"Harrowing language that casts up its characters like great drift logs seen through heavy surf"--Jan Clausen

"I want to hear Che read aloud ...while floating in a sensory deprivation tank”--Haale

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With + Stand is thrilled (as are we) to announce the publication of its fourth issue, devoted to the work of the great poet of materials and magenta, Lisa Robertson. Featuring essays and poetry by Stephanie Young, Scott Sweeney, Dan Thomas-Glass, Brian Ang, Anne Lesley Selcer, Alli Warren, Erika Staiti, Michael Marcinowski, Brian Mornar, Melissa Mack, Charles Legere, Jamey Jones, Richard Meier, Sam Lohmann, Alyssa Wolff, Sara Marcus, and Phoebe Wayne, as well as new work by Lisa Robertson.

The journal will be available to the public at a reading and release party, featuring Lisa Robertson and journal contributors: Sunday, March 21st, 7-9pm at Urban Ore EcoPark, 900 Murray St, Berkeley, CA. The reading, like the journal, is free.

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Dusie #9 is live. Read work by, oh, well, a few people: Cara Benson, Jessica Bozek, Ana Bozicevic, Elizabeth Bryant, Mairead Byrne, Juliet Cook, Michelle Detorie, Susana Gardner, Arielle Greenberg, E. Tracy Grinnell, Arielle Guy, Jen Hofer with Sawako Nakayasu, Carrie Hunter, Jennifer Karmin, Amy King, Mark Lamoureux, Juliana Leslie, Dana Teen Lomax, Nicole Mauro, Catherine Meng, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Anna Moschovakis, Michelle Noteboom, Kaia Sand, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Jane Sprague, Bronwen Tate, Maureen Thorson, Catherine Wagner, Stephanie Young, and--if you can believe it--many more .

And in case you've been living in a cardboard box for the last few years: Dusie is an experimental poetics journal as well as a yearly poetry publishing kollektiv. Under the auspices of Dusie Press, poets participate both physically and virtually in communal projects. Poets in the Dusie Kollektiv write, design, produce and distribute poetic chapbooks in limited, signed, editions of 50 to 150 copies. Dusie also makes poetry available to a wider community through free online PDF downloads.

Yah. Good stuff, Dusie. Go. Now.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED

NOTE: Most of the titles below are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010)

Molly Brodak, a little middle of the night (University of Iowa Press, 2010)

* Julia Cohen, For the H in Ghost (Brave Men Press 2009)

Daniel Coudriet, Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Tracy DeBrincat, Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night (Subito Press, 2010)

Sandy Florian, On Wonderland & Waste, w/collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie (Sidebrow Books, 2010)

Peter Gordon, Man Receives a Letter (Red Hen Press, 2009)

Heather Hartley, Knock Knock (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Shane Jones, Light Boxes (Penguin Books, 2010)

Natalie Lyalin, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009)

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Clay Matthews, Runoff (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Stan Mir, Song & Glass (Subito Press, 2010)

Christopher Salerno, Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Series 2010)

Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times (Twisted Spoon Press 2010)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Selenography, w/Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books, 2010)

Pre-Order and Save: New Books by Joanna Ruocco and Shelly Taylor

Joanna Ruocco
Man's Companions

ISBN: 9780982541630
Fiction | 6"x8", 144 pp, pbk |May 2010
$15 Special pre-order price: $13 includes shipping
(vs. $19, later, at Amazon or SPD)
Click here to pre-order by check.
Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010):

"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
(vs. $18, later, at Amazon)
Click here to pre-order by check.
Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010):

"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.

Birds, LLC; Diagram 10.1; Trickhouse, Vol. 8

Trickhouse volume 8 features work from Kate Greenstreet, Jen Bervin, and an interview with Shelly Taylor, whose book, Black-Eyed Heifer, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press this Spring.

Visual artist: Ilana Halperin
Writers: Laura Sims, Jen Bervin, Kate Greenstreet
Guest curator: Shelton Walsmith
Sound: Eric Jordan
Video: Vincent Goudreau
Correspondent: Nora Herting
Interview: Kristen Nelson with Shelly Taylor
Experiment: Richard Upchurch

Please visit the Trickhouse Back Room, too, for new work: video by Erin Costello, installation by Kerri Rosenstein, and drawings by Oriol Sàbat. Trickhouse is currently accepting image, sound and video submissions for the Back Room. For submission guidelines, click here.

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Birds, LLC, "a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world," announces its first two books: The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli.

Take advantage of Birds' special pre-sale offer, and buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. The pre-sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.

About The French Exit:

It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch. --Caroline Knox

About The Trees Around:

Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.--Graham Foust

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Diagram 10.1 features work from Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, and a crucial table showing suicidal poets and their "control" poets.