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28 June 2010

Versal #8

It's been too long since we gave a shout out to Versal, and since they were kind enough to float us a copy of the new issue, all the way from Amsterdam, we figure today is the day.


O, Switzerland! O, Canada! It's a Dusie (#10)


Dusie 10: the Canadian issue
Guest-edited by rob mclennan
Published by Susana Gardner
Design by Monique Desnoyers

Most TSky readers already know that Switzerland-based U.S. expat Susana Gardner is a DIY goddess whose benevolence knows no bounds, so you may not be surprised to learn that she has now turned her attention to the U.S.'s other border country*. Yes, Susana has added a feature on Canadian writers to the long list of her egalitarian endeavors, which have already made possible not only Dusie the mag, but also Dusie books, as well as one of the more astounding collections of chapbooks in recent history, via the kollektiv (also here).

22 June 2010

Titillating Tuesday


TSky Press author Danielle Dutton reads from her forthcoming work of wonder, S P R A W L (Siglio Press, August 2010), at Bomb.

If, like us, you simply cannot get enough S P R A W L, you can read excerpts in Tarpaulin Sky, here and also here.

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Kim Gek Lin Short breaks out "All the Mason Jars in the World," the book trailer for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010).

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TSky Press publisher
Christian Peet, whose left nipple is visible in the photo above--at no extra charge to you--is interviewed by Kevin Kane, at Word Riot, wherein Christian says stuff like this:
Once a manuscript is picked, I usually call the author. I do this for a couple reasons. I like to hear how happy they are because it helps to offset the bum feelings I have about “rejecting” hundreds of manuscripts for every one that we publish. Also, I like to see what kind of vibe I get from the author—because one just never knows—will they be easy to work with, or do they seem a bit uptight? Are they flakey? Do they sound like they’re on a lot of medication? These are good things to know. In the last couple years, I’ve taken to calling and saying that we’re “really interested” in their manuscript, but I don’t say that we want to publish it until we’ve chatted a bit. If I get a good vibe or, at least, if the author doesn’t frighten me, then I give them the good news.

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Speaking of picking new manuscripts, Projective Industries is "breathless waiting for you" to submit a manuscript to their chapbook open reading period. Which ends in eight days (June 30). And which is free to enter. Which should prompt you to donate a little cash to their cause. Projective Industries is run by fab peeps and fab poets Samuel Amadon and Stephanie Anderson. They also make great books. If you haven't already, go here.
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And speaking of good books, we have a bunch of new reviews and interviews at Tarpaulin Sky
* Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country

* Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows

* Gizelle Gajelonia's Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus

* Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows

* Jill Magi’s Torchwood

* Urs Allemann interviewed by Elizabeth Hall

* nick-e melville's Selections and Dissections

* Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton

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And speaking of reviews, fab TSky reviewer Kristina Marie Darling also has a new book out: Night Songs, on Gold Wake Press.

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And speaking of birds, we've been meaning to tell you about Birdsong. Like you don't already know. But in case you don't: You should check them out. Why? Well, TSky checked them out because they sent us an email asking us to, and, more importantly, because they called TSky "an exemplar to those of us who are up-and-coming in the publishing world" and added, "We read your site religiously." Enough said.

But not really. Because when we checked them out, we fell in love with them. For many reasons. Here are a few:


  • The current issue of their zine, birdsong #12: ravel (2nd anniversary issue), "a limited edition of 200 with screen printed cover and offset printed guts, hand stamped and stitched," which "comes in a 'party bag' with sticker, button, and postcard." Yeah. And it's only $6 plus $1 shipping and handling.
  • "Five On It," birdsong's "continuing interview series wherein five established writers and artists answer the same five “Inside the Actors Studio” type questions," and wherein said writers and artists include some of our favorite folks--Shanna Compton, Noelle Kocot, Katy Lederer, Richard Nash, Matthew Rohrer, Lytton Smith, Rodrigo Toscano, Rebecca Wolff, Matthew Zapruder--along with a couple dozen other greats.
  • What they're all about:
The Birdsong Collective and Micropress was founded in April 2008 with four goals in mind: to foster sustained collaboration among artists, musicians and writers in the form of an ongoing workshop; to continually encourage each other to produce creative work; to host free, public events where members can showcase works in progress; and to circulate members’ creative endeavors in a low-cost, easy to reproduce, and high-frequency format. Birdsong members share commitments to social movements of feminism, anti-racism, queer positivity, class-consciousness, and DIY cultural production. These commitments inform our creative work in many ways, ranging from the concrete to the theoretical to the experimental.
  • Their blog. A must read.
Staffed by Tommy Pico, Daniel Portland, Lauren Wilkinson, Roy Pérez, and Chantal Johnson, birdsong is found here: http://birdsongmag.com/

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12 June 2010

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.--Eds.]

John Bradley, You Don't Know What You Don't Know (Cleveland State University Press, 2010)

Ron Burch, Bliss Inc. (BlazeVox Books, 2010)

Peter Davis, Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! (Bloof Books, 2010)

* DJ Dolack, 12 Poems (Eye for an Iris Press, 2010)

Ben Doller, Dead Ahead (Fence Books, 2010)

Julie Doxie, Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2010)

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, A History of Clouds (University of Chicago Press, 2010)

Elyse Fenton, Clamor (Cleveland State University Press, 2010)

Barbara Claire Freeman, Ange Mlinko, Jesse Seldess, An Instance: Three Chapbooks (Instance Press, 2010)

Michael Gottlieb, Memoir and Essay (Faux Press / Other Publications, 2010)

Joe Hall, Pigafetta is My Wife (Black Ocean, 2010)

Brian Henry, Wings Without Birds (Salt, 2010)

Aaron Kunin, The Sore Throat & Other Poems (Fence Books, 2010)

Josie Sigler, Living Must Bury (Fence Books, 2010)

The Stark Electric Space: An International Anthology of Indie Writers (Graffiti Kolkata, 2010)

Jim Wittenberg, Haunt Me in the Morning (Graffiti Kolkata, 2010)

We've also been meaning to tell you . . .



Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

If you would like to submit work for consideration, please contact editors Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples: http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/

Recent contributors include Frank Sherlock, Brooks Haxton, Angela Sorby, T. Clayton Wood, Ron Silliman, Tamiko Beyer, Judith Barrington, James Wagner, Julian T. Brolaski, Lisanne Thompson, Jan Heller Levi, Sam Schild, Alison Pelegrin, Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Paul Ryan, Nicole Cooley, Rodrigo Toscano, Joseph P. Wood, Gordon Massman, Tara Betts, Fady Joudah, Philip Metres, Jeff Newberry, Kirsten Kaschock, Patrick Durgin, Alicia Ostriker, Carly Sachs, Kate Schapira, Bill Marsh, Evie Shockley and Franz Wright.

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Traci O Connor has new work in PANK.


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Carrie Olivia Adams takes "a brief look at writers who are using the dictionary as the structuring architecture of a chapbook," including Jeanne Morel's sold-out chap, That Crossing Is Not Automatic.

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Amy Henry reviews Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay


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TSky editor Laynie Browne's The Desires of Letters is out from Counterpath.
"Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again" (Anne Waldman). Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a passionate commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative . . . [in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time" (Juliana Spahr).


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TSky contributor Lance Phillips' These Indicium Tales is out from Ahsahta.
Both sensuous and sensual, These Indicium Tales continues Lance Phillips’ meditations on the body. Here, the indicia—markings or symbols—are birds, insects, and flowers, but rather than standing for the body, they stand with it in an exploration that refuses to romanticize nature. In this phenomenology of eros, where Phillips writes “I can't think of a way of continuing that is not sexually charged,” no word is wasted. Though lines stutter and jam together, though syntax is disrupted and interwoven with silence, the language itself remains delicious on the tongue, even when read silently—which is precisely the sort of conundrum these Tales love to raise and leave in ambiguity.

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&

Black Clock strikes again.

The 2010 We-Know-You-Shop-at-Amazon-But-Are-Prepared-to-Forgive-You-Anyway Summer Sale!

That's right, comrades, you can now get your hands on Tarpaulin Sky Press titles for as little as $8 each, including shipping (vs. $16-$19 "elsewhere.")

Click here to redeem yourself

08 June 2010

Been Meaning to Tell You . . .

. . . some excellent news from TSky Press author Brandon Shimoda. He's got two new books out, which, he says, are "something of fraternal sibling-strangers":



The Bowling [which you can't buy any more, becuase it's sold out, becuase it was too beautiful to live--and if it's any consolation, we missed it, too--Eds.], a collaboration with the royal Sommer Browning, and made by good wizard Carl Annarummo and his Greying Ghost Press. The Bowling is a collection of bowling, no less than the grease and the gleam, the balls and the buns of ten frames of subterranean heroism ...

Lake M, a long poem, and the preface of an even longer (forever in-progress) poem, beautifully made by Sueyeun Juliette Lee and her Corollary Press. Lake M resides at the bottom of a 15,000 year-old lake in western Montana, where my grandfather, Midori Shimoda, was imprisoned during World War II, under suspicion of being a spy. . . .


I hope you will all have a look, and thank you,

Brandon Shimoda
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. . . & TSky Press author Joshua Marie Wilkinson has prepared for you another fab installment of
Rabbit Light Movies (a journal of poemfilms)

Episode #11 features new work from TSky peeps Julie Carr, Lisa Robertson, and Zachary Schomburg, as well as from John Beer, Eula Biss, Joel Brouwer, Joel Craig, Patrick Durgin, Monica Fambrough, Judith Goldman, Sarah Gridley, Terrance Hayes, Christine Hume, Claudia Keelan, Sandra Lim, Dawn Lundy and Martin & Ronaldo V. Wilson, Peter O'Leary, Donald Revell, Michael Robins, Jennifer Scappettone, James Shea, Carol Snow, Kerri Sonnenberg, Peter Streckfus, Tony Trigilio, Leila Wilson, Allyssa Wolf, Lesley Yalen & Natalie Lyalin, and Matvei Yankelevich.


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. . . & Alice Blue #11 includes work by TSky peeps Benjamin Buchholz and Brian Evenson, as well as Amelia Gray, AD Jameson, Susan Moorhead, Erik Leavitt, Julio Peralta-Paulino, Erika Kristine Bogner, Sam Schild, Timothy David Orme, Michael Kimball, and Aaron Block.

You should check it out. It's edited by Sarah Gallien, Will Gallien, Madison Glass, and Amber Nelson. Amber's a wicked nice person. Also, Sarah Gallien used to be Sarah Burgess, so we're guessing that she and Will got married. That's pretty awesome.

One of TSky's former editors married one of our contributors after we had our famous TSky Summer Camp '05. That event was, like, the best time ever. Even though there couldn't have been more that a dozen people there. Mainly, our dozen NYC friends who aren't scared of the woods (can you believe there are a dozen?). Yeah. That totally rocked. We should do that again. . . .


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. . . & Craig Santos Perez at The Offending Adam reviews Christian Peet's Big American Trip.
These postcard meditations call into question what America means by 'we,' and why many feel that the presence of immigrants means there isn’t enough barbed wire to keep them ('us') out. . . . Peet notes: “the ‘lyric’ is // written with a hand of the tremor.” Indeed, the lyrics of Big American Trip are written with a hand of the tremor—a tremor caused by the unstable surfaces and underlying forces that constitute the history, language, politics, economy, and culture of the nation. [Read the full review]


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. . . & we have a lot of review copies from Ahsahta Press. High-end stuff. If it was heroin it would kill you. If you're a high-end reviewer, you should contact us about getting your hands on some of it, and then tell us what you think--if you're not dead.


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. . . & our friends at SLOPE also have good news for y'all:

Dear Friends, Readers and Loved Ones,

SLOPE is pleased to be re-joining you this spring with a portfolio of poems and materials by the luminous Sarah Gridley, the author of GREEN IS THE ORATOR, fresh out from New California Press. Sarah Gridley's portfolio is part of Issue #26 which began with a glimpse into the heart of Heather Christle and will continue with portfolios devoted to the work of Don Mee Choi, Richard Meier and Nathaniel Tarn among twenty others to follow--with Slope projects in preparation by Amber Nelson (Film) and Phil Cordelli (Unmaps), and issues guest-edited by Jen Bervin, Catherine Moore, Noah Saterstrom, among other good shepherds, to come.

Thank you for reading, and resting with us,

The Editors of Slope



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. . . & our friends at Fence would like to make life good (and inexpensive) for you:
Two years-ish ago, Fence offered a year’s subscription to the magazine, a la Radiohead’s In Rainbows release, for whatever you the buyer felt good about paying. It felt good to us and we hope it felt good to you, and so we’re offering it again.

Our Spring/Summer issue, very late this year, is coming out in a month, and you can click here to pay whatever you want, between $1 and infinity, for a year’s subscription starting with this issue. Contributors include:

Anselm Berrigan, Evan Lavender-Smith, James Wagner, Allyssa Wolf, Anna Moschovakis, Elizabeth Fodaski, Thomas Doran, Debbie Yee, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Yu, Michael Robbins, Lee Ann Brown, Heather Christle, Carl Phillips, Sandra Doller, Tomaz Salamun, Steven Alvarez, Timothy Donnelly, Jack Boetcher, Ben Greenman, Rebekah Rutkoff, Angela Ashman, Rebecca Schiff, Aurelie Sheehan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greta Byrum, with beautiful art by Dawn Clements.

Our slogan: Don’t regret not doing it.

New Reviews of TSky Titles

Jacket#40 review of Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute, thanks to Nicole Mauro, who writes, "Though Božičević’s work does terrify, and so, by extension, is rightly ‘about’ terror . . . Stars is more accurately (and happily) about what an émigré does, heart and eyes intact and hungry for the redemptive and the beautiful, after having experienced all that is contrary to the love and kindness (that can be) human beings." Read the full review.


Art + Culture review of Joanna Ruoco's Man's Companions, thanks to Ben Gottlieb, who writes, "Early Lydia Davis seems not unfairly applicable, as does Amy Hempel, not merely for their separately singular abilities to convey a tremendous amount of information and a great emotional range with an economy of text, but also for the alternately insouciant and piercingly human wit with which they do so." Read the full review.


Art + Culture review of Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, thanks to Ben Gottlieb, who writes, "Kim Gek Lin Short has written a beguiling and entirely enthralling collection of related prose poems; it is so unusual and provocative in its subtle oddities that I wonder how aware she is of what she’s done. This is always a good sign. It is what you think when you read a story by George Saunders, or see a film by David Lynch, or flip through a comic by R. Crumb: how did this person know he could do this? And how did he summon the courage, or merely the unconcern, to trust that others would not dismiss their work for whatever it first, and less interestingly, appears to be?" Read the full review.

February Submissions


Reposted from our submission manager, updated this morning:

Howdy, lovely Tarpaulin Sky submitters,

We're almost done reading your February submissions! Sorry it takes a while, but we have precisely

2481 submissions

to read, and we want to make sure that every last one receives the attention it deserves. You can log on to your account to view the status of your submission, but the system will have marked it "received" only; it doesn't give play-by-play status updates, unfortunately--that would be awesome. Instead, you're just getting this little note from TSky publisher Christian Peet, whose hoping that you'll remain patient, even excited. Right now your submissions are in the tender care of the final group of editors: Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey. Hold tight. You'll be hearing from us again, soon!

If you have further questions, feel free to drop a line to TSky's Editor-in-Chief, Colie Collen: ccollen@ "our domain name," where "our domain name" equals tarpaulinsky[dot]com, of course, though it's being rendered in the most awkward way possible here, in an effort to throw off those pesky spambots.

Thank you for your continued support, and thank you for sending work, and thank you for buying the things we publish.. Here's to your June!

Cheers,

Christian