Tarpaulin Sky Press New Books, Bestsellers & Reviews: Boully, Goldstein, Göransson

While Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is still a brand new baby, currently "recommended" at Small Press Distribution, toddlers such as Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate and Sarah Goldstein's Fables, we are pleased to report, are already on the SPD's poetry and fiction bestsellers lists.

Nick Sturm, at The Rumpus, reviews Sarah Goldstein's Fables.

‎"Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision, the stories of Sarah Goldstein’s collection, Fables, awaken the tension between human and nonhuman in these haunting vignettes. . . . Entering Goldstein’s Fables is good fodder for dreams and the conscience, but be sure not to leave this one laying out for the kids." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Karen Hannah, at Open Letters Monthly, reviews Jenny Boully's not merely. (Though, it's less of a review and more of a dissertation. Thank you for your attention, Karen and Open Letters Monthly!)

"Boully’s book subtly reveals how we engage in the act of creating narrative through our reading in order to find our own place within a narrative—in order to be placed within a narrative ourselves—in the same way that we place characters via our definition of them. This makes narrative a kind of place that we look to find ourselves within or that we try to settle ourselves within. We seek it out like a home because it feels familiar or because it began from the origins of something that felt familiar." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Fence poet and Capo of the Racine Public Library system, Nick Demske, provides a thought-provoking review of Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant.

"Göransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. He’s the Poet Laureate of the Coal Mine, our savior canary, dying and producing perpetually death-obsessed art that we might all be spared. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Joseph Michael Owens, at PANK Magazine, also reviews Göransson's Entrance.

‎"Entrance to a colonial pageant… demands its reader to engage it on a close sentence-to-sentence level and rewards the reader with some truly spectacular prose. Prose that, page after page, begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child . . . before immolating the host, the reader." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]