"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer," says Ander Monson.

"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way. It's not just her subject here, the Peter Pan story, but the way she reconfigures it—rips all the stuffing out of it, pops off its heads and parts, then shuffles, sexes, and reanimates it. You might expect her primary mode to be narrative, and it is, but this book's weird sweet homunculus heart is in the inquiry into and against these narratives, and the seams between real and not-real. I for one am glad that Boully sanded that safe, sane veneer right back off the story so it's become raw, confused, glorious, new."--ANDER MONSON

"This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism": LSU Student Arrested for Writing a Poem in Imitation of Johannes Göransson's "Quite Disturbing" Style

[Now that we've "officially" published Johannes Göransson's Entrance to colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, we're re-posting this feel-good story about LSU Student James Bellard, who was arrested after reading Johannes's work and writing (as assigned) an "imitation" poem. And then leaving a copy of said poem in the LSU library. While dressed as a leprechaun.

Why in hell is this a feel-good story? Well, because the investigating officer, Detective Morris, appears to be aware that poetry is alive and breeding and can be just as "scary" as "life." That Morris appears familiar with contemporary poetry beyond Mary Oliver is heartening news. One can only imagine what might have happened if, for example, John Barr had been the arresting officer.)

The following is Mr. Bellard's earnest and often hilarious account, re-posted here from Montevidayo. --Eds.]

Luck of the Irish

It was late at night when I got the e-mail for the assignment to write an imitation of Johannes Göransson. I was sick and really didn’t feel like writing a poem that I wouldn’t finish till 11:30 that night, but I hated being sick more and to change my routine would be to let the virus win. So, I read a few of Johannes’s poems. I picked out some elements of his style (killing, doll penis[es], and demons to name a few). The overall feel of his style was that it was quite disturbing. I set out to make my imitation even more disturbing—like the ramblings of a schizophrenic before some terrible act—and after the events that transgressed shortly thereafter, I’d say I’d surpassed my own expectations in that.

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Now available: Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

Johannes Göransson
Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

ISBN: 9780982541654
Fiction / Poetry / Drama
5.5" x 7", 100 pp., pbk. | May 2011

$14 includes shipping in the US
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Early Reviews of Entrance

“I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You'll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It's also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.”
—BLAKE BUTLER

“It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses.”
—AARON KUNIN

“Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Goransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of on-going tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation producing excessive, unruly 'truths.' Here the debased coin of feeling is rung hard and the 'Authenticity kitsch' of an easily accepted idea of the poetic is returned for a better metal, mined from a deeper vein. The love child—in this book at least—of Sylvia Plath and Antonin Artaud (if one can assign parentage at the end of an orgy?), Goransson gives us realisms complicated and fast enough to believe in. Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is an immensely important and absolutely thrilling experience. Read this! 'Something tells me he is the poet of social justice. Peekaboo!'”
—LAURA MULLEN

“A hybrid form somewhere between or among the categories of poetry, prose, essay, theatre production, and instruction manual. . . . There is much in the absolute inability of this production to be realized in physical terms and space which leads us to see a relationship to an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty being played out. There are masks and intricate costumes aplenty, from the infamous sacks worn by Guantanamo detainees seen in the earlier passage being worn by THE PASSENGER, to the recurring “Pussy” costume fabricated “from Charlotte Bronte’s gauzes”(42). There are dresses made from looted items, prison-style clothes, black and polished bodies, cowboy costumes, skins charred from suicide bombings, heaps of dead horses, birds bursting from bodies, wounds, basketball jerseys on androgynous children, kissing faces and murder victims, exoskeletons, audience members in whiteface, and many more get ups. The costumes sometimes act/exist as characters in and of themselves, and sometimes they are affixed to bodies which are keen on morphing and wrecking any attempt at stability or a false sense of character development. What develops is the spectacle. It is a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things. . . . The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone. . . . All aboard.”
—RYAN DOWNEY, HTML GIANT

“This is a terrifying world we have entered, one that might be likened to a frenzied America souped-up with steroids, LSD, and the rhetoric of fear. . . . The culture in which the drama is set is one with a notable amount of xenophobia. The Passenger undergoes a mandatory cerebral operation, assisted by a nurse who perceives this passenger as a threat to children and society as a whole. . . . Göransson’s prose is obsessive, feverish; it feels as if there is simultaneously an overwhelming joy and a keen aversion that animates his descent into the language inhabited by the characters. . . . This pageant is ultimately redemptive—in a world where much is hidden and persecuted, all parties involved are catapulted into a liminal state that requires a confrontation of the concealed/uncanny. Instead of accepting the paternal law as such, we must create our own, while allowing for a multiplicity of laws to flourish and coexist.”
—DREW KREWER, MARS POETICA

About the Author

Johannes Göransson has published three prior books of his own writings—A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”)—and several books in translation—including, most recently, With Deer by Aase Berg, Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson. He co-edits Action Books with Joyelle McSweeney, and co-edits the online journal Action, Yes with John Dermot Woods. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame and writes regularly on the blog www.montevidayo.com.

Excerpts from Entrance 

appear in Tarpaulin Sky, Tammy, New American Writing, jubilat, Cleaves Journal, Parthenon West and Columbia Poetry Review.

Now available: Sarah Goldstein's Fables

Sarah Goldstein
Fables

ISBN: 9780982541661
Fiction | 5.5" x 7.5", 92 pp., pbk. | May 2011
Click here for more information

$14 includes shipping in the US
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Departing from the Brothers Grimm to approach our own economically and socially fractured present, Sarah Goldstein’s Fables constructs a world defined by small betrayals, transformations, and brutality amid its animal and human inhabitants. We hear the fragment-voices of ghosts and foxes, captors and captives, stable boys and schoolgirls in the woods and fields and cities of these tales. Anxious townsfolk abandon their orphan children to the nightingales in the forest, a bear deploys a tragic maneuver to avoid his hunters, and a disordered economy results in new kinds of retirements and relocations. Goldstein weaves together familiar and contemporary allegories creating a series of vibrant, and vital, tales for our time.

“In the meadow of fairy tale, Goldstein unrolls ribbons of story that fly gamely and snap with brilliance. Truly worth gazing at.”
—DEB OLIN UNFERTH

“Sarah Goldstein’s fables make me happy, and they'll make you happy too. They’re delightfully unnerving: small animals fare poorly; we’re bounced to what feel like the settings of the tales of the Brothers Grimm—huntsmen and witches wander the landscapes, a magic needle runs away, a finch mends lace—and then, wonderfully, there’s talk of retirement accounts and urban decay and the sad tale of a dude crushed under his truck whilst fixing its axle. And ghosts! And my favorite: the captives. One captor tells his captive, “you ought to put that voice of yours in a pillow.” Thank goodness Sarah Goldstein put her voice into Fables. Honestly, I’ve never read a debut this stunning.”
—JOSH RUSSELL

“Goldstein lightly treads up and down the spectrum of delightfully playful to hopelessly grim via vivacious and unsettling possibilities. . . . An important glimpse into contemporary literature, which blends a new subtle style with both nature and the relatable subversive. For fans of Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, and César Aira.”
—HEY SMALL PRESS!

More excerpts from Fables

appear in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Open Letters Monthly, Society for Curious Thought, and Tarpaulin Sky.

About the Author

Sarah Goldstein was born in Toronto and attended Concordia University (Montreal) and Cornell University. She currently resides in western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Verse, and other journals, and her artwork has been shown in the US and Canada.

Read an interview with Sarah at Open Letters Monthly.

Now taking pre-Rapture orders for Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal Issue#17 / Print Issue #3

Tarpaulin Sky
Issue #17/Print Iss #3

7"x9", 204 pages, paperback
June 2011
Cover art: Noah Saterstrom

Special pre-publication price:
$12 includes shipping in the US
Pre-order by check or Add to Cart (ships June 2011)

Edited by

Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Colie Collen, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey, with associate editors Duncan B. Barlow, Michael Tod Edgerton, Brian Mihok, Christine Wertheim, along with readers Jac Jemc, Eireene Nealand, Janna Plant, Michael Rerick, Amanda Skubal, Julie Strand, Amish Trivedi, and Laura Woltag.

Featuring work by

Scott Butterfield, David Buuck and Juliana Spahr, Roxanne Carter, Joshua Cohen, Stella Corso, Patrick Crerand, Jeremy M. Davies, Sandra Doller, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Anne Gorrick, Janalyn Guo, Daniel Y. Harris, Catherine Imbriglio, Lucy Ives, Christopher Janke, Patrick Jones, Catherina Kasper, Sean Kilpatrick, Thorin Klosowski, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Susan Maxwell, Susan McCarty, Christina Mengert, Anjali Mullany, Christian Nagler, Aimee Parkison, Lance Phillips, Deborah Richards, Kate Schapira, Ben Segal, Donna Stonecipher, Bronwen Tate, Laura Vena, and Max Winter.

Notifications, re 2010 Open Reading Period for Full-length Manuscripts

too much goodness

Notification has begun in earnest and will continue throughout the week.

Writers who sent manuscripts via email will receive notification via email. Writers who sent manuscripts via post and included an SASE will receive notification via post. Writers who sent manuscripts via post but did not include an SASE will receive no notification other than an announcement, sometime next week, on this blog (and Facebook, Twitter, etc), as we assume that was the idea behind skipping the SASE.

Every year, this gets more difficult. Not the logistics, but the decisions. Please stop writing good things. Or, rather, just one of you write something good. The rest of you write easy-to-reject crap. OK? That would help a lot.

xo
The Management