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thanks to Sarah Heady [ read the review here], who not only had the guts to read the book in the first place but was also able to engage its more alarming contents--"the blunt physicality of child rape"--while navigating with seeming ease China Cowboy's myriad formal experiments: "a network of dreams, self-delusions and mini-universes reveals itself through Nabokovian footnotes, appendices, crime reports, fake nonprofits (Cowboys Against Child Abuse), press releases for suspicious art galleries...."
As a result, Heady writes one of the best reviews of a Tarpaulin Sky Press title, like, ever.
Indeed we'd like to believe that Heady's pithy summation of Short's abilities is also an apt description generally of the work we publish, work in which the author "has expanded and fused the poetic and narrative fields, creating a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up."
Early in her China Cowboy review, even Heady's synopsis sears:
A ring of hellfire encompasses La La from the moment of her birth, when the devil himself (“a white dark man”) wraps a searing-hot hand around the breech fetus’ calf and delivers her into the harsh world of Kowloon, 1977. La La’s parents make their living “taking the tourists to an alley stabbing them stealing their stuff,” and the child is used as a prop to gain victims’ trust. Early on, to cover up the odd claw-shaped birthmark on La La’s leg, her mother dresses her in “cowboy boots tube socks,” and Patsy Clone is born: La La’s country star alter ego, her ticket to America, where children “have their own rooms.”
Unfortunately, one of her family’s victims is an American ex-con/soybean farmer/child abductor who sticks around Hong Kong following the assault, and one day La La never comes home from school. Maybe Ren, a.k.a. Bill, a.k.a. William O’Rennessey, is really the devil incarnate, or maybe he’s just one of the devil’s many agents on a confused, globalized earth circa 1989. He is certainly an updated (and actually American) Humbert Humbert whose version of the coveted nymphet is called a “la la” (with a lower-case L). China Cowboy’s heroine is just one of many la las in the world, an unlucky abductee who’s bribable by sugary cereal, plastic microphones and flouncy skirts. And Ren is a man who will do anything the voices tell him—assuming aliases, squirreling away la las in remote corners of the country, wrestling with his own delusions of grandeur and multiple personalities. In China Cowboy, “Hell is red carpeted stairs lined with plastic runners smell of wicked shit”—a particularly cheap and Americanized evil. Ren “goes all the way inside,” and La La never comes out—smuggled through the port of San Francisco, sequestered in a shoddy Missouri cabin, serially raped and, finally, poisoned. But, says Heady, "if this all sounds too hideous to be enjoyable," it's also important to note that
Short infuses the story with kitsch, humor and addictively playful language that balance out the heartbreak. The dark subject matter is made lighter by La La’s protective pantheon of American deities: “Loretta Lynn Patsy Cline Emmylou Harris beautiful cowgirls,” Clint Eastwood, Woody Guthrie. She complains: “In my sleep I am starring in Coal Miner’s Daughter. I am as convincing as Sissy Spacek except I am Chinese and just can’t help it. I can’t.” " The Lovely Bones this ain’t ," says Heady. Instead China Cowboy is
a satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy. After all, Ren isn’t always evil and he’s 'not never the victim,' as Short admits in her acknowledgments.... [China Cowboy] is an account of trauma and the stories people tell themselves to survive, in the larger context of colonialism (1997 representing the British handover of Hong Kong) and cultural tensions between China and America....
Read the entirety of Sarah Heady's review at HTML Giant.
Read more about the book, read excerpts, and order via the official webpage for Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy.
Thanks to poet Erin Lyndal Martin.
Make-believe does not last forever, the page says. There is something waiting to replace, to consume, to lay a cloak over the days of play and make-believe. The dreaming life will be eradicated. Wendy grows up and dies. A love story does not develop. Death and decay await. The playroom is revealed as a crypt, the love bed a coffin....
Read the full interview here.
If you want to buy the book or read a big swath of excerpts while you decide, check out the official page for Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
Any two or more TSky Press paperbacks are now only $10 with flat-fee $2 shipping per book. That's right. You heard it here, $12 each, and our books are at your door in a matter of days. You won't find a better deal on our titles anywhere else. Forget Amazon. You'd have to rent out family members to afford to buy all our titles through that online beast. Instead, buy from the source and support indie lit while saving heaps of cash. Just use the drop down menu, place your order, and as you proceed to check out, you'll see the option to "Add special instructions to the seller." That's where you can tell us which titles you would like.
That's all there is to it. You order. We ship. You read. And everyone's happy this summer.
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| Cover design by Andrew Shuta. |
Kim's is a "difficult" book, by any definition.
We like that.
China Cowboy is not a platform, a soundbite, a two-party system, monsters v. innocents....
Thus we are delighted to read Travis Macdonald's review on the Fact-Simile Editions blog, aptly titled " Confronting Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy."
Writes Macdonald:
Just like the book’s protagonist, La La, who “...wears all her clothes. Her boots. All three skirts. All the shirts. The panties, many of them...” China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin Short is an expertly woven story told in tangled layers.
It is the story of an abduction or escape, a brutal love affair or abusive imprisonment, rise to fame or road to perdition, art installation or songbook retrospective. It is each of these things in turn or neither depending on the narrator in charge at any given moment.
Told in turn from the perspectives of each of the book’s primary characters (La La and Ren), China Cowboy is a successfully executed experiment in prosody that simultaneously braids and frays narrative timelines and expectations, bringing the reader to the brink of every sensory extreme and back again. The result is a darkly surreal adventure in perception that leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken....
We don't know how we missed this, but we are glad to have discovered Helen McClory's excellent review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them at PANK Magazine.
Writes McClory:
In this prose-poem hybrid, the texts of Peter Pan have been enmeshed, re-corded, and spun into a thickness of sensual detail and slippery cross-reference. Under Boully’s fingertips, Neverland has burst open like a sodden swollen root, spilling out cutlery, birds, bearskins, thimbles, peas, open windows, mermaid scales, pubic hair, damp pirate beards, and fairy dust, of course....
Read the entire review here.
Read more about, perhaps buy, Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
 Megan Burns's review of Claire Hero's Dollyland is filled with so many killer phrases and perceptions, the review would be worth reading even if Dollyland was just an idea rather than a physical book.
Here are just a few of our favorite sentences in Burns's review:
Claire Hero's newest collection Dollyland features 15 [prose] poems about that once dearly- beloved clone of clones, Dolly the Sheep, and if Dolly the Sheep opened a theme park, Hero could outfit the House of Horrors with verses such as these....
[Hero's] language rests hoofed and cloven as she takes us in hand to wander in the bones and muscles of that domesticated wilderness of the animal song....
...inhabiting the dark underbelly of a thing found first not in nature but in the lab.....
Science, religion, politics and belief came to the forefront in the unlikely form of a sheep, a wooly being through which we worked out our dark need to control and contain the shape of life and death....
Hero lets the wound stay open, she allows the reader to fall into the abyss, a bit terrible and also bitten down into the mouthfuls that she shoves in repeatedly. In this place, we are the beast, we are the faulty construction, we are the ones supplying the wool against the cold night and we are the ones choking on how much we swallow....
Click here to read the full review.
Click here to read more about, or purchase, Claire Hero's chapbook, Dollyland.
Not sure how we missed this, when it first went live in April, but Rebecca Hazelton published a great review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
Here's a snippet:
Peter and Wendy is [J.M.] Barrie’s novelization of a stage play, originally intended for adults but significantly altered for a child audience. The later Disney adaptation, Peter Pan, bears only a passing resemblance to the original story. Boully’s book retells the tale through the lens of memory, bringing the subtext of sexual and adulthood anxieties into the foreground. Tiger Lily, who competes for Peter’s attentions in the source text, is here even more overtly sexual, “her thong all encrusted with the little shells from the seashore…she doesn’t shave her pubes, and they’re all sticking out and out.” Wendy, who, as in the book, plays house with Peter in a kind of mock-marriage, wants a “marriage made more real” and is regularly associated with images of growing, pregnancy, and menstruation.
Also brought to the fore are the intentional and unintentional cruelties of Peter, about whom we are told: “this much is ever so real; this much isn't make-believe. Peter Pan can do a great deal in ten minutes. He can do a great deal to you. For example, he can put a little something inside of you, and you will carry that for the rest of your life..."
Read the rest of the Hazelton's review at Devil's Lake, published by the good folks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And follow this link to read more about--perhaps even to purchase!-- Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them.
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ISBN: 9780982541685
Lyric Novel | 6"x8", 132 pp, pbk, June 2012
Cover design: Andrew Shuta
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In the technicolor timewarp call Hell, Hong Kong, wannabe cowgirl La La is hellbent on realizing her dream to be a folk-singing sensation, even if it means surviving a dysfunctional relationship with her kidnapper, Ren, who is just hellbent. Ren thinks he’ll win, but La La, dead or alive, always wins.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR CHINA COWBOY
"Heated and heartbreaking.... guiding us expertly over the bluegrass, bodies and Time Warps of Hell, child abuse, power and Country Music"—RAUAN KLASSNIK
“Moving between the explicit descriptions of the Marquis de Sade and the implicit ironies of Nabokov, these pieces are excruciatingly compelling, so infernal as they are related in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender.... A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker." —HEIDI LYNN STAPLES
"More hydra than hybrid, a slim monster sprouting new directions for form, narrative, culture, and identity."—CHRISTIAN TEBORDO
"La La and Ren are as searing as any characters I’ve encountered....”—CHRIS TONELLI
Read more, including excerpts, at the TSky Press official webpage for Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy.
Prose Poetry
5"x5", 32pp., saddle-stapled
Limited, numbered edition of 100 copies
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from Dollyland :
making Dolly
Never was it a question of not. A beached beastscape, a great Cell agape – we entered it. We breached the teethy tunnel & what dumb light leads us we never. In & in & we dare not note what muck marks our hands, what holds us by the tongue. What turns us inward we know not, only that as we went the hold more holds & more until to draw limb from It grew harder still, until we melded our each to other, our me to we, & moved as muscles do, pulse by pulse. Into the vasty deep & deeper still we moved toward what the light might give. Not for eyes, this light, but as for mouth or blood, a feed, & we grew fat on it. We swelled on our stem, pearly & new – & if we rent the flesh that kept us? We birthed a newborn light, a blooded thing: the Hand within our hand, the Eye within our eye.
TSky Press author Johannes Göransson wins top award at California Journal of Poetics!
And another award on top of that one!
Although it's not really Johannes winning the award so much, or even his book, entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. But, rather, winning the awards are the blurbs by Blake Butler and Aaron Kunin:
BLURB OF THE YEAR
“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 in 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 on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
MOST POP CULTURE REFERENCES
“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). . . . Burroughs and Genet and ‘Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.” — Blake Butler on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
Editors Amy King and Ana Božičević announce the third installment of Esque :
"We asked you to tell us about the revolution," write Bozicevic and King. "We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district of your heart, you defined your revolution and told us what it is. Here are y/our findings...."
Amy Wright reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011) at Jacket 2, for which we are grateful. Not only does Wright locate not merely within Barrie, but manages to bring Byron into the mix, which is always a good idea.
Says Wright: " not merely contributes so rich a reading to Barrie’s text it should be assigned as a prep course for adolescents loosing the anemones inside their chests and a refresher course for fortysomethings who have forgotten the point."
Indeed. Read the full, awesome review here.
Read more about Jenny's book, and buy it, here.
Brian Oliu reviews Sarah Goldstein's Fables (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011) at Specter Magazine, and we are grateful.
Oliu calls Fables a "gorgeous intertwining of allegorical stories presented in tiny fragments, dare I say breadcrumbs!, that display a horrifying yet beautiful world where mayors keep bones in boxes and ghosts enter through the beaks of birds," but Oliu also notes "The language is reassuring, declarative: that we trust in whomever is telling us these fables, that the world that exists is a world that exists—that what happens here happens, that it will not disappear when someone wakes."
Good stuff. Read the full review here.
Get more info and read a sample of the book.
At The Huffington Post, poet and attorney Seth Abramson provides a succinct, spot-on review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (along with brief reviews of some other favorite books of ours, including Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Ariana Reines's Mercury).
Writes Abramson:
Peter Pan was a postmodern tour de force written at the height of Modernism -- and if the very best collections of literary art at least gesture toward their immediate influences, this is undoubtedly the contemporary re-treatment that Peter Pan deserves. Boully has captured the darkness of Barrie's text, and in elevating its inter- and sub-textualities to the level of discourse she illuminates and reinvigorates her source material without sacrificing any of its creepiness, wonder, or violence. Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming. Read all of Abramson's December 2011 Contemporary Poetry Reviews
At The Lantern Review, Jai Arun Ravine provides a unique, probing, and ultimately fab review, locating not merely within the contexts of Boully's The Body and J.M. Barrie's "source text," Peter and Wendy, and drawing parallels with Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003) and Padcha Tuntha-obas’ Trespasses (O Books, 2006).
Here are a couple excerpts:
“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover....
Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.
The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches. Read the full review.
Buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.
Poet Nick Ripatrazone at The Iowa Review provides a brilliant engagement with Sarah Goldstein's Fables (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011), and in the process evokes Ingmar Bergman, the Brothers Grimm, James Joyce, and W.B. Yeats, which works for us quite nicely. Especially Bergman.
"Regardless of the genesis of these prose poems and vignettes," however, writes Ripatrazone, "Goldstein’s vision and approach is wholly new. Her work in this collection is more than translation and transcription: Fables contains poems that whisper tradition but fully stand on their own."
Ripatrazone also discusses Goldstein's "contributions to the organic conversation of narrative form," noting that Fables
might be considered a book of prose poems, but strict definitions only muddle the power of the stories. The works certainly build toward a final line, and yet the profluence of the narrative builds in epigrammatic snippets, crafted with laudable precision. Goldstein opts for the sideways glance, the unfocused focus. What is not told to the reader is enticing: when “dogs of the town lie in a heap and cough, shuddering with every breath,” an entire architecture of apocalypse remains in the silent background. The power of fable, and Fables, has always been folks' ability to give blurry shapes to concrete fears, to convince the listener that the corners of the supernatural can be flushed with light just as easily as they have been shadowed dark. Read the full review here.
Buy Sarah Goldstein's Fables directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.
DIAGRAM Issue 11.5 includes an intelligent and thorough engagement with Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. Here's a snippet:
unlike in Book of Beginnings and Endings and "The Body," the idea of text in Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them is not being erased. Instead, conventions are being uprooted, turned upside down. Boully establishes complex characters inconsistent in their observations, unfaithful in their desires, untraceable in their animation, unknowable in their thoughts. All of this "unning" undoes the traditional gesture in fiction where the primary character's desire is clearly understood. Boully goes underground to root out the darker desires.
The book is divided by a horizontal line that moves around but usually appears in the middle of the page. One might read what's underneath the like as one does David Foster Wallace's footnotes, all at once. Or, one might read them as they do in Boully's essay, "The Body," and read nothing but the footnotes. But when I started to read them as individual poems, my reading of the book became clear and the premises apparent. . . .
Peter's love of power, his deviousness, his lasciviousness, appear in the original text but it's not until Boully digs them out from the underground, from the subtext of Barrie's work that those characteristics seem so cruel. What does it mean, to say to a woman, never grow up? Is there any curse worse for a woman to grow old? Old is alone. When you imagine Wendy, you must imagine her at her most lonely. She's twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen, then married. She'll leave the window open; she'll wear the same nightgown; she'll keep whispering stories, stories out the crack of the window, through keyholes, through fissures in the ground. Whenever she hears a twig snap or the fluttering wings of moths, she'll think that Peter's back, but he's never back, at least not for her (6).
[READ THE FULL REVIEW AT DIAGRAM] Via Examiner, Lisa M. Cole also dives deeply, and smartly, into Berrie's and Boully's divergent approaches to the "same" characters. Writes Cole:
The novel Peter Pan has many troubling aspects when viewed through today’s modern lens. It is often sexist, and too preoccupied with etiquette. Also, rather than being charming, Peter often comes off as too cocky, and Wendy too eager to fit into her predetermined gender role. However, there were a few interesting things about the story, despite these objections. Take, for example, the severe blurring of roles in the relationship between Peter and Wendy. Are they lovers? Are they mother and son? Are they siblings? This quandary is the emotional center of Boully’s book. As she retells the story of Peter and Wendy, she focuses on the universal theme of unrequited love. The supposedly whimsical and light children’s story transforms into something much more mature, much darker, as Wendy’s feelings of abandonment are at center stage. Most people have felt the sting of rejection that Wendy feels when Peter does not reciprocate her feelings for him. The fact that the audience can so readily empathize with Wendy’s character is part of what makes Boully’s book so haunting, and so intense an experience. . . .
This retelling is valuable because by bringing the true darkness of the story to the forefront, Boully’s text is not masquerading as something it is not, which is a problem identified in the original. It is not often that a response to a literary work is more successful than the original work, but that is certainly the case with Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them. [READ THE FULL REVIEW AT EXAMINER] Buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.
Johannes Göransson's entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is now featured at LitPub, where you can not only buy the book, but read excerpts and a review by Tim Jones-Yelvington .
Founded by Molly Gaudy, LitPub states: "Our mission is to promote a sustainable literary community by introducing readers to authors we know and love. By providing a public gathering place for ongoing conversations, we aim to connect readers, authors, publishers, and other independent artists of all creative disciplines."
And for that and more, we thank Molly and the rest of LitPub's large and awesome crew.
For folks craving more and ever more Göransson, we direct you to this interview with Johannes, via SJ Fowler, at 3:AM Magazine, where you will also find more excerpts from entrance.
Of course, you can always find more from Johannes at www.montevidayo.com or at our favorite distributors, Small Press Distrubution, where, like a half dozen other TSky Press titles in the past (we boast, shamelessly), entrance debuted on SPD's Bestsellers list, along with Sarah Goldstein's Fables.
And, speaking of Sarah Goldstein's Fables, In Digest Magazine's InDefinite Podcast Episode #22 features Ms. Goldstein reading from her bestseller. Thank you, InDigest!
Christian now has a real computer again and will try to answer your emails soon. Thank you for the many kind ones you have sent. We're OK, both E & I, and the cats are also fine. Our house was surrounded by water but did not flood inside, which feels nothing short of miraculous. The bad news is that the damage to our land and out-buildings is pretty extensive, as is the number of things, both personal and business, that were lost down the river. None of which was covered under our flood insurance, we have been informed.
We filled some orders this morning and will continue to do so. You may continue to order directly from Tarpaulin Sky or, if we are out of stock for a specific title, from Small Press Distribution (or Amazon, if you must). Tarpaulin Sky Press is able to honor present contractual obligations, but is unable to commit to any new projects at this time. Please do NOT send review copies, or reviews, or submissions of any kind.
Some photos follow. --Best, Xtian
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