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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)
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]
[ 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.
Today's post does not necessarily reflect the views of Tarpaulin Sky Press authors or staff, with the exception of TSky Press publisher, Christian Peet.
That said, and switching now to the first-person while noting the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, I'd like to dedicate this post to one particular woman, my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose (small(ish)-press!) memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist this year.
Sadly, Reiko's book, the book's nomination, and indeed most of the book's content has been overshadowed by media attention to one particular element of Reiko's story: how she's raised her children. Though slightly more balanced in a recent appearance on The Gayle King Show, Reiko's recent appearances on The Today Show and in articles at Salon and Shine have spawned a "discussion" (attack) that focuses solely on Reiko's "unorthodox" parenting of her two boys--boys who, in a recent visit to my house, seemed blissfully unaware of the suffering that some 15, 000 people at Shine alone desperately want to believe they have endured as a result of Reiko not only leaving them with Dad for six months(!), once(!), on a research grant(!), but also moving down the street from them(!), rather than in their home with her ex-husband(!)
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