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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.
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.
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
Main Vermont office hit hard by Irene. All that was green is now a sand dune. Two buildings floated down river. Xtian & E are OK. Will be offline for some time. Please order through SPD. Cant get on facebook from this ipad. Sorry for inconveniences. Best wishes, Xtian
JENNY BOULLY
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
Special pre-order price:
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For The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Passionate sensitivity of the kind that makes us fear for our adolescent children. Its absence in our own lives may well make our children fear for us as well. ( Los Angeles Times) Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch. ( John D'Agata) The binding is neither genre nor gender but eros itself, both of the physical variety and the type that caresses the noun and its attendants. Anne Carson comes to mind. But so does Lawrence Durrell, because cerebral as the book is, it is often winkingly so, and if not the overlay, the interior is sensual. ( C. D. Wright) Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end." She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with prose. ( Mary Jo Bang)
For [One Love Affair]*: Nominated for five awards, winner of two—B est Book of New Poetry Published in 2006, and Best Second Book— Coldfront Magazine. A genre-bending back-pocket book.... gritty and intellectual ... addictive and soothing ... fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf. . . . You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time. ( Coldfront) Her fresh style challenges the ways in which we construct narratives and read texts . . . and ultimately leaves us wanting more, more, always more Boully. ( Matrix) Boully’s fluid, lyrical writing makes what could be a difficult, intimidating read instead a delightful one.... Playful engagement with narrative levels of reality (poems within poems, stories within stories). I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry. ( Open Letters Monthly)
For The Body: An Essay: From the most minute particulars of intimate confession to the long history of literary forms, from the body of the lover to the body of the text, note for note, Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay documents and destroys in equal measure. ( Craig Dworkin) A strange and magical performance. It resembles a novella overheard through a keyhole, or a nouvelle vague film beheld through a plume of Babylonian smoke. Jenny Boully's mini-epic makes its statement quietly, and with a devilish, terraced charm, like a Derridean outburst turned into topiary. ( Wayne Koestenbaum) A courageous and thoughtful new voice in literature. ( Jacket)
ABOUT JENNY BOULLY
Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande, 2007), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006), The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, 2007 and Slope Editions, 2002), and the chapbook Moveable Types (Noemi Press, 2007). Her work has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, Language for a New Century, and Great American Prose Poems. Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she teaches nonfiction and poetry at Columbia College Chicago.
A few months ago, I sat down to a dinner and interview with Nick Demske, a librarian, curator and poet in Racine, Wisconsin. We spoke about his take on a library’s place in the world of contemporary small press poetry and fiction, as well as his thoughts on cross-pollination.
So Nick, since you are both a librarian and a poet, do you spend most of your time in the poetry section of the library?
Yes, poetry section, all the way. I also wind up in the feminist and the language sections a lot.
 Joanna Ruocco
Man's Companions
ISBN: 9780982541630
Fiction | 6"x8", 144 pp, pbk |May 2010
$15 Special pre-order price: $13 includes shipping
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Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010): "Clever tales . . . understated humor and irony . . . a playful, experimental appeal. . . ."—Publishers Weekly "This is a marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark, Man’s Companions is not to be missed. "
—Brian Evenson "Reading this work I imagine what it must have been like for people reading Donald Barthelme for the first time, that fully formed stylist suddenly sprung as if from nothing, this vision or version of the world that is our world and also isn’t—it’s wonderful and peculiar and radiant and much funnier and maybe a little bit sadder. Each of Ruocco’s tales is its own little triumph."
—Danielle Dutton For the characters in Man’s Companions, the self is a degraded version of someone else. Fantasy is stymied by performance anxiety. Delayed gratification phones in a last-minute cancellation. Thee fictions in this collection are mongrel, troubling the genus of story with miscegenations and mutations, and at the heart of the book is the figure of the anima non grata, the unwanted woman, a degraded version of man. Using language by turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, Man’s Companions manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes. About Joanna Ruocco Joanna Ruocco is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
 Shelly Taylor
Black-Eyed Heifer
ISBN: 9780982541647
Fiction/Poetry | 6"x8", 88 pp, pbk |May 2010
$14 Special pre-order price: $12 includes shipping
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Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010): "There’s a fine density and intensity to this work, the ‘thinginess’ that informs our actual lives, and a radically innovative use of language. I kept thinking of the alabaster bear and petrified whale vertebrae on our mantle, these fabulous memories of life."
—Jim Harrison "Black-Eyed Heifer is a mighty anthem to down home local culture—the deeply rooted—the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land. These lyrical prose poems sing a ‘rampant fire’ tune ‘to yesterday’s hands-up hinterland’ and the fact that ‘there were horses, there always are.’ There is abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty in Shelly Taylor’s contemporary Georgian eclogues, ‘all the while mindful of the color turn’ and ‘silent footwork & news.’"
—Brenda Iijima "The prose poems of Shelly Taylor’s first collection create stories that poke through your eye & go straight through your head. Ms. Taylor makes up words in ‘holler time,’ language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent. I can tell you that she ‘put me ripened there,’ into a three-dimensional South of horses, fields, and characters. Her poems are hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category".
—Jane Miller About Shelly Taylor Shelly Taylor is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). This is her first full collection. Born in southern Georgia, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
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