Recently Received

[ NOTE: Most of the titles below are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or special editions and are limited, if still available (or we bought our copy, as is often the case with the hand-bounds. Because we support little presses. Because we're a little press.) Publishers, mail review copies to Reviews, Tarpaulin Sky Press, PO Box 189, Grafton, VT 05146 ]

Ammiel Alcalay, "neither wit nor gold" (from then) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011)

Tricia Bauer, Father Flashes (FC2, 2011)

* Dan Beachy-Quick, Heroisms (Poor Claudia, 2011)

Joseph Bradshaw, In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books, 2001)

* Wayne Alan Brenner, Five Simple Steps to Greater Joy in This World of Sorrow

Susan Briante, Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press, 2011)

Read more »

November reviews

at the Tarpaulin Sky reviews blog:

Katie Eberhart reviews Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010)

Katie Eberhart reviews Peter Waterhouse's Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (Burning Deck/Anyart, 2009)

Read more »

Titillating Tuesday

TSky Press author Danielle Dutton reads from her forthcoming work of wonder, S P R A W L (Siglio Press, August 2010), at Bomb.

If, like us, you simply cannot get enough S P R A W L, you can read excerpts in Tarpaulin Sky, here and also here.

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Kim Gek Lin Short breaks out "All the Mason Jars in the World," the book trailer for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010).

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TSky Press publisher Christian Peet, whose left nipple is visible in the photo above--at no extra charge to you--is interviewed by Kevin Kane, at Word Riot, wherein Christian says stuff like this:

Once a manuscript is picked, I usually call the author. I do this for a couple reasons. I like to hear how happy they are because it helps to offset the bum feelings I have about “rejecting” hundreds of manuscripts for every one that we publish. Also, I like to see what kind of vibe I get from the author—because one just never knows—will they be easy to work with, or do they seem a bit uptight? Are they flakey? Do they sound like they’re on a lot of medication? These are good things to know. In the last couple years, I’ve taken to calling and saying that we’re “really interested” in their manuscript, but I don’t say that we want to publish it until we’ve chatted a bit. If I get a good vibe or, at least, if the author doesn’t frighten me, then I give them the good news.

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Speaking of picking new manuscripts, Projective Industries is "breathless waiting for you" to submit a manuscript to their chapbook open reading period. Which ends in eight days (June 30). And which is free to enter. Which should prompt you to donate a little cash to their cause. Projective Industries is run by fab peeps and fab poets Samuel Amadon and Stephanie Anderson. They also make great books. If you haven't already, go here.

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And speaking of good books, we have a bunch of new reviews and interviews at Tarpaulin Sky

* Brandi Homan's Bobcat Country

* Bruce Russell's Left Handed Blows

* Gizelle Gajelonia's Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus

* Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows

* Jill Magi’s Torchwood

* Urs Allemann interviewed by Elizabeth Hall

* nick-e melville's Selections and Dissections

* Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton

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And speaking of reviews, fab TSky reviewer Kristina Marie Darling also has a new book out: Night Songs, on Gold Wake Press.

* * *

And speaking of birds, we've been meaning to tell you about Birdsong. Like you don't already know. But in case you don't: You should check them out. Why? Well, TSky checked them out because they sent us an email asking us to, and, more importantly, because they called TSky "an exemplar to those of us who are up-and-coming in the publishing world" and added, "We read your site religiously." Enough said.

But not really. Because when we checked them out, we fell in love with them. For many reasons. Here are a few:

• The current issue of their zine, birdsong #12: ravel (2nd anniversary issue), "a limited edition of 200 with screen printed cover and offset printed guts, hand stamped and stitched," which "comes in a 'party bag' with sticker, button, and postcard." Yeah. And it's only $6 plus $1 shipping and handling.

• "Five On It," birdsong's "continuing interview series wherein five established writers and artists answer the same five “Inside the Actors Studio” type questions," and wherein said writers and artists include some of our favorite folks--Shanna Compton, Noelle Kocot, Katy Lederer, Richard Nash, Matthew Rohrer, Lytton Smith, Rodrigo Toscano, Rebecca Wolff, Matthew Zapruder--along with a couple dozen other greats.

• What they're all about:

The Birdsong Collective and Micropress was founded in April 2008 with four goals in mind: to foster sustained collaboration among artists, musicians and writers in the form of an ongoing workshop; to continually encourage each other to produce creative work; to host free, public events where members can showcase works in progress; and to circulate members’ creative endeavors in a low-cost, easy to reproduce, and high-frequency format. Birdsong members share commitments to social movements of feminism, anti-racism, queer positivity, class-consciousness, and DIY cultural production. These commitments inform our creative work in many ways, ranging from the concrete to the theoretical to the experimental.

• Their blog. A must read.
  

Staffed by Tommy Pico, Daniel Portland, Lauren Wilkinson, Roy Pérez, and Chantal Johnson, birdsong is found here: http://birdsongmag.com/

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New Reviews of TSky Titles

Jacket#40 review of Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute, thanks to Nicole Mauro, who writes, "Though Božičević’s work does terrify, and so, by extension, is rightly ‘about’ terror . . . Stars is more accurately (and happily) about what an émigré does, heart and eyes intact and hungry for the redemptive and the beautiful, after having experienced all that is contrary to the love and kindness (that can be) human beings." Read the full review.


Art + Culture review of Joanna Ruoco's Man's Companions, thanks to Ben Gottlieb, who writes, "Early Lydia Davis seems not unfairly applicable, as does Amy Hempel, not merely for their separately singular abilities to convey a tremendous amount of information and a great emotional range with an economy of text, but also for the alternately insouciant and piercingly human wit with which they do so." Read the full review.


Art + Culture review of Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, thanks to Ben Gottlieb, who writes, "Kim Gek Lin Short has written a beguiling and entirely enthralling collection of related prose poems; it is so unusual and provocative in its subtle oddities that I wonder how aware she is of what she’s done. This is always a good sign. It is what you think when you read a story by George Saunders, or see a film by David Lynch, or flip through a comic by R. Crumb: how did this person know he could do this? And how did he summon the courage, or merely the unconcern, to trust that others would not dismiss their work for whatever it first, and less interestingly, appears to be?" Read the full review.

Reviews of our new titles at Publishers Weekly, NewPages, Fanzine, and Sonora Review

Publishers Weekly reviews Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species

. . . These stories constitute some tender, aching love stories. Connor's characters are curious specimens who don't quite fit in, but have rich inner lives, such as Zha Zha, the chronically unfaithful exotic dancer in “The Flying Codona” (“tits are made of cantaloupe and she eats them with a spoon”), whose lovelorn boyfriend consoles himself by dreaming of being a trapeze artist. “Starla and June” is a creepy, Hitchcockian tale about an unraveling love affair involving a prosthetic hand that offers words of courage and strength: “Oh, Pet, she'll be back,” says the hand. “Van Gogh Dreams” juxtaposes vivid descriptions of flowers with excerpts from the painter's late asylum notebooks to evoke the chilling stream-of-consciousness of a troubled narrator. “Monkey Teeth” is a kind of nut job's notebook, full of Lolita-like obsession (including photographs). Cocktail recipes conclude each of the stories in this varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection. [Click here for the full review.]

Jeremy Benson at NewPages reviews Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits

The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is under a porch, is between the fridge and the cupboard, is hiding among the coats and sweaters in the tilted closet above the basement stairs. Its shapeshifting and heartbreak is nightmarishly microscopic and horrifically asymptotical. . . . Short’s prose poems have the exactitude of obsessive compulsion, yet the imagery and dimness of an opiate trip sponsored by Lewis Caroll – “And the tiny book became the word for rainbow and spilled into Harlan’s many gloved hands.” She frequently stretches the parameters of grammar, rearranging conventional syntax to just off kilter; her written style as surreal as her yarn-and-insect imagery. The result is a terrifying, ungraspable split-level love story: futile, sad and beautiful. [Click here for the full review.]

Sonora Review's Editor, Jake Levine, reviews Shelly Taylor's Black-Eyed Heifer

Shelly Taylor’s first collection Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky) inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines. This is neither an experimental or pastoral poetry, but a fusion of speech and intellect that reflect a poet who is deeply rooted in the earth, its dirt and concrete, its horses and cats, but speaks in a rhythm that explodes into space, taps into the pacing of a 21st century phantasmagoric, recollected, American landscape and self. If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems. The pacing is high octane, pyrotechnic, but the discursive function of the content is old school, familiar, and impressively defiant. [Click here for the full review.]

Trinie Dalton, at Fanzine, reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions

Part of what compelled me to read Man’s Companions was my curiosity about a fellow author who had also pondered “Unicorns.” This story, I happily report, is one of the highlights of the book. In it, an embittered writer ruminates on writer’s block, while processing jealousy of her prolific boyfriend by reducing his success to ‘phallogocentrism.’ “When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body. When Dave is writing, his…posture is excellent and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard…” She arrives at the phallus via noting Dave’s confidence, his efficient practice, and his boarding school education. “Whimsy,” she writes, “is how the phallogocentric artists try to hide the phallus. They hide the phallus right there in the open, with unicorns.” Even in this passage, one notices Ruocco’s peculiar writing style, in which short sentences show logical ideas leading to the next in almost robotic bursts. Then they leap somewhere else completely, recalling Lydia Davis’s grammatical, poetic math. [Click here for the full review--which begins with a review of TSky-friend Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography.]

And in case you missed it a couple weeks ago: Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions

Thirty-one brief, clever tales from the author of The Mothering Coven employ traits from the animal kingdom to underscore absurdities in the human species. 'Lemmings,' for example, features a desultory dialogue between two lovers who debate the better 'iconic' location to jump from—the Space Needle or the Empire State Building. . . . Satisfyingly developed, such as the nuttily obtuse 'Flying Monkeys,' featuring a rarely intersecting conversation between two women onboard an airplane that reveals how the women—former best friends who happen to sit next to each other—can't stand each other. . . . Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal. [Click here for the fill review.]

After Ellen, Ana Bozicevic; also new events, reviews, interviews, books received, Göransson, McSweeney, and a humongous White Fungus among us

New reviews of Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute

* at After Ellen: "thought-provoking, inspired and unexpected. Highly recommended."

* at Tower Journal: "On the edge of explosion. . . . an extremely talented and relentless young writer."

* at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center: "Following in O'Hara's footsteps, it challanges us to place the stuff of daily life under the adjective 'poetic.'"

If you haven't already picked up a copy of Stars of the Night Commute, we hope you will. 14$ includes free first-class shipping.


New Reviews at the Tarpaulin Sky reviews blog

Louis Streitmatter's A New Map of America (James Brubaker, Ed., The Cupboard, Vol. 2, 2008) reviewed by Jack Boettcher

Brubaker diverges from the conventions of the fiction-as-scholarship in the book’s subtle, rewarding humor and its rich characterization of Louis Streitmatter, which is intimate even as Brubaker professes greater and greater distance from his acquaintance. We see Streitmatter’s map not as a perfect, chiseled elucidation of the idea—as in the fictions of Borges—but through Streitmatter’s obsessions and oddities as a character, a man “in search of my country.” [Read the full review here.]

Timothy David Orme’s Catalogue of Burnt Text (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) reviewed by Jodi Chilson

Timothy David Orme dares us to exist, to become part of the motion, part of the plane his speaker inhabits; he dares us to take up the absence in the work and fill it with the speaker-self and our-self engaged in motion, through the act of reading becoming accomplice to the act of creation. [Read full review here.]

Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) reviewed by John Findura

Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, of death, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” In Noelle Kocot’s fourth book of poetry, Sunny Wednesday, that sentiment is only partly true: everything here hurts. [Read the full review here.]

TSky Press author Joyelle McSweeney on The “Future” of “Poetry” from her talk at the Minnesota Book Festival. Excerpt below. Read the rest here.

The future of poetry is the present, and it has already arrived. The present tense rejects the future. It generates, but it generates excess without the ordering structures of lineage. It subsumes and consumes pasts into its present , erasing their priority. It’s self-defeating; its rejection of survival into a future may be infanticidal.. Without a concern with past or future it necessarily negates many of the values which come with Western literary tradition, including stability, well-craftedness, elegance, restraint, timelessness, humanism. It is concerned with the media through which it moves, flimsy concerns and flimsy conceits, superficiality, errata and (likely) ephemera, flexibility, instability, unevenness, but it also partakes of a non-productive productivity typified by bombast, excess and overproduction. This art often involves failure and ‘bad fits’—the ‘bad fit’ of one genre into another, the bad fit of one media into another. Its modality is violence, frequently a self-violence against the text itself, so that text is something that explodes, exhausts, breaks down, flounces around, eats and/or shits itself, is difficult to study or call a text at all.

Forthcoming TSky Press author Johannes Göransson is interviewed at eXchanges--"An alternately illuminating and awkward conversation"--regarding translation, or, more specifically, "Closeness and Distance in Translation | Dada and Capitalism | Everyone Forgets Lawrence Venuti’s Critical Terminology | Translations Ghettoized as the Foreign | Pilot and Bilingualism | Get Rid of the Native Speaker | Future of Poetry Translation in America | The Internet as a Myth of a Neutral Space | Homophonic Translations: America Looks at the Foreign through a Mirror? | Foreignization Is a Kind of Domestication." Read an excerpt below. Read the entire interview here.

Part of the problem with a lot of translation is that the way they are packaged has sort of ghettoized them as the foreign text. And we go to them out of some kind of ethical duty to engage with the foreign and widen our horizons and learn more about foreign cultures. I didn’t want Remainland to be that kind of book at all. I wanted that book to be a book of poetry that was from a foreign country that would interest Americans, people I knew in America, as a book of poems—that would not be bracketed as the foreign text. To me, Aase is a great poet and in some ways, a major European poet. I didn’t want to bracket it off too much so that this European poet would be read when we wanted to take some medicine or something like that.

Recently Received at TSky Press

Macgregor Card, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, Winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series (Fence Books, 2009)

Douglas Kearney, The Black Automaton, Winner of the National Poetry Series (Fence Books, 2009)

Brian Evenson, Baby Leg (limited hardcover edition, Tyrant Books, 2009)

Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence Books, 2009)

James Westwater, Blue Boy and Pinkie, Together Again (self-published, 2009)

& from New Zealand, coming live to New York to melt your freakin head, White Fungus:



White Fungus is set to launch its 11th issue at P.P.O.W in New York on Thursday, January 14 with a night of performances as part of the gallery's Hostess Project series of events.

Kick-starting at 7pm, the event will feature:
Our Love Will Destroy the World (Campbell Kneale)
David Watson
Tao Wells
Anne Fiero
Millions (David Suss)
If, Bwana (Al Margolis) with Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Martelle and live video by Katherine
Liberovskaya

P.P.O.W
511 West 25th Street, Room 301
(at 10th Avenue)
New York, NY

White Fungus issue 11 is the first to be produced in the formerly Wellington-based publication's new home, Taichung City, Taiwan. The new issue comes with a CD compilation of artists off New York record label Pogus Productions. It includes articles on Miya Masaoka, Hijokaidan and experimental and non-academic music in Beijing. It features interviews with David Watson, Taiwan artist Isa Ho, Robert Voicey of Vox Novus and New Zealand curator Laura Preston; articles on artists Don Driver (Auckland), Jonathan Terranova (New York) and a critical look a Post-colonial and Oceanic art by Rudolph Hudsucker; art works by Yao Jui-Chung, Dan Arps, Su Hui-yu and Chung Shih-shun; poetry by McArthur Gunter and Peggy Chang; part three of Juan Santos' series Capitalism at the Expense of All Life, an article by Jane Janesly on New Zealand's Neo Liberal economic reforms of the 1980s, a reflection by Tao Wells on the letter-writing of Lazlo Toth, a review of The Coming Insurrection by Harold Grieves, and a 20-page black & white comic adaptation of The Mysterious Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Tim Bollinger.

Pogus CD compilation is compiled by Al Margolis and features artists: Ellen Band & David Lee Myers, Annea Lockwood, Noah Creshevsky, Anla Courtis, Big City Orchestra, Chris Brown, Jorge Antunes, Nick Didkovsky, Tom Johnson, Beth Anderson, Tom Hamilton/Bruce Eisenbeil, Christian Wolff/Larry Polansky/Chris Mann/Douglas Repetto/Tom Erbe, MartÌn Alejandro Fumarola and If, Bwana.

White Fungus at P.P.O.W is kindly supported by Creative New Zealand.
White Fungus' relocaton to Taiwan is kindly supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation.

www.whitefungus.com
www.ppowgallery.com
www.thehostessproject.com
www.pogus.com

Buggin Out: new look, new staff, new reviews & interviews . . ., and even some news re: chapbooks

BUGGING OUT W/ DANIEL RHODES

Daniel's the artist who designed Kim Gek Lin Short's wraparound cover for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. His work is so bloody great, we can't wait until the book's Spring release--so we're excerpting some images for the TSky website. & Keep on the lookout for other cover art making sneaky-preview appearances on the site.

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NEW STAFF @ TARPAULIN SKY PRESS

The bad news: we're no longer hiring. The good news: we're delighted to welcome new editors and staff to the TSky crew. While we're at it, we'd also like to thank the good folk that have been here a long time, some from the beginning.

Big props to all, then: Advising Editors Rebecca Brown, Elena Georgiou, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom; Publisher Christian Peet; Editor in Chief Colie Collen; Editors Laynie Brown, Blake Butler, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Karla Kelsey, and Joanna Howard; Managing Editor Dianthe Harris; Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow and Christine Wertheim; Production Editors Cristiana Baik, E. B. Goodale, Annie Guthrie, Kristen Nelson, and Stephen Shoup; Assistant Editors Brian Mihok, Jamey Dunham, and Michael Tod Edgerton; Reviews Editors Ross Brighton and Jared Schickling; Events Coordinator Michelle Puckett; Asst. Managing Editor Amanda Skubal; Line Editor J.A. Tyler; Copy Editor Caroline Ashby; Liaisons Sarah Brown, Jac Jemc, Deanne Lundin, and Brian Rogers; Events Assistant Megan DiBello; Production Assistants Ginger Knowlton, Josh Neely, Joseph Mains, and Joanna Pelletier; Editorial Assistants Erinn Mann, Eireene Nealand, Nathaniel Otting, Janna Plant, Mark Rockswold, Julianna Spallholz, Julie Strand, and Amish Trivedi.

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FOR THE PATIENT FOLK WONDERING WHADDUP W/MY CHAP MSS?

Notifications are already being being mailed. We're running behind (shocking!) but hope to finalize all decisions within the next week or two.

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NEW INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW ZORNOZA

TSky Press author Andrew Zornoza is interviewed by Molly Gaudry at Keyhole Magazine: includes "out-takes" from Where I Stay, a craving for negative reviews, good advice for homeless people in verdant pastures, a childhood pic, review copies for Eddie Vedder, and heaps of the refreshingly humble genius we've come to expect from Mr. Z.

An excerpt:

MG: Are you an experimental writer? What do you think about the possible overuse of the term "innovative"?

AZ: I like the word innovative. I don't like the word experimental. To me, the word conjures up failure and the white humped backs of balding scientists. All writing is experimental if you insist on having a reader. Even Judy Blume. But I'm not experimenting. I'm not trying anything new. New has nothing to do with it. I'm just putting the words the way I want to hear them. You may be experimenting by reading it, but me, I'm just trying to make it feel right.

Click here to read the entire interview

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NEW REVIEW OF BIG AMERICAN TRIP AT VERSE MAGAZINE

Brittany Taylor reviews TSky publisher Christian Peet's Big American Trip, at Verse magazine.

An excerpt:

As we follow the lone wanderer from Blaine, WA, to Brooklyn, we are given an increasingly intimate view of his private frustration with a society that wipes out all that has come before and simultaneously acknowledges its ravaged past with cheerful sound bites. The captions that crown many of the postcards are not-quite-prosaic bits of encyclopedic arcana that offer insight into the matter-of-fact manner in which Americans have treated their predecessors. With these tidbits, Big American Trip seeks to recall America’s erased history, deridable and otherwise. . . . The postcards are at once addressed to no one and everyone; it does not matter who reads them, but everyone will. Buckle up for Christian Peet’s worthwhile Big American Trip.

Please click here to read the whole review.

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NEW REVIEWS AT TARPAULIN SKY

James Belflower’s Commuter (Instance Press, 2009), reviewed by Joel P. Sodano Jr.

Commuter plays host to a constellation of motifs (international tourism, industrialization, photography, memory, identity) in addition to its main thematic focus—the juxtaposition of marriage and childbirth with the trauma of experiencing terrorist violence. In short, Commuter invites the reader on an aesthetic journey that tests the concept of relation through its positioning of various fragmentary manifestations of event, memory, emotion. This is illustrated at the book’s outset by a metro map that forms a multi-nodal system of simultaneous connection and separation. Thus, reading Commuter results in an experience greater than the sum of its parts, wherein one discovers unpredictable connections between various points of entry and departure. [Click here for the full review.]

Richard Froude's The History of Zero (Candle-Aria Press, 2008), reviewed by Sarah Suzor.

Zero questions the relationship between “fictions” (poetry, prose, literature) and “facts” (history, definition), and where in both fiction and fact language fails in conveying anything of absolute truth. . . . Zero is meant to be read and re-read multiple times, and Froude knows this, for it is our desire, as audience, to “make sense of something” that Froude is manipulating. [Click here for the full review.]

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FENCE

is up to its usual jaw-dropping amounts of goodness, not the least of which is a book that must be seen to be believed: Brandon Downing's text-image opus Lake Antiquity, wherein kitsch acquires gravity, becomes pathos, becomes a reckoning with the fairly unbelievable images and text that we'd sooner forget that we "own" in more ways than one. If you've seen [WARNING: seizure-alert at following link:] Dark Brandon, then this book might explain it to you. If you haven't seen Dark Brandon, then you should buy that as well. Says the promo for Lake Antiquity: "Brandon Downing has been scouring refuse piles and skimming the creme/scum off the top of two centuries of cultural production for these chiming elements. His paste-ups are cut-ups; his cut-ups are pasted with a discrimination that shares a border with insurgency." Yes. That, and a butt-nekked gnome.

Do yourself a favor and check out FB's holiday deals on Lake Antiquity, as well as Catherine Wagner's My New Job, Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton, Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary.

Think how great you'll feel when you already own those books, and then show up at the 4-author book release party on Dec. 12th.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED AT TSKY PRESS

Most of the titles below are available for review, though we include the friend copies and the purchased copies as well, thinking we can probably scare up another copy if you're interested in reviewing one for TSky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

Oana Avasilichioaei, Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009)

* Jack Boettcher, The Deviants (Airforce Joyride, 2009)

Rob Budde, Declining America (BookThug, 2009)

Angela Carr, The Rose Concordance (BookThug, 2009)

Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Emily Kendal Frey, Mark Leidner, and Zachary Schomburg, Coincide Series #5 (Brave Men Press, 209)

Katrine Marie Guldager, Copenhagen (P.K. Brask, translator, BookThug, 2009)

* David Highsmith, congregations (Plan B Press, 2009)

* David Highsmith, Petroglyph (Painted Bison Press, 2009)

David Highsmith, your wilderness & mine (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Christine Hume, Shot (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Matt Jasper, Moth Moon (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

* Scott Alexander Jones, One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009)

Garrett Kalleberg, Malilenas (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

Diane Klammer, Shooting the Moon (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)

Karyna McGlynn, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books, 2009)

* Christina Pacosz, Notes from the Red Zone (Seven Kitchens Press [Rebound Series], 2009)

Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Joanna Ruocco, The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009)

* 6 x 6 #19 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

* Claudia Smith, Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009)

Jane Sprague, The Port of Los Angeles (Chax Press, 2009)

Nancy Stohlman, Searching for Suzi (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)

* Michael Stewart, A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard, 2009)

* Michael Stewart, Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

* Janaka Stucky, Your Name Is the Only Freedom (Brave Men Press, 2009)

Spring Ulmer, The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press, 2009)

Chapbook Open Reading Period & A Month-Long Roundup

TSky Press Chapbook Reading Period
(ends 31 August)

Tarpaulin Sky Press is reading chapbook manuscripts during the month of August. Chapbook manuscripts should be postmarked between August 1 and August 31, 2009.

There is no need to query first; simply mail the manuscript according to the chapbook submission guidelines.

*

The New TSky is the New Trickhouse

Tarpaulin Sky #16
Summer 09:
Trickhouse

The current issue of Tarpaulin Sky is the current issue of Trickhouse; i.e., the current issue of Trickhouse is the current issue of Tarpaulin Sky. Think of it as Trick Sky or Tarp House. Or just don't worry about all that, and instead proceed directly to the goods:.

Trickhouse Vol. 5 / Tarpaulin Sky #16
Curated by Noah Saterstrom

• texts by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Thalia Field, and Joanna Howard (from Heide Hatry's Heads and Tales)
• video by Anne Waldman and Lisa Jarnot
• sound by Caroline Bergvall
• correspondence from Lisa Birman
• an experiment conducted by Brandon Shimoda & Lisa Schumaier
• an interview with Gordon Massman, conducted by Ana Božičević, Blake Butler, Elena Georgiou, Amy King, and Selah Saterstrom
• visual art by Josh Friedman
• and guest curator, Verbobala's "Hex-ologram"

*

Steven Karl reviews Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay & Christian Peet's Big American Trip

"Both Peet and Zornoza’s books are examples of not submitting to a status quo in literature, instead they use the traits once synonymous with Wong Kar-wai: originality, vision, risks, and experimentation to give you back this country as it is: flawed, fractured, hypocritical, greedy, beautiful, breathtaking, mesmerizing, and the constant dialect of a lie and a truth."

Read the entire review here.

*

Where I Stay is also reviewed at Small Press Reviews:

"As haunting as it is gritty, Where I Stay has the feel of an impressionist watercolor and underscores the value of the small press in literary culture. Indeed, I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts." Read the full review here.

*

See also: a great interview with Andrew Zornoza at Bookish Us.

*

Fence Vol. 12 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2009

The latest issue of Fence is particularly stellar. The two poems by Janaka Stucky are worth the price of admission alone. And since we couldn’t afford to make the AWP where Kate Bernheimer, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Eric Lorberer, and Joyelle McSweeney were in a panel discussion on nonrealist fiction, we were delighted to be able to read the transcript. TSky faves Karla Kelsey and Eugene Ostashevsky also figure prominently in the mix. As well as Kate Greenstreet, with whom I'll be reading--huzzah!--in October.

Need more? Well, then, you’ll also find James Gendron, Jannifer MacKenzie, Chris Pusateri, Lizbeth Keiley, ennifer Kronovet, Meena Alexander, Steve Langan, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Dean Young, Chris Tysh, Heather Winterer, Christine Hume, Rachel Sherman, Gregg Bordowitz & Lisa Johnson, images by Jason Middlebrook—and still more.

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The Best of Fence, The First Nine Years

Including essays from Fence editors Caroline Crumpacker, Anthony Hawley, Katy Lederer, Frances Richard, Matthew Rohrer, Christopher Stackhouse, Max Winter, Rebecca Wolff, and Jason Zuzga, along with 400+ pages of poetry and nonfiction from TSky editor Christian Peet and TSky contributors Amy Catanzano, Geoffrey Detrani, Brandon Downing, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Lance Phillips

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Francis Raven's Provisions

Interbirth Books is pleased to announce Francis Raven's hybrid collection of poems & prose: Provisions. Fifty books were printed, assembled, and hand bound in-house at Interbirth Books using a combination long / kettle stitch. Twenty-six books are lettered A through Z and signed by the author. This hardcover edition includes cover art by Francis Raven. 84 pages — 5.25 x 7.25 — $22 (free shipping in the US).

We have a copy. You should too. Even if you're broke, you should go to the Interbirth website just to peruse the photos: interbirthbooks.org. Oh yeah, another reason: the contents of the books are pretty alright, too. The David Hadbawnik book is sold out, but Francis Raven, Mary Burger? Handbound? Really, what the heck else can we ask of a book?

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Also check the latest issue of kadar koli, from Habenicht Press. Edited by Roger Snell; designed by Ann Marie Snell; cover by Yasuhiro Esaki. Featuring work by Joanne Kyger, John Phillips, Nicole Mauro, Lal Ded (trans. Andrew Schelling), Betsy Andrews, Beau Beausoleil, Jacques Roubaud (trans. Eleni Sikelianos), George Albon, Kate Colbu, David Miller, Carol Snow, Dale Smith, Laura Solorzano (trans. Jen Hofer), Chuck Stebelton, Rosmarie Waldrop, Theodore Enslin, Gypsy Cante (trans. Will Kirkland), and Kristin Prevallet. $5 plus shipping.

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H_ngm_n #8

The long-awaited 8th issue H_ngm_n is live.

Edited by Nate Pritts, the issue features art from Nikki Painter; fiction by Bill Dunlap, Christopher Higgs, A D Jameson, and Zachary Tyler Vickers; comix by John Dermot Woods; poems by Nico Alvarado-Greenwood, Scott Bade, Erica Bernheim, Joseph Bienvenu, Jason Bredle, Paula Cisewski, Nina Corwin, Jordan Davis, Jessica Dessner, John Duvernoy, John W. Evans, John Findura , Matt Hart, Steve Healey, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Eric Kocher, Ben Kopel, Gregory Lawless, B.J. Love, Tony Mancus, Anthony McCann, Pete Miller, Alexis Orgera, Chris Rizzo, Broc Rossell, Brandon Shimoda & Julia Cohen, Rachel M. Simon, Jeff Simpson, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Chad Sweeney, Robert Whiteside, Joseph P. Wood, and Jon Woodward; and a hell of a lot more. See for yourself.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED

Most of the titles below are available for review, though we include the friend copies and the purchased copies as well, thinking we can probably scare up another copy if you're interested in reviewing one for TSky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

* Samuel Amadon, Each H (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009).

Shaindel Beers, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009)

A Best of Fence, the First Nine Years: Vol.1 Poetry & Nonfiction
* Ross Brighton, A Pelt, A Shrub, A Soil Sample; with drawings by Anne Mackenzie (Neoismist Press, 2009)

Rebecca Brown, American Romances (City Lights, 2009)

Allison Carter, A Fixed Formal Arrangement (Les Figues Press, 2008)

René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland, Gustaf Sobin, tr. (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Ginnetta Correli, The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scarelli (Marshmallow Press, 2008)

Michael Cross, Throne / Michelle Detorie, A Coincidence of Wants / Johannes Göransson Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2007)

Jeremy M. Davies, Rose Alley (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Shira Dentz, Leaf Weather (Tilt Press, 2009)
Denver Quarterly, Vol. 43. No. 4

* Claire Donato, Someone Else's Body (Cannibal Books, 2009)

* Jeffrey Encke, Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse (Last Tangos Editons, 2004)

Fact-Simile, Spring/Summer 2009

Fence Vol. 12 No. 1 Spring/Summer 2009

Christine Gardiner, My Father’s Sister (Nascent A Press, 2009)

K. Lorraine Graham, Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009)

* Carolyn Guinzio, Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books, 2009)

*Caia Hagel, Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables (The Cupboard, 2009)

* Melanie Hubbard, Gilbi Winco Swags (Cannibal Books, 2008)

Elizabeth Hughey, Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press, 2007)

Robert Krut, The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Fred Marchant, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009)

Sabrina Orah Mark, Tsim Tsum (Saturnalia Books, 2009)

* C.J. Martin, City (Vigilance Society, 2007)

* Laura Nash, Brownfields (Ugly Duckling Presse Dossier, 2009).

* Akilah Oliver, The Putterer's Notebook (Belladonna Books, 2006)

Timothy David Orme, Catalogue of Burnt Text (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Poezija June 2009: If We Crash Into A Cloud, It Won’t Hurt (Croatian Poetry 1989 – 2009)

Kevin Rabas, Lisa’s Flying Electric Piano (Woodley Press, 2009)

* Francis Raven, Provisions (Interbirth Books, 2009)

Tomaž Šalamun, There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair; edited by Thomas Kane; translated by the author with Thomas Kane, Peter Richards, Phillis Levin, Joshua Beckman, Ana Jelnikar, Christopher Merril, Matthew Rohrer, Brian Henry, Anselm Hollo (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Carter Smith, Therefore You Are That Other One You Love (Dos Press)

* Andrea Strudensky, Incident Light Poem (Dos Press)

Marina Temkina, What Do You Want? (Ugly Duckling Presse Eastern European Series, 2009)

Mark Wagstaff, In Sparta (Troubador Publishing, 2009)

Rebecca Wolff, The King (W.W. Norton, 2009)

John Dermot Woods, The Complete Collection of People, Places, & Things (BlazVox Books, 2009)

Elizabeth Marie Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009)

New Reviews at Tarpaulin Sky: Art, Blossom, Crawford, Hightower, Konar, Marcom, Novey

• Robyn Art's The Stunt Double in Winter (Dusie Press, 2008), reviewed by Drew Dillhunt

• Idra Novey's The Next Country (Alice James Books, 2008), reviewed by Joshua Neely

• Scott Hightower's Part of the Bargain (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and Laurel Blossom's Degrees of Latitude (Four Way Books, 2007), reviewed by Carl Rosenstock

• Affinity Konar's The Illustrated Version of Things (FC2, 2009), reviewed by A D Jameson

• Micheline Aharonian Marcom's The Mirror in the Well (Dalkey Archive, 2009), reviewed by John Madera

• Stanley G. Crawford’s Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine (Dalkey Archive, 2009), reviewed by John Madera

New Reviews, Interviews, and Video "Other"

M. Perel interviews Kaisa Ullsvik Miller, re: Unspoiled Air (Fence Books, 2008)

Paula Koneazny reviews Susan Briante's Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007)

And a certain TSky editor with a camcorder expresses gratitude for two recently received book-events: Mary Burger's A Partial Handbook for Navigators (Interbirth Books, 2008) and Matter #11: "The Woods" (Wolverine Farm Publishing, 2008).

New Reviews at TSky: Dew & Rumble

Spencer Dew's Songs of Insurgency
Reviewed by Benjamin Buchholz

"As a reader you might choose to enjoy scenes of violence that read like retellings of violence, vicarious experience layered on vicarious experience. If so, read Tom Clancy. But, in Songs of Insurgency, little episodes of fantasy and horror, of real life excess layered over academia, capture the numbing cycle of repeated media immersion, this perpetuation of a mythology of cleanliness in war (and in life generally) that most have never experienced but often considered, seen on CNN, on the front pages of Newsweek, embroidered in our collective American unconsciousness and embedded in our language . . ." [READ MORE]


Ken Rumble's Key Bridge
Reviewed by Joseph Harrington

"It’s like a guidebook to Washington written by Robbe-Grillet. D.C. is “the center”; there’s an important city of some sort, but there’s no there there – and Rumble knows it, even if the talking heads don’t. . . . Race, class, “current events,” and history are always present in Key Bridge, just offstage – which, in fact, is often how they function for upper-middle-class white people, for whom “the police are an island/ you can choose not to visit.” [READ MORE]