REVOLUTIONESQUE

Editors Amy King and Ana Božičević announce the third installment of Esque :

REVOLUTIONESQUE

"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...."

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A handful of things, including blueberries

Tarpaulin Sky Press Authors in the News

Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute is reviewed at Verse Magazine. Says Mary Austin Speaker:

Although it is dangerous to make presumptions about the way one’s biography inflects their poetry, I think it’s helpful to consider the conditions of Ana Bozicevic’s native country when she left it. Croatia’s is a history of conflict in which voices speak over each other. Stars of the Night Commute, the author’s first collection of poems, suggests that since her emigration she has been learning how to write her own history while rejecting the very idea of writing history.

Please click here for the whole review.

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Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions is reviewed at Word Riot. Says Kevin Kane, fork in hand:

In order to tackle a good literary work, I need to be hungry. And I can usually judge what I’m reading by how it affects that hunger. Sometimes a story collection forces me to set it down after reading a story, too full of images and emotion to continue. Other times, I lightly snack my way through the whole thing. The strength and beauty of the stories in Joanna Ruocco’s Man’s Companions pushed me to devour the entirety of the collection in a few days despite being achingly full from the rich, dense prose.

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TSky Press author Shelly Taylor has contributed three texts to Amy King's and Heidi Lynn Staples' Poets for Living Waters, which we hope you are already familiar with, if you're familiar with oil.

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Chronic Content: Poems by Amy King

"It’s like being touched" : TSky's chronic content now includes new work by Amy King, who confides, "Everything I’ve told you so far is fake," and "This one/ is not one but three, a trinity/ of donation, kindling, the salt water serum/ of veins eaten open. . . ."

We've also been meaning to tell you . . .

Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy, such a return may well aid us.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions. Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in Washington DC.

If you would like to submit work for consideration, please contact editors Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples: http://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/

Recent contributors include Frank Sherlock, Brooks Haxton, Angela Sorby, T. Clayton Wood, Ron Silliman, Tamiko Beyer, Judith Barrington, James Wagner, Julian T. Brolaski, Lisanne Thompson, Jan Heller Levi, Sam Schild, Alison Pelegrin, Stephanie Strickland, Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo, Paul Ryan, Nicole Cooley, Rodrigo Toscano, Joseph P. Wood, Gordon Massman, Tara Betts, Fady Joudah, Philip Metres, Jeff Newberry, Kirsten Kaschock, Patrick Durgin, Alicia Ostriker, Carly Sachs, Kate Schapira, Bill Marsh, Evie Shockley and Franz Wright.

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Traci O Connor has new work in PANK.

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Carrie Olivia Adams takes "a brief look at writers who are using the dictionary as the structuring architecture of a chapbook," including Jeanne Morel's sold-out chap, That Crossing Is Not Automatic.

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Amy Henry reviews Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay

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TSky editor Laynie Browne's The Desires of Letters is out from Counterpath.

"Motherhood and housewifery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again" (Anne Waldman). Prose, verse, letters, and plays, The Desires of Letters is a passionate commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative . . . [in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time" (Juliana Spahr).

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TSky contributor Lance Phillips' These Indicium Tales is out from Ahsahta.

Both sensuous and sensual, These Indicium Tales continues Lance Phillips’ meditations on the body. Here, the indicia—markings or symbols—are birds, insects, and flowers, but rather than standing for the body, they stand with it in an exploration that refuses to romanticize nature. In this phenomenology of eros, where Phillips writes “I can't think of a way of continuing that is not sexually charged,” no word is wasted. Though lines stutter and jam together, though syntax is disrupted and interwoven with silence, the language itself remains delicious on the tongue, even when read silently—which is precisely the sort of conundrum these Tales love to raise and leave in ambiguity.

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Black Clock strikes again.

TSky Investigates: FOURSQUARE Editions

FOURSQUARE Editions, a branch of Outside Voices Press, is a literary publication printed on single, 8"x8" sheet which folds up to 4"x4"and is housed in a screen printed and embroidered fabric sleeve. Each issue contains four poems by women writers and one image by a woman artist. Jessica Smith, editor of FOURSQUARE Editions, was kind enough to talk about how and why this beautiful periodical was created.

What was your inspiration for FOURSQUARE's design, size, sleeves, etc?

Jessica: I wanted to incorporate screen printed fabric that hadn't been mass-produced into the design of a periodical dedicated to bringing together women from various artistic backgrounds (visual art, fabric design, poetry). I also wanted to pay homage to the crafts of sewing and embroidery which have been considered women's arts, "folk arts," "cottage industries,"--that is, of lesser value than whatever "men's arts" might be.

When FOURSQUARE was brewing, I was living at home, having taken a semester off of my PhD program, and was in the realm of fabric, embroidery, and the handmade. My parents both work or have worked in the clothing industry. My dad sells uniforms and my mom used to make children's clothes, and I wanted to involve my parents in the project. I also wanted to make use of my dad's huge embroidery machine, which is what makes the embroidered "FOURSQUARE" on the front of the sleeves.

The folded interior of FOURSQUARE grew out of discussions with my friend Maureen Thorson of Big Game Books, who makes "tinysides." These small chapbooks are usually under 3"x5" in size and are made from a single sheet, or broadside, folded to make multiple pages and bound along one side. To make poetry objects small and folded was kind of a Mid-Atlantic zeitgeist at the time, although Maureen's design for tinysides is more advanced than mine for FOURSQUARE. She takes multiple page sizes into account and must fold accordingly, where I make authors conform to a particular size requirement. The way the poems are arranged and which poems are chosen to work together in an issue, aims to influence the way the poems are read. There is an interplay that is more obvious than in a magazine where the authors' works are separated by pages.

What is the poetic and art aesthetic of FOURSQUARE?

Jessica: The idea was to bring together female artists and poets, with an emphasis on ones that were emerging and/or visual. I wanted to show my female poet friends, especially the visual poets, what my female artist friends were doing, and vice-versa. I think more collaboration between poets and artists would be fruitful-- would make "visual poetry" more informed, would provide more interesting words in visual art that uses them.

FOURSQUARE is a women's magazine. It is edited, made, and populated by women. In its pages I wanted to create a safe place for women to "play." There has been much discussion about gender equality in poetry and especially with regard to editorial policies. When I edited the magazine (name) before FOURSQUARE, it was hard to get women to "submit." I hoped that if I created a publication that was safe space for women, they would be more likely to send me poetry. I think it worked, but not in the way I expected. I expected to solicit submissions, when what has actually happened is that people who are in FOURSQUARE share their extra copies with friends, who then submit, or encourage their friends to submit. It has become more like a small network than a free-for-all of blind submissions.

Several authors have appeared in Tarpaulin Sky publications as well as in FOURSQUARE-- Jenny Boully (FOURSQUARE 1.2), Brenda Iijima (1.2 and Special Edition), Juliana Spahr (1.2), Jane Sprague (1.6), Amy King (1.8), Jen Tynes (1.11), Ada Limon (2.8), and Michelle Naka Pierce (3.1). What about these authors' work speaks to you as an editor, reader, writer?

Jessica: To make a broad generalization, what I like is that many of these poets mix genres. I am a poet who enjoys exploring the interrelationship of nacheinander and nebeneinander, and appreciate other poets who mix language and visual art like Brenda Iijima and Michelle Naka Pierce do, or poetry and the essay, like Jenny Boully and Juliana Spahr do. Although I support, encourage, and admire experimentation, I do not like experimentation for its own sake. Each of these poets seems to cross formal boundaries because the poetry's content requires it.

To concentrate on Boully's [one love affair]* for a moment, I enjoy the blend of journalistic self-expression and self-evaluation, academic references, prose poetry and essay-like prose (as the best essays are often "poetic"); the Wallace-esque hypertextuality of reading the text and its endnotes, the Duras-like sensuality of language, and the production values of the book itself.

FOURSQUARE is a home for short poems, do short poems speak to you differently than longer poems do?

Jessica: Indeed. I have a short attention span and am a busy person. I want a poem to do something for me quickly. I am not good at "getting lost in a book." Instead, I like to think of a singular project or point that a poem is making. I like to dwell on such a point for a long time-- months, years--rather than spend months or years reading a book. I enjoy the life of the mind, but I like to be in control of it. When I'm reading, the author is in control of me--I have to pay attention to what s/he is saying and I have to physically be sitting in front of the book. I would rather be cut loose to think on my own. This is one reason that poetry appeals to me as a genre-- it is often shorter than novels or plays and I don't have to follow the plot so much as I have to think of the aesthetics and what is at stake in terms of form/content.

Although it may be small, FOURSQUARE sets out to accomplish a lot and does. Thoughtfully, it showcases the short poem, creates a safe space for women writers and artists to play, incorporates sewing and embroidery, utilizes fabric, and creates a dialogue between arts. The amount of time, thought and love that goes into FOURSQUARE is evident.

For more information on FOURSQUARE Editions visit: http://looktouch.com/press/

New Review at TSky: Amy King's _Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country_

Amy King's Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country
by Caroline Wilkinson

Kiss Me with the Mouth of Your Country is a potent work not only artistically but politically, more so than King’s earlier poetry. Instead of loaded words, we get moments that bring us into a body where the borders shift. In this “country,” the “I” and “you” suddenly change because the line between the two keeps moving. The borders here are insecure . . .

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