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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Things that we've been meaning to post for, like, ever:

Tarpaulin Sky Press Authors in the News

Kim Gek Lin Short is the focus of a fab interview-ish essay in InDigest, wherein she recounts the joy of sending work to TSky Press's open reading period:

Christian Peet phoned me to say they’d like to publish it. I kept hoping I was not dreaming this conversation. Had I my druthers, Tarpaulin Sky was the press I would have chosen to publish this work. Why? I like their books and think that they have an identity I get as a reader. I feel this way about a number of small presses, but I had this hunch that if only one person in this world was going to love my book, it might be someone at TSKY.

Oh, and right she was.

Kim also details some of her experiences in writing The Bugging Watch, gives us a sneak peak at China Cowboy (also forthcoming from TSky Press) and discusses that much-maligned-of-late concept, "hybridity":

I didn’t set out to make these two books “hybrid.” And quite honestly I did not even use that term to describe my work until somewhat recently, after both books were well underway. And although I wonder about calling my books fiction-slash-poetry, because it is just as easy to call them not fiction and not poetry, I think it is a truthful designation. Also, the term hybrid alone can and should be problematic as a category. This is also why the term hybrid is so useful. Of course, there is always the thrill of creating a new category, and the danger of enacting rules. But whenever I read something that poses poetry on a categorical high horse in a big snooze purist way, I think: this book is a real asshole. . . .

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Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions is reviewed at the new TriQuarterly Online. Here's an excerpt:

Joanna Ruocco’s newest short-story collection is a keen manipulation of ordinary experiences into strange, funny, lovely, uncomfortable truths. “Chipmunk,” for instance, features a narrator who ponders her insecurities and then reflects on the absurdity of relationships: “I know that with my eyes shut I could kiss a whole parade of men and never guess the difference, even if one of them was my brother.” . . . Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses. With stories that average just a couple of pages, the brevity of Ruocco’s pieces makes it easy to zip through them—don’t. Don’t even read them in sequence. Each will stand alone, and will probably stand taller that way. [Read the full review.]

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TSky Press author Ana Božičević is interviewed at 3AM Magazine, wherein she at once edifies, inspires, and melts us (as is her way) and holds forth on "home," among other slippery subjects. Here's an excerpt:

3:AM: I’m interested in your relationship with Croatia, emotionally, creatively. . . . Do you feel an indelible nostalgia for Croatia?

AB: I remember thinking I wasn’t in love with anyone at the time, so there was no real reason for me to stay. Probably the truth is I knew I wasn’t entirely “of Croatia” even then, and so I was free to go. . . . Nostalgia thinks there’s a place where there is no place, and in its honest, touching delusion it’s no different than any other lover.

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TSky Press author Traci O. Connor holds forth on "The Difficulties of Being Human (and of Writing)" at The Story Prize, wherein, in addition to smashing drywall, she offers this rather moving description of Recipes for Endangered Species:

Every story in my collection is pretty much about this: As human beings we often fail to see other human beings as human beings. We see each other often as something less or, at best, monstrous, and, eventually, we begin to see ourselves thus. The characters in my stories all deal, to some degree, with the ways in which they feel themselves monstrous, the ways in which they act out their monstrosities – in short, they deal with the difficulties of being human.

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Last Friday kicked off not one but five weeks of Free-Book-Fridays at LitDrift, where the free books = Tarpaulin Sky Press titles. How amazing is that? We think: "pretty darn." This week's featured free book is Danielle Dutton's Attempts at a Life.

To enter the giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment at LitDrift. Winners are chosen randomly at 12pm on the following Friday and notified via email. No kidding. Check it out.

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Read more »

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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Read more »

Chronic Content: New Poems by Ana Božičević

"Is this what you meant / when you said we should watch some porn together?"

No doubt you meant: Gimme new poems by Ana Božičević.

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.

Lambda Literary Award Finalist: Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute

Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2009) is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Go, Ana!

The Lambda Literary Foundation announced its preliminary picks for the twenty-second annual Lambda Literary Awards. Eighty-two judges selected as finalists works of fiction, poetry, and memoir, as well as GLBT studies texts, anthologies, young adult literature, and books of drama, erotica, and genre fiction from a pool of 462 books—about 10 percent more than were nominated by publishers for last year's prizes.

The finalists are listed below by category. Winners will be named at a ceremony on May 27 at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.



Lesbian Poetry
Bird Eating Bird by Kristin Naca (HarperCollins)
Gospel by Samiya Bashir (Red Bone Press)
Names by Marilyn Hacker (W.W. Norton)
Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Zero at the Bone by Stacie Cassarino (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

Gay Poetry
Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann (University of Chicago Press)
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me by Brent Goodman (Black Lawrence Press)
The First Risk by Charles Jensen (Lethe Press)
Sweet Core Orchard by Benjamin S. Grossberg (University of Tampa Press)
What the Right Hand Knows by Tom Healy (Four Way Books)

Lesbian Debut Fiction
The Creamsickle by Rhiannon Argo (Spinsters Ink)
The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund (University of Georgia Press)
Land Beyond Maps by Maida Tilchen (Savvy Press)
More of This World or Maybe Another by Barb Johnson (HarperCollins)
Verge by Z Egloff (Bywater Books)

Gay Debut Fiction
Blue Boy by Rakesh Satyal (Kensington Books)
God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeneys)
Pop Salvation by Lance Reynald (HarperCollins)
Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories by G. Winston James (Top Pen Press)
Sugarless by James Magruder (University of Wisconsin Press)

Lesbian Fiction
Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon (HarperCollins)
A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone (Bywater Books)
Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory by Emma Pérez (University of Texas Press)
Risk by Elena Dykewomon (Bywater Books)
This One’s Going to Last Forever by Nairne Holtz (Insomniac Press)

Gay Fiction
Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre (HarperCollins)
The River in Winter by Matt Dean (Queen's English Productions)
Said and Done by James Morrison (Black Lawrence Press)
Salvation Army by Abdellah Taia (Semiotext(e))
Silverlake by Peter Gadol (Tyrus Books)

Lesbian Memoir and Biography
Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life by Mary Cappello (Alyson Books)
Mean Little Deaf Queer by Terry Galloway (Beacon Press)
My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement by Alix Dobkin (Alyson Books)
Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag by Ariel Schrag (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone Fireside)
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)

Gay Memoir and Biography
Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back by Reynolds Price (Scribner Books)
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960’s and 70’s by Edmund White (Bloomsbury USA)
Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division by Jon Ginoli (Cleis Press)
Once You Go Back by Douglas A. Martin (Seven Stories Press)
The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief by David Plante (Beacon Press)

Transgender Literature
Bharat Jiva, a poetry collection by Kari Edwards (Litmus Press)
Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show, a humor collection by Lynn Breedlove (Manic D Press)
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, an essay collection by S Bear Bergman (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Transmigration, a poetry collection by Joy Ladin (Sheep Meadow Press)
Troglodyte Rose, an illustrated science fiction book by Adam Lowe (Cadaverine Publications)

Monday Roundup:

Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, forthcoming, May 2010): "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.

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The Rumpus reviews TSky Press publisher Christian Peet's Big American Trip (Shearsman Books, 2009).

Says reviewer Angela Stubbs, "Big American Trip addresses all of our insecurities as artists, as lovers, and as citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak. Peet allows us to look closely at our limits as humans and as Americans in a world filled seemingly with so many opportunities to connect." Click here for the full review.

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Transversalinflections reviews Ana Božičević's Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009), comparing Bozicevic's work to a variety of other things we love, such as Jack Spicer, Jean-Luc Godard, and snowglobes: "I would like to think of the whole book and its sections and its individual poems as a snowglobe that has been shaken up, and where not snow, but objects are floating around in varying connected but wondrous configurations. . . .The poems are no longer primarily linear, but are constellations of ideas that have body and dimensions as well as being open and porous." Click here for the full review.

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At long last, Peter Money's novella, Che, is now available, thanks to the ongoing greatness that is BlazeVox Books.

Say the peeps, of Che:

"Epic"--Christian Peet

"Harrowing language that casts up its characters like great drift logs seen through heavy surf"--Jan Clausen

"I want to hear Che read aloud ...while floating in a sensory deprivation tank”--Haale

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With + Stand is thrilled (as are we) to announce the publication of its fourth issue, devoted to the work of the great poet of materials and magenta, Lisa Robertson. Featuring essays and poetry by Stephanie Young, Scott Sweeney, Dan Thomas-Glass, Brian Ang, Anne Lesley Selcer, Alli Warren, Erika Staiti, Michael Marcinowski, Brian Mornar, Melissa Mack, Charles Legere, Jamey Jones, Richard Meier, Sam Lohmann, Alyssa Wolff, Sara Marcus, and Phoebe Wayne, as well as new work by Lisa Robertson.

The journal will be available to the public at a reading and release party, featuring Lisa Robertson and journal contributors: Sunday, March 21st, 7-9pm at Urban Ore EcoPark, 900 Murray St, Berkeley, CA. The reading, like the journal, is free.

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Dusie #9 is live. Read work by, oh, well, a few people: Cara Benson, Jessica Bozek, Ana Bozicevic, Elizabeth Bryant, Mairead Byrne, Juliet Cook, Michelle Detorie, Susana Gardner, Arielle Greenberg, E. Tracy Grinnell, Arielle Guy, Jen Hofer with Sawako Nakayasu, Carrie Hunter, Jennifer Karmin, Amy King, Mark Lamoureux, Juliana Leslie, Dana Teen Lomax, Nicole Mauro, Catherine Meng, Bonnie Jean Michalski, Anna Moschovakis, Michelle Noteboom, Kaia Sand, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Jane Sprague, Bronwen Tate, Maureen Thorson, Catherine Wagner, Stephanie Young, and--if you can believe it--many more .

And in case you've been living in a cardboard box for the last few years: Dusie is an experimental poetics journal as well as a yearly poetry publishing kollektiv. Under the auspices of Dusie Press, poets participate both physically and virtually in communal projects. Poets in the Dusie Kollektiv write, design, produce and distribute poetic chapbooks in limited, signed, editions of 50 to 150 copies. Dusie also makes poetry available to a wider community through free online PDF downloads.

Yah. Good stuff, Dusie. Go. Now.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED

NOTE: Most of the titles below are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

Samuel Amadon, Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010)

Molly Brodak, a little middle of the night (University of Iowa Press, 2010)

* Julia Cohen, For the H in Ghost (Brave Men Press 2009)

Daniel Coudriet, Say Sand (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Tracy DeBrincat, Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night (Subito Press, 2010)

Sandy Florian, On Wonderland & Waste, w/collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie (Sidebrow Books, 2010)

Peter Gordon, Man Receives a Letter (Red Hen Press, 2009)

Heather Hartley, Knock Knock (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Shane Jones, Light Boxes (Penguin Books, 2010)

Natalie Lyalin, Pink & Hot Pink Habitat (Coconut Books, 2009)

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Clay Matthews, Runoff (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Stan Mir, Song & Glass (Subito Press, 2010)

Christopher Salerno, Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Poetry Series 2010)

Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times (Twisted Spoon Press 2010)

Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Selenography, w/Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books, 2010)

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

Outbreak! TSky Editors & Authors Cropping Up All Over the Place

NEW BOOKS BY TSKY EDITORS & STAFF

Feminaissance
Edited by Christine Wertheim
Poetry | Prose | Essays | $20
Les Figues Press, 2010
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-17-2
ISBN 10: 1-934254-17-7
Size: 6“x9”
Pages: 132
Binding: Softcover, Perfect

Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, Lidia Yuknavitch

Identity is dead. The 21st-century subject is an unstable fiction with no identifiable features or group affiliations. He’s a man without inherent qualities, a post-human ideal. But those who have long been hailed as Other exist in a different relation to this ideal. Unlike those traditionally self-possessed |s, these Others may find themselves split between a yearning to be contemporary and unqualified, and longing for a continued allegiance to their qualitative, albeit constructed, group identity.

It is with an awareness of this more ambiguous and refined notion of self that Feminaissance approaches questions of femininity and its relation to writing. Topics include: collectivity; feminine écriture; the politics of writing; text and voice; the body as a site of contestation, insurgence and pleasure; race and writing; gender as performance; writing about other women writers; economic inequities; Hélène Cixous; monstrosity; madness; and aesthetics.

If the fact that “women do not say ‘We’” was one of the constitutive problems for 20th century feminism, the fact that women do and still clearly feel the need to say “We” is just as rich and interesting a topic for feminism today. The writings gathered here prove feminism to be alive and more relevant to all genders than ever: not just because feminist discourse remains a political necessity, but because of its artistic and intellectual pleasures.
--Sianne Ngai

Inconceivable Wilson
a novella by J.A. Tyler
Scrambler Books
4.25"x 6.875", paperback, 129 pages
Cover photo by Andrew Ilachinski
$12.00
* Order your copy now and receive free shipping (will ship sometime between December 15 and December 30, 2009)

About Inconceivable Wilson:

A woman in a red dress, ankles strapped in shoes, leaving a man at the airport, at a terminal, holding a photograph of him, this man, and on the back only written: Wilson.

Forgive him, he has become so much less now.

Wilson goes: planes, boats, walking until the sun quits rising, until the sun stops existing, and there he begins, there he becomes. A place where the trees change shape and purpose, the environment lost to nothingness, where people speak in clatters and clicks, incomprehensible, a place where he is lost in blindness, deafening sickness, waves of unencumbered night. And Wilson unties within their circle, these people of pitch and tar, this village, these men and their women, their children. He should be reading them, writing words, penning a culture, creating a world from the tips of sentences, but he is instead consumed by them, bent to charcoal words on canvas made of darkness, hearing always and only the rattling of bones and laughter. Curtains open and he becomes less.

Forgive him, he should not have gone.

Men, women, children play in his brain, finger the creases of his thinking, until he comes undone.

Go, he has gone. Go Wilson. He goes.

Go Wilson. Go.

Museum of Vandals
by Amish Trivedi
(accordion-fold mini-chapbook)
Cannibal Books
Boundless Books Series #1
$5



TWO TSKY EDITORS PLEAD NO CONTEST

Advising Editor Elena Georgiou has new fiction in No Contest, the online magazine from GenPop Books, wherein you will also find a review of Asst. Poetry Editor Jamey Dunham's The Bible of Lost Pets (Salt Publishing, 2009).

From the GenPop Blog:

An excerpt from Elena Georgiou's short fiction, "Hummus," from The Immigrant's Refrigerator:

She spent the hour between the piano lesson and the black-eyed peas and spinach for dinner trying to calculate the correct answer. The first time, d - y equaled Jesus answering a prayer. The second time, d - y equaled the separation of piano + pianist from family. The third time, d – y equaled government intervention and her being placed in care (which, in effect, was the same as the previous answer). The fourth time, d - y equaled a struggle for independence. The fifth time, d - y equaled being swallowed up by the Loch Ness Monster and living happily inside Nessie’s stomach, like Jonah had done inside the whale. Once inside Nessie’s stomach, she would repeatedly practice the "Sonata Pathétique" until her whole body was filled with music.

An excerpt from Charles Freeland's review of Jamey Dunham's The Bible of Lost Pets:

At the school where I teach, the creative writing students, through close contact with Jamey Dunham’s work, have been for some time filling their prose poems with all manner of small animals doing cute and/or zany things. I hope this will stop. Such superficial emulation does not so much stunt the student writers’ growth as threaten to rob Dunham’s accomplishment of its power. It gets everything wrong.

TSKY AUTHORS: MAKING MORE THAN TO-DO LISTS

We're delighted to report that Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay is hanging tough at #7 on SPD's Fiction Bestsellers list, and Ana Bozicevic's Stars of the Night Commute receives not one but four shoutouts at No Tell's "Best Poetry Books of 2009" list.

Also, this amazing "congratulations" greeting card image was, like, totally free for the taking.

Busloads of news: books, reviews, interviews, other & elsewhere

RE: OPEN READING PERIOD

Two weeks remain for submissions of full-length manuscripts to Tarpaulin Sky Press's open reading period. Details here.

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Now available for pre-order (ships Nov 1st):

Ana Božičević
Stars of the Night Commute

ISBN: 9780982541609
Poetry | 6"x8", 84 pp, pbk | Nov. 2009
$14 includes shipping in the US

Cover: Remedios Varo | Ícono, 1945 [Icon]
Óleo, incrustaciones de nácar y hojas de oro sobre tríptico de madera [Oil, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf inlays on a wooden tryptich] | 60 x 39,3 x 5,5 | Malba - Fundación Costantini, Buenos Aires | Reproduced with kind permission of Anna Alexandra Gruen.

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Stars of the Night Commute haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams. Many of the poems carry a shamanistic, elemental quality, as if real matter were articulating out of word-fragments. Božičević writes, "At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote." If this is "the end of poetry," perhaps poetry is, after all, reaching forward back to its beginning.
—Annie Finch

Ana Božičević's poetry has everything—a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound. The words bristle with life, and they command the deepest reverence for the Ineffable, for pure Being. This poetry is clever without being shallow, and this is truly rare. Silence is my most honest response to her work, but a silence rooted in respect and awe for that which is truly great art.
—Noelle Kocot

Ana Božičević's work is sort of animist—it’s either about silence or the racket of the world. How does she do it? Clicks the switch to say it’s silent & it’s happening then on a distant tiny stage. She’s muttering, and then it’s a story and a very good one. I mean in poetry at some point you don’t know what the writer means. In Ana’s work I watch “it” vanish (all the time) & I trust it.
—Eileen Myles

Ana Božičević's work is filled with a wild freedom, and reading it often reminds me of reading Wallace Stevens, in that you know absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect. In her poems she expresses an attitude of solemn responsibility to history, both the world's and her own, yet there is often a marvelous lightness, even playfulness about them. She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial. These are not just technical matters. An émigré from reality (in the form of one of modern time's most monstrously and moronically cruel wars) and a Cassandra, she is able to perceive with the eyes of language—then render with lyrical immediacy—the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream.
—Franz Wright

About Ana Božičević

Ana Božičević was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1977. She emigrated to NYC in 1997. Stars of the Night Commute is her first book of poems. Her fifth chapbook, Depth Hoar, will be published by Cinematheque Press in 2010. With Amy King, Ana co-curates The Stain of Poetry reading series in Brooklyn, and is co-editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. She works at the Center for the Humanities of The Graduate Center, CUNY. For more, visit nightcommute.org.

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This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

features an essay by TSky Press publisher Christian Peet. Peet's response includes three mini-essays on the work of past TSky Guest Editors Bhanu Kapil and Selah Saterstrom, as well as the work of Aase Berg.

In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's "This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like." This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, they've curated "This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like."

All this week, new essays are posted:

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix
Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan,
& Kevin Simmonds
Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts
Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer,
Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, David Lau & Rodrigo Toscano

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In mudluscious #9, J.A. Tyler provides a kind & concise review (shoutout may be a better term?) re: Christian Peet's Big American Trip.

Says Tyler, "The most impressive aspect of Big American Trip is how Peet is able to interlace politics, linguistic commentary, and a subtle narrative through-line into one book, undercutting any notion that we cannot swell a sentence to something more than just words by breaking its structure, by making it new, by challenging our readers to read for more than one thing, and even more than two; in fact, like the narrator in Big American Trip, Peet asks each reader to look for and decipher everything, all at once.

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Fence & Tarpaulin Sky Press author Joyelle McSweeney is interviewed as only Joyelle McSweeney can be interviewed, at Rob McClennan's blog.

Here's a taste:

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word!) inspiration?

I turn to South Bend. Really, until you have lived in a rotting rust belt town you have not lived. People are hurting here, and they are dogged and ingenious. They drive their trucks through the walls of their living rooms on a nightly basis. They get in fights and throw pregnant dogs at each other. They find remarkable items to pawn (one winter morning two middle aged people were standing outside one of the many pawn shops at 7 AM trying to hold a window airconditioning unit up out of the snow. They were wearing sweatsuits and no coats.). There are residential motels here, one is called the Wooden Indian and it has almost no interior. So it’s a shelter without any shelter. We have a lot of yard sales around here where everyone tries to sell used goods to everyone else. The same used goods just pass back and forth. Capitalism is played out and distended here and very visibly broken. As a pregnant woman and a mother with a toddler, I fit right in to most expectations about women in this place, at least until I open my mouth and reveal myself not to be a Hoosier. But most of the time, at the supermarket, the BMV, the playground, the IRS office, daycare, I do not open my mouth. One is not invited to do so. As Denis Johnson writes at the end of Jesus’ Son, “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

Go here for the rest.

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Sean Lovelace wins the TSky Press "Hells Yeah, Go Fondle Some Art" Award for most entertaining review of Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay.

Here's a taste:

I would like to light my velvet pipe, stuff it with velvet tobacco, lean back, and say to you now that only sophistry could infer the “existence” of nonbeing. The nothingness which fascinates recent literary folks/analysts is a myth of declining capitalist society, and I should know. I got your tower ivory. The earth is black and buckled.

I finished the Andrew Zornoza book and it had me thinking. It was a small animal gnawing my shin, a teething, bloody type of thinking. I had class in five minutes and my head felt like the way men lay on a loading dock. You know how reading can be a cave (writing too, and Percodan). I didn’t know how I was going to use these feelings from Zornoza’s book in my class. I mean I wanted to do something.

So I took the class down to the BSU art museum and told them to touch something, to reach out and teach a piece of art, a painting or a sculpture. The BSU museum contains Warhol and Greek statues and Jesus bleeding all over lush crosses and all those museum necessities. The response was interesting . . .

Go here for the rest.

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TSky Press author Mark Cunningham has been busy since publishing Body Language. Not one but three new chapbooks are available from Mark:

nightlightnight, a collaborative web chapbook, with photographs by Mel Nichols, hosted at Right Hand Pointing

&

Nachträglichkeit, an ebook (PDF file) from Beard of Bees

&

10 specimens, an ebook (PDF file) from Gold Wake Press

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Alan Semerdjian's In the Architecture of Bone is now available from GenPop Books. Order directly from GenPop Books, get free shipping anywhere in the U.S., and save around $5 off what you'd pay at Amazon. Yeah, it's a sweet deal.

Click here for excerpts and more information. Click here to order

Alan Semerdjian's In the Architecture of Bone reads like a long poem cycle that pulls the reader into an open field in which Semerdjian weaves his explorations of language and art, Armenian history and family. These dynamic poems mingle the ghosts of the past with the pace of contemporary life. This talented, young poet is well worth your reading.—Peter Balakian

Writer/musician Alan Semerdjian’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online publications and anthologies including Chain, The Lyric Review, Adbusters, Arson, Ararat, and Diagram. He released a chapbook of poems called “An Improvised Device” (Lock n Load Press) in 2005. His songs have appeared in television and film and charted on CMJ. Alan has performed and read all over North America. He currently teaches at Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, NY and resides in New York City’s East Village.

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Also, if you haven't checked out GenPop Books' online magazine, No Contest, now may be a good time to start. They've just posted new work by Alissa Nutting, whose first collection of short fictions, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, was picked by Ben Marcus for publication by Starcherone Books. Nutting kicks off October at New Contest with a story about "free sex" on the set of a children's television show, dancing in a mouse costume, and a little blond star named "Missy."

An excerpt from "Dancing Rat":

I’m haunted by how physically perfect Missy is, her clear skin and her white white teeth. She just landed a detergent commercial, and because I want to punish myself I will not be able to resist switching to that brand. I am a zombie-slave under Missy’s control, I often think. I don’t have a child and I probably will never have a child: I hate this but trying any harder to have one seems like it would make the reality sink in even more. It is far easier to just do the bratty things Missy asks me to do, buy her endorsed products, and act like this agonizing relationship somehow brings me closer to motherhood. . . .

Going back on set when I know I have semen inside of me reminds me of that urban myth about a chemical that will turn all the water around people purple if they pee in the pool. I kind of expect that one day, while walking across the Rainbow River Bridge over to the Sharing Seat, I will look down and realize my crotch is flashing like a police siren due to some product that detects seminal fluid on the sets of children’s shows.

Go here for the rest.

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NEW REVIEWS AT TARPAULIN SKY

some excerpts:

Albert Goldbarth's Griffin, reviewed by Katie Eberhart

[Griffin] explores the nature of truth, of illness, and relationships, deftly hooking together information and experience in a shape-shifting narrative that moves forward, reverses, follows surprising detours and tangents, settling for truth that resides in the complicated messiness somewhere between a carnival ride and a Carl Sagan lecture. The narratives tackle tricky topics like failing relationships, illness and mortality with the grace of a poet, the thoroughness of a historian (and student of “the contemporary”), sensitivity, and humor. . . .

Chris Tonelli's No Theater, reviewed by Christopher Salerno

Masks here are also symbols of potential, often allowing the speaker the distance he needs to gain perspective on nature and the self: “Memories, / interior resonance, you / are inventing / new natures.” If a mask is a symbol of potential, it is one that, for Tonelli, certainly doesn’t muffle the voice. The masks of No Theater are a vehicle through which the character navigates emotional complexity, and the result is often personal and forthcoming: “The audience, / a constellation / scalding the silence. / They are waiting / for my feeling. I am waiting / to feel their absence." . . .

Michelle Detorie's Ode to Industry, reviewed by Juliet Cook

Many of the poems in Ode to Industry also present certain domestic trappings within unlikely contexts, so that ordinarily innocuous or even utilitarian objects suddenly take on a tone of menace or veiled threat. Seemingly routine assembly line rhythms are juxtaposed with an underlying sense of unease that just might spring forth like the blades in a spring loaded tampon, hidden within until a moment of hideous impact. Flesh containers and domestic constraints intermingle and brush up against each other, sometimes coalescing; other times, repelling or resisting. . . .

Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas, reviewed by J.A. Tyler

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways. Blake Butler has made something enormous here, in the reams of his Scorch Atlas, and if nothing else, we are simply destroyed by it, mistaking our skin for its cover, our blood for its damage, our eyes for its violent and broken images. . . .

Alexis Orgera's Illuminatrix, reviewed by Mark Rockswold

Illuminatrix . . . questions the rigid boundaries between high and low art, the sciences and arts, and language’s conceptualizing work in general: “there are mighty critics, illuminators deft / in the art of finding meaning /where none should exist” (30). Therefore, in the midst of its own illuminating project, the collection asks, is illumination a good thing? What is lost in the process? To have illumination, there must inevitably be darkness—in this way paradox and equivocal possibility become Illuminatrix’s only sure reality. . . .

Skip Fox's For To, reviewed by Megan Burns

Fox tells us early on: “Even the boy raised by wolves had a language” (15). He wavers between presenting language as quintessential to the human condition and also limiting and laughable in its design. In witty aphorisms and slingshot asides, Fox pokes fun at us, the users of language, who think we know what we’re talking about when we do talk. “Reason is one thing that happens” (61) . . .

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More great news: ecopoetics 06/07 is now available, and comes highly recommended by TSky.

Edited by Jonathan Skinner, ecopoetics is "a (more or less) annual journal dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings)."

ecopoetics 06/07 2006-2009 is 324 pages of poetry, essays, fiction, translation, interviews: Emily Abendroth, Fatho Amoy, mIEKAL aND, Kristen Andersen, Karen Leona Anderson, Stan Apps, Robert Ashton, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christine Boileau, Timothy Bradford, Pam Brown, Julieann Brownton, James Bunn, Andrew Burke, Bonny Cassidy, Louise Crisp, Justin Clemens, Jon Cone, Jack Collom, Matthew Cooperman, Gregory Day, Tyler Doherty, Thom Donovan, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theodore Enslin, John Estes, Kate Fagan, Michael Farrell, Alec Finlay, Lisa Fishman, Benjamin Friedlander, Forrest Gander, Jody Gladding, Liberty Heise, Krista Ingebretson, Jill Jones, Patrick Jones, Michael Kelleher, John Kinsella, Kyhl Lyndgaard, James Koller, José Martí, John McBain, Ray Meeks, Graeme Miles, Stuart Mills, Peter Minter, Luis-Aguilar Moreno, Derek Motion, Jesse Nissim, Alistair Noon, Lucas North, Antonio Ochoa, Peter O’Mara, Isabelle Pelissier, Carol Quinn, José Rabéarivelo, Daniel W. Rasmus, Joan Retallack, Sarah Rosenthal, Linda Russo, Kate Schapira, Andrew Schelling, Jared Schickling, Jonathan Skinner, Gary Snyder, Juliana Spahr, James Stuart, Alf Taylor, Angélica Tornero, Rodrigo Toscano, Lauren Tyers, Erica Van Horn, Stephen Vincent, Damian Weber, Simon West, Les Wicks

$17 Postage included; outside US & Canada, add $5

ecopoetics current and back issues are distributed by SPD and are also available directly from the publisher: Please make checks payable to Jonathan Skinner: ecopoetics ~ 145 Carding Machine Road _ Bowdoinham, ME ~ 04008

* * *

Edited by TSky faves Adam Clay and Matt Henriksen, Typo 13 features poems from TSky contributors Laynie Browne, Carolyn Guinzio, Lucy Ives, and Rauan Klassnik, along with a host of other greats: Cynthia Arrieu-King, Zach Barocas, Brooklyn Copeland, Christopher Deweese, Claire Donato, Kathryn Donohue, Joshua Harmon, Philip Jenks, Ben Mazer, Rachel Moritz, Sara Mumolo, Tom Orange, Anthony Robinson, Susan Scarlata, Nate Slawson, and Stephen Sturgeon.

* * *

We're new to Wag's Revue, and were pleased to discover that its new issue contains interviews with John D'Agata, Lee Gutkind, and George Saunders, as well as six H.C. Artmann poems translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, and Rimbaud translated by Christian Bök.

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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 are otherwise special editions and are limited, if still available at all.

* Emily Abendroth, Toward Eadward Forward (Horseless Press, 2009)

* Sarah Bartlett and Chris Tonelli, A Mule-Shaped Cloud (Horseless Press, 2009)

James Belflower, Commuter (Instance Press, 2009)

Birkensnake #2

* Sommer Browning, Vale Tudo (Horseless Press, 2009)

Brigitte Byrd, Song of a Living Room (Ahsahta Press, 2009)

* Allison Carter, Shadows Are Weather (Horseless Press, 2009)

* Thomas Cook, Anemic Cinema (Horseless Press, 2009)

Denver Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1

Kate Durbin, The Ravenous Audience (Black Goat, 2009)

Elena Georgiou, Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press, 2009)

Kate Greenstreet, The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta Press, 2009)

Barbara Henning, Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

* Alex Lemon, At Last Unfolding Congo (Horseless Press, 2009)

Michael Leong, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009)

P-Queue, Vol. 6

* Andrea Rexilius, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Horseless Press, 2009)

Alan Semerdjian, In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009)

Jered Schickling, O (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Zachary Schomburg, Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009)

Jason Whitmarsh, Tomorrow's Living Room (Utah State University Press, 2009)

Subscribe. Support. Save Big Money

TSky Press Fall 2009/Spring 2010 subscriptions are now available http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/catalog.html

$60 for six books w/free shipping
(vs. $103.94 from Amazon, or $107 from SPD)

Yes, you read the above correctly. $60 will get you five paperbacks and one chapbook w/ free shipping. & Yes, you'll save around $45.

All first books. All from women writers. Which excites us no end. Although we have always been committed to publishing both new writers and women writers, the 2009/10 subscription series really puts our money where our collective mouth is. Fall 2009 books include Ana Bozicevic's full-length poetry collection, Stars of the Night Commute; Traci O Connor's book of short fictions, Recipes for Endangered Species; and Emily Toder's poetry chapbook, Brushes With. Spring 2010 titles include Joanna Ruocco's book of short fictions, Man's Companions; Kim Gek Lin Short's lyric novella, The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits; and Shelly Taylor's book of interlocking short fictions/prose poems, Black-Eyed Heifer.

As they say in Fargo, “That’s a pretty sweet deal.” We hope you’ll think so, too. Please consider renewing your subscription and continuing to support TSky Press and its mission—which, in this case, includes publishing young women writers whose work, we’re willing to bet, you’ll be reading—and reading about—for years to come.

Please visit our catalog at http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/catalog.html to order online or pay by check.