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TSky Press author Johannes Göransson wins top award at California Journal of Poetics!
And another award on top of that one!
Although it's not really Johannes winning the award so much, or even his book, entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. But, rather, winning the awards are the blurbs by Blake Butler and Aaron Kunin:
BLURB OF THE YEAR
“It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage in the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses.” — Aaron Kunin on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
MOST POP CULTURE REFERENCES
“I don’t know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). . . . Burroughs and Genet and ‘Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.” — Blake Butler on Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)
Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal
Issue #17 / Summer 2011
192 pages, free, online
Click here to read the issue
Published by Christian Peet. Edited by Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Colie Collen, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey; with associate editors Duncan B. Barlow, Michael Tod Edgerton, Brian Mihok, Christine Wertheim; along with readers Jac Jemc, Eireene Nealand, Janna Plant, Michael Rerick, Amanda Skubal, Julie Strand, Amish Trivedi, and Laura Woltag.
Cover art by Noah Saterstrom. Featuring work by Scott Butterfield, David Buuck & Juliana Spahr, Roxanne Carter, Joshua Cohen, Stella Corso, Patrick Crerand, Jeremy M. Davies, Sandra Doller, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Anne Gorrick, Janalyn Guo, Daniel Y. Harris, Catherine Imbriglio, Lucy Ives, Christopher Janke, Patrick Jones, Catherina Kasper, Sean Kilpatrick, Thorin Klosowski, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Susan Maxwell, Susan McCarty, Christina Mengert, Anjali Mullany, Christian Nagler, Aimee Parkison, Lance Phillips, Deborah Richards, Kate Schapira, Ben Segal, Donna Stonecipher, Bronwen Tate, Laura Vena, and Max Winter.
Tarpaulin Sky
Issue #17/Print Iss #3
7"x9", 204 pages, paperback
June 2011
Cover art: Noah Saterstrom
Special pre-publication price:
$12 includes shipping in the US
Pre-order by check or Add to Cart (ships June 2011)
Edited by
Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Colie Collen, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey, with associate editors Duncan B. Barlow, Michael Tod Edgerton, Brian Mihok, Christine Wertheim, along with readers Jac Jemc, Eireene Nealand, Janna Plant, Michael Rerick, Amanda Skubal, Julie Strand, Amish Trivedi, and Laura Woltag.
Featuring work by
Scott Butterfield, David Buuck and Juliana Spahr, Roxanne Carter, Joshua Cohen, Stella Corso, Patrick Crerand, Jeremy M. Davies, Sandra Doller, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Anne Gorrick, Janalyn Guo, Daniel Y. Harris, Catherine Imbriglio, Lucy Ives, Christopher Janke, Patrick Jones, Catherina Kasper, Sean Kilpatrick, Thorin Klosowski, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Susan Maxwell, Susan McCarty, Christina Mengert, Anjali Mullany, Christian Nagler, Aimee Parkison, Lance Phillips, Deborah Richards, Kate Schapira, Ben Segal, Donna Stonecipher, Bronwen Tate, Laura Vena, and Max Winter.
 Trickhouse volume 8 features work from Kate Greenstreet, Jen Bervin, and an interview with Shelly Taylor, whose book, Black-Eyed Heifer, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press this Spring.
Visual artist: Ilana Halperin
Writers: Laura Sims, Jen Bervin, Kate Greenstreet
Guest curator: Shelton Walsmith
Sound: Eric Jordan
Video: Vincent Goudreau
Correspondent: Nora Herting
Interview: Kristen Nelson with Shelly Taylor
Experiment: Richard Upchurch
Please visit the Trickhouse Back Room, too, for new work: video by Erin Costello, installation by Kerri Rosenstein, and drawings by Oriol Sàbat. Trickhouse is currently accepting image, sound and video submissions for the Back Room. For submission guidelines, click here.
Birds, LLC, "a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world," announces its first two books: The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli. Take advantage of Birds' special pre-sale offer, and buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. The pre-sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.  About The French Exit:It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch. -- Caroline KnoxAbout The Trees Around: Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.-- Graham Foust
 Diagram 10.1 features work from Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, and a crucial table showing suicidal poets and their "control" poets.
 Bookslut starts 2010 right, with Blake Butler interviewing Andrew Zornoza, regarding Andrew's debut with TSky Press, Where I Stay, as well as a host of other things, from Chris Farley to Superman to Susan Sontag. Some excerpts:
You can set out to write something original, “make it new, make it new,” as Frederic Tuten now says channeling Ezra Pound... that mantra spanned those generations influencing each other in New York and Paris -- Queneau, Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Ashbery, Harry Matthews. The problem is, you can set out to make something new every moment of your life and still end up with a handful of sand. . . .
I am not a big believer in intelligence. It's not one of my goals, matching brains with my reader. I'm more interested in feelings, though that's not quite the right word for it. I'm interested in new feelings that haven’t been mythologized yet, I'm trying to get as high and bent as possible. I can over-intellectualize after the fact, but in the moment, when I'm sitting in front of that computer, all that is far away, everything is far away. . . .
Have I taken a lot of drugs? Yes. But there's no reason why anybody can't splinter their observational powers to be able to see multiple states of the same evolving moment. As long as you can get to some nexus, some original state . . . you can leave the constraints of being a static observer. I have students now, somehow, and they always want to find their voice. It's very important to them. And they want to write honestly. That seems completely bonkers to me. You mean, you only have one voice? Aren't we all more complicated than that? And you still believe in some sort of truth? The truth to what? We're a hundred years past modernism here and sixty-five past the Holocaust. What's honest? That people are awful? That evil exists? That men abuse their wives and mothers die of cancer? Of course. If we could get past our vicarious thrill of seeing the same dramas enacted over and over maybe we'd progress a little bit. . . .
The photography was difficult. Where I Stay is a complete work of fiction. Except, I took the photos. So, it's all completely true. I was there, some of these people are dead. The geography is there, but it's temporarily covered with Walmarts and Starbucks.
READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE
 Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) is reviewed at HTML Giant, courtesy of Blake Butler.
"Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe."
Read the entire review, here.
 No Colony #2
Edited by Blake Butler
Including new work by TSky Press editor Christian Peet, forthcoming TSky Press author Joanna Ruocco, and past TSky Lit Journal contributors Rauan Klassnik, Bryson Newhart, as well as Blake Butler Himself--not to mention a few other greats, including Isadora Bey, Kristina Born, Aaron Burch, Luca Dipierro, Scott Garson, Rachel B. Glaser, Chris Higgs, Brandon Hobson, Edward Kim, Matt Kirkpatrick, Lee Klein, Darby Larson, Evan Lavender-Smith, Patrick Leonard, Eugene Lim, Sean Lovelace, Anthony Luebbert, Conor Madigan, Gene Morgan, Jennifer Pieroni, Kathryn Regina, Bradley Sands, Ken Sparling, William Walsh, and Corey Zeller.
 EVER
a novella by Blake Butler
w/art by Derek White
Calamari Press, 2009
104 pages, perfectbound
ISBN 978-0-9798080-6-7
$12
Read excerpts from EVER in Tarpaulin Sky Issue #15/Print #2. Or just buy the book. We did. Even though we might have received a review copy sooner or later. That's how we do. How do you? Do you Ever?
"Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect."
—Brian Evenson
"Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality."
—Gary Lutz
"In EVER—as in, indicating any time in the past or future-light is entropic; "the sky could lift your skin off"; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks granting "no exit method"; and doors won't open even when you don't try. Articulating viscera, ever inside, Butler's narrative dispatches are enclosed between parentheses like unfinished houses, the pages opening out occasionally into exquisitely burnished fields of imagery. Much in the way minerals are pushed up past the mantle by core collisions, EVER reads to me like new evidence, delicate gear that allows us to glimpse a place we've always lived but still don't know."
—Miranda Mellis
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