Libraries, Small Press and Cross-Pollination Oh My! An Interview with Nick Demske

A few months ago, I sat down to a dinner and interview with Nick Demske, a librarian, curator and poet in Racine, Wisconsin. We spoke about his take on a library’s place in the world of contemporary small press poetry and fiction, as well as his thoughts on cross-pollination.

So Nick, since you are both a librarian and a poet, do you spend most of your time in the poetry section of the library?

Yes, poetry section, all the way. I also wind up in the feminist and the language sections a lot.

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Sunday Roundup & A Valentine

Do or rue . . .

Who would have thought February could be so hot? Well, for publication opportunities, anyway. Har har. But it's also a short month, and right now you have precisely half of it left to submit a little bit of work to the next issue of Tarpaulin Sky, and to submit your magnum opus to the 2011 Fence Modern Poets Series. Both reading periods come but once a year. Like Elvis said, "It's now or never."

TSky Peeps in the News

Should reading periods and contests and Valentine's Day and concepts like "acceptance" and "rejection" give you the willies, fear not: TSky's own living patron saint, Rebecca Brown, writes about "failure" in a recent issue of Seattle's (only) newspaper The Stranger, invoking those writers forever synonymous with failure, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, as well as sketching their obvious parallels with The Flaming Lips and Korean ceramic artist Young Sook Park. Writes Rebecca:

I often need to remind myself that I need to hear failure out, because by failing at doing an easy thing, a groupthink thing, a thing one has been taught to do for one's career, one might be encouraged to make or do or be something more original and true. Because failing as an artist is a necessary thing, a thing I wish I could more easily accept.

If you haven't already checked out Rebecca's latest, American Romances, please do.

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If you were sad to see Joyelle McSweeney go, you can take comfort that not only is The Constant Critic back in action, but that's it's being helmed by Karla Kelsey--who, it so happens, is also a new Poetry Editor at Tarpaulin Sky.

More good news: reviewers Jordan Davis and Ray McDaniel remain on staff, and are now joined by Christina Mengert and Vanessa Place. Does it get any better than that?

Yes, actually. The CC has also vowed to bring us "a new review every single week of 2010," which is just nuts, and they've begun with a review of Aase Berg's With Deer, translated by Johannes Göransson (who, among things, will soon have a book out with Tarpaulin Sky Press), along with reviews of Graham Foust's A Mouth in California, Claudia Keelan's Missing Her, Andrea Lambert's and 750910-2155's [sic] Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin: Extrapolations on Los Angeles, Lisa Olstein's Lost Alphabet, Mathew Timmons's Credit, and Elizabeth Marie Young's Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize.

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Andrew Zornoza's Where I Stay is micro-reviewed by John Findura, at elimae

As Antoine de St. Exupery wrote in Le Petit Prince, "Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them".... Andrew Zornoza does it with style and grace.

as well as by Jason Pettus, here, and Derek White, here.

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TSky Editor Sandy Florian and TSky Press author Joshua Marie Wilkinson both have new books coming out--which may not shock you, given that, like the Beastie Boys' Paul Revere, they are in demand--but what you may not know is this: their books mark the first single-author titles from the publishers of the online & print magnificence that is Sidebrow, and is now also Sidebrow Books.

Also: the books are full-color. Also: Florian's On Wonderland & Waste features collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, and Wilkinson's Selenography features polaroids by Califone's Tim Rutili.

Yeah. That's we're talking about. But that's also why we'll shut up now and just embed some previews, for your perusing pleasure:





Both books are available now for preorder at a special discounted rate of $30 for the pair (25% off the cover price), and are also available separately for $18 (10% off).

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Factory School announces the publication of Heretical Texts, Volume 5: TOWN, by Kate Schapira; Green-Wood, by Allison Cobb; Underground National, by Sueyeun Juliette Lee; House Envy of All the World, by Simone White; and The City Real & Imagined, by CAConrad & Frank Sherlock.

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And speaking of big announcements (& Valentines)

Kevin Sampsell is not just fab author and publisher. Not just a champion of small presses all around. Not just the guy who--bless him--buys our books for Powell's. Though he may bill himself as a "common pornographer," he is, in fact, a big ol' Romantic, an absolute sap:

The longtime Powell's employee proposed to his girlfriend, Frayn Masters, in front of more than 100 people, many of them friends and colleagues, who had gathered at the West Burnside bookstore to hear Sampsell talk about his new memoir A Common Pornography. Sampsell dropped to one knee and held out a plastic ring ("a placeholder") to a surprised and delighted Masters, who hugged and kissed Sampsell before saying "yes" into the microphone. The audience clapped and cheered and Sampsell and Masters cried and hugged some more, then Sampsell sat down at a table and started signing books.

Congrats, Frayn & Kevin!

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: Buzzeo, McSweeney, Stefans

Melissa Buzzeo's What Began Us
Leon Works, 2007
Reviewed by M. Perel

"In What Began Us, Melissa Buzzeo writes the space of absence, the space of the irretrievable love, thing, memory that marks its presence by its elusive nature. As if she is carving a body out of time, as if a body can be birthed by the space it leaves behind, Buzzeo uses language like small tools that carve up this flesh, or monument to a past no longer retrievable...." [READ MORE]

Joyelle McSweeney's Flet
Fence Books, 2007
Reviewed by Nick Bredie

"If Flet is the dreamscape of 21st century America, its grimly beautiful portent is that the dream can only go deeper, crushing language and the individual under its pressure. There is no waking up." [READ MORE]

Brian Kim Stefans' What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers
Factory School, 2006
Reviewed by C St Perez

"Stefans’s poetry, extended through the axis of punk, offers new possibilities for a “punk-avant” rebellion." [READ MORE]