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 »

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.

New Reviews at TSky: Bozicevic, Coultas, Huenún, and Staples

Ana Bozicevic’s Document
Reviewed by Chris Tonelli

"To evoke such complete empathy in the reader takes poetry of they highest order, and Bozicevic’s is undoubtedly that. . . . Though only thirteen poems long, Document accomplishes what most full-length books only set out to." [READ MORE]

Brenda Coultas's The Marvelous Bones of Time
Reviewed by Becca Klaver

"Coultas’ variation on “the personal is political” is “the local is national,” and she is a poet brave enough to look at—sit with, walk around in—our country’s dumpsters and cemeteries, a.k.a. our guts and our remains, our scariest local sites. . . . You could probably get away with calling Brenda Coultas many things, but one who heeds dirty, discarded, or dead things this intently is most often simply called a poet." [READ MORE]

Jaime Luis Huenún's Port Trakl
Translated by Daniel Borzutzky
Reviewed by Angela Woodward

"In Port Trakl, first world oppression of the third world, displacement of the indigenous, loss of culture, destruction of the environment, envy of the imperialist victor, float out of these poems like a shimmer of spilled oil or whiff of rot, barely there, but weighting our perception of these slight verses. It is a wonderful book, and Borzutzky and Action Books have done us a favor by bringing it into English." [READ MORE]

Heidi Lynn Staples's Dog Girl
Reviewed by Karen Dietrich

This is poetry in limbo, in a constant state of torque, wherein what matters is both content and form, both message and mode of delivery. Limber lines offer glimpses inside delicate juxtapositions of pain, displacement, and delight. While the poet’s head may be in the clouds, exploring a stratosphere of language, her feet are firmly planted in purpose, eyes focused intently upon human experience." [READ MORE]