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The Nation has published a feature on Tarpaulin Sky Press author Joanna Ruocco, including a great review of Man's Companions, as well as a look at her fab novel from Ellipsis Press, Mothering Coven.
Also revealed is Joanna's once-secret nom de guerre. . . .
Says David Carroll Simon, of Ruocco and Man's Companions:
Ruocco delivers something stranger than banal moralizing. In the final paragraph, she steers the narrative into foreign territory, and the weirdness of her conclusion is doubled by her ability to meet and then flout expectations with a single gesture, offering up the anticipated feminist insights in the least predictable fashion. . . . Ruocco restores the power of a familiar critique by rendering it uncanny. . . . When you read her stories, you find yourself warped from one world to another, transported by the flight of her words between languages. Click for the full article in The Nation
Read more about Joanna Ruocco and Man's Companions, or take a peek, below:
Joanna Ruocco
Man's Companions
$14 includes shipping
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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. * * *
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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 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.
Publishers Weekly reviews Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species
. . . These stories constitute some tender, aching love stories. Connor's characters are curious specimens who don't quite fit in, but have rich inner lives, such as Zha Zha, the chronically unfaithful exotic dancer in “The Flying Codona” (“tits are made of cantaloupe and she eats them with a spoon”), whose lovelorn boyfriend consoles himself by dreaming of being a trapeze artist. “Starla and June” is a creepy, Hitchcockian tale about an unraveling love affair involving a prosthetic hand that offers words of courage and strength: “Oh, Pet, she'll be back,” says the hand. “Van Gogh Dreams” juxtaposes vivid descriptions of flowers with excerpts from the painter's late asylum notebooks to evoke the chilling stream-of-consciousness of a troubled narrator. “Monkey Teeth” is a kind of nut job's notebook, full of Lolita-like obsession (including photographs). Cocktail recipes conclude each of the stories in this varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection. [Click here for the full review.]
Jeremy Benson at NewPages reviews Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits
The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is under a porch, is between the fridge and the cupboard, is hiding among the coats and sweaters in the tilted closet above the basement stairs. Its shapeshifting and heartbreak is nightmarishly microscopic and horrifically asymptotical. . . . Short’s prose poems have the exactitude of obsessive compulsion, yet the imagery and dimness of an opiate trip sponsored by Lewis Caroll – “And the tiny book became the word for rainbow and spilled into Harlan’s many gloved hands.” She frequently stretches the parameters of grammar, rearranging conventional syntax to just off kilter; her written style as surreal as her yarn-and-insect imagery. The result is a terrifying, ungraspable split-level love story: futile, sad and beautiful. [Click here for the full review.]
Sonora Review's Editor, Jake Levine, reviews Shelly Taylor's Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor’s first collection Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky) inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines. This is neither an experimental or pastoral poetry, but a fusion of speech and intellect that reflect a poet who is deeply rooted in the earth, its dirt and concrete, its horses and cats, but speaks in a rhythm that explodes into space, taps into the pacing of a 21st century phantasmagoric, recollected, American landscape and self. If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems. The pacing is high octane, pyrotechnic, but the discursive function of the content is old school, familiar, and impressively defiant. [Click here for the full review.]
Trinie Dalton, at Fanzine, reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions
Part of what compelled me to read Man’s Companions was my curiosity about a fellow author who had also pondered “Unicorns.” This story, I happily report, is one of the highlights of the book. In it, an embittered writer ruminates on writer’s block, while processing jealousy of her prolific boyfriend by reducing his success to ‘phallogocentrism.’ “When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body. When Dave is writing, his…posture is excellent and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard…” She arrives at the phallus via noting Dave’s confidence, his efficient practice, and his boarding school education. “Whimsy,” she writes, “is how the phallogocentric artists try to hide the phallus. They hide the phallus right there in the open, with unicorns.” Even in this passage, one notices Ruocco’s peculiar writing style, in which short sentences show logical ideas leading to the next in almost robotic bursts. Then they leap somewhere else completely, recalling Lydia Davis’s grammatical, poetic math. [Click here for the full review--which begins with a review of TSky-friend Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography.]
And in case you missed it a couple weeks ago: Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's Man's Companions
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.]
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.
 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.
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.
 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
 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.
 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.
RECENTLY RECEIVEDNOTE: 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)
 Joanna Ruocco
Man's Companions
ISBN: 9780982541630
Fiction | 6"x8", 144 pp, pbk |May 2010
$15 Special pre-order price: $13 includes shipping
(vs. $19, later, at Amazon or SPD)
Click here to pre-order by check.
Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010): "Clever tales . . . understated humor and irony . . . a playful, experimental appeal. . . ."—Publishers Weekly "This is a marvelous sequence of linked stories deftly portraying those animals inside of us which long ago tracked down and ate our inner child. A wry book that combines the obsessive music of Lydia Davis and the stripped precision of Muriel Spark, Man’s Companions is not to be missed. "
—Brian Evenson "Reading this work I imagine what it must have been like for people reading Donald Barthelme for the first time, that fully formed stylist suddenly sprung as if from nothing, this vision or version of the world that is our world and also isn’t—it’s wonderful and peculiar and radiant and much funnier and maybe a little bit sadder. Each of Ruocco’s tales is its own little triumph."
—Danielle Dutton For the characters in Man’s Companions, the self is a degraded version of someone else. Fantasy is stymied by performance anxiety. Delayed gratification phones in a last-minute cancellation. Thee fictions in this collection are mongrel, troubling the genus of story with miscegenations and mutations, and at the heart of the book is the figure of the anima non grata, the unwanted woman, a degraded version of man. Using language by turns digressive, obsessive, overblown, romantic, fickle, and mundane, Man’s Companions manipulates feminine tropes and finds a kind of joyous liberty in its proliferation of thwarted affairs and awkward interludes. About Joanna Ruocco Joanna Ruocco is the author of The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). She co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.
 Shelly Taylor
Black-Eyed Heifer
ISBN: 9780982541647
Fiction/Poetry | 6"x8", 88 pp, pbk |May 2010
$14 Special pre-order price: $12 includes shipping
(vs. $18, later, at Amazon)
Click here to pre-order by check.
Or pre-order with PayPal (Ships May 2010): "There’s a fine density and intensity to this work, the ‘thinginess’ that informs our actual lives, and a radically innovative use of language. I kept thinking of the alabaster bear and petrified whale vertebrae on our mantle, these fabulous memories of life."
—Jim Harrison "Black-Eyed Heifer is a mighty anthem to down home local culture—the deeply rooted—the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land. These lyrical prose poems sing a ‘rampant fire’ tune ‘to yesterday’s hands-up hinterland’ and the fact that ‘there were horses, there always are.’ There is abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty in Shelly Taylor’s contemporary Georgian eclogues, ‘all the while mindful of the color turn’ and ‘silent footwork & news.’"
—Brenda Iijima "The prose poems of Shelly Taylor’s first collection create stories that poke through your eye & go straight through your head. Ms. Taylor makes up words in ‘holler time,’ language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent. I can tell you that she ‘put me ripened there,’ into a three-dimensional South of horses, fields, and characters. Her poems are hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category".
—Jane Miller About Shelly Taylor Shelly Taylor is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). This is her first full collection. Born in southern Georgia, she currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
 Hola and howdy, readers and friends,
During the month of February we will be reading submissions for the next paper edition of Tarpaulin Sky. We hope you'll give it a go, and send your best, as this is the only submission period for the magazine this year.
We're trying something new, too--well, new to us--the online submission manager. So you'll be able to keep tabs on the status of your submission throughout the process.
Also new this year are many of the journal's editors: Blake Butler and Joanna Howard editing Fiction; Laynie Browne and Karla Kelsey editing Poetry; and Sandy Florian and Lily Hoang editing "Other"; presided over by Editor in Chief Colie Collen, with all submissions shepherded through the process by Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow, Jamey Dunham, and Christine Wertheim, as well as Assistant Editors Michael Tod Edgerton and Brian Mihok.
Please visit our guidelines for all the deets.
SEE YOU AT AWP DENVER?
We hope so. TSky authors and editors will be reading from new books and selling them as well, and we'll be joining our favorite presses for various kickass events: readings with Action Books, Apostrophe Books, Astrophil Press, Black Ocean, Featherproof Books, and Slope Editions, just to name a few. Events Coordinators Michelle Puckett and Megan DiBello invite you to keep
on top of our events blog for forthcoming details.
IS YOUR BOOKSHELF NOT SO FRESH?
We can fix that. Subscriptions to Tarpaulin Sky Press's forthcoming Spring titles are still available--as are huge savings on forthcoming titles. If you're looking for some of the most exciting literature being published today, you may want to have a look at our catalog, or take a look at some of our forthcoming Spring 2010 titles: Traci O Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species, a book of short fictions that Brian Evenson calls "a marvelous debut. . . . moving fast enough that you could end up anywhere, Connor’s thought about every single word, every gesture, and she can turn each story on a dime" or Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems that Joyelle McSweeney deems "twisted," and Norma Cole calls "irresistible.... with its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources.... it is a magnificent work." Also on the way, Joanna Ruocco's book of short fictions, Man's Companions; Shelly Taylor's book of interlocking short fictions / prose poems, Black-Eyed Heifer; and Emily Toder's poetry chapbook, Brushes With.
& Let us not forget the three chapbooks we just picked from the last reading period: Lara Glenum's The Hotling Chronicles: A Horror in Trans; Sarah Goldstein's Fables; and James Haug's Scratch. Plus forthcoming full-lengths-with-really-long-titles, Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate.
LOOKING TO SCORE FREE BOOKS?
 We can help. We have Advanced Reader Copies of all Tarpaulin Sky Press's Spring full-length titles, and we have hundreds of review copies from other publishers, from Ahsahta to Vagabond. Want to review a brand new title from Fence Books? We got 'em. Burning Deck, City Lights, Dalkey Archive, FC2, Graywolf, Salt, Sarabande, Shearsman, Ugly Duckling? No problem. Or how about Counterpath, Dusie, Ellipsis Press, Essay Press, Subito? Or Canada's positively stellar BookThug?
Our Reviews Editor Ross Brighton reads submissions of reviews and interviews all year long. Writers whose work is accepted for publication receive any two Tarpaulin Sky Press trade paperbacks of their choice. Send a brief cover letter and your previously unpublished review to reviews[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com, and be sure to include "Attn: Review Editors" in the subject line. Click here for a list of review copies currently available. Publishers may send review copies to Book Reviews ~ Tarpaulin Sky Press ~ PO Box 189 ~ Grafton, VT 05146
Write some reviews, yo. Get paid. In books.
GOT SOME NEWS TO SHARE YOURDARNSELF?
If you have something to say about a new journal, new book, new press, new reading series; and if said newness will be of interest to the people who read TSky Press's books or journal, or--better yet!--includes TSky Press authors or journal contributors; and if you'd like to share this newness and can do so in a way that includes some chewy content and few superlatives, then please send your brief shoutout, sidebar, or feature article to our News Editor Amish Trivedi at news[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com
OKEEDOKEE
We're probably forgetting as much as we're including, but we hope you'll forgive us.
Send some work!
Cheers,
Christian Peet, Publisher
Colie Collen, Editor in Chief
& Editors, Tarpaulin Sky Press
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.
 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.
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