Tarpaulin Sky announces 2010 chapbook picks!

Tarpaulin Sky Press is delighted to announce that it has chosen not one but two chapbooks from the 2010 reading period: Claire Hero's "Dollyland," and  Paula Koneazny's "Installation," which will be published in Fall or Winter 2011.

Claire Hero is the author of Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press, 2009) and two chapbooks: Cabinet (dancing girl press) and afterpastures, winner of the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. Her poems appear in journals such as Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Foursquare, Handsome, La Petite Zine, A Public Space, Octopus, and in the anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers, and elsewhere. She lives in upstate New York, where she teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Paula Koneazny's poetry appears in Aufgabe, bone bouquet, New American Writing, OR, and on the Kelsey Street Press blog. She is an assistant editor of Volt.

We received many fine manuscripts. Too many, honestly--it's much easier to make decisions when manuscripts are not so "fine." If you own a press and produce chapbooks and are looking for recommendations, we would like to point you to a large handful of ones--well, thirty-five--that made us remember why we read at all. (& Look for work from many of these authors, forthcoming in our Chronic Content!):

Anthony Alessandrini, "Four Ways of Removing a Wall (A Field Manual)"
David Bartone, "Interstate"
Bryan Beck, "Monster of the Year"
Devin Becker, "Me-You: The Poems of Chad Penderson"
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, "a slice from the cake made of air" and "{H0}"
Lindsey Boldt, "Do Me, Dreamlife"
David Brennan, "Another Gallows"
Lisa Ciccarello, "Under the town, a map"
Dereck Clemons, "Pyramidd: Constructs historical: or In Action"
Daniel Coudriet, "Private Astronomies"
Farnoosh Fathi, "come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill"
Joe Hall, "Apocalesque"
Ally Harris, "Floor Baby"
Jess Hagemann, "Hungry"
Jenny Gropp Hess, "Organographies"
Steven Karl, "From Every Slit Throat Still Song"
Jason Labbe, "Black Wash Canal"
Sara Levine, "Tiny Signs of Disrespect"
Ella Longpre, "The Odor of the Hoax Was Gone"
Barbara Maloutas, "Later, Wetness"
Tony Mancus, "Dates & Times" and "A Vessel Interior"
Stefania Irene Marthakis, "(from) A Filmmaker's Handbook"
Margarita Meklina, "Linea Nigra"
Andy Nicholson, "The Ground that Music Moves"
Danielle Pafunda, "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison"
Kristin Palm, "Lake Merritt Field Notes"
Lance Phillips, "from Nietzsche’s Bed"
Francis Raven, "Taking Over the World"
Marthe Reed, "Nights Reading"
Kristin Sanders, "This is a map of their watching me"
Michael Sikkema and Jen Tynes, "Autogeography"
Gale Marie Thompson, "Come to the Kitchen, Kelsey"
Tony Trigilio, "Pay Per View"
Danielle Vogel, "Clasp, a hypnosis project"
Arianne Zwartjes, "Disem(body): A Tracing"

STAY TUNED for an announcement (shooting for the end of April) on the 2010 full-length manuscript submissions!

Emily Toder's new chapbook, Brushes With_, now available from Tarpaulin Sky Press

Emily Toder
Brushes With

Chapbook. Poetry
Limited edition of 150 copies
5"x7", 40 pp, pbk | October 2010
Cover art by Jono Tosch

$10 includes shipping in the U.S.
Click here to order by check.
Or order through PayPal:

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Praise for Brushes With

"Reading these charming, brave, shiny, and sad poems, a reader quickly discovers what a pleasure it is to “go up” to them, ready for anything to happen, and then step away feeling, as Kenneth Koch wrote, “puzzled, / Distressed, and illuminated, ready to believe / It is curious to be alive.” Brushes With is positively bursting with imagination, and the delighted language Emily Toder has shaped invites and rewards our attention at every turn. We are a lucky world to receive her book."
—Heather Christle

If geometry approaches shapes in space, and poetry approaches shapes in thought & if these combine to acknowledge one another's significance and affinities in human nature's never-ending wandering, then what we have been given is the genius and pleasure of Emily Toder's poetry.
—Dara Wier

Read more »

James Haug's new chapbook, _Scratch_ now available from Tarpaulin Sky Press

James Haug
Scratch

Chapbook. Poetry
Limited edition of 150 numbered copies
5"x7", 40 pp, pbk | October 2010

Cover art by Jono Tosch

$10 includes shipping in the U.S.
Click here to order by check.
Or order through PayPal:

Scratch is a collection of offbeat narratives, broken logic and weather reports, hats and pontoons, a little fact, a little awe and confusion. Four men with rhyming names can't manage to leave the house. A driver takes a wrong turn. An amnesiac attempts a memoir. Everything's a bit crooked, tending toward the unexpected, and the characters, wherever they are, are never quite at home.

Scratch proves beyond a reasonable doubt that James Haug is one hell of a Mystery writer. That’s “Mystery” with a capital “M,” which is to say Haug is a real poet with many anonymous sources whispering in his ear. He deftly uses some of the same devices found in a good thriller or police procedural. There’s the plainspoken narratives that propel the reader through the twilight twists and turns of the fabular landscapes of Scratch and past a rogue’s gallery of unreliable witnesses, but like any gumshoe worth his day rate, this poet doesn’t pretend to know the answers. It’s all about the questions, the great investigation that surprises and delights us all.

--William Waltz 

Read more »

Buggin Out: new look, new staff, new reviews & interviews . . ., and even some news re: chapbooks

BUGGING OUT W/ DANIEL RHODES

Daniel's the artist who designed Kim Gek Lin Short's wraparound cover for The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. His work is so bloody great, we can't wait until the book's Spring release--so we're excerpting some images for the TSky website. & Keep on the lookout for other cover art making sneaky-preview appearances on the site.

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NEW STAFF @ TARPAULIN SKY PRESS

The bad news: we're no longer hiring. The good news: we're delighted to welcome new editors and staff to the TSky crew. While we're at it, we'd also like to thank the good folk that have been here a long time, some from the beginning.

Big props to all, then: Advising Editors Rebecca Brown, Elena Georgiou, Bhanu Kapil, and Selah Saterstrom; Publisher Christian Peet; Editor in Chief Colie Collen; Editors Laynie Brown, Blake Butler, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Karla Kelsey, and Joanna Howard; Managing Editor Dianthe Harris; Associate Editors Duncan B. Barlow and Christine Wertheim; Production Editors Cristiana Baik, E. B. Goodale, Annie Guthrie, Kristen Nelson, and Stephen Shoup; Assistant Editors Brian Mihok, Jamey Dunham, and Michael Tod Edgerton; Reviews Editors Ross Brighton and Jared Schickling; Events Coordinator Michelle Puckett; Asst. Managing Editor Amanda Skubal; Line Editor J.A. Tyler; Copy Editor Caroline Ashby; Liaisons Sarah Brown, Jac Jemc, Deanne Lundin, and Brian Rogers; Events Assistant Megan DiBello; Production Assistants Ginger Knowlton, Josh Neely, Joseph Mains, and Joanna Pelletier; Editorial Assistants Erinn Mann, Eireene Nealand, Nathaniel Otting, Janna Plant, Mark Rockswold, Julianna Spallholz, Julie Strand, and Amish Trivedi.

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FOR THE PATIENT FOLK WONDERING WHADDUP W/MY CHAP MSS?

Notifications are already being being mailed. We're running behind (shocking!) but hope to finalize all decisions within the next week or two.

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NEW INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW ZORNOZA

TSky Press author Andrew Zornoza is interviewed by Molly Gaudry at Keyhole Magazine: includes "out-takes" from Where I Stay, a craving for negative reviews, good advice for homeless people in verdant pastures, a childhood pic, review copies for Eddie Vedder, and heaps of the refreshingly humble genius we've come to expect from Mr. Z.

An excerpt:

MG: Are you an experimental writer? What do you think about the possible overuse of the term "innovative"?

AZ: I like the word innovative. I don't like the word experimental. To me, the word conjures up failure and the white humped backs of balding scientists. All writing is experimental if you insist on having a reader. Even Judy Blume. But I'm not experimenting. I'm not trying anything new. New has nothing to do with it. I'm just putting the words the way I want to hear them. You may be experimenting by reading it, but me, I'm just trying to make it feel right.

Click here to read the entire interview

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NEW REVIEW OF BIG AMERICAN TRIP AT VERSE MAGAZINE

Brittany Taylor reviews TSky publisher Christian Peet's Big American Trip, at Verse magazine.

An excerpt:

As we follow the lone wanderer from Blaine, WA, to Brooklyn, we are given an increasingly intimate view of his private frustration with a society that wipes out all that has come before and simultaneously acknowledges its ravaged past with cheerful sound bites. The captions that crown many of the postcards are not-quite-prosaic bits of encyclopedic arcana that offer insight into the matter-of-fact manner in which Americans have treated their predecessors. With these tidbits, Big American Trip seeks to recall America’s erased history, deridable and otherwise. . . . The postcards are at once addressed to no one and everyone; it does not matter who reads them, but everyone will. Buckle up for Christian Peet’s worthwhile Big American Trip.

Please click here to read the whole review.

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NEW REVIEWS AT TARPAULIN SKY

James Belflower’s Commuter (Instance Press, 2009), reviewed by Joel P. Sodano Jr.

Commuter plays host to a constellation of motifs (international tourism, industrialization, photography, memory, identity) in addition to its main thematic focus—the juxtaposition of marriage and childbirth with the trauma of experiencing terrorist violence. In short, Commuter invites the reader on an aesthetic journey that tests the concept of relation through its positioning of various fragmentary manifestations of event, memory, emotion. This is illustrated at the book’s outset by a metro map that forms a multi-nodal system of simultaneous connection and separation. Thus, reading Commuter results in an experience greater than the sum of its parts, wherein one discovers unpredictable connections between various points of entry and departure. [Click here for the full review.]

Richard Froude's The History of Zero (Candle-Aria Press, 2008), reviewed by Sarah Suzor.

Zero questions the relationship between “fictions” (poetry, prose, literature) and “facts” (history, definition), and where in both fiction and fact language fails in conveying anything of absolute truth. . . . Zero is meant to be read and re-read multiple times, and Froude knows this, for it is our desire, as audience, to “make sense of something” that Froude is manipulating. [Click here for the full review.]

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FENCE

is up to its usual jaw-dropping amounts of goodness, not the least of which is a book that must be seen to be believed: Brandon Downing's text-image opus Lake Antiquity, wherein kitsch acquires gravity, becomes pathos, becomes a reckoning with the fairly unbelievable images and text that we'd sooner forget that we "own" in more ways than one. If you've seen [WARNING: seizure-alert at following link:] Dark Brandon, then this book might explain it to you. If you haven't seen Dark Brandon, then you should buy that as well. Says the promo for Lake Antiquity: "Brandon Downing has been scouring refuse piles and skimming the creme/scum off the top of two centuries of cultural production for these chiming elements. His paste-ups are cut-ups; his cut-ups are pasted with a discrimination that shares a border with insurgency." Yes. That, and a butt-nekked gnome.

Do yourself a favor and check out FB's holiday deals on Lake Antiquity, as well as Catherine Wagner's My New Job, Douglas Kearney's The Black Automaton, Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary.

Think how great you'll feel when you already own those books, and then show up at the 4-author book release party on Dec. 12th.

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RECENTLY RECEIVED AT TSKY PRESS

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.

Oana Avasilichioaei, Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009)

* Jack Boettcher, The Deviants (Airforce Joyride, 2009)

Rob Budde, Declining America (BookThug, 2009)

Angela Carr, The Rose Concordance (BookThug, 2009)

Barbara Claire Freeman, Incivilities (Counterpath Press, 2009)

* Emily Kendal Frey, Mark Leidner, and Zachary Schomburg, Coincide Series #5 (Brave Men Press, 209)

Katrine Marie Guldager, Copenhagen (P.K. Brask, translator, BookThug, 2009)

* David Highsmith, congregations (Plan B Press, 2009)

* David Highsmith, Petroglyph (Painted Bison Press, 2009)

David Highsmith, your wilderness & mine (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

Christine Hume, Shot (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Matt Jasper, Moth Moon (BlazeVox Books, 2009)

* Scott Alexander Jones, One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009)

Garrett Kalleberg, Malilenas (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

Diane Klammer, Shooting the Moon (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)

Karyna McGlynn, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books, 2009)

* Christina Pacosz, Notes from the Red Zone (Seven Kitchens Press [Rebound Series], 2009)

Stephen Ratcliffe, Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet (Counterpath Press, 2009)

Joanna Ruocco, The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009)

* 6 x 6 #19 (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

* Claudia Smith, Put Your Head in My Lap (Future Tense Books, 2009)

Jane Sprague, The Port of Los Angeles (Chax Press, 2009)

Nancy Stohlman, Searching for Suzi (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009)

* Michael Stewart, A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard, 2009)

* Michael Stewart, Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009)

* Janaka Stucky, Your Name Is the Only Freedom (Brave Men Press, 2009)

Spring Ulmer, The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press, 2009)

New from TSky Press: Jeanne Morel's _That Crossing Is Not Automatic_

Jeanne Morel
That Crossing Is Not Automatic

Chapbook. Poetry
5" x 7", perfectbound, 36 pages
April 2009
$10 includes shipping in the US

- click here to order
- click here for PDF excerpts from the book

Distilling fragments from her work in Cambodia and in the United States, Jeanne Morel's That Crossing Is Not Automatic presents a collage of edges—images moving from refugee camps to American prisons, from airports to taxi cabs, from immigration to deportation—offering us a dictionary, if not an atlas, of sites for our possible crossings.

About Jeanne Morel

Jeanne Morel was born in California and grew up in Seattle. In the mid-1990s she lived in Cambodia and taught at the University of Phnom Penh. She has worked with refugees and immigrants in community based agencies, schools, factories, and prisons. She lives in Seattle and teaches writing at Bellevue Community College. This is her first chapbook.

from That Crossing

Open Reading Period: Chapbook Manuscripts

Note: the following guidelines are for submissions of chapbook manuscripts only--we will read full-length manuscripts in October 2008 (details forthcoming).

Tarpaulin Sky Press will be reading chapbook manuscripts submitted during the month of August. Manuscripts should be postmarked between August 1 and August 31, 2008. There is no need to query first; simply mail the manuscript according to the directions below.

Writers who have not been published in our literary journal should include a $10 reading fee in the form of a check or a money order made payable to Tarpaulin Sky Press. Past contributors to Tarpaulin Sky may submit their manuscript with a $5 reading fee.

Manuscripts should be in the vicinity of 18-28 pages (give or take a couple). Send one copy of your manuscript along with two copies of the title page (note: the reading process is not"blind"--we ask for two title pages only so that we may keep one with the manuscript, and the other for reference/notes, etc). Be sure that your title pages include your name, address, telephone number, and email address. Cover letters are read with interest. We like to know who your are, what you're up to, and where we can read more of your work. We do accept simultaneous submissions but ask that you let us know immediately if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Individual pieces from the manuscript may have been previously published in magazines and anthologies, but the collection as a whole must be unpublished. Manuscripts will not be returned. Please do not send us your only copy.

Mail your submission to

Tarpaulin Sky Press
PO Box 189
Grafton, VT 05146

For notification of decisions, include a business-size SASE. If you would like to receive acknowledgment of the receipt of your manuscript, please include a stamped, self-addressed postcard. Notification of decisions will be made in November 2008. Publication of accepted manuscripts will be in 2009.

If you are not familiar with our press and the type of chapbooks (and full-length books) that we publish, we encourage you to explore our work before submitting, by clicking here and purchasing one of our titles.