#2017 chapbook series

[hyejungkook]

Tomorrow I read with the fabulous Jenny Molberg and Anna V.Q. Ross for A Common Sense Reading Series! Thank you, Jordan Stempleman, for hosting us.

Details:

Saturday, October 14th at 7 PM at KCAI Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice, 4415 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64111

Link to register: https://www.jordanstempleman.com/events/hyejung-kook-jenny-molberg-anna-vq-ross

Hyejung Kook’s poetry has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in Poetry as Spellcasting and The Critical Flame and a chamber opera libretto. Born in Seoul, Hyejung now lives in Kansas with her husband and their two children. She is a Fulbright grantee and Kundiman Fellow. Find her online at hyejungkook.tumblr.com.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal(LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Associate Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.

Anna V. Q. Ross’s most recent book, Flutter, Kick, won the 2020 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and the 2023 Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry. Her other books include If a Storm (winner of the Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize) and the chapbooks Figuring and Hawk Weather. A Fulbright Scholar, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and poetry editor for Salamander, her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Anna teaches at Tufts University and through the Emerson Prison Initiative and lives with her family in Dorchester, MA, where she raises chickens. Find her at annaVQross.com.

Jordan Stempleman (host) is the author of nine collections of poetry including Cover Songs (the Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). Stempleman is the co-editor of The Continental Review, editor for Windfall Room, faculty advisor for the literary arts magazine Sprung Formal, and curator of A Common Sense Reading Series.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Insert Coin by Joshua Zelesnick

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/insert-coin-by-joshua-zelesnick/

This title will be released on January 10, 2025

In Insert Coin the reckless project of #American #capitalism and #imperialism is felt through four characters—a contestant, a drone operator, a monster, and a prisoner—who interact in a world of game shows, chain-of-command killing, and confusion around the virtual and the real. Through video games, fantasy, and drone warfare by joystick, the book chronicles dissociation and denial as well as a soul longing for meaning in a world whose absurd violence and demand for profit feels simulated but is all too real. Insert Coin launches an experimental syntax with strict formal constraints, such as a 6-syllable line by 8-line stanza sequence to suggest the unbearable dimensions of a solitary confinement cell. In these #poems, a #civilization that can only imagine destruction asks, “how do I get to the next level?”

Joshua Zelesnick‘s poetry collection, Insert Coin (Finishing Line Press, 2025) was a finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize at Conduit Books and Ephemera and the Trio Award at Trio House Press. Cherub Poems, his chapbook, was published with Bonfire Books in 2019. His poetry and prose have appeared widely in magazines and journals including Diagram, The Texas Review, Jubilat, Juked, Labor Notes, and Counterpunch. He’s currently working on a poetry book titled Very Beautifully, Suddenly. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his loving partner and kids in a garden co-housing community. With friends, he helps host a living-room music and reading series.

PRAISE FOR Insert Coin by Joshua Zelesnick

Insert Coin is indelibly shaped by the atrocities committed by the United States during its interminable War on Terror while meditating on the structures that underlie that violence, including the cultural form of the video game. For all the seemingly disembodied virtuality of our digital lives, of the simulacral experience of what theorist McKenzie Wark calls gamespace—“I’m in a video / game and there’s no way out”—Joshua Zelesnick tirelessly attends to the material realities of what it means to be human in the infowhelm throughout this superb collection, to the bodies, feelings, affects, and images of those who have to navigate this space—which is also battlespace, dronespace. Page after page of Insert Coin confronts the fact that “constructing walls can’t defend us / from our tectonic heart,” and this collection’s remarkable, dense poems document some of the more difficult aspects of what it means to live on this late planet in this late year of late empire, this “strange electronic limbo, white / hot clarity of nightmare / in infrared, heat signatures / ghostly white against the cool black earth.” Zelesnick’s work also holds out poetry as an alternative to the eradicating quantification that defines so much of contemporary life, inviting us to hear and see and sing and feel some other space of play, a space against and beyond the violence of the digital, what we might call a poetryspace.

–Bradley J. Fest, author of 2013-2017: Sonnets (2024)

“Zelesnick’s language game places a jar not in Tennessee but to the wall(s): listens proper, listens the better to hear a prisoner’s voice; cracked shouts; grandmothers; children’s rhymes; tulips; a command, light em up; reported statistics then applause; some audience… These all come through and are formed in rough clay into this almost-story taking almost-place on a large empty plain, the figures and characters becoming, as we read, haunted and haunting. Insert Coin is a fabulous, furious book.”

–Kate Northrop, author of Homewrecker (2022)

I found a narrow form of six-syllable lines and eight-line stanzas to reflect the six-foot by eight -foot cell solitary confinement prisoners are forced to live in. So begins Joshua Zelesnick‘s meticulous, terse, fearsome book, Insert Coin. Extraordinary the way these poems unflinchingly confer their intelligence on suffering, burrowing deep into the dehumanized and dystopic: the prisoner in the embassy/the prisoner in solitary/the prisoner with sleep-deprived/ eyes still pale as a suffocating/fish…the prisoner as a meme. Zelesnick’s poems arise out of the crises of the era, and they provide that era with a relentless, formidable critic.

–Lynn Emanuel, author of Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing (2023)

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetrybook #read #poems #USA #history #society #civilization

[movedbywords]

SAT AUG 26@2PM Join Moved By Words & Frye Art Museum for New Voices Of Color 2023

Our Moved By Words fall event is coming up this weekend presented by the Frye Art Museum, if you have a minute please pass this information on! More information about our New Voices 2023 reading featuring Zaji Cox, author of 'Plum For Months' below (and for writers a chance to write with us in the beautiful Frye Art Museum on Saturday!)

MOVED BY WORDS: NEW VOICES OF COLOR READING — SAT AUG 26 2PM MORE INFO & FREE EVENT REGISTRATION FOR ATTENDEES: https://fryemuseum.org/calendar/event/moved-words-new-voices-color-reading

WRITE WITH US 

We still have spots for writers and volunteers for this Saturday. Please reply ASAP if you would like to get early entry to the museum, sit with the writers, read with us during the event, and have a space to put your books or art after the show then give us a shout. There will be tables available and we will have time to spend as a writing community together. We are going to write one short piece on "Remixing Identity" based on the Kelly Akashi exhibition at the Frye Art Museum: https://youtu.be/3pxw5pJw-E8  VOLUNTEER TO HELP

If all you want to. do is come early and support, help set up tables, and do a general vibe check that's fine too—just reply to this email ASAP and tell us you are interested in volunteering. Otherwise we hope to see you at the show~!

MOVED BY WORDS: NEW VOICES OF COLOR READING — SAT AUG 23 2PM Join the Frye and Moved by Words as we celebrate 10 years of poetry project New Voices of Color with a special reading at the Frye Art Museum, honoring both a decade of emerging talent and the closing of current exhibition Kelly Akashi: Formations. Headlining the program, Zaji Cox will offer a special reading from her recently published book of essays Plums for Months, which explores life growing up mixed race in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. Other participating artists include Maryam Imam Gabriel, Stacy D Flood, Prashant Kakad, and more special guests!

New Voices of Color invites emerging authors and poets to workshop, connect, share works, and get inspired. Participating poets will have spent the day at the museum with Moved by Words founder Skyler Reed, touring the galleries to absorb Akashi’s work. Their responses will be shared during the reading, highlighting the special symbiosis between the visual and literary arts.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Zaji Cox wrote her first short story at age nine. A dancer, model, and artist, she has performed at the PDX Poetry Festival, Survival of the Feminist reading series, Corporeal Writing’s LOOP, and the Northwest Folklife Festival. She holds a bachelor's degree in English and her writing can be found in Pathos Literary Magazine, Entropy, The Portland Metrozine, Cultural Daily, CARE Covid Art REsource, and the anthology 2020: The Year of the Asterisk (University of Hell Press).

Skyler Reed (Skyler / Skylers / he / him / they / their) is a Sycan River Paiute (PIE-YOOT) artist, writer, and musician of the duo Lark & Raven currently living under the troll bridge in Sia’hl (SEE-AL-TH) on Duwamish (DOO-WAU-MISH) Tribal Lands. The founder of Moved By Words and a recipient of the Dean’s Residential Fellowship at the UW Information School, Skyler is the author of two chapbooks, And All Ampersands (2016) and Sex & Wikipedia (2017).

ABOUT MOVED BY WORDS

Founded by Skyler Reed, Moved By Words is a project dedicated to connecting new writers with writing workshops and community outreach. In 2020, Skyler hosted and organized the first ever free-of-charge women and queer folk of color writers' workshops and reading series, in community collaboration with the women and queer folk of Northwest Native Writers Circle and of the Whitenoise Reading Series community.

ABOUT KELLY AKASHI

Kelly Akashi: Formations is organized by the San José Museum of Art and curated by Lauren Schell Dickens, Chief Curator. The presentation at the Frye Art Museum is organized by Amanda Donnan, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions.

Major support for Kelly Akashi: Formations provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Fellows of Contemporary Art. Generous support for the Frye’s installation provided by the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Frye Foundation, and Frye Members. Media sponsorship provided by The Stranger.

SKYLER REED

MOVED BY WORDS

[lovepoemsforpace]

Poets 2023

Erin Kirsh is an award-winning writer from Toronto. Her work has appeared in Alma, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, The Pinch, Gordon Square Review, EVENT, CV2, QWERTY, PRISM International, Geist, and more. Visit her at www.erinkirsh.com or follow her on twitter @kirshwords.

Jasmine Ruff (they/them) writes from the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in The Puritan, Foglifter Press, Plentitude Magazine, and elsewhere. Currently, they are the poetry editor at PRISM international. 

Edie Reaney Chunn (they/she) is a writer based on the the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their poetry has recently been published in Maisonneuve, and they are the 2021 winner of the Norma Epstein National Award for Creative Writing. Edie loves love !, and enjoys working collaboratively and inefficiently on theatre projects, and other pursuits. 

Dora Prieto is a Vancouver-based emerging writer, translator, and cat mami based with work published or forthcoming in Acentos Review, Capilano Review, Catapult, GUTS, Maisonneuve, Room Magazine, and SOMOS. Her poem "the withholding map" was the winner of the 2022 Room Magazine Poetry Contest :))) She also co-facilitates El Mashup, a creative workshop series for Latinx youth in Vancouver. 

Dani Rodríguez Chevalier (she/ella) is passionate about analogue & lo-fi practices, poetry & hybrid forms, art making in community, and independent radio. She is a co-facilitator + co-creator of writing and experimental film programs for youth: "el mash up" and "filmfood". She currently lives with her two dachshunds and one of her 4 siblings in the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ nations.

Cristina Holman (she/her) lives and writes on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh). She was a participant in the 2017/18 Artspeak Studio for Emerging Writers and the 2022 Banff Centre Spring Writer’s Retreat. Her debut chapbook, published with Artspeak Gallery in 2018, is titled Stop Wincing/We’re Fine. Her work can be found in Bad Nudes magazine and Poetry is Dead, and her second chapbook, Repeater, was published in 2021 by Zed Press. 

Erin is a poet/playwright and performer who values interdisciplinarity, collaboration, care, sensitivity and hybridity in her own and others’ work. Learn more about Erin by following her poetry account @crowlake or visiting www.crowlake.space

Nadia (she/her) is a poetry and fiction writer raised on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver). Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared and are forthcoming in PRISM international, Bat City Review, The Temz Review and Phoebe. Her debut chapbook of poetry, Something Spectacular, was published by 845 press in 2021.  Follow her on instagram @ned4writing

[nostroviapress]

2017 Chapbook Contest: Week 12 Review

It’s a huge day for Nostrova! Press, as presales have finally begun! We also have beautiful blurbs to share, too! 

Presales!

After a good chunk of the weekend + 4th of July, our website has been updated to include blurbs and and covers, and our online store is built out with pages for each chapbook + the bundle deal! We’re ready for today!

http://nostroviapress.bigcartel.com/ http://nostroviapress.bigcartel.com/ http://nostroviapress.bigcartel.com/

We’re starting with a limited edition print run of only 125 hand-numbered copies, so be sure to get yours! We’ll be shipping next month.

As always, our chapbooks are sold at a "pay-what-you-can + $5 shipping" rate, though we’ve included other payment options in case you’re tight on cash–we want everyone who wants a copy to be able to get one! <3

Blurbs

As of now, all blurbs have been received! I really like getting two for the back of every chapbook we release--besides the cover, I’m personally drawn to the back cover notes for all books I come across, seeing whether these mini-reviews invite me to read further. 

Here are the blurbs in full(!):

EVERYTIME I PARK MY CAR I FEEL LIKE I'M DOING SOMETHING WRONG BY JOSEPH PARKER OKAY

This chapbook has a story where an armadillo is the most revered animal in the world. I found that relatable because I revere armadillos very much. It also has a story that is very pro-snake, which I support. You will probably have fun reading this thing. And one of my favorite parts is the story titles, so if you're busy you can just read the titles and have fun that way, too.  –Steve Roggenbuck

This book is the response to the reality we are all trying to end. Imagine you didn't sleep for 8 days and then you told someone you love them. This is that moment.  –Audrey Honeydrone

LOATHE/LOVE/LATHE BY ALAIN GINSBERG

As a poet, Alain Ginsberg is resourceful with language and imagery, finding metaphor and anecdote where the reader had previously thought language had already dredged all it could out of that instance; as a vocally transgender poet, Alain Ginsberg is a poignantly necessary voice. There is often a lot of talk in literary communities about what makes a "trans poem" a "trans poem," and while the majority of Alain's poems mention they are trans somewhere within the text, there is never a sense of force or plea; rather, while Alain's gender is influential in all aspects of their work, it does not define their work. Alain's work is instead profoundly influenced by the daunting task of humanizing and unraveling trauma, from abusive relationships to harassment by customers at their food-service job, and throughout their narrative, Alain never lies to their audience or sugarcoats the circumstance. Instead, Alain presents their truth unflinchingly, letting the audience know they've got some heavy shit to talk about, but it's our choice if we want to listen. And goddamn, I am positive y'all will want to listen. –Linette Reeman, writer, performer, Aries

Loathe/Love/Lathe is a phenomenal book written by an even more magnificent poet. Alain Ginsberg brings to every poem a rawness that only they are capable of bringing. Exploring topics such as bodies, gender, safety, and the self (whatever the "self" is), Ginsberg provides not only understanding but an honest gentleness that is so necessary. No other book of poetry that I have had the privilege of reading does justice to the lived realities of young queer Americans in the same way Loathe/Love/Lathe does. Having read this book a few times over now, each time being left without words yet with an intense desire to hold every person I've ever loved, I truly recommend this work.  –Erin Taylor, writer, Interviews for Maudlin House, Sagittarius

OUR OWN SOFT BY KATIE CLARK

Katie Clark's collection is a fierce journey into gender and sexual identity. They say, "I wake up with your body my body" and "I was a boy until I wasn't a boy." These lines are absolutely what we need right now. The collection is self-conscious about its own body and explores what it means to fall deeply into the abyss of others' bodies when you are barely living in your own. 

–Joanna Valente, Marys of the Sea (The Operating System)

the poems of our own soft refuse to protect us from sharp edges as we unravel their secrets in the low light of unsleep. to move forward we rely on remembered litanies, associating to make ripples. imperfect perfect summer / orange at the edges / water / water / what clothes / which trees to bother climbing / what do you see when you try to see yourself / what do you see when looking back over your shoulder? is this nostalgia or something else invented to stand in its place? either way, it feels sun-warm: a snake coiled on a rock that may strike or may stay still as death. Clark writes, “it doesn’t always happen in the order that it happened,” then throws the past in the air like confetti / like releasing a hive of bees to hunt for what is sweet, stinging as they seek the honey out.  –Emily O'Neill, Pelican (YesYes Books)

A big thanks to these thoughtful folks for their love and support as we enter another year of releases <3 

Print Proofs

I’ve started sending along files to @bottlecappress​ and am excited to begin print proofs soon! In the next week or so I hope to have the rest of the files ready for this important stage :)

Stay tuned, as our 2017 video poem series begins soon!

Much love, and see you next week! <3 -Christopher

*

We’ll have a new Tavern post each Wednesday, giving an inside look at the N! process, so stay tuned for more updates!

Week 1 Review    (Opening the Floodgates) Week 2 Review    (Reading + Ordering Supplies) Week 3 Review    (Reading + MSS Observations)  Week 4 Review    (Reading + Starting Search for Finalists) Week 5 Review    (Picking Winners)  Week 6 Review    (Featured Finalists + Announcing Winners) Week 7 Review    (Cover Art + Additional Pieces) Week 8 Review    (Blurbs + Excerpts + Review Copies) Week 9 Review    (Timeline Check + Interior Design) Week 10 Review  (Front Covers Revealed!) Week 11 Review  (Action Items)

[matthewburnside]

SELECTED WORK OR INTERVIEWS APPEARING IN LITERARY MAGAZINES:

2023

“Fable” Prose Poem, Nurture Literary Journal. Forthcoming. 

2022 

“A Tooth is a Tree” Poem, The Meadow. “Perpetuum’s Sonata” Fiction. Cream City Review. “No Exit: A Gallery of Existential Horrors” Nonfiction, Post Road. “Here is a Little Book to Comfort You During These Unusually Dark Times” Chapbook, Poems, Selcouth Station Press. “Transmigration of the Soul: a Cheat Sheet” Story, Phantom Drift Limited. “Hungers | Hunches| Hunts | Haunts” + “True Story” Stories, The Pinch.

2021 

“An Advent Calendar to Assay the Dolorously Heartsick” Hybrid, Meow Meow Pow Pow. “Technologies of Sorrow” Poem, The Shore. “Attention All Poets!!!” + “Can You Just Be Serious Already, Please?” Prose Poems, Sledgehammer. 3 “The Artist of the Ugly” Story, Contrary. “Not a Prose Poem” Prose Poem, Unbroken Journal. “Ramshackle Heavens” Prose Poem, Ice Floe Press: Pandemic Anthology. “Reliquaries of the Loveless” Story, Hominum. “Ghost Story” Story, Hobart After Dark. “Encore” Story, BULL. “Infinity Paradise Oblivion Cubicle” Story, Trampset “Digital Dreaming in Analog” Story, Heavy Feather Review. “Starskins” Story, Hobart. “Caustics: A Love Story” Story, Always Crashing. 

2020 

“Three Prayers” Poems, Rejection Letters “I cut my hand on a flower sharp with absurdity” Prose Poem, Giallo Lit “¤ Clockwork Melancholies ¤” Flash Fairy Tale, GASHER Journal “Young Escher Reconsiders the Human Heart as a Series of Tessellations Unspooling Toward Eternity” + “All of Tomorrow’s Rust is Electric,” Prose Poems, No Contact “∂ Tetherlings ∂”, “₾ Pilgrimage ₾,” Flash Fairy Tales, Lammergeier “Postlunar Lovesong” Poem, Pithead Chapel “The Prognosticators” Short Story, Okay Donkey “Meditations on an Echo in a Cave – Part I: A Brief History of the Coffee / Tea Break in Nintendo’s Mother Series, Writing as Getting Lost, Bombs, Wolves, Wax Jesus, & The Art of Pretending to Pray” Nonfiction, Grimoire “Wiki of Infinite Sorrows” Novel, KERNPUNKT. Forthcoming “13 objects of obscure power” Digital Chapbook (poetry, hybrid) – [https://matthewkburnside.wixsite.com/13objects] “Dear Wolfmother – Part 3, Serialized Digital Novel, Heavy Feather Review. Forthcoming 

2019 

“Secondhand Heavens,” Story, Cartridge Lit “Moments After My Wife Informs Me from the Passenger Seat That Lightning is Merely a Bundle of Negatively Charged Ions but What We Famously Know as Lightning Is Actually Just the Positive Flash of Afterlight Crawling Its Way Wounded Back Up the Sky,” Prose Poem, The Hunger “Story of a Dollhouse,” Poem, 8 Poems “There,” Poem, The Stay Project “Dear Wolfmother - PARTS I&II: Allegro/Summer”+”Adagio/Autumn” Serialized Digital Novel, Heavy Feather Review “Interview with Josh Denslow,” Interview, Lit Reactor “Parting Letter,” Nonfiction, Brevity blog 

2018 

“Rules to Win the Game,” Novel, Spuyten Duyvil “Meditations of the Nameless Infinite,” Poetry Collection, Robocup Press. 

2017 

“A Topography for Cataclysmic Dreamers,” Mixed Media Collaboration, 7X7 “The Architecture of Emotion,” Interview with A.A. Balaskovits, Cartridge Lit “Band-Aids are Some Bull,” Poem, Lit.Cat “Brief Index of All My Past Lives Leading Up to You,” Poem, Maudlin House “Postludes: An Interview with Matthew Burnside,” Interview with Koh Xin Tian, Ploughshares blog “On Postludes,” Interview with Lauren Prastien, Michigan Quarterly Review “An Interview with Matthew Burnside,” Interview with Patrick Font, Arcadia 4 “An(other) Interview…,” Interview with Sarena Ulibarri. Spec Fiction blog 

2016 

“The World is Flat” Poem, JMWW, Exquisite Duet “Spies” Story, Day One “Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost” Poem, Cartridge Lit “Totidem Verbis” Digital Poem, Permafrost 

2015 

“In Search Of: A Sandbox Novel” Interactive Novel-in-Progress, Best American Experimental Writing  “Six Books to Light the Way Through the Darkest Night(s) of Your Soul” Blog post, Ploughshares “Reading as Intoxicant, Part II: Ten Books That Are Basically Drugs” Blog post, Ploughshares. “Reading as Intoxicant, Part I: Neurochemical Qualities of the Modern Manic Page Peeler” Blog post, Ploughshares “Carefully Curated Catastrophes” Blog post, PANK “In Search Of: A New Media Crash Course” Blog post. PANK “My Literary Zombie Apocalypse Dream Team” Blog post, Ploughshares. “Interactivity and the Game-ification of Books” Blog post, Ploughshares. “Stories You Can Touch” Blog post, Ploughshares “Bestiary” Fiction, Los Angeles Review “Postludes” Fiction, Gingerbread House “The Devil (and God) in the Details” Nonfiction, Passages North Blog “Rules to Win the Game” Fiction, MARY: A Journal of New Writing [reprint] “Five Literary Games” Blog post, Ploughshares “The Virtue of Stillness” Blog post, Ploughshares “An Incredibly Brief Introduction to New Media Lit” Blog Post, Ploughshares “Is Anyone Reading Your Blog Posts?: Building a Literary Community in the Age of Facebook” Blog post, Ploughshares 

2014 

“On Bitterness” Nonfiction, Passages North Blog. July 25 “I’m Sorry Princess But Your Plumber Is In Another Castle,” Nonfiction, Entropy. July 13. “As We Speak Pink is Pissing in the Mouth of Tyranny,” Poetry, Black Heart Magazine. June “I am a Quantum Wizard,” Poetry. Literary Orphans “Twelve Classic Poems Rewritten By Twelve Classic Video Games,” Poetry, Cartridge Lit. "Directing James Franco," Nonfiction, DIAGRAM. Issue 14.2. “The Root to Heel is Peeved with Ghoul Intestines," Poetry, The Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature/The NewerYork “Anti-Midnight in the Kingdom of Yes” + “Consequence of Splitting the Atom,” Poetry, OmniVerse [reprint]. ZombieVerse: Resurrection Issue 

2013 

“Oblivion’s Fugue,” Fiction, Revolution House [reprint]. Volume 3.3. December “Questionable Lessons on the Craft of Writing Deciphered from Some Shitty Translations of My ‘What Would I Say’ Results,” Nonfiction, Sundog Lit Blog “Novel Excerpt from In Search Of” + “Interview with Matthew Burnside,” Fiction, Interview, Squalorly “My Kingdom for a Placebo,” Fiction, Schlock Magazine “Mow a Field of Flux” + “Iguana Ambulance,” Poetry, The Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature/ The NewerYork “Preludes,” Fiction, Prick of the Spindle. Vol. 7.2 “The Zombie Apocalypse Will Be Televised?” + “Anatomy of a Clockwork Cock” + “Four 5 Ways to Drown a Cloud,” Poetry, Literary Orphans "In Japan There Are Crows as Big as Bicycles: An American’s Brief but Indispensable Guide to the World at Large," Nonfiction, The Molotov Cocktail “J Franco Uploads a Video of Himself Singing Ke$ha to YouTube,” Nonfiction, Defenestration. April 17 “Index of Humilities: a Self-Study (of Sorts),” Nonfiction, Sundog Lit Blog. March 11 "Careening Down the Highway in a Stolen Bumper Car, Slappy Sullivan Has His Last Laugh" + "The Puppy Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised" + "At the Sour Patch Kids' Birthday Party," Fiction, Black Heart Magazine. February 19 "note found on vanity mirror one hour after your melting away," Poetry, Interrobang Magazine "For Kevin," Fiction, Apt "For Mom," Fiction, Necessary Fiction "For Dad," Fiction, Monkeybicycle "On the Benefits of a Lego Heart, Which Unlike Human Hearts Can Be Rebuilt Again and Again Knowing the Resilience of Their Delicate Construction Even as They're Being Smashed Against Something like a House or Tree Trunk or Even Your Daddy's Old Pickup Truck With the Missing Left Rearview Mirror and Faulty Cab Lights," Fiction, Hobart. January 30 "Horoscapes," Poetry, Menacing Hedge 

2012 

"Chronology of a Black Hole,” Poetry, Ilk. Issue 6 "11 More Inflexible Rules for Upstart Writers," Nonfiction, PANK Blog. December 3. "For Heather," Fiction, Bartleby Snopes. Issue 9 "Romance: Beyond Thunderdome," + "Death Metal Music Box," Poetry, Used Gravitrons. Issue 9 "Cosmonauts/nots/knots," Fiction, Ninth Letter. Debut Online Issue. "Primer for Imaginary Theft," Poetry, Unshod Quills. October 10. "Into the Purple," Poetry, Photography, Extracts. October 3 "Only the Gods Know What Steve Buscemi is Capable Of," Fiction, Untoward. Volume 2, Issue 12 "Totems for New Combustible Life," Poetry, OF ZOOS. Issue 1.2 "The Internet Brushes Her Teeth With Candy Skulls," Poetry Collaboration, co-written with Nathan Blake, OF ZOOS. Issue 1.2 "Poem from the Cobbled-Together Statuses of Mom's Facebook Friends," Poetry, Rorschach Occasional "Futures," Fiction, LITnIMAGE "On the Failure of Language to Comfort You Following the Death of Your Pet Rock, Pebble Without a Cause," Poetry, The Northville Review. September 4 "This Poem is a Legitimate Threat," Poetry, Banango Street. Issue 2 "Manifesto in Autopilot," Nonfiction, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review. August 6. "Nineteen Uses for a Room Its Walls Perfumed With Kerosene," Poetry, Radioactive Moat "For Kylie," Fiction, Jersey Devil Press "A Brief/Infinite Summer of Playing House," Poetry, Gargoyle "The City She Sings Noir, Softly First & Then Without Mercy," Poetry, A-Minor. July 30. "Dear Poem," Poetry, The Fiddleback "11 Inflexible Rules for Upstart Writers," Nonfiction, PANK Blog. July 3. "Concerning the Sad Magician," Poetry, Word Riot "Sunken Dreamers' Almanac," Fiction, Pear Noir! Issue 8. "Escapology," Fiction, NAP. 2.10 "Oblivion's Fugue," Fiction, The Stone Hobo "A Good Mandible is Hard to Find," Poetry, Birdfeast. Issue 3. Summer 6 "Karma Sutra” + "Trading Cards for the Legally Paranoid" Poetry, Dirtflask. Issue 3 "Anti-Midnight in the Kingdom of Yes" + "Consequence of Splitting the Atom" Poetry, > kill author. Issue 18 "Ahmed Builds a Miniature Trebuchet Out of Milk Cartons and Popsicle Sticks, Aims it at Nobody," Poetry, elimae "Yul Brynner Doesn't Give a Motherfuck" + "No Orgasm Will Ever Make Me Feel the Way Morgan Freeman's Voice Sounds" + "Trapped in Gary Busey's House, One Text Left" Poetry, Dinosaur Bees. Issue 4 "How to Build a Human Child From Spare Parts," Poetry, Used Furniture Review. February 3. 

2011 

"Revival," Fiction, Juked. November 15 "This Poem Will Not Save You," + "Romance like a Pneumatic Hiss" + "Tao of Right Now" Poetry, The Chaffey Review. Issue 7 "Literary Short Story: A Mad Lib," Fiction, PANK. Issue 6 "Robots in Tokyo," Pale Horse Review, Poetry "Emily on Fire, Waltzing, Waiting for the Rain," Poetry, Ginosko, Issue 11. "Rules to Win the Game," Poetry, Zahir "21st Century Postmodern Love Song" + "Scenes From a Fractious Lucid Dream," Poetry, Psychic Meatloaf "Moon on Fire," Fiction, Revolution House. Issue 2. "Biography," Fiction, decomP "Ballad of a Wingless Butterfly, Torn Asunder By Unforeseen Windstorms," Fiction, The Dirty Napkin. Volume 4.4. "Promethean Proclamation," Poetry, Danse Macabre. Poésie D'été: Summer Issue "Procession of the Dogface Lepers," Fiction, Gloom Cupboard. Issue 128. "Pan's Lobotomy," Fiction, State of Imagination "Ballad of a Bumblebee Trapped in Honey," Fiction, Contrary, Summer Issue. "Splinter," Fiction, Short, Fast, and Deadly. Issue 81 "Hey, got a light?" Fiction, Pulp Metal Magazine. May 29 

2010 

"Cautionary Notes on a Blood-Splashed Sneaker Sole, Size 6½," Poetry, PANK. November "Headline," Fiction, The Cynic Online Magazine. Volume 12, Issue 9. September "Adrift," Fiction, Barrier Islands Review, Issue 4 "Be a Minecatcher" + "Meditations of the Nameless Infinite" Poetry, Neon Magazine, UK. Issue 23, Spring 

2009 

"Dog Death Requiem," Fiction, Concho River Review. Vol. XXIII, Spring

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Kate Zambreno, Author of To Write As If Already Dead

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her newest book is To Write As If Already Dead, published by Columbia University Press.

Kate Zambreno will be in conversation with T Fleischmann about her new book in our City Lights LIVE! virtual event series on Wednesday, June 30th, 2021.

*****

Where are you writing to us from?

I’m writing to you from the first floor of the Victorian house we have rented in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, for nearly a decade. We haven’t left this entire year. I am on the couch at the end of a long day. There’s an early evening light coming in through the front window, my dog Genet is vigilantly expecting dinner, my four-year-old is tearing around outback, while her baby sister and her father watch.

What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?

Going to Prospect Park regularly this year—even in January and February—and watching my daughter run around, and make mudpies, and make forts and strange tree sculptures by dragging around fallen branches, sticks, rocks, and logs.

What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?

I am writing the introduction to the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho’s novel, Empty Wardrobes, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Two Lines Press, so I’m thinking through that work of interiority and domestic spaces and oppression and grief.

I just finished being in conversation with Cristina Rivera Garza at Sarah Lawrence College, where I teach, and a work that Rivera Garza kept mentioning in conversation with her newest essay collection Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press) is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press), so that’s up next.

I’m reading everything I can get my hands on about Eva Hesse, including the diaries, for a novel I’m writing, Foam, that thinks through different traumas and textures, including soft sculpture.

Speaking of Two Lines Press, I’ve been loving the work of Marie NDiaye in translation, specifically Self-Portrait in Green. I’ve also been returning frequently to works by Japanese women in translation, specifically, Yuko Tsushima, not only Territory of Light but also her stories, and Hiroko Oyamada’s novels, all published in translation by New Directions.

For a class I teach at Sarah Lawrence, on writing and elegy and the anthropocene, I’m reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press). Hedi El-Kholti, my editor at Semiotext(e) is sending me Peter Sloterdijik’s Spheres trilogy in the mail, because I need to read a book called Foams! And so I’m looking forward to that. I also am looking forward to reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

The diptych structure of the book was inspired by reading Enrique Vila-Matas’s Because She Never Asked (published in translation by New Directions), which begins with the story written for the conceptual artist Sophie Calle to live out—the second half involves the Vila-Matas narrator writing the story. Vila-Matas is so ludic and conceptual and in love with literature and probably one of the writers that inspires me the most for the past two books (Drifts and the Guibert study). And Sophie Calle as well—the concept of a noirish or speculative essay like The Address Book—and in To Write As If Already Dead I think through Calle’s relationship with Hervé Guibert and how they fictionalized each other in their works. The photobooks of Moyra Davey, the relationship of her essays and diaristic works to her images, are incredibly important to me, like Burn the Diaries and Les Goddesses. Anne Carson, especially her talks and pieces collected in Float and her Short Talks. Bernhard and Sebald.

Of course, I should say the writing of Hervé Guibert, and that’s the right answer—the book in general was catalyzed by him, thinking through his whole project, the diary, the later illness works, his relationship to speed, to tone, to writing friendships. There’s also really interesting writing that’s channeling Guibert now—from Moyra Davey’s work, to Andrew Durbin’s novel Skyland, that Nightboat published.

So much of the first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a love letter to the community I formed online now a decade ago and whose writing I always feel in conversation with—my friends who are writers are often my favorite writers, and doing such tender and vital work, especially T. Fleischmann, who I’m delighted to be in conversation with at City Lights. I love them and their work and we have spoken to each other about Guibert for a while. Others like Sofia Samatar, and Danielle Dutton, who also runs Dorothy, a publishing project.

The book is dedicated to Bhanu Kapil, who I first met online a decade ago as we each wrote these unruly notebook projects on our blogs, and so much of the study feels like continuing the conversation we’ve been having the past few years, about how to write and survive under capitalism, on caretaking vs art. I think Bhanu is one of the most important and thrillingly playful and exciting writers alive.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I think it would be on Cortelyou Road in Ditmas Park, as we don’t have a bookstore here. It would be called Finger and Thumb – when my partner John Vincler and I always spoke about having a bookstore that’s what we wanted to call it, it’s from Beckett and seems to gesture to the eroticism of actual print. I’m imagining we would sell artists’ books and chapbooks (like Sarah McCarry’s Guillotine series), art presses, presses like Semiotext(e) and Dorothy and Two Lines and Fitzcarraldo and Nightboat and New Directions and Transit Books. I think that our bestseller would be Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, because it’s the book we often refer to amongst each other and urge on others to read, especially those interested in taking care in writing from research and archives, of what the archives have neglected, and the imaginative possibility of resurrecting the lives of others.

[rpgsandbox]

Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons

Strange Attractor Press, Edited by Peter Bebergal, with an afterword by Ann VanderMeer

Cover art by Arik Roper, Interior illustrations and explorer’s map by Alex Crispin

Special Edition Hardback £30.00 Includes a chapbook edition of A.M. Merritt’s 1918 novella People of the Pit with art by Virgil Finlay.

Hardback available 16 November, with paperback to follow in early 2021.

“When the adventurers first arrive in the village, they can already hear whispers of the strange and terrible happenings in the ruins of the nearby hills…”

Drawing upon Gary Gygax’s list of “inspirational reading” in the original 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide, Appendix N presents a selection of short fiction and resonant fragments that shaped the world’s most popular role playing game.

Rippling flesh, fiendish beasts and chasmic horrors populate what were then entirely novel fantastic landscapes, which have lost none of their atmosphere, magic or otherworldly allure in our own embattled century.

Appendix N explores and contextualizes these ambitious lyrical excursions that set the adventurous tone and dank, dungeon-crawling atmospheres of fantasy roleplay as we know it today.

Featuring tales by Poul Anderson, Frank Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Tanith Lee, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, David Madison, Michael Moorcock, C. L. Moore, Fred Saberhagen, Clark Ashton Smith, Margaret St. Clair, Jack Vance, Manly Wade Wellman.

Whilst this new book is a collection of some of the short stories listed in Gygax’s famous Appendix N, a previous book of the same title has taken a critical look at the majority of works on that list:

Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons by Jeffro Johnson ~ Castalia House (2017)

Jeffro Johnson is an expert role-playing gamer, an accomplished Dungeon Master, and a three-time Hugo Award Finalist. In this book he critically reviews all 43 works and authors listed by Gygax, in the famous “Appendix N”, as the primary influences on his seminal role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. In doing so, Johnson draws a series of intelligent conclusions about the literary gap between past and present that are surprisingly relevant to current events, not only in the fantastic world of role-playing, but the real world in which the players live.

Appendix N is a deep intellectual dive into literary history that will fascinate any serious role-playing gamer or fan of classic science fiction and fantasy.

==========================================

And for those unfamiliar with Appendix N, here it is from the 1st edition  Dungeon Masters Guide (Gary Gygax, TSR, 1979):

[pswgallery]

Visual Shareware #14 „WHY“.   This chapbook is a modified duplicate of my forthcoming original artist book "WHY". It contains a series of etchings created in 2017/18 in an etching course experimenting with dry transfer lettering on etching plates. Mimeo printed, handbound edition of 45 copies, 16 pages, A6 size.


PDF preview

buy here

[practicegallerynyc]

ICP Lab: Queering the Collection

March 25, 2018, 3-5:30pm, ICP Museum, 250 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

Artist Christopher Clary hosts a show-and-tell workshop for the ICP Library series Queering the Collection. Ten artists and collectives will present works that range from a zine project that documents the death of nine men at a 1970s gay bathhouse to a journal that promotes critical engagement with contemporary art and politics from artists, writers, and thinkers who work outside of mainstream discourses. Join the conversation to define and complicate the very notion of what it means to queer through insights from the ICP Library’s collection.

Queering the Collection is a series of exhibitions and events originally conceived by Emily Dunne of the ICP Library and Brett Erich Suemnicht of GenderFail as an intervention in the library. GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative featuring the perspectives of queer and trans people and people of color. The project looks to build up, reinforce, and open opportunities for creative projects. The hope at ICP Library is to present work of and outside the collection as a way to excavate and acquire new material as well as to expand the voices of artists in the collection.

Participants:

Practice began as an independent, not-for-profit gallery run by Philip Tomaru in the Lower East Side of New York City. The limits and contextualization of self-publishing within contemporary artistic practices was a particular emphasis area, as seen through several projects realized in the space including Visible Scene, Conversations in Print, and Poster, a collaborative experimental publishing project involving over a dozen artists. After a year of programming, the gallery is now nomadic without a public space and renamed Private Practice. Most recently, Shelves, Cabinets, Closets was exhibited in a small Paris residential apartment for one evening that coincided with the Paris Ass Book Fair at the Palais de Tokyo.

Aaron Krach is an artist and writer based in New York City. He works with people, books, rocks, text, vodka, and frogs to make books, sculptures, prints, and installations. He exhibits in galleries, book fairs, and public spaces in cities large (Sao Paulo and New York City) and small (Lake Ohrid, Macedonia). He once hired a hustler to make paintings with a frog. Krach has also collaborated with American soldiers in Afghanistan to ship useless stones from Kabul to New York City. Often his work is distributed through newspapers, email, t-shirts, and bookstores. Recent books include, Almost Everything (Dark Pools), about the dark side of Mies Van der Rohe, and Richard Prince Cowboy, Chris, and Jennifer, which underline and undermine the star system. Recently he reconstructed a 25,000-image archive into a set of 10 encyclopedic image books. Aaron is a two-time recipient of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Grant for Public Art. His first novel, Half-Life, was published by Alyson Books.

Alice O’Malley is a New York photographer whose portraits comprise an archive of downtown’s most notorious artists, performers, and muses. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including PS1/MOMA, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the ICP Museum, agnes b. galerie du jour, and Participant, Inc. She has contributed editorial work for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Vogue, and the New Yorker. O’Malley teaches in the Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program at the International Center of Photography.

Anthony Malone is an artist based in New York City (Lower East Side). Hailing originally from Winesburg, Ohio, Malone moved to the east coast to attend Yale University. He then went abroad to the University of Stockholm for graduate work in shipping and banking law. He currently feels a strong repulsion and disconnect with his academic career, so he focuses instead on what makes him happy, his art practice. In 2013, Malone started working on a multi-disciplinary project inspired by the 1977 fire at the Everard Baths. He has published a series of zines (For Everard) and artist books and has exhibited his publications internationally at art book fairs, small galleries, and private spaces. In 2017, on the 40th anniversary of the fire at the Everard Baths, Malone conceived and executed a performance to honor the memory of the nine victims of the Everard tragedy.

Linda LaBeija is a multidisciplinary artist, organizer, and curator from Bronx, New York. Her work explores the complexities of living as a transgender woman of color in today’s America. With origins in both Black America and the English/Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Linda’s transnational experience of living at the intersection of embodied, social, and national borders hones in on the critiques of hegemonic power. Born out of the Iconic House of LaBeija in the underground New York City Vogue Ballroom scene, Linda’s pursuit of spoken word infused music sound has been featured in articles in both Afropunk and The Fader. She has performed in various theaters and venues including the Cherrylane Theater, the National Black Theater of Harlem, and El Teatro of Museo Del Barrio. She has performed with wonderful voices and writers such as StaceyAnn Chin and Me’shell Ndegeoecello. She can also be seen in the feature film Pariah directed by Dee Rees.

Christopher Clary is an artist, author, and curator exploring queer communication through poor media. He was a 2017 Eyebeam Resident finalist for his research of safe space in networked culture that was realized as an online platform for The Wrong digital art biennial. His porn, novella commission for Rhizome at the New Museum was honored by Hyperallergic and acquired by the libraries at ICP, MoMA, the Whitney, and the Walker. His photography was exhibited for the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles in France. In March 2018, he exhibited and performed for the Paris Ass Book Fair at the Palais de Tokyo.

Molly Soda (b. 1989) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. She works across a variety of digital platforms, producing videos, GIFs, zines, and web-based performance art, which can be found both online and in physical installations. Her recent solo shows includeI’m Just Happy to Be Here at 315 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2017; Thanks For the Add! at Leiminspace, Los Angeles, CA, 2017; and Comfort Zone at Annka Kultys Gallery, London, UK, 2016.

Patricia Silva is a Lisbon-born, New York–based photo and video artist. Silva’s films have been screened in film festivals and screening series at MIT List Visual Arts Center, USA (2017); Contemporary Center of Art Glasgow, UK (2017); IFC Theater, USA (2016); MoMA PS1 Theater, USA (2016); British Film Institute, UK (2016); and Colorado Photographic Arts Center, USA (2016). Her photo books have been exhibited in group shows at the Benaki Museum, Greece (2017); Phoenix Museum of Art, USA (2016-17); Ateliê da Imagem, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015–16). Her photographs have been exhibited in group shows at Flux Factory, USA, (2017); the International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2013); Berlin Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2012); and were recently published in Der Grief, Number 10, the 10th Anniversary Issue, and are currently on their way to an exhibition in South America.

Shiv Kotecha is a writer, artist, and scholar living in Brooklyn. He is most recently the author of a chapbook, Unlovable (Troll Thread, 2016), and Extrigue (Make Now, 2015), a shot-by-shot poetic rendering of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. His first solo-show, a multimedia installation, Looking for Richard, was displayed at Ginerva Gambino (Cologne, Germany) in 2015. Other work can be found online on GaussPDF, Jacket2, Social Text, and elsewhere. He is also a PhD candidate at New York Univeristy, finishing a dissertation titled The Bait and the Switch: Durational Writing from E. A. Poe to AIDS.

unbag is a semi-annual magazine that promotes critical engagement with contemporary art and politics. Commissioning artists, writers, and thinkers who work outside of mainstream discourses, unbag functions as a space to explore ideas through discussion and exchange. Andy Wentz handles operations and productions for unbag. Mylo Mendez is an unbag editor and also works with the zine distro We’re Hir We’re Queer.

Photos: installation views of Visible Scene and Conversations in Print.

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Miscellaneous by Julia Rose Lewis

In this review, Maria Sledmere visits the verdant isle of Julia Rose Lewis’ pamphlet Miscellaneous (Sampson Low, 2019), and engages chaotically with its shape-shifting poetics of ecstasy, digression and slippery things.

> Miscellaneous: of various kinds; elements of different kinds. A little green book full of miscellany. The work of Julia Rose Lewis has been dealing in miscellany (let me say it as much I can, it’s a lovely word) for a while now. Lewis’ collection Phenomenology of the Feral (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2017) was a veritable assemblage of household objects, clothing items, all things edible (from oranges to gummy bears), tools, chemicals and other substances. Words had a Steinian tendency to slip, where a ‘pear’ becomes ‘peer’ and sugar becomes sand. The whole book teems with a delicious excess of things and their zoomed-in, jostling, merging and almost psychedelic relation (I mean just consider the multicoloured octopus-bunny hybrids on the cover). Her recent pamphlet, Miscellaneous (2019), a slender offering from chapbook series Sampson Low, edited by fellow dealer in poetic animalia, SJ Fowler, continues this playful approach to disordering objects, experience and relation.

> Explicitly ‘inspired’ by Green Eggs and Ham, a classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss, Miscellaneous works with its foodstuffs in a fractal and kind of ecstatic way. Ecstasy meaning rapture or transport; Miscellaneous as a little island of strong emotion. I want to say island, but I could just as easily say green tomato. It’s difficult to resist the seduction of island metaphors during quarantine, and besides, Lewis herself spent time as a child in Nantucket Island. According to the publisher, Miscellaneous ‘asks if it is possible to have a mutually healthy relationship between a human and an island’. In an interview from 2016 with Katy Lewis Hood, Lewis says, ‘I use writing about the place I’m longing for as an antidote; I see islands as stories and stories as islands’. Staying with that chiasmus, might we see Miscellaneous itself as a kind of place? The scales upended sufficient to slip into our pocket, a zoomy island remainder? A dinky little 12-page island you could circle on foot and do it again and again — for this is a book that loves repetition, a veritable jaunt on the anaphora express, a 5-7 syllabic ride on the waves. But it’s difficult to know what constitutes the very land you walk or ride on:

A mane! A terrain! A mane is a terrain through and through and should you be guarding the herd inside the river valley? You hold this territory? Not harnessed! Not in a horse-less carriage!

Lewis plays deliciously with the fact of metaphor as a transport, a vehicle, while thrashing around in the joy of assonance and sound as forces of meaning and meaning’s disruption. What’s more, the repeated invocation of the ‘you’ means I’m forever hailed back to the scene; I can’t leave the island utterly behind, can’t glide drone-like over its landscapes. Besides, maybe it’s more like an archipelago? Terrain is a region of land, a system of rocks or geological formations, a standing-ground or position. Lewis teases us with the ever resolving, dissolving, negating terrains of lyric. Those exclamation marks are surely provocations to the reader, as much as the swept up proclamation of revelling in words themselves (thinking of the upward-looking heart emoji, reacting to a message). Her ‘I’ (perhaps riffing off the O’Haran tradition of I do this I do that poems, via Colin Herd’s I like this I like that variation) is quite demanding, precise, has an eye for arrangement (‘The musk ox is not in the / ocean’), identification, variation, placement (‘They disappear’). As with the effect of haiku (a kind of ‘cut’ of images), she challenges ‘nature’/object relations by similarity and contrast:

I would not like that morose woman faraway, that maiden hair tree. I am that old ginkgo tree.

What is the connection between the morose woman and the maiden hair? Does the fact of the speaker being the ‘old ginkgo’ explain her conditional dislike of the woman? And is the maiden hair tree the same as the woman? With its short, invitational lyrics, Miscellaneous gives you time to wander around the ideas of things, ideas in things. Maybe it’s telling the story of an island which is really a metaphor for Earth: its ‘holding pattern[s]’, its ‘there or anywhere’, its snowy territories, its ‘dry grasses / and mosses’ (v. Eliotic, ‘The Dry Salvages’ of Four Quartets?), its ‘skyhook’, its ‘living fossil leaf’ with ‘many millions of years’ inside it. Crudely speaking, ecopoetry often tries so hard to seem either objective (ecomimesis) or explicitly subjective (Romantic); the speaker of these poems insists on a kind of declarative, shape-shifting reality, whose run-on code requires the user command of something more than human. ‘You hold all the weeks / would you tote the boulders here?’ The labour of bringing the world to life in poetry is more than just reading; you have to really consider toting the boulders of words around. There’s a weird hospitality to this, a gesture of extending the voice: ‘So I / say try the bloom of mold!’. Maybe as a reader I’d speak better the world with the mold in my throat. It’s these kinds of special conditions Miscellaneous gets at so well. What the chapbook gives is a portable miscellany, a set of questions, a dicey and moreish feast of seeing the world anew — at all scales and dwellings, from a ‘ptarmigan nest’ to the air itself. Better eat up.

> Lewis’ smart and choppy lines remind me of the best chefs at the restaurant where I used to work, who would dice veg or make meat cuts with a certain deftness, all the while engaging in dishevelled conversation. I would ask, from which precise bay are the oysters sourced, and the chef would lecture me on the valiance of a 2Pac album. We would swerve from one topic to another by the time of the bell: language defined by the beat and demand of cooking. It was good to feel enslaved to the temporality of the microwave, the rising of bread, the petulant delay on the part of a chicken. And you might say, O maria what does this have to do with Julia Rose Lewis’ new book? And I would say, well, it’s all about iteration, digression, perversion of recipe. The poetic line as the flick of sweaty chef hair, the child’s demanding inquisition, the special way of dodging the question. But don’t let me fill you up with nonsense.

> There’s this weird piece in The Guardian that totally disses Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, which I’ll admit I haven’t read this side of puberty. The author, Emma Brockes, is pretty damning: ‘two-thirds of the words feel like filler’, ‘the rhyme scheme [...] is like something a kid would throw at a homework assignment so he could finish and run out to play’, ‘[Seuss’] books are creepy, empty, over-long, cheap, twee writing posing as whimsy’. Maybe I don’t have a striped ankle to stand on here, but I can’t help but think Brocke is missing a point somewhere. What’s wrong with poetry that wants to fly through itself quickly, all the better for the writer to go out and play? I’m thinking of something Jack Spicer writes in one of his letters to Lorca, describing how there are times in a poet’s life where ‘the objects change’ when ‘someone intrudes into the poet’s life’ so a certain balance is lost. ‘The seagulls, the greenness of the ocean, the fish—they become things to be traded for a smile or the sound of conversation—counters rather than objects’. You sort of get the feeling Brocke got tired of this (too many counters, too much supposed impeachable brilliance) and upended the board, sending everything scattering to miscellany. Maybe that was the appropriate reaction. I’d like my poetry to have that effect sometimes. And then I’d quite like to run out and play, or fall in love (if we were not in lockdown), or otherwise just write you a blowsy prosy letter.

> There’s this idea of Green Eggs and Ham as a childhood exercise in epistemological questioning. Asking you to think about how experience establishes beliefs about the world. Miscellaneous quite obviously trades in the empirical possibilities of knowing, experimenting in what happens when certain patterns or conditions are put into play (it’s worth noting that Julia Rose Lewis is also a scientist by training). I think of a child stuffing sand in its mouth, learning about size, scale, texture, taste. A child that learns a tomato is good when ripe and sweet. I also think of judging when I might cross the road, or a chemist inching just a *wee* bit more of X in the formula (is that how it works? is it like choosing to add another comma to a poem - what exactly is the risk of explosion?). Every day of our lives we are hedging, testing. ‘If you will then I will try / rain on rain on rain’; how I learn from you, a fashionable imitation in the wearable weather/whether. Things pile up, acquire elemental charge; the poems are teasingly object-oriented; the ‘I’ is an iterative effect of desires, repulsions and relations. Substances effect themselves into life and I think of Francis Ponge and the orange. Expression is something to be ���endured’. How does an object hold itself in a poem, without being overly squeezed into miscellany, matter? Lewis uses the singsong effects of poetry (repetition, rhyme), to play with causality and intention. In the final poem, for example, is the ‘gold’ ‘old’ and what temporality is ‘golden’; is it the ‘spring /green’ or the speaker who is ‘cold’?

> Miscellaneous in general describes a kind of extra or supplementary category, that which escapes the normative set. Perhaps there is then a case for this being a kind of queer object-oriented poetics. Things are slippery and hungry and irresistibly insistent. They become the book itself, the little object in your hand, tomato green as ‘the spring / green tomatoes in sea salt’, sprinkled with salty little words. This is a case for frivolity and filler and whimsy in poetry, for appetite and affect, salty wit, the necessity of dancing around sentiment, excess, sweetness and swerve. ‘I will eat the spring / fruit upside down’; the fruit of the book you peel again.

Miscellaneous is out now and available from Sampson Low.

~

Text and image: Maria Sledmere

Published: 12/6/20

[jaxntp-poetry]

***AT 40TH ST. WOLFMAN NEW LIFE BOOKSTORE***

Tuesday, November 7, 2017 at 7 PM – 10 PM E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 644 40TH ST OAKLAND, CA Berkeley Poetry Review will be holding a release party for the inaugural issue of our new chapbook series: MIDTERM 1 - Localities, Locales, Haunts, including poems from Ada Smailbegovic, Benjamin Gucciardi, Claire Marie Stancek, Jax NTP, and Renoir Gaither. The party will be hosted at the Wolfman New Life Bookstore @ 644 40th St., Oakland @ 7pm and will feature readings by a few of the poets to be published in our chapbook. Snacks and beverages will be included & we hope to see you there!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1962278107363604/

https://twitter.com/JaxNTP/status/997935366186266625?s=20

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Everything is Ghosts by Tyler Robert Sheldon

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/everything-is-ghosts-by-tyler-robert-sheldon/

Everything is Ghosts is a meditation on the fragility of new independence, and a juxtaposition of personal histories-in-progress with the troubled histories of a college town’s residents—many of whom are dead. This collection’s #poems follow a group of #college #friends through their experiences with burgeoning #adulthood, as they reckon with where they’ve been and whom they might be turning into. Whether braving a dorm haunted by the spirit of a basketball player and nebulous “shadow people,” daring each other out onto a murder-scene bridge at midnight, witnessing ghost hunters in the campus library, or wrestling personal hauntings like vehicular accidents, drug use, the after-effects of polio, and the passage of #time, the players in Everything is Ghosts learn to keep one eye open at all times. As they create, carouse, and hold each other up, they learn that being haunted can have more than just one meaning.

PRAISE FOR Everything is Ghosts by Tyler Robert Sheldon

These luminous poems reveal how a college campus can be a whole cosmos where to ghost is not to disappear but to offer one’s presence, one’s abundance. Never have I encountered a collection so haunted by warmth, so peopled by tender stories. Tyler Robert Sheldon is a poet whose trust in language is only rivaled by his love for the places where strange meetings are inevitable, where libraries burst with gratitude, “where silence is sacred as saddles in summer.”

–Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

In Tyler Robert Sheldon’s Everything is Ghosts young adulthood is a haunted time. Landscapes, dorm rooms, dreams and friends are all swarmed with ghosts. The specters in dreams are always more than imagination, and memory is always scratching the walls at night. Even the future is a ghost. But not everything is shadows; this book reminds us that our fear of death is what reminds us to hold loved ones close, to really appreciate the unbearable brightness of our lives.

–Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2023-2026, author of Love Prodigal

Refreshingly tender and celebratory, Everything is Ghosts offers a series of coming-of-age vignettes, sometimes playful, sometimes eerie, and always pulling us—paradoxically—into the future and the past at once: “The road opens before me / and yawns like the mouth / of a bright, waiting ghost.” This collection centers on a group of college kids as they face the joy and fear and awkwardness of newfound freedom. Among the cast is a mastiff terrified of pool noodles; a friend who channels a spirit named Gwen, who warns “Try not to piss me off”; and, of course, a whole chorus of ghosts, who seem to haunt with more benevolence than rage, more compassion than judgment. The author, too, embraces a stance of compassion, giving us a collection that—while spooky—is ultimately overwhelmed by warmth.

–Anders Carlson-Wee, author of Disease of Kings

Although we work here, we don’t all live with the legacy: mother and father and son all go to the same university, and all take up the mantle to teach English. Tyler examines his thoughtful, searching “early years” as a college student, where the mind enlarges and so does the heart. Richard Russo and Michael Chabon both take a look at university life, with humor and with heart, but not with the precision that Tyler does, not with a hand on the pulse of what it is to make it an entire life.

–Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2017-2019, author of Improvise

Tyler Robert Sheldon‘s new collection invites us to listen to what’s at the edges of our lives and callings from his first poem, “Legacies,” in which he writes: “The road opens before me / and yawns like the mouth / of a bright, waiting ghost.” The characters along this road, the tender and fierce moments these poems encounter, and the truths landed on and unfurled altogether welcome us into one rite of passage after another. Each poem helps us pause enough to take in the world in real time as well as what has seeded and tended this time. Even the titles—from “It’s Not Crazy If It’s Real” to “And Then Everything Was Different” to “So Many Ways You Cannot See”—point us toward new and renewed ways to see our pasts as well as to arrive in the present right now. This is a marvelous collection that multiplies its meanings through time.

–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2009-2013, author of How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[fatehbaz]

New Poetry by Queer Indigenous Women - A Series Curated by Natalie Diaz - Literary Hub - 12 April 2018

The words of Natalie Diaz:

In my Mojave culture, many of our songs are maps, but not in the sense of an American map. Mojave song-maps do not draw borders or boundaries, do not say this is knowable, or defined, or mine. Instead our maps use language to tell about our movements and wonderings (not wanderings) across a space, naming what has happened along the way while also compelling us toward what is waiting to be discovered, where we might go and who we might meet or become along the way.

This feature of indigenous women is meant to be like those song-maps, to offer myriad ways of “poetic” and linguistic experience—a journey through or across memory, or imagination, across pain or joy or the impossibility of each, across our bodies of land and water and flesh and ink—an ever-shifting, ever-returning, ever-realizing map of movement, of discovery, of possibility, of risk—of indigenous and native poetry. It is my luck to welcome you to this indigenous space and invite you into the conversations of these poems, languages, imageries and wonders. In the first installment of this bi-monthly feature, I’m pleased to share the work of Noʻu Revilla, Janet McAdams, Lehua M. Taitano, Deborah A. Miranda, and Arianne True.

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Noʻu Revilla is a queer Indigenous poet and educator of Hawaiian and Tahitian descent. Born and raised on the island of Maui, she has performed and facilitated creative writing workshops throughout Hawaiʻi as well as in Canada, Papua New Guinea, and at the United Nations. Her work has been exhibited at the Honolulu Museum of Art and appears in Poetry magazine, Black Renaissance Noire, The Missing Slate, Hawaiʻi Review, and Poem of the Week by Kore Press. Her chapbook Say Throne was published by Tinfish Press in 2011, and she is currently finishing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa.

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Janet McAdams is the author of three poetry collections, most recently the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After.  With Geary Hobson and Kathryn Walkiewicz, she coedited the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal. A writer of mixed Scottish, Irish, and Creek (Muscogee) ancestry, she grew up in Alabama and now lives in Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College.

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Lehua M. Taitano, a native Chamoru from Yigo, Guåhan (Guam), is a queer writer and interdisciplinary artist.  She is the author of two volumes of poetry–Inside Me an Island (forthcoming 2018) and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook,  appalachiapacific, won the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction, and her most recent chapbook, Sonoma, was published by Dropleaf Press in 2017. She hustles her way through the capitalist labyrinth as a bike mechanic who sometimes gets paid to make art.

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Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and folk artist who has worked everywhere from the temperate rainforest canopy to the rocky edges of the Salish Sea. Arianne has taught and mentored with Writers in the Schools (WITS), YouthSpeaks Seattle, and the Richard Hugo House, and has served as a guest editor for cloudthroat. In May, Arianne will graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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Deborah A. Miranda is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award), as well as three poetry collections, Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, and Raised By Humans.  She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature and her collection of essays, The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows and Other California Indian Lacunae is under contract with U of Nebraska Press.  Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California.  As John Lucian Smith Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, Deborah teaches Creative Writing (poetry and memoir), composition, and literature of the margins (Native American, Chicana/o, LGBTQ, African American, Asian American, mixed-genre, experimental).

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Read more, including some poems from each of the listed writers.

[ucbsound]

March 15, 7pm UC Berkeley - 315 Wheeler Hall

Jennifer Scappettone works at the juncture of scholarly research, translation, and the literary arts, on the page and off. She is the author of the books From Dame Quickly: Poems (Litmus Press, 2009), Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016).Her most recent publication is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: Two Acts (The Elephants, 2018), a free e-chapbook hailing from a libretto composed for live mixed-reality performance with writer and code artist Judd Morrissey and artist/technologist Abraham Avnisan. In 2009 she edited Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse,which included new poetry by Lyn Hejinian and Etel Adnan in dialogue with her own poetry and critical prose. She has developed interactive and site-specific poetry in collaboration with other artists for performance and installation at locations ranging from Counterpath Gallery (2019) to the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018), 6018|North for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles (2014), Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome (2011) and, Fresh Kills Landfill (2010-11). She is currently Associate Professor of English, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, and an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

[nostroviapress]

2017 Chapbook Contest: Week 14 Review

It’s another big day at Nostrova! Press, as our video excerpts from our 2017 Series continue! We also have news about Goodreads listings, updates to the main website, and some notes about FB ad campaigns!

Katie’s Video Poem

Be sure to get your limited edition copy from Nostrovia!’s 2017 Series at our online store. As always, prices are pay-what-you-can + $5 shipping! 

Goodreads Listings

I saw a post a few weeks ago on FaceBook noting all the different ways a press can better promote their writers, and it inspired me to create some Goodreads listings. Here they are for our 2017 Series(!), so be sure to use these listings if you’ve already preordered:

Katie’s Goodreads Listing Joseph’s Goodreads Listing Alain’s Goodreads Listing

I’ve also gone and updated the main page for our 2017 Chapbook Contest winners, so everyone has their Goodreads link + Featured Finalist excerpt shared alongside their listing at our online store:

FB Campaigns 

I’ve started spending some decent chunks of time on FB, learning more about their ad system + analytics. Along those lines, I’ve used FB’s Power Editor (lol) to setup a split campaign this week, testing two different ad groups to see what works better for ad engagement. Somewhat a pain in the ass, and I do dislike a lot of FB’s algorithms, but it’s silly not to consider what works best for promoting your writers.

The print proofs should be arriving very soon, so I hope to have some pictures in the next weekly review!

Much love, and see you next week! <3 -Christopher

*

We’ll have a new Tavern post each Wednesday, giving an inside look at the N! process, so stay tuned for more updates!

Week 1 Review    (Opening the Floodgates) Week 2 Review    (Reading + Ordering Supplies) Week 3 Review    (Reading + MSS Observations) Week 4 Review    (Reading + Starting Search for Finalists) Week 5 Review    (Picking Winners) Week 6 Review    (Featured Finalists + Announcing Winners) Week 7 Review    (Cover Art + Additional Pieces) Week 8 Review    (Blurbs + Excerpts + Review Copies) Week 9 Review    (Timeline Check + Interior Design) Week 10 Review  (Front Covers Revealed!) Week 11 Review  (Action Items) Week 12 Review  (Presales Began!) Week 13 Review  (Joseph’s Video Story)