TS Press Books Archives • Tarpaulin Sky Press

Body of Empire

Co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award
Nonfiction, 272 pages, paperback. September 2022

Weaving historical documents, photographs, and first-hand accounts against a background of nationalism and war, Body of Empire explores the lives of Japanese sex workers – both government-sanctioned and freelance – between 1868 and 1953. "An astonishing act of counter-erasure" (Brandon Shimoda); "Extraordinary" (Cassandra Atherton); "Haunted and inspired" (Janice Lee); "Harrowing, essential work" (David Naimon)

Summer

Poetry, 120 pages, paperback. August 2022

inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar

Descent

Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.

In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)

Womonster

"I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With Womonster, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Womonster is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years" (Johannes Göransson)

Hunting Season

Julia Brennan’s debut novel, Hunting Season, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, Hunting Season is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. “A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force.” (Carole Maso) “You never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. Hunting Season is ‘a slow amputation’ of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies.... Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly.” (Vi Khi Nao)

Poetry Against All

"This slim journal contains multitudes. It’s a compulsively readable account of returning to a childhood home, a provocative meditation on artists such as Susan Sontag, Francesca Woodman, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and a radical reexamination of concepts like ruin porn, tourism, and translation. But mostly it’s an urgent manifesto. Göransson concludes: "This is written without hope." But paradoxically, Poetry Against All offers just that." (Jeff Jackson) "Moralists who find themselves clutching their pearls about this book of noir perversions should read less literally and see that Göransson's Poetry Against All -- for all its anti-libidinous interrogations of pornography, the Holocaust, and cadavers -- concerns some of the most relatably humanist emotions of all: grief, the meaning of home, and the protectiveness one has about one’s children. Göransson imagines pornography as the body at the edge of otherness, at once alluring and perverse, which is not unlike the lens through which he conceives his own role as immigrant, the contaminant in our body politic, alive to the sheer horror of America but never quite able to go home himself." (Ken Chen)

Steven Dunn: water & power

A Small Press Distribution Fiction Bestseller

Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. water & power is a collage of voices, documents, and critical explorations that disrupt the usual frequency channels of military narratives. "Dunn’s remarkable talent for storytelling collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction." (Nikki Wallschlaeger) Dunn unrelentingly captures the difficult, funny, abject, exhilarating, heartbreaking and maddening aspects of Navy life, both on and off duty. Read this book and understand the veterans in your life better ... complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human." (Khadijah Queen)

Rebecca Brown: Not Heaven, Somewhere Else

Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is narrative cycle that revamps old fairy tales, movies, and myths, as it leads us from where we are to where we might go. Praise for Not Heaven, Somewhere Else: "It feels dangerous and exciting, like if (Brown) puts her big brain to it long enough, she could completely rewrite the story of who we are." (Seattle Review of Books) "Highly recommended and highly rewarding." (The Stranger) Praise for Rebecca Brown: "Strange and wonderful...Brown strips language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need." (The New York Times) "Simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around." (Dorothy Allison) "America's only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher." (Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth)

Jennifer S. Cheng, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems

Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”
SPD Poetry Bestseller
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil

“Exquisite imagination…” (Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”) Exhilarating…An alt-epic for the 21st century…Visionary…Rich and glorious.” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review) “If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life.” (Bhanu Kapil)