NEW BOOKS FROM TARPAULIN SKY IN 2018
REBECCA BROWN
NOT HEAVEN, SOMEWHERE ELSE
Paperback, 80 pp. Publication date: October 2018
ISBN 9781939460189
Cover art by Robyn O’Neil
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$14 includes US shipping (Oct 2018)
If heaven is somewhere, it isn’t with us, but somewhere we want to get — a state, a place, a turning to home. Novel- and essayist Rebecca Brown’s thirteenth book is narrative cycle that revamps old fairy tales, movies, and myths, as it leads the reader from darkness to light, from harshness to love, from where we are to where we might go. “These updated and revised fables satisfied a desire for moral discussion I didn’t even know I had…. Highly recommended and highly rewarding.” — Rich Smith, The Stranger
PRAISE FOR REBECCA BROWN “A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need.” (The New York Times) “One of the few truly original modern lesbian writers, one who constantly pushes both her own boundaries and those of her readers.” (San Francisco Chronicle) “Watch for her books and hunt down her short stories. She is simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around.” (Dorothy Allison) “The straightforward prose style belies Brown’s penchant for brilliant narrative, which at any moment can turn from the gentle and intimate to the violent and bizarre.” (Utne Reader) “A dry, witty, graceful — if savage — gift.” (Mary Gaitskill) “Ripe and imaginative, often funny, and sliding craftily between fact and wishful fantasy.” (The Sunday Times (London)) “America’s only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher.” (Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth)
READ MORE ABOUT REBECCA BROWN AND NOT HEAVEN, SOMEWHERE ELSE
WATER & POWER
STEVEN DUNN
Paperback.180 pp.
Publication date: October 2018
Cover art by Jay Halsey.
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$14 includes shipping in the US
Navy veteran Steven Dunn’s second novel, water & power, plunges into military culture and engages with perceptions of heroism and terrorism. In this shifting landscape, deployments are feared, absurd bureaucracy is normalized, and service members are consecrated. 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. Dunn reveals, exacerbates, and speculates on the gargantuan mythology of a legendary branch of the American armed forces: The Navy. How is a superpower created and maintained? Who maintains it? What stories are told, buried or collected along the way — stories of survival, violence, duty and ethics? Among the interviews, photographs, and journal entries Dunn shows us an intimate portrait of power: like water, you are never quite sure who is claiming control beneath the surface. (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, understand the aggressive disconnection the armed forces demands, and retain a much clearer picture of the people who wear the uniform in America’s name — as who we are, complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human. (Khadijah Queen)
READ MORE ABOUT STEVEN DUNN AND WATER & POWER
JENNIFER S. CHENG
MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS
SPD Poetry Bestseller. Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil.
Paperback, 140 pp. Pub date: May 2018
Cover art by Maude Tanswai
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$14 includes shipping in the US
Mixing fable and fact, extraordinary and ordinary, Jennifer S. Cheng’s hybrid collection, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, draws on various Chinese mythologies about women, particularly that of Chang’E (the Lady in the Moon), uncovering the shadow stories of our myths — with the belief that there is always an underbelly. Moon explores bewilderment and shelter, destruction and construction, unthreading as it rethreads, shedding as it collects.
“Exhilarating…An alt-epic for the 21st century…Visionary…Rich and glorious.” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review) “Everything that’s left behind. If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life.” (Bhanu Kapil) “Each of the voices in Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon speaks as if she’s ‘the last girl on earth.’ … With curiosity and attention, Moon shines its light on inquiry as art, asking as making. In the tradition of Fanny Howe’s poetics of bewilderment, Cheng gives us a poetics of possibility.” (Jennifer Tseng) “Cheng’s newest poetry collection bravely tests language and the beautiful boundaries of body and geography. This is a rare poet whose elegant poems create a lovely convergence of geometries and mythologies into something akin to ‘an ocean fever to break between…teeth.’ The assembly of ‘insect script’ in these worlds where ‘the sky becomes a chilled pomelo’ makes for a rich and deeply satisfying read.” (Aimee Nezhukumatathil)
READ MORE ABOUT JENNIFER S. CHENG. READ EXCERPTS FROM MOON ONLINE AT THE ADROIT JOURNAL, FOUNDRY, HYPHEN, AND TUPELO QUARTERLY.
PIPER J. DANIELS
LADIES LAZARUS
Co-winner, 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Awards
Paperback, 140 pp. Pub date: April 2018
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$14 includes shipping in the US
Equal parts séance, polemic, and love letter, Piper J. Daniels’ Ladies Lazarus examines evangelical upbringing, sexual trauma, queer identity, and mental illness with a raw intensity that moves between venom and grace.
Fueled by wanderlust, Daniels travels the country, unearthing the voices of forgotten women. Girls and ghosts speak freely, murdered women serve as mentors, and those who’ve languished in unmarked graves convert their names to psalms. At every turn, Daniels invites the reader to engage, not in the soothing narrative of healing, but in the literal and metaphorical dynamism of death and resurrection.
“Beautifully written collection of 11 lyric essays…. [Daniels] emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice.” (Publishers Weekly); Piper J. Daniels is going to rip the essay world apart. Ladies Lazarus is the best debut I’ve read in a long time. Daniels has resurrected the personal essay and what it is and what it can do” (Jenny Boully); “An extremely intelligent, impressively understated, and achingly powerful work” (David Shields); “A siren song from planet woman, a love letter from the body, a resistance narrative against the dark” (Lidia Yuknavitch).
READ MORE ABOUT PIPER J. DANIELS. READ EXCERPTS FROM LADIES LAZARUS ONLINE AT THE RUMPUS AND TARPAULIN SKY