All available, as of now, from Small Press Distribution :


I-Formation, Book 2
Anne Gorrick
$17 | paper | 150 pp.
Shearsman Books
ISBN: 9781848612372

Poetry. I-Formation in its entirety is comprised of four separate groups of poems, that when ordered in a particular way, tell a Genesis story. The first book (2010) begins in a garden and ends with an incarnation of Eve meeting her coeval. The break between books expresses a break in the story. Something has happened. Something perhaps as simple as eating an apple. The second book addresses the things we are left with once we are thrown out of the garden: co-identity and depiction, the self and landscape. The first section of the second book is a collection of poems based on anagrams of people’s names, and forms a relationship map of this poet’s life. The final section is comprised of poems based largely on the Hudson Valley landscape, a world exterior to and surrounding the garden.


Kind One
Laird Hunt
$14.95 | paper | 213 pp.
Coffee House Press
ISBN: 9781566893114

Fiction. As a teenage girl, Ginny marries Linus Lancaster, her mother’s second cousin, and moves to his Kentucky pig farm “ninety miles from nowhere.” In the shadows of the lush Kentucky landscape, Ginny discovers the empty promises of Linus’ “paradise”—a place where the charms of her husband fall away to reveal a troubled man and cruel slave owner. Ginny befriends the young slaves Cleome and Zinnia who work at the farm—until Linus’s attentions turn to them, and she finds herself torn between her husband and only companions. The events that follow Linus’ death change all three women for life. Haunting, chilling, and suspenseful, Kind One is a powerful tale of redemption and human endurance in antebellum America.


The Practice of Residue
Kimberly Lyons
$14 | paper | 83 pp.
Subpress
ISBN: 9781930068537

Poetry. “Kimberly Lyons wants to ‘stay with the poem in this uncomfortable singular place / Where the flies and moths co-exist.’ It is hard to listen when ‘The poems says: / You can’t have any lobster, you stupid, hungry poet.’ But that is exactly what the poet does. Instead of shutting the world out, she follows the sounds wherever they take her. ‘I abide / one who abets / a lady’s maid.’ It makes for an intricate music, a teasing out of possibilities. These are the poet’s ‘restorative analects.’ This is a book to read again and again.”—John Yau


Autobiography of Envelopes
Sarah Riggs
$14 | paper | 160 pp.
Burning Deck
ISBN: 9781936194100

Poetry. Begun in the turmoil of moving house, these poems were jotted on envelopes because that was the form of paper on hand. But there was more to this choice. Oscillating between the US, France and Morocco, living on three continents and in three languages, Sarah Riggs felt the need to address her own self in order not to disperse into alternatives. But how do we address ourselves? the book asks. How many selves do we have? How do we sort what we think from what has been thought for us? Is it that our language cannot follow the mind’s rich, fluctuating process or does language outrun what the mind can seize? So that we are caught between two excesses, two ineffables?


The Clara Ann Burns Story
Heidi Ann Smith
$15 | paper | 98 pp.
Monkey Puzzle Press
ISBN: 9780982664674

Fiction. Poetry. “Heidi Ann Smith’s unflinching novel viscerally tracks the ways trauma can break our contract with language, how it can hybridize hearts and mouths, and how our tongues might, in the end, fork to speak it all: revelatory, plural, here. The Clara Ann Burns Story, through text and image, offers a map by which to read the geographic/familial underpinnings of our emotional and physical bodies so that we might articulate our own hermeneutic of triumph.”—Selah Saterstrom


{ untitled: under the auspices }
sturnus vulgaris
$13 | paper | 128 pp.
Calamari Press
ISBN: 9780983163336

Poetry. Art. Photography. { untitled: under the auspices } is a book of auguring, or divination codex, where birds are the words, in particular the common starling (with a few cameos by seagulls and crows). The sequenced set of flight patterns, or murmurations, were captured over the course of the past few years in the skies over Rome, where the starlings winter in the months of October and November. In the ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman empires, the will of the gods was determined by “taking the auspices,” or interpreting the flight patterns of birds. In fact, Romulus and Remus, the infamous twin brothers raised by a she-wolf, were both augurs. To settle a dispute about where the city of Rome should be founded (Romulus preferred the Palatine hill and Remus preferred the Aventine), they both took auspices and Romulus “won,” hence Rome is named for him. The murmurating cross-sections in this book were captured mostly from the loser’s Aventine perspective and from along the banks of the Tiber, where Remus and Romulus were born. To preserve the integrity of interpretation, for those “reading” the book, no words or characters were used in the compiling and editing of the birds, only punctuation and numbers. The book itself also contains no title or author, though they are referenced here to meet the metadata demands of this modern world.