Authors & Books • Tarpaulin Sky Press

Authors & Books | Tarpaulin Sky Press

TRANS-GENRE TEXTS. INNOVATIVE FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY | SINCE 2003

Tarpaulin Sky Press
Authors & Books

TRANS-GENRE TEXTS. INNOVATIVE FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY | SINCE 2003

Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than are offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.

Bookstores, libraries, and organizations may order here.

Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than are offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.

Bookstores, libraries, and organizations may order here.

Andrew Zornoza

Andrew Zornoza is the author of the novel Where I Stay, from Tarpaulin Sky Press. His short fiction and essays have been featured at The Poetry Foundation, BOMB, Gastronomica, Confrontation, CapGun, and Matter Magazine, among many others. He teaches in the Design & Technology MFA program at Parsons in New York City and is a contributing editor to the arts journal HOW.

Andrew Zornoza: Where I Stay

Andrew Zornoza's debut, Where I Stay (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009) walks the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. A meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love, Where I Stay is a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything: "Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe.... Meditative and rhythmic in the mind of Mary Robison mashed with William Vollmann.... Unforgettable." (BLAKE BUTLER, HTML GIANT); "Squarely situated between the ethos of Jack Kerouac and Walker Evans" (REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION); "With a languorous but precise lyricism…. [Zornoza] is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams" (RAIN TAXI); "a gifted journey through borderlands between text and image" (LANCE OLSEN); "As haunting as it is gritty.... I hesitate to simply call it a book; its ambitions, beautifully realized, make it a hybrid of textual and visual arts" (SMALL PRESS REVIEWS); "expert" (NEWPAGES)

Mark Cunningham

Mark Cunningham lives in central Missouri and is the author of Body Language, from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He is also the author of 80 Beetles (Otoliths) and several ebooks: 10 specimens (Gold Wake Press), 71 Leaves (BlazeVox), Nachträglichkeit (Beard of Bees), Second Story (Right Hand Pointing), and nightlightnight, with photographs by Mel Nichols, also from Right Hand Pointing.

Mark Cunningham: Body Language

Mark Cunningham's first full-length collection of prose poems, Body Language (TSky Press, 2008): "Cunningham tests what allusions, anecdotes, punch lines you know, be they liturgical, canonical, numerical, numerological, historical, mystical, magical, simple, or other.... It’s funny, sad and serious. Ultimately, reflective.... Impressive.... Body Language is a great choose-your-own adventure. There’s something for us all. And that’s fun." (THE ADIRONDACK REVIEW); "Always thought-provoking, always enjoyable and unexpected, the combination of topics of math, language and symbolism via the alphabet and the body as a complex system, turns out to be an appropriate, engaging compendium." (PRICK OF THE SPINDLE)

Joyelle McSweeney: Nylund, the Sarcographer

Acclaimed poet Joyelle McSweeney's first novel, Nylund the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) is a something like a baroque noir: "Campy-cum-lyrical post-Ashberyan prose.... Language dissolves into stream-of-consanguinity post-surrealism and then resolves into a plot again.... Recommended" (STEPHEN BURT); "Nylund is like interesting on steroids.... If you are looking for a typical, straight forward, good old fashioned yarn, you’d do best to look elsewhere; but if you want to experience something fresh, daring, creepy, and significant, this is the one for you" (BOOKSLUT); "a masterful redefinition of what constitutes prose.... A character who is the very embodiment of writing" (NEWPAGES); "Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney" (KATE BERNHEIMER)

Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson are the authors of Figures for a Darkroom Voice, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press (2007). Gordon is the author of several other books of poetry including Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial; selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series). Wilkinson is also the author of several books of poetry including The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (Tupelo Press).

Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Figures for a Darkroom Voice

Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson passed a notebook back and forth, creating and trading poems and prose-poems. Then they handed these poems to artist Noah Saterstrom. This produced Figures for a Darkroom Voice (2007): "This book glitters" (TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN); "their voice comes across not as a warning, but as an ominous knell" (INTERIM); "These aren't just two guys with three names each; these are two of the poets to watch in the next generation" (POWELL'S STAFF PICK)

Danielle Dutton

Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life, from Tarpaulin Sky, and SPRAWL (Siglio Press), finalist for the Believer Book Award. In 2010, Dutton launched her own independent press Dorothy, a publishing project, dedicated to works of fiction, "or near fiction, or about fiction, mostly by women."

Danielle Dutton: Attempts at a Life

Danielle Dutton's debut short-fiction collection, Attempts at a Life, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Danielle Dutton writes with a deft explosiveness that craters the page with stunning, unsettling precision" (LAIRD HUNT); "Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood.... An important new literary voice" (RAIN TAXI); "It’s serious, but as many dramatists celebrate: comedy orbits a dark sun. Which is to say, this is also a very funny book" (AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW)

Max Winter

Max Winter's first book of poems, The Pictures, was published by Tarpaulin Sky Press in 2007. He co-edits the press Solid Objects and is a Poetry Editor of Fence. He has published reviews in The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Time Out New York, Bookforum, and other publications.

Max Winter: The Pictures

Max Winter's first poetry collection, The Pictures, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "A long-awaited debut by a promising younger poet" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); "Inherently fun" (BOOKSLUT); "subtle, thought-provoking" (OPEN LETTERS); "very much worth reading" (OCTOPUS MAGAZINE)

Jenny Boully: [one love affair]*

Jenny Boully's one love affair (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006) meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug-addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much a study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion: "I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry." (OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY); "Boully’s sentences are a joy in and of themselves" (RATTLE); "A genre-bending back-pocket book.... Gritty and intellectual ... addictive and soothing ... fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf.... You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time." (COLDFRONT)

Jenny Boully

Jenny Boully is the author of two Tarpaulin Sky titles, [one love affair] and not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, as well as The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande Books), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, first published by Slope Editions).

Jenny Boully: not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

In not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, Jenny Boully presents us with a “deliciously creepy” swan song from Wendy Darling to Peter Pan. As in her previous book [one love affair]*, Boully reads between the lines of a text—in this case J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy—and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at. "[T]o delve into Boully's work is to dive with faith from the plank -- to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself." (BOOKSLUT) "Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming." (HUFFINGTON POST); "Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way." (ANDER MONSON)

Johannes Göransson: Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

"I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all).... You'll need a machine gun and a body double.... Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Goransson" (BLAKE BUTLER); "a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready" (BOOKSLUT); "Page after page begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child ... before immolating the host, the reader" (PANK MAG); "a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things.... The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone.... All aboard" (HTML GIANT)

Sarah Goldstein

Sarah Goldstein is the author of Fables, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Goldstein's writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Verse, and other journals, and her artwork has been shown in the US and Canada.

Sarah Goldstein: Fables

Departing from the Brothers Grimm to approach our own economically and socially fractured present, Fables constructs a world defined by small betrayals, transformations, and brutality amid its animal and human inhabitants. Goldstein weaves together familiar and contemporary allegories creating a series of vibrant, and vital, tales for our time. “Goldstein’s vision and approach is wholly new. Her work in this collection is more than translation and transcription: Fables contains poems that whisper tradition but fully stand on their own.” (THE IOWA REVIEW); "Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision" (THE RUMPUS); “In the meadow of fairy tale, Goldstein unrolls ribbons of story that fly gamely and snap with brilliance.” (DEB OLIN UNFERTH)

Shelly Taylor

Shelly Taylor is the author of Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and Dirt City Lions (Horse Less Press), as well as two poetry chapbooks, Peaches the Yes-Girl (Portable Press of Yo-Yo Labs) & Land Wide to Get a Hold Lost In (Dancing Girl Press).

Shelly Taylor: Black-Eyed Heifer

Shelly Taylor's debut collection of poems is a "mosaic of form and language, childhood and adulthood, the American South, horses, gravel roads, and light. It is a riptide pulling its readers out into the deep, powerful currents of nostalgia. It is unrelenting" (TRIQUARTERLY); "Radically innovative use of language" (JIM HARRISON); "Language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent.... Hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category." (JANE MILLER); "A mighty anthem to down home local culture ... the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land.... Abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty" (BRENDA IIJIMA)

Kim Gek Lin Short: The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits

The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is the prose elegy of a boy who wants to be a bug in order to save by symbiosis the dead girl he loves. Enacted in prose poems and cross-referenced datebooks, the inseparable lovers eternally rehearse for a real life together, repeating in that instant between being and nonbeing, the loss into which their love escaped. "beguiling and entirely enthralling" (ART + CULTURE); “An opiate trip . . . terrifying, ungraspable . . . sad and beautiful” (NEW PAGES); “Irresistible!” (NORMA COLE); “Do not read this book at night” (BHANU KAPIL); “This small unsettling book . . . both conceals and reveals its morbidity, its twisted thirsts” (JOYELLE MCSWEENEY); “Valentines . . . cut from thick, mealy-colored childhood stock. Here is language as enchantment” (SELAH SATERSTROM)

Joanna Ruocco

Joanna Ruocco is the author of Man's Companions, published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press) and the novel The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press). Winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, judged by Ben Marcus, Joanna's forthcoming book from FC2 is Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith-A Diptych. Joanna co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She currently resides in Denver, Colorado.

Joanna Ruocco: Man’s Companions

Joanna Ruocco's first short-fiction collection, Man's Companions, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Find yourself warped from one world to another, transported by the flight of her words between languages" (THE NATION); "Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); "Early Lydia Davis seems not unfairly applicable, as does Amy Hempel" (ART + CULTURE); "Ruocco is consistently inventive. She tilts the world as we know it, challenging our senses" (TRIQUARTERLY)