Gordon Massman is the author of The Essential Numbers 1991 - 2008, from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He divides his time between Medford, MA, and the island of Frenchboro, ME. Poems from The Essential Numbers have appeared in The Numbers (Pavement Saw Press) as well as in Exquisite Corpse, The Harvard Review, The New York Quarterly, Pleiades, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere.
Gordon Massman's The Essential Numbers 1991-2008, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Unyielding monoliths of spit and tongue.... Fucked and ready to fuck your head.... Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.... This is the kind of book you can’t ask for until you have it." (BLAKE BUTLER, HTML GIANT); "Gordon Massman is the kind of writer that guts you, revolts you" (SHELLY TAYLOR); "timid people be damned" (BRANDON SHIMODA)
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'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 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'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)
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 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 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)