At The Rumpus, Nick Sturm reviews Sarah Goldstein's *Fables* (Tarpaulin Sky, 2011): "Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision.... Antiquated elements mix with contemporary moments of horror to create a wholly new kind of fable ... exploring the liminal spaces between human and nonhuman, natural and supernatural, and ripping open the differences to see what bleeds out..... Be sure not to leave this one laying out for the kids."
At PANK Magazine, Joseph Michael Owens reviews Johannes Göransson's *entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "[entrance] "demands its reader to engage it on a close sentence-to-sentence level and rewards the reader with some truly spectacular prose. Prose that, 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."
Fence poet and Capo of the Racine Public Library system, Nick Demske, reviews Johannes Goransson's *entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "For all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own."
Tarpaulin Sky Press is pleased to announce that it has selected not one but two manuscripts from the 2010 open reading period: Claire Donato’s novel, Burial, and David Wolach’s poetry collection, Hospitalogy, both of which will be published in Spring 2013. Congrats!
At Bookslut, Micah McCrary reviews Jenny Boully's *not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "[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."
At HTML Giant, Blake Butler interviews Johannes Göransson, author of *entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011): "I don’t think of art as separate from the world, nature etc. Nor am I interested in art which claims to be part of the world; art that claims to not be art. I am interested in art that is invested in its own Art-ness – with all of its crass devices and costumes, all of its kitschy metaphors and pageantry, all of its infected toys. On the other hand I’m not interested in creating a kind of refined space of contemplative art either, I don’t want art as an escape. I suppose in all of these what I object to is a kind of stability, a kind of space that art depicts or documents or provides. I’m more interested in art as violence, art as a haunting, as a spirit photograph, as what Aase Berg calls a 'deformation zone' or what Joyelle has called 'necropastoral'." (JG)
A feel-good story about Louisiana State University student James Bellard, who was arrested after writing a "quite disturbing" poem inspired by Tarpaulin Sky Press author Johannes Göransson. "I was in Tureaud hall walking towards my last class of the day," writes Bellard, "when a man walked up behind me and said in a voice like my high-school teacher that had always stood by the school entrance and inspected everyone’s uniforms, 'Excuse me sir!' I turned around to see what he wanted (faintly annoyed by the association), then I saw the badge clipped to his belt. 'Put your hands on the wall!' he commanded."
Tarpaulin Sky Press is delighted to announce that it has chosen not one but two chapbooks from the 2010 reading period: Claire Hero's "Dollyland," and Paula Koneazny's "Installation," which will be published in 2012.
The Nation features Joanna Ruocco and *Man's Companions*, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Ruocco delivers something stranger than banal moralizing. In the final paragraph, she steers the narrative into foreign territory, and the weirdness of her conclusion is doubled by her ability to meet and then flout expectations with a single gesture, offering up the anticipated feminist insights in the least predictable fashion.... Ruocco restores the power of a familiar critique by rendering it uncanny..... When you read her stories, you find yourself warped from one world to another, transported by the flight of her words between languages."