With hidden noise reviews Danielle Dutton's *Attempts at a Life* (Tarpaulin Sky Press): "An argument could be made that these pieces are prose poetry, but there’s an emphasis on narrative that isn’t usually stressed so much in prose poetry. But like prose poetry (I’m thinking of Mallarmé), this is a firmly written language: they couldn’t really exist in spoken form, because they have to exist on the page...."
At NewPages, Jeremy Benson reviews Kim Gek Lin Short's debut from Tarpaulin Sky Press, *The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits*: "Short’s prose poems have the exactitude of obsessive compulsion, yet the imagery and dimness of an opiate trip sponsored by Lewis Caroll.... She frequently stretches the parameters of grammar, rearranging conventional syntax to just off kilter; her written style as surreal as her yarn-and-insect imagery. The result is a terrifying, ungraspable split-level love story: futile, sad and beautiful."
At Trickhouse, Kristen Nelson interviews Shelly Taylor, author of *Black-Eyed Heifer*, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "The regular downsweep of reading a poem textured by the rotating horizontal universe that also feeds meaning into the whole—density, double meaning, and texture. I think I got my way of understanding this from Robert Creeley...."
Publishers Weekly reviews Joanna Ruocco's *Man's Companions* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010): "Thirty-one brief, clever tales from the author of The Mothering Coven employ traits from the animal kingdom to underscore absurdities in the human species. 'Lemmings,' for example, features a desultory dialogue between two lovers who debate the better 'iconic' location to jump from—the Space Needle or the Empire State Building. . . . Satisfyingly developed.... The nuttily obtuse 'Flying Monkeys,' [features] a rarely intersecting conversation between two women onboard an airplane that reveals how the women—former best friends who happen to sit next to each other—can't stand each other. . . . Ruocco's understated humor and irony have a playful, experimental appeal."
At the Sonora Review, Jake Levine reviews Shelly Taylor's *Black-Eyed Heifer*: "Black-Eyed Heifer inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines.... If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems.... High octane, pyrotechnic ... impressively defiant."
Publishers Weekly reviews Traci O Connor's *Recipes for Endangered Species* (Tarpaulin Sky Press): “These stories constitute some tender, aching love stories. Connor’s characters are curious specimens who don’t quite fit in, but have rich inner lives…. Creepy, Hitchcockian….. Juxtaposes vivid descriptions of flowers with excerpts from the painter’s late asylum notebooks to evoke the chilling stream-of-consciousness of a troubled narrator….. A kind of nut job’s notebook, full of Lolita-like obsession (including photographs). Cocktail recipes conclude each of the stories in this varied and occasionally unnerving debut collection.”
At Powell's, via Rain Taxi, John Madera reviews Andrew Zornoza's *Where I Stay* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2009): "Zornoza's narrator, with a languorous but precise lyricism, traverses the Mid- and Southwestern United States, telling tales of greasy, smoky bus terminals and truck stops.... He selects details with a jeweler's precision, endowing them with symbolic meaning and using rhythmic prose that twists and turns like the many roads on which his narrator travels.... Zornoza is as much a novelist as he is a cartographer of loneliness, doubt, and fear, one that fearlessly delineates the stark realms of disappointment, unrequited love, and unfulfilled dreams."
Ana Božičević's *Stars of the Night Commute* (Tarpaulin Sky Press) is named a Lambda Literary Awards Finalist in the category of Lesbian Poetry!
Transversalinflections reviews Ana Bozicevic's *Stars of the Night Commute* "Think of the whole book and its sections and its individual poems as a snowglobe that has been shaken up, and where not snow, but objects are floating around in varying connected but wondrous configurations. . . .The poems are no longer primarily linear, but are constellations of ideas that have body and dimensions as well as being open and porous."