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Body of Empire

Co-winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award
Nonfiction, 272 pages, paperback. September 2022

Weaving historical documents, photographs, and first-hand accounts against a background of nationalism and war, Body of Empire explores the lives of Japanese sex workers – both government-sanctioned and freelance – between 1868 and 1953. "An astonishing act of counter-erasure" (Brandon Shimoda); "Extraordinary" (Cassandra Atherton); "Haunted and inspired" (Janice Lee); "Harrowing, essential work" (David Naimon)

Mariko Nagai

Having grown up in Europe and America, Mariko Nagai studied English at New York University where she was the Erich Maria Remarque Fellow. She has received Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Yaddo, and Hawthornden International Writers Retreat, among others. She is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2007), Georgic: Stories (BkMk Press/University of Missouri Kansas City, 2010), Dust of Eden: A Novel (Albert Whitman & Co, 2014), Irradiated Cities (winner of 2015 NOS Award, Les Figues, 2017), Under the Broken Sky (MacMillan/Henry Holt / Christy Ottaviano Books, 2019), and The Sword of Yesterday, forthcoming from Little, Brown / Christy Ottaviano, 2023. Her work has been translated into Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Romanian, Bulgarian, and German. She currently lives in Tokyo and is Professor of Creative Writing and Japanese Literature at Temple University Japan Campus.

Summer

Poetry, 120 pages, paperback. August 2022

inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar

Johannes Göransson

Johannes Göransson is the author of four books with Tarpaulin Sky Press -- Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), Haute Surveillance (2013), The Sugar Book (2015), and Poetry Against All (2020) -- in addition to three previous collections of poems: A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”) He has also translated several books, including Aase Berg's HackersDark Matter, Transfer Fat, and With Deer as well as Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson. Göransson teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and together with his wife, Tarpaulin Sky author Joyelle McSweeney, Göransson co-publishes Action Books.

Descent

Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.


In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)

Lauren Russell

Lauren Russell is the author of Descent, which won the 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize and is published by Tarpaulin Sky Press, and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry, she has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and VIDA/The Home School, and residencies from the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and City of Asylum/Passa Porta. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, boundary 2, The Brooklyn Rail, Cream City Review, and the anthologies Bettering American Poetry 2015 and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, among others. She was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2020. In the fall of 2020, she joined the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.

Womonster

"I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With Womonster, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Womonster is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years" (Johannes Göransson)

Olivia Cronk

Olivia Cronk is the author of Womonster (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she edits The Journal Petra.

Hunting Season

Julia Brennan’s debut novel, Hunting Season, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, Hunting Season is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. “A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force.” (Carole Maso) “You never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. Hunting Season is ‘a slow amputation’ of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies.... Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly.” (Vi Khi Nao)

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