Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of two lyric novels from Tarpaulin Sky Press, China Cowboy and The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, in addition to the the cross-genre chapbooks The Residents (dancing girl press) and Run (Rope-a-Dope), a 2010 Golden Gloves winner.
Set in a technicolor timewarp called Hell, Hong Kong, Kim Gek Lin Short's China Cowboy follows wannabe cowgirl La La, who is hellbent on realizing her dream to be a folk-singing sensation even as she tries to survive her kidnapper, Ren, who is just hellbent. Ren thinks he’ll win, but La La, dead or alive, always wins. "both devastating and uncomfortably enjoyable" (AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW); "a satanically intricate narrative with seemingly infinite vantage points in space, time and sympathy … a zone where elegance and grace can gambol with the just-plain-fucked-up" (HTML GIANT), “leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral fortitude shaken" (FACT-SIMILE). “Excruciatingly compelling, so infernal...in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender…. A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker" (HEIDI LYNN STAPLES) "Grossly disturbing and excruciatingly seductive... Tales of fierce femme survival.... (JAI ARUN RAVINE)
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).
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)
"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 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.
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 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'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)