“In this beautifully written collection of 11 lyric essays, debut author Piper J. Daniels challenges popular narratives about suicidal ideation, sexual assault, mental illness, and female bodies…. (and) emerges as an empowering and noteworthy voice.”
Granta issue 142 — “Animalia” — features an excerpt from water & power Steven Dunn’s forthcoming second novel with Tarpaulin Sky Press: “A surreal and compelling indictment of the US military machine.”
If luck is on an author’s side, a book reaches its audience at the right time. TS editor Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018) can confidently make this claim. “Quiet, yet powerful.” (Booklist) “A celebration of life.” (Rahna Reiko Rizzuto) “Dazzlingly good.” (John McManus)
“A green and downy sheet of sounds. You make a most extraordinary music. A beautiful music–boots cannot drown out, soldiers cannot outcount. We remember…hiding inside every leaf. Shining through the paper thin. Chlorophylled awhile.”
“Widescreen nativity: nativity of the eye. Ringed by lashes and flames. // Endgame cinema, Nuremberg hypothesis, the present unforgiven by both past and future….” — from Hannah and the Master, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“We’re almost fucking but we’re not. We’re all tongue. We’re all tongue down the glass, mouth open and taking. No, we’re not. We’re wasted on memory tonight. We’re fucking memories.” — from Nympholepsy, by Lisa Marie Basile and Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“[H]ybrid coat of feathers and fur … bathed in punk rock, metal, old skate ramps, and the gym shower, as well as the toxic landscape of memory that is both lichen-drenched and cut with light. Night terrors shimmer off the page with each long line, each breath, each shift in the wet dirt.” — Evan Gray on Kids of the Black Hole by Marty Cain.
“Can a lizard’s thermoregulation be compared to the female human cycle? And is the reptilian parietal eye comparable to the human psychic third eye? By the end of Lizard, readers might feel at one with this fragile, resilient and adaptable survivor.”
“Frazier-Foley unflinchingly points out humans’ capacity for cruelty, and the realities of gendered violence that are still familiar to many of us in the present day. Yet, even as the body falls prey to the bodies of others, the voices of these poems press on, seeking in their own bodily dissolution/evolution what they were denied in flesh.”
Geoffrey Babbitt discusses books by Xhenet Aliu, Laurie Sheck, Sasha Steensen, Max Wolf Valerio, and Nicole Walker.
V.V. Ganeshananthan discusses books by Rohinton Mistry, Solmaz Sharif, Ralph Ellison, Grace Paley, and Toni Morrison.
Hackers by Aase Berg (translated by Johannes Goransson) Channeling flatworm parasites, an Amazonian queen, rabbits, Trojan horses, and whistleblowers, Swedish poet Aase Berg hacks…
“On the door hangs a sign, sometimes plastic, sometimes bearing the smudges of printer ink, & often with a line drawn neatly down the middle: he? on the left, she? on the right, & me, standing straight, stiff as a board, standing upright between them.”
“I knew Tom for about 20 years. Or ten minutes. It’s odd to say knew, instead of know. I’ll say know. He was as open and opaque when I first met him at a reading in DC as when I last saw him at his flat in Hove. Like a pond of fish—an elegant electric-fast consciousness that withdrew if you delved too deep. It was as if he was saying, I’m right here, it’s all right here. What you get is what you see.”
An exceptional essay on demons, mental illness, self-harm, and suicide, which we’re publishing just in time for Christmas. “If human life is an oath, then suicide for me was like an oath recited backwards, a protest against the physical body that gave entrance to that first strange and violent ghost and all that followed,” writes Piper J. Daniels.
“to the glories of the dark longing you see in an aspirant on the path of devotion. Often used to bring the inner organs into control. You breathe in one image and breathe out a different night…”
“It took a century to realize / Earth had died inside / a tin cup left upon a wall / the slowworm struggled in the glare until the hawk arrived.”
“Widescreen nativity: nativity of the eye. Ringed by lashes and flames. // Endgame cinema, Nuremberg hypothesis, the present unforgiven by both past and future….” — from Hannah and the Master, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“A green and downy sheet of sounds. You make a most extraordinary music. A beautiful music–boots cannot drown out, soldiers cannot outcount. We remember…hiding inside every leaf. Shining through the paper thin. Chlorophylled awhile.”
“A flash of lightning from outside the cave, a brief illumination: snake heads, so many snake heads, swaying inches from the tip of her nose. ‘Emmeline,’ the heads say together in a language not legible above ground. ‘O crooked, ugly Emmeline: you are blessed.’” — from Bridget Brewer’s Beasts of Revelation, semifinalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“we weren’t so stupid. we’d done our reading, even there in school. we knew of the deformities. we’d seen the portraits in our history book – the habsburgs with their horrible lips, their jaws. mental retardation, et cetera. we knew, we knew. but that wasn’t what we were doing.”
“Pauline Oliveros has been described as a musician, a composer, a performer, a philosopher, an educator, an accessibility designer and the godmother of electronic music, and she has been actively making boundary-dissolving music for more than half a century….”
By Nathan Meltz and Shira Dentz. You know that you’re not watching a traditional kid’s movie when animated Jack Kirby-like Viking storm troopers murder an animated village of medieval Irish peasants.
Part two of our interview with Jan Clausen, author of Veiled Spill: A Sequence (GenPop Books), one of the more important books of poetry published in the last year.
“to the glories of the dark longing you see in an aspirant on the path of devotion. Often used to bring the inner organs into control. You breathe in one image and breathe out a different night…”
“We’re almost fucking but we’re not. We’re all tongue. We’re all tongue down the glass, mouth open and taking. No, we’re not. We’re wasted on memory tonight. We’re fucking memories.” — from Nympholepsy, by Lisa Marie Basile and Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“Spiders crawl down my thighs, across my abdomen. A kind of scholarly pornography.” — from Miranda Metelski’s Resisting the Book of a Woman Possessed, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
