Praise for Rebecca Brown: “Strange and wonderful…Brown strips language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need.” (THE NEW YORK TIMES) “Simply one of the best contemporary lesbian writers around.” (DOROTHY ALLISON) “America’s only real rock ‘n’ roll schoolteacher.” (THURSTON MOORE, SONIC YOUTH)
Steven Dunn, a professional member of PEN America, is the author of the novel, Potted Meat (TS 2015), which was a Colorado Book Award Finalist and was shortlisted for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. His second book, water & power is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press later this year.
“Exhilarating…. An alt-epic for the 21st century… Visionary…. Rich and glorious.” — Publishers Weekly on Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
“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.
“Babbitt transmutes the language he was offered through Catholicism into the language of his readings of margins, and in turn, marginalia: the strophe of the book is transmuted into centerpiece: apostrophe. What else but alchemy or poetry could do that?”
Lindsey Appell reviews British poet Keston Sutherland’s eighteenth collection, “Whither Russia” (Barque Press, 2017).
“[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.
Timothy O’Keefe discusses books and chapbooks by C.S. Giscombe, David Markson, Marcel Proust, Mary Ruefle, and Tomas Tranströmer.
Danielle Pafunda holds forth on books by Josué Guébo, Ginger Ko, Esther Hautzig, and Jeff VanderMeer; anthologies by Leslie Jamison and by TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson; and more!
Divya Victor discusses “some enjoyments during our daily devastations” — books by Holly Melgard, Aditi Machado, Mercedes Eng, Eric Schmaltz, and Serena Chopra.
“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.
