Rebecca Brown, “Not Heaven, Somewhere Else” (TS 2018) featured in The Stranger
Big thanks to Rich Smith for his wide-ranging Stranger feature on Rebecca Brown and her forthcoming (Oct 2018) title with Tarpaulin Sky Press: Not Heaven, Somewhere Else.
Tarpaulin Sky Literary Magazine
News & Notes
SPD Bestseller! Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (TS 2018)
We’re tickled to note that Jennifer S. Cheng’s hybrid masterpiece, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (TS 2018) is now officially a bestseller at Small Press Distribution.
TS Press Editor Elena Georgiou named Finalist for the New American Voices Award from the Institute for Immigration Research
Hernán Díaz, Renee Macalino, and TS Editor Elena Georgiou are finalists for the Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award, a post-publication book prize created to recognize work that illuminates the complexity of human experience as told by immigrants.
Indeterminate Texts & Images
Carole Maso: excerpt from “The Bay of Angels,” a novel-in-progress
“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.”
Joshua Corey: excerpts from “Hannah and the Master”
“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.
Lisa Marie Basile and Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, excerpts From “Nympholepsy”
“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.
Reviews
Caroline Manring’s “Manual for Extinction” reviewed by Julia Madsen
“Caroline Manring’s Manual for Extinction exquisitely traces an ecopoetics of loss in the face of industrialism and myths of progress, revealing through nuance and beauty the ‘news that stays news.'”
Selah Saterstrom’s “Ideal Suggestions: Essays In Divinatory Poetics,” reviewed by Abby Hagler
Abby Hagler reviews Selah Saterstrom’s brilliant Ideal Suggestions: Essays In Divinatory Poetics (Essay Press, 2017): “A book dedicated to not only showing the link between the diviner and the writer, but also to helping a reader recognize the diviner within.”
Geoffrey Babbitt’s “Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light” reviewed by Michael McKee Green
“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?”
Reading Guides
What I’m Reading Now… by Mary-Kim Arnold
Mary-Kim Arnold discusses books and anthologies by Fatimah Asghar, Kate Colby, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Christine Wertheim.
What I’m Reading Now… by Piper J. Daniels
TS author Piper J. Daniels (Ladies Lazarus) discusses books by Catherine Bresner, Rosemarie Dombrowski, Akwaeke Emezi, and Danez Smith, as well as a collaboration by Elizabeth J. Colen and Carol Guess.
What I’m Reading Now… by Diana Khoi Nguyen
Diana Khoi Nguyen discusses the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as well as plays and books and pamphlets by Lauren Yee, Dan O’Brien, Thi Bui, Susan Howe, and James Salter.
Music(k)
Things To Do When You Pick Up A Guitar
“Look around at the people in front of you, if any, or the animals, plants, air molecules. Try to get a feel for them without passing judgement or drawing any major conclusions.”
Astrology For Guitar
“One day in Los Angeles (February 3rd 2014 from the looks of things) it occurred to me to assign a note to each of the 12 Western astrological signs.”
Remember To Breathe
“In the late 1990s I started having mini-meltdowns inside my head as I played: whether this or that was the right note to play next, whether everyone in the room hated the note I was playing now & thus perhaps hated me by extension.”
Essays
from Gender/Genre by Erin Bertram
“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.”
In Memoriam: Tom Raworth, by Martin Corless-Smith
“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.”
Piper J. Daniels, “Sirens”
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.
Poetry
Evan Gray, excerpts from Wretch Poetics
“as the river / floods to the horse’s / bridle. with blood. / yes lord. it will never / run dry.”
Five poems by Biswamit Dwibedy
“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…”
Four poems by Martin Corless-Smith
“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.”
Fiction
Carole Maso: excerpt from “The Bay of Angels,” a novel-in-progress
“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.”
Bridget Brewer, excerpt from “Beasts of Revelation”
“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.
Fiction by Garett Strickland: “Gills”
“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.”
Interviews
Lance Olsen interviewed by Adam Tedesco
“Lance Olsen is prolific in the field of innovative literature: Having published over twenty volumes of fiction, poetry, essay, and theory, his work is wide ranging while remaining deeply embedded in the intertextual tradition of postmodernism….”
Pauline Oliveros interviewed by Betsey Biggs
“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….”
Illuminated Animation: an Interview With Tomm Moore
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.
Occult
Selah Saterstrom’s “Ideal Suggestions: Essays In Divinatory Poetics,” reviewed by Abby Hagler
Abby Hagler reviews Selah Saterstrom’s brilliant Ideal Suggestions: Essays In Divinatory Poetics (Essay Press, 2017): “A book dedicated to not only showing the link between the diviner and the writer, but also to helping a reader recognize the diviner within.”
Five poems by Biswamit Dwibedy
“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…”
Lisa Marie Basile and Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein, excerpts From “Nympholepsy”
“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.