We are delighted to announce that Piper J. Daniels’s debut collection of essays, Ladies Lazarus (TS 2018) has been longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Steven Dunn makes his third appearance in Granta with an excerpt from his second novel, water & power (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2018).
We’re grateful to Publishers Weekly for naming Jennifer S. Cheng’s Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky Press) among the “Best Books of 2018.”
“Grief does not go away, but it does evolve, often into forms that enable us to get through the day.”
“Captivates with its joie de vivre … hinges on a carnivalesque lens through which the poet filters the body and its boundless passions. The corporeal enters the poem like a string quartet: bladder, teeth, asshole, knees, all playing their minor fugues, erotic and elemental….”
Joe Sacksteder reviews “Night Vision” by Claire Wahmanholm (New Michigan Press, 2017). Although it “implicates poetry as one of the obscuring forces … ‘Night Vision’ will help you see in the dark.”
Amy King discusses books by Rosi Braidotti, Anthony Gierzynski, Robert Greene, Celia Kitzinger, and César Vallejo.
“Despite the displacement, assimilation, and killing of tens of thousands of Indigenous residents and Black arrivants, Midwestern whiteness remains incompletely achieved.”
Juliana Spahr discusses Poets of the Chinese Revolution (eds. Gregor Benton and Chongyi Feng) as well as books by Diane Hamilton, Karl Ove Knausgård, Andrew Piper, and Keith Richards.
“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 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.
“Our ultimate goal was to write a book. What crystallized instead is this email thread, composed less than a month before Mark left for his second cross-country walk….”
“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.”
“It was another 30 years before G. felt that very few people wanted to eat her or do her monstrous harm. Most people, she concluded, had enough of a handle on themselves to be indifferent, and only a few were wired to commit murder, cannibalism, child sacrifice….”
“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.
“as the river / floods to the horse’s / bridle. with blood. / yes lord. it will never / run dry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
New holy text from TS High Priestess Bhanu Kapil appears in the debut publication of Ignota Press, Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry, along with work by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kaveh Akbar, and a host of TS faves: CAConrad, Lucy Ives, Dorothea Lasky, Ariana Reines, et al.
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.”
“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…”
