We don’t need to tell you that the last several months have been exceptionally brutal. Nor will we comment further, except to say it is in the context of this nationwide brutality that we read manuscripts for the 2017 TS Book Prizes.
Today, good news comes in twos. We’re totally freakin stoked to announce that debut author Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat (TS Press 2016) has been chosen as a finalist for a Colorado Book Award in the category of Literary Fiction.
We’re thrilled to announce that Elizabeth Hall’s I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris (TS Press 2016) has been chosen as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of Bisexual Nonfiction.
“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.”
“Abra (short for cadabra), the brainchild of poets Kate Durbin and Amaranth Borsuk and designer Ian Hatcher, is a wormhole for the era … one that’s a cosmic, fangy, hallucinogenically-venomed, Edenic pleasure to bite into.”
Michael T. Young reviews Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, edited by Fox Frazier-Foley & Erin Elizabeth Smith (Sundress Publications, 2016): “A collection that speaks to our culture and time, and will only become more relevant as the next few years unfold.”
Andrew Seguin on Elizabeth Bishop, Leonard Gardner, Yannis Ritsos, and Keith Waldrop, as well as Fred Moten’s “whopping music of language.”
Shane McRae discusses “style” in poetry, via Swinburne, Helen Vendler, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Jeff Dolven, and Aase Berg.
Rikki Ducornet with a short list of recommended books by Juan Pimentel, James Baldwin, Alia Malek, Tim Low, and Marwa Al Sabouni.
“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 self-harm and suicide, which we’re publishing in time for Christmas 2016. “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 Daniels. “This is a call to the damaged, the suicidal, and the mentally ill who feel as though they are drowning in darkness. I see you. I see your beauty.”
Post election essay by M. NourbeSe Philip: “Trump has won the hearts and minds of the American public that is the raw underbelly of a bloated, imperialist state. He has given new meaning to the expression: Anybody can become president of the United States—anybody as in serial harasser and predator of women; as in known racist supported by the KKK; as in a shady dealer, snake oil salesman; as in confirmed liar. Anybody! But a competent, experienced, intelligent woman.”
“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….” — from Anna Maria Hong’s H & G, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“Let’s think a bit about textual art that is ephemeral, outside, fugitive; text that isn’t carved into a building or a street or a stone or a wall. Let’s note the diminutive textual adventure. The infinitesimal moment. I want to think about earth texts beyond shelter. Going outside brings the death in a little, releases the work into the air. Poem as prayer flag. Poem as act against the immaculate. Text as emphatic and intimate protest.”
In the wake of The Becoming (book 1 of the West of Kingdom Come quadrilogy), the feral twin brothers Rem + Rom “eggnawledge itchudder” and “reeleyes” their current state (fathered by a rogue member of the Lewis + Clark expedition and reared by a she-wolf) and build a log raft to “riverse ingenear” their father’s route-cum-rut that berthed them unceremoniously in spitting image at the mouth of the Columbia—all in the name of westward expansion.
“Take this frackwaste voice you wish / I’d use 4 truth instead of dare. You’ll want // to salt&bury it, so it don’t rise, but where’s / your shovel? Where’s the body?” Kirsten Kaschock’s manuscript, Numbness, the Practice was semifinalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“Y the monster has a deck of cards. The back of each a / forest. The monster lays a cross along discarded leaves. The / cards are invisible, but the monster knows they are there….” — from Jeff T. Johnson’s The Book / Or / The Woods, semifinalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
“I dream of my manifest body / and coexisting with toxic waste, I dream of cops / who murder babies, I dream of teachers who murder babies, / I dream of a doctor who says You want a boy / and pulls a cock from his drawer and glues it on / and it dangles flaccid and huge from our infant’s body …” — From Marty Cain’s The Wound Is (Not) Real: A Memoir, semifinalist 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.
“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.”
“Having climbed all five thousand stairs of the towering high-rise, OUR AUTHOR, in a red state of rage, erupts wildly into the room, and there, seeing that he was late to the conference, seeing that there were already so many authors at the table already, a million authors with a billion inflections, OUR AUTHOR thinks to himself that to pose even a single assertion, to converse with even a single poet, simply would not do….” Excerpts from Sandy Florian’s prose manuscript, The Chair, a finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
“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.
“Abra (short for cadabra), the brainchild of poets Kate Durbin and Amaranth Borsuk and designer Ian Hatcher, is a wormhole for the era … one that’s a cosmic, fangy, hallucinogenically-venomed, Edenic pleasure to bite into.”
This holiday season, support the Satanic Temple’s efforts to protect the rights of women and children and to keep the separation of church and state.
An exceptional essay on self-harm and suicide, which we’re publishing in time for Christmas 2016. “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 Daniels. “This is a call to the damaged, the suicidal, and the mentally ill who feel as though they are drowning in darkness. I see you. I see your beauty.”
