Publishers Weekly: Jennifer S. Cheng’s “Moon” in “Best Books of 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.”
Tarpaulin Sky Literary Magazine
News & Notes
TS author Steven Dunn interviewed by Hillary Leftwich at Heavy Feather
Steven Dunn discusses his new novel, drawing on ten years in the Navy, water & power, published this October by Tarpaulin Sky Press.
Seattle Review of Books on Rebecca Brown’s “Not Heaven, Somewhere Else”
At The Seattle Review of Books, none other than Paul Constant does his darndest to describe the genius of Rebecca Brown and her “dangerous and exciting” new book from TS Press, Not Heaven, Somewhere Else.
Reviews
Katie Jean Shinkle’s “Ruination,” reviewed by Meghan Lamb
“Condensing a war, an outbreak, an apocalyptic flourishing of the sky, and a girl’s coming of age evolution into the length of a novella….Leaving us in a state of exploded-open Ruination, Shinkle slyly invites us to pick up the pieces, to reassemble ourselves anew.”
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.”
Reading Guides
What I’m Reading Now… by Tod Lippy
21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari An enlightening, thrilling, depressing, and periodically terrifying meditation on the future of the human race….
What I’m Reading Now… by Kathy Fagan Grandinetti
Kathy Fagan Grandinetti discusses books by Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Sheila Heti, Sabrina Orah Mark, Terrance Hayes, and Tarfia Faizullah.
What I’m Reading Now… by Alifair Skebe
Alifair Skebe discusses books by Maram Al-Massri, Kathline Carr, Robert Henri, Adeena Karasick, and Peter Turchi.
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.
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.”
Anna Maria Hong, Excerpts from H & G
“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.
Rem + Rom, excerpt from “A Raft Manifest”
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.
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.”
Miranda Metelski, Excerpts from Resisting the Book of a Woman Possessed
“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.
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.
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.”
Occult
New from Ignota Books: “Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry”
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.
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…”