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)
Praise for Steven Dunn: “Texts that keep tapping the nails in, over and over, while speaking as clearly and directly as you could ask.” (BLAKE BUTLER, VICE MAGAZINE) “Complex and bold and conflicted and powerful and terrified and tough and human.” (KHADIJAH QUEEN) “Collapses the boundaries between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction.” (NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER)
Big thanks to Rich Smith for his wide-ranging Stranger feature on Rebecca Brown and her new book with Tarpaulin Sky Press: Not Heaven, Somewhere Else: “These updated and revised fables satisfied a desire for moral discussion that I didn’t even know I had…. Highly recommended and highly rewarding.”
“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 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.'”
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.”
Alifair Skebe discusses books by Maram Al-Massri, Kathline Carr, Robert Henri, Adeena Karasick, and Peter Turchi.
Mary-Kim Arnold discusses books and anthologies by Fatimah Asghar, Kate Colby, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Christine Wertheim.
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.
“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.
“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….” — from Anna Maria Hong’s H & G, a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prizes.
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.
“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.”
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…”
“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.
