Tarpaulin Sky News & Notes

Huffington Post and Lantern Review examine, praise Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:30:00 +0000

At The Huffington Post, poet and attorney Seth Abramson provides a succinct, spot-on review of Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (along with brief reviews of some other favorite books of ours, including Julianna Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Ariana Reines's Mercury).

Writes Abramson:

Peter Pan was a postmodern tour de force written at the height of Modernism -- and if the very best collections of literary art at least gesture toward their immediate influences, this is undoubtedly the contemporary re-treatment that Peter Pan deserves. Boully has captured the darkness of Barrie's text, and in elevating its inter- and sub-textualities to the level of discourse she illuminates and reinvigorates her source material without sacrificing any of its creepiness, wonder, or violence. Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming.

Read all of Abramson's December 2011 Contemporary Poetry Reviews

At The Lantern Review, Jai Arun Ravine provides a unique, probing, and ultimately fab review, locating not merely within the contexts of Boully's The Body and J.M. Barrie's "source text," Peter and Wendy, and drawing parallels with Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Small Arguments (Pedlar Press, 2003) and Padcha Tuntha-obas’ Trespasses (O Books, 2006).

Here are a couple excerpts:

“Sewing,” “pockets” and “stories” being things that don’t quite exist in the Neverland, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them sews pockets in and around the mythos of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy. Cutting snippets of Barrie’s source text, including Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and events in Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie & the Lost Boys, Boully centralizes Wendy’s experience and sews up bits of her story, stitching the make-believe into the made-quite-real. In her pockets, open ends and open endings fit and hover....

Having also read Barrie’s text, I find that the original story is already quite dark and awkwardly twisted. The Neverland is a world of recurring trauma and chronic amnesia, wrapped up in a child’s ignorance, which continues to circle itself. Sexuality is no stranger to Barrie’s story either, but Boully does unravel the hems a bit further, taking a peek at Tiger Lily’s pubes, Hook’s pubic-y beard, Wendy’s panties, poo, peepee and pooper holes.

The realness of make-believe washing, make-believe medicine, make-believe food and make-believe sex—stink, sickness, malnutrition and still-birth—peep through Boully’s stitches.

Read the full review.

Buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.

New review of Sarah Goldstein's Fables, at The Iowa Review

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:31:00 +0000

Poet Nick Ripatrazone at The Iowa Review provides a brilliant engagement with Sarah Goldstein's Fables (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011), and in the process evokes Ingmar Bergman, the Brothers Grimm, James Joyce, and W.B. Yeats, which works for us quite nicely. Especially Bergman.

"Regardless of the genesis of these prose poems and vignettes," however, writes Ripatrazone, "Goldstein’s vision and approach is wholly new. Her work in this collection is more than translation and transcription: Fables contains poems that whisper tradition but fully stand on their own."

Ripatrazone also discusses Goldstein's "contributions to the organic conversation of narrative form," noting that Fables

might be considered a book of prose poems, but strict definitions only muddle the power of the stories. The works certainly build toward a final line, and yet the profluence of the narrative builds in epigrammatic snippets, crafted with laudable precision. Goldstein opts for the sideways glance, the unfocused focus. What is not told to the reader is enticing: when “dogs of the town lie in a heap and cough, shuddering with every breath,” an entire architecture of apocalypse remains in the silent background. The power of fable, and Fables, has always been folks' ability to give blurry shapes to concrete fears, to convince the listener that the corners of the supernatural can be flushed with light just as easily as they have been shadowed dark.

Read the full review here.

Buy Sarah Goldstein's Fables directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.

New reviews of Jenny's Boully's not merely at DIAGRAM and Examiner

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:24:00 +0000

DIAGRAM Issue 11.5 includes an intelligent and thorough engagement with Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. Here's a snippet:

unlike in Book of Beginnings and Endings and "The Body," the idea of text in Not Merely Because of the Unknown that was Stalking Toward Them is not being erased. Instead, conventions are being uprooted, turned upside down. Boully establishes complex characters inconsistent in their observations, unfaithful in their desires, untraceable in their animation, unknowable in their thoughts. All of this "unning" undoes the traditional gesture in fiction where the primary character's desire is clearly understood. Boully goes underground to root out the darker desires.

The book is divided by a horizontal line that moves around but usually appears in the middle of the page. One might read what's underneath the like as one does David Foster Wallace's footnotes, all at once. Or, one might read them as they do in Boully's essay, "The Body," and read nothing but the footnotes. But when I started to read them as individual poems, my reading of the book became clear and the premises apparent. . . .

Peter's love of power, his deviousness, his lasciviousness, appear in the original text but it's not until Boully digs them out from the underground, from the subtext of Barrie's work that those characteristics seem so cruel. What does it mean, to say to a woman, never grow up? Is there any curse worse for a woman to grow old? Old is alone.

When you imagine Wendy, you must imagine her at her most lonely. She's twelve, then fourteen, then sixteen, then married. She'll leave the window open; she'll wear the same nightgown; she'll keep whispering stories, stories out the crack of the window, through keyholes, through fissures in the ground. Whenever she hears a twig snap or the fluttering wings of moths, she'll think that Peter's back, but he's never back, at least not for her (6).

[READ THE FULL REVIEW AT DIAGRAM]

Via Examiner, Lisa M. Cole also dives deeply, and smartly, into Berrie's and Boully's divergent approaches to the "same" characters. Writes Cole:

The novel Peter Pan has many troubling aspects when viewed through today’s modern lens. It is often sexist, and too preoccupied with etiquette. Also, rather than being charming, Peter often comes off as too cocky, and Wendy too eager to fit into her predetermined gender role. However, there were a few interesting things about the story, despite these objections. Take, for example, the severe blurring of roles in the relationship between Peter and Wendy. Are they lovers? Are they mother and son? Are they siblings? This quandary is the emotional center of Boully’s book. As she retells the story of Peter and Wendy, she focuses on the universal theme of unrequited love. The supposedly whimsical and light children’s story transforms into something much more mature, much darker, as Wendy’s feelings of abandonment are at center stage. Most people have felt the sting of rejection that Wendy feels when Peter does not reciprocate her feelings for him. The fact that the audience can so readily empathize with Wendy’s character is part of what makes Boully’s book so haunting, and so intense an experience. . . .

This retelling is valuable because by bringing the true darkness of the story to the forefront, Boully’s text is not masquerading as something it is not, which is a problem identified in the original. It is not often that a response to a literary work is more successful than the original work, but that is certainly the case with Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them.

[READ THE FULL REVIEW AT EXAMINER]

Buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and save about $6 off the Amazon price.

Sarah Goldstein podcast reading for InDigest; Johannes Göransson interviewed at 3:AM Magazine, with entrance to a colonial pageant now featured, and reviewed, at LitPub

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:29:00 +0000

Johannes Göransson's entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is now featured at LitPub, where you can not only buy the book, but read excerpts and a review by Tim Jones-Yelvington .

Founded by Molly Gaudy, LitPub states: "Our mission is to promote a sustainable literary community by introducing readers to authors we know and love. By providing a public gathering place for ongoing conversations, we aim to connect readers, authors, publishers, and other independent artists of all creative disciplines."

And for that and more, we thank Molly and the rest of LitPub's large and awesome crew.

For folks craving more and ever more Göransson, we direct you to this interview with Johannes, via SJ Fowler, at 3:AM Magazine, where you will also find more excerpts from entrance.

Of course, you can always find more from Johannes at www.montevidayo.com or at our favorite distributors, Small Press Distrubution, where, like a half dozen other TSky Press titles in the past (we boast, shamelessly), entrance debuted on SPD's Bestsellers list, along with Sarah Goldstein's Fables.

And, speaking of Sarah Goldstein's Fables, In Digest Magazine's InDefinite Podcast Episode #22 features Ms. Goldstein reading from her bestseller. Thank you, InDigest!

Irene Flood Update from Tarpaulin Sky's Vermont Home Base

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 17:32:00 +0000

Christian now has a real computer again and will try to answer your emails soon. Thank you for the many kind ones you have sent. We're OK, both E & I, and the cats are also fine. Our house was surrounded by water but did not flood inside, which feels nothing short of miraculous. The bad news is that the damage to our land and out-buildings is pretty extensive, as is the number of things, both personal and business, that were lost down the river. None of which was covered under our flood insurance, we have been informed.

We filled some orders this morning and will continue to do so. You may continue to order directly from Tarpaulin Sky or, if we are out of stock for a specific title, from Small Press Distribution (or Amazon, if you must). Tarpaulin Sky Press is able to honor present contractual obligations, but is unable to commit to any new projects at this time. Please do NOT send review copies, or reviews, or submissions of any kind.

Some photos follow. --Best, Xtian

Prior to Irene, this was flower gardens and vegetable gardens and lawn. Several trees are missing from the upper left corner of the photo, where you can see river. The little building in distance, center, used to sit about 50 feet to the left of the stone well.

This little building floated about 100 feet but was stopped by a silver birch.

Christian was able to remove some things prior to the flood, but the waters rose too fast to get everything. The river took about an hour and a half to jump the banks and to travel inland about 100 feet.

Free table.

Free printer.

Free mud.

Can't tell from the pic, but the mud inside the buildings is sloped/slopped at a depth of about 2 feet. Not sure if you've ever tried to shovel mud, but heavy is the word.

Gives you an idea of the water line. The angle is off, however--the debris on the tree is about eight feet high.

Back woods.

Backwoods installation #1

Backwoods installation #2

Phlox.The only flower that remains visible above the new dunes. Odd, too, given that the sand swallowed an entire young pear tree not more than twenty feet from the phlox.

All trees must be dug out, or they will die.

On the river, about twelve feet of root base.

On the river #2

Tarpaulin sky press flooded

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:35:00 +0000

Main Vermont office hit hard by Irene. All that was green is now a sand dune. Two buildings floated down river. Xtian & E are OK. Will be offline for some time. Please order through SPD. Cant get on facebook from this ipad. Sorry for inconveniences. Best wishes, Xtian

Kristin Sanders at HTML Giant reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown...

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:12:00 +0000

At HTML Giant, Kristin Sanders reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them:

Sanders discusses structure and hybridity and all that good stuff, and her engagement is wholly intelligent and insightful throughout--

. . . perhaps most prominent are questions related to traditional gender roles and the budding sexuality of the story’s youth, which every other adaption appears to have dulled down . . .

--though it's Sanders' appreciation of the book's humor that we particularly enjoy:

. . . [not merely] offers more questions than answers. Who are the Lost Boys, really, and why are they clothed in bearsuits? What’s the history between Peter and Mrs. Darling? How many other little girls did Peter whisk off to Neverland? How does one properly dispose of Never poo? About Tinkerbell, Boully wonders: “where ever will we get such small medical supplies for you? The Tinker dental dam; the Tinker tampon.” . . .

Read the full, totally awesome review here.

Read more about the book at the following link, where you can also buy Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them for $2 off the Amazon price, with free shipping.

Tarpaulin Sky Issue #17: Free, online

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 14:42:00 +0000

Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal
Issue #17 / Summer 2011
192 pages, free, online

Click here to read the issue

Published by Christian Peet. Edited by Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Colie Collen, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey; with associate editors Duncan B. Barlow, Michael Tod Edgerton, Brian Mihok, Christine Wertheim; along with readers Jac Jemc, Eireene Nealand, Janna Plant, Michael Rerick, Amanda Skubal, Julie Strand, Amish Trivedi, and Laura Woltag.

Cover art by Noah Saterstrom. Featuring work by Scott Butterfield, David Buuck & Juliana Spahr, Roxanne Carter, Joshua Cohen, Stella Corso, Patrick Crerand, Jeremy M. Davies, Sandra Doller, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Anne Gorrick, Janalyn Guo, Daniel Y. Harris, Catherine Imbriglio, Lucy Ives, Christopher Janke, Patrick Jones, Catherina Kasper, Sean Kilpatrick, Thorin Klosowski, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Susan Maxwell, Susan McCarty, Christina Mengert, Anjali Mullany, Christian Nagler, Aimee Parkison, Lance Phillips, Deborah Richards, Kate Schapira, Ben Segal, Donna Stonecipher, Bronwen Tate, Laura Vena, and Max Winter.

Tarpaulin Sky Press New Books, Bestsellers & Reviews: Boully, Goldstein, Göransson

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:40:00 +0000

While Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is still a brand new baby, currently "recommended" at Small Press Distribution, toddlers such as Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate and Sarah Goldstein's Fables, we are pleased to report, are already on the SPD's poetry and fiction bestsellers lists.

Nick Sturm, at The Rumpus, reviews Sarah Goldstein's Fables.

‎"Horrifying and humbling in their imaginative precision, the stories of Sarah Goldstein’s collection, Fables, awaken the tension between human and nonhuman in these haunting vignettes. . . . Entering Goldstein’s Fables is good fodder for dreams and the conscience, but be sure not to leave this one laying out for the kids." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Karen Hannah, at Open Letters Monthly, reviews Jenny Boully's not merely. (Though, it's less of a review and more of a dissertation. Thank you for your attention, Karen and Open Letters Monthly!)

"Boully’s book subtly reveals how we engage in the act of creating narrative through our reading in order to find our own place within a narrative—in order to be placed within a narrative ourselves—in the same way that we place characters via our definition of them. This makes narrative a kind of place that we look to find ourselves within or that we try to settle ourselves within. We seek it out like a home because it feels familiar or because it began from the origins of something that felt familiar." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Fence poet and Capo of the Racine Public Library system, Nick Demske, provides a thought-provoking review of Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant.

"Göransson pays the ultimate penance and shoulders the heaviest burden: to reflect a culture accurately, no matter how disfigured. His art drinks deep of the disease it most fears so that we can learn more from his symptoms. He’s the Poet Laureate of the Coal Mine, our savior canary, dying and producing perpetually death-obsessed art that we might all be spared. So for all its ugliness—all its child predators and body dysmorphia, its castrations, its Ronald Reagans, its hate crimes and artists and anorexia, everything—Entrance is the dubious gift of the diagnosis we’ve been too afraid to confront on our own. It’s embarrassing, it’s frightening, but it’s also potentially the long-neglected first step in addressing a major disease." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Joseph Michael Owens, at PANK Magazine, also reviews Göransson's Entrance.

‎"Entrance to a colonial pageant… demands its reader to engage it on a close sentence-to-sentence level and rewards the reader with some truly spectacular prose. Prose that, page after page, begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child . . . before immolating the host, the reader." [READ THE FULL REVIEW]

Tarpaulin Sky Press 2010 Open Reading Period picks ...

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Tarpaulin Sky Press is pleased to announce that it has selected not one but two manuscripts from the 2010 open reading period: Claire Donato’s novella, Burial, and David Wolach’s poetry collection, Hospitalogy, both of which will be published in Fall 2012. Congrats!

Claire's and David's books will join the already-scheduled publication of Joyelle McSweeney’s second book with TSky Press, a collection of short fictions entitled Salamandrine: 8 Gothics. Other forthcoming publications include Kim Gek Lin Short's second book with TSky Press, China Cowboy, coming this fall, as well as our picks from the last chapbook reading period, Claire Hero's Dollyland, and Paula Koneazny's Installation, also coming fall/winter 2011.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who thought enough of Tarpaulin Sky Press to send their work to our open reading period. We would also like to note that the following authors and titles made this a particularly difficult reading period for us, by virtue of their being too damn good:

Rosa Alcala, The Translator's Blues
Greg Bachar, Curiosisosity
Carrie Bennett, The Land is a Painted Thing
Emma Bolden, Malificae
David Brennan, Another Gallows
Amy Sara Carroll, FANNIE + FREDDIE/The Sentimentality of Post-9-11 Pornography
Dereck Clemons, Arts & Leisure
Olivia Cronk, Skin Horse
John Deming, Human Heads
Sandra Doller, Memory of the Prose Machine and Man Years
Jamey Gallagher, Crumblehead
K. Lorraine Graham, Baseball Season In America
Adriana Grant, Bang, Pouf
Jenny Gropp Hess, Organographies
Steven Karl, Dear Human Race
Drew Krewer, I Could Be Your Beauty Resort
Tony Mancus, How to Build a Radio-belly
John Mann, Able, Baker, Charlie
Kristi Maxwell, PLAN/K
Susan Maxwell, Tournament
Catherine Meng, The Longest Solar Eclipse of the Century
Ben Mirov, Nightingale Forge
Monica Mody, Kala Pani
Linnea Ogden, Heart Of Palm
Caryl Pagel, Emergencies
Aimee Parkison, Water-Clock Water
Kim Parko, Junior
Jeffrey Pethybridge, Striven, The Bright Treatise
Michelle Naka Pierce, Continuous Frieze Bordering [Red]
Deborah Poe, Hélène
Michael Rerick, OdeIss/heIs
Amber Sparks, The Monstrous Sadness of Mythical Creatures
Dao Strom, we were meant to be a gentle people
JeFF Stumpo, diluvium
Dan Thomas-Glass, An ocean is a body
Genya Turovskaya, The Man Falling
Sara Veglahn, The MayfliesSharon White, On Voyage
Carolyn Zaikowski, An Invisible Bottle of White Ink
Nicole Zdeb, The Friction of Distance

Bookslut reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:01:00 +0000

At Bookslut, Micah McCrary reviews Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, out this month from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Here are two of our favorite quotes from the review.

Boully, both a poet and an essayist by experience, knows perfectly well how to weave together the intricacies of chosen words and images with an arc essential to an impacting story, and the key to her prose here lies not in its darkness or its grownup-ness, but rather its careful tiptoeing between the minds and hearts of characters whose surfaces we've known for decades....

[T]o delve into Boully's work is to dive with faith from the plank -- to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself. One must, when reading the work, “dispel every other thought,” as Calvino would say. They must find themselves in a locked room, perhaps on a couch, perhaps in the bath (to dream of mer-creatures), or perhaps almost prostrate in bed with wide and absorbing eyes. They must be willing to fly themselves....

Click here to read the full review at Bookslut

The Man Booker Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:56:00 +0000

The prize was originally known as the Booker-McConnell Prize, after the company Booker-McConnell began sponsoring the event in 1968; it became commonly known as the "Booker Prize" or simply "the Booker." When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain "Booker" as part of the official title of the prize.

Hilarity on Wikipedia. That's one way of putting it. The Man Group "opted to retain" the word "Booker." You know, rather than just calling it "The Man Prize."

Julianna Spallholz's debut collection of short fictions, The State of Kansas...

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:48:00 +0000

cannot be published soon enough. Get a little taste here. The actual pub date is Fall 2011. This is what Christian said about it: "I'm guessing that Lydia Davis and Diane Williams fans will be the most excited, but only because no one is waiting on new Hemingway or Carver, and Spallholz is something like the love child of all four. Don’t ask me how that works, or how Spallholz does what she does, but the end result is an astonishing debut. Indeed the whole genre of short-fictions is getting a major facelift of late, thanks to a proliferation of young and youngish U.S. women writers such as Danielle Dutton, Amelia Gray, Joanna Howard, Alissa Nutting, Joanna Ruocco, Deb Olin Unferth, Lidia Yuknavitch, et al—and now, Julianna Spallholz. I have been welcomed into homes I should not have been welcomed into, writes Spallholz. I have touched things I probably should not have touched. Hell yeah. Lucky us."

"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer," says Ander Monson.

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:43:00 +0000

"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way. It's not just her subject here, the Peter Pan story, but the way she reconfigures it—rips all the stuffing out of it, pops off its heads and parts, then shuffles, sexes, and reanimates it. You might expect her primary mode to be narrative, and it is, but this book's weird sweet homunculus heart is in the inquiry into and against these narratives, and the seams between real and not-real. I for one am glad that Boully sanded that safe, sane veneer right back off the story so it's become raw, confused, glorious, new."--ANDER MONSON

"This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism": LSU Student Arrested for Writing a Poem in Imitation of Johannes Göransson's "Quite Disturbing" Style

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:09:00 +0000

[Now that we've "officially" published Johannes Göransson's Entrance to colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, we're re-posting this feel-good story about LSU Student James Bellard, who was arrested after reading Johannes's work and writing (as assigned) an "imitation" poem. And then leaving a copy of said poem in the LSU library. While dressed as a leprechaun.

Why in hell is this a feel-good story? Well, because the investigating officer, Detective Morris, appears to be aware that poetry is alive and breeding and can be just as "scary" as "life." That Morris appears familiar with contemporary poetry beyond Mary Oliver is heartening news. One can only imagine what might have happened if, for example, John Barr had been the arresting officer.)

The following is Mr. Bellard's earnest and often hilarious account, re-posted here from Montevidayo. --Eds.]

Luck of the Irish

It was late at night when I got the e-mail for the assignment to write an imitation of Johannes Göransson. I was sick and really didn’t feel like writing a poem that I wouldn’t finish till 11:30 that night, but I hated being sick more and to change my routine would be to let the virus win. So, I read a few of Johannes’s poems. I picked out some elements of his style (killing, doll penis[es], and demons to name a few). The overall feel of his style was that it was quite disturbing. I set out to make my imitation even more disturbing—like the ramblings of a schizophrenic before some terrible act—and after the events that transgressed shortly thereafter, I’d say I’d surpassed my own expectations in that.
This is the poem:

Dear, Lucifer

i opened up my refrigerator, and thought, who should i kill today, or maybe someone should kill me because something really only has meaning when its wrapped up, because there needs to be a moment that sUMmarizes it all up. so give me the super-freaky super-nunchuck from outer-space. let the death-scythe Carve my pain into my soul. but i didn’t have a death-scythe in my refrigerator, only a bottle of tooth-paste that i could use to slowly slit my wrist, only I couldn’t do it because that wouldn’t be as sexy… not that i want to be dead, but to die. Hey, look there’s a doll in here with a penis.

***

It was 8:55 the next morning when I went into the LSU library to print out my poem. To celebrate the holiday, I was wearing a green leprechaun top hat. To add to the effect, I had my side-burns poking out like Wolverine. I had even been going to buy spray paint to make my hair green, but I was pressing the clock and didn’t have time to make the stop. My first class would start in 15 minutes.

Once I managed to get the slow computer to start printing my poem, I found myself standing in line behind a person who must have been printing a whole book. Nonetheless, I’d given myself a little time to spare, so I stood there for a few minutes. That’s when the printer ran out of paper and my impatience won over. I tried another printer, this time with success.

I went back to log off of the computer, but someone else had gotten on it. I didn’t like that because they might be able to mess up something of mine. I don’t like to cause trouble, though, for anyone, so I said not a word to him, and just hurried to class.

***

I was in Tureaud hall walking towards my last class of the day, when a man walked up behind me and said in a voice like my high-school teacher that had always stood by the school entrance and inspected everyone’s uniforms, “Excuse me sir!” I turned around to see what he wanted (faintly annoyed by the association), then I saw the badge clipped to his belt. “Put your hands on the wall!” He commanded.

“There’s the leprechaun.” Another officer said smugly as he walked up with a third. “Good eye!”

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in the can and will be held against you in court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, an attorney will be appointed to you by the court of law. Do you understand your rights?”

A leprechaun… yeah, I guess I had the luck of the Irish.

***

The situation didn’t feel quite real as I rode in the SUV to the LSU police department. All manner of explanations for why I’d been taken in for questioning went through my mind. I could only think that there’d been some mistake, though I couldn’t imagine what it was. Nonsensical thoughts drugs being planted on my body wandered through my mind.

They pulled up beside the station, then led me inside to a room where I sat down across from Detective Morris. After I’d signed the document saying that I understood my rights he began the questioning. “Tell me everything you’ve done today.” Morris said.

I told him everything I’d did since that morning. I told him because I was innocent and wanted to clear up my name. Besides, being cooperative itself should relieve some of their suspicion. When I got to the part about when I’d gotten off of the computer for a bit to came back and find it taken, I thought to myself that someone must have got on then and done something illegal under my name. I didn’t say this out loud. If a virus had been uploaded onto the computer, I didn’t want my guess to be right, because it would seem to them like I knew something I didn’t.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Morris asked when I’d nearly gotten to the part where they’d spotted me.

“No,” I said, glad that we were finally getting to this. I wasn’t sure if the feeling in my stomach was just my nerves or the stomach virus I’d had since yesterday, but the shaking in my legs was definitely the nerves. I was anxious to prove my innocence and get out of there.

“No idea?” Morris asked again.

“No idea.” I repeated.

“A disturbing letter was found on the printer in the library. Are you familiar with this?”

I realized now what it was, and had to keep myself from laughing at how seriously the people who found this “disturbing letter,” and the cops now, were taking this. “That was a poem.” I said. “I’m not going to kill anyone or commit suicide. It must have printed out when they reloaded the printer with paper, I was running late for class, so I just printed from the other printed.”

At first they didn’t believe me. It was a weird mix of feelings, trying not to laugh, and being scared they might not believe me at the same time. But, it was mostly my trembling body that was scared. My mind was more reasonable. Once I showed them the e-mail for the assignment, and they read about killing, terrorism, and dolls on Johannes’s site (Officer Morris was actually really good at reading poetry), they were obliged to release me.

Later Dr. Lara told Johannes about my experience, and he said that it meant art was a crime. With this in mind, I added a new title to the top of my poem above “Dear, Lucifer,” something that should keep me from almost getting arrested in the future:

This is a Poem, Not an Act of Terrorism

A lot good did end up coming out of what could have been a catastrophe. I got to delay a quiz I hadn’t studied for, for one thing. For another, Johannes talked about what happened to me for two days before we actually met, then told me he wanted to have my poem and the story published on his blog. I guess I have the luck of the Irish.

Now available: Johannes Göransson's Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:17:00 +0000

Johannes Göransson
Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate

ISBN: 9780982541654
Fiction / Poetry / Drama
5.5" x 7", 100 pp., pbk. | May 2011

$14 includes shipping in the US
(vs. $16 + $3.99 at Amazon)
Add to Cart or order by check

Early Reviews of Entrance

“I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all). An 11th TV right behind you will show you yourself reading to the backside of your head. You'll need a machine gun and a body double. You will not feel your disease: as here these words bring such high pleasure: this malaria is fun. It's also fidgety, petrifying, elegantly rash, giddy, stunned. Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Göransson.”
—BLAKE BUTLER

“It would take a miracle to perform this pageant. For a start, you would have to reanimate Charlotte Brontë, Adolf Loos, and Ronald Reagan, and you would need an ungodly amount of wax. Most of the action is obscene, and therefore takes place offstage. The actors enter and report on scenes of spectacular violence that go on all the time every day. The audience is part of the spectacle too. We are all transformed into images somewhere in this script. At one point, all of Hollywood appears onstage on the form of dead horses, perhaps because Hollywood film continues to rely on narrative conventions that it exhausted long ago. The entire world also appears, played by a boy who, in a series of rapid costume changes, puts on increasingly pretty dresses.”
—AARON KUNIN

“Voluptuous, turbulent, and focused, inventive and strictly faithful to the performative instability of our queer moment, Johannes Goransson’s new book brings page and stage together in order to put genre (and gender) to a series of on-going tests. Here body and body of work (inextricable) are in a critical condition: subject to an invasive and relentless interpretation producing excessive, unruly 'truths.' Here the debased coin of feeling is rung hard and the 'Authenticity kitsch' of an easily accepted idea of the poetic is returned for a better metal, mined from a deeper vein. The love child—in this book at least—of Sylvia Plath and Antonin Artaud (if one can assign parentage at the end of an orgy?), Goransson gives us realisms complicated and fast enough to believe in. Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is an immensely important and absolutely thrilling experience. Read this! 'Something tells me he is the poet of social justice. Peekaboo!'”
—LAURA MULLEN

“A hybrid form somewhere between or among the categories of poetry, prose, essay, theatre production, and instruction manual. . . . There is much in the absolute inability of this production to be realized in physical terms and space which leads us to see a relationship to an Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty being played out. There are masks and intricate costumes aplenty, from the infamous sacks worn by Guantanamo detainees seen in the earlier passage being worn by THE PASSENGER, to the recurring “Pussy” costume fabricated “from Charlotte Bronte’s gauzes”(42). There are dresses made from looted items, prison-style clothes, black and polished bodies, cowboy costumes, skins charred from suicide bombings, heaps of dead horses, birds bursting from bodies, wounds, basketball jerseys on androgynous children, kissing faces and murder victims, exoskeletons, audience members in whiteface, and many more get ups. The costumes sometimes act/exist as characters in and of themselves, and sometimes they are affixed to bodies which are keen on morphing and wrecking any attempt at stability or a false sense of character development. What develops is the spectacle. It is a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things. . . . The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone. . . . All aboard.”
—RYAN DOWNEY, HTML GIANT

“This is a terrifying world we have entered, one that might be likened to a frenzied America souped-up with steroids, LSD, and the rhetoric of fear. . . . The culture in which the drama is set is one with a notable amount of xenophobia. The Passenger undergoes a mandatory cerebral operation, assisted by a nurse who perceives this passenger as a threat to children and society as a whole. . . . Göransson’s prose is obsessive, feverish; it feels as if there is simultaneously an overwhelming joy and a keen aversion that animates his descent into the language inhabited by the characters. . . . This pageant is ultimately redemptive—in a world where much is hidden and persecuted, all parties involved are catapulted into a liminal state that requires a confrontation of the concealed/uncanny. Instead of accepting the paternal law as such, we must create our own, while allowing for a multiplicity of laws to flourish and coexist.”
—DREW KREWER, MARS POETICA

About the Author

Johannes Göransson has published three prior books of his own writings—A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Dear Ra, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”)—and several books in translation—including, most recently, With Deer by Aase Berg, Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland and Collobert Orbital by Johan Jönson. He co-edits Action Books with Joyelle McSweeney, and co-edits the online journal Action, Yes with John Dermot Woods. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame and writes regularly on the blog www.montevidayo.com.

Excerpts from Entrance

appear in Tarpaulin Sky, Tammy, New American Writing, jubilat, Cleaves Journal, Parthenon West and Columbia Poetry Review.

Now available: Sarah Goldstein's Fables

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:41:00 +0000

Sarah Goldstein
Fables

ISBN: 9780982541661
Fiction | 5.5" x 7.5", 92 pp., pbk. | May 2011
Click here for more information

$14 includes shipping in the US
(vs. $16 + $3.99 at Amazon)
Add to Cart or order by check

Departing from the Brothers Grimm to approach our own economically and socially fractured present, Sarah Goldstein’s Fables constructs a world defined by small betrayals, transformations, and brutality amid its animal and human inhabitants. We hear the fragment-voices of ghosts and foxes, captors and captives, stable boys and schoolgirls in the woods and fields and cities of these tales. Anxious townsfolk abandon their orphan children to the nightingales in the forest, a bear deploys a tragic maneuver to avoid his hunters, and a disordered economy results in new kinds of retirements and relocations. Goldstein weaves together familiar and contemporary allegories creating a series of vibrant, and vital, tales for our time.

“In the meadow of fairy tale, Goldstein unrolls ribbons of story that fly gamely and snap with brilliance. Truly worth gazing at.”
—DEB OLIN UNFERTH

“Sarah Goldstein’s fables make me happy, and they'll make you happy too. They’re delightfully unnerving: small animals fare poorly; we’re bounced to what feel like the settings of the tales of the Brothers Grimm—huntsmen and witches wander the landscapes, a magic needle runs away, a finch mends lace—and then, wonderfully, there’s talk of retirement accounts and urban decay and the sad tale of a dude crushed under his truck whilst fixing its axle. And ghosts! And my favorite: the captives. One captor tells his captive, “you ought to put that voice of yours in a pillow.” Thank goodness Sarah Goldstein put her voice into Fables. Honestly, I’ve never read a debut this stunning.”
—JOSH RUSSELL

“Goldstein lightly treads up and down the spectrum of delightfully playful to hopelessly grim via vivacious and unsettling possibilities. . . . An important glimpse into contemporary literature, which blends a new subtle style with both nature and the relatable subversive. For fans of Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, and César Aira.”
—HEY SMALL PRESS!

More excerpts from Fables

appear in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Open Letters Monthly, Society for Curious Thought, and Tarpaulin Sky.

About the Author

Sarah Goldstein was born in Toronto and attended Concordia University (Montreal) and Cornell University. She currently resides in western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in Barrow Street, Bateau, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, New South, Verse, and other journals, and her artwork has been shown in the US and Canada.

Read an interview with Sarah at Open Letters Monthly.

Now taking pre-Rapture orders for Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal Issue#17 / Print Issue #3

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 18 May 2011 15:40:00 +0000

Tarpaulin Sky
Issue #17/Print Iss #3

7"x9", 204 pages, paperback
June 2011
Cover art: Noah Saterstrom

Special pre-publication price:
$12 includes shipping in the US
Pre-order by check or Add to Cart (ships June 2011)

Edited by

Laynie Browne, Blake Butler, Colie Collen, Sandy Florian, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Karla Kelsey, with associate editors Duncan B. Barlow, Michael Tod Edgerton, Brian Mihok, Christine Wertheim, along with readers Jac Jemc, Eireene Nealand, Janna Plant, Michael Rerick, Amanda Skubal, Julie Strand, Amish Trivedi, and Laura Woltag.

Featuring work by

Scott Butterfield, David Buuck and Juliana Spahr, Roxanne Carter, Joshua Cohen, Stella Corso, Patrick Crerand, Jeremy M. Davies, Sandra Doller, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, Molly Gaudry, Roxane Gay, Anne Gorrick, Janalyn Guo, Daniel Y. Harris, Catherine Imbriglio, Lucy Ives, Christopher Janke, Patrick Jones, Catherina Kasper, Sean Kilpatrick, Thorin Klosowski, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Susan Maxwell, Susan McCarty, Christina Mengert, Anjali Mullany, Christian Nagler, Aimee Parkison, Lance Phillips, Deborah Richards, Kate Schapira, Ben Segal, Donna Stonecipher, Bronwen Tate, Laura Vena, and Max Winter.

Notifications, re 2010 Open Reading Period for Full-length Manuscripts

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Tue, 03 May 2011 16:50:00 +0000

too much goodness

Notification has begun in earnest and will continue throughout the week.

Writers who sent manuscripts via email will receive notification via email. Writers who sent manuscripts via post and included an SASE will receive notification via post. Writers who sent manuscripts via post but did not include an SASE will receive no notification other than an announcement, sometime next week, on this blog (and Facebook, Twitter, etc), as we assume that was the idea behind skipping the SASE.

Every year, this gets more difficult. Not the logistics, but the decisions. Please stop writing good things. Or, rather, just one of you write something good. The rest of you write easy-to-reject crap. OK? That would help a lot.

xo
The Management

Recently Received

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:53:00 +0000

[ NOTE: Most of the titles below are available for review at Tarpaulin Sky. Titles marked with asterisks are hand-bound books or special editions and are limited, if still available (or we bought our copy, as is often the case with the hand-bounds. Because we support little presses. Because we're a little press.) Publishers, mail review copies to Reviews, Tarpaulin Sky Press, PO Box 189, Grafton, VT 05146 ]

Ammiel Alcalay, "neither wit nor gold" (from then) (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011)

Tricia Bauer, Father Flashes (FC2, 2011)

* Dan Beachy-Quick, Heroisms (Poor Claudia, 2011)

Joseph Bradshaw, In the Common Dream of George Oppen (Shearsman Books, 2001)

* Wayne Alan Brenner, Five Simple Steps to Greater Joy in This World of Sorrow

Susan Briante, Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press, 2011)

Noah Cicero, Best Behavior (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2011)

Julia Cohen, Triggermoon Triggermoon (Black Lawrence Press, 2011)

Denver Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011

* Emily Kendal Frey, Frances (Poor Claudia, 2010)

Emily Kendal Frey, The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011)

Noah Eli Gordon, The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011)

David Gruber, Sleepers' Republic (Astrophil Press, 2008)

Joseph Harrington, Things Come on: An Amneoir (Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works (Belladonna, 2011)

Brian Henry, Lessness (Ahsahta Press, 2011)

* Ish Klein, Success Window (Poor Claudia, 2011, DVD)

Bradley Lastname, Insane in the Quatrain (Press of the 3rd Mind, 2011)

Lesle Lewis, lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011)

* Justin Marks, On Happier Lawns / Paige Taggart, Digital Macrame (Poor Claudia, 2011)

James Maughn, The Arakaki Permutations (Black Radish Books, 2011)

* Joyelle McSweeney, The Necropastoral (Spork Press, 2011)

Poor Claudia #4, Poor Claudia, 2010

Eric E. Olson, The Procession of Mollusks (Astrophil Press, 2008)

Andrea Rexilius, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011)

Zach Savich, Events Film Cannot Withstand (Rescue Press, 2011)

Zach Savich, The Firestorm (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011)

Tony Triglio, Historic Diary (BlazeVox Books, 2011)

Joni Wallace, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine (Four Way Books, 2011)

Mark Wallace, The Quarry and the Lot (BlazeVox Books, 2011)

Ellen Welcker, The Botanical Garden (Astrophil Press, 2010)

Tarpaulin Sky announces 2010 chapbook picks!

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:15:00 +0000

Tarpaulin Sky Press is delighted to announce that it has chosen not one but two chapbooks from the 2010 reading period: Claire Hero's "Dollyland," and Paula Koneazny's "Installation," which will be published in Fall or Winter 2011.

Claire Hero is the author of Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press, 2009) and two chapbooks: Cabinet (dancing girl press) and afterpastures, winner of the 2007 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. Her poems appear in journals such as Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Foursquare, Handsome, La Petite Zine, A Public Space, Octopus, and in the anthology, narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers, and elsewhere. She lives in upstate New York, where she teaches at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Paula Koneazny's poetry appears in Aufgabe, bone bouquet, New American Writing, OR, and on the Kelsey Street Press blog. She is an assistant editor of Volt.

We received many fine manuscripts. Too many, honestly--it's much easier to make decisions when manuscripts are not so "fine." If you own a press and produce chapbooks and are looking for recommendations, we would like to point you to a large handful of ones--well, thirty-five--that made us remember why we read at all. (& Look for work from many of these authors, forthcoming in our Chronic Content!):

Anthony Alessandrini, "Four Ways of Removing a Wall (A Field Manual)"
David Bartone, "Interstate"
Bryan Beck, "Monster of the Year"
Devin Becker, "Me-You: The Poems of Chad Penderson"
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, "a slice from the cake made of air" and "{H0}"
Lindsey Boldt, "Do Me, Dreamlife"
David Brennan, "Another Gallows"
Lisa Ciccarello, "Under the town, a map"
Dereck Clemons, "Pyramidd: Constructs historical: or In Action"
Daniel Coudriet, "Private Astronomies"
Farnoosh Fathi, "come-come-where-where-all-together- down-the-hill"
Joe Hall, "Apocalesque"
Ally Harris, "Floor Baby"
Jess Hagemann, "Hungry"
Jenny Gropp Hess, "Organographies"
Steven Karl, "From Every Slit Throat Still Song"
Jason Labbe, "Black Wash Canal"
Sara Levine, "Tiny Signs of Disrespect"
Ella Longpre, "The Odor of the Hoax Was Gone"
Barbara Maloutas, "Later, Wetness"
Tony Mancus, "Dates & Times" and "A Vessel Interior"
Stefania Irene Marthakis, "(from) A Filmmaker's Handbook"
Margarita Meklina, "Linea Nigra"
Andy Nicholson, "The Ground that Music Moves"
Danielle Pafunda, "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison"
Kristin Palm, "Lake Merritt Field Notes"
Lance Phillips, "from Nietzsche’s Bed"
Francis Raven, "Taking Over the World"
Marthe Reed, "Nights Reading"
Kristin Sanders, "This is a map of their watching me"
Michael Sikkema and Jen Tynes, "Autogeography"
Gale Marie Thompson, "Come to the Kitchen, Kelsey"
Tony Trigilio, "Pay Per View"
Danielle Vogel, "Clasp, a hypnosis project"
Arianne Zwartjes, "Disem(body): A Tracing"

STAY TUNED for an announcement (shooting for the end of April) on the 2010 full-length manuscript submissions!

Maloutas, Nicholson, Pafunda, and Vogel, new at TSky's Chronic Content

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:07:00 +0000

New at TSky's Chronic Content:

* Danielle Vogel, from Clasp, a hypnosis project
* Danielle Pafunda, from The Dead Girls Speak in Unison
* Andy Nicholson, "No One Is Dead"
* Barbara Maloutas, from Later, Wetness

Advance Reader Copies Available: Jenny Boully's not merely becuase of the unknown that was stalking toward them

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:34:00 +0000

JENNY BOULLY
not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

ISBN 9780982541678
Fiction/Poetry/Lyric Essay
6"x8", 80pp., pbk. | June 2011
Cover art: Noah Saterstrom

Click here for more info
See also: Jenny Boully, [one ove affair]*

Special pre-order price:
$12 includes shipping in the US
(vs. $16 + $3.99 at Amazon)
Add to Cart or order by check (ships June 2011)

A dark re-visioning of J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy—as only Jenny Boully could have written.

EXCERPTS ONLINE

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR

For The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Passionate sensitivity of the kind that makes us fear for our adolescent children. Its absence in our own lives may well make our children fear for us as well. (Los Angeles Times) Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch. (John D'Agata) The binding is neither genre nor gender but eros itself, both of the physical variety and the type that caresses the noun and its attendants. Anne Carson comes to mind. But so does Lawrence Durrell, because cerebral as the book is, it is often winkingly so, and if not the overlay, the interior is sensual. (C. D. Wright) Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end." She uses form in a way that undercuts our every expectation based on previous encounters with prose. (Mary Jo Bang)

For [One Love Affair]*: Nominated for five awards, winner of two—Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006, and Best Second Book—Coldfront Magazine. A genre-bending back-pocket book.... gritty and intellectual ... addictive and soothing ... fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf. . . . You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time. (Coldfront) Her fresh style challenges the ways in which we construct narratives and read texts . . . and ultimately leaves us wanting more, more, always more Boully. (Matrix) Boully’s fluid, lyrical writing makes what could be a difficult, intimidating read instead a delightful one.... Playful engagement with narrative levels of reality (poems within poems, stories within stories). I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry. (Open Letters Monthly)

For The Body: An Essay: From the most minute particulars of intimate confession to the long history of literary forms, from the body of the lover to the body of the text, note for note, Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay documents and destroys in equal measure. (Craig Dworkin) A strange and magical performance. It resembles a novella overheard through a keyhole, or a nouvelle vague film beheld through a plume of Babylonian smoke. Jenny Boully's mini-epic makes its statement quietly, and with a devilish, terraced charm, like a Derridean outburst turned into topiary. (Wayne Koestenbaum) A courageous and thoughtful new voice in literature. (Jacket)

ABOUT JENNY BOULLY

Jenny Boully is the author of The Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande, 2007), [one love affair]* (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006), The Body: An Essay (Essay Press, 2007 and Slope Editions, 2002), and the chapbook Moveable Types (Noemi Press, 2007). Her work has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American Poetry, Language for a New Century, and Great American Prose Poems. Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she teaches nonfiction and poetry at Columbia College Chicago.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, experimental motherhood, chapbook reading period, chronic lurchers, Ally Harris, Johannes Goransson, Traci O. Connor, eating babies, etc

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:53:00 +0000

Today's post does not necessarily reflect the views of Tarpaulin Sky Press authors or staff, with the exception of TSky Press publisher, Christian Peet.

That said, and switching now to the first-person while noting the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, I'd like to dedicate this post to one particular woman, my friend Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose (small(ish)-press!) memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist this year.

Sadly, Reiko's book, the book's nomination, and indeed most of the book's content has been overshadowed by media attention to one particular element of Reiko's story: how she's raised her children. Though slightly more balanced in a recent appearance on The Gayle King Show, Reiko's recent appearances on The Today Show and in articles at Salon and Shine have spawned a "discussion" (attack) that focuses solely on Reiko's "unorthodox" parenting of her two boys--boys who, in a recent visit to my house, seemed blissfully unaware of the suffering that some 15, 000 people at Shine alone desperately want to believe they have endured as a result of Reiko not only leaving them with Dad for six months(!), once(!), on a research grant(!), but also moving down the street from them(!), rather than in their home with her ex-husband(!)

I think Amy King, via Facebook, put it best: "Gasp."

But what is ordinarily a non-conversation, when the not-at-home parent is Daddy, has become a viral, scathing attack on a vewwy vewwy baaad Mommy. Lost from this "conversation," of course, is any mention of the "other subjects" of her book--two little things called "Hiroshima" and "9/11"

Why sweat the small stuff. Right, "America"? Let's talk about the "sacred" institution of motherhood and make fetishes of children instead--meaning, the sacred institution of American motherhood, of course, and American children. Let's not talk about the motherless children and childless mothers of Hiroshima and the wars waged in the wake of 9/11.

O, siwwy wittle Amewwica. It would be so much easier to care about your adorable little monkeys if you didn't keep raising them to be self-righteous, daytime-talkshow-watching, non-reading, can't-find-Japan-on-a-map, xenophobic breeder-consumers.

*

While it is unsurprising that a culture that fetishizes children is routinely unable to generate discourse rising above a kindergarten level, what is more surprising is that a few people still remain--whether parents or ("gasp" again!) non-parents--who can deploy the words "childhood" or "parenthood," etc, without cooing platitudes and without causing us intentional-non-parents to spit up on ourselves.

The 400-plus page Fence Books anthology, Not For Mothers Only, collects works from many of these rare individuals (work by Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lee Ann Brown, Maxine Chernoff, Norma Cole, Gillian Conoley, Stacy Doris, Carolyn Forche, Kathleen Fraser, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson, Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, et al), as does Fence founder Rebecca Wolff's own most recent book of poetry, The King, one of my favorite books of 2009, with poems such as "The Bawdy Mothers" and "Breeder Sonnet," and the source of the following three-line poem re: the "miracle":

LACONIC PARKWAY

I had a baby

it was inevitable--
I was pregnant

*

TSky Press also received no shortage of chapbook and book-book manuscripts for our 2010 reading period (see update here) that offer interesting angles on children and parenthood. Ally Harris's chapbook manuscript, Floor Baby, was one such delight. Though the manuscript is concerned with much more than American kids, thank gawd, its title poem so delighted certain among us, we've published it and two others in TSky's Chronic Content section. Who couldn't love such a poem, really? So short and sweet, just like its subject:

FLOOR BABY

Dear floor baby, you fucking lurcher, your floor bench, bilesome mechanical nest. Motion of layered no, egg the great goose, pained brow. The snapping light, notion of being the only only, notions of once-men. Dear floor baby, your plastic sax, lurching sadly just like you.

Read the rest of Ally's poems here, poems which, some might argue, are even better than the one that features that "fucking lurcher" above.

*

Forthcoming TSky Press author Johannes Goransson's recent post at Montevidayo, "Aase Berg on Motherhood and Authorship," in which Goransson provides a "rough translation" of Aase Berg's essay "Language and Madness," which was published a few years ago in an anthology of Scandinavian, Baltic and Russian poets.

Says Berg via Goransson:

In order for love to develop, there has to be distance. To feel love is only possible if one realizes that the symbiosis consists of two people. Love is an automatic split into you and me. You + me = we. If one is involved in the traditional, patriarchal psychosis there is no we. I am the world. In the great, self-righteous male despair there is no we, just one bloated I that swallows everything that moves. . . .

Please read the rest of the post and then pressure Johannes to translate more of the essay (because he's not already busy enough, as writer, publisher, professor, and--gasp!--parent).

Indeed I look to Johannes' own work for more interesting angles on the ab/uses of children in a culture that professes undying love for them--at least until they are no longer children but merely cannon fodder in the War to Keep America Ignorant and Bloated. That's just my presently ornery take, of course; Johannes says far more interesting things in his forthcoming Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate:

NURSE MARBLE

Knowledge is Power. That is what the billboard says and I agree. I am an adult, therefore I understand the threat of passengers. The threat to Our Children, who don’t understand the threat of these bird-like, twitchy people. They pose two kinds of threat. To begin with, there is the one we all know about, the predatory threat, the hawk-like passengers that prey on children as they sit in front of their computers or televisions. The terrorist threat. That threat is easy to handle. You shoot it. You contain it. You confiscate. You stitch. You bleed from various orifices and sockets, but you survive, you rebuild house and rinse the child. The more serious threat is the diseases passengers carry with them. Internal terrorism. Children love those diseases. It makes them babble like possessed. Their make-up looks like oil in the moonlight. Such children cannot be cleaned off. Kill them. Or turn them into entertainment. Art.

TSky Press author Traci O. Connor's Recipes for Endangered Species includes more than one delicious story regarding children as well as that never-anything-less-than-sacred-chicken-soup-for-the-soul condition called "motherhood."

In "Mrs. Rotham Has a Bun In the Oven and Plans to Eat It with Butter and Jam," for example, we find the following (here heavily excerpted from several pages):

She is only weeks perhaps days even hours away from giving birth, and her belly feels volcanic beneath her hands. When, she thinks, did my life become all this? The baby bellows deep inside her. God. I am the black inside a hole, she thinks. And her husband, she thinks of him—what he looked like when his body was human and not something fashioned of tubes and pumps and blips on a screen....

She had decided in the fourth month, the night of her husband’s accident (the fiery juncture of a hasty retreat and a mule deer in the median; important details, but try not to dwell on them), while vomiting into a dumpster, that when the baby was born she would eat it. As viciously sick as she was, she knew, even then, that it was her responsibility. She couldn’t drown the baby, or leave it in a bathroom stall, or bury it—as the Arabs did—in the desert. And besides, there was always the possibility that someone would find the baby’s body and then, what, arrest her? No no.

And what call would they have, anyway?

It is, after all, her body. Her cells. Her skin. Her blood. Her oxygen. Not so different than chewing her nails, or gnawing the top layer from her chapped lips. It’s true, she imagines, that the baby’s bones might be difficult to get through—a texture problem (like water chestnuts, which give her the shivers)—but small enough, especially since she’s been careful to watch her calories, that she’ll manage....

Do you find the idea of eating babies repellent?

What if you were stranded in the Andes?

What if the baby was made of marzipan?

What if you were on a deserted island with nothing to eat but a few coconuts which gave you the worst diarrhea, and besides, there was only one palm tree because the island was that small and it was quickly running out of fruit; in fact, the tree was dying, too much salt, perhaps, or the sun was too hot, or the idea of it—being all alone on a little bump of sand—just made it want to give up?

But what if the baby was fried up with onions?

What if it was roasted with thyme?

What if it was all you ever wanted for as long as you could remember and everything you couldn’t have and now it’s staring you in the face like a long black hallway—palpable and altogether terrifying in that Good God is there somebody there—Hello? Anybody?—kind of way?

*

Also of note, today(ish):

Though they forgot to mention their children in the process (what's wrong with them, anyway?), TSky Peep Bhanu Kapil and TSky author Danielle Dutton both hold forth on "experimental literature" at HTML Giant: Danielle here, Bhanu here.

And, last, but anything but least: Jenny Boully--a new mommy just this year, and indeed the woman whose [one love affair]* not only launched, but is the reason we launched, Tarpaulin Sky Press--has a new book coming out with us soon: not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. (We're already mailing review copies; please email cpeet@tarp... if you want one.) It's something like a re-envisioning of J.M. Berrie's Peter and Wendy. The "something like" part means it's not for kids.

Peter does some things to you, and after that you fit. For the house underground, he’ll take your measurements; he’ll see how tall, how wide is that tree and whether or not you’ll survive without scratches, without getting stuck, going down. He’ll find a tree; he’ll find a tree for you. And then, thereafter, it will be your tree, all hollow on the inside. And a little bird will come and a little caterpillar will come and perhaps a little apple too will grow for you. Oh, Wendy, don’t look now, but your dress is just a tad bit shorter than it was when. Do you think he’ll notice? Do you think he’ll notice when you droop a little, when you stoop a little, when you hunch a little on your way down? Peter does some things to you, and after that, you will want to fit; you will want to fit forever.

First, it will be the size of this here speck of sand, Wendy, and then, while you’re asleep, that’s when it will start to grow little feet. It will grow into the size of an acorn and then into something you can hold. We’ll make-believe a bottle of warm milk for it; we’ll make-believe the doctor’s come to tidy things. But will it fly, like all of our other children, dear? It will fly, Wendy, and I’ll always keep it. Here. And it will grow wild and unshaken; it will have a cloven foot and mane. My dear.

*

Reiko will be on The View on Friday, March 11. I think we're all hoping the spin will be respun. Perhaps to include Hiroshima? 9/11? The National Book Critics Circle Nomination? The ceremony is on the 10th, methinks, so maybe it will even be a discussion of the award. Either way, it will not include the following video.

Kudos, Reiko. xoXtian

The Nation features Tarpaulin Sky Press author Joanna Ruocco and Man's Companions

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Press) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:44:00 +0000

The Nation has published a feature on Tarpaulin Sky Press author Joanna Ruocco, including a great review of Man's Companions, as well as a look at her fab novel from Ellipsis Press, Mothering Coven.

Also revealed is Joanna's once-secret nom de guerre. . . .

Says David Carroll Simon, of Ruocco and Man's Companions:

Ruocco delivers something stranger than banal moralizing. In the final paragraph, she steers the narrative into foreign territory, and the weirdness of her conclusion is doubled by her ability to meet and then flout expectations with a single gesture, offering up the anticipated feminist insights in the least predictable fashion. . . . Ruocco restores the power of a familiar critique by rendering it uncanny. . . . When you read her stories, you find yourself warped from one world to another, transported by the flight of her words between languages.

Click for the full article in The Nation

Read more about Joanna Ruocco and Man's Companions, or take a peek, below:

Joanna Ruocco
Man's Companions
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