Now Showing: Goat in the Snow
Some people are unreasonably unselfish, and Emily Pettit is one of them. An editor for Notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, she is also the new publisher of jubilat, which, under her thumb, just released a bad motherfucker of an issue (see: Julia Cohen, Michelle Taransky, James Tate, Rachel Glaser, Dara Wier, lots!). Her devotion to art is exemplary and climbs no ladder, but aims at making our anxious little world a bigger, bettered one. It should come then as no surprise then that her poems, too, are of the giving kind; and her new book Goat in the Snow, now available for pre-order from BIRDS LLC, gives and gives and gets it right. Im not one to blurb (ed note: bullshit), but when a wise old man once again feels the change coming in his bones and scrys the truth, you listen:
Her kindness is always ahead of us, anticipating the problems we will or won’t run into, and we always end up in a different, precise place than the one we started out from, as she reassuringly tells us: “You know/ you know you know. It’s all uncertainty/ and your neck. You walk slowly/ in a calm voice.” Goat In The Snow is multicolored, ever-changing, a delight to try to clasp. -
JOHN ASHBERRY
POOR CLAUDIA 5
The fifth edition of Portland, OR’s POOR CLAUDIA has come to.
“Clean-cut, slim, and summery, if No. 5 were a cigarette she’d be a Gauloises, if she were a drink she’d be a tart negroni. Saddle-stitched chapbook on laid and linen paper. Get your copy while supplies last. “
POOR CLAUDIA NO 5
Jae Choi
Julia Cohen
Jennifer Denrow
Brian Foley
Graham Foust
Noah Eli Gordon
Dorothea Lasky
Anthony McCann
Sawako Nakayasu
Christie Ann Reynolds
Mathias Svalina
Subscriptions for this years POOR CLAUDIA output are cheap too. $30 gets you everything they publish – chapbooks, nonbooks, broadsides and two issues of journal. Plus free shipping. Yes. So! For example, if you’d subscribed for this past year you would’ve received
Oil Changes to Garlic
Jono Tosch is a poet and artist who blogs at Oil Changes, a rolling document that knocks you over the head with its absurdist, agricultural, and poetic thought. Jono bangs a drum similar to what I imagine Thoreau would kick and scream like today were he to be wormholed from the past and into our era. And like Thoreau, Jono is a self reliant, rare to ask a hand for help unless it was of a total necessity.
But now, Jono is asking for help, help to fund a month of “agricultural research” on the famed garlic farm of Stanley Crawford, author of Log of the S.S. Unguentine. By helping him make his way from Massachusetts to New Mexico, Jono promises to trade ” top-notch road and farm content if you pony up some gas $$$.”
Subcrime
Art is crime because it departs from municipal, state, national, and moral codes, introduces puncture, rupture, lawlessness, collapse. Sometimes Art-as-crime reveals the criminality in the current hygenic system or makes visible a kind of filth that is under threat of extermination. But is the reverse true– is crime Art? If I’m being honest, I ‘d have to admit that some crimes are also Art. I think Fascism had/has a big art component– the brutal State was made like a brutal artwork. This is a sad and flummoxing fact and this is why people so often come back to Fascism when they’re trying to grapple (or not grapple) with Art as maximalism.
Maybe it’s just more accurate to say that Art and Crime are both limit experiences– sometimes they double with each other, sometimes they split from each other, sometimes they feed off of each other, sometimes they destroy each other, sometimes each causes the collapse of the other.
I’ll Drown My Book
I irrationally don’t like Kickstarter. Mostly because I have no money to contribute. I would like, however, to introduce to you the first project I’ve ever donated to.
I’ll Drown My Book will be the first collection of conceptual writing by women.
Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and Les Figues Press wants to represent the contributions of women in this defining moment. By supporting this project, you will ensure that women claim their literary space. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, the book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries. Contributors respond to the question: What is conceptual writing? I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.
Noo Duende Edition
I like NOO Weekly when Goodie Mike Young let’s others take over curating for a week. This week it’s Ben Kopel.
Ben says, “consider this the Duende Edition: “Extra! Extra! Bleed all about it!”
See this week shake in the shapes of Graham Foust, Gordon Massman, Chelsea Hogue, LaTasha N Nevada Diggs, Bianca Stone, & Matt Suss.
Do Yo Know Matt Suss? O shit.
You should.
SALTGRASS 6
I’m pleased to announce that the new issue (#6) of Saltgrass is available, starring these lovely contributors:
Cynthia Arrieu-King, Anselm Berrigan, Justin Carrol, Tina Brown Celona, J’Lyn Chapman, Cathy Linh Che, Sandra Doller, Brian Foley, John Gallaher, Anne Cecelia Holmes, Lily Ladewig, Heather Monley, GC Waldrep
What!
So you can order a print copy on our website: www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com
Only $5!
Please help us support our contributors and spread the word.
We will have an open reading month this June. We hope you submit.
Thanks,
Julia Cohen & Brian Foley
Editors, Saltgrass
www.saltgrassjournal.blogspot.com
Fables
Tarapaulin Sky has come alive again with a fistful of new release including Issue #17 of their journal & Johannes Goransson’s Entrance to a Colonial Pageant in which We All begin to intricate.
But I want to talk about FABLES, a new book by author & artist Sarah Goldstein. From TP website:
Sarah Goldstein
Fables
We Are Dead Unless We Do Something – a conversation between Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen
Matt Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun. Brandon Shimoda is the author of The Girl Without Arms. Both books are available now from Black Ocean. Both authors are currently on tour.
Adam Robinson recently had some good things to say about Matt Henriksen’s book, finding its poetic attempts at translating the incommunicable both frustrating, yet filled with meaning. As Johannes Goransson wrote at Montevidayo, “The ‘difficulty’ of Henrikson’s poetry is not about access but the experience it aims to put the reader/writer through.” So I invited Matt & Brandon to interview each other, to further collide those ideas of frustration and experience, and the poetry that comes out of it. What takes place amounts to late night cross-country trek talk, hallucinatory and winding, filled with shunned understanding and been-through truth. Enjoy.
Fools Gold
The best collection of poetry I’ve read this year to date is Becoming Weather by Chris Martin. Its confident, bold, excavating and it all feels natural. This Friday in NYC is the release party for that book. There’ll be original music from Oneida & I Feel Tractor, an original film from Stephanie Gray, and a sermon on becoming weather by Evangelist J.B. Best (Anticon’s Pedestrian). Its a serious event. Happening 8:00 P.M. at Secret Project Robot in Brooklyn.
See the Facebook invite for detailed info.
Califono
Califone is a band to get bent with – a stethoscope to the picked over cloud country, a mason jar of one eyed mermaids drink from. Good beauty, if you can get it.
For a time now, poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Solan Jensen have been making a long anticipated film about the ramshackle blues crew. They’ve just now come back from the darkroom with their own 68 minute dream, Made A Machine By Describing A Landscape. Shot between 2004 and 2008, the film follows the acclaimed indie-rock icons on the road and in the studio with “an exploratory, intimate, and at times experimental take on both creative process and performance.”
Out now from Indiepix Films.
Benefit for Dean this week in NYC
via Coldfront
Matthea Harvey, Edward Hirsch, Mary Karr, Matthew Rohrer, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier and others will read at a benefit for the eminent poet and teacher Dean Young in Manhattan this Thursday night. Young is facing a heart transplant, and all donations will be used to help with his expenses. Admission to the event is free. To read about Dean and make an online donation, please visit http://www.transplants.org/
Address: Grand Gallery, National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY
Forthcoming Nature
Danger poets Lily Ladewig and Anne Holmes have a chapbook forthcoming from Blue Hour Press called I Am A Natural Wonder. In anticipation, they’ve started a webpage inviting other poets to write their own natural wonders. So far there’s been poems by Julia Cohen & Jennifer Denrow, Jared White, Hattie & Leigh Stein, & David Bartone. Forthcoming poems from Nate Pritts, Elissa Gabbert, Mike Young & bunch more are on the way.
Meanwhile you can catch Lily & Anne this Friday at SUPERMACHINE reading series in NYC. Details here.
Get Tethered
Black Ocean & Octopus are offering some vicious subscriptions deals to float your boat, and theirs.
from Black Ocean
The 2011 Subscription – $40 (ships 2/2011)
Includes one copy of every title we will release in 2011 plus a free book.
Almost a 20% savings! And as always, free shipping!
Destroyer of Man by Dominic Owen Mallary
Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen
The Girl Without Arms by Brandon Shimoda
Handsome Vol. 3
Metal
(young Matt Pike of Sleep/High on Fire)
What novels actively feature metalheads and/or metal culture in their narratives? Period is the only one that comes to my mind.
Blunts
Emily Kendal Frey’s THE NEW PLANET is now available from Mindmade Books. Some of these poems recently leapt into Real Poetik
PITY
I feel sorry for people who fall in love with other people.
We wait on the boat’s deck to see a whale.
What we see are waves.
Dead-hearted tomatoes bobbing up and down.
Ocean of hearts.
Brian Foley—
via thethe
I once heard a scholar use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project [blah blah blah].” The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question really had a “project” per se. Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain
11
2 from Octopus Books
When I showed you about the best chapbooks I bought in Denver I wanted to show you HOW, but couldn’t.
Now I can.
How by Emily Pettit
Staple-bound
Edition of 200
26 pages
$8 (includes shipping)
Good Advice
The new issue of Gulf Coast features a roundtable between Matthew Rohrer, Heather Christle, Matthew Zapruder, & Zachary Schomburg on what “surrealism” means today in American poetry.
Most interesting is what Matthew Rohrer says about surrealism and optimism.
The Best Chapbooks I bought in Denver
In thought of the upcoming Chapbook Festival, I want to tell you about a few great little books that have come to be.
DoubleCross Press, run by MC Hyland, makes her own damn paper and has a bunch of new releases you should eyeball, including this one -
Museum Armor by Lily Brown.
Letterpress printed pamphlet on khadi and frankfurt white papers. $7
Get it here
