Displaced Press
From the minds of Daniel Borzutzky, Brian Whitener, and Steven Hendricks, the ultra new and sexfed Displaced Press, who have come out of the gates hard and strong with two titles of powertext, one a translation by Johannes Göransson of Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital, and Yedda Morrison’s girl scout nation. Both titles have just been released, and are available through the press’s site, as well as via SPD.
Check the specs:
Lost & Found: Stories From New York – A Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood Anthology
When I got back from Gainesville, there was a big fact package from Open City waiting for me. I felt like I had won a prize. Inside were three books: Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying; and a galley of Rachel Sherman’s debut novel, Living Room (dropping this October); and Lost & Found, the second Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood anthology, which clocks a thoroughly impressive gut-busting 853 pages. (The first anthology, you might recall, was Before & After, in 2002). Just a few of the names included: Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Ames, Charles D’Ambrosio, Phillip Lopate, Daniel Nester, Mickey Z., Iris Smyles, and several dozen others. As Beller explains in his introduction (apropos the question- why does NYC produce so much writing about itself?), “The essential ingredient is density. The density is the drug.” I’ll cheers that one. Anyway, for those of you who actually live here, I thought you might want to know that there’s a reading for the Beller book tonight in Washington Square Park. Details after the jump (and more on the Sherman and Flight books at some point in the nearish future).
Gordon Massman’s ‘The Essential Numbers’
Ready to want to buy a book?
Read the poem on the back of Gordon Massman’s The Essential Numbers: 1991-2008, just out from Tarpaulin Sky Press:
Yeah.
I’ve been reading this for a couple weeks now, a few poems at a time, because it is so brutally right there and fucked and ready to fuck your head, it needs the slow imbibe, the good one. Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.
Sampled from 18 years of Massman’s writing, poems all numbered for titles, all to the teeth.
I.e. here is the first full sentence of 1262:
Dear God: thank you for the physical beauty in the world, etc.
and get fucked.
Jonathan Allen and Steve Carey
The artist Jonathan Allen (and dear friend, full disclosure) designed the cover for The Selected Poems of Steve Carey (Subpress, click here to see the cover ). Jonathan Allen’s website makes for fantastic browsing. He recently had a painting at The Whitney Art Party and it was featured in Style (which is sort of funny, considering his art questions the values of such magazines, according to me). The man is a massive talent. He’s designed other covers for books of poetry and journals so contact him via his website and get a piece of him before he becomes so huge he retires to a Greek Island or something.
Evolving: OR Books
Two Dollar Radio rereleases Rudy Wurlitzer
Two Dollar Radio has just now rereleased Rudolph Wurlitzer’s classic ‘Nog,’ a sincerely gritty and visceral book with sentences that crush. Having read this book in earlier editions, I can tell you this book feels just as vital and fresh now as it likely did among the literary terrain of its original release in the 60’s, perhaps even more so.
But let’s don’t have me give you the word on it. Let’s have Thomas Pynchon:
“Wow, this is some book, I mean, it’s more than a beautiful and heavy trip, it’s also very important in an evolutionary way, showing us directions we could be moving in — hopefully another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to arrive, to take hold. Rudolph Wurlitzer is really, really good, and I hope he manages to come down again soon, long enough anyhow to guide us on another one like Nog.”
Death to the Novel of Bullshit, what else can you ask for?
The Oblivion Seekers by Isabelle Eberhardt
I recently reread this tiny collection of stories by Isabelle Eberhardt, published by the great independent publisher, City Lights Books (click here to visit) . I originally read it in my mid-twenties when going through a massive Paul (primarily his short fiction) and Jane Bowles phase which culminated in my reading other authors Paul Bowles had translated, Eberhardt being one of them. READ MORE >
MLP Chapbooks Arrive
J. A. Tyler’s Mudlicious Press publishes these tiny chapbooks.(Click here to order.) Mine arrived today. They are cute things, these chapbooks. I like getting them. Today I got P’.H. Madore’s “Da Vinci Died Before Cigarettes”, Matthew Savoca’s “Altruism”, “In Praise of Virgins” by Johannes Goransson (sorry that I have no umlaut) and a sticker with a picture of a dead looking whale that has the words “bleached whale” on it. READ MORE >
Prurient’s ‘Rose Pillar’
Goddamn, I want this:
After two years in the making, Heartworm Press is proud to present Rose Pillar by Prurient.
The Rose Pillar in traditional Roman culture is used to mark the graveyard or mosualueam, as a signpost of death. Usually they contained carvings of birds and plants signifying rebirth. Taking inspiration from authors like Whitman, Lechev and Rumi, Prurient delivers its first major literary endeavor in Rose Pillar. Prurient combines text, image and sound in this uniquely packaged and presented release by the Heartworm Press.
What separates Dominick Fernow’s Prurient project from the rest of the contemporary underground cannon is its unyielding personal subject matter. From the inception of Prurient the concept has always utilized intimate details, photographs, letters and other ephemera culled from places where most artists would choose to obscure. Prurient draws these details into focus more than ever on Rose Pillar, a 180-page hardbound book of Fernow’s collage work and text supplied by his mother Jean Feraca from her previously published memoir I Hear Voices. Feraca tells the story of the death of Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist who was adopted into a Sioux tribe.
BLACK OCEAN ACCEPTING POETRY MANUSCRIPTS UNTIL JUNE 30TH AND I AM SITTING BY AN OVEN THAT IS ON AND IT SMELLS LIKE GAS I AM DIZZY
go here for submission guidelines. i didn’t know these mahfackahs was in chicago. i’m finna walk a manuscript over pretty soon.