VanessaPlace Inc. launch this Friday
You are invited to a press conference on May 3, 2013 at CAGE83, 83a Hester Street in NYC to announce the official launch of VanessaPlace Inc. (http://vanessaplace.biz/).
VanessaPlace is a trans-national corporation whose sole mission is to design and manufacture objects to meet the poetic needs of the human heart, face, and form. We are what we sell, we sell what we are – It’s not the point, it’s the platform. Here is a press release with more details on this project.
On the evening of May 3, CEO Vanessa Place will introduce VanessaPlace Inc. and its core management team:
– Joseph A. W. Quintela, Director of Finance (New York)
– Ana Bozicevic, Director of Marketing (New York)
– Steve Giasson, Director of Production (Montreal)The launch will feature the exclusive debut of the first object-product of VanessaPlace Inc., a very limited edition of which will be available only at the press conference.
We are also seeking sponsors for the event – more details on that here: http://vanessaplace.biz/news/
Hope to see you there — let me know if you have any questions.
Warmly,
Ana
Ana Bozicevic
Marketing
VanessaPlace Inc.
http://vanessaplace.biz/
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/136364639880000/
You Need I Feel YES by Nick Sturm
32 pages, soft cover, stapled
$5 (First Class postage paid)
Forklift, Ohio
It’s a chapbook. It’s one long poem. It’s freaking awesome.
It’s in a baggie because the lettering is made out of lemonade. It’s made out of lemonade because lemonade is an important element in the poem.
Listen to him read the entire thing here.
A Novel by Harmony Korine
“This reissue is 100% identical to the original text and also 100% more awesome!”
Drag City has just re-issued Harmony Korine’s long out-of-print novel A Crackup at the Race Riots, first published in 1997.
On Letterman, back in 1997, Korine described it as “The Great American Choose Your Own Adventure Novel.”
Without giving too much away, I’ll say it behaves like a bumblebee. Notes of David Markson, Joe Brainard, and Kathy Acker can be detected. Also Andy Warhol and Andy Kaufman. But these flavors are also misleading. Both Tupac and MC Hammer make appearances. Not to mention a startling revelation about Jackson Pollock’s sexual proclivities.
I’ll soon be interviewing him about it for The Paris Review Daily, so be on the look out. I plan to ask him about the relationship between the book and his avant garde tap dancing movement.
Buy it from Amazon
But it from Drag City $18.00 / or $9.99 for PDF
Jen Michalski’s first new book of 2013
First new book of 2013? Yep. Jen Michalski has three books coming out this year—one each from Dzanc, Black Lawrence and Aqueous Books. The first, Could You Be With Her Now, is itself sort of like two books, because it’s made up of two novellas. They’re both comprised of short chapters. “I Can Make it to California Before it’s Time for Dinner” is a story about a mentally, uh, diminished kid who kills somebody within the first 1000 words, then goes on an adventure by getting kidnapped. It’s really great, reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates in a good way. The second novella, “May – December,” is about a young woman helping an older one do a blog. I heard her read from it on Saturday and was struck by the way she braids memories around each other. Jen is an astonishingly sensitive writer. Could You Be With Her Now makes me want to yell GOAL! and celebrate the first part of Jen’s 2013 hat trick.
Announcing Requited Journal #8
It is my pleasure to tell you that Requited #8 is now online. This issue features:
- Fiction by Thomas Mundt, Berit Ellingsen, and Matt Rowan;
- Poetry by Lucy Biederman, Carol Guess & Kristina Marie Darling, Gillian Cummings, Zachary Scott Hamilton, Kamden Hilliard, Kati Mertz, M. Pfaff, Amanda Silbernagel, and Michelle Sinsky;
- Performance pieces by Marisa Plumb, Dave Snyder, and Brian Torrey Scott;
- Visual art by Tyler Mallory (including the image you see above);
- Jeff Bursey’s review of Sam Savage’s Glass.
Check it out!
. . .
I am the non-fiction and reviews editor for Requited and am always eager to consider submissions. Previously I’ve published work by William Bowers, Jeremy M. Davies, Julianne Hill, Steve Katz, Mark Rappaport, Keiler Roberts, Viktor Shklovsky, and Curtis White, as well as interviews with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White, and reviews by Daniel Green and Jeff Bursey.
Also, please do check out the Requited‘s steadily swelling archives, where you’ll find poetry by Molly Gaudry and Nate Pritts, fiction by James Tadd Adcox, Jimmy Chen, Jac Jemc, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Suzanne Scanlon, and (ahem) myself, as well as many other nice fine things.
Enjoy!
Literary Feud in Tallahassee
Vanessa Place looks on, as Blake Butler reads from his forthcoming book 300,000,000.
Probably I shouldn’t post this. Probably I should just keep my mouth shut.
But a few people have written and asked me to explain what happened, having heard about the fight from one source or another.
Basically, things got ugly between Blake Butler and Vanessa Place, nine days ago, down here in Florida, when the three of us convened for the first time as a group since the publication of our collaboration ONE
By the end of the night, which began with me introducing them, and then each of them reading, and then the three of us conversing with the audience, Vanessa had vowed to never speak to Blake again.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know how it happened. (Which is partly why I haven’t written about it until now.) It just sort of happened.
One of them said something about the other one being too orderly or too chaotic or too derivative or something — at least that’s how I think it started — which I thought was a joke, but apparently it wasn’t taken as a joke.
The next thing you know they’re shouting at each other.
The audience, not knowing how to react, weren’t sure if they should laugh or be worried. I was pretty much in the same boat.
I tried to stay out of it, partly because I was confused and partly because I didn’t want them to turn on me.
Over a hundred people were in the audience that night, so there are plenty of versions of what happened. But from my perspective, to put it generously, it seemed like a moment when two different approaches to literature were coming face to face and not for the purpose of a warm embrace.
Luna Miguel, now in English translation
The great Spanish poet Luna Miguel has a bilingual, Spanish/English-translation book coming out from Scrambler Books, entitled Bluebird and Other Tattoos. It ships December 22nd. Here is my blurb for it:
Luna Miguel is a poet who can make me cry. Her passion for life and for poetry is uncommon. She makes language concise, supple, and exciting again. Recurring images: of birds, disease, spit, and blood, integral to a mortal, embodied poetry that reminds us ‘Death cannot be experienced neither for the living nor the dead but for the sick.’ Luna writes a poem, ‘The Beautiful World Gives Me Disgust.’ She writes, ‘I exist, therefore, / then I tremble.’ She writes of the suicidal poets, she writes of all women, she writes of the young. She writes knowing it’s a lie, she lives in the shadow of death. Luna writes of her ‘unprotected life,’ her ‘unprotected diary.’ There is no comfort in this poetry, there is hard beauty. ‘The wind was this. Being born was this. Dying without dying and without a disease was this. To tell you the truth: I am here and I need you.’ Luna.
Mira Gonzalez has a book coming out
Mira Gonzalez‘s first book, i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, is now available for pre-order from Sorry House, a new press founded by Spencer Madsen. It will be published in January. The trailer above is by Meggie Green and Michael Inscoe.
It’s a book of poems. I’ve read the manuscript and enjoyed it. The poems are declarative, metaphorical, full of imagination and dreams as well as physical events. They create a feeling of rudderlessness, an uncanny mixture of confusion, sadness, and detached introspection.
Click here to read a poem by her on her tumblr and see one of her collages, which I also like. Also there’s these poems and this one.
As an added bonus, Mira is a real fun, nice person to interact with, and her Twitter is very enjoyable and funny and zany.
Sorry House has rounded up an impressive group of blurbs from Blake Butler, Melissa Broder, Brad Listi, Tao Lin, and Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez.
I feel nice that Mira will have a book out in January and I’m glad Spencer is making a press according to his particular tastes and collaborating with lots of good people.