News & Notes - Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

At Constant Critic, Sueyeun Juliette Lee reviews Janice Lee's Damnation, and Ray McDaniel reviews Kate Greenstreet's Young Tambling. Elsewhere: WITH + STAND #6 is available at last. And Ron Hanson's White Fungus is going global.

Noted: Judy Byington

Tipped off by a TSky fan who knows our love for all things related to "satanic ritual abuse," we're delighted to find the genre's most recent author, Judy Byington is the requisite caliber of batshit insane.

Michelle Naka Pierce's Continuous Frieze Bordering Red reviewed by Thomas Fink

"Continuous Frieze Bordering Red examines how others identify the poet’s speaker based on social structures of racial differentiation and hierarchy, as well as how she entertains strategies of self-identification or resistance and identifications."

Teresa K. Miller's Sped reviewed by Dennis James Sweeney

"Miller’s approach does not take the language of those she is passing by for granted. We are given a hint as to her goal in a note after the text on “the beautiful continental Portuguese language, transcribed here primarily as butchered, not as used by fluent speakers.” A strange multiplicity of argots are a part of understanding, during the brief time we are given to do so, the worlds into which Miller peeks. "

Books, Chapbooks, Anthologies, Journals, Received & Available for Review

Books, chapbooks, anthologies, and journals from over 30 authors, including Dodie Bellamy, Jessica Bozek, D.J. Dolack, Julie Doxsee, j/j hastain, Marthe Reed, Camille Martin, Elizabeth Robinson, and Ron Silliman; from 15 presses, including Ahsahta, Black Ocean, BookThug, Calamari, Fence, Les Figues, New Michigan, &NOW Books, and Ugly Duckling.

Kate Greenstreet's Young Tambling reviewed by Gail Hanlon

...Mulling over the past, she sees in tiny, rushed glimpses like someone on a merry-go-round, her memory sampling the ballad so that the actual events remain hidden by the dark, the “proper dark.”

j/j hastain’s myrrh to re all myth reviewed by Joseph Cooper

We are all given a form, an identity, a self, but what happens when you outgrow the flesh, the pronoun, the title, the masculine/feminine social obligation? What does it mean to be a man? What does it to be a woman? Are we inside each other any less when we ignore our sheer sameness?

Two books & one journal you should read right now

From Derek White's incomparable Calamari Press & Sleepingfish: History of [...]

Joe Sacksteder reviews Gabriel Blackwell’s The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men: The Last Letter of H.P. Lovecraft

The thing about Lovecraft’s characters is that they desperately want you to believe them but desperately don’t want to believe themselves. Blackwell embodies this ambivalence in order to confuse the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, editor and author, sickness and inspiration.

Renee Gladman’s “Calamities” reviewed by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

"Each essay in Calamities has about it the quality of Ikea instructions. Instead of a bookcase, though, these are directions for a cardboard device that makes the world look different than it was, like what Michel Gondry might try— a pinhole camera or chakra lenses or Google Glass. The thing she is telling you how to make is pure imagination, it is not something you would or could bring to life—but you can wear it by reading her essays."

What I'm Reading Now… by Kathleen Weaver

Kathleen Weaver on Arctic Dreams, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez; The Poetic Species, A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass; A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays, by Natalia Ginzburg, chosen & translated from Italian by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Secretaries of the Moon, The Letters of Wallace Stevens & José Rodriguez Feo (eds. Beverly Coyle, Alan Filreis); and The Journal of Jules Renard (edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget).

What I'm Reading Now… by giovanni singleton

giovanni singleton discusses The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, Ltd. 2012); Douglas Kearney, buck studies (Fence Books, 2016); devorah major, and then we became (City Lights Books, 2016); James Baldwin, Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998); Phebus Etienne, Chainstitching (unpublished manuscript).