News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM

News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM

Two Reviews of Kate Durbin’s Kept Women

By the end of Kept Women, Durbin successfully changes the viewing activity of reality-as-entertainment into an active reading of trauma, or post-trauma. Readers become increasingly self-aware as the speaker’s emotional detachment from the scenes feels tensely at odds with the negated inhabitants. The women’s physical bodies are acutely absent from the poems, as if the speaker is treating a fresh crime scene like a museum tour.

Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp reviewed by Joe Sacksteder

Its advice works if you’re interested in clawing your way into the lit journal world: 'Remember, you campers with less personality, it really is a numbers game – if you write enough notes, you’re gonna get a reply. Even telemarketers make a sale now and then.'

Chaps from Ricochet Editions available for review

Ricochet's entry into the chapbook scene comes by way of three titles -- Bradley Harrison's Diorama of a People, Burning; Matthew Kirkpatrick's The Exiles; and Glenn Shaheen's Unchecked Savagery --each of which exudes its own organic form.

Books received & available for review

14 books, 12 authors, 11 presses. Carrie Olivia Adams, Michael S. Begnal, James Belflower, Amina Cain, Jack Collom, T. Zachary Cotler, Peter Davis, Kate Greenstreet, Brian Henry, M. Kasper, Ethan Paquin, and Kim Rosenfield; published by Ahsahta Press, Black Scat Books, Bloof Books, Denver Quarterly, Insert Press, Instance Press, Salmon Poetry, Salt Publishing, SpringGun Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Verse.

Lisa A. Flowers’ diatomhero: religious poems reviewed by Zack Kopp

"Gods and myths and works of art. And through it all a slack jawed, salivating artful rearrangement of half-unconscious social and mythological tropes, reflecting characters like Houdini, or Pinocchio, or Rorschach, in ancient Greece, or Los Angeles, or Egypt, offset by the smell of sex on johnnycakes. Characters like Jenny Greenteeth, the river hag of English nursery rhymes said to drag errant children to watery death, or Abyzou, birth-killing female demon and partner of Lilith, are briefly historied in the appendix provided by Ms. Flowers at the back of the book...."

Frank Montesonti’s Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope reviewed by Matthew Sadler

Matthew Sadler reviews Frank Montesonti's poetry collection and winner of the 2011 Barrow Street Poetry Prize, selected by DA Powell: "I want to say my heart yearns for the over-complicated days of my young self figuring out the world, that Montesonti has captured that zeitgeist, put it in a bottle of Drakkar Noir and sprayed it all over the abstract expressionist print silk shirts of my middle school dances. But the double edged sword of nostalgia is just a part of Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope . . .

Sarah Fox's The First Flag reviewed by Joseph Harrington

Sarah Fox’s second book is The First Flag, and it is one fierce standard to follow. The book dispenses a potent compound of divination, memoir, psychoanalytic insights, placental rites and resolute feminism. This list might evoke what Kathleen Fraser referred to in 1989 as “immediately accessible language of personal experience as a binding voice of women's strength,” a “poetry of content” resistant to “fragmentation and resistance” at the level of the sentence. While The First Flag is all about women’s strength, its style of writing is consistently inventive, innovative and imaginative. Yes, there is Voice in these poems, but it speaks paratactically and goes in unexpected directions; it out-foxes patriarchal syntax; it is as often bemused and reflexive as it is rhetorical or representational....

Noelle Kocot’s ‘Phantom Pains of Madness’ Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin

In his 1917 essay "Art as Device," Viktor Shklovsky wrote: “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself, and must be prolonged.”

prospicio qui concursus futuri sint: Books Received & Available for Review

Books by 30 authors on over two dozen presses, including Ahsahta Press, Black Radish Books, Burning Deck, Calamari Archive, Commune Editions, Dusie Press, Hummingbird Press, Llewellyn, Milkweed Editions, New Michigan Press, Plays Inverse, Ricochet Editions, Solid Objects, Subito Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, and more.

Soma Magica: Claire Donato, The Second Body

Making its debut in Assiah is TS Press novelist Claire Donato's stunning first collection of poems, The Second Body, brought to you by Poor Claudia. Watch this space for a review, and in the meantime, we encourage you to read an essay by Claire at the Poetry Society of America, meditating on the title poem from The Second Body.

Shira Dentz curates: six reviews, an interview, and a tribute

Melanie Jordan’s Hallelujah for the Ghosties reviewed by Barbara Duffey; Ander Monson’s Letter to a Future Lover reviewed by Kelly Lydick; Nicholas Mosley’s Metamorphosis reviewed by Michael Mejia; Wendy S. Walters’ Multiply/Divide reviewed by Aisha Sabatini Sloan; Tom Williams’ Among the Wild Mulattos reviewed by Matthew Kirkpatrick; Marina Zurkow’s The Petroleum Manga reviewed by Michael McLane; Nathan Meltz and Shira Dentz interview Tomm Moore; and the late Stephen Rodefer is paid tribute by Martin Corless-Smith.

Wendy S. Walters’ “Multiply/Divide” Reviewed by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Some days, it doesn’t feel right to risk, as Rankine describes it, “falling right into some white folk’s notion of black insanity.” What Wendy S. Walters demonstrates in Multiply/Divide is that we need not turn away from that notion, merely. We can plumb down deep beyond insanity by one-upping this kind of white id.

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ALL CONTENT COPYRIGHT 2003-2019 TARPAULIN SKY AND AUTHORS UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED. WHEN REPOSTING, LINK TO THE ORIGINAL PAGE AND PROVIDE ORIGINAL AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER INFO. FOR PRINT INQUIRIES, CONTACT EDITORS@... THANKS!

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