News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM

News & Notes | Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

IMAGE: NOAH SATERSTROM

Looking forward to seeing this in the world:

Incorporating language from trial records to papal bulls to incendiary theological documents, Emma Bolden's Maleficae explores the intersection of forces that led to the witch persecutions – forces alarmingly similar to those operating in American society today – in a book-length series of poems that seeks to re-create the sheer terror of the trials, while also focusing one so-called witch: her story, her wail from the center of the flames. In making the dead speak, Maleficae gives the victims of the trials a voice. (GenPop Books, Spring 2013)

Kim Vodicka’s Aesthesia Balderdash reviewed by Lisa A. Flowers

In a world where everything—the sea, ships, father and motherlands—are assigned genders, there are, correspondingly, books so suffused with their sexes they almost waft pheromones (Hemingways, Anais Nins, et al). Intercepting and scrambling such motes are tour de forces like Kim Vodicka’s Aesthesia Balderdash, whose pages seem to open on a drag queen’s indiscreet tucking in an avant-garde douche commercial written by Elsa von-Freytag Loringhoven. The regularly scheduled program is one where Kathy Acker, Emily Post, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and other luminaries get their very own alter-ego transsexuals in a fusion of Rimbaud’s “belly where sleeps the double sex” and Genesis P Orridge’s “Pandrogyne” project—a fully contained entity where “it am the selfsame cum it swallow” …“Like a flock of fucking myself I was invited to identify with.”

j/j hastain: Creative Engagement with Michael Leong’s Cutting Time with a Knife

An ultratrace element plays a significant role in the metabolism of the organism in which it resides, even if the percentage of space it inhabits within that organism is significantly less than the size of space that other elements (within that organism) take up. Perhaps the intentions that Leong ‘outs’ in the preface of his new book Cutting Time with a Knife (two of such intentions being: “to create an un-holy amalgam on which we might witness the chance meeting of a poet and a cryogenic tank” / “to perhaps quixotically if not poetically anticipate the future contours of literary history”) are ultratrace elements within the larger work? There is no singular-narrative, authoritative voice moving through the book, reminding us of Leong’s intentions, but we feel those intentions permeate pages; intensify our pulse, our pauses.

Received & available for review

Do you write reviews worth reading? Well, then, allow us to send you one of twelve new books from five presses, including new texts by Shanna Compton, Laura Elrick, Margaret Christakos, Beatriz Hausner, Aisha Sasha John, Nicole Markotić, Christine McNair, Kirill Medvedev, Chantal Neveu, Lisa Robertson, Jamie Sharpe, and Cecilia Vicuña; published by Bloof Books, BookThug, ECW Press, Kenning Editions, n+1/Ugly Duckling Presse.

Available for review: Michael Zapruder’s Pink Thunder (Hardcover & CD; Black Ocean, 2012)

From Black Ocean: "With contributions from 23 poets, 3 engineers, and over 30 musicians, Pink Thunder presents a musical and lyrical experiment by award-winning songwriter / composer Michael Zapruder, to see what happens when poems are sung instead of spoken.... "The full-color hardcover book contains an artist's statement by Michael Zapruder with an introduction by Scott Pinkmountain, and comes with a CD containing 22 tracks. The book also features photographs from the recording sessions and the Wave Poetry Bus Tour and hand-lettered versions of the poems illuminated by Arrington de Dionyso. "Contributing poets include: Joshua Beckman, David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Bob Hicok, Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Anthony McCann, Valzhyna Mort, Hoa Nguyen, Sierra Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, Travis Nichols, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe Wenderoth, Dara Weir, and Matthew Zapruder." If you're interested in reviewing Pink Thunder, send a brief cover letter and a copy of past review to....

Around the Way

Noted: Brian Henry's Verse Magazine introduces us to poet Tracy Truels; At Jacket2, Barry Schwabsky reviews Amy King's I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press); at Best American Poetry, Michael Schiavo interviews Samuel Amadon; artist Noah Saterstrom is selling lotsa work; and Jen Tynes's Horseless Press is having a chapbook sale.

BlazeVOX Books’ 11th Annual Thanksgiving Day Menu Poem

The ever-festive BlazeVOX [books] cordially invites you to attend their 11th Annual Thanksgiving Day Menu Poem -- "an online poetry project which you can enjoy at home with your computer and family! Hurray!" adds publisher Geoffrey Gatza. This year BlazeVOX is honoring Bill Berkson....

Dear Fans of Diane di Prima

Please take a moment read the following, sent from Ana Božičević at Lost & Found, the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the Center for the Humanities. Diane di Prima, beloved poet, finds herself facing medical expenses that have proven insurmountable. Writer, teacher, revolutionary, friend: di Prima has been essential to our efforts here at Lost & Found. We’d like to acknowledge the power of Diane by donating all proceeds of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative purchased through December 20th toward her recovery....

Tomaž Šalamun’s On the Tracks of Wild Game reviewed by Kevin Kinsella

In 1964, the Yugoslavian literary journal Perspektive published a poem that mentioned a dead cat and the new editor was promptly arrested. It seems that Tito’s interior minister Maček (“cat”) thought the poem was about him, so he sentenced his maligner to 12 years in prison. But the arrest of Tomaž Šalamun set off such a hue and cry from the international literary and human rights communities that he was released after just five days. While the dead cat reference was nothing more than a coincidence, Šalamun managed to come out of it all as something of a hero--a distinction he would later laugh off in Bomb Magazine in 2008 as “a very cheap glory.” Still, he realized that he would have to “become a really good poet to earn [his] fame.”

Brian Henry’s Static & Snow, reviewed by Laura Carter

"[With] terse lines and images of severe desolation that compel it forward, Henry sings a song that is deeply moving.... I think this may be what he was after, but it’s impossible to know entirely. Unless one backs away from the snow, entirely. Or does something to subvert it, as he has done here, and done well."

Danielle Vogel’s Between Grammars reviewed by m. forajter

m. forajter reviews Between Grammars by Danielle Vogel (Noemi Press, 2015): "Between Grammars suggests each book we read is an intimate relationship that leaves a lasting impression and helps formulate, not only ourselves as individuals but, our internal maps for language."

Plinth Vol.4

Beautiful monsterchild of the equinoctial super-bloodmoon eclipse, the fourth issue of Plinth, published by Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia, features work by Tarpaulin Sky Press author Claire Donato along with Purdey Lord Kreiden (whose new collection, Scolopendrum, is forthcoming from Action Books in April 2016), Nick Greer, Matthew Johnstone, A.A. Walker, Jayme Russell, C.C. Parker, Alina Popa, and Lital Khaikin.

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