Fabulous book designer Alban Fischer is just now working on some final edits to Nikki Wallschlaeger’s HOUSES, before we send it off to the printers. That means our pre-order deal is almost over! Have you ordered your copy yet?
We are so happy to hear that Tim Earley’s POEMS DESCRIPTIVE OF RURAL LIFE AND SCENERY is this year’s recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters award for poetry! About the book, judge Jason Koo writes:
Part Henry Miller, part Rimbaud, part Whitman, part Joyce, all swirled into the “poor, rude clown” of mad John Clare resurrected and rampaging through the “post-natal slime” of the American South, Tim Earley reinvents or damn near obliterates the prose poem in Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, a book of “abundant strangeness” and originality, a teeming cesspool of language like a “disease that overspills.” Every sentence in this book is alive and creepy-crawly with creation, belying the book’s title, because there is nothing “descriptive,” but detonating, about what these poems do to the language and the landscape. This book could only be “described” as “like when order is a disrober is a disorder is an ordinance which evades and invades itself.” What a terrifying, exhilarating ride, with death riding shotgun, that asks, “Are not our cesspools shared … are not our miseries the same?” This writer eats at his “death each day of [his] life. It feels like practice. It is [his] job.” Luckily for us he takes this difficult task on. This is a book like no other.
Here You Are by Sara Peck & Jared Joseph is here! We are so excited! Get your copy now!
This book presents a clutch of lyric contacts, tenderness leaping like a spark across synapses to nest in in a thread of phrases. Here affinity, separateness, loneliness, compatibility, and the sense of being attuned to another send up a quiet array of small-scale yet endearing effects. A playful duet for the End of Time, or for Miller Time. –Joyelle McSweeney
I hear the old folk tune here, again and again, the lullaby Jack Spicer threaded throughout “Fifteen False Propositions Against God,” the mockingbird, diamond ring., the absent savior. In Here You Are, again, Mama’s objects endlessly threatening to disappoint, even as new, better objects appear to staunch baby’s tears. Like the phrases from the news that fall, like leaves, into the mulch of the poem, e.g the “binders full of women” of Mitt Romney ’12. Peck and Joseph use word and line as counters—colorful steps with which to raise the reader (the dreamer) a gorgeous house of cards. “God right here still nothing on top of everything/ to be in all this beauty.” Joseph and Peck’s personae start out strong and united, like siblings, but as the book wears on, propinquity seems to play on nerves, and out of sheer anxiety the poem begins to throw itself back onto its own beach, the waves like iterations of rain and sun,” “pink,” “home,” “garden”; the poets Hiromi Ito and Mark Zuckerberg each make an appearance—it’s a theophany, a book of rite, and all who come and linger here, even for a moment, shall experience the rhapsodomancy of the adept. -Kevin Killian
“Here You Are is a broken mirror held up to a broken world. It’s a troubled but exuberant challenge to the self, the lyric, the name, the language, the author, and the poem. A+ Five Stars Would Read Again Great Transaction Thanks!” -Leif Haven
What’s that beautiful thing I overheard you saying I said in reaction to your arms being around? It was Lyotard insisting that we need to, “To make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible.” And isn’t that our on going / I heart you forever hang up about co sponsorship of a poem? Who had the idea rather than How had the idea / or better yet / something I recently read / in Mike Young’s book said, “Belief = imagination you give up measuring.” The correspondence that makes the poem is also not a correspondence but is a correspondence and also just a reverberation between two bodies as they make in the space between them. I really fucking wish I didn’t have to talk about the hang ups / we have / to talk about the co sponsorship / the co writing of these poems by / Sara or Jared or Sared or Jara / which is just a space you enter into / eagerly / together or not / “the root systems naked to the creek.” Oh call and response, / liquidate my preparation. -Carrie Lorig
Hurry! Dark grows when dawn is running there, as high as heavens. They admired each other’s ivory once again. They became parents. It took 400 years to develop it. Father, you have forgotten the lamb for the sacrifice? Oh Sara, I said, you have placed me on the throne of Israel, but I’m like a child. Shut the lions’s mouths so they won’t hurt me. Jared, I said, drag your sword to this spot where I lay. Cut the baby in half, and give a piece to each woman, that it will stop this noisy quarreling. Becoming is a movement from someplace, but becoming oneself is a movement at that place. “It took four-hundred years to develop it”, we went in the sun, black fish, sucking together, death is beautiful, music shut off in the middle of silence, it’s all an aura. Tree, but two in a raw. You say oh you say I was going to…blow up. I think I know you. Are you dead? -Purdey Lord Kreiden & Michael Thomas Taren
The best collaborations to my mind are the ones which preserve sympathy and difference, and Sara Peck and Jared Joseph’s Here You Are achieves this beautifully. Far from the seamless surface of musical thoughts presented in a given order that constitute most lyric poems, seams are suddenly everywhere, and in Here You Are they populate the space between two lines with the dynamic theater that Peck and Joseph maintain between their sensibilities. Lines like “I feel the flowers” are followed by “I feel my bald spot.” Their rapport is unruly, impertinent, and unfolds in this work as an ever-unpredictable and bizarre universe of things and feelings. They’re really smart, and funny, and they pay attention to each other, to things and feelings. They make it look easy. -Brandon Brown
Interested in reviewing Nathan Hauke’s EVERY LIVING ONE? Contact me at jen.tynes@gmail.com and we’ll set you up!
We just received proofs for Here You Are by Sara Peck and Jared Joseph!
Thanks for this beautiful work, Alban Fischer!
The pre-order deal will be available for just a little bit longer; visit our catalog to pre-order Here You Are and to get information about other new and forthcoming titles, including Nathan Hauke’s Every Living One and Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses. Did you know you can also pre-order the entire 2015 full-length book catalog? O yes.
We are so excited to show you the cover of Sara Peck & Jared Joseph’s HERE YOU ARE, which we just sent to the printers!
About HERE YOU ARE, Kevin Killian writes:
I hear the old folk tune here, again and again, the lullaby Jack Spicer threaded throughout “Fifteen False Propositions Against God,” the mockingbird, diamond ring., the absent savior. In Here You Are, again, Mama’s objects endlessly threatening to disappoint, even as new, better objects appear to staunch baby’s tears. Like the phrases from the news that fall, like leaves, into the mulch of the poem, e.g the “binders full of women” of Mitt Romney ’12.
Peck and Joseph use word and line as counters—colorful steps with which to raise the reader (the dreamer) a gorgeous house of cards. “God right here still nothing on top of everything/ to be in all this beauty.” Joseph and Peck’s personae start out strong and united, like siblings, but as the book wears on, propinquity seems to play on nerves, and out of sheer anxiety the poem begins to throw itself back onto its own beach, the waves like iterations of rain and sun,” “pink,” “home,” “garden”; the poets Hiromi Ito and Mark Zuckerberg each make an appearance—it’s a theophany, a book of rite, and all who come and linger here, even for a moment, shall experience the rhapsodomancy of the adept.
Yesterday afternoon we received shipping notice; we’ll have copies of Nathan Hauke’s EVERY LIVING ONE tomorrow! That means today, Tuesday, is the final day you can get a copy of EVERY LIVING ONE for the pre-order price.
Composed through the accumulation and solve of discrete interwoven series, EVERY LIVING ONE attends to presence rent by attachment and loss—creation entrusted to itself, further bewildered by text(s) and belief. It picks through the razor briar of “born-again” religious rhetoric and junks the abstraction of transcendentalism to embrace visionary experience, cleaving to practice grounded in relinquishment and acts of salvage that accompany the transformative threshold of edges.
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“What if the secret heart of rural America were a still waiting, an all-but-silent psalm? These lyrics are delicate, involuted fossils of a trance-like attention that somehow does not exclude chronic underemployment, neighbors up on assault charges, and other vicissitudes of contemporary rural living. In the tradition of C.D. Wright, besmilr brigham, and perhaps Lorine Niedecker above all, these are poems ‘learning the mirror and field guide,’ becoming ‘a process of mapping’—not just of place, but also of being-in-place, an angled consciousness that pares itself away even as the lines all but dissolve on the reader’s sympathetic eye-tongue.” —G.C. Waldrep
Horse Less author Jenny Drai has a chapbook forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, THE NEW SORROW IS LESS THAN THE OLD SORROW. You can read more about it and pre-order it here!
Horse Less Press 