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MLKNG SCKLS

Is available for preorder.

Matt Bell breaks it down for you:

In MLKNG SCKLS, two young men leave Fallujah to follow a river, letting its flow dictate the path of their escape. Along the way, the narrator keeps track of his thoughts on his slowly dying laptop, its fading battery power increasing the tension of his already fraught passage through this dangerous landscape. These brief entries record not just the thoughts of the refugee, the exile, but also how these two men try to understand themselves through tall tales about brothers saved from rabid dogs by mere cigarettes, through fantasical memories of uncooking meals for girlfriends, through hallucinatory visions of predatory trees and circling vultures. These are stories told first to pass the time, sure, but also to explain who they once were, in the lives they have just left behind.

Sirois' masterful creation is not just a travel narrative, not just a epistolary, not just a war story. This is desert madness made universal, a coming of age rendered apocalyptic in language as sparse and beautiful and ultimately perilous as the desert passage it describes.
- Matt Bell, author of The Collectors and How the Broken Lead the Blind

Light Boxes: read it

Julie Dill wants you to read Light Boxes as much as I do.

Dang

Work is killing me.

Posting Is Reads v5 cont.

Everyday Genius: Deanna Erickson

There's a very sensitive mash-up (sorta, loosely) of Frost today at Everyday Genius. Deanna Erickson seems smart, seems to exist in spite of her ontological struggles.

Is there a way, can someone tell me, is there a way to put an RSS feeder into the HTML code so that people can subscribe to Everyday Genius feeds?

Light Boxes review

Josh Potter's review of Light Boxes in Albany's alt-weekly is, I think, the fullest summary of the book. With linear thought, Potter manages to coherently encapsulate all the angles of Shane Jones's multiplicitous novel. When the lit students starting writing their exegesis on Light Boxes, I'm sure that this review will be an valuable resource.

This is getting ridiculous

So this guy walks into a bar,
which was pretty funny
because you'd have thought his friend woulda told him about.

Everyday Genius: David Daniel

Today in Everyday Genius I posted a chapter of David Daniel's amazing chapbook, Six Off 66. I think that is one of the books I'm most proud to have published. The story is 1,200 words long, which I think is tough to sit for on the Internet, but it's such a good story, with such an easy flow, that it works and works quickly. Give it a read.

There are a few copies of the book still available too, and if you order it by Monday I will include the new Francis Raven This PDF Chapbook and Chris Toll's I'll Be the Invisible Girl Till the Day I Die. I reread some of those poems yesterday and Chris is still one of my top five favorite poets.

Next book

Looks pretty good. Psyche -- looks flabbergastingly great.

Justin Sirois wrote and designed the next PGP book, which will be out in June. Here's an excerpt.

How you doing, here're some thoughts I just had, I'm setting blog culture back 10 years with this post, Sometimes when people do goofy things for a lo

ng time the things stop being goofy and become kind of cool and I wish I was like those people, Huh, I wonder if there are any things I do that were goofy for a long time but have become cool cuz I stuck with them, Why don't I ever post about what women want, Why don't I watch more baseball, Has poetry become more important to me than baseball, Finally reading "Play" by Mathias Svalina was a great idea and sometimes I laugh and then feel sad immediately afterward about the kids who disappear, Oh shoot is what I'm doing now something Sam Pink would do/has done, Anyway, what I was saying about "Play" and baseball is that I think Adam Peterson's blog is my new favorite, He's practically Mike Royko you know what I'm saying, Baby I don't care how you feel I just care about what you do *Updated*

Via Sean Lovelace and his funniness of review, I like this story called "Doll Eyes" by Robert Repino in Night Train. The way the story moves, the pacing, the details coming in quick succession reminds me that flash fiction is harder to read than regular fiction. You have to pay closer attention, be more patient -- which is counterintuitive because when I think "short" I think "cool, I'll be done with this in 2 seconds and a better person afterward."

Hey, it's like poetry in that way, except not as flakey.

In other news, if I want to do something I just do it and then whatever happens, happens.

I don't have a game plan, per se.

What if everyone was like Shane Jones and just suddenly deleted his/her blog out of nowhere? It would be like M. Night Shamalyan's movie The Happening.

This PDF Chapbook: Francis Raven

Francis Raven’s poem covers the C&O Canal, but manages to be about much more. Raven was driven to write the piece based on his reflection while walking along the canal to work each day – that in America we have so few ruins.

The poems match that sentiment, themselves falling apart, tracing out what was but what is left hanging on.

Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include 5-Haifun: Of Being Divisible (Blue Lion Books, 2008), Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).

Francis lives in Washington DC; you can check out more of his work at his website.

A Jello Horse on Goodreads

Matthew Simmons originally sent his manuscript of A Jello Horse for consideration in This PDF Chapbook. At first read I was skeptical; it took me a couple tries to get through the strange opening paragraphs. (When facing a deep submissions pile, I tend to skim through several different manuscripts until one grabs me.)

When I finally got past those initial paragraphs, during which a lion crashed through my house and I took hold of his thick fur and was lifted out through the roof, I quickly caught on to the emotional complexity of what Matthew had written. I read it at work. At one point I felt a little bit like crying.

So I told Matthew I loved the story but it was too long to run in This PDF Chapbook. I wanted to figure something out. That is when I decided I could afford to print 4-5 short books a year, and Matt's book could work for that.

So we did it, and now it's done. I have received the printed book and for pre-orderers, your copy will mail this week.


Give it an add.
Give it a win.
Give it a buy.
Give it a listen to.

Whale Box by Lauren Bender is now available as an eBook

Lauren Bender's long poem, "Whale Box," was released by PGP in October 2007 as a limited edition chapbook. It sold out of its 100 copies in less than two months. Now it's available to read online as an eBook.

Whale Box, read it.

A Jello Horse contest

Don't forget to somehow make a picture of something about pinball and send it to Matthew Simmons for the contest to win one of two limited edition hardcover books. The cover for said book will look something like this:
FRONT

BACK and SPINE

ALL TOGETHER NOW

Everyday Genius: Laura Ellen Scott

The Wigleaf Top 50 is live.

One of the winners is Laura Ellen Scott, whose new piece "The Temple Dog" was posted in Everyday Genius today. I hope it wins in next year's contest. Cuz it's wack.

Speaking of wack, peep my fam at last year's camping trip:

Works on so many levels

A Softer World. Check it out.

Everyday Genius: Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook's poem, "Pig Trough as Concept" -- posted today in Everyday Genius -- really delights me. Give it a read. Doesn't it strike you like a Mike Young piece in the way that she juxtaposes unusual (though plainly syntactical) sentences about one thing which culminate in a sentiment that is distinctly different from those one things.

Er, uh.

I honestly didn't do a close reading to sense what happens in this poem; I just let myself associate with it and from that association comes the, what, the grist (if you will), and then I allowed that grizzle (um) to be enough in terms of "understanding," and to be part of the thing that is the poem. I guess I'm arguing for an "Against Interpretation"-type reading here, as always. And why not? Otherwise, I'd be reminded of David Orr's condescending article in the Times --

" . . . the trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles (“The Gem Is on Page Sixty-Four”), quirky diction (“orangery,” “aigrettes”), flickering italics, oddball openings (“The scent of pig is faint tonight”) and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent — basically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein . . ." (link) --

And I'd think, yeah, but come on Tackleberry: it's good. Orr lists these characteristics like they're a detriment, as if to say they're cataloged, so clearly Juliet Cook didn't think of this first -- so what can the value be? A checklist of tropes employed does not strike me as a productive way to read Cook's poem, or any poem.

I don't want to know what's happening in a poem or how it derives its meaning. The fact that it's possible to recognize a good poem means precisely that it's possible to recognize what's good in a poem. Being able to language those elements, though, is a different, often superfluous matter.

In that regard, I've enjoyed reading these essays on negative reviews.

Bass Solo, Great!

I will be playing the open-body electric bass guitar.

Travel spatially faster

The pickup truck with flames I wanted to buy was already bought and then I found a Corolla (great car, boring car) but I have some confidence issues with the seller so now I don't have a car still. Should I buy the Corolla anyway? I've spent some pretty good time looking for a car and I don't like anything about this process. Is it really worth it to buy a car just so I can go to this:

?

A Jello Horse: Bonus Package

One person has ordered the Bonus Package for A Jello Horse. Here is what she will receive:

A Jello Horse in a special envelope
The first draft manuscript of A Jello Horse which was submitted to PGP, with my editorial comments and "Tracked Changes"
Christopher Higgs's story Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously from This PDF Chapbook
A tee shirt iron-on related to the book (will it be a pinball machine? A jackalope? A phone?)
And also Typewriter, by Jimmy Chen, from Magic Helicopter Press

The deal is still open. For the most part, this is what the bonus package will consist of -- just the extra small press book will be different each time (probably).

Did you people read Matthew's story, "Underlings: a rebuke" in elimae? Freakin' wow.