Party in Denver: BLOOF + COOPER DILLON + NOEMI

Mark your AWP calendar for Thursday night!

7-10 PM
Green Spaces Colorado
1368 26th Street

We're throwing a small press party in Denver, featuring Bloof Books, Cooper Dillon Books & Noemi Press.

Readings by:

Shanna Compton
Peter Davis
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Jennifer L. Knox
Gary L. McDowell
Danielle Pafunda
Nate Pritts
Sandra Simonds

& more TDB

RSVP at the Facebook page here.

Coming soonish

7 poems from Peter Davis's forthcoming Bloof book Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

Here.

In case you missed them: news & recent reviews

The blurbs for Peter Davis's forthcoming book Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! are rolling in.

Mairead Byrne says "Passing Professor Davis's office door yesterday--Professor Davis’s closed office door--I found myself wishing he was on a Fulbright like before, not a MacArthur, so that he would be back among us sooner, casting his brilliant (and humane) light. Because how is our intellectually restless little ivied community to survive without him? This book will help. From a time when he was young, full of hope, teaching in Muncie, it looks us straight in the eye, inviting us to identify with this nubile and insouciant David--before he became the giant that is Peter Davis."

Check the others (by Kenneth Goldsmith & Daniel Nester, with more on the way) out on Peter's new PPP-related blog here. We expect to have copies in time for AWP.

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Becca Klaver reviews Warsaw Bikini in the latest edition of h_ngm_n:

"Simonds’ poems are rocket-speed soliloquies. They’re the opposite of Wordsworth’s 'emotion recollected in tranquility': instead, they are acts projected out of anxiety, revealing the artistic propulsion of that psychic state—the prismatic, sometimes madcap voices and visions waiting where its arrow touches down.

If the turns of Warsaw Bikini’s diction and imagery dazzle as consistently as the book’s title leads you to believe they will (and they will!), there might be some room for the forms to better direct their glint. Many poems consist of dense, imagistic leap-laden stanzas snaking thickly down the page ('A System of Sufficient Complexity,' 'The Truth About the Pills I Took,' 'The America You Learn From'), but I tend to prefer the ones that use shorter lines and more white space, the ones that visually alert their leaps, deftly place their puns, and provide a defined, if rugged, structural landscape for the speaker to climb up or ski down (e.g., 'You Should Put a Neighborhood on That,' 'I Am Small,' and 'Tomorrow’s Bright Bracelets')."

Read the rest here.

Anne Boyer on Warsaw Bikini: "Sandra is a fellow-traveler to some celestial organization, a down low ideologue for the heavens, as if an aesthete were mistaken for an astronaut and given, as a costume, scuba equipment, and given, as reading material, Das Kapital." Read the rest here.

Sandra's chapbook Used White Wife (Grey Book Press) makes Nate Logan's Best of 2009 list at No Tells.

And she's got a new poem up at The New Post-Literate: A Gallery of Asemic Writing.

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Carrie Lorig reviews My Zorba for Lesser of Two Equals:

"Some poets take language out for a long, leisurely lunch and a stroll. Danielle Pafunda drags language out of bed in the middle of the night and takes it on a desperate mission through the war-torn house of the body.

Mirrors explode and shattered glass rains down on the mostly female narrator of Pafunda’s book, My Zorba, as she fights with an imaginary, mostly male character named Zorba. 'I could only think in small pieces!/I could not speak in first person! The copper wire/strung!/From my armpit, a personality exam, a pelvic diatribe' (In the Museum of Your Two Halves). Confusion, urgency, shape-shifting, and struggle maims every poem in My Zorba, producing language that is fragmented and mysterious, that jolts and halts like an ancient amusement park ride. It is as terrifying and difficult as it is beautiful; a drunk horror story covered in glitter."

Read more here.

And watch for Danielle's appearance on the Delirious Hem 2009 Adventskalendar on the 21st.

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Jennifer L. Knox's poem "Why We Came and Why We Stayed" from A Gringo Like Me appears in The Lineup an annual chapbook of poems from Poetic Justice Press. Mystery Scene Magazine reviews the collection in their latest issue:

"Hardly representing the 'roses are red' school of poetry, these 20 poems smash into the dark heart of murder like a bullet into bone. Especially effective is Jennifer L. Knox's 'Why We Came and Why We Stayed,' which reveals a 'White-gloved, big-boned, wide-eyed wife.'

More info here.

Jen gets a nod from Mark Bibbins in this interivew with Bomb Magazine: "The person wearing the sweater in a Currin painting might also be naked from the waist down, which will always make someone uncomfortable, so he’s a good artist to invoke. John Waters and Gabriel Gudding and Jennifer Knox and Eileen Myles and Andy Warhol are others. Taste needn’t be merely 'good.' Solemn reverence is the default 'good taste' mode, and such poems look like parody to me at this point. On the other hand, if snark is your default and you don’t somehow tweak or transform it, that’s just as dull." Read the rest of the interview (and info on Mark's new book, The Dance of No Hard Feelings) here.

And she's got a new poem in InDigest and three more (including one from Drunk by Noon in The Awl. Don't miss 'em.

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Anne Boyer on For Girls (& Others):

"Appropriation is always a slant authorship, aggravating to those who want to believe a poem is something with which we can disagree. This technique always has exactly a feminist cunning, and always a feminist heritage (the Baronness, Acker). We steal shit. It's not okay. It is sideways and deflecting and done with our under-hand out. [...] So Shanna Compton in For Girls & Others, steals shit, specifically from an old-fashioned instruction manual For Girls, also a little from that great heaving machine of cruel instruction, The Internet. To steal words to screw them up and then to self-publish them is for a girl (subjected to cruel instruction) like doing everything you were instructed against. This is a book made from elegant defiance. Compton means almost nothing of what she steals and says, not directly. She does not want us or our girl-offspring, to remain "soft / pink / forlorn."

Shanna also reads a poem for day 13 of the Delirious Hem 2009 Adventskalendar, curated by Susana Gardner of Dusie. Direct link.

Read the rest here.

Hey, so there's a lot of stuff to tell ya!

First, check the events page for upcoming readings. Sandra Simonds is coming to visit NYC, and Jennifer L. Knox and Shanna Compton have a few too. Link.

Also, check out the new issue of Spooky Boyfriend, edited by Bloof pal Nate Logan. It's got poems by Bloofers Sandra Simonds and Peter Davis, plus Nicole Steinberg & more. Link.

Peter Davis also appears in the most recent issues of Shampoo and Double Room, each containing poems from his upcoming Bloof book Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

Also, maybe you're not aware that Peter also releases music via his site Art Is Necessary. His new Short Hand record, Attila, is now downloadable. That'd be free, kids. Link.

Finally, what the hell, we're going to AWP in Denver. For some reason this year we just feel like it. Stay tuned for event details. Jen is threatening a karaoke party. And tee shirts.

What's next: Bloof Books 2009-2010

We've been sitting on this happy news far too long. Finally, we can share:

JOAN by Anne Boyer (Fall, 2009)

Anne Boyer is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers (Coffee House, 2008), Art is War (Mitzvah, 2008), Selected Dreams with a note on phrenology (Dusie, 2007), Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse(Effing, 2006) and Odalisqued blog. Other projects include Abraham Lincoln Poetry Magazine and An Actual Kansas Reading Series.

JOAN FALLS FROM THE SKY

This story recounts how and why my body should often have turned to dust, for beginning when I was six months old, I dropped from the sky. My mother was very busy working in the field, so I came out of her abdomen. The newspapers named me Joan. The doctors said I wouldn’t live past three.

I wheezed and coughed in my sleep, and my parents took me to my pediatrician for advice. He thought it would be good to remove my pins and screws. The doctors operated on my clitoris and realigned my urethra so I could wee from the same place other girls do. On holiday in Portugal when I was six months old one of the locals told Mom what a handsome boy I was. The starter studs went in the day that we arrived.

Coming out right in the end, I nearly died. All wrong, for an infant to be so caught up in the last things. Naturally, the hospital was called Providence; then I was brought to England, and a painter did a delightful picture of the mermaids carrying me.

The doctors said I would always have a feeling the comics will think it is funny to bring me out in a high chair in a schoolroom sketch. As they told me this story later, my mother started to suspect all was not well with me. My body was always hot and dry. My mother went to many rehearsals and watched the orchestra rehearsing. The townspeople considered this to be the embodiment of backwardness and superstition, so my mother gave the rest of her possessions to my uncle, packed up me with her baffled desires and set off.

My father was confused in the beginning. He was a socialist but a strict, Victorian man whom I never knew. He did not know what to do with an albino, but afterwards, he became my friend. In a letter addressed to me when I was still a baby he wrote, “There were no Northern Lights last night but there was a big moon and a sky full of stars asserting full human dignity heroically demonstrated in the face of this grievous blow.”

I remember back then my favorite way to sleep was curled up in the island of Kauai. According to family lore the first time happened when I was still a baby and rolled over in my crib. Then one other time I remember was when I was coming to a clearing where a creature had disappeared.

Even when I was still a baby I had a boyfriend that cheated on me three times. Although it was crap, it didn’t mean that much to me. I bet I still could’ve rolled down that hill. If I had got momentum, there’s no way a stake could’ve held me in place. I still remember everything that happened during the next twelve months. The memories are like movies and snapshots that I can unfold. I could sense that loss, and I sobbed.

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis (Spring 2010)

Peter Davis is the author of Hitler's Mustache (Barnwood, 2006), editor of Poet's Bookshelf and Poet's Bookshelf II (Barnwood, 2005 and 2007), and the writer/cartoonist ofthis blog. He teaches at Ball State University in Muncie, IN.

POEM ADDRESSING MY POETRY FRIENDS AND WHATNOT, MY CONTEMPORARIES WHOM I MEET AND CONVERSE WITH

I mostly feel inferior. Many of you are smart and good looking and, more importantly, obviously very “cool.” Some of you have won something prestigious or went to some super great school or something. I like to think that I am very “cool” but I question myself sometimes when I am around you. Other times, I feel that you are pretentious or too serious or too something or too stupid. Sometimes I feel superior to you. Sometimes I don’t enjoy being with you because all of us can be so self-conscious. This makes for some awkward stuff sometimes. Thank goodness we all drink so much!


POEM ADDRESSING PEOPLE WHO LIKE NARRATIVE POEMS INVOLVING EPIPHANIES AND CUTE STUFF PRESENTED IN A MILDLY SURREALISTIC WAY

Once there was this poem that began with a long title and a rather obvious beginning sentence. It was a good poem, a kind poem, a poem that always thought of others. At one moment, there was a knock on the door of the poem. When the poem answered the door it found an animal that was exceedingly common in nearly every area of the world, except in the area that the poem lived. The poem, surprised by the sight of this animal, dropped the glass it was holding, severing its toes. The animal leapt on the bleeding stumps, sucking the blood of the poem, getting fatter and fatter. When the poem ended, things were different somehow. The poem had a rainbow over it and was holding a bunny and watching a baby smile for the first time.


POEM ADDRESSING FANS OF CELINE DION

I look at myself in the mirror all the time, as you might, and I just think, what the fuck?

The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox (Fall 2010)

Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—once crystal meth capitol of the nation, and home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Space Shuttle. She received her BA from the University of Iowa, and her MFA in poetry writing from New York University. She has taught poetry writing at Hunter College and New York University. Her books Drunk by Noon and A Gringo Like Me are both available from the Möthershipp that is Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 1997, 2003 and 2006, Best American Erotic Poems, Great American Prose Poems: From Poet to Present, and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books.

Burt Reynolds FAQ

Burt Reynolds is the son of six grizzly bear brothers and the Holy Goddess of Cherry Trees. He was born from his mother's nose, which ensures lifelong charisma. Before he could walk, alligators would gather to watch him wrestle other babies. He excelled at all sport--especially football, baseball, gymnastics, rugby, tennis, archery, swimming, sailing and horseback riding. At school, he was not the brightest student in the class, but he was the luckiest: Whenever the teacher called upon him, he would guess the answer correctly. When he was seven, he grew his first mustache, which wealthy older women fought for the privilege of combing through with gold paint. He was made a general in the President's Army, but on the eve he was to leave for battle, robbers clobbered his knees with a tar-covered club. Burt was crushed because his knees were crushed, but he never cried. The president's queen said, "Stay here and read me stories," because he was also the most talented storyteller in the land. He rose to great power, which made the priests and princes jealous. After the night a murderer poured mercury into his ear as he lay sleeping, he became The Lion Who Did Not Want to Be Loved. But the people would not let him not be loved. Neither would Burt be pinned. The match is still going--no one knows who will win. At night Burt returns to his home on the edge of a fire pit with a lush green yard full of tigers waiting for him to read a story, like the old days. Burt does not believe he'll have no need for toupees in heaven. In summer, his mustache still grows unruly with lily of the valley.


Old Friends

I'm in a coffee shop, remembering a woman I knew
years ago who had drowned eight kittens in a sack.
I listened to her tell the whole story many times, even
begged her to repeat it when we were wasted, and laughed
at the part where the flung sack hit the concrete instead
of the water. I'm thinking how different things are now,
especially me, how my heart can barely stomach the story,
which means I've become a better person, certainly better
than the woman I knew, who I could never be friends with
again--she probably hasn't changed at all. Now that I'm
a better person, I probably shouldn't forgive her, or
should I? I wonder, and as I'm wondering this, the bodies
of all the people I'd drowned years ago begin falling from
the sky, heavy like giant wet slugs from a crane. I go out
to watch them. God, lots of them. To each, I wave
as it flies past, mouth "I miss you," wait for a "Me too:
from the back of its smooshed, hairless head.


The Earth Is Flat and So's My Ass

These days, not so much regret.
Brute will's broke as a petting zoo pony.
Funny how it kept us entranced by difficult piffle
that passed as the whole enchilada: bruises always
fresh as hothouse violets then--they dared not darken
to the ochre that signaled surrender and whatever
came next. We called it not "Death"--more like "Man
Gnaws Off Limb in Imaginary Tractor Accident."
[Gavel pounds] But gentlemen, we believe something
has [big time] shifted--that you won't catch us again
marching stiff and shatterable as stale candy canes
into a taco stand to demand our just potato kugel.
We accept all [lllllll] the limitations. We understand
[deep sigh] the work will be arudous--the toads to be
swallowed, numerous--and [hoo!] it's gonna get ugly [er].

Hot list, no? We think so.