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.

January readings

Sandra Simonds: NYC in January 11

Jennifer L. Knox: NYC in January 14

Details on the events page.

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.

Sandra Simonds in NYC, October 9 & 12

FRIDAY, October 9 @7:30 PM
in Brooklyn

Sandra Simonds reads with Daniel Hoyt, Caitlin Dube, Jackie Delamatre & Tricia Taaca
Earshot
Hosted by Nicole Steinberg

ROSE LIVE MUSIC
345 Grand Street (b/w Havemeyer & Marcy)
$5 + one free drink

Nearby Train Stops: L (Lorimer/Bedford), G (Metropolitan/Grand), J/M/Z (Marcy Ave)

MONDAY, October 12 @7:00 PM
in Manhattan

Sandra Simonds reads with TBD
KGB Poetry Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone

KGB Bar
85 E. 4th Street
FREE

Trains: F/V to 2nd Ave, or 6 to either Astor or Bleecker

New chapbook by Sandra Simonds

Here's a note from Sandra about her new chapbook, Used White Wife:

Just wanted to let you know that I have a new chapbook for sale. Very cheap! I even handmade the covers. So if you are interested in supporting small presses, and you need a Used White Wife, please visit Grey Book Press and order one here.

Love,
Sandra

Here is a blurb from Kevin Killian:

Something got into Sandra Simonds' poetry like "a wasp in a vehicle" that makes her "jump over the yellow lines." Her writing is full of amazing things, and if it makes the bystander on the sidewalk fear for his life as well as hers, those are the hazards of the souped-up turbo drive talent that propels her best poems. As if to counter this, Used White Wife finds Simonds (or her lyric surrogate) in a frightened and pensive mood, so bring comfort with you as you open its pages, she needs it badly poor thing.

Bonus tweak

Another riff on Warsaw Bikini from Maurice Burford here. (See also, his post after Anne Boyer. See also, the rest.)

Tweak job drawing: Winners!

The following are the winners of the random drawing:

Angela Genusa
Catherine Daly
Adam Strauss
Maurice Burford

Each entry email was assigned a number as they were received, and winners were selected by the random number generator at Random.org.

We have emailed these folks for their mailing addresses.

Please check out all of the Warsaw Bikini-inspired tweaks at Tweak Job.

Thanks for playing!

Tweak Job update

The first few poems (after Sandra Simonds, in whichever way their authors chose) are now up at Tweak Job.

And we're loving this...and wouldn't mind giving away a few more books in the drawing...so we're extending the deadline to Sunday, August 23.

Are the "rules" for entry too complicated? Simplify at will. Just be sure to email tweakjob [at] bloofbooks [dot] com so we don't miss your entry.

Random drawing will be held shortly after the new deadline. Happy tweaking!

Tweakjob: Win a copy of Sandra Simonds' Warsaw Bikini

How to enter:

1. Write a poem (or very short prose piece) based on a line, title, image, or whole poem by Sandra Simonds. (See list of suggestions below.) You may tweak the original in any way you like. You may illustrate it or respond to it visually or in music, if you are so inclined.

2. Post your piece to your blog, website, or Facebook wall. (If you do not have a blog, website, or Facebook account, feel free to post it at the Bloof Books Facebook group.)

3. In your post, mention Warsaw Bikini and the title of the poem of Sandra's your piece tweaks, and include a link back to this post.

4. IMPORTANT: Send an email to tweakjob[at]bloofbooks[dot]com letting us know you've entered, and including a link to your post.

5. Emails will be assigned numbers in the order they are received. A random number generator will be used to choose winner(s). One book will be awarded per 15 entries, up to a maximum of 5 winners. (So, if we get 36 entries, 2 winners will be chosen; 45 entries equals 3 winners; if we get more than 90 entries, we will be happy but we will still only award a maximum of 5 books.)

6. ALSO, our favorite pieces will be collected at Tweakjob.

7. Tweaking begins Friday, July 24 and ends Monday, August 3.

NOTE: ONE entry per person/email address. There no restrictions to US-only entries, or any silly business like that. We will ship winning books anywhere. No purchase is required to enter.

SUGGESTED POEMS

You may use any poem or piece of writing by Sandra Simonds, either from Warsaw Bikini, one of her chapbooks, or in a print/online magazine. Here are several possibilities that are freely available online:

A Poem for David Schubert at Verse Daily
Three poems in La Petite Zine
Bildungsroman Americana in Typo
Four poems in Coconut

Also see the list under "MY WORK" in the sidebar of Sandra's blog for more.

Happy tweaking!