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NaPoWriMo is in full swing at the Bloof blog

A multicolored graphic of abstract leaves with large white text that says April Is a Mess. Smaller light green text below that says #NaPoWriMo daily drafts at bloofbooks.com/blog.

I just did a quick count. As of this moment, day 8, there are 89 very fresh drafts posted!

Some may disappear as we go, so catch them while you can.

Click a poet’s name to see their drafts collected:

Natalie Eilbert
Irene Vázquez
JJ Rowan
Elisabeth Workman
Steven Karl
Jenn Marie Nunes, translating Yen Ai-lin
Rebecca Loudon
Nicole Steinberg
Katie Jean Shinkle
K. Lorraine Graham
Reagan Louise Wilson
Farrah Field
Jared White
Sharon Mesmer
Peter Davis
Danielle Pafunda
Becca Klaver
Shanna Compton

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April is here? April is here!

And we’ll be digging in mud-season style here on the Bloof blog, dropping some poem bulbs into the muck. That’s as far as I’m willing to stretch that metaphor. The point is, it’s NaPoWriMo time.

What is NaPoWriMo? It’s an unofficial, noncommercial, sans-sponsorship, egalitarian, world-wide (that’s GloPoWriMo to you, bub) celebration of poetry that induces a 30-day fever of daily drafts.

NaPoWriMo started 21 years ago when Maureen Thorson gave herself the challenge to write a poem a day on her blog and jokingly called it “national” even though it was just her, after NaNoWriMo, the novel-writing month (and now nonprofit org) that has been held every November since 1999. Shanna and a few others joined her on their own blogs the following year, and well, then it was a whole thing somehow.

You can read more about it at the NaPoWriMo.net site, where Maureen also very generously offers (optional) daily prompts, podcasts, feature sites, and other resources. (Pssst, we’ve got a new book of essays by Maureen, available here.)

Bloof poets are invited to post with abandon here all month. It’s generally a bit of a mess and a ton of fun to follow along.

APRIL ASSEMBLAGE:

Peter Davis
Natalie Eilbert
K. Lorraine Graham
Steven Karl
Kirsten Kaschock
Becca Klaver
Rebecca Loudon
Sharon Mesmer
Danielle Pafunda
JJ Rowan
Katie Jean Shinkle
Nicole Steinberg
Irene Vázquez
Reagan Louise Wilson
Elisabeth Workman
Shanna Compton

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New! Romance in Twelve Lines

Bloof’s first release in the new year comes to us all the way from Brazil: Bruna Beber’s romance in twelve lines. We’ve been working as a guest printer over at Kennedy Press in Belfast, Maine to print up these covers from our hand-carved linoleum block in gold metallic ink on wrought iron gray paper.

This sequence of poems appears in both English translation by Sarah Rebecca Kersley and in the original Portuguese in the chapbook’s second section. As the titular relationship tumbles through its inevitable phases, Beber’s imagery shifts from the giddy tick tock of anticipation into days of “doubts and lilies” and metaphorically overdrawn accounts. We’ve all been there, and this handful of poems captures each point in love’s arc in deeply observed detail.

Chapbooks are in stock—take a look back at the process of printing and assembling them on Instagram—and are limited to 150 hand-sewn copies. Orders are shipping now, and you can mix and match it in your own custom chapbook bundle. You’ll also find copies at our partner bookstores like Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, and Open Books in Seattle!

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1: Sample Post, tips for formatting

A black and white photo of Joyce Mansour, holding some glittery beaded decorations on sticks, and surrounded by more of same.
Joyce Mansour

Sample April post. This is my text. You can write
directly into the post, or copy/paste from elsewhere
(but weird things sometimes happen in the transition from MSWord).

Experiment! and let me know if you need help.

Single spacing between lines is shift + return.
Double spacing between lines return only.

If you want to use          variable spacing
or
   stagger
          your
              lines
use the Preformatted block option
(It will look gray in the editor but
        like this! when published!
The Verse paragraph setting
(shown here)
also lets you
manipulate spacing       as       much       as you like
and keeps all the lines in one box
instead of w
            e
             i
              r
               d
                l
                 y making each hard return into
a new spaced paragraph

Feel free to add media (Alt Text encouraged!)

Tags can be added by clicking the gear in the upper right
(That’s a bit different since April 2020)

—Shanna
PS: I expire my posts the day after they appear

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April is coming. So are the poems.

The NaPoWriMo graphic for this year is a black and white photo of a rock wall with a rainbow eye painted on it. It says NaPoWriMo at the top in black type, and at the bottom in white says (20 years of looking out for poetry).

What is #NaPoWriMo, you wonder? It’s an unofficial, unaffiliated poetry game played annually by poets all over the world (#GloPoWriMo). It grew, sort of accidentally, out of a personal challenge Maureen Thorson set for herself one April, many moons ago in the poetry-blog days of yore. I joined her the following year, and others did too, and soon it became an annual, organic free-for-all, a lively everybody-is-invited event. 

Maureen’s idea has proven so popular, people have assumed it’s hosted by some Official Org or Institution, but nope. It’s entirely noncommercial and unsponsored. She’s created a site—napowrimo.net—and accompanying Twitter account to share daily prompts and featured participants every day in April, which is really nice of her. 

Bloof always hosts a handful of our authors on our blog, and this April will be no exception. Wanna play? You can join in on your own site or social media account. See napowrimo.net for the details.

PS: This is the 20th year!

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AWP 2023: Where to find Bloof poets

Bloof, the press, will not be at AWP. But Bloof, the poets, will be! And you can still grab some bookfair deals online.

VIRTUAL BOOKFAIR at bloofbooks.com
March 7–13. All paperbacks in bundle deals: 2 for $25, 3 or more for $10 each.
+ Free shipping on all orders over $25 (US only).
This virtual bookfair is for everyone, whether or not you’re attending the conference.

Thursday, March 9

DANIELLE PAFUNDA
Family Trees in the Enchanted Forest: Fairy Tales & Intergenerational Trauma
12:10 p.m. Room 427

KATIE JEAN SHINKLE
Two or More Become One: Writing in Collaboration Across Genre
3:20 p.m. Room 337

KATIE JEAN SHINKLE
6:00 p.m. Slip In Beltown Gallery
2301 1st Street
Orchestrate Your Whole Fucking Life! reading

IRENE VÁZQUEZ
Muzzle Magazine reading
7:00 p.m. Loving Room
1400 20th Ave

Friday, March 10

IRENE VÁZQUEZ
10:00 a.m. Bookfair signing
Take Me to the Water chapbooks + broadsides of Glory from Above
Riot in Your Throat table (T1522)

KATIE JEAN SHINKLE
2:00 p.m. Museum of Museums
900 Boylston Ave
University of Louisiana Lafayette and Sam Houston University Graduate Student Reading

DANIELLE PAFUNDA, KATIE JEAN SHINKLE
7:30 p.m. Alley Mic
1922 Post Alley
Apogee, Diagram, March Fadness, Texas Review, TRP reading

Saturday, March 11

A pastel radial gradient background with white and lavender text giving reading details and readers’ names:

Extravaganza, an offsite reading.

Saturday, March 11, 3:30–5:00 p.m. at the Crescent Lounge, 1413 E. Olive Way, Seattle.

READERS
Ginger Ko
Irene Vázquez
Katie Jean Shinkle
Natalie Eilbert
Danielle Pafunda
Min Kang
Jessica Rae Bergamino
Jackson Bliss
Abby Hagler
Megan Kaminski
Nilufar Karimi
Sarah Minor
Olivia Muenz
JD Pluecker
Claire Marie Stancek
Dennis James Sweeney
+ karaoke to follow!
Event graphic for Essay Press, Noemi Press + Bloof Books Extravaganza

KATIE JEAN SHINKLE, GINGER KO
1:45 p.m. Room 437
#FeelsBad: Writing Discomfort and Pessimism in Genre

GINGER KO, IRENE VÁZQUEZ, DANIELLE PAFUNDA, KATIE JEAN SHINKLE, NATALIE EILBERT
Essay Press, Noemi Press & Bloof Books Extravaganza reading
(see graphic above for the full list of readers!)
3:30 p.m. Crescent Lounge
1413 E. Olive Way

NATALIE EILBERT
6:00 p.m. Elliot Bay Book Company
1521 10th Ave.
Copper Canyon 50th Anniversary Celebration

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ON DREAMS by Maureen Thorson: Now available for preorder

22% off through March!

After being diagnosed, or misdiagnosed, with a rare, “invisible” eye condition that causes blind spots, Maureen Thorson set out to write a self-portrait in a broken mirror: a “mirror of my suffering,” wry and poignant, fragmented and necessarily incomplete. On Dreams is allusive, searching, and self-arguing, a lyric meditation on reality, truth, illusion—the warped reality of the mirror image and everything we “see”—and the illusion, “the dream,” of control. 

—Elisa Gabbert

After a pandemic delay and the intervening release of another book by Maureen last year (from our friends at Veliz), we’re finally ready to spring this fascinating book on you, dear readers!

On Dreams is as much a personal exploration on reality and illness as it is a richly documented commonplace book—the notes on the text are integral to the way the essays move, crisscrossed with rabbit holes and byways, with citations ranging from Aristotle to tweets. As Kwoya Fagin Maples puts it: “This work won’t allow itself to be pinned, even by its author. It follows its own north.” We can’t wait to get it into your hands.

Read “Confessions of a Pareidoliac,” an essay from On Dreams, in On the Seawall.

Preordered copies begin shipping in mid April, ahead of the official release in May. Read more about this fascinating collection.

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February Flash Sale! Nikki Wallschlaeger

From now till March 1, we’re offering both of Nikki’s Bloof books at a hearty discount—plus a limited edition art print!

CRAWLSPACE is “a series of sonnets that consciously disrupt their own formal limits, discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself. Wallschlaeger’s poems feel timely, as the links between property ownership, alienated labor, and the history of black slavery in the United States (‘Greasy gangrene hamburger wrapper of a country,’ in her words) become clearer by the day. She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life — a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image.” —Iris Cushing, HYPERALLERGIC

I HATE TELLING YOU HOW YOU REALLY FEEL is a full-color hardcover version of Nikki’s groundbreaking meme-poem chapbook, first published by Bloof in our handmade series, which sold out almost instantly. This graphic chapbook features Julia, the 70s doll from Mattel based on Diahann Carroll, styled and photographed against colorful backdrops. “The writing in I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel is, by turns, thrillingly allusive and thrillingly frank. […] Wallschlaeger’s is a poetics of multiplication and plurality.” —Toby Altman, ENTROPY

I DO HAVE AN ABNORMAL AMOUNT OF DREAMS: A limited-edition print featuring one of the graphic chap memes! 12 x 16 inches in brilliant color on lightly textured 100% cotton fine art paper. A rare opportunity—available till March 1 only. Once they’re gone, they’re gone! FREE shipping on orders including this print. Enter FREESHIP at checkout to receive the discount. (Shipping on these is direct from our printer, approximately 2 weeks from order date.)

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Happy new year!

Huge thanks to all our readers for your support in 2022. It was a great comeback from our pandemic slowdown, and by our count we’ve handmade and mailed almost 500 new chapbooks! And there’s lots more to come.

As of December 19, all pending preorders were filled. We took a little break for the holidays (ahhhh), and now are shipping normally as of January 3.

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Chapbook Shipping Status Update

A hot pink graphic with black hatchmarks and yellow text saying “handmade poetry is worth the wait.”

Here is the scoop for this week. We are in the home stretch for both of these now. Please remember that orders are filled in the order they were received.

This week, November 28–December 2, we are working to fill orders that came in on the following dates:

  • Take Me to the Water by Irene Vázquez, from Oct 24 on
  • I Prefer the Forests Making Blankets from Themselves by CAConrad, from Oct 10 on

We appreciate your patience! I will email you with your tracking number when your package has gone out. I will update the email autoreply each week as necessary, so feel free to check back.

Thank you!
Shanna

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Important Chapbook Shipping Update

An announcement graphic in yellow with multicolored abstract shapes around the edges. The text says: Chapbook Shipping Status. This week, November 7–11, we are working to fill orders that came in on the following dates: Take Me to the Water preorders placed Oct 10–15. I Prefer the Forests Making Blankets from Themselves preorders placed Oct 3–10.

Because y’all have been so enthusiastic, I have a lot of chapbooks to make! I’ve set up an email autoresponder to answer status questions and will update it each week until I’ve caught up. OK? Thank you for your patience!

This week, Nov 7–11, I’ll be working on TAKE ME TO THE WATER preorders that came in between Oct 10–15 and I PREFER THE FORESTS preorders that came in between Oct 3–10.

It’s a bit hard to explain, but well before we “go live” with preorders, we actually already have a backlog. Our subscribers mostly signed on in the spring, for instance, and our authors also sometimes need the first batch for a launch event, etc. So even if you smashed that button on the first day, so sorry, you are not actually first. 😂

I’ve sent out…let’s see…about 150 copies of these two, all told. And yours is coming, I promise.

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Our 2022–2023 Handmade Chapbook Series

Bloof Books is thrilled to announce our new series of chapbooks for 2022–2023:

Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin
Wearing a T-shirt of Ryan Gosling
Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin
Marisa Crawford & Morgan Parker

Romance in Twelve Lines
Bruna Beber, translated by Sarah Rebecca Kersley

If Your Lungs Are Skied Make the Scar Song Echo
Until All the Winged Things Bleed Your Poetry
Steven Karl

dear Elsie / seltzer
Nicole Steinberg

Take Me to the Water
Irene Vázquez

dwellswarm
Reagan Wilson

Additionally we will be publishing a chapbook we held over from 2020 (aka the Uncertainty Year), by a poet already part of the Bloof collective:

three tides
Pattie McCarthy

ABOUT THE POETS

Bruna Beber (Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, 1984) is a Brazilian poet and translator. She is the author of five books of poetry, including a fila sem fim dos demônios descontentes (the endless line of unsatisfied demons, 2006); balés (ballets, 2009), and the critically acclaimed Rua da padaria (Bakery street, 2013) and Ladainha (Litany, 2017). She is also the author of a children’s book, Zebrosinha, illustrated by Beta Maya (2013). Her translations into Portuguese include books by Eileen Myles, Sylvia Plath, Dr. Seuss, Shakespeare (a new Brazilian translation of Hamlet, published in 2019), Louise Glück, Mary Gaitskill, and others. Her work has been translated into various languages and has appeared in journals and anthologies in Germany, Argentina, Italy, Mexico, and the United States. She is based in the city of São Paulo and has recently completed a Master’s degree in literary history and theory from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). Website: www.brunabeber.com.br / Instagram profile: @brunabeber_ (Photo credit: Rafael Roncato)

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections Reversible and The Haunted House from Switchback Books. She is co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are th Baby-Sitters Club: Essays & Artwork from Grown-Up Readers (Chicago Review Press, 2021), and founder of Weird Sister. Her writing has appeared in the Nation, Harper’s Bazaar, BUST, VICE, Hyperallergic, Bitch, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. marisacrawford.net. (Photo credit: Lauren Desberg)

Steven Karl is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently, Sister (Noemi Press, 2016). He is the editor-in-chief for Sink Review, an online journal dedicated to experimental contemporary poetry. Recent poems have appeared in the tiny, jubilat and the Tokyo Poetry Journal, and a collaborative Dos-à-dos art book with Joseph Lappie will be forthcoming in 2022. Born in Philadelphia, he currently lives in Tokyo with his wife and daughter. stevenkarl.wordpress.com.

Sarah Rebecca Kersley is a translator, poet and editor, originally from the UK and based in Brazil for over a decade. Her work has appeared in places such as The Elevation Review, Asymptote Journal, Denver Quarterly, Isele Magazine, and elsewhere. She co-runs Livraria Boto-cor-de-rosa, a bookshop and small press focused on contemporary literature, in the city of Salvador, Bahia, where she is based. Instagram profile: @sarahrebeccakersley. (Photo credit: Ana Reis).

Pattie McCarthy is the author of seven books of poetry and over a dozen chapbooks. She teaches literature and creative writing at Temple University where she is a non-tenure track associate professor.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On?; and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. Parker’s debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. morgan-parker.com (Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths)

Nicole Steinberg is the author of Glass Actress (Furniture Press Books, 2017) and Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013), as well as various chapbooks, most recently Fat Dreams (Barrelhouse, 2018). She is the editorof a literary anthology, Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011), and her work has been featured or reviewed in the New York TimesNewsweekFlavorwireBitch, and Hyperallergic. She is the 2021–2022 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and she can be found online at nicolesteinberg.net or @nicolebrett.

Irene Vázquez is a Black Mexican American poet, journalist, and editor. Irene graduated from Yale with a BA in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and English, as part of the 2021 cohort of Mellon Mays-Bouchet Fellows. Recently, Irene was named a winter/spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow. Irene’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle, the Oxford American, and the lickety-split, among others. Mostly Irene likes drinking coffee, impulse-buying books, and reminding people that the South has something to say. Irene’s work can be found at www.irenevazquez.com. (Photo credit: Gerardo Monarca Velasquez)

Reagan Louise Wilson is a writer & artist who lives in Los Angeles. Some of her work can be found in the Portland Review, Matter Monthly, CONE, and Simultaneous Times, as well as several long lost zines. She is currently at work on a strawberry garden and a novel about care work in catastrophic times. The kiddo she looks after wondered if “& blah blah blah…” could really be included in this official bio.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

These chapbooks will be released individually (on a schedule to be determined, starting this summer) for $10 each + $3 shipping, featuring hand-printed linocut covers and hand-sewn in natural twine. Or subscribe now to collect the whole series, and save $10.

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Smol Fair / AWP 2022

Join us Saturday, March 19 at 4:00 p.m. EDT as we gather to read poems in celebration of Smol Fair!

Readers (L to R, from top in photo above): Dakotah Jennifer, Becca Klaver, Ginger Ko, Sharon Mesmer, Danielle Pafunda, JJ Rowan, Katie Jean Shinkle, Maureen Thorson & Elisabeth Workman. Hosted by Shanna Compton.

Register for the free reading via Zoom here.

And now through March 27, we’re also running a Virtual Bookfair special (like we have every year during these conferences!): Enter SMOLFAIR at checkout to receive 20% off all Bloof books and chapbooks, including the already discounted chapbook bundle. (Excludes Hi Water art prints/cards and used books.)

Check out the amazing indie press smorgasbord that is Smol Fair here. There are dozens of presses doing virtual bookfair tables and days and days of free events!

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Bloof Books at SMOL Fair, March 3–7

This week we’re excited to be taking part in the alternative small-press book festival, SMOL Fair! Dozens of your favorite little presses are participating, most offering discounted book fair specials on their sites, and many hosting virtual readings and other events.

About SMOL Fair:SMOL Fair is an alternative, virtual book fair that will be ‘live’ from March 3-7, 2021. It is 100% free for presses to participate.  For readers, we are hosting a reading, a keynote address, and a mixer.  We are coordinating an events calendar for that week featuring readings from participating presses as well as book give-aways and deals on work from your favorite authors.”

Hello from the ink slab. We carve, ink, and print our linocut chapbook covers by hand.

20% off at bloofbooks.com

NOW through Sunday, March 1–7, use the promo code SMOLFAIR at checkout to receive 20% off your order. We’ll be enclosing hand-printed postcards, bookmarks, and other surprises with your packages (while supplies last).

Bloof Books + Action Books Marathon Reading for SMOL Fair

On Saturday, March 6 beginning at 4:00 pm EST, a multitude of poets will perform via Zoom. Details are still being finalized, but the lineup is looking stellar. The event will be auto-captioned and include some visual materials by the performers, plus a multimedia intermission. Free registration via Eventbrite here.

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RAT QUEEN by Katie Jean Shinkle is now available in our handmade chapbook series

RAT QUEEN
Katie Jean Shinkle

$10.00

Dec 2019
6 x 9 |  24 pages

Handprinted linocut cover
Gold metallic Cranfield Traditional Relief Ink on cream 80 lb cover
Digitally printed interior on cream opaque 70 lb text
Hand sewn in natural twine

Note: Individually printed by hand in small batches, no two covers will be exactly alike. Expect minor variations across the edition. Thank you, readers, for your incredible support of Bloof’s handmade series. Full series subscriptions are sold out, but you can create your own custom bundle (discounted shipping) with the books that remain!

Limited to 150 numbered copies

BLOOF BOOKS CHAPBOOK SERIES
Volume 4: Issue 4 (2019)
ISSN 2373-163X

The eighteen poems in Rat Queen luxuriantly explore transgression and intimacy, the various ways we take each other eagerly apart and taxidermy ourselves back together again. “My dear, what muscularly defines you?” the speaker asks, “When I pin you like insect wings, / corked-fog and iridescent-under.”

Rat Queen is the fourth chapbook in the 2019–2020 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series is released in a limited edition of at least one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release, and eventually in a combination volume called Bound. 

This is Katie Jean Shinkle’s fifth chapbook. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing at Sam Houston State University. She is the author of three full-length works, most recently Ruination (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018). Her poetry, prose, and criticisms can be found in Flaunt Magazine, the Georgia ReviewDenver QuarterlyNew South, the Collagist, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She serves as associate fiction editor of ANMLY, co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.

41 in stock

SKU: RAT Categories: , Tag:

Description

Excerpt RAT QUEEN Let me cry 1,000,000 tears of gold, weave tapestry strands with vigor, douse your open heart with champagne, only the best, most expensive will do. Show me Benjamin Franklin, fanned out to cool, I will show people you forget along the way. Tell me, while at my feet, how the bank of booze is vampiric and fanged. The equation of who will perish first, (w)hol(l)y simplistic: You, knee-crouched, or me, hands in prayer, eyes transfixed? So funny what we cling to, not giggles or open-mouth hardy, but uncanny, filled to the brim.

Additional information

Author

Shinkle, Katie Jean

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