DWELLSWARM notice: The first batch of 40 copies sold out very quickly! I’m working on batch 2 now. And our final chapbook in this series by Morgan Parker & Maria Crawford, “Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin Wearing a T-shirt of Ryan Gosling Wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin,” is also in progress. Coming soon! Dismiss
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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:
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 Times, Newsweek, Flavorwire, Bitch, 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.
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.
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.)
We’ll be featuring excerpts from the current series—as well as some deeper cuts—on both Twitter and Instagram starting next week too, as a little extra inspiration.
Event graphic for Bloof + Action marathon reading, March 7 at 4 pm EST
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.
🐝🐝🐝 Bloof will be closed Monday 10/19–Thursday 10/22. Orders placed during those days will ship Friday 10/23. 🐝🐝🐝
The Social Distancing virtual bookstore sale continues: 30% off all our current books and chapbooks! (Preorders for forthcoming books will be discounted separately.) BE WELL. READ POETRY.
ON DREAMS Maureen Thorson$18.00
