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.
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.
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!
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 Review, Denver Quarterly, New South, the Collagist, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She serves as associate fiction editor of ANMLY, co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM.
ExcerptRAT 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.
Do you follow us on Instagram? We post regularly there, a mixture of books (our own and those we’re reading), design, nature, and (vegan) cooking. When we’re making the chapbooks, we always show you some of the process.
The background colors & textures for these covers were individually printed on a gelli plate with blue and green soy inks, then the lino-cut key was applied in gold paint, the title stamped in ink with rubber type, and finally the author name added in colored pencil. For poems about automatons, they are very handmade.
We are delighted to announce we will be publishing these six chapbooks in the 2019 Bloof Chapbook Series!
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Ana Hurtado Miedo al Olvido: Poems from an Uprooted Girl
Ana Hurtado is a Venezuelan writer who grew up in Ecuador. She earned her MFA at Iowa State University in 2017 and currently teaches rhetoric and creative writing in Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Her work has been published by Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 5, and others. Her chapbook Miedo al Olvido: Poems from an Uprooted Girlis forthcoming from Bloof in 2019. Website: anahurtadoro.wixsite.com/anahurtado. Find her on Twitter:@ponciovicario
Dakotah Jennifer Fog
Dakotah Jennifer is an eighteen-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing at eight and has loved it ever since. While working on self-publishing her poetry and an essay collection, she has been published in the Grief Diaries, interned for the JMWW literary magazine, and was on the Long List in the Fish Publishing Flash Fiction contest. Jennifer writes about race, class, and gender, stretching her emotions into tangible things. She strives to write things that grow. Her chapbook Fog is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019. Website: dakotahjportfolio.com
Kristina Lugn, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel Seeking an Older, Well-Educated Gentleman
Kristina Lugn (b. 1948) is the author of eight collections of poetry and eighteen plays, the former artistic director of the Brunnsgatan Fyra theatre in Stockholm, Sweden, and a member of the Swedish Academy. She’s also the winner of the Selma Lagerlöf Literature Prize (1999) and the Bellman Prize (2003). A chapbook of her poems called Seeking an Older, Well-Educated Gentleman, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019.
Elizabeth Clark Wessel is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, a founding editor at Argos Book, and the translator of numerous novels from the Swedish, including most recently What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. Originally from rural Nebraska, she spent many years living in New York and Connecticut, and these days calls Stockholm, Sweden home. She has translated a chapbook of poems called Seeking an Older, Well-Educated Gentleman by Kristina Lugn that is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019. Website: elizabethclarkwessel.com
Douglas Piccinnini Victoria
Douglas Piccinnini is the author of Victoria (Bloof, forthcoming in 2019), Blood Oboe (Omnidawn, 2015) and Story Book: a novella (The Cultural Society, 2015). Recent writing has appeared with Denver Quarterly, Fence, Lana Turner, Nat. Brut, Seattle Review, Tupelo Quarterly,Tammy,Verse, and the Volta—among other publications. Currently, he lives in Lambertville, NJ and works as a chef and consultant. Website: www.douglaspiccinnini.com
JJ Rowan a simple verb
JJ Rowan is a queer poet and dancer living in Southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley, looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect. Their poems, hybrid work, and VisPo have appeared in Phoebe, the Hunger, Dream Pop Journal, and others. Their collaborative sonnets with Nate Logan were recently published in where is the river and in the chapbook mcmxciv. (Shirt Pocket Press). Their chapbook a simple verb is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019.
Katie Jean Shinkle Rat Queen
Katie Jean Shinkle 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 Review, Denver Quarterly, New South, the Collagist, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She serves as associate fiction editor of ANMLY, co-poetry editor of DIAGRAM, and is an Assistant Professor of English at Central State University in Wilberforce, OH. A chapbook called Rat Queen is forthcoming from Bloof in 2019.
Additionally we will be reissuing—due to popular demand!—one of our previous handmade chapbooks in a new hardcover artist book edition!
Nikki Wallschlaeger I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel
Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Nation, Georgia Review, Brick, Witness, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horse Less Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel from Bloof Books (2016). She lives in the Driftless region of Wisconsin with her family. Bloof will be publishing a hardcover art-book edition of I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel in 2019. Website: nikkiwallschlaeger.com
Subscribe to reserve your copies
We’ll be posting excerpts from each of these chapbooks in the next few days, so please check back for more. Can’t wait? You can subscribe to the 2019 series now, to reserve your copies of these limited-edition handmades. (They tend to sell out quickly, so in some rare cases we may sell out of a particular chapbook before individual preorders have a chance to open.)
Book submissions from that period are still being read. Thank you for your patience as we make our selections for 2019–2020.
The announcement of our 2019–2020 chapbook lineup is imminent. We’re just waiting for one final confirmation before the big reveal.
(And yes, we’re still reading books. Those will be announced separately as soon as we are able. We’re reading as fast—but as considerately!—as we can.)
