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Cottonmouth Incarnate / poems / Joseph Bienvenu
32 pages. 4.75 x 8”. Letterpress printed covers; hand-bound. Edition of 200.
In Cottonmouth Incarnate Joseph Bienvenu pilots the visual poem into the unknown. The dazzling poems in this book elude trodden representations of everyday life and soar with lyrical emotion. Furthermore, these cosmic-geologic explosions reverberate in Bienvenu's typographic designs.
32 pages. 4.75 x 8”. Letterpress printed covers; hand-bound. Edition of 200.
In Cottonmouth Incarnate Joseph Bienvenu pilots the visual poem into the unknown. The dazzling poems in this book elude trodden representations of everyday life and soar with lyrical emotion. Furthermore, these cosmic-geologic explosions reverberate in Bienvenu's typographic designs.
Joseph Bienvenu is the author of Atom Parlor ( BlazeVOX 2010, second edition Hobby Horse 2016), Cocktail Poems (Hobby Horse 2011), and Pool Hall Quartet (Verna Press, 2008). His translation of the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus was published by Diálogos (2013). He is also the co-host of the No Good Poetry podcast. Joseph is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, where he lives and teaches Latin and English at a local high school. He received his B.A. in Classics from Loyola University of Chicago and his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. You can find out more about his work at josephbienvenu.com.
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The Sexual Organs of the IRS / poems / Jennifer Karmin and Bernadette Mayer
Jennifer Karmin and Bernadette Mayer’s Sexual Organs of the IRS was conceived and written together in East Nassau, NY from 2009 - 2014. Sections of their project are based on the 3:15 Experiment, a yearly collaborative-consciousness writing experiment exploring hypnagogic and hypnopompic sleep/dream states. In these poems, Karmin and Mayer explore the universes inside and outside the alphabet skull. When they turn their open minds to one another, the potential of all meaning ricochets and blooms.
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Small Wars / poems / Hai-Dang Phan
32 pages. 5.5 x 7”. Letterpress printed covers. Hand-bound. Edition of 125.Hai-Dang Phan’s Small Wars superimposes the grotesque militarism of American everyday life on the cultural dislocations of first- and second-generation Vietnamese immigrants. The poems are at once lyrical, darkly humorous, and chilling as they chart the startling collisions of our private and public conflicts.
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Only Sunshine / a poem / Michael Robins
Tri-fold pamphlet. Letterpress printed covers; hand-bound. Edition of 75
Michael Robins' triptych poem responds to the Sandy Hook Massacre. Proceeds were donated to the Sandy Hook Promise.
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16 pages. 4.25 x 5.5”. Letterpress printed on sketchpad
paper with torn fringes. Screen-printed covers. Hand-bound, saddle-stitched. Edition of 50. Entirely handmade!
Written in the four-line format
of standardized test answers that lack a question, the evocative poems in James
Shea’s Air and Water Show
trace the subtle yet startling mutations that occur when language is
stretched into multiple possibilities. Strangely free in a maze of choices, one
can hear “the decay after hitting the
whole note” opening onto new registers.
James Shea is the author of Star in the Eye (Fence Books), and his second collection, The Lost
Novel, is forthcoming from Fence Books
in 2014. He teaches at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
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16 pages. 5.5 x 6.5”. Letterpress printed covers.
Hand-bound. Edition of 125.
In settings for these scenes Genevieve Kaplan performs 13
erasures on a paragraph from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Each resulting poem recomposes the verbal scene,
“throwing ordinary voices in and out” with uncanny repetitions so that readers
feel submerged in an echo chamber where the settings constantly change into the
scene like water turning into sky at some imperceptible horizon.
Genevieve Kaplan's first book of poetry, In the ice house (Red Hen Press 2011), won the 2009 A Room of Her Own
Foundation To the Lighthouse poetry
prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous print and
online journals, including Poecology,
Western Humanities Review, Gulf
Coast, and H_NGM_N. Since 2003, she has edited the Toad Press International
chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose. For
more, visit her on the web at The Forest and The Trees.
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Selections from The World Book / Poems / Dina Hardy
24 pages. 6 x 10.5". Edition of 200 with letterpress printed covers. 50 copies are hand-bound (SOLD OUT).
Selections from The World Book presents 16 poems from Dina Hardy’s monumental work in progress, The World Book. Faced with disparate entries on the pages of the encyclopedia, Hardy captures the vibration that happens in the variance: English sparrows and engraving, for example, or Dinwiddie, diphtheria and Diogenes. The content is collaged, with a nod to the collision between a sewing machine and an umbrella, and a revised reference book is created. Working in obsessive five-line stanzas, these poems wrestle with information--sometimes factual, sometimes outdated--in an attempt to make sense of history both personal and global. Hardy's language splits itself between the inner and outer worlds as these restless poems attempt to find a home amid the world’s deceptive sense of order and form. “I am real / and not real. I am of two minds,” one poem declares, registering the boundaries that Hardy’s work dances so nimbly between.
Selections from The World Book presents 16 poems from Dina Hardy’s monumental work in progress, The World Book. Faced with disparate entries on the pages of the encyclopedia, Hardy captures the vibration that happens in the variance: English sparrows and engraving, for example, or Dinwiddie, diphtheria and Diogenes. The content is collaged, with a nod to the collision between a sewing machine and an umbrella, and a revised reference book is created. Working in obsessive five-line stanzas, these poems wrestle with information--sometimes factual, sometimes outdated--in an attempt to make sense of history both personal and global. Hardy's language splits itself between the inner and outer worlds as these restless poems attempt to find a home amid the world’s deceptive sense of order and form. “I am real / and not real. I am of two minds,” one poem declares, registering the boundaries that Hardy’s work dances so nimbly between.
Dina Hardy is a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she attended on a Maytag Fellowship. She was a finalist for the Poets & Writers’ New Voices in California Contest, named one of Los Angeles’s Newer Voices and published in Meridian’s Best New Poets anthology. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Agni, Black Warrior Review, POOL, Lo-Ball and Transom, and has been awarded first place in Southeast Review and Smartish Pace contests. She recently received a nomination for a Pushcart Prize.
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In Forest Static / Poems / Christopher Hund
24 pages. 5.5 x 7".
24 pages. 5.5 x 7".
Christopher Hund’s In Forest Static charts out new lyric territory in forested zones that are flooded by the static of inner and outer worlds. Here is a place where tape machines hiss memory, where a snowstorm breathes “the noise machine in the nursery,” where the white owls “shatter / the wrongs wrought on the environment,” and where the forest spreads chaotically, a kind of virus infiltrating the suburbs and replicating itself “unpatterned in backyard after backyard.” These lively poems are “rattled by the rips of thrush, the cracks of jays.”
Christopher Hund lives with his wife and two children in Grayslake, IL. He works for the Health Research & Educational Trust, a healthcare improvement organization in Chicago. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hund has published poems in ForkliftOhio, The Columbia Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and other journals.
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Hothouse Orphan / Poems and Drawings / Ben Gocker / Tanya Larkin
28 pages. 5.5 x 8.5". Includes 10 exquisite ink drawings. Limited edition of 25 handbound copies.
In Hothouse Orphan, Tanya Larkin’s poems respond to the contorted beauty of Ben Gocker’s ink drawings of semi-mythical figures that appear trapped in invisible boxes. In tones both humorous and sorrowful, the poems explore their own contorted voices, genders, and species. The pages of Hothouse Orphan are full of the unpredictable energy of “the sensitive brains of hell.”
Ben Gocker is from Rochester, New York. He studied poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently represented by PPOW gallery in New York City. He works as a librarian.
Tanya Larkin’s first book of poetry My Scarlet Ways is the winner of the 2011 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She teaches English, Humanities, and Surrealism at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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Read James Pate's micro-review of The June Cuckold here.
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Chad Chmielowicz’s Means of Egress is a long poem that documents the flowering and withering of magnolia blossoms over the course of a Chicago spring. At turns both delicate and violent, the poem dwells on the desire to seize and preserve efflorescence itself. As these blossoms “poke through the wrought iron fence,” their botanic consciousness infiltrates the speaker’s subjectivity. Words, meanings, and feelings are confused with blossoms, “each a repeated event marked across / hemispheres.” Amid the distortions of the poet’s inspection and reflection, both the poem and the magnolia become storms that make “the random / actual.”
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24 pages. 5.5 x 7.5". Edition of 125 hand-bound with letterpress printed covers.
Catherine Theis' The June Cuckold floods us in the erotic vegetable splendor of an English garden. Amid “the underneath whispering of peonies,” a chorus of insects bears witness to the exploits of Emily and Ray, a photographer rake. From the same bower, Emily’s daughter Peyton lives as a botanical aesthete, snapping photos and making sketches in charcoal, “mindful of my mother’s garden map.” And Samuel, Emily’s husband, reflects with detachment on the tragedy, ecstasy and doom stitched together by “the liberal thread” of life. What ensues is a simultaneously epicurean and meditative ensemble of voices that confirms Walter Pater’s suspicion that “the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts.”
Catherine Theis is a poet and playwright living in Chicago. She spent her childhood summers in Sicily, where she swam in blue coves and ate gelato before dinner. Recent poems and plays have appeared or are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Barrelhouse, Ghost Town, and 1913 a journal of forms. She is the recipient of an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Her first book is called The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011).
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Calyx / poems and drawings / Michael Anichini and Elizabeth Chisholm
20 pages. 5.5 x 7”. Letterpress printed cover. Hand-bound. Edition of 125.
20 pages. 5.5 x 7”. Letterpress printed cover. Hand-bound. Edition of 125.
Michael Anichini’s Calyx is a twelve-part poem that sounds a dirge for our planet, for our imagination, and for our language, all of which have been irrevocably singed with disaster. Anichini occupies this “painted brink / depicting our ruin” where “an anorexic robot forages / a plaster cast of a mammoth” and “digital marquees / thrash us all night.” Present, past, and future seem to collapse into a delirium of uncanny clarity so that “we find ourselves / half-choked by a dream.” Even so, the poem acts with nervous, valiant energy—it dances, sings, drums, builds, clenches, conjures, chops and gulps. Graphite and watercolor renderings by artist Elizabeth Chisholm illuminate some of the “other-worldly / contours” that the poem channels through its “invisible siphon.”
Michael Anichini currently lives, works and plays in his hometown of Chicago. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his poems have appeared recently in Jubilat and Propeller.
Elizabeth Chrisholm is a proud Chicago native who received her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan. She teaches visual art to the amazing students at Lane Tech High School.
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Means of Egress / poems / Chad Chmielowicz
32 pages. 4.25 x 5.5”. Letterpress printed covers. Hand-bound. Edition of 125.
Chad Chmielowicz’s Means of Egress is a long poem that documents the flowering and withering of magnolia blossoms over the course of a Chicago spring. At turns both delicate and violent, the poem dwells on the desire to seize and preserve efflorescence itself. As these blossoms “poke through the wrought iron fence,” their botanic consciousness infiltrates the speaker’s subjectivity. Words, meanings, and feelings are confused with blossoms, “each a repeated event marked across / hemispheres.” Amid the distortions of the poet’s inspection and reflection, both the poem and the magnolia become storms that make “the random / actual.”
Chad Chmielowicz’s work has appeared in The Journal, Hobart, The Prism Review, and elsewhere. Means of Egress, his first chapbook, arose out of his walk to work every morning in Chicago.