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DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative

December 14, 2005

Coming soon from Kitchen Press: Matt Rasmussen's Fingergun

Kitchen Press editor/publisher Justin Marks announces that Kitchen Press will release Fingergun, a chapbook by Matt Rasmussen in the next few weeks.

Here's a a sample poem:

Dream after Suicide

A hole is nothing but what remains around it.

My brother stood
in the refrigerator light
drinking milk that poured
out of his head

through thick black curls,
down his back into a puddle
growing larger around him.
My body stood between

the living room and kitchen,
on the metal strip dividing
the carpet and linoleum.
He couldn’t hear his name

clouding from my mouth,
settling in the fluorescent air.
I wanted to put my finger
into the hole,

feel the smooth channel
he escaped through,
stop the milk
so he could taste it,

but my body held
as if driven into place.
The milk on the floor
reflected the light,

then became it.
Floated upward and outward
filling every shadow,
blowing the dark open.



Matt Rasmussen was born in International Falls, Minnesota in 1975. He holds degrees from Gustavus Adolphus College and Emerson College. He is a former Peace Corps Volunteer (Papua New Guinea, ’99-‘01) and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He currently lives in Hopkins, Minnesota.

For more info on Kitchen Press, visit the website here.

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December 13, 2005

The Independent on Lulu.com's publishing model

"...the final price is determined by what the author sets as his royalty, of which Lulu takes 20 per cent. If the author forgoes a royalty, Lulu does too. Copyright is with the author. So who needs publishers, when you can easily do it all yourself, take 80 per cent of the profit and retain copyright?

"It's not yet eBay, but it's getting there. Now in its third year, Lulu offers more than 40,000 titles on its website and new ones are being added at over a thousand a month. In October it sold 45,000 copies and growth continues at 10 per cent or more each month. In three years they have sold 444,000 books. Two thousand new authors sign up each month.

[...]

"Bob Young says that he intends to revolutionise publishing the way that Steve Jobs revolutionised the music industry with Apple's iTunes. And the fact that Lulu's founder and principal investor is Bob Young means that this is an ambition which must be taken seriously. He has had a spectacular career as an digital entrepreneur."


Read the rest here.

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