Summer downtime = very busy DIYers. Awesome.

Effing Press has just released Is It the King? by Farid Matuk

5 x 7.5
48 pages
saddle-stitched
cover art and design by Jared Faulkner
bound in assorted endpapers
$7.00

Get it here.







Introducing the Onion Union, a new online journal edited by Marcus McCann.

The Onion Union pledge: We recognize a liberating promise in the unmooring of poetry and economics. Poets have gained unparalleled freedom to produce their work unapologetically, free from the external pressures facing artists working in other mediums. On the internet, poets have the unprecedented ability to reproduce and distribute their own work. And, most importantly, poetry's readers have an enormous amount of choice about what they read, unfiltered by traditional industry constraints. We will sever the last ties between poetry and economics, which are imaginary rather than material anyway. We will celebrate a post-capitalist poetics. Self-publishing is a revolutionary anarchic act. The poems are free.

The first issue features poetry by Mark Young, William Piety, Sawako Nakayasu, Liam Wilkinson, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Eileen Tabios, Eric Lehman & Caleb Puckett.

Check it out.


Brian Howe's chapbook Guitar Smash is out too.

GUITAR SMASH, the debut poetry chapbook by Brian Howe.

GUITAR SMASH is what happens when you force-feed language to technology until it vomits!
It’s c r a z y …

GUITAR SMASH is available by way of purchase, trade, bully tactics, flattery, comp.
Contact Brian for details.

(By the time I got around to this announcement, copies are already scarce. But Brian notes on his blog, the chap is also available as a free PDF here.)


Logan Ryan Smith reviews Parad e R ain by Michael Koshkin

After Johnson wrote, or etched out his radi os, one might wonder why anyone else would want to do erasures ever again, as it is a capsulation of an idiosyncratic and clever idea. As well, the idea of creating poems from erasures seems almost endless--where would it ever stop? Could one create a whole literary "career" out of erasures? If not, why not? If so, how? Yet, erasures seem to be a form of translation, and also a way to create a whole new poem. And again, one might ask why someone would write another erasure from Milton's trilogy after Johnson tackled Paradise Lost. The answer to that is: Because Michael Koshkin can, and did. The differences between radi os and parad e r ain are remarkable. It's interesting to see how an erasure done in the 70s and one done in the 2000s of similar source material can be so different.

Read the rest here.

Then visit Big Game Books to get your copy.


New! Beat Roots by Anne Waldman, with illustrations by George Schneeman, from Hot Whiskey Press

Speaking of Michael Koshkin, he and his Hot Whiskey partner Jennifer Rogers have just published Beat Roots with a letterpressed cover and Japanese stab binding.

The 250 copies are going fast--the first 10 signed copies were snapped up immediately.

Click and ye shall receive.


And finally, CAConrad's Mooncalf Press offers a new chap by Frank Sherlock

Frank Sherlock's poem from the Poetry, Politics, Proximity: Third Annual Kerry Sherin Wright Prize event at Kelly Writers House on April 27 is now available in chapbook form: Spring Diet of Flowers at Night with cover art by Jonathan Allen.

There should be infinite
meaning in
the blandness of a shot
victim in an unfamiliar
neighborhood but

prospects of imagined life
are tied to clean logic

Diagetic background
music has been used to
steer me into attempting
an architectural line

Copies are available at Robin's Bookstore in Philly (108 S. 13th Street), or to order contact Mooncalf Press at CAConrad13 [at] aol [dot] com.