Introducing Bloof Books

(Click the bee to visit the website.)

Two books due out this fall: Jennifer L. Knox's second book, Drunk by Noon (see store page for more info) & my own For Girls (details to come). & in the spring, Danielle Pafunda's My Zorba.

"Don't Call It a Vanity Press"

Time Magazine's got an article up on digital printing services like Blurb and Lulu. [via Jilly Dybka]

Self-publishing, the only real success story in an otherwise depressed industry, is booming, thanks to the Internet, digital cameras and more sophisticated digital printing. It's also gaining respect. No longer dismissed as vanity presses, DIY publishing is discovering a niche market of customers seeking high-quality books for limited distribution.

Read the rest.

Librarians of the Ephemeral

There's a neat article [via Ron Silliman's linkfarm today] in the Boston Globe about how certain savvy librarians (many of whom are zinesters or former zinesters themselves) are managing the collection of zines, chapbooks, & DIY etceteras, some going so far as to establish proper Zine Collections:

[Jennifer] Freedman [at Barnard College] is part of a generation that grew up with zines during their heyday in the 1990s. Now she is part of an emerging community of professionally trained librarians who are trying to make zines a part of the modern academic library system. It is a community, Freedman says, that faces a difficult question: How do libraries -- institutions that by nature require a strict, stately style of micromanagement -- assimilate these self-published and occasionally category-defying dispatches from the cultural hinterlands?

"I think because we're all making it up, everyone is trying something and we'll see what the best practice is," Freedman explains. "Zinesters are not thinking about libraries when they write them" -- rarely do they contain copyright statements, dates of publication, or even reliable contact information.

Read the rest.

Then if you're near Barnard, check out their collection in person & report back, will ya? There are also similar collections at Duke University, the New York Public Library (um, news to me!), the Salt Lake City Public Library, and "about 20 colleges and universities."

What we need is a list.

Dropped in the river like a sack of blind kittens, eh?

The most striking aspect of the showcase was the innumerable small and tiny presses that have risen to the challenge of publishing poetry in today’s marketplace, where commercial houses have dropped the genre like a sack full of blind kittens into a river. Presses like Factory School and Wave Books have recently emerged to join the ranks of Copper Canyon, Graywolf, and Hanging Loose as independent publishers exclusively devoted to putting out several volumes of new poetry a year. In addition, a hundred or so chapbook presses have sprung from the union of desktop publishing and DIY culture, producing often-beautiful pamphlet-sized books featuring the work of both emerging and established poets. Seeing so many books hand-stitched or letter-pressed, with silk-screened cover art, was a reminder of the effort and the pride that goes into this art[....]

From the May issue of the Brooklyn Rail, (though danged if I can tell who wrote it). Click the quotation to read the rest.

Congrats to Lorna Dee Cervantes & Ocho!

. . . & congrats to editor/publisher Didi Menendez too, on Lorna's just-announced Pushcart Prize, received for "Shelling the Pecans," which appeared in Ocho #6.

More on the Pushcart Prize anthology may be found here.

Here's a little reminder that Ocho is the print/PDF companion to MiPoesias, available through MiPo's Lulu store.

Scott Pierce's new letterpress & chapbook

If you're into letterpress printing, you might stop by Scott's blog if you haven't peeked lately. He recently acquired his very own letterpress (SWOON) and has been blogging about his projects, including forthcoming Effing stuff, some broadsides, and a very cool idea for "coaster sides."

     

With photos, naturally. Check it.

He's also got a new chapbook out from Small Fires Press (Tuscaloosa, AL--hello! Adding you to the press links!). Called Some Bridges Migrate, it can be yours for a mere ten spot. Details.

Scenes from the Body by Robyn Art: new from Dancing Girl Press

Scenes from the Body
text/photographs by Robyn Art
dancing girl press, 2007
$7.00 (includes S&H)

Robyn Art is the author of The Stunt Double in Winter, forthcoming from Dusie Press in October 2007. She is also the author of the chapbooks Degrees of Being There (Boneworld Press 2003), Vestigial Portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Dancing Girl Press September 2006), and The Last Time I Saw Bonnie Blue (ensemblejourine.com, May 2007).

An excerpt:

It was a kind of falling-toward,
A stained, magnificent bloodbath
Wherein we were split in two,
And then there were two,
It was fits of anhilatory bliss
And the sutures that wouldn’t hold,
The nearly unbearable tenderness
As we trudged along the block:
Bovine, besotted,
Slogging through the steady
Flow of suits and midsize canines,
The monophonic swan song of which
We’d always dreamed: holding someone
As she dreams and the dream
Becomes you holding her,
The spit-up, onesies,
Mass influx of rattles,
The old gray mare that ain’t
What she used to be:
We wanted to take
One last look back but soon
It was clear there was
No way back……….

Visit the Dancing Girl Press site to order.

Introducing Anchiote Press

Poet-blogger Craig Perez of Blind Elephant has founded a new chapbook press called Anchiote. Here's the scoop:

Achiote Press releases their spring 2007 chapbooks: the immaculate autopsy by Todd Melicker & achiote seeds a chap-journal featuring Barbara Jane Reyes, Rich Villar, and Rebecca Mabanglo Mayor.

     

$12 gets you both chapbooks. But if you email Craig (csperez06 [at] gmail [dot]] com) he will most likely give you a discount, with ordering info.

See the Anchiote Press blog for more info. It's also been added to the presses in the sidebar.

News of two news from Transmission Press . . .

The word from editor/publisher Logan Ryan Smith:

TRANSMISSION PRESS, my chapbook press, which is still under a year old, has recently released its 5th chappy, ORGY IN THE BEEF CLOSET, by Michael Koshkin. Shortly before this release, Sabrina Calle's THE GILLES POEM - WINTER 2006 COLLECTION was also released [& is still available].

     

Please go the website (transmissionpress.blogspot.com) for more info. Each book is $3.50 thru PayPal or by sending a check made out to me, Logan Ryan Smith, and sending it to:

Logan Ryan Smith
711 Leavenworth St., #35
San Francisco, CA 94109

And, of course, trades are always welcome. Also, if you're simply that broke but feel like you can't go another day knowing the distance between you and your favorite TRANSMISSION chap only grows, then let me know and I'll send ya one for free. Be sure to spread the news in the street and on your subway cars that Logan Ryan Smith is one generous mofo. Also that I'm pretty. Thanks.

Hugs and stuff,
Logan

You know what to do.

A new issue of Tarpaulin Sky

From the editor Christian Peet, this announcement:

Tarpaulin Sky
Sping/Summer 2007
Text-Image / Ekphrastic Issue
Guest-edited by Rebecca Brown

Kitty has claws, that’s why kitty can’t get in the closet. Kitty won’t use them, if she doesn’t have to. Who’s seen my green eye shadow? Backstage, getting ready for the play. What’s interesting about the house on Kingswood is the TV room is for the grownups, the back bedroom is for us kids. These are all the dolls your mother played with, when she was a little girl. One even looks just like her, you think.

--Douglas A. Martin, My Grandmother's Closet

This special issue features new work created in response to images by Nancy Kiefer by Chris Abani, Rebecca Brown, Lucy Corin, Camille Dungy, Brian Evenson, Amy Halloran, Joanna Howard, Laird Hunt, Douglas A. Martin, Frances McCue, Suzanne Oliver, Selah Saterstrom, & John Yau.

Table of contents

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S now available in printed, portable format (i.e. a book)

One of my favorite interview websites has just been transformed into a tangible object by Mark Young's Otoliths Books.

E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S :
The First XI Interviews
Tom Beckett, curator
ISBN: 978-0-9775604-9-3
Otoliths, 2007
Paperback, 252 pp.
$16.95 + p&h

In response to popular demand, Otoliths is releasing one of the books from its next round of offerings early, E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews.

Tom Beckett's E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S website has become, since its inception in 2005, an important source of information on contemporary poetry and poetics. This book brings together the first eleven interviews from the ongoing series, augmented by bionotes and almost one hundred pages of self-selected examples of the interviewees' work.

The interviewees (some of whom later reappear as interviewers) are Crag Hill, Thomas Fink, Nick Piombino, Sheila E. Murphy, Eileen Tabios, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, K. Silem Mohammad, Geof Huth, Barbara Jane Reyes, Paolo Javier, Stephen Paul Miller and Jean Vengua. Most of the interviews were conducted by Tom Beckett, and Ron Silliman and Mark Young also appear as interviewers.

GET IT HERE.

Also forthcoming from Otoliths Books later this month: Nick Piombino's "visual collage novel" Free Fall, Rochelle Ratner's poetic journal/memoir Leads & Sheila E. Murphy's first integrated collection of text & visual poetry, The Case of the Lost Objective (Case). All will be available via the Otoliths site and Lulu bookstore.