The Best of Stain, Volume One

In the fall of 2008, Janice Brabaw created the music and literary series Stained Glass Confessional in Brooklyn, New York. After nearly forty performers and features in Time Out, New York, the Greenline, the Brooklyn Eagle, AMNY, and the NY Daily News, Janice is proud to announce the release of the chapbook anthology, The Best of Stain, Volume One.

The Best of Stain, Volume One features:

Swapan Basu
Janice Brabaw
Patricia Carragon
Mike Fiorito
Roxanne Hoffman
Valerie Jupe
Laurel Kallen
Nina Karacosta
James Kass
Frank Kelly
Jee Leong Koh
Harry Bentivenga Lichtenstein
NIck Loss-Eaton (Leland Sundries)
Jason Madison
Puma Perl
James Skidmore
Carrie VanDenburg
Darcie VanHamlin
Joe Yoga

Pre-order your copy TODAY. $7 including shipping. This is a limited run so reserve your copy now!

ORDER HERE! PAYPAL ONLY!

Please send check or money orders (made out to Janice Brabaw) to:

Tangled Up In Blue Productions
629 Grand Street
Brooklyn New York 11211

You can also pick up your copy at the BOOK RELEASE PARTY on APRIL 20th at the Stain Bar in Williamsburg @ 766 Grand Street.

This event is also STAINED GLASS CONFESSIONAL 4 which will feature Poets Laurel Kallen, Nina Karacosta, Janice Brabaw, Jessica Reed and musicians Lizzah Lohse, James Skidmore, and Mike Fiorito. Hosted by James Kass!!

Party Starts @ 7 with an open mic, features begin at 8!!

*** Also a special reminder that this MONDAY, April 13th, Stained Glass Confessional Presents

An Echo, A Stain: An evening of poetry at Stain Bar

Hosted by Lawrence E. Soehnel

Featuring Lawrence E. Soehnel, Janice Brabaw, Frank Kelly, Ameliia Terry, and Luis Bernard.

766 Grand Street in Williamsburg. Readings begin at 7:30. Open mic to follow features.

Ahem.

(because some things can never be too Internet-hailed. go Ye. fill your hands.)

New! Scrambler Press

Rarer and More Wonderful
Poetry by Trevor Calvert

Price: $14.00
Shipping: $1.50 (USA)

6" x 9" Paperback book
76 pages

ISBN: 978-0-6152-1398-2

I don't know who/what/why about this press (thanks to Reb for the tip on her blog). But I hope they install a blog or some kind of RSS for news so I can add them to the DIY feed. Anyway, see the Scrambler Press website for ordering info.

Really, no really really this time

I've been, um, distracted. To put it mildly.

But now that the first two Bloof books have launched, I really will have more time to spend here.

Oh, you may have missed this post on Jennifer Moxley's The Middle Room, which being a new release from the Subpress Collective ("Self-Publish or Perish") should have been crossposted here as well.

Also new from Subpress, Ben Friedlander's The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes, which I'm taking with me on a road trip to read later this week. So watch for a review of that, plus I'd also like to take a look at the new chapbook by Ange Mlinko (from Ryan Murphy's latest one-off press), some of the new crop from the Dusie Kollektiv, & assorted other goodies.

Introducing shadowbox press

shadowbox press has just released its first chapbook, Fuel In Vacant Lots: Essays On Queer Existence, featuring work by Jen Alabiso, Zachary Jean Chartkoff, Woody Loverude, Jaffa Aharonov, Kim Schneidman, & E.M. Bertram.

28 pages
'for those fumbling through & those who make it to the other side'
5.5x8.5, hand-stitched w/ love
cover art by Jaffa Aharonov
$5 (S&H incl.)

Copies are available via their website (linked above, and added to resource links at right).

News of 2 news from Lame House Press

Firstly, get you some of dis Alli Warren poetry, namely Cousins, which will spin you right round. I am a fan of Alli's poetry here & here (a whole 'lectronic bookish object made of light & dots) & here, below, from her chapbook Hounds of the year 2005, which I am lucky to prick myself on whenever I want because when it came out I didn't mess around. (Yes, that is a prediction about the future.)

To Those That Would Deny Poetry

Into canons we
are stuffed into duffel
bags, toolbelts
      Physicists proclaim
logic--that's a business suit but what
does it mean? What
Benefit of Clergy
--brackets of a car
are brakes of wind
much like the bee's mother
and myth

      After thoroughgoing
      investigation it has been
determined A lot of you
elks are shoe leather
      Or, Go You Graphs of Trade
as if you spoke "good
English," "I understand"
your tired scripts your
full-daggered throats
      arming units
for what's called perpetual
      war Call us
what you will
what is willed is
half-deceiving yet
trope of the eyes
      fire under foot

She will poison you (in a good way), but with words not a little vial which is actually a cameraphone. Perhaps pointing to her previous work is misleading, you think. No, even if this book has entirely diff stuff disimilar in feeling execution I am leading you to the right place, which is wherever Alli's poems perch. Anyway I ordered mine. Here is where you click to become happier than you currently are.

Additionally, you should be tempted by this sample from the also brand new Harmstorm by Karl Parker, of whom I do not know otherwise at all, & so place in the exciting & always shivering-quivering category of JUST DISCOVERED. What a batch. (Go, Gina.)

Tags: Lame House Press

Introducing Catfish Press & past simple

From editor/publisher Jim Goar:

past simple, a new online rag, is out and ready to be seen. You can find prose and poetry by Richard Froude, Pirooz Kalayeh, Matthew Langley, Dorthea Lasky, Tao Lin, Reb Livingston, Farid Matuk, Gina Myers, Logan Ryan Smith, Tyler Smith, Aaron Tieger, Gabriella Torres & art by Stacy Elaine Dacheux.

Poking around on the site (good poems in this first issue!), I note that Jim has also started up Catfish Press, through which he will publish "only books he loves," in addition to past simple. First up will be The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy by Richard Froude (December), then in spring 2007 this is affront you pig by Logan Ryan Smith and Letters Toward Jim by Matthew Langley.

Tags: Catfish Press, past simple

Cherries, cherries everywhere: A Slice of Cherry Pie

Ivy has announced that she'll be hosting an online release party tomorrow for the UK version of A Slice of Cherry Pie. Details here.

And I am making books today too. You can follow along at the new DIY Publishing Flickr group. (Click the image up there, or the link in the sidebar.)

You can still preorder the US version here, and the UK edition will be available tomorrow here.

Tags: Half Empty/Half Full, Private Press

A several-legged creature peeked from 'neath my dream . . .

. . . & gave me to understand I'd forgotten (so far) to tell you about these two new chaps, which are one, Monsters (which being by K. Silem Mohammad I have read in a less deluxe proto-version & which ROCKS) & two, little ones, which I have not seen but being by Anne Boyer has been ordered.



So now you know.

And here's where you get them.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln

Cy Press & Transmission: Two new chaps by Brandon Brown

"Hello" from Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

To order your copy of Brandon Brown's Memoirs from My Nervous Illness from Cy Press, send check or money order for $7 to the address here.

And publisher/editor Logan Ryan Smith at Transmission Press has also published a new book by Brown, 908 - 1078.

This is the second chapbook to be released from TRANSMISSION and is printed in an edition of 150 copies. 908 - 1078 is 20 pages, letterhalf in size, staple-bound, and printed on linen paper.

You can purchase 908 - 1078 by Brandon Brown for $3.50 thru the PayPal button here.

From the poet: 908 – 1078 represents a literal translation of the last 170 lines of the ancient tragedy The Persians by Aeschylus.

Tags: Cy Press, Transmission Press

New from Cy Gist: Three new releases & a special blog offer

From editor/publisher Mark Lamoureux:

"Summer's gone, but a lot goes on forever"--Leonard Cohen

Cy Gist Press is happy to announce the release of 3 new chapbooks as we bid summer farewell and stumble into autumn and everything after.

SPECIAL FOR BLOG READERS: Order all 4 recent Cy Gist Press titles for $20 ($5 each, normally $6) and I will throw in a copy of Another Night, the first Cy Gist Press chapbook for free. There are only a few copies of Another Night left, so act fast!

[Look! A handy, irresistible PayPal button!]

____________________________



Exertions
by Scott Glassman
(20 pp., sewn binding) $6

Scott Glassman's first chapbook offers simultaneously alien and quotidian glosses on the perils of existing alone and with others. Scott's take on the prose poem operates by way of arpeggios of contrapuntal phrases threatening to tear the form apart while giving them surprising rhythmic balance. For ordering and a sample poem go here.


Caracas Notebook
by Guillermo Parra
(20 pp., saddle-stapled with linen binding, B&W photographs) $6

Guillermo Parra's lyric paean to the city and the dramatically changing face of Venezuela at the beginning of this century is rife with exile and nostalgia. These are poems from between--between languages, cultures, identities and forms. Sparse, objectivist-inspired poems are mingled with direct but enigmatic prose reminiscent, to my mind, of W.G. Sebald. Like Sebald's, these poems are homesick for a point of origin which may or may not have ever existed. With black-and-white photographs of Caracas by Isabel Parra. For ordering and a sample poem go here.



(Please note image is a reproduction of the mirrored cover which cannot be reproduced on the computer screen)

Face Time
(22 pp. Sewn Binding, B&W photographs, mirrored cover) $6

What do Paris Hilton, Al Pacino, Hilda Doolittle, Charlize Theron, Marcello Mastroianni and a quivering, self-eviscerated blob have in common? Find out in Face Time, an anthology of poets responding to stills from films. Featuring work by Joe Hall, Craig Perez, Noah Falck, Phil Crippen, Matina L. Stamatakis, Francois Luong, Brian Lucas, Nicole Mauro, Jessica Smith, G.L. Ford, Mark Lamoureux, Christina Strong, Michael Carr, Sandra Simonds, John Mulrooney, Brenda Iijima & Christopher Rizzo.

To order and for a sample poem and image go here.

Tags: Cy Gist

Anchorite Press: New site, new releases & online archives

Good news from Chris Rizzo--Anchorite Press now has an online home . . .  and three new releases: 15 Poems in Sets of 5, a chapbook by Catherine Meng; "Fickle Hill," a broadside poem by Joseph Massey; & After Rilke by Aaron Tieger.




Chris has also scanned and posted the covers and production details for all the (elegant, classic) Anchorite books & broadsides to date!

In an effort to supply interested folks with some sort of web presence, I've designed this blog, which is linked (see sidebar) to a fairly extensive archive. Until I actually sat down to confront the notion of putting together an archive, I hadn't realized how much work Anchorite had done in the past, especially in 2004. Unfortunately, there is a general lack of images for very early broadsides, which were called "monographs" for a time. I hadn't expected Anchorite to grow as it has, and I subsequently gave away practically all of the early projects.

Still a work in progress, this blog will eventually carry news about the press and forthcoming publications, information on publishing, and hopefully some visual documentaries on how Anchorite Publications are put together. I'll also post calls for work here, too, so check back from time to time.

Cool. (Here's to many more, C.) Write to anchorite dot press at gmail dot com for ordering info.

Tags: Anchorite

New from New Michigan Press: Exit Interview by Paul Guest

Technically it's not out till Friday, but you can preorder Exit Interview by Paul Guest now at the Diagram/New Michigan Press website.

To be released September 15, 2006, Paul Guest's new chapbook, Exit Interview is available for pre-order now. It's great. The work here is lyric, luminous, hilarious and heartbreaking by turns. Axe that: that description just doesn't do it justice; it's blurbese. Let us just say that this is really good. The poems are tender and speculative, lit up by Elvis, Jonny Quest, robot butlers and the general widespread need for them, the invisible man, Godzilla, and the worlds of pain and memory and love.

5.5" x 8.5", 40pp. $8.00.

The new issue of Diagram is also fresh, so check it while you're over there.

Tags: New Michigan Press, Diagram

New schtuffs from . . . everybody.

Octopus Books: The 8th issue of Octopus will be a series of chapbooks, selected in a recent contest. Look for chaps by Julie Doxsee, Jen Tynes & Erika Howsare, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Eugene Ostashevsky, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Genya Turovskaya, Jonah Winter, & Samuel Amadon soon, and congrats as well to all the finalists.

Braincase Press: Noah Eli Gordon's handmade chapbook press has just released two new books, Iowa by Travis Nichols & Secret Architecture by Aaron Kunin. As usual, they have beautifully hand-printed covers. Note that Braincase has a new address, where you should direct your $6 per book.

Ordering info here.





Lame House Press: Gina Myers' DIY press offers a new chapbook by Michael Sikkema, Code Over Code, which Norma Cole praises as "a whole rhythmic life, then another life, or a part, of an elemental past, present and future you want to read, 'because division is how one gets here.'" Order info here, & watch that space for two more upcoming titles, by Karl Parker & Alli Warren.

Ugly Duckling: The duck goes quack . . . & I can't keep up. Please take a peek at their announcements page, which highlights new releases, reviews & events. They're very busy over there.



Fewer Further Press: Editor/publisher Jess Mynes announces two new chapbooks, a new broadside of his own work & a third chapbook by Clark Coolidge on the way.

Christopher Rizzo's the Breaks and Joseph Massey's Property Line are now available from Fewer Further.

the Breaks is printed in an edition of 200 copies, 40 of which are special editions. The first twenty orders of the Breaks will receive a signed double-sided broadside.

Property Line is printed in an edition of 250 copies, 40 of which are special editions.

Special editions are author signed, hand-sewn with special end papers, printed on linen paper.

Landscape Odes, a folded broadside featuring 5 poems from Jess Mynes, printed in an edition of 40 copies, is also just published by Fewer & Further Press.

Please visit the Fewer & Further Press site excerpts, audio samples, & ordering info.

Clark Coolidge’s Counting on Planet Zero will be the next Fewer & Further Press publication.

H_NGM_N Press: H_NGM_N also offers some new chaps, Sonnet by Matt Hart & Between the Room and the City by Erica Bernheim.




Bear Parade: Tao Lin's new chapbook Today The Sky is Blue and White with Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale Moon and I Will Destroy Our Relationship Today appears in the new issue, along with work by Matthew Rohrer, Ellen Kennedy, Micheal Earl Craig & Noah Cicero. Clicky.

absent: From Simon DeDeo (whose reviews you know you read at Rhubarb Is Susan) comes the word that this new magazine will launch in December 2006 and is currently calling for submissions:

We are seeking innovative, tradition-defying work in multiple genres: poetry, microfiction, and essays on topics poetical, cultural and political. Work of uncategorized form is also of interest--please query.

Our guidelines provide information on how to submit.

The absent board : Simon DeDeo (poetry) works in Chicago, where he edits the blog-journal Rhubarb Is Susan; Elisa Gabbert (poetry) lives in Boston where she aids Ploughshares; Joanna Guldi (essays) is a historian and political activist in San Francisco; additional board members TBA.

& finally, what could be better than free poetry? Josh Hanson has posted his latest PDF chapbook Mix Tape on his LiveJournal profile page here for your perusing pleasure (along with two earlier PDF collections). Rock.

I've also got a new stack of colorful goodies here on my desk that I hope to get through soon, to do some more mini reviews & ecstatic pointing, my favorite kind. Maureen Thorson's new tinysides sold out before I had a chance to get them up, for instance, but that doesn't mean you can't still get a peek at them via a review. And I've been gifted with new stuff from Sean Casey too, among others. (Thanks, y'all!)

One final announcement re: my own Half Empty/Half Full: I am pushing back the release of A Slice of Cherry Pie by a few weeks, in order to coordinate better with Ivy's Private Press UK release, so we can release simultaneously. Thanks for your preorders--the hand-stitched first edition is about half sold out already! Expect copies in late September or early October.

Villanelles Are Retarded: new from Big Game Books!

What's that sound? That mad buzz, that rapid-fire stapling, that whistling needle, that flashing X-acto? Was it wearing a hand-printed tee shirt? A straw cowboy hat? You, my friend, have just been buzz-dived by a red-headed poetical blur known as Maureen Thorson, speedy creator of chapbooks, tinysides, stuffed animals, bookmarks, Clip-Art collages, drunken sailor poems, & repeated collaborative sillinesses. Hurry, hit the PayPal button. She's fast!

Thorson recently combined forces with the infamous Texan poet Shafer Hall in an exercise of formal ridiculousness. It's called Villanelles Are Retarded, and it's now available from Big Game Books for $6.00, including US shipping.

I got my copy yesterday, packed in a protective sleeve with a sobering (but not too sobering) warning label. I carefully slid the little book from its wrapping and turned to the informative (if somewhat retarded) introduction by one Jennifer El Knox:

"The villanelle was invented by retard François Villon in France in the early 1400s, as period now known as 'L'Age d'Or des Crétins.' It is assumed he derived the form from a peasant dance performed on the first day of April in which the stupidest child in the village would jump back and forth over a rope on the ground until he or she passed out. The priest would then scrawl RETARD across the unconscious child's head with a Sharpie."

El Knox's introduction further claims that Thorson, who works in a law office by day, "is paid peanuts to read enormous three-ringed binders overflowing with documents that are so mind-bogglingly boring they have been known to throw lawyers twice her size into Rip Van Winkle comas," and Thorson's accomplice Shafer Hall (who for reason or reasons unknown habitually lies "under a pile of 2-liter Mountain Dew bottles on the floor of his dark, fecund apartment" in Brooklyn) collaboratively created the villanelles included herein line by line over the communication technology known as e-mail. "Now that's retarded," Knox concludes. Well, we'll just see about that, I'll admit I scoffed.

But, Reader, no sooner did I turn to the first poem than I too became convinced. Witness "You're Bored, We're Hot":

Summer on the Swanee. It's a hundred degrees
And confusing for all of the whiskey and blonde chicks.
At this lowly meridian, we space out under the trees.

I'll spend most of my time down beneath my knees,
Looking for bottles to pass all this time in the sticks.
Summer on the Swanee. It's a hundred degrees

And I'd rather be naked as hell but for all the fleas,
Singing love songs to the forest's myriad ticks,
To whose lowly harmony we space out under the trees.

If you're as hot as I am, you're sweating seas,
And a little distraction is what our situation predicts.
Summer on the Swanee. It's a hundred degrees

Above zero; insects hum a humid reprise
And I am willing, as always, to take multiple licks,
A lowly harmony spacing out under the trees

As some equatorial virus turns us dead over easy.
We'll go out in style--tragically beautiful, completely transfixed
As we space out harmoniously under the trees:
Summer on the Swanee, one hundred degrees.

I mean, really! Who else but poets as retarded as the retarded form they repeatedly torture nearly two dozen times would rhyme degrees and reprise, or allow ticks to follow so soon on the tiny heels of fleas? In a stupor that can only be described as retarded, I made my way through the subsequent pieces, each more blatantly absurd than the last--"Disturbing Ringtones," "Telescopes, 80% Off," "Betsy Pickle," "Want to Get Huge?" and "Visit New Jersey," among others equally dull-witted. Some of these poems were almost definitely written under the influence of retardation. In the end, I put down the little book with a relieved sigh. Thank goodness most poetry is not like this! How lucky we are that these retarded poets with their retarded obsession are only two of a kind!

Get yours here. (& I mean it, you better act quick.)

Hey, there's a new failbetter too!

Check it for fiction, poetry, art & this great interview with Stephen Dixon (who is, uh, great).

Your first book wasn’t published until after you turned 40, although you’d been writing for a number of years. Had you ever considered giving up? Where did you find the motivation to keep writing?

I thought of giving up a few times before I turned 40, but I was kidding myself. I never could have given up writing. It was the one thing I liked doing most. Why would I ever give it up? And I knew that my work wasn't for everyone and that it wasn't something that'd make me enough money to live on. I knew that early on. But I did sometimes get frustrated that my full-length work (I always sold my stories) wasn't getting accepted by publishers. So I'd tell myself: Give it up if you don't have a book out in two years. But who was I fooling? Me. But clever foolishness. I was saying that to myself to work even harder and longer at what I was doing. I would "show them," so to speak. The best thing about not getting my full-lengths published earlier than 40 was that it showed me whom I was writing for: myself. It gave me full license to write the way I wanted to without thinking of an audience.

He even doodled a self-portrait for them.

Facing pages: Henry Gould's In RI . . . in a bilingual edition

Henry Gould's In RI is a book-length poem on early New England history and the founding of Rhode Island. Written in 1994 but published here for the first time, this bilingual edition also includes the Italian translation by Anny Ballardini.

6 x 9, 200 pp.
Perfect-bound paperback
$10.75

Also available for download as a PDF
$2. 19

New England October. The earth grows ancient.
Leaves fall, and we fall with them,
      slowly, almost floating.
Under pewter skies, the small yellow leaves
of the plane trees blaze more golden.
      Classical. The crowded
streets are quiet, introspective. Leaves
cluster, flattened in low relief across
      dark, rain-soaked
pavement.

Something European. An imaginary
Paris. Intellectual schoolgirls, hugging books,
      walking under the high,
somber stone spires, singing
out of eternity. Tremor of old
      young love.

And then I saw her again,
moving ahead of me up the street, pigeon-
      toed, a little
slowly, tenative, wearing some autumnal
shawl. Walking alone, toward
      Italian class.

Order via Lulu.com here, where you can also preview Anny's Italian. (& while you're there, why not take a look at Henry's other books?)

H_NGM_N #5

The new issue of H_NGM_N is up, featuring poetry, fiction, essays, & reviews by Brad Liening • Brett Price • Christopher Mulrooney • Clay Matthews • Corey Mesler • Daniel Becker • Daniel Nester • Dorothea Lasky • Erica Bernheim • Erin Martin • Evan Commander • Gina Myers • Jason Bredle • JD Schraffenberger • Joshua Beckman • Julia Cohen • Matt Hart • Monica Fambrough • Pablo Peschiera • Peter Jay Shippy • Richard Fein • Samuel Amadon • Sheila Murphy • Steve Orlen • Thomas Hummel • Twilight Greenaway • Adam Clay • Bob Marcacci • Fred Schmalz • Jon Woodward • Lance Phillips • Tyler Carter • Jake Adam York • Joyelle McSweeney • Richard Meier • Vincent Masterson • Michael Cross • Clay Matthews • Gina Myers • Jen Tynes • Marci Nelligan • Matt Hart • Michael Broder • Nate Pritts • Pablo Peschiera • Richard Scheiwe • Matt Dube • an artist's portfolio by Henry Samelson • & comix by Michael Donnelly

Free for the clicking.

UPDATE: & hey, lookie. FLIP/CHAP #2 is ready too: KER-THUNK by Brad Liening / FEAR OF THE KNEE BENDING BACKWARDS by Gina Myers! 32 pp., $6 including postage right here.

Diagram 6.3

The new issue of Diagram features work by Amy Blache, S. Burgess, Naomi Clewett, Stephanie DeHaven, Josh Hanson, Matthew Hittinger, Anna Journey, Dawn Cunningham Luebke, Mark McKain, Peter Orner, Dan Pinkerton, Claudia Ryan, Morgan Lucas Schuldt, M. B. Seigel & Abraham Smith, as well as reviews of new books by Danielle Pafunda, Misty Harper & Sam Savage.

On Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing*:

Like doctor's offices, certain dogs, human relationships, and words themselves, the poems in Danielle Pafunda's debut collection Pretty Young Thing look innocent enough from a distance. It's an illusion easily shattered by sticking your nose in.

From first blush to last, these blunt, racy, sometimes alienating lines wipe that little-boy smirk off the book's title and assume a kind of intimacy that's not always comfortable, and frequently cutting.

Check out the whole issue here.

* Full disclosure: Why yes, I did happen to edit this book for Soft Skull. & I think you would like it.

Coconut 5 is fresh . . .

With new poems from Mong-Lan, Ashley VanDoorn, Ada Limón, Scott Glassman, John Cotter, Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Katie Degentesh, Gina Myers, Dustin Williamson, Johannes Göransson, Noah Eli Gordon, Kristen Hanlon, Matt Hart, Kirsten Kaschock, Jennifer Moxley, Sarah Mangold, Carly Sachs, Joshua Edwards, Michael Rerick, Jen Tynes, Albert Flynn DeSilver, Maureen Seaton, Neil de la Flor, Hal Sirowitz & Robyn Art.

Crack it open with your machete & get slurping here.

(NB: Hey! Stay tuned for Coconut editor Bruce Covey's book Elapsing Speedway Organism, forthcoming from No Tell Motel Books.)