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(First the frontlist in order of release, then the backlist, in alphabetical order.)

[author, alphabetical]
[book] [description] [order!]
2019 Chapbook Subscription

2019 Chapbook Subscription: six chapbooks (Admussen, Bertram, Dally, Saland, Roeder/Safa, and Thon).

Print + PDF ($35 + $5 shipping in USA):

PDFs only ($20):

 

03.22.19: Emily Viggiano Saland, Trajectory: a Verse Biography of Evel Knievel

Print + PDF ($9 + $2 shipping):

PDF only ($5):

  04.15.19: Nick Admussen, Stand Back, Don't Fear the Change

Print + PDF ($9 + $2 shipping):

PDF only ($5):

 

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, How Narrow My Escapes

Poems. They rule.

Print + PDF ($9 + $2 shipping):

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Andrew Dally, All the Times We Passed McDonald's Between Chapel Hill and Tuxedo, North Carolina

Poems.

Winner of the 2018 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest.

Sez Abraham Smith: "Andrew Dally's poetry is smart and it smarts. Charles Olson sd the problem with America is space. Gertrude Stein sd Anybody is as their land and air is. Dally answers all of that on his speakerphone while rougeing a fry & otherwise going 777mph & watching where he's going like Creeley sd we must(ard). Herein Dally trellises—with seasoned alacrity and tiny good saltpackets of humor—Japanese wanderliterature tradition to the giant cheesy M on high. It's sad. It's loving. It's lovelorn. And it's damn lovely. I don't know about you but I live for some kinds of etched
sadness. And Dally doesn't disappoint. I am 100% satisfied that three winters
from now these ketchupy lung songs, all the ghosts in the white spaces,
will still be not quite tiring across the tars of my ears."

& Sez Melissa Ginsburg: "Andrew Dally's poems turn the ubiquitous McDonald's in the American
landscape into touchstone, into rhythm, via a language that feels brand new. Like a perfect playlist for a long road trip, this book fuses disparate elements to build a moving, intimate mythology for our time."

Print + PDF ($9 + $2 shipping):

PDF ($5):

 

Tara Roeder and Arman Safa, Every Bird is a Miracle

Poems and drawings.

Many birds.

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PDF ($5):

 

Melanie Rae Thon, The Bodies of Birds

Prayers / Love Songs / Laments / Confessions

Resurrected and restored through the bodies of multitudes, a young woman who becomes an organ donor after a car accident radiates unmitigated love as she comes to know the recipients of her heart and kidneys—lungs, bowel, vertebrae, corneas . . . Twenty-seven years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, black storks glide over the Zone of Alienation. Apple trees bloom; lilacs flower—radioactive wolves thrive; bees make glowing honey . . .  A prisoner in California, a man who killed a woman a hundred times, who stabbed face and throat, heart and belly, now washes another man in the shower, shaves his face, changes his diapers, protects and serves a murderer like himself, riddled by dementia . . .

Prayers, love songs, laments, confessions—these three provocative immersions through and beyond the body explore the revelatory expansiveness of consciousness and compassion; the persistence of love; the trauma of intimate violence and environmental devastation; unexpected grace; and the remarkable resilience of the marvelously diverse more-than-human world.

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PDF ($5):

2017 Chapbook Subscription [6 chapbooks]

The 2017 Chapbook Subscription gets you print and pdf copies of all six chapbooks in the series: Jacqueline Lyons' Earthquake Daily, Patricia Clark's Deadlifts, Kathleen Peirce's Vault, Albert Goldbarth's The World of Multicongruencies We Tend to Inhabit Increasingly, Maya Popa's You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, and our chapbook contest winner, Claire Wahmanholm's Night Vision.

Print + pdfs ($35 + $5 shipping in USA)

PDF only ($20)

 

Print + PDF ($35 + $5 shipping in USA):

PDFs only ($20):

 

 

Patricia Clark's Deadlifts

"What a brilliant concept: Deadlifts offers witty, lyrical verses, historically accurate and imaginative, in which poet Patricia Clark provides an insider's view of other "Patricia Clarks"—the dead ones. These poems are even more brilliant than the concept, their endings a surprise and a good shock. Heartening and perfectly tuned, like Arcade Fire or Stephen Colbert's monologues, these poems are what we need now—and will return to—for a long time to come." —Marilyn Kallet

"In Patricia Clark's Deadlifts, we cling to the speaker as she dives right into mortality's maw, poring over obituaries of those who share her name. They're strangers, yes, but the connection Clark makes is powerful. Are we anything in death beyond our names? As Clark says, 'We are all the same, these lives/ bracketed by dates,/  these lists—who/ preceded us, who remains.'" —Glenn Shaheen

"These poems are masterful—the way Clark tucks reverberating sounds from one line to the next—pain, thanks, face—like she tucks her namesakes into their graves. So gently and with so much love. Through the breath and ink of this author Patricia Clark, the Patricia Clarks that have gone on come back again." —Nicole Walker

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PDF ($5):

 

Albert Goldbarth's The World of Multicongruencies We Tend to Inhabit Increasingly

"I don't want you to think that all of Goldbarth's poetry is science fiction. It isn't. But he has a kind of science fiction outlook on the world.... He looks at even the most mundane events of human behavior in our ordinary world in all of Einstein's four dimensions." —Frederik Pohl, Science Fiction Chronicle

"If ever the Martians do pay us a courtesy call, I will nominate Albert Goldbarth as an ideal ambassador. He is well-versed in their customs as in our own, and on ace terms with fellow starbuffs from Aristotle to Hawking; collects model spacecraft; has gone on record finding a timewarp no weirder than time; and is hiding, I'm convinced, waggly antennae.... Besides, what better earthling to regale the little green visitors, during the long voyage back to Mars, with tall tales of our exploits, our splendid tomfoolery, our love?" —Ben Downing, Parnassus

Print + PDF ($9 + $2 shipping):

PDF only (which is hilarious, as you probably know, since Goldbarth has never touched a computer) ($5):

 

Jacqueline Lyons's Earthquake Daily

"Highly inventive, these poems feel driven by emotional and cultural urgency, as earthquakes shock every part of the system, personal and collective. This is a world where the U.S. Geological Survey monitors catastrophes of mind and heart, where a quake strikes 'during 47% of our waking hours when we were thinking about something other than what was actually happening.' Poems for our shook times." —Dana Levin

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PDF ($5):

 

Kathleen Peirce's Vault: a Poem

Everyone who's ever read Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" knows the depth, the loss, the bewilderment, the vision and discovery one has when encountering the work of art that's truly talismanic. This encounter lies at the heart of Kathleen Peirce's poetics. This poetics is aware that an encounter with a piece of art, (and, perhaps, language, too) is like entering a soul itself. She might be looking at a watercolor or at a statuette, or a gilded egg—but what she sees is the mystery of time. Her eye, examining an object, travels back in time, through time, at time. Whether it is 1575 or 1705 or 2017, she sees the fires are blazing. People and animals are burning. The music flames us. The silence flames in that music.
     How marvelous, in our scattered, ironic, frightened age to find a poet who is unafraid to possess a larger vision, a poet who, not unlike our Modernists, almost a century ago, is unafraid to look at beauty and see the dark waters of time that this beauty survives, yes, but that ravages us, its makers. —Ilya Kaminsky

Find here: poetry's virtues/pleasures. Gorgeous witness. Silence muscled with qualities. Net of attentiveness rippling outward from the meeting of the seer and the seen. Kin to The Tempest: the wondrous woven of the mundane. The strength of purpose and hearkening needed to walk in beauty's strangeness. Its sensuousness; its intimacy (especially with necessity) that supples its language. Patience of soul spun into physical brilliance. Time present and antique, interior and exterior, "feather of hair in one hand, / scissors in another, not the heart / beating but what might return over the heart." These are the most beautiful poems I know. —Liz Waldner

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  [Cover TBA] Maya Popa, You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, forthcoming in March 2018; cover to come: February 2018 [ordering to come]
 

Claire Wahmanholm's Night Vision, our 2017 chapbook winner.

"In Claire Wahmanholm's Night Vision, we are made to witness narrative's inevitable unravelling. By placing hybrid prose in conversation with skillful erasures, Wahmanholm creates a subtle and striking commentary on the nature of language and story. She reminds us of the infinite ways that voice resists containment by history, convention, and our expectations as readers. In each lyric fragment, each fracturing of the source text, we are shown all that has been buried in the trappings of prose. This is a gorgeously subversive chapbook, a work that reflects powerfully on the circumstances of its own making." —Kristina Marie Darling

 

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PDF ($5):

       
 
Sara Gelston's Odette, 44pp, $9, shipping now

"Sara Gelston's Odette is a compelling chronicle of a self being made and tested, unmade and remade in a world not unlike ours: "a tough place we must chew / our way through." Where are we in these poems? It doesn't matter. The poems become their own reality and the speaker a keen guide charting the mutability of experience: longing, disaster, transformation. Reading felt dangerous and refreshing and instructive. By the end, I understood Gelston's speaker when she says, "Out here, I've developed / muscles I didn't know I had." —Carrie Fountain

—Print + pdf ($9 + $2 US shipping)

 
 
BJ Soloy's Selected Letters, 60pp, $9, 12/15/16

"These poems really put the bear in Bea Arthur. They shake and shiver like roses on the trellis Soloy is climbing to enter the upper floors of our hearts. They are the whole marching band, and we fall in with the poet and the people and parts of his composed world, even though the music is fluttering off our music stands in this weather we're having. I treasure this poet's work." —Ed Skoog

"In Selected Letters, BJ Soloy addresses the oldest, strangest, rumors of ourselves, whether we be deceased celebrities or his personal friends. That we are all "excellent/food for many predators" is a truth he handles with an exquisite attunement both to hilarity and grief—for Soloy's slippery, canny intelligence creates switchbacks and u-turns: his poems force recognitions sure to simultaneously reassure and discomfit. When have I gotten such deep pleasure from a vision that so readily acknowledges its own bleakness? Never. I simply follow: "each line a last line until the next." —Elizabeth Robinson

"Ostensibly elegies to dead celebrities, BJ Soloy's "letters" tell us more about the private life of the poet than the public figures they address. Bea Arthur's death stirs his own remorse: "I do miss you in a small, potent way / & regret a lot of things." Merle Haggard's aged face triggers Soloy's "post- / modern brand of neurosis": "My face is apparently still young, if less / & less." Soloy situates us in his world, a poet's world, which is both lovely and lonely. In the end, he is on intimate terms with mortality: "It's not mine—none of it." An original voice, blessedly frayed around the edges." —David Trinidad

—print + pdf ($9 + $2 US shipping)

—pdf ($5)

 
  Adrienne Celt's Apocalypse How? An Existential Bestiary, 76pp, $9 [12/1/16]

"Apocalypse How catches you emotionally and dare I say spiritually off guard in the best way possible." —Yumi Sakugawa, Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe

"Adrienne Celt has a created a world where animals see to the heart of the human condition, finding it even sillier and stranger than we had thought." —David Troupes, Buttercup Festival

"These comics are a funny and surreal dive into many of life's existential quandaries. Celt's loving rendering of her animal characters softens some of the hard truths they describe." —Anne Emond, Comiques

"Adrienne Celt's offbeat animal cartoons never fail to make me smile. There's something magical about an owl experiencing ennui." —Nicole Cliffe, The Toast

—Print + pdf ($9 + $2 US shipping

—pdf ($5)

 
 

Tim Jones-Yelvington, Become on Yr Face, 56pp, $9 [01/10/17]

"When I think about contemporary
poetry and its impossible donut shape—by which I mean continuous, obscure, dazzling, interesting, retreating, arriving—I always think about Tim Jones-Yelvington." —Joyelle McSweeney

"Tim Jones-Yelvington is a glittery
moonbeam from my favorite planet, Jupiter." —Jennifer Tamayo

—print + pdf ($9 + $2 US shipping)

—pdf ($5)

 

 
 

Maya Popa, The Bees Have Been Canceled, 48pp, released 02/15/17

"The poems in The Bees Have Been Canceled are ravenous, rich, and exquisitely built. Maya Catherine Popa's language makes visible how yearning tethers the mind to the world and how hurt spawns an astonishing self-awareness. Her gaze alights on beauty and violence; it ‘scurries from birth to blight.' Such attentive looking brings closer the brokenness of the world. This gaze is also restorative; it alleviates and mends and delights." —Eduardo C. Corral

"Maya Catherine Popa's The Bees Have Been Canceled is haunted by violence and catastrophe, by the consequences of human desire turned to incommensurate ends, and anxious about the resources of language. There are no glib answers, only a certain kind of belief (the kind Emily Dickinson might recognize) embodied afresh in poems that are richly textured, and filled with energy, wit, and intelligence. Popa's work is serious, but there's joy here, too, in a balance that defies gravity." —Averill Curdy

—print + pdf ($9 + $2 US shipping)

—pdf ($5)

 

 

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New Releases,

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Quite Awesome, We Assure You,

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Are Below

 
Nicole Walker

Micrograms

Listen to what the people say:

"Even the table of contents of Nicole Walker's Micrograms is geekily witty, including as it does such fanciful micro-essay titles as "Micromeat" and "Micro Prairie Dogs and Micro Turkey Vultures" alongside the more familiar and even potentially dire "Microbursts" and "Microencephaly." In fact, the table of contents reveals many of the tensions this book explores: between the invented and the real, the wild and the mundane, the grim and joyful challenges at the heart of the smallest events of our daily lives and the fear, humor, and hope with which we encounter these challenges. There is no other writer like Nicole Walker for weaving a fabric that incorporates all the threads of her reality: the scientific and the poetic, the trivial and the dire, the mundane and the apocalyptic, all held together by Walker's deep pleasure in the operations of language itself." —Katharine Coles

"Like Galeano's Book of Embraces or Weil's Gravity and Grace, Nicole Walker's Micrograms portray the force of a keen mind fully engaged with disparate, successive parts of the world, which unify, reconfigure, and become new things in her strange, wondrous prose. These essays are not description or depiction but revelation; they both show and prophesy." —Patrick Madden

"Though I'm tempted to applaud the micro-joys, micro fascinations, and micro-revelations of Nicole Walker's Micrograms, the truth is that this miniscule book of micro-essays offers inquisitive readers gargantuan pleasures. A micro-burst of essays, fresh and intriguing." —Dinty W. Moore

"Micrograms by Nicole Walker is a cause for swooning and celebration. I cleaned my glasses and caught my breath. She is a microscope and a telescope, gives us a book writ large, writ small. 'Let's go smaller,' she asks us, but never in import as, in her delightful deadpan, she leads us through life and death. Yes, it's a small world after all. And an extraordinary book about looking close, and thinking far." —David Lazar

80pp, essays, ISBN 978-1-934832-54-7, $9 (print + pdf) or $5 (pdf). Order it below!

Print chapbook + pdf ($9 + $2 shipping in USA):

Or if you just want the pdf, that's cool, for $5:

 
Sean Lovelace and Mark Neely, eds

Nice Things By James Franco

Well, here is the real Franco, the only true Franco. You need to read what he has to say about McDonalds, plot, teaching, poetry, and voice. Also: being horny for Sleater-Kinney, Gogol, gossamer, Battlestar Galactica, soccer, Subarus, Diet Mountain Dew, nature, Nature, counterinsurgency, the rhetoric of rivers, breasts, damaged heroes, misunderstanding fairy tales, and Nice Things by James Franco.

But first, a disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents have been fed through the elaborate machine of James Franco's imagination. Though passages relating to health, fitness, and creative writing do draw on the author's extensive education, they should not be substituted for the medical advice of physicians.

Also this chapbook tolerates no blurbs.

Cool? Cool. In the words of the immortal and horrible Rage Against the Machine, come and play, come and play: forget about the movement!

64pp, ISBN 978-1-934832-53-0, $9 (print + pdf) or $5 (pdf). Preorder below:

Print chapbook + pdf ($9 + $2 shipping in USA):

Or if you just want the pdf, that's cool, who wants to be encumbered? Not Franco. Not you, so it's yours for $5:

 
Nik de Dominic
Nik de Dominic: Your Daily Horoscope, poems; chapbook + pdf, $9 + $2 shipping in USA
Catie Hannigan
Catie Hannigan: What Once Was There Is the Most Beautiful Thing, poetry; chapbook + pdf; $9 + $2 shipping in USA
Nick Neely
Nick Neely: Chiton & Other Creatures, nonfiction; chapbook + pdf; $9 + $2 shipping in USA
Colleen O'Brien
Colleen O'Brien: Spool in the Maze, poems; chapbook + pdf; $9 + $2 shipping in USA
Melanie Rae Thon (limited edition)
Melanie Rae Thon: The 7th Man, Limited Edition, fiction/poetry; chapbook + pdf; $9 + $2 shipping in USA
Melanie Rae Thon
Melanie Rae Thon: The 7th Man, Trade Edition, fiction/poetry; chapbook + pdf; $9 + $2 shipping in USA

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And, Let's Admit,

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The Backlist Continues

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to Rock

 
Stephanie Anderson

In the Particular Particular: Stephanie Anderson

(2006 Chapbook Contest winner)

It's a great debut: we are thrilled to announce the publication of Stephanie Anderson's chapbook In the Particular Particular, winner of the 2006 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest.

These poems smoke when sprayed with water: that is how hot they are. (Technically that's evaporation, but it looks a lot like smoke.) They are each like evaporations, evocations, interactions with the world via verb and adjective and noun. They are gloriously in love with language, and we believe you will love them in return.

[press release & order form]

5.5" x 8.5", 48pp. $8.00.

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-1-1.

 

Lucy Anderton

the flung you: Lucy Anderton

The awesome Simone Muench says of this: "Sutured with strange, glittering sentences, fat with music and intelligence, the flung you negotiates the kinetic, violent, vigorous dance of existence. Anderton writes with both exuberance and ferocity, conceiving poetry "Stung with nocturne, shy /And savage." Employing tongue and teeth motifs as emblems for the unsaid and the sung, her poems spit, bite, lick and soothe. Adroitly coupling the revelatory with the mysterious as it fuses images of blood owls and "red, wet guts" with "pearled birds" and bowls of stars, the flung you is a dark beautiful beast "soldered in shimmer."

We trust Simone. You trust Simone. Everyone trusts Simone.

5" x 8", 68pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-36-3

[press release & order form]

 
Brent Armendinger
Armendinger Undetectable: Brent Armendinger

Brent Armendinger's poems are smart, elegiac, and wonderful, filled with formal play, the vapor between rainfall, skies full of knives, and the memories of breath. Undetectable celebrates and makes visible the body's perforations, the openings between the body and the world, and manifests them in the fracture evident everywhere in this book. These poems pose questions of loveliness and loneliness: Where do syllables take us? and What would it take for the window / to be the wish?

The cute new size: 5" x 8", 60pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $9.00.

[press release & order form]

ISBN: 978-1-934832-20-2.

 

Caren Beilin

Americans, Guests, or Us: Caren Beilin

Here are some kickass blurbs:

Remember when we were young and first dreamed of a life of writing? It would be like living as a spy, or in a movie. Life suddenly made sense and could be endured insofar as it could be written. Pain and humiliation could be used. People, good and evil, were characters. Everywhere clarifi ed lush, miraculous images. Not a word, a moment, would be again lowly. In the center was the dream of the writing, taking shape as the unfolding encyclopedia of our lives--heroic, magical, wise. At some point, we actually began to live that life, yet with the humiliation and miraculousness warped. Our mothers and fathers are dead. Everything has burned or is gone with the wind. What remains is the encyclopedia, from which Caren Beilin's writings have been torn--more hallucinatory, mas-
turbatory and sociopathic, while also more bold, brave and beautiful, than our minds once conceived. Americans, Guests, or Us is the realization and destruction of the dream. And we are within it, animal and timeless: inhabitants, strangers, the writing, the vengeance; the heartrock of Earth's outer space. So says Brandon Shimoda.


Jesse Bercowetz sez: Harsh and sexy and at all times uniquely American.

We concur. You should too. READ! BUY!

5" x 8", 60pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-37-0

[press release & order form]

 
Deborah Bernhardt
Deborah Bernhardt's DRIFTOLOGY, the 2013 winner of the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM chapbook contest, is a thrilling linguistic ride. We'd almost say dizzying, since she shifts so quickly between registers and textures, except that the result's more electrified Van Gogh than vertigo. These poems show--and venerate--their seams. Throw a whole lot of smart and lovely in the "Will It Blend" blender, which shows up in one of Bernhardt's poems, and we get this key-shifting chapbook. Needless to say it's great. 5" x 8", 48pp, ISBN 978-1-934832-40-0. [press release & order form]
 
Kristy Bowen

Feign: Kristy Bowen

Bowen writes: "And what else to do with a girl / with a mouth like a dirty book, / a burnt out car." We could not have said it better ourselves. We'd rather just listen to her characters acting out in these ingenious poems. They're beautiful, not a little dangerous, a touch magical, algebraical (if that's a word at all—well, it is now; Bowen has driven us, pleasingly, to this). They are good. Better than. 48pp, $8.

[press release & order form]

5.5" x 8.5", 48pp. $8.00.

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-2-8.

 

Jason Bredle

A Twelve Step Guide: Jason Bredle

(2004 Chapbook Contest winner)

Our 2004 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest winner is the most hilarious (and pathological) book you'll read all year. His work is bizarre, beautiful, and inventive. Sample it in DIAGRAM issue [4.4] and see for yourself. Now buy the book.

5.5" x 8.5", 48 pp. $7.00.

ISBN 0-9725095-7-7

 

Laura Bylenok
bylenok

a/0 is a glorious, terrifying, tender enchantment—an immersion in a world made strange through the alchemy of metaphor—where approaching noon might become a horse, breathing hard, glowering. Here, it is always noon, falling snow forever filthy. Only the body is new: gaining a tooth, losing a vertebra, suddenly old at the wrist where brittle bone too easily crumbles. Through the magical confabulations of language, Laura Bylenok unconceals our infinite mutability and our gorgeously human capacity for kinetic empathy. Compassion alone can break the spell of endless noon: by the grace of fear, a red sweater becomes a woman's body, the fallen woman a vision of our own desperate possibilities. Free to love and die, we are resurrected in time, restored by desire for changing light and changing seasons, joy and loss, the pleasure and grief of our fragile, transient, miraculous world. —Melanie Rae Thon

Laura Bylenok's a/0 loops clockwise and counterclockwise through a quantum gothic tale of loss and transformation. What's its genre? A nonce science of evanescent increments. Newton and Leibniz confer. A vertebra vanishes. Noon is now and null and now again. "If time is infinitely divisible, it must also be infinitely expandable," Bylenok writes. Now replace "time" with "Bylenok's nimble, ruminative prose." Now replace "must also be" with "is also infinitely readable, infinitely pleasurable, and." —Zach Savich

Poems, 5"x8", 72pp., $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-47-9. [press release & order form]

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Karen Carcia

On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing: Karen Carcia

"What are these? Birds passing over at midnight? Light speeding sideways? Or call them poems and their marvelous footnotes, just for now: in On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing, Karen Carcia has made a heartbreakingly beautiful thing of them, these poems, these stars or birds begun as poems and then—having traveled by footnote!—ending either fathoms deep inside themselves or far out into deep space, I can't tell which, just somewhere dark and quiet enough to truly perceive "the mechanics of moonlight" or the silences of a map. I could travel these distances with Carcia over and over: how lovingly she remembers anything a mere numeral might have effaced." —Nancy Eimers

"Karen Carcia is among the few voices in poetry genuinely receptive enough to track the crisscrossings of perceptions, and this collection is the most curious I have read in a long while. Curious: all the way back to cure, care. These poems tender a caring place for truth, as if, in truth, the beautiful could not be more close at hand. And, then, the footnotes: stars that shine from under our feet, sourcing our daily longing for connection to the quiddities, essences that are themselves perceptions and voicings—of anything we might ever hope to ask of required reading." —William Olsen

[press release & mail order form]

5" x 8", 48pp. $9.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-30-1.

Jennifer S. Cheng

Invocation: an Essay: Jennifer S. Cheng

Preorder at right (chapbooks will ship 01/01/11, or shortly before).

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 56pp. $9.00.

ISBN: 978-1-934832-27-1.

Weston Cutter

All Black Everything: Weston Cutter

"Weston Cutter's poems are ecstatic—reaching out, pulling an eyelid over, pulling everything in. Emerson's transparent eyeball and Ashbery's convex mirror combine in symphony, with the Peterson's Field Guide to North American Birds for a libretto and a train derailment for an orchestra. That's Cutter's address. Keep walking till you see light streaming from the chimneys and the windows every moving thing is crowded in. What's inside: more zoology than zoo, more everything than ever." —Jake Adam York

"Cutter's world is vividly and joyfully detailed—here be licking and willows and liquor and birds and and and—but his book's central subject is its thrilling syntax, which rushes wild, stops short, tests, sniffs, hesitates, and gusts away again, ever on the verge of chaos but never quite out of control. It's a delirious ride, equal parts scary and beauty; you'll enjoy every minute you dare to." —Joel Brouwer

"Weston Cutter's poems are accelerants of invention—highly flammable as they careen adeptly past matches, burlap, and gods on fire. What the poems give light to is what gets traded, lost, or abandoned as our past and possible lives lose their force, and we are left to claim the improbable, persistent self. Such awareness results in the restless hilarity of never quite knowing whether 'the neighbor's dog's barking at meaningless blowing leaves or someone approaching finally with the axe.' Disconcerting, really, to have this much fun racing to watch the fire and finding it's our own house in flames. —Jennifer Boyden

5" x 8", 72pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-34-9

[press release & order form]

 
James D'Agostino

Slur Ouevre: James D'Agostino

The 2011 Chapbook Contest Winner, D'Agostino's Slur Ouevre is one we're in love with and would go all the way for. Mixing the the comic and the void beneath it with the linguistically spectacular, D'Agostino delivers.

"Slur Oeuvre is sui generis: original, strange, exceptional, solitary." —Mary Ruefle

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 76pp. $9.00.

ISBN: 978-1-934832-29-5.

Stephanie Dickinson

In Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg, Stephanie Dickinson becomes the voice of a legendary movie star and the last All-American girl Jean Seberg. Written as a fictional interview, no question is off-limits (French husbands, love with a Black Panther, alcoholism, death of a child, suicide). The imaginary answers are real and haunting as they pull you into a fascinating world of the 1960s. Dickinson skillfully draws on her own Midwestern childhood and with heart-rending imagery gives us a portrait of a dreamy teenager in Marshalltown who "watched the bluegill bite the hook's surprise," a girl who could never shrug off her small-town roots even as she embraced the Paris life of celebrity. Dickinson has written a book of such depth, knowledge and sensitivity that it should be considered the star's authorized biography because had Jean Seberg read this she would have cried with joy at the prospect of finally being understood. —Marina Rubin

Life's an existential journey for Jean Seberg. It's not easy being a seething adolescent sexpot, a free-love heroine of French New Wave films and Black Panthers, a mother, not to mention Joan of Arc burning at a funeral pyre under the direction of Otto Preminger. A film director or critic cuts through the fine façade between life onstage and off—killing and resurrecting. "What's real is make-believe..." just as this interview is. Dickinson's great talent lies not in writing about Jean Seberg but in occupying that space between her spirit and her flesh. Dickinson speaks Seberg, sees Seberg, savors the humiliation of brutish critics until it sours, has felt heavy make up melting on her face, heard the sobs of butterflies alighting in her body's crevices, felt the heat rise from her torched costume, been trapped in a sack, taken to the anvil, hammered. Even then, says Seberg-Dickinson, "I'm deep in the sky. Alive." —Maria Lisella

5" x 8", 80pp, $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-41-7. [press release & order form]

Melissa Ginsburg

Arbor: Melissa Ginsburg

Poems that exist in and emanate out of silence and horizontal spaces, and a great deal of cold, Ginsburg's excellent Arbor is dark and clear and beautiful, all still water and towering columns of air.

[press release & order form]

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

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-4-2.

 

Andrew C. Gottlieb

Halflives: Andrew C. Gottlieb

A 2005 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest finalist, Gottlieb's chapbook falls on the more traditional side of the poetry fence, which is not to say uninteresting or anything less than spectacular. These poems are expertly imagistic and linguistic.

Check out his work in DIAGRAM issues [3.5], [5.3], [5.5]

5.5" x 8.5", 40 pp. $7.00.

ISBN 0-9762092-4-1

[press release & order form]

 

Arielle Greenberg

Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials: Arielle Greenberg

This is another strange project that is very much in keeping with her other books. She's exciting, energetic, diffuse at times, and linguistically definitely on. This chapbook tries to parse the real-life strange world of a murder trial through the lens of a sort-of bluegrass opera. Really odd. Really good. She was a finalist for our contest in 2003.

Check out her work in DIAGRAM issue [3.4].

5.5" x 8.5", 32pp. $7.00.

ISBN 0-9725095-6-9

 

Paul Guest

Exit Interview: Paul Guest

It's great. No one messes with the Guest. 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.

[press release & order form]

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

ISBN: 0-9762092-7-6.

 

Zachary Harris

There is another poem, in which the news is erased and rewritten: Zachary Harris

There is another poem, in which the news is erased and rewritten is a great, strange beast of a debut. Studded with esoterica like musical theatre, Anita Ekberg, the Scythians, a Victorian photographer, Larry Levis, Samson, not to mention ABBA and the Talking Heads along with a treatise and philosophical inquiry on soft-shell, or piss-, clams, Harris's excellent chapbook digs its own gorgeous, luminary trench. Zachary Harris's There is another poem, in which the news is erased and rewritten contains and performs its own cabinet of wonders.

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 52pp. $9.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-28-8.

Mark Holden

A finalist in the 2014 Chapbook Contest, Mark Holden's No One Wants to Live Here: Stories

In No One Wants to Live Here, Mark Holden turns fantasy and reality inside out, showing us the frail thread that holds them together and the raw edges that our superegos scrabble to keep hidden—the things we would never want to reveal in a million years. But in this world, to quote one of his characters, "a million years was up." Holden's sharp, deadpan eye is a seam-ripper that lays bare our tattered, basted-together interiors. —Kate Moses

The mundane and the shocking are neighbors in Mark Holden's powerful collection of stories No One Wants to Live Here. So are his characters—neighbors who watch one another. They are ordinary people, farmers, prison guards and waitresses, a new mother, a cameraman for a local news channel. But the normalcy ends there, because these ordinary people sometimes get out their arsenals of weapons and kill one another. But then maybe that is normal, too. Writing in sublimely simple prose, stripped bare of any unnecessary flourishes, Holden paints a picture of bland and lonely, so-called "ordinary" lives in which extraordinary cruel acts transpire, and in doing so he shows us how such extreme acts have become irrevocably stitched into the fabric of American life. —Elizabeth Cohen

The stories in Mark Holden's No One Wants to Live Here are suggestive and sparse, apparently without affect. In conjunction with their startling plots, the effect is one of a dazzling muteness. —Steve Shipps

Stories, 5"x8", 64pp., $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-45-5. [press release & order form]

 

Charles Jensen

The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon: Charles Jensen

This beautiful, haunting text describes Maribel Dixon's crossing over to the Ghost-World and Edward's attempts to reach her there, to bring her back or go himself—via found documents, interviews, prose fragments, and reassembled poems.

[press release & order form]

5.5" x 8.5", 36pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-00-4.

Jessica Johnson

The 2014 Chapbook Contest Winner, Jessica Johnson's In Absolutes We Seek Each Other: Poems

Johnson's poems, full of quiet and gracious observation, are acts of kinship-in-strangeness with the natural world. Even the slightest creatures are alive with vision. —Joanna Klink

For a moment, reader, as you orient yourself in one of Jessica Johnson's poems, you might classify a scene as quiet and scientific, or moody, wet, and metrical; then a shift and, god, it's luminous and grief-struck and haunting and it's yours. The linked poems in the book's first section are a feat of beauty: transformation and lost innocence set in a glimmering laboratory. The second section of ocean dwellers, anatomies, and sea-soaked lyrics is equally remarkable. Jessica Johnson is a true discovery. —Kathleen Flenniken

Poems, 5"x8", 60pp., $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-44-8. [press release & order form]

 

George Kalamaras

The Mining Camps of the Mouth: George Kalamaras

(2012 Chapbook Contest Winner)

"In The Mining Camps of the Mouth, George Kalamaras's newest book, we encounter a poet 'who dares to write location--and not just about location.' Kalamaras tramps over the most tramped-over area as cultural ideal in American life—the West. With the aid of grave witchers who dowse up corpses, he untombs lives never mentioned in the history books, mining camp prostitutes for one. To these unheralded lives, he adds his memories of his dog Barney, the poet Gene Frumkin, and a 'Dream in Which Frank Waters Is My Mother' where Waters tells him 'it's easier to grieve than to mouth the sound of now.' This book, which ends with an astute send-up of cultural criticism, continues and enriches this important poet's explorations
of subjectivity and the discourses it drives, including history, as he 'mouths the sound of now.'" —Roger Mitchell

"Kalamaras laurels that part of freedom which knows no bounds except the crime of love. Read him sideways, read him backwards. This is the mouth of a cannon that fires at all conventional assumptions." —Alvaro Cardona-Hine

5" x 8", 92pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-35-6

[press release & order form]

 
Brandon Krieg

A finalist for the 2012 NMP/DIAGRAM Chapbook Competition, Brandon Krieg's Source to Mouth is a rangy collection of poems. Reading Emerson and Hopkins, "seven hundred salmon flashes in an hour," "mussels cluster[ing] on black rocks like magnetic shavings," considering the Romans and Etruscans, pointillist dandelions, "white windmills, futurist / crosses," "diminished sixths from the blanching chips / of a mouse's skull," gneiss, and coal and and and... How can we incorporate all these things into a semblance of a self, the lead poem, "I, Inc." asks us. Comprehensive and comprehending, incorporating everything it can find or read or see, Krieg's vision and voice is expansive, an experience.

5" x 8", 60pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-39-4

[press release & order form]

 
Genine Lentine

Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes: Genine Lentine

"Reading Genine Lentine's poems--so ardent and playful, risky and affecting--I kept thinking that it's not true, what René Char once said, that 'no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.' These poems plunge headlong into uncertainties of both language and life and, in doing so, they are so original that I often felt while reading them that I was in the grip of a brand new and still unnamed emotion." --Richard McCann

"These clear, refreshing acts of attention seem to wake us to another way of seeing, and to the problems and pleasures of saying what we see. Have we taken the act of speech for granted all along? In her short, formally inventive pieces--and especially in her dazzling long poem about language's power and limits that anchors this collection--Lentine sounds like no one else. Her wry, astonished, aching voice is a fresh presence in American poetry." --Mark Doty

"Beautiful experiments from the spiraling ladder of someone who has spread out her root hairs and patiently attends the right words to assign; one who is there to honor the instant something shimmers before it disappears, be 'it' the meaning of 'all this' or the lack thereof, not unlike Mr. Worthington photographing a droplet's splash he so ingeniously rigged to measure. And what doesn't Genine Lentine's aqueous breath expel--a disquisition on Softsoap, a sideways look at the motivational expression of Grenville Kleiser, the speed of sperm, along with a little consideration of the comma, the prefix un-, the contour of a vowel. Ms. Lentine's experiments begin and end with the parent body as it breaks away, that 'which asks nothing of us, only that we're here for it.' She is here." -- C. D. Wright

"These thrilling poems--restless, calm, reckless, wise--interrogate themselves by hovering over moments of aching beauty, as well as utter bewilderment, until they become the world itself." --Nick Flynn

5.5" x 8.5", 77pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $10.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-22-6. [press release & order form]

 

Chloë Joan López
Lopez

Quodlibet: Chloë Joan López

Oh yes! Chloë Joan López's Quodlibet, a finalist for the New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM 2008 Chapbook Contest, is a stellar debut indeed. Brainy, defiant, and precise, these poems explore form and light and sorrowing and sonoluminescence. Moods shift and flicker from line to line, going from doomed to wakeful, desirous to suspicious and unwilling. Each poem is its own tiny constellation of language and lilies, pleasures and pressures, that resist and yield in equal measure.

5" x 8", 56pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $9.00.

ISBN: 978-1-934832-18-9.

Barbara Maloutas

Practices: Barbara Maloutas

(2003 Chapbook Contest winner)

Our 2003 chapbook contest winner, this chapbook is a real treat--featuring diagrammy images paired with prose poems. Easily our most diagrammatic chapbook, Practices is a feast for the eyes and mouth. Check out her work in DIAGRAM issues [3.2] and [5.4].

5.5" x 8.5", 32pp. $6.00.

ISBN 0-9725095-3-4

 

[out of print]
Barbara Maloutas

Of Which Anything Consists: Barbara Maloutas

This is Barbara's second chapbook with NMP. (See also the out-of-print Practices.)

"Expertly weaving various textual matter into beautiful, nuanced, and finely balanced form/content patterns, Barbara Maloutas's Of Which Anything Consists is a serial exercise in radical apposition that finally puts a new spin on an old teleological argument: thus; all things being equal; all things are equal; after all." —Harold Abramowitz

"In Of Which Anything Consists, Barbara Maloutas explores consciousness responding to the four elements of our material world. Here is the record of consciousness feeling and thinking of itself in response to what is most elemental. Employing a broken idiom, haltingly clear, Maloutas's language approaches the boundaries of the world with a strange and wonderful grace. We should not be surprised, however, because in Maloutas's poetry, language and the liminal world are drawn to each other as strangers who find in the presence of the other a strange and pure joy." —Jon Thompson

"Barbara Maloutas's remarkable Of Which Anything Consists is a marvelous testament to the four sources of the earth's traditional elements—water, fire, earth and air—in which the poet miraculously balances associations, both naturally symbolically and linguistically dissociative, to create new relationships between the forces of our lives. Ultimately, Maloutas's impassioned associations cry out for our culture's lack of understanding of the relationships between the essential elements of our living world, yet her work poetically embraces our potential relationship with all of the elements which define our lives: "pure air enters the lungs...before nailing down windows for winter...." Maloutas's work is an astonishingly poetic achievement." —Douglas Messerli

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 60pp, perfect bound. $9.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-32-5.

 
Peter Markus

The Moon is a Lighthouse: Peter Markus

The one and only. This is a prose chapbook—often going lyric, but still they're stories—interested in mud, the girl, the moon, the river, the fish, and the ever-present brothers. Markus is creating a strange new world in his prose, and he keeps going back to it again and again. This is beautiful, mysterious, primal, and often very strange.

Check out his work in DIAGRAM issue [3.4].

5.5" x 8.5", 40 pp. $6.00.

ISBN 0-9725095-4-2

 

Matt Mason

Mistranslating Neruda: Matt Mason

One of the odder projects we've ever taken on. Mistranslating Neruda is a translation of Pablo Neruda's poetry by a poet who knows very little Spanish. The general arc of Neruda's poems comes through regardless, and it's almost as if Mason is channeling Neruda, or reconstructing him out of more American fragments. This book is a stunning and unusual achievement.

Check out his work in DIAGRAM issue [2.1].

5.5" x 8.5", 36pp. $5.00.

ISBN: 0-9725095-2-6

 

Karyna McGlynn

Scorpionica: Karyna McGlynn (2nd Edition)

These are dark and playful, sometimes brutal, seemingly confessional poems. Here you will find: long electric hair, death by tetherball rope, sex, termite-infested houses, potato salads, prehistoric birds, body of missing teen found in family shed, a cousin's slender curling neck, and suburban barbarism, among much more.

This second edition is reprinted in paperback with a new cover.

5" x 8", 40pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-43-1

 

Marc McKee
McKee

What Apocalypse?: Marc McKee

(2008 Chapbook Contest winner)

An oddity, an excavation, an exclamation, an excoriation, a string of direct addresses to the world—both the one we know and the brightly-colored one just undeneath our every precipice, this chapbook is fabulous in all senses of the word, including burning Camaros, prosthetic limbs, Lethe, the poet Jason Bredle, the Wig-o-Rama, a repurposed porpoise, terror, beauty, love, the cinema, sharks, and much light. 56pp of gloriousness, you'll want to read it.

5.5" x 8.5", 56pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $9.00.

[press release & order form]

ISBN: 978-1-934832-17-2.

Ben Mirov

I is to Vorticism: Ben Mirov

(2009 Chapbook Contest winner)

Bad-assed, smart, and woven of very rich thread, Mirov's debut is an awesome and highly entertaining one. Let's hear from the experts on the subject:

"A recurring character in the poetry of Ben Mirov is Ben Mirov, part charming host, part self-inflicted lab experiment in a debut dedicated to demonstrating our daily, perilous transformations. These poems are sudden, agile, heart-strong, and as wonderfully unsolvable as their analogical title. Welcome to the surgical theater. You're finally going to learn how to sleep with your eyes open." --Dobby Gibson

Also: "These poems and parables celebrate the idea of no self, even as they sing a host of eccentric alter-egos and delightfully strange secret-identities into being. Using 'interstellar ventriloquism,' Ben Mirov is able to inhabit several worlds at once. He deftly mixes the mythic with the mundane, the literary with the cartoonish, sincerity and simulacra. The result is an impressive, often hilarious, book that truly works on many levels." --Elaine Equi

5" x 8", 48pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $9.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-21-9. [pdf press release]

 

Ron Mohring

The David Museum: Ron Mohring

(2002 Chapbook Contest winner)

Still a classic, still selling well, our 2002 chapbook contest winner is more traditional poetry than some of our titles, but is just fantastic. Ron's work is tender, heart-wrecking, and beautiful. Reminscent at times of some of Mark Doty's poems (in both form and content, we think), this chapbook is lovely, dark, and deep. Go here. Read this.

Check out his work in DIAGRAM issues [2.1] and [2.3].

5.5" x 8.5", 40pp. $5.00.

ISBN: 0-9725095-1-8

 

Ander Monson

Our Aperture: Ander Monson

Elegaic and occasionally formal as always, this new collection of Monson's poems explores virtual and physical spaces, lining up world after world after world. These poems list, go associative, riffing on the manifestations of our manufactured lives. From methylchloroisothiazolinone, the wonderfully-named shampoo ingredient, to actor Wil Wheaton and digital shivs, these poems explore the muchness and emptiness of our lives.

5.5" x 8.5", 40pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-03-5

Trey Moody

"Reading Trey Moody's poems feels a little like standing among flags slapping in a bright wind in a field of flags, except that it's the middle of the night and each flag moves according to its own force. This new, serious, vivid, original voice reports from necessity. These beautiful poems are layered, foreboding, magnetic, preternaturally wise." —Kathleen Peirce

"When I was a boy, I choked on a piece of candy outside the kitchen window for a few minutes while watching my parents making dinner. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't want to scare them. Our existence was so separate, a dying and a doing well, an outside and an inside. Trey Moody's poems hover in that cold, wet, refrigerator-lit place between the dying and the doing well, the outside and the inside. His poems are the thoughts of the person you love who is always standing behind you, slowly and silently suffocating. But they're not afraid to say hello, and please, and I'm scared." —Zachary Schomburg

"Artful without being pretentious, well-made without being staid, Trey Moody's investigations of our weird and ordinary world are a little off, by which I mean that they're onto something. Read 'em and be crept into."—Graham Foust

5" x 8", 48pp, perfect bound. $9.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-26-4. [press release & order form]

 
Rachel Moritz

The Winchester Monologues: Rachel Moritz

(2005 Chapbook Contest winner)

Check out her work in DIAGRAM issues [3.3], [4.3], [5.5]

Rachel Moritz's chapbook consists of one long, researched (occasionally-digressing-into-prose) poem, combined with a set of poems touring the Winchester house. This is an exceptionally fine poetic debut.

5.5" x 8.5", 48 pp. $8.00.

ISBN 0-9762092-2-5

[press release & order form]

Rachel Moritz

Night-Sea: Rachel Moritz

Rachel's new chapbook is gorgeous, languagey, and strange. Haunting is one word we might use to define it. Also amazing. If you liked The Winchester Monologues (and who didn't), then here's more Moritz for you. If you don't know The Winchester Monologues, you are missing out like crazy.

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 56pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $9.00.

ISBN: 978-1-934832-16-5.

 

Jennifer Moss
Cover Image

Beast, to Be Your Friend: Jennifer Moss

This chapbook is a strange beast indeed. Beautiful and odd in equal measure, these poems charm, are charms themselves collected on a string, shining, shrinking, shirking all of their duties, opting instead for play. Instead they make up a tiny bestiary (birds, goats, calves, cows, centaurs, octopi, zebras, dogs, and more) and court the darkness under everything.

5" x 8", 48pp, perfect bound, rocking color cover. $8.00.

[press release]

ISBN: 978-1-934832-19-6.

Simone Muench

Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum.: Simone Muench

One of the more straight-ahead lineated poetry chapbooks we've published, Simone dazzles with her wordplay and associative logic. this chapbook certainly has a female bent (we hesitate to say feminist, in that it's not overtly political). Her other two books are available from Sarabande Books and Helicon Nine Editions.

Check out her work in DIAGRAM issue [3.4].

5.5" x 8.5", 44 pp. $6.00.

ISBN 0-9725095-5-0

[out of print]
Joshua Poteat

In a litany that is both a grand introduction and the mournful aftermath, Joshua Poteat celebrates, serenades, and grieves the animal passing through the frame in an accident and a perfection of timing. Using a rigid formal principle—9 fully-stopped lines per stanza, each opening with "For the animal"—Poteat carves a multi-faceted crystal prism, taking in the white light of anaphora and scattering out unpredictable bands of composite color. The animal too reveals the layered nature of things: it "pulls from the taxidermy an arsenic shawl"; it "takes silence from the milk"; it hears and measures the "sound of whiteness over the city." Arriving while leaving, the animal is unreliable and steadfast, a witness and accessory, abandoned and preserved. Mimicking the human—or, anthropomorphized by the human—the animal "holds the nail gun," "removes its wig," "replaces abundance with Klonopin." The swelling chords of cognitive dissonance grow deafening until, beyond our perception's ability and alongside the animal, we visit "the place where names burst like clouds," climb "a ladder of withering blood," and finally "survey the atmosphere." A welcome vision from a heart trapped in a landscape of contradiction. —Oni Buchanan

5"x8", 40pp., $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-42-4. [press release & order form]

 

John Pursley

A Conventional Weather: John Pursley III

These poems include all of the following: supermarket fluourescence, wood thrushes, Chet Baker, geological strata, periodicity, failure, kerosene, gasoline, and varieties of light. Plus more of course. They're restless, thoughtful, always in motion. You will enjoy following their constantly surprising and entertaining gaze.

[press release & order form]

5.5" x 8.5", 48pp. $8.00.

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-3-5.

Sima Rabinowitz

Murmuration: Sima Rabinowitz

2004 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest finalist Sima Rabinowitz brings you a chapbook exploring the interior lives of spiritualists, scientists, and taxonomists.

5.5" x 8.5", 36pp. $8.00.

ISBN: 0-9762092-6-8

[press release & order form]

 

Justin Runge

PRAISE FOR PLAINSIGHT:

At once documentary in its plain-spoken observations and attuned to the romance of place, this chapbook buzzes with people laboring, cowering ranch houses, food courts and "failed utopias." A history and projective future of the Plains, Runge's poems vibrate with particulars and possibilities. —Megan Kaminski

Justin Runge's staccato travel narrative migrates across Nebraska, marking its stations, east to west, by way of mile and exit numbers on Interstate 80, the ghosted path of the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails. Disembodied in its vehicle, the thinking eye of these poems passes through the placed and put structures in the ether of the lost prairie as if passing the way stations on the road to Compostela, or Basho's narrow road north. At once a feature article and catchall, an elegy and an invitation to new vision, Plainsight reports and collects, laments and reflects: "Everything / is crushed / by this sky, / as if a vise / grip forms / from the ground / and it. Dark / mouth. Posts / but no lights." Here the world is recognized by one of its own. "As Roman / decay was / built in," Runge builds in subtle insight, deftly scored: "Two functions / here: departure / and effluvia." —Peter Streckfus

5" x 8", 56pp, $9

ISBN 978-1-934832-38-7

[press release & order form]

 
Lauren Shapiro

Yo-Yo Logic: Lauren Shapiro

There is a kind of alluring, cosmic deadpan to these poems that deftly unveils our contemporary experience of its peculiar and sometimes even Romantic wonders. Playful and impulsive, mirthful and marauding, a little reckless and a lot wry, Lauren Shapiro sees right through the world and feels it deeply with a heart full of butter. Welcome to the gingerbread house. You won't leave hungry. —dobby gibson

"To all you jaded poetry hipsters out there, I double-dog dare you to read Lauren Shapiro's Yo-Yo Logic and not fall passionately and unironically in love with these poems' sly sincerity and hawk-eyed humor. Go ahead, try." —Nick Lantz

'"I've lived / on the edge of an abyss that doesn't even exist,' deadpans the canny speaker of this book of bent syllogisms, whose every line upends the sly logic of the line before. With her feet on the 'moving floor' of contemporary culture, and her head buzzing with 'a love of theory in which the proposition never / leads to the conclusion,' Lauren Shapiro is a master of the declarative sentence, the wisecrack that cracks the doors of perception just enough to glimpse an infinite horizon beyond the umbrella-filled drinks at the chi-chi bar." —Suzanne Buffam

[press release & order form]

5" x 8", 48pp, perfect bound. $9.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-31-8.

Michael Sowder

A Calendar of Crows: Michael Sowder

(2001 Chapbook Contest winner)

Michael Sowder was our first contest winner back in 2001. While he has gone on to bigger glories, this chapbook is still essential. It is an actual calendar (12 poems, 12 months) of crows (plus of course the term describes a group of crows). By turns funny and wrenching, we endorse this chapbook wholeheartedly.

Check out his work in DIAGRAM issue [2.1].

5.5" x 8.5", 36pp. $5.00.

ISBN: 0-9725095-0-X

 

Matthias Svalina

Creation Myths: Mathias Svalina

(2007 Chapbook Contest winner)

This book offers, as the title suggests, a variety of creation myths that come in as beautiful, thoughtful, bizarre, hilarious, absurd, theological, disturbing, wack, and generally spectacular. Svalina has answers to most, if not all, of your theological questions concerning dimensionality, bacon, Larry Bird, teambuilding, chemistry, Des Moines, office supplies, and unexpected catastrophe.

[download press release]

5.5" x 8.5", 44pp. $8.00.

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-9-7.

 

Molly Tenenbaum

Old Voile: Molly Tenenbaum

A finalist in the 2004 contest, this manuscript was so good that we had to publish it regardless. Molly's work is one of a kind. She also plays old time music, and publishes poems widely. This book is lovely, airy (mostly), and playful.

Check out her work in DIAGRAM issues [5.3] and [4.4]

5.5" x 8.5", 32 pp. $7.00.

ISBN 0-9762092-0-9

 

G. C. Waldrep

The Batteries: G. C. Waldrep

this lovely chapbook, a lyric meditation on the now-abandoned California seacoast fortifications of the Marin Headlands, is unfortunately out of print. In typical Waldrep fashion, these longer poems are thoughtful and evocative, introspective and fluid, above all, luminous. Includes photographs by Jennifer MacKenzie.

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

ISBN: 0-9762092-5-X.

[out of print]
Eric Weinstein

Vivisection: Eric Weinstein, 2010 Chapbook Contest winner

"Reading these poems bring to mind the precision, the imagination and the profound questioning of being of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings where metal and flesh would seem to mate and mesh to be animated in perpetual movement. With a preternatural mastery of meter and rhyme, Weinstein's verses become wonderful human machines to convey, with the precision of scalpels, the complex uncertainties and the sorrows of living." —Breyten Breytenbach

"These elegant lines cut deep, not into bodies but into thoughts, thoughts about bodies, about the pain, shame, and delight of incarnation. For Eric Weinstein, poetry may be vivisection, but vivisection is, for him, metaphysical, an art of awe and understanding, where it is not so much poetry as our own contradictions that rend us, that appear to us, in these pages, with such an arresting tension, between galaxy and microbe, flesh and metal, living and dead. These poems peer into the dark." —Joseph Donahue

"Weinstein's Vivisection exposes the beating heart of its subjects with no loss of life: these remarkable poems are pensive yet urgent, allusive yet never needlessly elusive, grounded yet never sentimental. If this is surgical poetry, its implements—graceful precision, incisive thought, a meticulous accounting of the self's sacred and fungible parts—are wielded by a poet of significant subtlety and skill. ‘I have a heart & so I know / how to make one,' writes Weinstein—and the reader who fully registers the tensile structure and pulsing warmth of these poems is inclined to agree." —Seth Abramson

"What is this quintessence of dust to me? Hamlet asks a flummoxed, completely overmatched duo pressed into the service of politicians, not more than a breath or two after he's exclaimed man to be a piece of work. As if in answer, Eric Weinstein launches Vivisection, this volley of vaulting philosophies. Here, the vehicles of body that give humankind its various and temporary residences are real, fragile, desirous, terrible pieces of work. In one poem after another, the hearts and the brains tough out another moment or month in their nearly involuntary quest to endure. But in the face of inexorable finitude, Weinstein's poems know and sing what we need to remember, what poems themselves remind us: that the brevity and transience that we might otherwise rue charges our existence with meaning. Detail by luminous detail, Vivisection insists on the value and significance of the vast co-op that is life, sentient and non-. In doing so, he implicates us in a sad and gorgeous summons to a world that we might otherwise only fear." —Marc McKee

5" x 8", 72pp, perfect bound. $9.00. ISBN: 978-1-934832-25-7. [press release & order form]

Khaty Xiong

Luminous and feral, Deer Hour is part creation documentary of the worlds we build for ourselves with language, part elegy for the fact that it is impossible to generate closure without enclosure. In a world where humanity is bound to "red cedars whose secrets keep us logging" as well as "childhood / writing from the front lines," Xiong would guide us through the anxieties of being "bound in sore action, / unable to reconcile / the wild & the not-wild" with poetry that is determined to witness while resistant to the complicities of history. Here, as in other crucial, contemporary poetics, the acts of speaking and writing are not halves of a pristine poetic whole, but yearning, expressive portions that remain troubled by the absence of a bearable relationship to the world. The resulting work is of an important new perspective that would liberate us from the dualism of what is sayable and free us into an argument about what is livable. Read this book if you have ever contemplated the institution of civilization, known the love of language, or taken one step toward the wild and opened your eyes. —Lo Kwa Mei-en, author of Yearling

Poems, 5"x8", 44pp., $9, ISBN 978-1-934832-46-2. [press release & order form]

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

A Ghost as King of the Rabbits: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

2005 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest finalist, and winner of the University of Iowa Poetry Prize. This long fragmented poem plays on the Wallace Stevens poem of the inverted title. This chapbook kills and kills. Check out his work in DIAGRAM issues [4.3], [5.4]

5.5" x 8.5", 40 pp. $7.00.

ISBN 0-9762092-3-3

[press release & order form in pdf]

 

Vincent Zompa

Jacket of the Straits: Vincent Zompa

Presented here for you: three long and beautiful, spatial and fragmented, poems, variously influenced by Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, by James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, and by influence itself. There's much water here, and language, book and song, all taken apart and reassembled into something surprising and new.

5.5" x 8.5", 40pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-0-9791501-8-0

Arianne Zwartjes

stitched (a surface opens): Arianne Zwartjes

These intricate essays use mathematics and poetry, the intersection of language and thought, to interrogate and describe the world. The cast list includes Gauss, Euclid, Weil, Rumi, Heidegger, Eliot, Carson, and Calvino. Thinky and beautiful, Zwartjes's essays are open, electrical explorations in space.

5.5" x 8.5", 48pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-02-8