Order any 3 of the following backlist titles (at right) for $15 + $5 shipping to anywhere in the US. Enter the last names of the titles in the order box at right, or the comments section of your order.

Eligible chapbooks:

• Kristy Bowen's Feign
• Jason Bredle's A Twelve Step Guide
• Melissa Ginsburg's Arbor
• Andrew C. Gottlieb's Halflives
• Paul Guest's Exit Interview
• Charles Jensen's The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon
• Peter Markus's The Moon is a Lighthouse
• Matt Mason's Mistranslating Neruda
• Ron Mohring's The David Museum
• Ander Monson's Our Aperture
• Rachel Moritz's The Winchester Monologues
• John Pursley III's A Conventional Weather
• Sima Rabinowitz's Murmuration
• Michael Sowder's A Calendar of Crows
• Mathias Svalina's Creation Myths
• Molly Tenenbaum's Old Voile
• Joshua Marie Wilkinson's A Ghost as King of the Rabbits
• Vincent Zompa's Jacket of the Straits
• Arianne Zwartjes' stitched (a surface opens)

Buy a subscription to the entire 2009 chapbook series. Only $21 (+ shipping) gets you Ben Mirov's I is to Vorticism, Genine Lentine's Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes, and Brent Armendinger's Undetectable.

Subscriptions also make sweet sweet gifts, we might add.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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

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

Scorpionica: Karyna McGlynn

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.

5.5" x 8.5", 36pp. $8.00

ISBN: 978-1-934832-01-1

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.

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]

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

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

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]

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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