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(First the frontlist in order of release, then the backlist, in alphabetical order.)
[author, alphabetical] |
[book] |
[description] |
[order!] |
| (2012 chapbook series subscription: all 6 chapbooks published in 2012) |
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This year NMP is publishing 6, count them, 6, chapbooks in its series. That's a lot of chapbooks! But they're all so good. We don't have covers for all of them yet, but we do have the first two, George Kalamaras's contest-winning The Mining Camps of the Mouth and Weston Cutter's All Black Everything (covers at left).
Subscribe to the whole 2012 series. You'll get all six for $39, which includes shipping in the USA (they're $9 ea + shipping normally). You don't even have to remember to buy the others. We'll just ship them out when they're released, one at a time, culminating in December 2012.
You'll get periodic installments, then, of awesome prose & poetry in monster designs: George & Weston's chapbooks (out now—Weston's is poetry; George's is a hybrid beastie). Lucy Anderton's poetricious the flung you (11.15.12); a fiction chapbook, Caren Beilin's Americans, Guests, or Us (11.15.12); Brandon Krieg's Source to Mouth (12.01.12); and Justin Runge's Plainsight (12.01.12), and perhaps a special gift around the holiday season too.
What better way to give a gift that comes in installments? So... |
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[2011 chapbook series subscription] |
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Oh yes, it's the chapbookiest time of year. The four new NMP chapbooks are rolling out, and the subscription is the way to get them, in order: chapbook contest winner James D'Agostino's Slur Ouevre on 11.15.11; Karen Carcia's On Subjects of Which We Know Nothing, also on 11.15.11; Barbara Maloutas's Of Which Anything Consists on 12.01.11; and lastly Lauren Shapiro's Yo-Yo Logic, on 01.15.12. If you order the set, we'll ship them as early as we have them, even if it's before pub date.
The whole set is $30, shipping included (in the USA; shipping's extra internationally).
What better way to give a gift that comes in installments?
Reasons for ordering may include, but are not limited to, the following: (1) to remind the person that you love them; (2) to remind the recipient that you like them somewhat; (3) to remind the recipient that you thought they were punk rock; (4) to remind the recipient that you thought they were a good writer with impeccable taste; (5) to remind them to brush their teeth every once in a while, like every month or two; (6) to woo (90% proven success rate); (7) to curse (50% chance of cursing recipient or self, if you miss the saving throw); (8) to teach them to read. |
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New Releases, |
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Quite Awesome, We Assure You, |
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Are Below |
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| Lucy Anderton |
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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] |
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| Caren Beilin |
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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] |
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| Weston Cutter |
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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] |
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| George Kalamaras |
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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] |
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| Brandon Krieg |
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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] |
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| Justin Runge |
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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] |
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The Backlist Continues |
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to Rock |
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Stephanie Anderson |
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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.
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Brent Armendinger |
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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.
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Kristy Bowen |
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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.
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Jason Bredle |
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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
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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. |
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Jennifer S. Cheng |
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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. |
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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. |
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Melissa Ginsburg |
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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.
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Andrew C. Gottlieb |
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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]
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Arielle Greenberg |
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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
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Paul Guest |
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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.
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Zachary Harris |
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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. |
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Charles Jensen |
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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. |
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Genine Lentine |
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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]
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Chloë Joan López |
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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. |
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Barbara Maloutas |
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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
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[out of print] |
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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. |
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Peter Markus |
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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
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Matt Mason |
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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
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Karyna McGlynn |
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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
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Marc McKee |
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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. |
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Ben Mirov |
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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]
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Ron Mohring |
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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
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Ander Monson |
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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 |
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Trey Moody |
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"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] |
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Rachel Moritz |
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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] |
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Rachel Moritz |
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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. |
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Jennifer Moss |
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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. |
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Simone Muench |
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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] |
John Pursley |
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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. |
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Sima Rabinowitz |
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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]
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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. |
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Michael Sowder |
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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
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Matthias Svalina |
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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.
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Molly Tenenbaum |
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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
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G. C. Waldrep |
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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 |

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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] |
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Joshua Marie Wilkinson |
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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]
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Vincent Zompa |
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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 |
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Arianne Zwartjes |
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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 |
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