I is to Vorticism: Ben Mirov

(the 2009 NMP/DIAGRAM 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.

[pdf press release]

ISBN: 978-1-934832-21-9.

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

(a 2009 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest finalist)

"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. [pdf press release]

Undetectable: Brent Armendinger

(a 2009 NMP/DIAGRAM chapbook contest finalist)

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.

[pdf press release]

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