Sunday, November 20, 2016

Sympathetic Nervous System by Jackie Clark (free ebook PDF)



It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser, or are using a mobile device. Use the links below to download a copy. If you're using an iPhone or iPad, open the pdf in iBooks.



Get the PDF (1.4 MB)

In this case, the wide-page format (10 inches across in the original design) may make reading on a smart phone more challenging. For a print-ready version, use this link:

Get the print-ready PDF (1.4 MB)





Printed copies of this chapbook are sold out, but the full text will also be included in our six-in-one paperback chapbook compilation volume, BOUND: The Second Array (forthcoming).

We have several more free PDF chapbooks to release, very soon! There are several already available on our site.



Monday, November 14, 2016

Collage poems by Sandra Simonds (free PDF ebook)



It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser, or are using a mobile device. Use the links below to download a copy. If you're using an iPhone or iPad, open the pdf in iBooks.



Get the PDF (12.5 MB, all images)




Sandra Simonds is the author of six books of poetry: Orlando (forthcoming, Wave), Further Problems with Pleasure (forthcoming, Akron), Steal It Back (Saturnalia), The Sonnets (Bloof), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof). Her poems have been included in the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014 and have appeared in many literary journals, including Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston ReviewPloughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an assistant professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. 

This untitled chapbook of collage poems is an bonus addition to the 2016 series from Bloof Books. Handmade copies were created and distributed by the poet in September 2016, followed by this digital release by Bloof in November 2016.

ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT: A text-only version of this chapbook with image descriptions is available on request. Please email info at bloof books dot com to request it. 

Bloof Books Chapbook Series

ISSN 2373- 1648 Online
This is the electronic edition
November 2016

We have several more free PDF chapbooks to release, very soon! There are several already available on our site.




Sunday, November 13, 2016

scenes from the lives of my parents by Pattie McCarthy (free ebook PDF)



It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser, or are using a mobile device. Use the links below to download a copy. If you're using an iPhone or iPad, open the pdf in iBooks.



Get the PDF (791 KB)





Printed copies of this chapbook are sold out, but the full text is also included in our six-in-one paperback chapbook compilation volume, BOUND: The First Array.

We have several more free PDF chapbooks to release, very soon! There are several already available on our site.



Thursday, November 10, 2016

I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel by Nikki Wallschaleger (free ebook PDF)



It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser, or are using a mobile device. Use the links below to download a copy. If you're using an iPhone or iPad, open the pdf in iBooks.



Get the PDF (1 MB)
Color cover & interior




Since these poems are designed to be memes, we have also released them individually as .jpg files. Please feel free to share them, with credit to Nikki (and a link where possible).

Meme .jpgs for sharing (500–650 KB each)

And remember: Nikki's book of sonnets, Crawlspace, is forthcoming from Bloof in Spring 2017! More about that here.

Printed copies of this chapbook are sold out, limited to a run of 150 copies released earlier this year. We may have limited swag from this book (posters, postcards, etc.) as we approach the release of Nikki's new book.

ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT: A text-only version of this chapbook with image descriptions is available on request. Please email info at bloof books dot com to request it. 

We have several more free PDF chapbooks to release, very soon! There are several already available on our site.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

EMPIRE WASTED by Becca Klaver


Empire Wasted
now available!


We are thrilled to bring you this perfect-for-an-election-year-at-the-end-of-the-world new book from one of our favorite poets, Becca Klaver.

"Empire Wasted is an astonishing book, anthemic in its catchiness and the power of its arguments. From the suite of 'Decade Zero,' the years so vacant they don’t even have a name, and the concomitant attraction of the very dreariest productions of the 90s, through to the neo-di Prima fervor of the revolutionary letters, it hits all the right notes." —Kevin Killian

Preorder for $12 + free shipping. That's $7 off. (Reg. $16 + $3 shipping.) 
$16 + $3 shipping*

*Domestic shipping for US and Canada only. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.

Plus, the first 50 orders come with a limited-edition postcard set featuring poems and excerpts from the book.
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, forthcoming 2016), and several chapbooks. She's the cohost of the Real Wives of Bohemia podcast with comedian Lauren Besser, and the curator of a new series of Tiny Talks currently underway at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop. (More.)
 

One of the limited-edition postcards

More about EMPIRE WASTED


Think of the empire waist as a dress with a lot of breathing room, in which the body can move within ample space while still remaining hidden. A comparably generous poetics suffuses Becca Klaver’s Empire Wasted, a collection that aims to fashion for the world new space to move inside. Using technology as an instrument to stitch together materials as disparate as tweets and autobiography, this book pays homage to schools it has inherited while thrusting dizzyingly into its own brainy vortex.

Empire Wasted metabolizes the twentieth century into the fashionable neons of a numbing regime. In a fit of collage, the Internet speaks from its most comfortable of media troll outfits, Manhattan gleams in apocalyptic shine and false prophecy, and the 90s deploy a feminist artillery of bell-bottoms, Discmans, and snapping barrettes. As readers, we witness a poetry that shimmies away from its capitalist, patriarchal heirs in favor of a feminist documentary lyric, a poetry that opts to stay in its room all night with Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, and Reality Bites rather than reenter the party booming below.

Sample poems 


From "Decade Zero"at Sink Review

Announcement! We're doing another book with Peter Davis in 2017.


The future rocks so hard. BAND NAMES by Peter Davis is joining CRAWLSPACE by Nikki Wallschlaeger on our 2017 list, scheduled for fall. More about this to come!

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Jennifer L. Knox in NYC: May 31, June 1 & 2



Tuesday, May 31: New York, NY / 7:00 p.m.
Jennifer L. Knox, Ada Limón & Jason Schneiderman Bryant Park Reading Room Avenue of the Americas between 40th & 42nd The Reading Room is on the 42nd side of the park (look for the burgundy umbrellas) Bryant Park Events Calendar
Wednesday, June 1: New York, NY / 7:00 p.m.
Jennifer L. Knox, Laura Sims & Carey McHugh Pen & Brush 29 East 22nd Street Facebook Events Page Series Events Calendar
Thursday, June 2: Brooklyn, NY / 7:00 p.m. Sharon Mesmer, Jennifer L. Knox, Natalie Eilbert & Jason Schneiderman Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop 126A Front Street, DUMBO Events Calendar

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Process Pamphlet #1: Censored Interview, CAConrad interviewed by Jasmine Platt

online

This is an unscheduled flash project—when we heard this piece needed a home we jumped at the chance & completed the editing/design in about ten hours. Preorder to reserve a copy if you want the printed chapbook. (The digital releases are free.) We don't know how many of these there will be. Right now we're not putting a cap on the print run.

The Library of Congress* Censored Interview

CAConrad interviewed by Jasmine Platt

*Not published by the Library of Congress

Prose / Poetics
Bloof Books Process Pamphlets #1

May 2016
5 x 6 inches, hand trimmed
Mohawk i-Cream Eco Tone Cover
Inkjet-printed with Avery label** & Sharpie
Laser-printed Mohawk Natural Smooth 70lb Text interior
Saddle stapled
16 pages | $3*

THIS CHAPBOOK IS SOLD OUT, but the free ebook versions are linked below.

*$1 from each printed copy sold will be donated to LAMBDA LEGAL (www.lambdalegal.org) for their tireless battle to protect LGBTQ people in the United States. (They are not affiliated with the press or this project, except as our designated beneficiary for donations.) The other $2 covers materials & postage.

**Cover label may vary in color across the print run

FREE SHIPPING is for US/Canada only. Additional shipping is required for international orders. Place international orders via PayPal (Square will not accept them), and we will email you with details (and if you don't like them, we will refund). The extra postage would eat into what we're able to donate to Lambda Legal.

EXCERPTS:

"This is a call to poets to stand together and vow to never change what we write and what we say when any part of the government body asks this of us." 
"No matter how many poems I write I cannot undo my complicity, I cannot reverse the sea of gravestones, and my poems will never be an apology worth a single life taken by our collective national ignorance, greed and irrational fear." 
"We need as many people being creative right now as possible because it is the creative people who will solve the problems facing the survival of our species."

BLURBS/REVIEWS

"It appears that the Library of Congress asked CAConrad to participate in a new interview series with poets, only to turn around afterward and decline to run the piece! Lucky for us, and not so much for LOC, Shanna Compton at Bloof Books as published The Library of Congress* CENSORED INTERVIEW, as it is now titled, as a full printed chapbook. Compton has also made the publication available as a free download.

"Conrad’s conversation with Platt is unsurprisingly straightforward about the realities of being a citizen–much less a poet–in a climate of injustice, war, and unrest. Conrad also speaks to how somatic practice affects his poetry, what it means to speak through character (as in The Book of Frank), what a vision for queer poetry might look like, and more."


AUTHOR BIOS

CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for their mother and helping her shoplift. They are the author of eight books of poetry and essays. The latest, ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books), is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. They are a Pew Fellow and have also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross. For their books and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit CAConrad.blogspot.com.

Jasmine Platt lives in the melodic belly of the word. She is an English Writing graduate of Boise State University, with previous membership to both the University of Maryland’s MFA program and to the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress. At present, she is a librarian pursuing a career in public arts administration. She also pursues bones, aspen leaves, and the cynical crashing of the waves. She lives in Idaho.

COLOPHON

The Library of Congress Censored Interview is the inaugural volume in a new (and probably irregular) Bloof Books handmade series called Process Pamphlets.

This chapbook is being simultaneously released in free e-book & PDF formats. You may SHARE, COPY & REDISTRIBUTE this pamphlet for *noncommercial purposes* with attribution to the authors and bloofbooks.com.

 DIGITAL VERSIONS AVAILABLE AT GOOGLE DRIVE 

PDF print (as pages) 
PDF print (as spreads)  
PDF interactive (clickable links, as pages) 
PDF interactive (clickable links, as spreads)

ePub (reflowable) 

(I'm not putting up a .mobi file since they have not been widely used in the past. However, if you read on a Kindle and want it that way, comment or send me a note. If I get a lot of requests I will. —SC)

Sunday, May 1, 2016

SOLD OUT: I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel by Nikki Wallschlaeger




I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel

Nikki Wallschlaeger


Full-color interior on 80# text with gloss
Cardstock cover in Antique Gray Linen
Hand sewn
5.5 x 6 inches
28 pages + 4 text panels printed inside fold-out cover
$8.00*

*Domestic shipping for US and Canada only. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.

Bloof Books Chapbook Series
Vol. 3: Issue 4 (2015)
ISSN: 2373-163x
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES 150 COPIES
  SOLD OUT: August 2016  
A free PDF version is coming soon

I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel is the first graphic chapbook from Bloof Books, and the fourth in the 2015 series, containing 25 full-color photographs, plus 2 supplementary text pieces by poet-artist Nikki Wallschlaeger.

Trifold design includes introductory text on front flap and inside cover. Another text piece is printed at the inside back cover. The full-color 28-page photo booklet is hand-sewn into the cover. Expands to 16.5 inches wide when fully opened.

A selfie-by-proxy sequence of sorts, each portrait of the Julia doll (Mattel, 1969–1970, after the television series starring Diahann Carrol) combines the ultra-condensed gravitational effect of Wallschlaeger's poetry, the hyper-consumability of the internet meme, and a Warholian pop-art palette of color, repetition, and cultural reference.

Excerpts







Each chapbook in the series is released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release, and a year-end combination volume called Bound

About the author

Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of Houses (Horse Less, 2015), and the chapbook I Would Be the Happiest Bird (Horse Less, 2014). She is currently at work on a book of sonnets called Crawlspace, some of which can be found in the Brooklyn RailFanzineElective Affinities, the Account, the Inquisitive Eater, and elsewhere. www.nikkiwallschlaeger.com

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Hours of Opening

 My students are much more open to experimenting with the space of the line than I am. And it’s because they’re better poets. I tell them to write work I would only dream of writing. I lied this week and told them I had written a poem about a special object from my childhood in order to gird them into writing with their objects in mind. The Owl and The Pussycat, the famous Edward Lear nonsense poem, recapitulated as an illustrated book by Hilary Knight, is back in my possession. Every page arranges the scope of an idea’s transition into image and back again. I don’t think I’ve ever been alive. Daily I pass a Polish beer garden and the sign reads, “Hours of Opening” as if the structure were a great plant astonished by its breathing. I walk by the same man in his cubicle forever leaning over to consider his calendar. There is no context for anything we do. As my mother tells it, I used to read The Owl and the Pussycat to my younger brother upside down so that he could read the images. Why does it feel like my life started when I arrived at the foot of a bed. I would read the words upside down but I was reciting. Around this time I killed my older brother’s fish by filling their tank with too much food. The flakes formed a film over their lives and shadowed them to death. As I understand it, recitation is a kind of overfeeding. It is important to connect the girl’s scarf with the growth of the girl’s tail, the shapely feline overtaking the girlflesh, how the shape overthrew its captor is how I first learned to starve. When he lay me down and when he lay me down and when he lay down my neck was the noose around my neck. It was easy to imagine being taken in a boat to elsewhere, freedom became a talisman I stroked to keep me animal. Chronology is a denture and the landscape removes me from its mouth, I the viscous silver string drooping to silk in the parabola. No one has ever sworn they’d change for me. They see I have already brimmed with the blades of my childhood and I’m done for. They see that I have learned to sleep with gold insects swarming my legs. And when I close my eyes, I cannot, for the life of me, ignite. 

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Rhythm Thirteen

 Never put value in a belief. All I do is repeat.
\
I’m astonished by every mouth I’ve had. An orange
/
pushed down my throat. This afternoon I left
\
the office to run in line. My discipline is straight.
/
A crystal falls through me. Fiber drips down my chin
\
as I assess the world smashed into me. I ran 
/
in a line to a window. Every object on its side
\
looks like a beached whale. I think the problem
/
with scene is my death can’t fit inside it. I’m hurt
\
by narrative, the promise of humans to be their verbs.
/
The times I’ve been intellectual, my lips were wet.
\
I pantomime in the pretty gloaming of my youth
/
and push myself through a disc so I don’t have to look
\
anyone in the eye. I need more space. I repeat.
/
I lay down in the road as a girl because I wanted
\
someone to stop me like no one stopped him.
/
Because the car never came, they called me 
\
an attention whore. I’m relearning inventory
/
to repeat myself better. Tonight, Paul said the word 
\
ichor in their poem. I can still feel the god blood
/
melting through the snow. My landscape flattens
\
to one without snow, without rain, without land.
/
I draw the word ichor in the steamy mirror. It drips.
\
I splash the glass with bleach. It drips.
/

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Girl to Complete a Portrait

I can already see the way I presume teenagers are too un
formed to make decisions but I remember my destruction
well. I masturbated to the livejournal community _nakedparts,
a blog made of livejournal users who showed off various
quality photos of their naked bodies. There was a beautiful
woman naked and splayed against a tree, her butt in full
bloom. Spiky blurs of genitals. It could never be fully
satisfying, which was the greatest arousal of all. I read comments
and the tiny wars winnowed in the flesh grids. A man 
commented on a woman’s vag shot, Shave. Another man
condemned the comment, because her full growth was hers.
I was 14, believed feminism to be an older, won battle
despite my body’s multiple invasions and the natural silence
expected. The silence was a tautology and I needed its shape.
Everyone loved a winner and to speak was to lose. So I touched
my naked parts to the safety of a flat screen. I fantasized
posting, amazing the community with my firm figure.
I learned I was desirable when a stranger at the mall threw me
over his shoulders and ran with me screaming to his sedan.
My friends stopped him. Everyone laughed. I was 13
and knew to cry meant I was a prude. I swallowed terror.
I knew I was desirable when Ryan, 21, kept grabbing my butt
in the food court. Everyone laughed. When he found out
where I lived. Got me into the car and led me away.
I show my students Mary Ruefle’s essay, “I Remember, I Remember,”
and she has written “I remember saving everything” after
saying she never did like to save things. Last night I dream
my apartment suffers an electric fire, the second fire of my life.
My landlord screams that I’ve ruined her beautiful house
and she is right. I mastered cateyes. In HS, wrote Chuck Palahniuk
fanfic. My best friend returned from college and said L
drugged and raped him. He slid his hand up my knee, in a gesture
I’ve never allowed myself to understand. My other best friend
fought three women at the mall, ripped out a hoop earring
and kept it on her nightstand with her bracelets. I learned
I was desirable when I used textbooks to cover my butt
in the halls. When S taught me skinniness required a finger
and vigilance. A student comments on Bhanu Kapil’s “Text
to Complete a Text” that she is having difficulty articulating
its genre. Risk is a kind of twin of permission, says Bhanu.
I woke up this morning stunned by the confidence we have
in our houses. There is a belief about houses that is in line
with our capacity to live, that they are upright, secure, impenetrable. 

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

March & April events (AWP, BSPBF & more)




AWP, Los Angeles: March 30–April 2



Though Bloof is not participating in the bookfair at AWP this year, we are pitching in for a joint during Camp Real Pants on Friday night, and several of our poets will be at the conference. Here's where to catch their readings & panels next week:

 Wednesday, March 30 


Sandra Simonds at the AWP Saturnalia Books Party/Reading! (8 PM)

 Thursday, March 31 


Khadijah Queen at Mile-High MFA at AWP, Bookfair Table 623, signing (11 AM)

Ginger Ko at the High Plains Collective - AWP offsite Reading & Art Exhibit (6 PM)

Natalie Eilbert is cohosting Switchback / No, Dear / Gazing Grain / Atlas: an AWP off-site (7 PM)

Natalie Eilbert at the Muzzle, the Offing, and Vinyl plus DANCE PARTY! (8 PM)

 Friday, April 1 


Ginger Ko at Asian-American Writers Reinventing Los Angeles panel (10:30 AM)

Ginger Ko & Natalie Eilbert at Happy Hour with Bloof, Green Mountains Review & Hunger Mountain at Submittable presents Camp Real Pants (6 PM)

Sandra Simonds at Bennington Review & Black Warrior Review Launch Party and Reading (6 PM)

Khadijah Queen is hosting Courting Risk: Epilogue (6:30 PM)

Ben Fama is cohosting Nightboat, Krupskaya, Wonder (7 PM)

Sandra Simonds at Lana Turner and Nightboat Books Reading: AWP Offsite Event (8 PM)

 Saturday, April 2 


Ginger Ko at Craft & _____: Creating Interdisciplinary Possibilities in the MFA panel (10:30 AM)

Khadijah Queen at Spectacular Poetics & the Poetry of Spectacle panel (3 PM)

Ginger Ko at All of Us Witches: An AWP Offsite with Nat. Brut & The Spectacle! (9 PM)

+++ Some of our books will be available in limited quantities at YES FEMMES AWP '16 off-site reading + party (6 PM) +++

 Bloof at Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, April 9–10 


Bloof is going to be tabling at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair the following weekend, April 9th and 10th! Come see us at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum on Porter Street, all day Saturday at Sunday. We'll have a bunch of our handmade chapbooks, all of our books, and some special ephemeral surprises. This is the 10th anniversary of BSPBF, and it's sure to be a great time, as always.

Also in April: Jennifer L. Knox is reading in Ames, Iowa, with Ada Limón on 4/5. Sandra Simonds is doing a mini tour for her new book from Saturnalia, Steal It Back. She'll be in Philadelphia 4/19 and 4/20, DC 4/21, Baltimore 4/23 & Tuscaloosa 4/30—details on these to come. Get the latest & subscribe to our events at Facebook.

Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! by Daniel Borzutzky (SOLD OUT, now available as FREE EBOOK)






Bedtime Stories for the End of the World!
Daniel Borzutzky
SOLD OUT as of September 2015. 
Free PDF released March 2016

Available as an Ebook here or to download as a PDF here.


Hand sewn in black twine with black metal eyelets
Persian Blue covers with dark blue inkjet & gold linocut print
Gold flyleaves
Strathmore Bright White interiors
7 x 7 inches | 40 pages
$8.00

Bloof Books Chapbook Series
Vol. 2: Issue 5
ISSN: 2373-163x (Dec 2014) LIMITED TO 100 COPIES / SOLD OUT
ISSN: 2373-1648 Online (Mar 2016)

Excerpt: 
from In the Blazing Cities of Your Rotten Carcass Mouth 

The children were eating the bushes outside of their former houses that had been crushed by The Bank of America. 
There was a boy in a bush singing an improvised song about a bulldozer that obliterates the bureaucratic centers of the earth. 
Do you remember cheese, he sang to his friend. 
Te acuerdas de la piña? 
Do you remember ferries, he sang to his friend. 
Te acuerdas de los patos? 
Do you remember school bells and cowards and the boys who would come to our yard to eat the scraps of food we threw to them before the city started to blaze? 
Bienvendios a CVS. Si cuenta con tu Extra Care Card please escanea it now. 
There really wasn't money anymore or at least there wasn't money for us. 
The man with the camera kissed me and took photographs of the blood that dripped from my fingers. 
Everyone knew he was CIA. 
He knew for example that the blood that dripped from my face tasted like the blood of the workers assassinated by the Fatherland. 
Then I found a dying shack and I met a man with a chain and he was snoring and talking in his sleep and he smelled like pee and complained he had lost his pension when they privatized the city in the dying days of the rotten carcass economy. 
Looking after the world is a shitty job if you're really not a people person.
Read more of this poem at Pen America.

Photo credit: Sean Patrick Cain
Daniel Borzutzky’s books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007), and Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). His poetry translations include Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for His Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010), among others. His chapbooks include Data Bodies (Holon, 2013), One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad, 2009), and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull, 2007). His writing has been anthologized in The Sonnets: Translating & Rewriting Shakespeare; La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else; A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish. His work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/America Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. He lives in Chicago.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

FAQ: Next open reading period & 2016 subscriptions

Our 2016 Schedule

Getting several questions about this so I'm gonna informally say it here: Bloof Books is full for 2016 for paperbacks.

We took on four extra books midway through 2015 that were not originally on our schedule (a wonderful, beautiful thing, but definitely extra work!) and our 2015 slate of chapbooks has been extended into 2016 as we work together to schedule all the stuff.

Of the 2015 chaps we've still got three more to go: Catie Rosemurgy, Khadijah Queen & Ginger Ko.

In 2016 so far, we've already done one chap, Nikki Wallschlaeger's, and two books—Natalie Eilbert's and Ginger Ko's. K. Lorraine Graham & Danielle Pafunda are coming up with paperbacks next. Then Becca Klaver is scheduled for fall, also in paperback. 

That's a pretty full year. I also have a book (my own) I took off the schedule and would very much like to put back on.

However, I would like to add at least one or two chaps, and later in the year we might be able to open for a brief period to consider 2017 titles of any length, though we also have some things already in the 2017 hopper (not finalized but first in line for consideration).

Anyway, right now that's the goal. 

Our 2016 Subscription

Yes! We can do that. UPDATE: These are now available.

online

BOOKS
Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert
Motherlover by Ginger Ko
The Rest Is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda
Empire Wasted by Becca Klaver
The Hazard Cycle by Shanna Compton

CHAPBOOKS*
Exercises in Painting by Khadijah Queen
First the Burning & Then the Witches by Catie Rosemurgy
Inherit by Ginger Ko

*The chapbooks will be limited in quantity, since each is already half sold out based on existing preorders.

If you're on the Bloof email list (sign up in the right sidebar), you will get first notice of any future Open Reading Periods and Subscription offers, when those happen. 

Thank you for your interest & for supporting all these fantastic books. 

This is the best job ever. 

Shanna, for Bloof

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Every day in April…

 …as we have done for the last several years, Bloof poets will be posting drafts and snippets of new work in progress, as part of Maureen Thorson's inspirational NaPoWriMo.


You can follow the poems here, and via our Facebook and Twitter feeds. Each poet has a tag you can follow here as well, linked in the list below. Some poets may erase their drafts as the next day's posts go up. (Because these poems will likely appear in more finished form elsewhere later.) So stop by often if you want to catch them all.

    Participating Poets    


Shanna Compton
author of For Girls & Others (Bloof 2008) and Brink (Bloof 2013)

Peter Davis
author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! (Bloof 2010) and TINA (Bloof 2013)

Natalie Eilbert
author of Conversations with the Stone Wife (Bloof 2014) and Swan Feast (Bloof 2015)

Farrah Field
guest poet, author of Rising and Wolf & Pilot (Four Way Books)

Hailey Higdon
author of Packing (Bloof, 2013)

Packing also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Becca Klaver
author of Nonstop Pop (Bloof 2013) and Empire Wasted (Bloof, forthcoming in 2016)
Nonstop Pop also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Kirsten Kaschock
author of Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts (Bloof, 2013)
Windowboxing also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Jennifer L. Knox
author of A Gringo Like Me (Bloof 2007), Drunk by Noon (Bloof 2007), The Mysteries of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof 2010), and Days of Shame & Failure (Bloof 2015)

Pattie McCarthy
author of scenes from the lives of my parents (Bloof, 2013)
scenes from the lives of my parents also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Sharon Mesmer
author of Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof 2015)

Jenn Marie Nunes
coauthor of Hymn: An Ovulution (Bloof 2015)

Catie Rosemurgy
author of First the Burning & Then the Witches (Bloof, forthcoming in 2016)

Maureen Thorson (at her own site)
author of The Woman, the Mirror, the Eye (Bloof 2015)

Jared White
author of This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me (Bloof 2013)
This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

 & probably a few more





Friday, February 12, 2016

MOTHERLOVER by Ginger Ko: now available


online




MOTHERLOVER
Ginger Ko
ISBN: 978-0-9965868-2-5
6 x 9 | $15
Trade Paper Original*
80 pages
Distributor: Ingram

Purchase via Square above
Prefer PayPal? Use this button:


Choose your copy/date:
60 advance reader copies available for $12, shipping now
Regular copies will arrive mid-March at $15

Official publication date: April 15, 2016

* NB: This is a redesigned and updated second edition of MOTHERLOVER by Ginger Ko published by Bloof Books. This debut book was briefly released by another press in spring 2015, but did not get the attention it deserved when that press closed unexpectedly soon thereafter. We are promoting our edition as a NEW RELEASE, under the circumstances.

Cover art by Sofi Thanhauser.

From now till early release day, March 1, get it for $12! 

We are pleased to announce the publication of Motherlover, the debut collection by Ginger Ko. This is a work of boldly expressive, emotionally restless poems, in which tonal variation, precision of imagery, and discomfiting honesty shape our understanding of its complex speaker as she attempts to address and process both her personal history and her own ambivalence to the various roles she is expected to fill as a woman, lover, wife, and future mother.

The opening sequence, “Gaslight,” explores the ways in which childhood abuse affects family dynamics, while the second looser section of individual poems called “Body” looks at various ways this history comes to bear in other relationships, in an ongoing way. The final sequence takes as an organizing metaphor the flashing signature of a lighthouse, which in this case Ko has situated in the wide prairies surrounding her as she wrote the book in Laramie, Wyoming. Does her Prairie Lighthouse warn of obstacles ahead, or point toward safe passage? What does it mean to internalize this metaphor, to signal oneself as off/on, to throw out a self-illuminated, searching beam: 

At night I must turn off lights, click the set, and lie in bed like a drowned flower,

dried spice, a glass mannequin filling out my clothes.
  I feel around my head with taps of recognition.

I remember how it feels, but have forgotten how to get there.

I point a flashlight at darkness,
  the light dissipating before touching on a single thing.

[“Night Signature,” p. 73]

PRAISE FOR MOTHERLOVER


"Thick weight we feel for, bowl of poison & chicken feed we do also tip to our lips, gob of fused gold ingots we cough up in the river with the snow falling one etched flake at a time and if a calliope plays, it's not the tune you were expecting. The top of the head a tin toy wound, the body flavor-sodden. Motherlover's hilaria & cool-eyed righteousness, effortless abyss skimmer, cradle of heartless & heartbreaking turns. Here is a degradation as rich in wry indignation as any of us pukes could hope for." —Danielle Pafunda

"In Motherlover  many selves speak: sister, lover, mother, stranger. All speak, though, from one 'body bearing up under puzzlement,' and they speak, not pretending to hear 'angels in the music of a difficult landscape,' but with more imposing purport: to 'weird the grayscale quality of my life.' Ginger Ko's poetry epitomizes poetry's purchase, its capacity to contest the pervasive forces of grayness, of uniformity and conformity. Motherlover is formidable, a fierce weirding." —H. L. Hix

"Ginger Ko's Motherlover is a gut-wrenching and memorable debut, gorgeous in its renderings of discomfort and precise in its sensitivity. Ko slips expertly from density to emotionality, from repulsion to compassion. Her verses are 'razor-wire flowers to punish / those taking what isn't theirs.' This is a book of giving, taking, and remembering, an exploration of memory's insistence, power, and slipperiness. The poems feel for something with their hands, as if in the dark, sliding around in the beautiful mess of language and personal history. The exploration is terrifying, felt, real, funny, and just a goddamn pleasure." —Morgan Parker

"Ginger Ko’s Motherlover is at once supplication and rebuff. I’ve been going back again and again to the book for its moments of airtight agony, unsparing in their demands. Despite everything: Motherlover doesn’t want your sympathy. Motherlover doesn’t want your disdain. Motherlover doesn’t want your loyalty, even. It only wants you to let it alone, sit back down, and think about the errors of your ways. Fanzine, Grace Shuyi Liew

"The speaker, who is multivoiced yet tonally consistent, presents a daughter, a wife, and, at times, the vestige of a mother; she talks of and to a mother, a father, and a partner. This underlying question operates on a practical and psychological level: who am I to you? The closing section’s title seems to grow out of the opening’s: the 'Gaslight,' the small flickering streetlight that can reveal but a small part of blanketed darkness where Motherlover started, is now a 'Prairie Lighthouse,' a towering flare giving glimpses onto a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree world, which much like a prairie fades out at the distant horizon. As Ko’s speaker concludes, 'From the top of the fortress two leaps of light take turns.' Two beams alternate, attempting to light up the darkness. This is not just a work of agony—it’s a work seeking restoration out of a damaging pattern and into an illuminated horizon." Entropy, Tim Etzkorn


Author City: Athens, GA


Ginger Ko is from California. Her chapbooks Inherit (Bloof) and Comorbid (Lark Books) are forthcoming. Motherlover is her first book. She wrote it in Wyoming. 

Read an interview with Ginger, at the Conversant.

Read more about Motherlover, including a sample poem and Ginger on her writing process, at the Poetry Society of America.