Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Meet our lovely contestants LIVE!




MICROPRESS POETRY PAGEANT

FRIDAY FEB 1 @ 8PM
STAIN BAR
766 Grand Street
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
(L TRAIN to Grand Street, 1 block West)

FREE! PUBLIC! PRIZES!
No AWP badge required!

BLOOF BOOKS
COCONUT BOOKS
NO TELL BOOKS

Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Jenna Cardinale*
Shanna Compton
Bruce Covey
Jill Alexander Essbaum
Shafer Hall
Jennifer L. Knox
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Reb Livingston
Danielle Pafunda
PF Potvin
Ravi Shankar

(Sponsored by Lulu.com, the place for people to publish. Empowering
anyone to create, buy, sell and control their work with the click of a mouse.)

* Unfortunately cannot attend in person, yet will be attending in spirit, which is also good company.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Dear Tilly, Dear Hermes,*



Enclosed, please find Zorba's lamb shank. Please find a coveted booklet.
A prerequisite. In the future, when you shadow, please find a subtle
distinction between street and theater.

I craze the window in her butchered sedan. I leverage her documents,
spilling from the console. Figure these. Repeat.




From My Zorba by Danielle Pafunda (Bloof Books, April 2008)

Monday, January 21, 2008

We scrambled. We made it.




A limited number of advance copies will be available to reviewers at AWP. (Details/schedule to come.)

Catalog page is in the works too. We can't wait to see this pink in person.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Heaping praise upon Drunk by Noon





Woot. Two new reviews of Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk by Noon:
Ben Mirov in Coldfront sez, "[Drunk by Noon] is a series of beautiful failures linked together by the imaginative desire to fail again and again in highly enjoyable and creative ways."

& "Not since I first read James Tate have I encountered a poet who is able create a world that is at once so bizarrely asymmetrical to ours and yet somehow uncannily accurate in its portrayal of humanness."

& many other nice things.

Chris Purdom in PhilArt compares Drunk by Noon to a very wild ride of a careening cable car & recommends, "It's that good. Seriously. Go buy a copy. Now."

The Grand Opening Specials are available through the end of this month, at the Bloof Store. Drunk by Noon is also available via Powells.com (as well as the physical store in Portland, OR), Amazon.com, these great booksellers, or your favorite store can order it for you via Ingram.

Friday, January 11, 2008

It's a very bloofy week.


On Tuesday, Sina Queyras posted an interview about Bloof & For Girls (& Others) at Lemonhound:
To be truly funny one often has to be bawdy, inappropriate, or “off-color,” qualities that are considered neither very “ladylike” nor “poetic.” But humor in poetry is another long, rich tradition that only relatively recently has been pooh-poohed and devalued, as if it’s not a serious or artistic endeavor. And yes, there’s also an expectation that a feminist woman shouldn’t risk seeming frivolous or dismissible by engaging in comedy—that’s often a self-directed expectation by feminists themselves. I take humor seriously though, and so do writers like Jennifer L. Knox, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, and many others. Comedians in other genres, from literary satirists and fictioneers to songwriters and stand-up artists, use humor to do “cultural work,” so why not poetry? We’re seeing an ivory-towerism at work there. Personally what I find funny generally has a darker undertone—humor works best under challenging circumstances. After all, laughter is a biological/physical stress-reliever and social lubricant, a natural response to fear, embarrassment, frustration, etc.


On Thursday, Jason Jones posted an interview with Jennifer L. Knox at Bookslut:
I’m interested in people who do and say stupid, insane or compulsive things, and finding respect for them despite that. I’m not interested in pointing out how wrong people are—-even the President-—it’s way too easy—-like watching Cops. Take the biggest yahoo on Dr. Phil and discover your common humanity. The dark side’s real, and it’s something to stand against. But nobody is all one thing. I was in a class with Gerald Stern who said that every human being-—unless they were raised in a cage or got kicked in the head-—has the standard set of feelings that everybody else has: hate, love, fear, loneliness, hunger, etc. He said, “Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian who loved his dogs. In other words, he was a man who cared deeply about the sanctity of life.”