See you in 2013.

The Bloof mailroom is closed for the holidays until January 2.

The store will continue to accept orders, but they will not ship until Jan 3.

Documentary: Assembling Packing

The handmade Bloof Bee stamp, to mark the colophon page.

Some of the repurposed covers have marking or printing inside.

Numbers 1-5 of the hundred.
Number 3 is made from a recycled Priority Mail envelope.
Number 4 is made from a repurposed shirt box. Others are
made from various boxes and package inserts, as well as from
kraft cardstock left over from a chapbook project for Dusie.

Allowing the stamps and numbering on the colophon page to dry.

The range of color in the repurposed covers is just beautiful!

Themed packing materials for Packing—also recycled.

Packing by Hailey Higdon now available!

Packing
Hailey Higdon

December 2012
Chapbook, Limited edition
5.5 x 8.5, 24 pages
Kraft cardstock 65 lb. cover
Cream laid interior
Saddle stapled 

Get it here, or in one of the bundles & subscriptions!


PACKING is the first chapbook in the 2012-2013 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series will be released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release.

These poems are not only about packing up and leaving behind a city and making a move—from Philadelphia to Nashville–they also explore linear and serial narratives and the ways each can represent events and the compounded passage of time.

you love the stone

it stays, only moves or changes in relation to you

when really what I've been polishing is the face on the back of my head

the mirror components

my elbow that bends the other way, my foot that leads from the other side of me

still, I'm moving to Nashville so I wrote this song about forgiveness

—from "The Stone That Produces Milk"

The design concept of Packing incorporated the use of recycled/upcycled materials (just like collecting used boxes to pack for a move), so all the paper and most of the cover stock comes from previous projects, and the packing materials are themed too. Another aspect of the concept was to keep the book affordable and unfussy: a minimalist cover illustration, no-frills formatting. Just Hailey's great poems classically saddle stapled, five bucks.

---

Hailey Higdon is the author of the chapbookHow to Grow Almost Everything, (Agnes Fox, 2011) and the book-blog The Palinode Project. She runs What To Us (press). She is affiliated with many states and has many homes. She is a lifelong student of sound and language.

Bloof Bundles & Subscription Deals!

You asked for it, and now here they are. Just about everything in our catalog is covered.

Go here to shop (or via the link in the main store if you need to browse first).

For the subscriptions, the books ship as they become available. (Packing & Brink are available now, and ship immediately. The others will follow throughout 2013.)

UPDATE: Getting a few questions, so sharing the answers here…

Q: Are review copies of the chapbooks available?

A: Yes, but as PDF only, and only for Packing so far. These are very limited handmade editions, so we do not have many to send out the way we normally would for a paperback. If you review a chapbook based on the PDF, we will very happily send you a printed copy. Probably we will even make it a special deluxe edition. Reviewers/interviews who are interested, just get in touch via email or FB message. (THANKS)

Q: I want to order THE WHOLE SHEBANG Subscription but I already preordered or purchased BRINK. Can I replace it with another paperback from your catalog?

A: Sure, why not. Just let us know which book you'd like instead. And thank you!

2012 New Release Bundle

Packing by Hailey Higdon (chapbook) 

Brink by Shanna Compton (book)  

Our two newest releases, together.  

$20 + shipping $14.00 + free shipping

Chapbook Subscription

Packing by Hailey Higdon (Dec 2012) 

This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White (Feb 2013 

Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver (March 2013) 

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo (April 2013) 

Windowboxing by Kirsten Kaschock (date TBD, 2013) 

scenes from the lives of my parents by Pattie McCarthy (date TBD, 2013) 

All 6 chapbooks from our 2012 Open Reading Period. $45 + shipping $35 + free shipping

The Whole Shebang 2012-2013 Subscription

All four books released in 2012-2013… 

Brink by Shanna Compton (vol 1 of 2, Dec 2012) 

TINA by Peter Davis (Mar 2013) 

Natural History Rape Museum by Danielle Pafunda (Fall 2013) 

The Seam by Shanna Compton (vol 2 of 2, Nov 2013)  

+ all six chapbooks released in 2012-2013… 

Packing by Hailey Higdon (Dec 2012) 

This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White (Feb 2013 

Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver (March 2013) 

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo (April 2013) 

Windowboxing by Kirsten Kaschock (date TBD, 2013)  

scenes from the lives of my parents by Pattie McCarthy (date TBD, 2013) 

All the poetry! $105 + shipping $75 + free shipping

Bloof Bundles 

Quantity discounts on orders of multiple books. Applies to currently available books only (not chapbooks, not future releases). Shipping for bundles is at standard rates. 

Specify which books in Special Instructions during Checkout.  

Available titles are: 

Brink by Shanna Compton
The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox
Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
Warsaw Bikini by Sandra Simonds
My Zorba by Danielle Pafunda
For Girls (& Others) by Shanna Compton
Drunk by Noon by Jennifer L. Knox
A Gringo Like Me by Jennifer L. Knox 

2 books $30 + shipping $25 + shipping 

3 books $45 + shipping $33 + shipping 

4 books $60 + shipping $40 + shipping

Mostly in Lowland Rainforest

 "Mostly in Lowland Rainforest" originally appeared in the Equalizer. Larger

  Preorder Brink for $10.

Year-end news re: all things Bloof!

"Red Wand" by Sandra Simonds was chosen by Poem-A-Day readers as one of their favorites of 2012! Check out the full list from the Academy of American Poets, below. "Red Wand" will be included in Sandra's forthcoming Bloof book House of Ions: Sonnets (2014).

And here's the PoemFlow version again too:

Shanna Compton's Brink celebrates its official birthday next week, 12/17. It's already in circulation via direct orders and we're getting great feedback so far.  CAConrad selected Brink for his BEST OF SMALL PRESS 2012 list at Karen the Small Press Librarian. And Justin Marks includes it on his 2012 Holiday Recommendations list at Birds, LLC. (Sandra's Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland) is on there too. Check out the Birds sale while you're there. Everything's $10 through Jan. 2.)

And Andy Fitch interviews Shanna in the December issue of the Conversant, about both Brink and The Seam (vol. 2 of the set, to follow next year).

Let's see…what else?

Oh, we're going to press with Peter Davis's forthcoming Bloof book TINA next month, so it can make its debut at AWP and be ready for its official April release. We're working on the cover sketches right now, so we'll have that to show soon. In the meantime, admire Pete's prodigious winter beard, which he's calling "the General." A friend of his created this celebratory graphic to help gauge its impressiveness. (Yes, there are a couple of facial-hair themed poems in TINA—how did you guess?)




We're also getting ready to release the first chapbook from our new series, chosen during our Open Reading Period earlier this fall—Hailey Higdon's Packing will be available any day now. There will be only 100 printed copies of this limited edition, so if you want one, be prepared to act fast. The design concept of Packing incorporated the use of recycled/upcycled materials (just like gathering boxes to pack for a move), so all the paper and most of the cover stock comes from previous projects, and the packing materials are themed too. Another aspect of the concept was to keep the book affordable and unfussy: a minimalist cover illustration, no frills formatting. Just great poems classically saddle stapled, five bucks. We couldn't resist showing off our new hand-carved logo stamp on the colophon page though.

Next up, we've got Jared White's This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me scheduled for February. We've started talking about the design concept on that one. It's going to be Japanese-influenced, since the poems are loosely based on the haibun form. Sorry, no pics yet.

Becca Klaver's Nonstop Pop & Jennifer Tamayo's Poems Are the Only Real Bodies are scheduled for March/April. These (and Jared's) are also 100-copy limited-edition chapbooks. But we'll put aside a dozen or so of each for exclusive sale at AWP (table J6 with Coconut). Becca & Jennifer just got back from Georgia, reading for What's New in Poetry at Emory in Atlanta and Avid Bookshop in Athens, with Marisa Crawford, Lily Laedewig, and Hanna Andrews.

Bonus Becca: Listen to her audio poem for Day 10 of the Delirious Hem audio advent feature, curated by Susana Gardner.

Kirsten Kaschock's Windowboxing is also on the chapbook list for 2013. In the meantime, here's a new review of her novel Sleight (Coffee House Press), at Word Love. An excerpt:

I just finished the beautiful and affecting Sleight by Kirsten Kaschock, and I can honestly say I've never read anything like it. It was a novel written in poetry, in dense, brief little chapters -- each one a rounded, shiny truffle with a spider lurking inside.

And one more lil spider-filled truffle, another poem from the Delirious Hem audio advent, by Elisabeth Workman. (The feature continues through the 24th, so check it daily for more!)

Sign up at Goodreads for a chance to win Brink

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Brink

by Shanna Compton

Giveaway ends December 16, 2012.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

William Shatner's thoughts on BRINK

Now up at the Conversant

Here's an interview with Shanna Compton by Andy Fitch, in the December issue of the Conversant. (It will also appear in Andy's collection of interviews forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2013.)

If you must order from Amazon...

 ...please do it using one of our alt listings that look like the screenshot below.

We get a bigger cut this way (so we can print more books) and also the books that come from here are guaranteed to be correctly printed and bound.

We've had a couple of reports of Amazon-ordered books having no spine text, fuzzy interior texts, and or random sections of other books stuck inside the bindings. They print and bind their copies themselves, so we have no control over them, alas.

It's always best (most advantageous for the creators, including the authors) to shop via small press websites, independent bookstore partners, or from distributors like SPD (which we don't use but lots of our friends do).

But if you must use Amazon, please do it this way.

If you previously ordered a screwy copy of any of our books from Amazon, let us know, even if you returned it (and we hope you did).

The books sent directly from us are from a totally different printer and look fantastic, promise.

"Panoramic View" up at The Academy of American Poets & in the Poem Flow app

From Brink.

The Best Thanksgiving Ever

 by Jennifer L. Knox

After the meal, Sandy decided we should spice up charades

by slapping the loser's butt with a ping-pong paddle.

Whenever Ed got slapped, he farted because he was so nervous.

The ladies won, slapped all the men's butts, but then what to do?

"Take off your clothes!" I told Sean, who didn't seem like the kind

of guy who'd do such a thing—but he was, and he did. Then Jim

took off his clothes. Then John. And then the other Jim

who brought all the lovely bottles of wine. And finally Ed.

Deb came out of the bathroom and saw five big men naked in the kitchen.

They screamed, "Take off your clothes!" We all figured she would,

and she did. Then Sandy the Slapmaster, then me, then Tomoko

who kept her glasses on. We walked around the house naked,

talking about how it was to be naked with other naked people,

how none of the guys had boners, and how cold it was out in the garage.

Somebody found a big bottle of vodka. We made a no-hugging rule.

John kept trying to open the curtains and show the neighbors

what they were missing. Deb thought an orgy was imminent,

but since we'd all spent a lot of time in Iowa, I didn't think it would fly.

Jim passed out. Ed put a robe on. I passed out. We woke up

the next morning in t-shirts, ate bagels from Bagel Land, and said,

"We all got naked last night." That afternoon, on our way

to the Walt Whitman Mall, the ladies gave each other nicknames

ending with the word "Bitch." Deb was Stupid Bitch,

Sandy was Gentle Bitch, Tomoko was Fucking Bitch and I was Precious Bitch.

All the bitches agreed that slapping people's butts with a paddle

was something we needed to do every weekend, that this was the best

Thanksgiving ever, and that Ed had the biggest dick we'd ever seen.

Originally published in Painted Bride Quarterly. 

This poem is from Jennifer's book A Gringo Like Me. You know you want it.

November news

Brink by Shanna Compton is now available for preorder. We're expecting books to begin shipping the day after Thanksgiving (11/23), with an official release date of December 15. But you can order it now for $5 off. Details here.

Sandra Simonds will be in Chicago Wednesday, November 14, reading at Danny's Reading Series with Betsy Wheeler & Hannah Gamble. Details here, or on our events page.

Sandra Simonds, Jennifer L. Knox & Shanna Compton are joining Brenda Coultas & Todd Colby for a reading in Brooklyn on Friday, November 16 at the Stain of Poetry. Details here, or on our events page.

The next night, November 17 and also in Brooklyn, Becca Klaver, Jennifer L. Knox, Sandra Simonds, & Shanna Compton team up with Hanna Andrews, Susan Brennan, Michael Broder, Bonnie Rose Marcus, Tim Trace Peterson & Jason Schneiderman to celebrate the work of Surrealist poet Joyce Mansour. Each poet will read from Mansour's work as well as their own. Details here, or on our events page.

We're working on the first chapbook in our new series, Packing by Hailey Higdon. We've just chosen the cover design and acquired all the materials. We're just waiting on a delivery of fresh ink so we can start printing! It'll be in the store by the end of this month.

We're in production on TINA too, the new book by Peter Davis, doing the final round of edits and brainstorming cover ideas. That'll be going to press in January, we think, for a March release.

We're excited to be bringing you Kirsten Kaschock's chapbook Windowboxing next year too! Here's Jed Rasula on Kirsten's novel Sleight at Attention Span:

Kirsten Kaschock | Sleight | Coffee House | 2011

Spellbinding: ostensibly a novel, Sleight reads like a critical theory treatise that’s been Pixared into plot and characters, with all the sentences personally airbrushed with the scrupulousness of Mallarmé.

Bonus: Here's a new interview with Danielle Pafunda, at Pank.

Blurbs for BRINK

Shanna Compton is one of those poets I will always read, will always eagerly anticipate the next brilliant collection to read!! “Even our angst feels replaceable / as if it ebbed a little way”—yet another gem for a misunderstood world that we have been waiting to read and to know. BRINK is a word we gather on top of, ready for the pictures around us to modify us into the new.  Not every poet can promise this word, but it’s most fitting for a Shanna Compton book!! The smart poets of my time have been following her all along, and we know the departure she takes with this latest collection is one we can all be excited to take with her!!   —CAConrad

Shanna Compton’s beautiful new book Brink captures the weird and dazzling collision between the suffering and the awe of contemporary existence. As if through a series of discovered polaroids, in one poem she holds up a raw and tender image of a woman isolated in “the domesticated shell,” in another, she holds up a joyful white blur of something we cannot name, but recognize as our own hazy and sweet connection to the world. At once disturbing and triumphant, the poems in Brink work together to create an honest, unexpected, and fascinating lyrical exhibition of the complicated human heart.   —Ada Limón

Coming next: BRINK

 

(Updated with final, sans pesky typos &tc.)

It's not in the store yet, but we wanted to show you what it will look like.

We might have a few copies by the time we do the reading at Stain next month. Maybe.

Alas, our cantankerous old FileMaker Pro publicity database will simply not run anymore. This is where we keep addresses, guidelines, and contact info for:

• book review editors
• freelance reviewers
• bookstores w/ small press sections
• reading series curators
• book fairs & conferences
• etc.

We are hopeful that we can extract at least a raw text file and rebuild in a new less crash-prone format.

It's quite a job. And since we're rebuilding, we should also do a thorough update.

If you should be on our list to receive review copies, catalogs or notices of forthcoming releases, etc. please get in touch: info at bloof books dot com

Thanks.

The bee now tweets

Yeah, Sandra convinced us we needed to Twitterfy, so we have.

You can follow us @BloofBooks.

A terrific new review of Danielle Pafunda's Manhater

...in Publishers Weekly: 

Manhater

Danielle Pafunda. Dusie (SPD, dist.), $15 trade paper (66p) ISBN 978-0-9819808-4-3 

Lifting a page from Plath’s book of tricks, Pafunda comes out swinging in her fourth book with poems that tackle that other half of the parental nightmare, Mommy. “Mommy must eat,” she writes in the book’s opening sequence, because “every morning/ comes hard into the room and frisks you to death.” By stitching this infantile name to her own hem, Pafunda exposes the conflicts of motherhood: her lust and refusal to carry herself as a symbol of fecundity make for some frightening conflations. In the same poem where “Mommy’s brood wails,” Pafunda asks herself how long it’s been “since she had her hand/ down a woebegone hunk’s steamy front” and tells us with a grin that “Mommy’s fist is popping her frame.” For Pafunda, the body following birth is both a source of revelry and disgust, and she likes to welcome us in with one hand and warn us away with the other. “There is a pit,” she writes, “in which worms have grown/ as thick as my wrist.” A mother’s inner life in this book is rife with passionate ambivalence. (Sept.)

Available from our friends at Dusie, via SPD.

(And heh, wait till they get a load of Natural History Rape Museum in 2013.)

Oh, there's also this interview between Andy Fitch & Danielle, up at The Conversant.

DP: Mommy V does love her babies in this strange way. She’s not human. She’s post-human or vampire or something. So her system’s a bit different than ours. And she doesn’t have companions or partners. She has sort of her army, sort of her responsibility, her community, but it’s not—maybe I’m psychologizing my speakers too much. She speaks to no one on an equal level. Also the poems provide experience of disability. They are about experiences of desire when desire fails. It’s often about the isolation of a body in pain, or a body made monstrous by outside forces.

Results of the Open Chapbook Reading Period

We are very pleased to announce the following:

Chapbooks forthcoming from Bloof   

Packing by Hailey Higdon 

WindowBoxing by Kirsten Kaschock

Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver

scenes from the lives of my parents by Pattie McCarthy 

Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo 

This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White

We will be telling you more about these poets and their chapbooks as we begin working together on the projects.

The first chapbook in the series will be scheduled for later this year, and the remainder throughout 2013. Each will be released in a limited edition of 100 printed copies, with digital versions thereafter.

We would also like to recognize the following poets:

Finalists in the 2012-2013 Open Chapbook Reading Period  

Allyson Boggess, The Heck Point 

Tina Brown Celona, Letters from the Underworld 

Todd Colby & Joanna Penn Cooper, Age of Wonder 

Joanna Penn Cooper, Crown 

Marisa Crawford, 8th Grade Hippie Chic(k) 

Jessica Dyer, Uterus Poems 

Tim Earley, Catfish Poems 

Jess Rowan, the living 

Kate Schapira, Dogbook 

Nicole Steinberg, Undressing 

Dawn Akemi Sueoka, Not One Thing but Every Thing 

Paige Taggert, Smothered in Emu Milk

We got many more submissions than we expected--a thrilling circumstance. Some of us have been reading submissions for a long time (decades even), and could hardly believe how exceptional these projects and proposals were. What a pool!

We understand each submission to be gesture of support for what we are doing here. We thank everyone who shared their work with us.

A totally different portrait of Emily Dickinson!

"Emily" by Peter Davis, from TINA
Bloof Books, forthcoming 2013

Two more sonnets from Sandra!

Everyday Genius is featuring two sonnets from Sandra Simonds' upcoming House of Ions today, in the August issue guest-edited by Elisa Gabbert.

A snippet...

You are my ounce, my octagon, my omen, ornate

      as palm leaf shadow curing the chlorinated waters

of the nuclear family’s backyard swimming pool. 

They own the world, do they not?  You are my zero sum game,

      my tribe, sailboat catching its cloth lip on the torn horizon. 

Go read the rest. 

Poetic labor: still reading!

"Utopian Slumps" by Ed Ruscha. Pastels on paper, 1981.
They Called Her Styrene (Phaidon, 2000)

We're still reading your chapbooks, conferring.

We should be able to get through the rest of them this week, and expect to be able to make notifications after folks are back from the long Labor Day weekend.

Then we will announce what we've chosen, once the poets have confirmed.

We are very grateful that you have shared your work with us, and it's been very exciting reading these. We got more than we expected, which pleases us too!

More soon. Just wanted to give you an update.

Update to the update, September 6: We have finished reading, but are now re-reading the "finalists" and conferring one more time. Announcement next week.

Sandra Simonds is blogging for The Best American Poetry this week!

From her first post, "Notes on the birth of my daughter (and poetry)":

Being a poet is kind of like being a good detective. Taking mental notes on what was happening to my body, mind and environment during and after the hemorrhage allowed me to distance myself from my own experience and helped me cope during what has been one of the scariest and loneliest experiences of my life. During my blood transfusions, I thought, “I need to write a poem about getting a blood transfusion while watching the Leon County Spelling Bee on TV” and “No, wait! I need to write a dramatic monologue in the voice of a BLOOD CELL entering another person’s body.” When Ezekiel, my three-year old son, came to visit me, I thought, “I need to write a poem about TOWERS and I have to incorporate the fact that he keeps calling the hospital “mommy’s tower” into the poem. And that reminded me of going on a field trip to Watts Towers when I was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles and then that reminded me of how I was in Dante class in graduate school when the Twin Towers fell and isn’t this a little bit like being in a circle of hell and if it is, which circle, and more importantly, which way to PARADISE? Auden is right when he says, “poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences.”

Read the rest here. And check back daily for more.

On Poetry Daily today

"Planets Are Pretty Big"
from Brink by Shanna Compton, forthcoming Fall 2012.

Double dealing

TODAY only, and for no reason at all.


Buy one Bloof book, get one free.


Just specify the title of the second book in the comments box during your PayPal transaction. Direct sales from our site only (obviously).


Click through to the store. 

This promotion is over. Thanks for your orders! 

More news!

A new poem by Jennifer L. Knox in the current issue of Gulf Coast: "Between Menus." And a close reading of her poem "The Earth Is Flat and So's My Ass" from The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway appears in the latest issue of Galatea Resurrects.

Two new poems by Danielle Pafunda in the current issue of Pebble Lake Review: from "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison" and another one from same. Danielle's third poetry collection, Manhater, should be out from our friends at Dusie soon too!

And a review of Sandra Simonds' second book (from our friends at Cleveland State University Poetry Center) in the Huffington Post.


Vouched Books conducted this "awful interview" with Peter Davis, back in May and we missed it, oops!

Bloof Books for 2014: House of Ions + Ultramegaprairieland

We've been dying to tell you this. We've signed two books for 2014.* They are...

House of Ions by Sandra Simonds

In April 2011, right here on this blog, Sandra began a series of daily sonnets. The project developed from there and some of the poems have lately appeared in Court Green, Boston Review, Barrelhouse, Lana Turner, and The Awl.

American Girl

In college I had this job as a file clerk for Dr. Glassman, 

   a dentist, whose patients included Brad Pitt and Dodi Fayed 

and you probably didn’t know that I’m the girl

    who wrote “deceased” with a black Sharpie across the front 

of Dodi’s chart. Sometimes when I go running my chest hurts 

   like a black tunnel in Paris and I’ve never really thought about who

might write “deceased” across my chart because back then

    I would go surfing in Malibu with my boyfriend and then sleep

on the beach and in the morning, hung over, would take the RTD 

   bus back to Beverly Hills to file charts when Tom Petty walks in 

and he’s so much cooler than Brad Pitt will ever be because yesterday

    in Tallahassee I ran through these trees that had this marijuana-like

smell that reminded me of the way Tom Petty looked when

   I handed him his prescription for antibiotics after he got a filling.

Sandra Simonds is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof, 2008) and Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland, 2012). House of Ions will be her third poetry collection and is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia and lives in Tallahassee, FL. For more information, please visit http://sandrasimonds.wordpress.com/

---

Ultramegaprairieland by Elisabeth Workman

Elisabeth is a poet we've been reading for a while now, and we are so excited to bring her into our collective madness! Elisabeth is the author of several chapbooks, but this will be her "first book" in that silly sense of a longer book for some reason being a "bigger deal." Well, we do think she's a big deal! She writes things with titles like "Yeti with Nihilists by a Fountain" and "Hardcore Brady Bunch Asexual Reproduction" and "Thunderbitch." This was an easy decision. 

Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf 

Then, there was toil,
as toiled the slaves of Rome
in flowy frocks and torpedo tubes
abnormally polite to the love hostage
who realized quite unexpectedly
the “U” in U-boat
is for “venereal.” 

According to ancient science
after every explosive climax comes
“What then?” Then, entire families,
sitting in the middle of craters
chomping down corndogs. Then,
a little bit of syphilis.
Then, Comic Sans. 

Year after year the toil
and the coitus. This would be
the real story told to earth people
in a voice more trusted
than the situation warranted.
What then? Maybe Malibu.
Maybe Beowulf. 

Then, when the hills break out
ablaze, people will reach for their
joy sticks and try to transubstantiate
into the infernal wisdom of electricity
using Western techniques and trends.
Hi-fi clap-on, clap-off firelight, 

then another high noon
in which staring at the same dot
transfixed for hours could
potentially result
in hot gore.

Elisabeth's chapbooks include a city_a cloud; Opolis; Megaprairieland; and Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf. Ultramegaprarieland will be her first collection and is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. In 2010, Elisabeth received the McKnight Fellowship for Writers/Loft Award for Poetry, selected by Marilyn Nelson. In 2009, she was a recipient of the SASE/Jerome Award from Intermedia Arts. Her poems have appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Dusie, Boo Journal, Diode, Alice Blue, and lots of other places. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, with the designer Erik Brandt and their daughter Beatrix. For more information, please visit Geotypografika.com.

---

*The chapbooks we are currently considering from our Open Reading period last month will be added to the 2012-2013 schedule. We will probably open for chapbooks in 2014 sometime next year as well.

Everybody, Everywhere

Jennifer L. Knox has pronounced her judgment in a recent round of HTML Giant's Tournament of Bookshit: Alcoholism vs. Everybody Has a Story.

Danielle Pafunda has a new piece, "Fake-ish Memoir Totes Sincere, Unusually Embodied Affect Performance" at Montevidayo and some excerpts of her "novel under the sign of poetry" at Pank.

Sandra Simonds has new poems in the Boston Review and Open Letters Monthly.


Peter Davis's Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up review (the cover works!) from Rattle and has several poems featured in a recent issue of Atticus Review.


Shanna Compton has a new poem appearing on bus posters in Atlanta, GA thanks to the Emory Poetry Council's Poetry on the Move series. And her forthcoming Bloof book has morphed into two books. We're having twins! (Look for them here October and April.)

Finally, we remind you that our Open Reading Period for Poetry Chapbooks is still open.

BLOOF would like our submissions to better reflect the diversity of our friends and peers in poetry.

BLOOF would like our submissions to better reflect the diversity of our friends and peers in poetry. 

Right now our submissions (as wonderful and plentiful as they are) do not.

This is our first open reading period ever. Perhaps we have not yet made clear that though we focus primarily on innovative poetry by women, we are also actively interested in work by Human Poets of any race, gender, sexual orientation, spiritual philosophy, or ability?

Well, WE ARE. This reading period is open to any poet writing in English (because that's the only language we read fluently enough to edit).

There are 2 more weeks to go. But we are going to keep working on this long after.

Mini review of Shanna Compton's For Girls (& Others)

"Recommended Poetry Books:
For Girls (& Others) by Shanna Compton. 

Two centuries of advice for girls, from Victorian health texts to Internet chat rooms, get remixed and satirized in this playful poetry collection with an underlying serious question: how to secure a space of enjoyment and dignity when one's identity is continually subject to public judgment."

...at Winning Writers.

Jennifer L. Knox's desert island disc picks

...at the Poetry Society of America, here.

"Because I'm Lazy" by Peter Davis

Pete's got a new poem in Atticus Review. Read it here.

UPDATE: Actually, he's the featured poet over there for the month of May. Here's the intro, by Michael Meyerhofer, as well as links to the other poems in the issue. 

Open Reading Period for Poetry Chapbooks: June 2012

A Slice of Cherry Pie, edited by Ivy Alvarez. From the HE/HF archives.

Bloof will open the month of June for manuscript submissions of poetry chapbooks. All manuscripts must adhere to the requirements below, and be submitted electronically between June 1 and June 30, 2012.

This is not a contest. There are no fees, no judges, no bullshit. Manuscripts will not be read blind. This is an open reading period.

We will choose at least ONE but as many as SIX chapbooks to publish between Fall 2012 and Fall 2013.

If your chapbook is chosen, you will hear from us via email. If not, you will be notified of the selections when we make the public announcement, on or around September 1.

Books will be done in a limited handmade run of 100 copies, then released electronically thereafter. 

Guidelines  

1. Read a couple of our books, or at least Google the poets and read some of their work.  While we are theoretically open to reading any style of poetry, we certainly have preferences and even biases. Familiarity with the books we have already published* should help you decide whether your work is a good fit. That's different than saying we are only looking for work that looks just like what we have already done. (As if!)

 
2. Bloof is a collective press. What does that mean? Read this post about "The Way We Work."  Basically  it means if you publish with us, you become part of the collective and will be expected to actively participate in the press, including activities and events beyond the scope of your own book. Do not submit to Bloof if you don't think that sounds like a whole lot of fun. That post also explains how you will be paid, if you publish with Bloof. 

3. Manuscripts should be typed, in English, consist of up to 30 pages of poetry, and be formatted in a sane, easy-to-read manner. The work should be unpublished in chapbook or book form, as a whole, though individual poems may have appeared in magazines, etc.

4. Collaborations and translations are acceptable, with the participation of all collaborators. If you are submitting translations, you must include written permission from the original poet (or copyright holder).  

5. Include a cover sheet with name, manuscript title, mailing address, and email address. It is unnecessary to include this information anywhere else, like page headers or footers.  

6. Number the pages in the manuscript.  

7. Cover letters are OK (we are not reading blind), but we'd actually prefer to see a Chapbook Proposal. How do you imagine this chapbook will look? Do you have any design or artistic skills (or an artist collaborator) you'd like to incorporate? Would you enjoy helping with the assembly? Are you interested in particular binding styles or materials? The final design will be a collaboration between Bloof and the author--and obviously we are constrained by budget considerations--but for the proposal, if you have a vision, describe it to us. Maybe we can make it work. (UPDATE: To clarify, it is optional for you to bring your own design or illustrative skills into play here. If that's something you'd like to do, explain. If you have any other ideas about the book, beyond these few examples---like, you want to create a downloadable soundtrack or send each purchaser a custom tea mix or guerrilla-distribute your author copies in significant public places or whatever--explain those. In other words, you can submit just a manuscript...or a manuscript plus these sorts of ideas in a concept/proposal.) 

8. Manuscripts must be saved as a PDF and submitted electronically to the email address in the sidebar. Save the file with your last name and title (or partial title if it is long) as the document name, separated by an underscore. For example: Knox_Mystery.pdf 

9. Simultaneous submissions are your right. We ask only that you promptly let us know if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. 

10. Any submissions that do not follow these guidelines will be automatically deleted. It’s fine to ask a question (same email address) if something is unclear, but if we can tell you haven’t read what we’ve taken the time to write here, we probably won’t answer. We’re very busy...and about to get a whole lot busier. 

 *(Since our list is still rather small, also have a look at that HEHF archive on the store page, to check out some of our older chapbook and broadside projects. You might also consider some of the books Shanna edited for Soft Skull Press, before leaving to found Bloof: Danielle Pafunda's Pretty Young Thing, Maggie Nelson's Jane, CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion, Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen, Wanda Phipps' Wake Up Calls, Ronald Palmer's Logicalogics, etc.)  

Goodbye, NaPoWriMo

Roy Lichtenstein, Explosion, 1965-6 (Tate)

Well, that was fun. We will be snatching the poems down now, to take them back to our laboratories for further poking and prodding. Perhaps some of them will appear again, in transmogrified book form here, or out there somewhere in the wild. Our vintage Magic 8 Ball says: It is certain.

Thanks to Maureen for hosting this annual madness (and the feature link), Jennifer and the Best American Poetry blog for their feature links, and to all of you for reading!