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/

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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.

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*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.