Wednesday, September 19, 2012

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.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

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.