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!)