This is what TINA will look like

Staff recommendation review by Farley's Books

BRINK • Shanna Compton

Compton's writing cracks sharp and lean here. Poems that tackle the hear, the deeper parts of the self we call soul, our position amongst empire and ruin. Reminiscent of Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest though with a voice and power all her own, Compton's book is one of our new favorites this year.

TINA is coming

Hello, we're back from the holidays and the mailroom is once again bustling getting your orders and subscriptions out. THANK YOU. We're happily busy and energized, to be doing so many new things this year.

Packing by Hailey Higdon is about 2/3 sold out.

Which means so are the New Release Bundle, Chapbook Subscription, & The Whole Shebang Subscription.

We hope to be able to share the cover design for TINA by Peter Davis this week too. One thing we need to do is narrow down all the great press Pete's received for his previous work, to choose what to use as blurbs. (He's also got a great one re: TINA from Matt Hart.)

In filtering through our files we realized we'd failed to share all the reviews for Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! here on the blog as they appeared, so here are some excerpts: 

“The hope, beauty, ego, neediness, fear, awe, wonder, humor and sadness of it all. It’s like Peter Davis has taken every thought a poet has ever had about writing and pinned it the page for full exposure. Each piece written with a sort of grounded absurdness, that allows him to take a joke out to the absolute edges, but still be telling a wonderful stinging truth.” —Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

“With just two books of poetry, and a third on the way, PETER DAVIS has already established himself as an innovator with a great deal of intelligence and skill. Modest but assured, he explores ideas most poets would not think to broach and pushes the accepted limits of form in ways that expand what a poem can be. Whether pondering the heinous mustache of the previous century’s most infamous tyrant, or inventing satirical monologues for real and imagined audiences, Davis knows that in order to break ground a writer must be bold and open to uncertainties: ‘An artist has to pursue something he or she is unsure of, but then pursue it recklessly.’ While these pursuits make great comic shtick, they are only half the story, for Davis’s sense of play services a unique moral vision.” —HTML Giant 

"Peter Davis is considered to be one of most important American contemporary poets.” —Time Out Tel Aviv

“The consistent, unabashed persona that Davis writes in creates a rhythm that often echoes the pace of the reader’s thoughts—it is fluid, sometimes quick, and difficult to control. Davis builds a platform for our imaginations to fill in the blank.” —H_NGM_N

“Davis works in the same vein as John Ashbery, by making things so personal, they're universal.” —The Best American Poetry, Michael Schiavo

“Peter Davis is a master of the prose poem format.” —Midwest Book Review

“In an environment in which so many seem to steer their sculls between appointed lines, Peter Davis’s poems motorboat back and forth across poetry currents – satirically, yes, but also intelligently, self aware, and shrewdly critical. Davis’s brilliantly bizarre [first] book both parodies and plays homage to precursors as varied as Frank O’Hara, Robert Bly, and Russell Edson; tests the limits of traditional form (haiku, sestinas, and the Blues, for example); and isn’t afraid to act unassumingly goofy, putting, in the words of Amy Gerstler, ‘the id through a juicer.’ His new work tackles assumptions not of the canon, but of the writing process itself. The awkwardly plain, self-conscious tone is both startlingly ironic and subtly perceptive. Peter’s poems make me laugh aloud or shake my head, wondering how and where he unearths their chutzpah!” —The Best American Poetry, Bruce Covey

“Poems that shriek with personality, his honesty and humor and goodness.” —Vouched Books, Tyler Gobble