Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Bloof at the New York City Poetry Festival this weekend: July 26 & 27



Bloof Books will be at The New York City Poetry Festival both days this weekend—Saturday, July 26 and Sunday, July 27.

Complete festival info & directions: http://newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com/

The festival is free & no tickets are required.

PERFORMANCES

Sunday, July 27 at 2:10 p.m. on the White Horse Stage
Becca Klaver, Kirsten Kaschock, Sharon Mesmer, Shanna Compton & Justin Marks

Also don't miss these Bloof authors in these additional slots: 

Saturday, July 26 at 2:30 p.m. on the Algonquin Stage
Jackie Clark performs with Coldfront Magazine

Sunday, July 27 at 4:30 p.m. on Chumley's Stage
Natalie Eilbert performs with Coconut Poetry


BOOK FAIR: Come see us both days!

We'll have handmade chapbooks by Natalie Eilbert, Dawn Sueoka, Amanda Montei, Pattie McCarthy, & Kirsten Kaschock, plus our complete catalog of paperbacks including the our new release, Ultramegaprairieland by Elisabeth Workman. 

Also available: guidelines for our Open Chapbook Reading Period.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

This weekend/next week: Jennifer Tamayo, Jennifer L. Knox, Peter Davis



New York! Jennifer Tamayo is performing Friday, July 11 with Monica McClure & Lucas de Lima.

The Latina Gurlesque

Bureau of General Services-Queer Division
83A Hester Street
New York, NY
7:30 PM
Details here. 





Iowa! Jennifer L. Knox is reading Saturday, July 12 in Des Moines for new Laugh Child series/artist residency, with Jennifer Perrine, Lauren Haldeman & Caryl Pagel. 

The Des Moines Social Club
Viaduct Gallery
900 Mulberry Street
Des Moines
7 PM

Details here.



Wisconsin! Peter Davis is reading with Milo & Otis, Walking Easel & Hakim Bellamy for BONK! Hosted by Nick Demske.

BONK!
316 6th Street 
Racine
6 PM

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Speaking of great reviews: Ultramegaprairieland

We tweeted and facebooked this one, but haven't yet posted it here.

Carrie Lorig's got the goods on Elisabeth Workman's superhawt post-Flarfy debut, Ultramegaprairieland, at Entropy Magazine:


I am such a sponge fisherman. I have so much pores. When you speak to me, I suck it in. It drifts around the insides of me like a box of jewels (Joe Brainard dreamed repeatedly of boxes of jewels and considered it a good omen). When you read around me / When you read a good part out loud / When you leave books around for me to pick up, I will suck it in. It drifts around the insides of me like a floralabundant hurricane / like a dangerous potentiality / like burning / like big petals of thunder the bees suck on. There has been so much Bernadette Mayer in the house lately. My pores are covered in all her dreams / her incredible, synesthetic relationship to sex and color. I’m reading Mayer’s Utopia and re -/ re- / re-reading Elisabeth Workman’s book, Ultramegaprairieland. I’ve been thinking about them so much together. 1) Because closeness, intuition, recommendation, and reading are most often how I work through / acquire a stack of literature / language. I tend to trust these things more than genres, schools, canon, etc. 2) Workman once gifted me a copy of Midwinter Day by Mayer. It took me over a year to read the book / realize what I had in my possession. What’s amazing now, being so accidentally and purposely immersed in Mayer, while simultaneously being so connected to Workman, is seeing how MUCH more naturally they overlap than I ever anticipated or understood. And isn’t this actually the most vivid thing about literature and language? / It’s re-configuring of time and distance in terms of how people need / find each other?
The titles, Utopia and Ultramegaprairieland, too, crack bootskins together. Both create flickering surfaces jokingly / seriously meant to be other names for Paradise. Both books, in their frothy, meaty layers, think intensely about what it means for a woman to speculate and imagine such an area / any area. It occurs to me that any writer / any woman writing any area / such an area / Paradise / ends up thinking a great deal about what / in the current space / is trying to kill them / or her. Thinking about Paradise means Touching Hell / Bouquets on Fire / means seeing how you, / like Paradise, / are unproven. / How you are imagining yourself / in reality / because reality doesn’t really / imagine you / at all.
“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.”
—“Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf


Read the full piece (an event in itself!) here. Entropy also put Ultramegaprairieland on their Ultimate Summer Reading List.

A new review of Brink

(There's a terrific new review of Shanna Compton's Brink in the current issue of the Yale Review, by Stephen Burt. We don't have the actual issue in hand, but pulled the PDF from the library and can quote a bit for you here. The full essay is definitely worth a read! )




Compton – based in Princeton and in Brooklyn – writes the eclectic, distractible poetry of people just a few years younger than I am, or the same age as, but more plugged in than I am, people who grew up with electronics in everything, pursued by glowing screens. (Her first book was an edited collection about the pleasures of video games.) Though her poems of Brink belong to venerable genres – the aubade, the erotic sonnet, the sequence about a breakup, the ‘‘Panoramic View’’ – their delights lie in the verbal swerves and sparks that belong only to our time, or else to a time just ahead of ours. Her lines are a millefeuille of generational markers, coming of age between the advent of the Internet and the first season of Girls, in or near a New York of toxic assets, multiple piercings, collapsing finance:

We’re still in the skinflint sheets 
of a place we’d rather not be, 
languid among no-account debris . . . 
I’ll pretend to miss the day we met 
if you can try not so much to mind 
the piercing when we go wrong, 
foaming in the evening, toxic refraction, 
to baffle this diminishing sun 
into peach-rust-gold derivatives.     
[Sometime  I'll Perfect My Adoration]
There is nothing quite like this exuberance, on the edge of paraphrasable sense but not over it, among Compton’s contemporaries, though many of them have tried. It can remind me at once of Frank O’Hara and of Edna St. Vincent Millay (as with Millay, we can fear it will seem dated later, or just enjoy the way it sounds now). Compton rakes in diction that has not turned up much in serious poetry before – if it is not the lingo of today’s teens, then it belongs instead to her own youth: ‘‘He gave me a nonsarcastic thumbs up in the parking lot.’’ ‘‘A neon / ring above an extincted / window showcasing something / formerly fabulous now kinda / poignantly disappeared.’’ When Compton is off her game, her poems can edge past the hyper-contemporary into the ridiculous, the quasi-sarcastic, the perhaps deliberately bad: ‘‘I celebrate the tanginess of your gruntly curves.’’ It is, perhaps, the kind of risk that any writer willing to be explicit about eroticism must take.

Compton sounds as if she knew that her ‘‘tendril-like projections / of youthful slang’’ have not often made it into poetry before, but that her topics – urban disillusion, political snafus, falling in and out of love – certainly have. ‘‘Timetables & Humble Pie’’ translates, into its twenty-first-century screen-driven lingo, Shakespeare’s sonnet 129, with its ‘‘waste of shame’’: ‘‘Alas, the day is wasted. Toss the scrapped commodity / in a pile like snipped stockings, admired / in the morning but soured by noon.’’ Compton, like Shakespeare, asks whether ‘‘love’’ names a commodity, though for her it is a commodity newly on sale: ‘‘What will we do,’’ she inquires, ‘‘if affection / is discovered to be . . . something we inhabit / like a hoodie from H&M, hot yellow / and scored at a deep discount?’’ She speaks to her heart, as Philip Sidney spoke to his, but she speaks in the era of biodegradables, of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch:
Preening heart I have tended 
like a weak flame on the beach, 
do you have a box or bag 
(the tearing aside for a moment) 
to pursue our decay? . . . 
Perhaps, my precious clutter, let us recast 
our likeness in plastic and endure as timeless litter.       
[One More Favor]
‘‘Timeless litter,’’ both ephemeral and perdurable, eternal and apparently without use: there are worse figures for poetry. Brink is a good book to come upon last in a stack, or last in a year: rather than complaining about how bland and frustrating everything is, in the city or in the country, Compton takes it upon herself to make everything interesting, to make daily life spark and fizz. So do the friends she imagines alongside her poems: ‘‘We shout in marquees. We stud the clamoring / traffic in our brightest, most orange cones.’’ Two sequences about couples, in love and at loggerheads (parts two and four of this four-part book), cannot retain the power in Compton’s always accelerating stand-alone poems, because their construction requires them to slow down or to look back. Even the sequences, though, can succeed in making the familiar strange: after a quarrel,
Each sentence held back an ache to crack 
the domesticated shell. It’s as if 
an illustrator has come through with a fine- 
nib pen, to hatch and crosshatch everything.         
[The Deeps]


The Yale Review 
Volume 102Issue 3 
pages 152–166, July 2014

POETRY IN REVIEW: SIX POETS STEPHEN BURT


Abstract    Order




The Two Yvonnes: Poems, by Jessica Greenbaum (Princeton University Press, 80 pp., $29.95 cloth; $12.95 paper)
Almanac: Poems, by Austin Smith (Princeton University Press, 96 pp., $35, cloth; $12.95 paper)
A Glossary of Chickens: Poems, by Gary J. Whitehead (Princeton University Press, 72 pp., $29.95 cloth; $14.95 paper)
Brink, by Shanna Compton (Bloof Books, 86 pp., $15 paper)
Lobster  Palaces, by Ann Kim (Flood Editions, 96 pp., $14.95 paper)
3 Sections: Poems, by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf, 64 pp., $22 cloth)





Monday, July 7, 2014

Summer Break: July 11–21

Bloof will close July 11–21. We're aiming to have all orders filled by the 10th. Place them now if you need something before the end of the month!