NEW: Days of Shame & Failure by Jennifer L. Knox

We couldn't be more excited to bring you Jennifer L. Knox's fourth book. Preorders start shipping in October, with official pub date December 1.


DAYS OF SHAME & FAILURE by Jennifer L. Knox from Bloof Books

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DAYS OF SHAME & FAILURE by Jennifer L. Knox

DECEMBER 2015
(but preorders start shipping in October)
6 x 9 | 92 pages
Trade Paper Original
ISBN 978-0-9965868-0-1
$15*

*Domestic shipping for US and Canada only. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.

Cover painting by Charles Browning

If you thought her first three books were batshit, just wait till you read this one. JENNIFER L. KNOX is, honestly, one of our Reasons for Being, and DAYS OF SHAME & FAILURE is her best collection yet.

"Knox’s aesthetic falls somewhere between Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and John Waters’s film Pink Flamingos. Each voice carries its own tragedy, perversion, American darkness. And there is the surprising tidiness of her writing, despite its pace and the amount of stuff she packs in. She writes the way Dean Moriarty parks cars." —Poetry Review (UK)

Sample titles: 

• The New Let's Make a Deal
• Radical Honesty Night
• Waiting on the Ambulance
• The Decorative Airport Fern Is Not What It Pretends to Be

Read some excerpts at the Ampersand Review: 
http://ampersandreview.com/tag/jennifer-l-knox/

Cover painting by Charles Browning. 

JENNIFER L. KNOX's new book of poems, Days of Shame & Failure, will be published by Bloof Books in Fall 2015. Her poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series as well as the anthologies Great American Prose Poems, From Poe to Present and Best American Erotic Poems. She teaches at Iowa State University. Her previous books are also available from Bloof: A Gringo Like Me, Drunk by Noon, and The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway. 

EARLY RAVES for DAYS of SHAME & FAILURE:

"It’s hard to resist using a game show announcer’s voice when discussing Jennifer Knox’s latest collection, Days of Shame and Failure. Knox knows how to draw human complexity out of absurdity and kitsch (and vice versa) without positioning herself above it. She is one of us, sharing our fear and wonder, and we feel this sense of community as if there were five million other viewers—a spin on Whitman’s 'multitudes'—watching along with us to see how she makes it out of each lyrically harrowing poem. Is that camp? Is it satire? Who cares! 'Whatever it is,' as one poem reports, it gives me 'a real, really felt feeling,' and that’s what I’m a sucker for every time."

—Gregory Pardlo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for DIGEST

"I can't with Ms. Knox. I simply cannot. I can't fight the way she twists a world I thought I knew into rambunctious and revelatory word disco. I cannot resist the dizzying amount of real that comes blazing in every time one of these sizzling stanzas rips off my blinders. I cannot imagine what the inside of her head must be like, all tango and blaring and pinball, locked in its relentless churn. I can't believe that mere covers were able to contain this tender, this snorting laughter, these rampant truths. I cannot with Ms. Jennifer. But I did. I will. And you should."

—Patricia Smith, author & National Poetry Slam Champion

"When I'm asked why people should love poetry, I often point to the darkly funny, brutal poetry of Jennifer L. Knox and say, 'There is your reason, asshole. Right there. I dare you to read those poems and not be brought to your knees.' Days of Shame and Failure is her best work yet: potent with heart-sickening truth, humor and observation that will take us all from being on our knees, to face planting on the ground, kissing this good Earth with gratitude that such a poet exists in our time."

—Amber Rose Tamblyn, author of DARK SPARKLER

"Jennifer L. Knox is one of our funniest writers, but what places her work in a realm of its own is the empathy that surrounds, contradicts, and occasionally undermines the joke, sending us far beyond the punch line. Written from the far edge of vast experience, these poems lyricize the post-beatdown quality of middle age. The marvelously capacious Days of Shame and Failure is the work of a genius at her peak, the best book yet from one of our most brilliant and sui generis American writers."

—Sarah Manguso, author of ONGOINGNESS

Bloof poets at NYC Poetry Festival, Saturday & Sunday

This weekend, catch a couple of Bloof Books poets at the The New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island.

JACKIE CLARK
• Coldfront event, Saturday 4PM, Algonquin Stage

NATALIE EILBERT
• Luna Luna Magazine event on Sunday 1:30PM, White Horse Stage
• the sensation feelings journal event on Sunday at 2:00, White Horse Stage
• Brooklyn Poets event on Sunday, 3PM, White Horse Stage

Full schedule & line-ups at http://newyorkcitypoetryfestival.com/

Get a copy of Jackie's Sympathetic Nervous System here.

Read a copy of Natalie's Conversation with the Stone Wife here.

On the "irreverently imaginative poems" of Jennifer L. Knox

The Poetry Review (UK) has just released their Summer 2015 issue, which includes an omnibus review of all three of Jennifer L. Knox's books. Jack Underwood says, 

The unsettling humour of Knox’s poems is a by-product of what Gabriel Gudding describes as her “satiric empathy.” The laughter her poems provokes is a kind of nervous laughter, at the “cultural horror she depicts with complicity as if she too were not entirely innocent of it” (to cite Bill Knott). Class and gender politics gnaw away in Knox’s poems: tangible, but kept complex, dissolved in the kitsch and weirdness[.] 

Read the rest here. (PDF)

And of course you can get all three Knoxes in our store. (Select a Bundle Deal and they're 3 for $39, or $12 off.)

Bloof Bundles: Discounted Mix & Match Multiples from Bloof Books

Don't forget, Jen's fourth book is coming from Bloof real soon! Days of Shame & Failure is in progress now for fall 2015.