March & April events (AWP, BSPBF & more)

AWP, Los Angeles: March 30–April 2

Though Bloof is not participating in the bookfair at AWP this year, we are pitching in for a joint during Camp Real Pants on Friday night, and several of our poets will be at the conference. Here's where to catch their readings & panels next week:

 Wednesday, March 30 

Sandra Simonds at the AWP Saturnalia Books Party/Reading! (8 PM)

 Thursday, March 31 

Khadijah Queen at Mile-High MFA at AWP, Bookfair Table 623, signing (11 AM)

Ginger Ko at the High Plains Collective - AWP offsite Reading & Art Exhibit (6 PM)

Natalie Eilbert is cohosting Switchback / No, Dear / Gazing Grain / Atlas: an AWP off-site (7 PM)

Natalie Eilbert at the Muzzle, the Offing, and Vinyl plus DANCE PARTY! (8 PM)

 Friday, April 1 

Ginger Ko at Asian-American Writers Reinventing Los Angeles panel (10:30 AM)

Ginger Ko & Natalie Eilbert at Happy Hour with Bloof, Green Mountains Review & Hunger Mountain at Submittable presents Camp Real Pants (6 PM)

Sandra Simonds at Bennington Review & Black Warrior Review Launch Party and Reading (6 PM)

Khadijah Queen is hosting Courting Risk: Epilogue (6:30 PM)

Ben Fama is cohosting Nightboat, Krupskaya, Wonder (7 PM)

Sandra Simonds at Lana Turner and Nightboat Books Reading: AWP Offsite Event (8 PM)

 Saturday, April 2 

Ginger Ko at Craft & _____: Creating Interdisciplinary Possibilities in the MFA panel (10:30 AM)

Khadijah Queen at Spectacular Poetics & the Poetry of Spectacle panel (3 PM)

Ginger Ko at All of Us Witches: An AWP Offsite with Nat. Brut & The Spectacle! (9 PM)

+++ Some of our books will be available in limited quantities at YES FEMMES AWP '16 off-site reading + party (6 PM) +++

 Bloof at Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, April 9–10 

Bloof is going to be tabling at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair the following weekend, April 9th and 10th! Come see us at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum on Porter Street, all day Saturday at Sunday. We'll have a bunch of our handmade chapbooks, all of our books, and some special ephemeral surprises. This is the 10th anniversary of BSPBF, and it's sure to be a great time, as always.

Also in April: Jennifer L. Knox is reading in Ames, Iowa, with Ada Limón on 4/5. Sandra Simonds is doing a mini tour for her new book from Saturnalia, Steal It Back. She'll be in Philadelphia 4/19 and 4/20, DC 4/21, Baltimore 4/23 & Tuscaloosa 4/30—details on these to come. Get the latest & subscribe to our events at Facebook.

Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! by Daniel Borzutzky (SOLD OUT, now available as FREE EBOOK)

Bedtime Stories for the End of the World!

Daniel Borzutzky
SOLD OUT as of September 2015. 
Free PDF released March 2016

Available as an Ebook here or to download as a PDF here.


Hand sewn in black twine with black metal eyelets
Persian Blue covers with dark blue inkjet & gold linocut print
Gold flyleaves
Strathmore Bright White interiors
7 x 7 inches | 40 pages
$8.00

Bloof Books Chapbook Series
Vol. 2: Issue 5
ISSN: 2373-163x (Dec 2014) LIMITED TO 100 COPIES / SOLD OUT
ISSN: 2373-1648 Online (Mar 2016)

Excerpt: 

from In the Blazing Cities of Your Rotten Carcass Mouth 

The children were eating the bushes outside of their former houses that had been crushed by The Bank of America. 

There was a boy in a bush singing an improvised song about a bulldozer that obliterates the bureaucratic centers of the earth. 

Do you remember cheese, he sang to his friend. 

Te acuerdas de la piña? 

Do you remember ferries, he sang to his friend. 

Te acuerdas de los patos? 

Do you remember school bells and cowards and the boys who would come to our yard to eat the scraps of food we threw to them before the city started to blaze? 

Bienvendios a CVS. Si cuenta con tu Extra Care Card please escanea it now. 

There really wasn't money anymore or at least there wasn't money for us. 

The man with the camera kissed me and took photographs of the blood that dripped from my fingers. 

Everyone knew he was CIA. 

He knew for example that the blood that dripped from my face tasted like the blood of the workers assassinated by the Fatherland. 

Then I found a dying shack and I met a man with a chain and he was snoring and talking in his sleep and he smelled like pee and complained he had lost his pension when they privatized the city in the dying days of the rotten carcass economy. 

Looking after the world is a shitty job if you're really not a people person.

Read more of this poem at Pen America.

Photo credit: Sean Patrick Cain

Daniel Borzutzky’s books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007), and Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). His poetry translations include Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for His Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010), among others. His chapbooks include Data Bodies (Holon, 2013), One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad, 2009), and Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull, 2007). His writing has been anthologized in The Sonnets: Translating & Rewriting Shakespeare; La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA; Seriously Funny: Poems about Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else; A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Turkish. His work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/America Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. He lives in Chicago.

FAQ: Next open reading period & 2016 subscriptions

Our 2016 Schedule

Getting several questions about this so I'm gonna informally say it here: Bloof Books is full for 2016 for paperbacks.

We took on four extra books midway through 2015 that were not originally on our schedule (a wonderful, beautiful thing, but definitely extra work!) and our 2015 slate of chapbooks has been extended into 2016 as we work together to schedule all the stuff.

Of the 2015 chaps we've still got three more to go: Catie Rosemurgy, Khadijah Queen & Ginger Ko.

In 2016 so far, we've already done one chap, Nikki Wallschlaeger's, and two books—Natalie Eilbert's and Ginger Ko's. K. Lorraine Graham & Danielle Pafunda are coming up with paperbacks next. Then Becca Klaver is scheduled for fall, also in paperback. 

That's a pretty full year. I also have a book (my own) I took off the schedule and would very much like to put back on.

However, I would like to add at least one or two chaps, and later in the year we might be able to open for a brief period to consider 2017 titles of any length, though we also have some things already in the 2017 hopper (not finalized but first in line for consideration).

Anyway, right now that's the goal. 

Our 2016 Subscription

Yes! We can do that. UPDATE: These are now available.

online

BOOKS
Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert
Motherlover by Ginger Ko
The Rest Is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham
The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda
Empire Wasted by Becca Klaver
The Hazard Cycle by Shanna Compton

CHAPBOOKS*
Exercises in Painting by Khadijah Queen
First the Burning & Then the Witches by Catie Rosemurgy
Inherit by Ginger Ko

*The chapbooks will be limited in quantity, since each is already half sold out based on existing preorders.

If you're on the Bloof email list (sign up in the right sidebar), you will get first notice of any future Open Reading Periods and Subscription offers, when those happen. 

Thank you for your interest & for supporting all these fantastic books. 

This is the best job ever. 

Shanna, for Bloof

Every day in April…

 …as we have done for the last several years, Bloof poets will be posting drafts and snippets of new work in progress, as part of Maureen Thorson's inspirational NaPoWriMo.

You can follow the poems here, and via our Facebook and Twitter feeds. Each poet has a tag you can follow here as well, linked in the list below. Some poets may erase their drafts as the next day's posts go up. (Because these poems will likely appear in more finished form elsewhere later.) So stop by often if you want to catch them all.

    Participating Poets    

Shanna Compton
author of For Girls & Others (Bloof 2008) and Brink (Bloof 2013)

Peter Davis
author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! (Bloof 2010) and TINA (Bloof 2013)

Natalie Eilbert
author of Conversations with the Stone Wife (Bloof 2014) and Swan Feast (Bloof 2015)

Farrah Field
guest poet, author of Rising and Wolf & Pilot (Four Way Books)

Hailey Higdon
author of Packing (Bloof, 2013)

Packing also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Becca Klaver

author of Nonstop Pop (Bloof 2013) and Empire Wasted (Bloof, forthcoming in 2016)
Nonstop Pop also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Kirsten Kaschock
author of Windowboxing: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts (Bloof, 2013)
Windowboxing also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Jennifer L. Knox
author of A Gringo Like Me (Bloof 2007), Drunk by Noon (Bloof 2007), The Mysteries of the Hidden Driveway (Bloof 2010), and Days of Shame & Failure (Bloof 2015)

Pattie McCarthy
author of scenes from the lives of my parents (Bloof, 2013)

scenes from the lives of my parents also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

Sharon Mesmer
author of Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof 2015)

Jenn Marie Nunes
coauthor of Hymn: An Ovulution (Bloof 2015)

Catie Rosemurgy
author of First the Burning & Then the Witches (Bloof, forthcoming in 2016)

Maureen Thorson (at her own site)
author of The Woman, the Mirror, the Eye (Bloof 2015)

Jared White
author of This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me (Bloof 2013)
This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me also appears in BOUND (Bloof 2015)

 & probably a few more