Ghosts, Models, Visions by Ginger Ko

GHOSTS, MODELS, VISIONS by Ginger Ko
$8.00

4.25 x 5.5
36 pages
laser-printed on cream stock
unique monoprint covers in soy ink with metallic stamped illustration & colored pencil
hand sewn in natural twine
LIMITED EDITION, numbered 1-150

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A long-awaited new chapbook in our handmade series! New poems by Ginger Ko from a series in progress called Biography of My Automaton. 

If you have a current Bloof subscription, this chapbook is already included.


THE ROTTED WATER OF MY URBANITY

I can’t make
anything from me,
anything not
already dead. I look
to my family
but none of them
are like me. They
have led up to me.
What do we do
when they no longer
need the mannequin
casings for their
clever matrices?
I asked a keeper
and they became
so angry that they
led me to the edge
of the dolphin tank,
pointed at the warders
who must masturbate
the males, massaging
pink extensions
as the dolphins float
belly up against
the poolside. When
your own body
is meaningless, when
you sit at home
on soft furniture
because your
automaton sits
at work every hour
of the day, suddenly
you begin to love
all the bodies.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR



GINGER KO is the author of Motherlover (Bloof, 2016), Inherit (Sidebrow, 2017), and Comorbid (Lark, 2016). Ginger is a Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia’s creative writing program, where she teaches writing and Women’s Studies. She is a contributing editor for The Wanderer and an editor at smoking glue gun. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com.

NEW! Crawlspace by Nikki Wallschlaeger

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CRAWLSPACE by Nikki Wallschlaeger
Publication date: May 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9965868-5-6
6 x 9 / 80 pages
Trade paper original
$15

*NOTE: The domestic shipping charge automatically added by PayPal is for US and Canada only. Square will only accept US addresses. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.

Bloof is thrilled to announce the first book in our 2017 lineup: CRAWLSPACE by Nikki Wallschlaeger. We have already had the pleasure of working with Nikki on her graphic chapbook, I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, and we can't wait to bring this new book.

The second book by the author of Houses, CRAWLSPACE collects thirty-six pieces built on the foundation of the sonnet, ranging in length from fourteen lines to longer works stacking multiple sonnets into linked sequences. CRAWLSPACE deepens and extends the house metaphor from Wallschlaeger's first book, while opening up more initmate and sometimes darker intellectual territory. Where Houses explored the mental/emotional/physical sheltered spaces in which we live out and construct our lives, Crawlspace explores the the more constricted spaces, the tighter concealed passages running above and below. These sonnets aim to be "very very fraught with you." 

Publication is scheduled for May 2017. To reserve a review copy or invite Nikki to do a reading, contact Shanna Compton: info at bloof books dot com.

"Form is everywhere & it’s useless to deny it, so I like to play with the illusion of having control. This is from a series of sonnets that I’ve placed into small buildings, but since the bank owns the buildings that I move in, I am only paying mortgage. We have an understanding. The sonnet has agreed to the task of my subversions, that the security guard is on a permanent lunch break so we can get inside. A window that is open on the top floor? A claw in the painting? These are my micro-victories against hegemony."

Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of Houses (Horse Less, 2015), and the chapbooks I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (Bloof, 2016) and I Would Be the Happiest Bird (Horse Less, 2014). She is currently at work on a book of sonnets called Crawlspace, some of which can be found in the Brooklyn Rail, Fanzine, Elective Affinities, the Account, the Inquisitive Eater, and elsewhere. www.nikkiwallschlaeger.com

Excerpts & Media

Poems from Crawlspace have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, P-Queue, TheThe Poetry Blog, the Account, Fanzine, Elective Affinities, Dusie, the Philadelphia Review, Quaint Magazine, the Enemy, the Inquisitive Eater, the Poetry Project Newsletter & elsewhere.

Sonnet (36)

Face me in your sonnets so I can permanently grieve

is really what the roses say to the antebellum purling 

dogtags of myself. It’s one of our common flowers

along with the gardenia, violet, & heady geranium

leaning into a postcard advertising vintage weedkiller.

It makes it difficult to approach the crowd with love,

I turn an unnatural whip of red like a baboon’s crypt.

Whether or not they like it depends on their versions

of paternalistic stylecraft, the jetskis they rode in on

red and black girls grown for their gutted waterpetals.

Afterwards I hear their toasts while I pour champagne

to health and happiness. I trip on a slab of calf muscle,

the grooms giving the essential lists of panting warning

It is the big gulp of seaworld sacraments I have sampled

when they asked me to be a bridesmaid in topos red tulle,

the families who have grown me out of hysterical divide.

I have been their servant. I’ve listened to their decimations

of languor, that slow cookin is always the best way to unite.

I’ve been pregnant before and I will be wrecked pregnant 

again: heavier with the tree slits of Mary Turner’s baby

who sings of rapturous hexes oiled by the truly innocent.

These Dostoyevskian friends, what can you say to them

who choose the inconsequential as their primary crime.

Like the good shigella drugged citizens that they are,

they handwax the long calvacade of cars with Jackie O

fibroids, the journeymen specializing in overseeing

plant lacuna switches & steel workboots that massacre

babies not ready to be born w/ tinted glass is my belly

all the babies covered in secret eyes blinking for our nights

running with their infant infareds, flashing through the paths.

We are in hiding. We make pot roast sandwiches for senators

as I trace my eyes down to the documents being fabricated

over their lunch hours I know I will have to wipe down this

table when they finish. A newspaper asks,” How many words

can you make out of the word arrogate?” next to a crossword

puzzle about cinema noir. How much of it can be destroyed

if it’s designed to kill you cuz Baldwin says here it comes again

when you’ve already been walking for miles, talkin back to cops

and your voice gets auto-tuned swelled with dripping generations

of statesmen. By the glow of mycelium lakes who are connecting

the old growth trees for shelter: We, as marked women transform

ourselves. We are the wood violets and roses stretching in the rain. 

• Sonnet (13): Mother you want is going to yell at you, from Fanzine
• Sonnet (8): Do not feed the inquisitive machine, from the Account
• Sonnet (29): To drag one's razed cesarean stories, from the Poetry Project website
• Sonnet (59): Three scoops of natural black hair, from the Inquisitive Eater
• Four Sonnets (57, 41, 34, 51), from the Brooklyn Rail

Hymn: An Ovulution is now a free ebook PDF

Get the PDF (272 KB)

HYMN: An Ovulution
Mel Coyle & Jenn Marie Nunes

Hand sewn
Curious Metallic Gold Leaf cover with pink ink
Passion Fruit pink translucent flyleaves
Cream card stock frontispiece
Natural 70 lb. text b/w interior
4.25 x 7
$8.00
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES

SOLD OUT, now a free ebook PDF (3/30/2017)

HYMN: An Ovulution is the second chapbook in the 2015 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series is released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release, and eventually a combination volume called Bound.

BLOOF BOOKS CHAPBOOK SERIES
ISSN 2373- 1648 Online
This is the electronic edition
March 2017

"Across from the title page of Mel Coyle and Jenn Marie Nunes’s HYMN: An Ovulution is a line drawing of Hera, her face set in an Elvis-like sneer. This visual reference to Elvis makes sense: Coyle and Nunes’ paean to Hera—queen bitch of the Olympic gods, cow-eyed and regal, dispensing vengeance from her peacock-drawn chariot—structures itself around both the call-and-response structures Elvis took from R&B and the blues, and the strophe/antistrophe patterns of ancient Greek theater. If this sounds erudite, it is: the poem circles around real and false etymologies. [...] It's a performance of matriarchy to make crowds go wild." —MC Hyland, Rain Taxi

EXCERPT:

HUM < W > ME

her main reaction is blank bovine stare.

Hera knows where the $$ comes from. to give

her some idea of the landscape it’s porcine

February and the biscuits ain’t risin’

HUM < W > ME

down bondage and braille

HUM < W > ME

down pink plastic selfies and sluts.

the fogwitch goes in and out. in and out.

Hera’s left defrosting the ladder

HUM < W > ME

there’s another string of fur at her throat

HUM < W > ME

the fogwitch knows where the Dr. keeps

his other. under the matte black slacks

and filled to the brim with coca-cola

HUM < W > ME

Hera wonders did she eat the animal beneath

the fur. her lips and fingers are blue. she leaves

prints on the satin documentation. she leaves

prints where no one will find ’em

HUM < W > ME

corporate

HUM < W > ME

Syria

HUM < W > ME

and quit smoking. freedom is yours

HUM < W > ME

the Dr. ain’t in but he sure ain’t out.

the waves are on repeat today

HUM < W > ME

Hera won’t come down

HUM < W > ME

wild anti-pilgrims snapchat the streets

HUM < W > ME

it’s media day at the ashram

HUM < W > ME

the future is coming into focus. the sentiment

is not new and neither are the Hitler references.

the headline reads: Hera Sheds Curfew

(comma) Realizes Capital Gains

HUM < W > ME

in like a lion

HUM < W > ME

out like a lesbian

Mel Coyle & Jenn Marie Nunes

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Mel Coyle is from Chicago and other places where the corn grows. Currently, she lives in Ohio where she coedits TENDE RLOIN, an online poetry gallery. You can find some of her work online.

Jenn Marie Nunes is the author of four chapbooks, including Object Reference Not Set to an Instance of Object from dancing girl press. Her work appears most recently in Similar:Peaks::, Tupelo Quarterly, Smoking Glue Gun, and Southeast Fiction, and she is coeditor of TENDE RLOIN, an online gallery for poetry. Her first full-length collection, selected by Switchback Books as the winner of their first-ever Queer Voices Award, is And/Or, and Juned is now available from YesYes Books.

SOLD OUT, coming soon in free e-book PDF formats

The following chapbooks have recently sold out: 

Exercises in Painting by Khadijah Queen

The Library of Congress Censored Interview by CAConrad

And there are only 3 or 4 copies this one:

Knotted. left, by Alyssa Lynee

We still have to put up the free e-books of these:

Maureen Thorson's The Woman, the Mirror, the Eye

HYMN: An Ovulution by Mel Coyle & Jenn Marie Nunes

We have two more chapbooks forthcoming still before we open again for Open Reading Period for new chapbook submissions, by Catie Rosemurgy & Ginger Ko. More about those soon.

Bloof at AWP 2017

We're going to DC next week, you?

Bloof Books will be participating in the AWP Conference & Bookfair next week in Washington DC. We will be reading, paneling, writing & otherwise making our voices heard. Though we recognize the timing of this conference is not ideal, we feel it is important to carry on with our small-press and poetic activities (not to mention our jobs!) in spite of our intense opposition to this new administration. We wish all our readers & fellows resilience & strength of heart. We thank you all for your efforts—seen & unseen. We will never stop resisting.

Here's a schedule of Bloof-related events for the conference. (Updates may be posted here or to our social media accounts.)

Bookfair: February 9–11

Bloof Books & Black Radish Books will be at table 625 in the bookfair, all three days: Thursday 2/9, Friday 2/10, Saturday 2/11. The bookfair hours are 8:30–5:00. Washington Convention Center, 801 Mount Vernon Pl. NW

We will be debuting all three of our new books! Details below. And of course bringing our full catalog. As usual, we'll be offering exclusive bookfair discounts.

Three new books!

Our first releases of 2017 are ready for your preorders. We're so excited to bring you Nikki Wallschlaeger's second book, Crawlspace, a collection of fiercely experimental sonnets; K. Lorraine's beautifully present second book, The Rest Is Censored; and this horror-inflected sixth book by Danielle Pafunda, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. 

Crawlspace

The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

The Rest Is Censored

Thursday, February 9

9:00–10:15 a.m. Panel

Shanna Compton is a panelist on a forum about the long poem: The Long & Winding Road, with R. Erica Doyle, Katrina Vandenberg, John Gallaher, and Matthew Thorburn. Marriott Marquis, Marquis Salon 9 & 10, Meeting Level Two.

BLOOF's side of the bookfair table may not be open during this panel, but we'll see you there immediately after, by 10:30 a.m.

 

7:00–9:00 p.m. Readings

Khadijah Queen, Mg Roberts, Danielle Pafunda, Anastacia Renee Tolbert, Becca Klaver, Natalie Eilbert, K. Lorraine Graham, Jackie Clark, Sandra Simonds & more! 

Offsite reading: Black Radish + Bloof Books at AWP 2017

DC Arts Center Theater (2nd Floor)
2438 Eighteenth Street NW
in Adams Morgan
Free admission

Maureen Thorson is reading at Resist/Replenish: Coven Press
Songbyrd Music House & Record Cafe 2477-2475 18th St NW

 

Friday, February 10

 

10:30–11:45 a.m. Panel

Sandra Simonds is a panelist on Writing in the Internet Age, with Esmé Weijun Wang, Mark Neely & Ashley Ford. Washington Convention Center, Room 101, Level One.

12:00–3:00 p.m. Book Signing & Tarot Readings

Danielle Pafunda will be signing copies of her new book, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison, and offering tarot readings. Washington Convention Center, AWP Bookfair, Table #625.

1:30-2:45 p.m. Panel

Becca Klaver is a panelist on The Poetics of Empire: Five Books, with Farid Matuk, Laura Jaramillo, Christopher Kempf & Sam Taylor. Marriot Marquis, Supreme Court, Meeting Level Four.
 

3:00 p.m. Book Signing

Becca Klaver & Jennifer L. Knox will be signing copies of their new books, Empire Wasted and Days of Shame & Failure. Washington Convention Center, AWP Bookfair, Table #625.

3:00–4:15 Panel

Khadijah Queen is a panelist on Legacies of the Badass: Black Feminist Writing in the Millennium, with Ruth Ellen Kocher, Dawn Lundy Martin, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram & Duriel E. Harris. Washington Convention Center, Room 209ABC, Level Two.

BLOOF's side of the bookfair table will be closing a little early Friday, by 4:00 p.m.
 

Saturday, February 11

10:30–11:45 a.m. Panels

Jennifer L. Knox is a panelist on Arsenic Icing: Sentiment as Threat in American Women’s Writing, with Vievee Francis, Brenda Shaughnessy, Cate Marvin & Erin Belieu. Washington Convention Center, Room 202A, Level Two.

Khadijah Queen is a panelist on Writing White Characters, with Sophfronia Scott, Traci L. Jones, Daniel José Older. Marriot Marquis, Archives, Level Four.

12:00–3:00 p.m. Book Signing & Tarot Readings

Danielle Pafunda will be signing copies of her new book, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison, and offering tarot readings. Washington Convention Center, AWP Bookfair, Table #625.

NEW! The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda

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The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

Danielle Pafunda

ISBN: 978-0-9965868-6-3
5 x 7 | $15
Trade Paper Original
84 pages
$15*

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

Publication date: April 2017

A second redesigned & updated edition of The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda is now available for preorder from Bloof Books. The Dead Girls Speak in Unison is Danielle Pafunda's sixth collection of poems. Two of Danielle's other books are also available from Bloof: My Zorba and Natural History Rape Museum.

"Danielle Pafunda abolishes the stereotype of prissy, dainty girls in her thrilling poetry collection The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. Set in a surrealistic underworld, takes on the collective voice of empowered female corpses and ironically uses quaint language and structure to describe the true nature of women. […] Pafunda’s collection leaves readers craving more of its 'rotten pages.' 'If you’re looking for something pretty,' don’t look here. —Verse, Brittany Capps 

"We don’t often see choral speakers, but speaking in unison gives these 'girls' collective presence, forcing us to face gender violence. [T]he girls gain a certain power in this…raw girls who bypass maturity, who are as rank and offensive as possible. These unrefined girls are deeply unsettling." —The Plot, Heidi Czerwiec

26

Where’s our deady daddy?

Where’s our dear dead

dada man?

We’re all dolled up.

We’re curls and pearls

and ruffled pants.

We’ve tacked our skin

back ontobones, and hissing

roaches at our throats.

Gemless, rigged.

We’re daddy’s girls

we’re apples

pierced through

the heart, the socket

where the heart

or the eye once was.

We’ve his eyes, in fact

his expression fixed

a fix, a needle

dropping down

a syringe full of seed

straight into the cavity

or this bombed-out hide.

About the author: 

Danielle Pafunda is the author of The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books, 2017), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books, 2008), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and the chapbooks Cram (Essay Press, 2015) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of this Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace, 2014). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry and have been anthologized in Beauty is a Verb: The Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011),   Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting & Child Rearing (Fence Books, 2007), Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Penguin, 2015). 

NEW! The Rest Is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham

online

The Rest Is Censored
K. Lorraine Graham
ISBN: 978-0-9965868-3-2
5.5 x 8.5
Trade Paper Original
106 pages
$16*

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

A second edition of The Rest Is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham is forthcoming from Bloof Books. This book was very briefly released by another press last year, but our new edition has been totally redesigned and corrected, and we are treating it as a new release to ensure it receives the readership it deserves.

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"Lay the pieces of languaged life of your, next to one another, they were moved from, they moved, me. If I don't misunderstand you, KLG, you are coding these pieces of languaged, life, as poetry. It is very good poetry. I think, of poets who bring a day, into the poem—Leslie Scalapino, Larry Eigner, Joanne Kyger—Lorraine Graham on a bus in California—and I am given pause, is changing, misunderstanding can, get to, life through, this." —CATHERINE WAGNER

Review at HARRIET/POETRY FOUNDATION by Gina Myers:

"K. Lorraine Graham’s The Rest Is Censored also takes a look at the day and what one does to get through it. And it captures concern of not wanting what is expected: 'Wake up in a panic / about real estate / about not wanting it.' It also captures a life lived variously, which includes panic as well as connection to others and beauty.' 

"The wide-ranging exploration of a life reminded me that there are so many others (perhaps all poets?) who are trying to figure out how to live, and while they may not arrive at any answers, the journey is well worth it. 

"The Rest Is Censored reminds me of Fanny Howe’s essay 'Bewilderment,' where she offers one possible definition of the lyric: '[I]t is a method of searching for something that can't be found. It is an air that blows and buoys and settles. It says, "Not this, not this," instead of, "I have it."' Howe describes serial poems as spirals, and writes of the spiral-walker, '[T]here is no plain path, no up and down, no inside or outside. But there are strange returns and recognitions and never a conclusion.' Poetry makes sense to me for this reason: it is willing to raise questions and be happy to not arrive at answers."

Author City: WASHINGTON, DC

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009), My Little Neoliberal Pony (Insert Blanc, 2013), and The Rest Is Censored (Bloof Books, 2017). She lives in Washington, DC.