Dear Black Oceanographers,

We enthusiastically present our forthcoming publications for the following year:

Scape by Joshua Harmon (Spring 2009)

With Deer by Aase Berg / trans. by Johannes Göransson (Spring 2009)

Scary No Scary by Zachary Schomburg (Summer 2009)

Objects For A Fog Death by Julie Doxsee (Winter 2009)

Pigafetta Is My Wife by Joe Hall (Spring 2010)

The tremendous honor of escorting these books toward their public consumption has been the cause for numerous bacchanalia in the Black Ocean HQ. Much revelry has been had with each new acquisition, at the expense of personal safety and upright reputations. With our remaining limbs, we write of the joy that we experienced selecting the most exciting work that came across our desks. Each of these books stimulates the brain in its own way: exciting the cortex of language; rousing the senses; animating our nightmares; stimulating the bones of the inner ear; filling history with flesh and blood. We hope you will subscribe to the coming year of all these beautiful failures and in a few months you will be afforded the opportunity to do so formally, with your wallet.

In addition to the titles listed above, we have some other projects in the works that are top secret, to be announced only when the perfect hour is upon us. Of course a new issue of our evolving lifestyle magazine, Handsome, is due upon the shelves this winter season as well.

At a time when the corporate publishers are laying off droves of editors and all but eliminating their literary departments; when the small independents are turning to the more cost-effective mediums of digital printing and e-publishing; when all our friends and family insist we read the Twilight series—Black Ocean forges ahead by expanding our staff and continuing to publish ground-breaking volumes of poetry using the finest processes and materials available. In short, we are dancing in the ashes. Dance with us and become your own hero.