Dear Black Oceanographers,
We are swollen with pride and brimming with relief now that our next two books of poetry are at the printer. Please consider pre-ordering either/both of them now, at a specially discounted rate of $10, plus free shipping. In doing so you will not only help us quickly recoup some of our overhead expense (and in these dark days of publishing all expenses seem to be over our heads har har), you will ensure yourself that status of ‘coolest kid on the block’ when you receive your copies weeks before they’re even available on Amazon. But hurry: this offer expires on February 11th. All pre-orders will ship on March 3rd. A little bit about these titles:
WITH DEER by Aase Berg / translated by Johannes Göransson
In this, her first single-volume collection to be published in English, Berg works a wicked necromancy in her poems. Filling each page with fluids and viscera she plunges into the palpable, pulsating center of our psyche—pulling up fistfuls of nightmares at once strange and familiar. To read this book is to glimpse the ecstasy you always suspected lay at the heart of every rapturous horror. With Deer [Hos rådjur] was Berg’s first full-length book of poetry, originally published in Sweden in 1996. Since then she has published four more books in her native language, exploring the divine terror throbbing beneath the surface of a naturalistic and barely human world. Read advance praise from Cathy Wagner, Dodie Bellamy and Michael Gira (and place your order) here.
SCAPE by Joshua Harmon
Scape, a poised and attentive debut collection by Joshua Harmon, engages with various landscapes—from the constructed and debased world of parking lots, potato chip factories, and cul-de-sac traceries to the “rural equation” of woods, fields, and “clouds’ crumpled page” to create a series of conversations and engagements with the idea of the natural. Through his precise observations, Harmon defines landscape—the word and the idea—through an insightful and meticulous relationship with language. For Harmon, landscape is never static; instead his poems map a constantly changing terrain, in which the interior is imposed on the exterior as a frame for seeing it. Read advance praise from Lydia Davis, Michael Davidson and Noah Eli Gordon (and place your order) here.