Together with Cinamatheque Press, Black Ocean has been holding a salon-style reading series called Poetry & Biscuits in poetry editor Carrie Olivia Adams' living room. If you don't live in Chicago and can't catch the real thing, be sure to check out the Poetry and Biscuits vimeo page and enjoy these sure to please readings at home in your jammies (or anywhere you like and in your attire of choice). Past readers include Joe Hall, Julie Doxsee, Matt Hart, and A. Minetta Gould.
In the week following our offer of a free lifetime subscription to anyone who got a tattoo inspired by one of our books, people have been blogging and reblogging the news. Here are just a few examples:
What's more, there is already another lifer who has joined the ranks... Robert W. got a tattoo of the antles from the With Deer cover at his local parlor today. He was kind enough to record the deed on video and post it to YouTube:
Here is a picture of the piece, raw and ready to heal:
And lastly, he blogs about his experience and reason for getting the piece over at the online magazine, Uncanny Valley.
While this is all amazing and fun and completely unexpected, it's also been really meaningful to me. I'd like to clarify that this is not simply a 'marketing gimmick' but a way for me to express my gratitude for the enthusiasm people are expressing. We're a small press that started only half a decade ago that I've kept running with the help of a devoted staff and a pocketful of credit cards. I just wanted to put out books that I believe in--that were important to me. In the process, others have found these books to be important and that's incredibly rewarding.
Thanks again to all our readers, tattooed or not. You keep us going.
It's recently come to our attention that our books are very popular with the kids these days. So popular in fact that they're getting tattoos to show their love. Tattoos!? Yes...
Following are three body modifications:
From top to bottom: Rebecca H. with a tattoo inspired by "The Center of Worthwhile Things" from The Man Suit; Kimberly D. with a tattoo inspired by the black telephone / white telephone section of The Man Suit; Brittany D. with a similarly excellent inspiration. I'm so moved by their devotion that I'm giving all three LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTIONS to Black Ocean.
Below is some dude who got a henna "tattoo" of the Scary, No Scary cover. But like a summer fling it is impermanent, and so he receives nothing more than our well wishes and fond memories...
If you'd like toget a tattoo inspired by a Black Ocean title, you too can receive a lifetime subscription and become a Black Oceanographer for life! Just send us a picture of you getting your tattoo (so we know it's not simply a magic marker), or find one of us in person and expose yourself to us (with fair warning). If only Persea Books had a deal like this going when I got my Paul Celan tattoo... *le sigh*... Thanks to the above individuals for being so particularly great!
If you're feeling wayward, check out Sean Patrick Hill's review of Objects for a Fog Death on Bookslut. What follows is just a tiny peep, so be sure to click the link to read the whole thing.
Objects for a Fog Death is a conceptual book, a series that evolves toward a unified poem, a singular tone elaborated upon and improvised to the underlying rhythm. Meaning no poem in particular stands out as singular; rather, Doxsee’s poems revel in their fragmentary nature: they are a part of something larger, but in and of themselves seem to hover at the edge of a fog.
In honor of all you stranded in various parts of the country due to the blizzards (or anticipated blizzards) sweeping across the Eastern half, I'd like to offer a free copy of PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE with EVERY purchase made between 11:59a on 12/26 and 11:59p on 12/27 (EST).
Why PIGAFETTA IS MY WIFE? These poems fragment the journals of Antonio Pigafetta, a 16th Century traveler who recorded Magellan’s hellish circumnavigation of the globe, while tracking a present-day speaker and his beloved as they are distanced and reunited across the map.
Find it, and other titles in our catalog. Make your purchase within the alloted time-frame and we'll automatically include it with your order. And as always: SHIPPING IS FREE!
Today, take a stroll with Brandon Shimoda over to Fiction Land, where he’s sure you’ll find Elisabeth Benjamin’s The Houses (Catenary Press) just what your little enjambed hearts have been craving.
Composed of eight stories written for eight friends -- eight stories composing eight distinct houses -- eight houses built for eight friends -- each house constituting an environment, each furnished with a world of acute movement and personified wonder, of dilemma and deeply attended perception -- Elisabeth Benjamin's The Houses, published by the Catenary Press, in 2009, constitutes the simultaneously joyful and arresting awareness that we each live our lives sentence-by-sentence, one perception to the next, and often barely and just bearably held together by the faith of our friends, and the imaginative possibilities our friends project onto us, from within distances both real and abstract, that we might occasionally ravel (read, write, speak and live) ourselves into. Benjamin is a creator of extraordinary fiction, living on the eastern edge of Maine; the Catenary Press is a micro-press devoted to the presentation of serial work, currently housed in Iowa. The Houses is a series of quiet and defiantly essential acts of generosity. It is a deceptively small fold that, once opened and entered, reveals the private space we compose for ourselves as surprisingly, necessarily communal, and infinite.
The Black Ocean blog took a rest this weekend, and we hope you did too--maybe curled up with one of the many books we’ve shared with you this month. To celebrate the duality of a lunar eclipse on the winter solstice, here are two chapbooks recommended by Joe Hall to read by the light of the blood-red moon.
Vallejo and Starkweather wreck each other in what he calls a transcontemporation (definition: A transcontemporation is to a poem what RoboCop is to a normal police officer). The flaming rubble that results is by turns awkward and gorgeous as the poem's deal with love, hornyness, resignation etc in a voice swerving between angry adolescence and the opposite of that:
"In seventh grade, I couldn't find the heart / on a 3D anatomy model, I just stood there like a town / dotted with paralyzed tornados, as the students snickered / I imagined Andre the Giant flying through the air, getting / head from Stacy Kerkoff beneath the bleachers. // Today, I brush back the harshness of because..."
or
"May this rain never end. / Unless I am allowed to fall / from the same source, unless they bury me / in a downpour, in the waters / that surge from every fire. // This rain, to what end will it reach me?"
Wade's poems enter the process of your own reading and revise. They erase their own tracks, boiling themselves down to what they are--words in relation. The most thinly whispered proposition. What you have to strain to hear, to lean in, turn your ear to. The book is vegan. It is not there.
It is so punk I can't even figure out how to buy it. And isn't that what Christmas is all about? Look at some pages here, here, here.
Check back tomorrow for something of a slightly different flavor from Brandon Shimoda.
This time of year, whether you're writing a letter to Santa, sending (or receiving) one of those catch-all family newsletters, or mailing out holiday cards, one thing is clear--'tis the season for letters. Perhaps you'd like to catch up on a little bookish correspondence, and in that case, let this book recommended by our poetry editor Carrie Olivia Adams be your guide.
Correspondence by Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan (Seagull Books)
Though not a poetry book per se, this collection of love letters between Bachmann and Celan is as intense, beautiful, and lyrical as any of the poems that either Bachmann or Celan produced. The letters themselves incorporate some of their poems and many thoughts on their work, which makes this book both a wonderful source of insight into their writings as well as a fraught and powerful look at love in a Europe repairing and healing from World War II and the holocaust.
A. Minetta Gould shared a trioofbooks with you earlier this month, so today we're giving you a peek at what you can look forward to from Ms. Gould in the new year. Over on Publishing Genius, AMG's got a chapbook forthcoming called Arousing Notorietyand something so awesome at Spooky Girlfriend Press it defies description.
We've posted quite a few chapbooks lately with plans to share some more. What are your favorite chapbooks?
To all of you fellow Goodreads members out there, we have some news! Joe Hall's Pigafetta Is My Wife has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2010. But you, dear readers, can turn this nominee into a winner simply by casting your vote. Just log in to Goodreads and click the link below to vote!
Today, Paula Cisewski, author of Upon Arrival, shares a recommendation with you that she eagerly anticipates herself:
I haven't even received my copy of MC Hyland's Neveragainland (Lowbrow Press, just released December 5th!) in the mail yet, but I can pre-recommend it with confidence. Her lovely online chapbook, Residential As In from Blue Hour Press would convince anyone of the same.
For some of this week, I'll be letting you in on what some Black Oceanographers have been up to recently. And Paula's been busy. In addition to Upon Arrival, available from Black Ocean, Paula’s new book Ghost Fargo is available from Nightboat books.
It’s been a little quiet on the blog here the past few days, but to make up for it, we’d like to share three chapbooks recommended by our poetry editor Carrie Olivia Adams. Check out all the lovely things Carrie has to say about these little beauties.
Mobius Crownsby Srikanth Reddy and Dan Beachy-Quick (P-QUEUE)
This chapbook was new to me in 2010, even though it was originally published in 2008. But in a year when one of the most discussed poetry books was Anne Carson's Nox, I came across Mobius Crowns as another amazing example of the book as art object, and as an object where physical form serves content. There are two chapbooks, each with french flaps, boxed and bound in the collection. In my day job, I spend a lot of time talking about e-books and e-marketing and i-pad apps for books, so I know that if we want the book to live it must be beautiful. And it is reassuring to see small presses make a thing of beauty. "I thought a friend, like a poem, is what allows you to cease being oneself, and so be more oneself."
Be they prose poems or flash fiction or some other attempt at categorization, these are mini fables of madness--each beginning with "a friend who"--a bleak world of suicide and murder, albeit with an acerbic tongue. The collection is complete with an index that lists 9 kinds of murder from asphyxiation to patricide and suicides from defenestration to overdose.
All of the little chapbooks produced by Cinematheque are lovingly made. With a pocket-size trim, crafted with a loving attention to detail, this chapbook by Adam Clay is no exception. As well, the poems inside feel perfectly handmade: Of course a quilt is a house--
And of course you can become so enamored with an image that you become it:
like the snow all over town and like the snow all over town you become it.
--
If you're looking for a book you can hold, love, and cherish this season one of these might just do the trick!
I'll have some recommendations for you later today, but in the mean time check out these recommendations on the Book By Its Cover Cover blog. These books have beauty but they also have brains.
We've spent a week bringing you the best book reccomendations in cyber space, and for the next few days, we'll share what Black Oceanographers are up to on other presses. But as we trudge through December, we can't help but think of the new year and all the books that are yet to be. Here at Black Ocean, Destroyer of Man by Dominic Mallary, The Girl Without Arms by Brandon Shimoda, and Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henrikson are all forthcoming. But there are plenty of other great presses out there with books just waiting to get born. We want to know: what books are you looking forward to? Tell us in the comments and we may feature your suggestions in a future blog post.
Newly off of the forthcoming list, my holiday recommendation for you, dear blog readers, is a book I'm about to give myself. I can't wait to read it because I’m certain Ada Limón’s Sharks In the Rivers (Milkweed Editions) will warm the cockles of the heart. Ada’s poems will make you shamelessly tingly inside--they filter sun & sadness & awareness & life's grit and let them warm your arms in patterns both familiar and stunning, leave marks barely visible to the eye that seep into your guts and simmer. From my wish list to yours.
Some days you just want to read a chapbook. Lucky for you, Brandon Shimoda, whose book The Girl Without Arms is forthcoming from Black Ocean, has just the chapbook you need: Phil Cordelli's Book of Numbers Book of Letters(Agnes Fox Press).
Years from now ... after poetry has quit the world of money and influence ... after art has dispensed entirely with any cares for the mainstream (consumers, commuters, homeowners, husbands, voters, committee members, academics, etc.) ... after 99% of what we have come to accept as good and important has rotted out of the atmosphere ... people will begin unearthing the relics of the life and work of Phil Cordelli -- a poet, artist and farmer, born in the twentieth century, active across the first half of the twenty-first, and currently living in western Massachusetts. Among the innumerable home recordings, painted films, letterpressed pieces of garbage, book-length collages, scarified vinyl, copyright violations and field guides that form Cordelli's art, will be Book of Numbers / Book of Letters, published in 2010 by Agnes Fox. It might be the notes of a filmmaker, or the films of a scavenging note-taker. It might be the pin-hole paintings of a shut-in, or text installations assembled by an entire community. It might be the liner notes of a clairvoyant country musician, or the transcripts of an early morning conversation between a lone individual and his generously overwhelming environment. Undoubtedly it will continue to be all of these things. Numbers / Lettersis a humble part of what I take to be a growing and indispensable compost and, after all, the "years from now" aforementioned are these ...
You can begin the excavation now just by clicking the link above.
Reading this book is like smearing dead leaves onto my wet face so that it makes a paste, like a pastey mask before bedtime. It confuses me. I mean, I'm perplexed, stunned. I mean, all the words seem impossible. Remember what David Cameron did to Baudelaire? Christian Hawkey is one of our most fascinating poets, heaving George Trakl's dead body up into the dead trees.
If you haven't, be sure to check out Zachary's books Scary, No Scary and The Man Suit, both available on Black Ocean's website.
Rauan Klassnik knows what's holy. Which is why you should believe him when he says to buy Kim Gek Lin Short's The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press). And if you don't believe him, believe Joe Hall because he recommends it too.
Rauan says:
This book made me and my writing feel like Klingons. It's beautiful. Exciting. And it made me ashamed.
Don't shame yourself. Check it out! Let Joe Hall destroy any lasting doubts you might have:
Partly because Dorothea Lasky's Black Life is already starting to reach some kind of shout out tipping point and partly because it deserves your attention just as much, I'm going with The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits. In the rowdy, field of book length proems(?) / genrelessexpulsions / whatever, it's a stand-out, a thing of its own. Linked prose--propose a narrative and revise it twice, evoking and jarring sympathy--swinging between pure joy of language invention and staggering sadness--
"What will we do? she asked, burping a miracle with her soggy hands."
& unflinching, visceral in its investigation into dynamics of relationships, how one exerts force on, revises, mutilates, remakes etc, others self-conceptions, body, self-composure, chronology, etc. in the laboratory of the house and stage of public.
I read it in a day.
Rauan is the author of Holy Land which you can find here on our website. Joe Hall is the author of Pigafetta Is My Wife, also available on our website or sneaking up on the tails of wayward tabby cats.
This love doesn't stop--the words of these two Black Ocean baddies will last us through the weekend, but check back Monday if you care at all what Zachary Schomburg has to offer us (and I know you do).
For her final yule log, A. Minetta Gould is throwing Ben Doller's Dead Ahead on to the fire.
Doller eats it up in Dead Ahead, bombarding his reader as if he's a child with his thumbs in his ears taunting "nanner nanner nan," daring anyone to command the word as he does. He's like a fifth grader or something though, so I wouldn't stand up to him--could get ugly.
Check back tomorrow for a recommendation from Rauan Klassnik.
A. Minetta Gould's second recommendation for all of you in cyberland is Aaron Kunin's The Sore Throat and Other Poems(Fence).
Kunin's Sore Throat straight up changed my life and I haven't gone a day since reading it without thinking about what he's doing and how mind-blowing it is. These poems are the fucking werido walking around your neighborhood you know you want to be friends with.
