FJORDS News

After his thoughtful and generous review of Butcher's Tree, Justin Helms is at it again with a review of Fjords Vol. 1 for his Poets and Prophets series. Read it here.

So maybe we must swallow these poems without chewing. They are (already) tessellations of memory, fantasy, and fear that re-discover the missing beauty of the quotidian.

Verse daily posted a poem from Fjords this week.

And over on the Rumpus, a poem from Scary, No Scary is featured as part of the Last Poem I Loved series.

It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. 

 

 

Micro Review Monday!

Radio, Radio
by Ben Doller (ne Doyle)
$16.95
When I think about Doller’s work, I think about an extremely thick word play and a comedic level that isn’t matched by most serious, academic poets. I think about how shirt functions in FAQ. I think about how nautical language twists in Dead Ahead. In these books the reader is hit over the head by a club of sound, intelligence, and confidence that doesn’t exist in Doller’s debut collection, a collection that existed before “Ben Doller” even did. This isn’t a bad thing. 
I am shocked into subtly by Radio, Radio. All the fixings of Ben Doller are present, but act through a filter which today I’d say was a fear of untying himself onto the page. I don’t blame him. He needed to be tied down, gagged, fearful of himself in order to produce such a strong collection. The most striking moments are those when he tries to revolt and introduce the reader to who he is today: “Hollowing. Hello, thing. Hell, lathing. Howlingly singing holes.” This same poem, “Tug,” ends with tragic comedy
So what are you going to be?  
—A ghost.  
I stole a white sheet from the line.
Leaves were stuck to it, I’ll
Punch some holes in it, I’ll 
Jump from the balconies
Of bleached buildings.
I love Ben Doyle, but I’m happy he is how he is now. 

—A Minetta Gould

Micro Review Monday!

No Grave Can Hold My Body Down
by Aaron McCollough
Ahsahta Press, 2011
$17.50

No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is a grass fed and finished cow freshly slaughtered. That is to say it’s the best beef one could ask for. That is to say it’s of the best traditions of poetry one could ask for. McCollough sites the grass’s uncut hair of graves, leaves his good shirt by “a clearing / within the clearing // of the little lawn,” and begs I to gain solid ground:

as in I will always be I
in this head or out of it jesus my head is full of waters
my american head I must not park on dry grass or leaves
have I always believed or was I converted―towards
what conversations await what customs  

McCollough’s poetry does what I love most about poetry: tells me go get yourself a fucking poem and be it. It tells me “say the passing beauties to the root of my tongue.”  

—A. Minetta Gould  

FJORDS on Publishers Weekly!

You can find the latest review of Fjords vol. 1 on the Publishers Weekly website. Read it here.

Narrative without losing lyrical beauty, witty without losing gravity, the poems—though fiercely contemporary—still uphold the priorities to delight (“I am working in the ticket booth of the movie theater when you come in and take off my pants”) and to instruct (“Nothing is anyone’s fault, which is something we must remember.

Black Ocean at the Juniper Literary Festival

If you'll be in Boston next month, come visit us at our table at the Juniper Literary Festival. We are proud to be a co-sponsor of the event, and hope to see you if you're local!
12th ANNUAL JUNIPER LITERARY FESTIVAL
NEW WRITERS/NEW WRITING
April 13 & 14, 2012
Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst

On April 13 & 14, 2012 the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers will host the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival: New Writers/New Writing. Focusing on the ever-changing landscape of new American poetry and fiction, the festival showcases emerging poets and fiction writers alongside dozens of independent journals and presses in a unique national event. Featuring readings by diverse and talented poets and writers, roundtables on crucial creative and professional issues, and a press fair, the festival introduces audiences to vital contemporary writing and explores issues essential to the future of American literature.

FJORDS: Reviewed

Many people had a chance to pick up their copy of Fjords vol. 1 at AWP, including Christopher Newgent of Vouched Books. On the Vouched website he writes

When I got it home, I immediately devoured it, and found it so painfully sad, so beautifully made, so original and funny and insightful and so even better than anything else he’s ever written, that I kind of wanted to just give up writing and buy a hundred copies of this book and hand it out instead, everywhere I go.

Thanks for making us your first table at AWP, Christopher! We'll be looking for your order. 

You can also read this review of Fjords on The Rumpus by Kelly Forsythe (who we also met at our table this year!) which begins

Schomburg’s newest book, Fjords, Vol. 1 holds true to this idea of finding familiarity in a parallel consciousness. Just because the poems often work in a seemingly private dreamscape, doesn’t mean you aren’t invited to into the strangeness, asked to ascend and descend into the illusory.

Get your copy here.

AWP: everything that's fit to print

AWP is the one stretch of time during the year that our staff and many of our authors are together in one place, and we had a great time working the table, meeting our wonderful readers, and being surrounded by so many presses we admire. This year, we debuted our two newest titles Butcher's Tree by Feng Sun Chen and Fjords Vol. 1 by Zachary Schomburg, along with our newest issue of Handsome. By the end of the conference, we sold out of all the copies we brought of Butcher's Tree and Handsome. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our table and supported us!

The Hideout was completely packed for our off-site event Friday night, featuring a reprise of the collaborative live performance of Fjords with Zachary Schomburg, Manual Cinema, and the Chicago Q Ensemble, readings by Feng Sun Chen, and authors from Letter Machine Editions and Octopus Books. Then we danced, drank, and partied past the point of sanity. Of course, enjoying ourselves as much as we did means that most of us were too caught up in the festivites to take too many photos that would prove just how awesome it was.

For those of you who pre-ordered one of our new titles, or bought a 2012 subscription, we begin shipping orders this week. If you haven't picked up a copy of Fjords or Butcher's Tree, you can read exerpts from the books just posted on Everday Genius. Click here for Butcher's Tree and here for Fjords Vol. 1.

Many people at the conference also asked about a 2012 subscription. As a staff of poets, a few of us aren't so good at remembering numbers, so if we gave you confusing answers forgive us! You can order a subscription here for $50; it includes our two newest titles along with our forthcoming Fall releases (see the link for a full list). This is the first year we will be releasing five titles, so we're pretty excited and hope you will be too!

I hope everyone who made it to the conference is happily recovering at home. We'll see you next year!

This Week In Chicago

This week, we're headed to AWP in Chicago. If you're headed there as well, be sure to catch at our bookfair table G7 (right next to Action Books!) for some great deals and new releases! You'll want to leave some room in your suitcase because our entire catalog of books will be available below cover price for AWP only. We love to see your pretty faces, so please stop by (and just try to resist our enticing books)!

And don't miss our off-site event THE LEGION (along with Letter Machine Editions and Octopus Books) at The Hideout--a  late night gathering of poetry, performance and music. Featuring:


Feng Sun Chen
Christopher DeWeese
Rebecca Farivar
Peter Gizzi
Thurston Moore
Andrea Rexilius
Zachary Schomburg
Jenny Zhang

with a live show by Manual Cinema & Chicago Q Ensemble

and DJ Jacob Ross spinning our dance party into the wee hours.

Friday, March 2nd, 9p-2a. 1354 W. Wabansia Chicago, IL 60642

BRING YOUR AWP BADGE: FREE FOR AWP ATTENDEES / $10 FOR EVERYONE ELSE.  

Hope to see you there! 

FJORDS Trailer Now Online!

FJORDS Trailer from Manual Cinema on Vimeo.

Finally the trailer is here for the originally scored shadow puppetry show based on Zachary Schomburg's new book, FJORDS. Co-produced by Black Ocean and the Poetry Foundation, there will also be a performance at our AWP event in Chicago, and they will be touring with Zach in March.

The music heard in this trailer is from the soundtrack to the show--which is also on the bonus CD included with all copies of the limited edition hardcover of the book!

Wednesday Around the Web

Happy hump day! Enjoy these links for your Wednesday reading pleasure!

Holy Land by Rauan Klassnik was reviewed on the Huffington Post as part of Seth Abramson's Contemporary Poetry list for February! Abramson begins with the declaration that "[t]hese poems may well be among the most vulgar and violent published in the English language in the past quarter-century" and goes on to argue "[i]n both its tender and horrifying moments, Holy Land aptly maps how we are chained to time, place, ourselves, and one another by a million minor assaults--only some of which are physical." Read the review in full here and be sure to click the link for an excerpt.

Ordinary Sun by Matthew Henriksen is on POETS.org's "Books Noted" right now! The post offers a mini review and excerpt. Read it here!

Micro Review Monday!

WILLIAM SHATNER
by C. McAllister Williams
Alice Blue Books, 2010
$10.00, Limited Edition Chapbook 

As the crowd around a car accident, WILLIAM SHATNER draws your eye to the devastation that surrounds its savior. Shatner is the subject. Shatner is the object. Shatner is not what you think he is. WILLIAM SHATNER marries biblical verse with Us Weekly, producing a journey for salvation that doubles as a gossip column through the arc of the poems. Williams tells us “william shatner is a ghost. by ghost i mean / he is a great television. in the city square, / william shatner has become multitudes. / or so says my souvenir tee shirt.” Be warned yet assured. WILLIAM SHATNER polishes its brass knuckles before punching you in the face.

—A. Minetta Gould

Micro Review Monday (on Wednesday)!

Correct Animal
by Rebecca Farivar
Octopus Books, 2011
$12.00

Yes, this is an animal, cooing under terse lines mirroring old fashioned poetic disturbances. Disturbances in the sense that young poets can be terrorized by mere existence too. Farivar writes

If she wants
to say bird
not finch
not starling
not snipe

let her

This is how to break a heart, to rip into poem flesh and say “give me some space to breathe,” to show a subtleness in what plagues the poet that can at once be gendered and completely not. All I want to do is synchronize my movements with this animal. All I want to do is be correct too.

—A. Minetta Gould

Micro Review Mondays Are Back!

Panic Attack, USA
by Nate Slawson
Yes Yes Books, 2011
$16.00

 

The lust-filled teenage heart that Slawson provokes out of the I of Panic Attack, U.S.A. has nothing on the mature articulations of contemporary anxiety these poems present in their hot bellies. As if peeling the band t-shirt off adolescence’s sweaty, nervous body, Slawson opens up the poem to a tragic humor that is so delicate I wonder if its skin has ever seen light: “what sucks about the soul / is not knowing if it ends / like a parade ends.” If poetry had a yearbook, and that poetry yearbook held a vote for “most popular” or “best hair” or twenty other meaningless awards, Panic Attack, U.S.A. wouldn’t win any of them; it’s too slight and quiet to ever be thought of for the ballot. It’s too smart to care.   

—A. Minetta Gould

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Micro reviews will be posted every Monday on our blog. Interested in submitting? Send your review of ~100 words to nikkita@blackocean.org.



Staff Profile: Nikkita Cohoon

One of my favorite parts of being the online editor for Black Ocean is the chance to talk with our authors and staff members. I love learning what drives them and how they work. This week, it’s my turn to answer a few questions about my role at Black Ocean. With these staff profiles, we hope to give our fans a little insight into how we run our press, the type of people we are, the things we love. I hope you’re enjoying the series! — Nikki

How I got involved:

I discovered Black Ocean while I was living in Northern Michigan watching people shovel off the snow that threatened to cave in their rooftops, requesting books I’d only heard hints of be sent to the small library in town. I loved the vibrancy and richness I found with the books from Black Ocean, and I continued to follow what the press was doing until a year later when the online editor position opened up. It’s been so wonderful to get to know the staff and to be involved with projects I care so much about.

What I do and why I love it:

The position has developed over time to include updating all things virtual—the blog, Facebook, Twitter, and our monthly newsletter. Some of it is sharing content from other parts of the web, but the best part is the content I help create, often through collaboration with staff or authors.

Working on the blog especially has been a fun challenge, because we really want it to have the feel of a virtual community space; so I am always thinking of different features to add that will help bring about that sense. Having an excuse to reach out to poets I deeply admire and ask them questions is great—I’m constantly surprised and excited by the things I learn from our writers. And there really is such camaraderie and collaboration with everyone—authors giving me ideas and suggestions, initiating projects of their own, having conversations with us, with each other—so much wonderful exchange.

What it’s like to work virtually with staff and authors:

It’s kind of a given when working on a blog that a lot of correspondence will be through email, but what’s been really fun for me is the few times we do get to see each other. I started working with Black Ocean before I’d met anyone, so when I went to AWP last year, I was meeting Janaka and Carrie and Ashley in person for the first time, and our authors too. It made returning home to continue the work at my computer a little more dimensional and engaging.



Shimoda Three Ways

A new review of Brandon Shimoda's The Girl Without Arms recently appeared in Zoland Poetry. The reviewer considers "how a book determines its being remembered," in this case,  "the small and bodily sense of love and wanting love and wanting love to be more than it can ever be in full." Read the review here.

*

Read The Girl Without Arms and find yourself craving more? Brandon's latest book is O  B O N, released by Litmus Press in November. Of O  B O N Brandon says

O Bon was written from 2005 through 2007

in the skin of inland seas and migration, fire and dementia,

corpses and corpse eaters, the memory of the Shimoda Family

and the Obon Festival in Japan

It was written alongside my first book, The Alps.

* 

And because there's never too much Brandon Shimoda, check out his essay "Winter Dwelling" in this month's issue of EVENING WILL COME. 

New Reviews of Ordinary Sun

This has been a busy few weeks for Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun. After making it to the final rounds of the Goodreads Choice Awards, it has also been reviewed in some great places like The Quarterly Conversation and The Aviary.

In the QC, Ellen Welcker takes us back to (this) world of Ordinary Sun, describing it as "like listening to confession in a parallel universe, a world like the aforementioned, with all the guts displayed on the outside, and the underworld on top."  She argues that

What makes this book feel so loaded is Henriksen’s investment in the act of existing in the poems, in imbuing words with symbolic and relational power, in not providing answers.

and that ultimately, this is "a book for the living."

**

Amid an issue studded with gorgeous visuals, the review of Ordinary Sun in The Aviary explores the notions of language within the book, "a musicality of word relations that eschews simple wordplay," and notes that "[t]here is a type of beautiful frustration with not being able to reconcile the ordinary and the metaphysical in this world." The review is thoughtful and thorough, arriving at the idea that

What sets Henriksen’s work far apart, though, is the pure control of craft and language by which he changes what is being looked at, what is being read. These poems are well-wrought but not over-wrought, beautiful but human, accessible but refusing. The project here is to make the ordinary and the concrete something more “angelic” or infinite, but if the reader squints hard enough, he or she might see that even the poet himself cannot escape the beauty of bringing down to earth such things as heady and abstract as love and loss.

The diverse offering of these two reviews alone pays tribute to the rich possibility and depth of reading that Ordinary Sun can offer.

Staff Profile: A. Minetta Gould

Though we provide very extensive bios on our crew page (everything you wanted to know about how Janaka takes his whisky, which El track Carrie writes her poems on, and Minetta's worries over rust), in the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing staff profiles of the clandestine figures behind Black Ocean. You’ll get a sneak peek into what we do behind the scenes and how it all comes together.

A. Minetta Gould is our illustrious Managing Editor. When not hosting elaborate dinner parties, she works like mad juggling spreadsheets, contacting authors, and greasing the cogs of our dark machine.

On how she got involved:

Black Ocean was born for me in some hot springs north of Boise, ID. Martin Corless-Smith and I were giving Paige [Ackerson-Keily, Handsome Editor] (she was here as our visiting author, In No One's Land had recently released from Ahsahta Press) the full Idaho experience. It was right before the last AWP Chicago...2009...and after a few hours hanging out in the pools Paige announced that I must introduce myself to Janaka, the editor of Black Ocean. I think she said we were similar souls and that we'd get along well. Something like that. A few weeks later I was standing in front of the Black Ocean table at AWP, still drunk from the night before, announcing that we were supposed to know one another, that Paige had said so (I also in this heat of morning drunk passion told Brandon Shimoda that I loved everything he did and wept at a Wallace Stevens presentation, in case anyone was wondering what I'm like upon first meeting me). Janaka gave me his card, I went to the Black Ocean reading that night, and understood this is what I wanted. My actual position is the product of a few basic elements: I was around when something needed done, I did said thing. Rinse: Repeat. 

On what she does and why she loves it:

I am the Managing Editor. This means I manage things. I have about twenty different spreadsheets for various aspects of the press that I keep updated. Time lines for awards. Reading organizers. Reviewers. Various other contacts. Pretty much everything that isn't creative about running a press I have a hand in. I like it this way...I could mess up creativity but I can't mess up whether or not a book store carries our titles. Janaka still takes care of a lot of organizational things like AWP related tasks, but most tasks that exist in the cloud I do.

I like that my job is to help make the press grow. A lot of the time when I'm doing tedious projects (ever try to decide whether every independent bookstore in the country would want to carry your books? Definitely tedious.) I am reminded that what I do is make this press more efficient and sustainable. 

I think the most surprising thing about my position is when I get approached about the press. Sometimes when I'm in my little spreadsheet world I forget that people really love and admire this press. A few months ago a group of students from Montana came through Boise to read and afterward one of them cornered me and was all gushy over Black Ocean. 1. It threw me that he knew who I was 2. After a few drinks he kept saying to people "Do you understand who she is?!?" or variations of a sort. I am a symbol for him of something bigger, and that throws me whenever it happens. 

On what it’s like to work virtually with staff and authors:

I think most small presses work virtually, don't they? I worked for Ahsahta Press prior to my position at Black Ocean and all of that was in the flesh. Most of it didn't need to be. It was nice to have everyone in a single room doing the same things, and impromptu conversations could arise that can't happen via email, but I think this system works well too. I like feeling popular, and when I get emails I feel popular, so days when we're discussing a topic in a long email train thrill me. Days when I can see Janaka or Carrie or Nikki working over in their time zones because I have five different email subject lines from them are awesome. It always makes me want to work harder. I don't think I'd have the same experience if we were all in the same place right now. I don't think it effects how I think about books or authors, beyond its nice to meet them in the flesh if I never have. A cherished moment kind of thing.