The Self Unstable Web Roundup

The internet is abuzz this week with Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable. Click the linked text to read up!

Find new poems by Elisa up at PEN, a sneak peak of her poems in the forthcoming anthology from Black Ocean, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (ed. Andrew Ridker, Black Ocean 2014).

Read a review of The Self Unstable in The New Inquiry:

These lines are like tweets I would like to favorite: “If you find anything other than food or sex interesting, it’s signaling.” “To have enemies is a coming of age.” “Regret is a kind of certainty.” “In the moment, we value stability, but we prefer our painful memories.” “Schadenfreude complicates utilitarianism.”

And another on H_NGM_N's Tumbr:

The poem-essay things sort of eat their own tails when they work well. (But I would not say the word “ouroboros,” which is not exactly the same thing.) My favorite ones nimbly navigated authority and skepticism and wonder.

Then give yourself a treat by reading this interview with Gabbert and Travis Nichols:

But writing comes out of life; you can't write anything interesting in an isolation tank. Experience, thought, talk all feed into the work and are thus part of the work. You can't extricate writing from life.

Get in on the conversation yourself! Purchase your copy of The Self Unstable here.

LitBridge Features The Self Unstable

You can find a short interview and profile of The Self Unstable right now on LitBridge. In the interview, Elisa Gabbert speaks about her latest Black Ocean explaining how it came about: 

I started writing this book about four years ago, after my first book was published. I had started a job that involved a lot of writing and was finding it difficult to transition from writing prose all day into writing traditional lineated “poetry” in my off hours. 

Read the rest here.


Two in the Top 40

Two Black Ocean titles have been honored with a listing in Coldfront Magazine's Top 40 Poetry Books for 2013. 

Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson weighs in at #39:

The book sustains this continuum of private and public in a way that commands our attention again and again and raises the questions of what can or needs to be known. In the book’s front matter, we are informed that Swamp Isthmus is the second book in Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and this knowledge extends the possibilities of the book beyond the first and last pages. Most importantly, it frees us to let the poetry wash over us, let the poems simply be, and to look around our own lives and determine what matters and why.

and Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable is #8:

These poems awaken our curiosities regarding the human life and its possibility for holding any real purpose. They are philosophical yet pragmatic. They don’t expect too much of the truth; they teach us satisfaction with life’s “continual climbing, with no resolution—just an ever-building terror” because, like the self, the truth is unstable.

Check out the list in full here, and be sure to add these books to yours.