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1. From Letterpress to Hypertext--KELSEY ST PRESS
on the Web!
In 2004, Kelsey St. Press celebrated its 30th anniversary. Now,
just four years later, we are excited to say that we are growing
and changing in many ways. What started in 1974 with an old
letterpress dressed in leopard print in Patricia Dienstfrey's
basement has extended its arc through pixels and html. With much
thanks to Jerrold Shiroma, who redesigned our web site, we
can offer online ordering for our readers for the first time.
Please try out this new feature and if you don't already have
it, add Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim (2007) to your
shopping cart!
The internet has become a vital part of today's small press
world and as a long time member of the publishing community,
KSP is thrilled to begin this blog and have a voice in this
forum. Like any good blog, the goal is to keep you up-to-date
on projects, readings and other news related to our authors,
artists and friends in innovative writing. But we also hope
to bring you special features-not only interviews with our
authors and artists but by newer writers, book artists and
designers. Just as with works like Symbiosis and our most
recent, Concordance, we welcome collaboration and we are eager
to see where that can go in the more impromptu and open space
of the blog.
In the next year or two, I hope to revisit and blog about
the KSP oeuvre from start to finish, to better familiarize
myself, as a new member with our history, but also to
revitalize dialogue around these books. This kind of re-imagining
is happening on many levels at KSP. Other members are exploring
possibilities for e-books, re-issuing out-of-print works, and,
any moment now, you will be able to visit our Listen page and
hear readings and other audio from KSP writers. We have been
able to make these recording thanks to Ross Craig's know-how
and generous donation of studio space. Stay tuned for recordings
from Bhanu Kapil, Kathleen Fraser, Laynie Brown, Susan Gevirtz
and more!
And please email me with your questions, comments, or ideas
about blog features, interviews, guest writers, etc. Also,
don't forget to send me links to your personal blog or press
so I can be sure to add them to the side bar. Finally, be sure
to join our brand new e-mail list. Click on the About page
to sign up.
[or link to them from our sidebar]
2. Press Release, Newcomer Can't Swim
Newcomer Can't Swim, Renee Gladman. Kelsey St. Press, 2007.
Written as seven loosely connected pieces, Renee Gladman's
Newcomer Can't Swim mixes poetry with prose to recreate life
for the twenty-first century flaneur in urban America, where,
amid a confusion of aims, identities, and miscommunication
devices, being attuned to different frequencies also means
being lost. In this contemporary world of signs that crisscross
a global culture, how can one maintain a firm existence and
make human connections? Gladman posits a fluid self and parallel
existence: "The / body moves away from living, from the flesh
and bone of life, / and becomes regions. I take on / water.
I look outward." In languages of elegy and splintered
consciousness, Newcomer holds all frequencies together,
keeping the contradiction of a life that animates the "I" of
this book at the same time that it goes on without her.
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.
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EXCITING EVENT FEATURING 32 POEMS MAGAZINE:
32 Poems is having a reading at The Writer's Center in
Bethesda. We're going to mix poetry with indie rock music
from a band named The Caribbean and see if we can blow
the roof off. (Shhhh, don't tell Sunil, the director,
I said that, okay?)
Want to know the cost? Zero dollars.
Oh, guess what? You can become a 32 Poems "fan" on Facebook
to follow who we're publishing, where poems from the magazine
are appearing (Best American Poetry 2008!)
and see photos of events we hold. CLICK HERE.
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The Sound of Words: A Scheme to Rock the Writers Center
Featuring: The Caribbean (a rock band) and 32 Poems Magazine
(a poetry magazine)
DATE: Friday, May 9
TIME: 8 PM
LOCATION: The Writer's Center,
4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815
DESCRIPTION
32 Poems Magazine, The Caribbean (an indie rock band), and
the Writer's Center join together to bring you outstanding
poetry from Sandra Beasley and Bernadette Geyer
and songs from The Caribbean.
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EXCITING NEWS FROM BURNING DECK:
2 new Burning Deck titles are available from:
Small Press Distribution, or orders@spdbooks.org
In Europe: H Press
1. vol. 51 of the “BURNING DECK POETRY BOOKS”:
CYRUS CONSOLE
Brief Under Water
Poetry, 64 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-87-2, original paperback $14
ISBN13: 978-1-886224-88-9, limited signed edition $20
Publication date: March 15, 2008
Brief Under Water is a sequence of 55 short passages that uses prose
narrative as a design element in a larger lyric structure. The title
refers to Kafka’s 1919 Brief an den Vater, reflecting a struggle with
the notion of literary inheritance. So does Console’s sentence,
refined nearly to the point of anachronism, that owes a great deal to
Melville and to Garnett’s translations of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and
Turgenev.
The book was written while the author supported himself as a
metalworker, housepainter, and waiter. The clashing of these
professional spheres contributed to the struggle outlined above. The
binary numbering (1, 10, 11, 100, 101…) is meant to express his sense
of movement-in-place.
“[The] manuscript is terrific….The sensory detail of the writing, not
surrealistic, not plot-oriented, is not even with the sense of
'leading anywhere' but accumulating both detail and expansion at
once, opening a floating, fascinating, sometimes apparently violent
yet detached terrain, as if not the author's psyche…but the world
itself… seen from at once extreme and mundane edges.”—Leslie Scalapino
2. volume 20 of SERIE D’ECRITURE:
Caroline Dubois
You Are the Business
translated from the French by Cole Swensen
Poetry, 104 pages, offset, smyth-sewn
ISBN 978-1-886224-86-5 original paperback $14
Publication date: March 15, 2008
C’est toi le business uses an eerie cadence to examine the
construction of identity in a media-saturated world. Focusing on
icons of cult film from Simone Simon to Blade Runner, she develops a
haunting collage of overlay and echo, populated by unsettling twins
(a “sister,” a clone, a verbal stutter), that evokes the doubles with
which a society based on representation invests us.
In “talala” for instance, the terms of identity taken from the
film Blade Runner (human being vs. “fake” or “android”) are used to
raise questions of authorship: do phrases come to us or do we make
them, and if they come to us, then from where?
Always conscious of the role that language plays in the
mediation between self and media, the book is poetry in its
linguistic freedom, film criticism in its thematic aspects, prose in
its physical shape. But it always pushes language toward new sensual
territory.
Caroline Dubois lives in Paris and teaches at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Rueil-Malmaison. She has translated American poets like
Norma Cole and Deborah Richards. C'est toi le business is her most
recent book (2005). Earlier books include Je veux être physique [I
want to be physical; P.O.L., 1999], Arrête maintenant [Stop now;
Editions de l’Attente, 2001] and Malécot [Ed. contrat maint, 2003].
Cole Swensen’s recent books include The Book of a Hundred
Hands (2005), The Glass Age (2007), Noon Try, Oh, and Such Rich
Hour. She has translated Pierre Alferi, Olivier Cadiot, Pascalle
Monnier, Jean Frémon and others. Both her poetry and her translations
have won many prizes.
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