Apostrophe poet Paul Foster Johnson will be reading in St. Louis on Friday, April 12th in a series co-curated by another Apostrophe poet, Jessica Baran. The reading is at fort gondo compound for the arts. Details HERE.
Also, Jessica has a great new poem published in AWL.
Great short interview with Tony Trigilio whose book, White Noise will be published with us this spring. Have a look:
Tony Trigilio: The Next Big Thing InterviewApostrophe Books is pleased to announce our current open reading period. We will be accepting manuscripts from January 1, 2013 to March 31, 2013.
While we define ourselves as a press that publishes innovative poetry, our prior titles represent a broad spectrum of approaches to contemporary poetry. To get a sense of the kind of work we are interested in as editors, just read our books by Catherine Meng, Johannes Göransson, Paul Foster Johnson, Jessica Baran, Gina Abelkop, and soon, Tony Trigilio. We invite those who are unfamiliar with our press to purchase copies of our titles before submitting to us.
We view Apostrophe Books as a series, so our book covers are designed to reflect a community of authors with shared values. We are distributed by SPD Books.
It can take anywhere from three to nine months for us to respond to submissions. If you are interested in submitting, please follow the guidelines below:
When submitting your manuscript, we request a reading fee of $15.00. This fee supports the rising printing costs of doing print runs that sustain distribution through SPD and sales through the usual online retailers. The fee also supports promotion of the press through our presence at book fairs and hosted readings at small art galleries.
In order to submit please click on the link below:
Apostrophe authors have been quite active recently. Here are just a few noteworthy items:
Stay tuned….more to come later from our other authors and more about our upcoming reading period.
Apostrophe Books is happy to announce that Tony Trigilio’s White Noise has been selected as our next manuscript for publication this year.
Thank you to all who submitted during our 2011 reading period. Once again we received a large number of excellent manuscripts, which always makes the decision process difficult. We certainly think you will be very pleased with our selection. . . .
White Noise by Tony Trigilio
Tony Trigilio’s White Noise blends the political and the personal in an unsettling amalgam of prose fragments that have been disassembled and reassembled through a variety of strategies that are almost Oulipian in their peculiar constraints and methodology. From a unique ‘deformation’ of Don DeLillo’s White Noise to a collocation of speech culled from Usenet bulletin boards to scattered material originally posted on the web, Trigilio stitches, reassembles and re-weaves the rhetoric of fear and politics with the language of literature and personal narrative. The book examines the poignant and disturbing intersection between the underground Usenet forums existing before 9/11 and post 9/11 terroristic paranoia. Trigilio reveals that everything these forum-users were ‘paranoid’ about since the Cold War has, in a sense, come true. This dystopian vision is becoming an increasing reality, Trigilio shows, because we have openly accepted this bizarre and chilling world of “kill lists” and mass surveillance. White Noise is a quintessentially pataphysical response to our current milieu, but it is also, ironically, approached in utterly realist terms.
Please check back for more announcements, publication dates, author events, and our next reading period.
Our most recent books include Darling Beastlettes by Gina Abelkop and Remains to Be Used by Jessica Baran. Go to our BOOKS & AUTHORS page for a complete list of our books. All books can be ordered through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.
Gina Abelkop’s Darling Beastlettes is now available through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.
Description:
“A murder / glided in last night, nested / in your bouffant, stayed / for months.” This mix of violence and humor offers just a glimpse of Abelkop’s poetic vision whereby in poem after poem she explores the gritty and sometimes sinister side of sexuality in mock-romantic and surrealist fashion. With a biting wit she takes aim at shattered domesticity, while also exploring the often bizarre and disturbing realm of gender politics. This is an ominous, sometimes Gothic universe where the jagged terrain of the human body becomes a canvas for uncanny scenes full of perversity and complexity, beauty and brutality. Each poem feels like a collage made from snapshots, memories, or the fractured mise-en-scène of wives and women – historical, imagined, mythological, fabulist, and cinematic. While grappling with fear, desire, lust, and uncertainty, the frenzied inhabitants of Abelkop’s world oscillate between prayer and cannibalism, love and violence, laughter and sex.
From Darling Beastlettes . . . .
Mrs. de Winter Rides Again
I pleasured and came dreaming about him slaughtering
her. As a fantasy, I liked it rather well.
I can put on any dress I like and he loves. I can drive
to any balmy province and still he has bludgeoned her
down, because she was a trollop and I am his wife.
I am a plain and kind wife. I am the wife he loves.
If she’d rotted from the inside out everyone
would’ve mourned. Instead now they haunt, me
and you and anyone who’s ever loved to see a beautiful,
live thing, which is everyone. Don’t you forget it.
It’s why I’m the wife and she’s the corpse.
It’s why I wake up and smile. I can forgive anything
so long as he loves only me. It’s this powerful gust
of air and I can’t stop it churning through me,
blasting me skinless. I don’t think I have a choice. I think
I enjoy not having a choice, some days. Other days,
I weep in the library because were I to choose otherwise—
if such a choice existed— I’d cease to fantasy. I’d go to sleep
at night and wake up remembering nothing. I’d never
smile. I’d probably draw everything my eyes chanced upon.
Author Bio:
Gina Abelkop’s recent work can be found in Action, Yes, Encyclopedia Vol. II: F-K, Everyday Genius, Delirious Hem’s “Seam Ripper” series and Octopus. She is the founder and editor of Birds of Lace (http://birdsoflace.wordpress.com), a DIY feminist press started in 2005, as well as co-editor of the online journal Prayers for Children (http://www.prayersforchildren.be). She blogs regularly at The Moon Stop (http://themoonstop.blogspot.com).
Be sure to check-out Gina’s own webpage for a glimpse of the various inspirations for the book, as well as some intriguing visual, textual and musical references.
