Borrowing its title from an Ennio Morricone ditty in the spaghetti western Gunfight at Red Sands, Jennifer L. Knox's A Gringo Like Me contains poems at once raucous and sexy, tender and high. In favorites such as "Hot Ass Poem," "Cruising for Prostitutes,

A Gringo Like Me

Literature & Fiction

Knox, Jennifer L.

Poetry

Bloof Books

Did somebody say Jen Knox's poems "read like Richard Pryor with an MFA"? Yes, somebody did. (It was John Findura in Verse Magazine.) She's also been compared to comedian Sarah Silverman, artist Jeff Koons, a 10-year-old who can't keep her mouth shut, and cartoonist R. Crumb. None of these equations is quite right, however. Jennifer L. Knox's work is unmistakably her own: darkly hilarious, surprisingly empathetic, utterly original. DRUNK BY NOON is the eagerly awaited sequel to Knox's first book, A GRINGO LIKE ME, which is also available from Bloof in a new edition. Jennifer L. Knox is a three-time contributor to the Best American Poetry Series and her poems have also appeared in Great American Prose Poems and Great American Erotic Poems. For more information, see www.jenniferlknox.com.

Drunk by Noon

Jennifer L. Knox

In her second collection, Shanna Compton leads readers on a lightly satirical tour through various works of advice for young women, including antique etiquette manuals, pseudoscientific physiology textbooks, 19th-century sermons, contemporary newspaper cl

For Girls & Others

Compton, Shanna

An enticing second collection by Danielle Pafunda, MY ZORBA is a mysterious, memoirish confabulation of missives narrating the dark domestic drama of the speaker and one shape-shifting Zorba. Is Zorba lover? Sister? Captor? Uncanny double? And does the story end in a bloody accident or intentional poisoning? Danielle Pafunda is the author of PRETTY YOUNG THING (Soft Skull, 2005), and the chapbook A PRIMER FOR CYBORGS: THE CORPSE (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, forthcoming). Her poems have been chosen three times for Best American Poetry (2004, 2006, and 2007) and appeared widely in journals. She is coeditor of the online journal La Petite Zine, a doctoral candidate in the University of Georgia's creative writing program, and Spring 2008 Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College Chicago. See daniellepafunda.blogspot.com for more information.

My Zorba

Pafunda, Danielle

"In Sandra Simonds' poetry, a terrific, nihilistic dislike of herself and others (her heroine 'dires' men) vies with an extreme will to prevail in full color. The tension is sustained by an imagination of remarkable fertility and a rich and crowded verbal palette. Simonds writes to sting. She's like a Plath whose capacity for erotic altruism has thoroughly imploded, producing a crisis that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power. Simonds has such a talent." --Cal Bedient

Warsaw Bikini

Simonds, Sandra

POEM ADDRESSING CONSPIRACY THEORISTS You're right to understand the underlying devious intentions of this poem. You are definitely on to something. You should really examine my other poems too (just google me) and notice the clues I have left behind. You might want to share what you find with others by starting a blog, informing the media, making videos, etc. I have said to my wife and others that I don't understand how few people notice the prophecy in my work. For reasons that are probably obvious to you, I don't want to directly address what I'm not openly addressing, except to say that, yes, I am addressing what you think I am. I know; it blows my mind too!

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

Davis, Peter

In The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Jennifer L. Knox expands on her inimitable cast of characters, in hilariously poignant poems. In poems like "Marriage" and "One Ton of Dirt," Knox ventures further into autobiographical territory than she's ever gone before, in ways that will startle those familiar with her previous books, exploring relationships with her exes, her parents, and her younger self. Like the best comedians (to whom she's often compared), Knox is never merely funny. Each of her speakers, even the bedraggled coyote that walks into a Quizno's, has something important to say. Bob Hicock describes the effect of her trademark dark humor perfectly when he says, "The oddities of her work create a space in which it's possible to be oddly sincere. Knox is asking what really matters, in poems that move powerfully toward an answer." www.jenniferlknox.com.

The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

"Shanna Compton captures the weird and dazzling collision between the suffering and the awe of contemporary existence. At once disturbing and triumphant, the poems in Brink work together to create an honest, unexpected, and fascinating lyrical exhibition of the complicated human heart." --Ada Limón "Shanna Compton is one of those poets I will always read, will always eagerly anticipate the next brilliant collection! Brink is a word we gather on top of. Not every poet can promise this word, but it's most fitting here." --CAConradIn her third collection, Shanna Compton offers poems for our brink times: As Texas burns, the Midwest drowns. As one planet explodes, Curiosity captures stunning panoramas of Mars. As one couple argues, another sinks into the silent depths of an ocean trench. The poems in Brink explore the slippage between our lives and the sensation of living inside a miniseries, insistently assuring us we're still solidly here, "amidst all this news."

Brink

Warning: If you're looking to find out who Tina is, these poems won't help you very much. But if you're interested in reading the work of one of our most obsessively inventive, hilariously human, and sometimes crushingly affecting poets, then you've come to the right book. Through a series of direct addresses and lyric effusions to "Tina," Peter Davis reminds us that sometimes talking, even casually, to anyone else is always talking significantly to oneself-and by extension, all of us. Tina is a suckerpunch, and then you see stars. Sometimes it's so funny, it hurts a little bit, and sometimes it hurts so much, it just hurts. -Matt Hart

TINA

The fifth poetry collection by Danielle Pafunda, Natural History Rape Musuem centers around an unnamed speaker and her intimate/adversary, the fuckwad, in pieces interrupted (or violated) by their boxed-in titles. Further interrupting this narrative are a prose sequence and a menagerie of objects/animals/elements borne as totems by the speaker-a lump of coal, a stingray, a cord of wood, a wolf spider, an earthworm, the fly. The volume culminates in four linked essays on the subject of pain: The Bid for Pain, The Manner in Which Pain Becomes Me, Pain Beak-Pecks a Figurine, and Extraterrestrial Painsake. Exploring the more grotesque branches of the Gurlesque aesthetic, in Natural History Rape Museum Pafunda ventriloquizes through the unstable identities of her characters to create creepy tableaux that resemble-despite their vivid, violent excesses-the world we know.

Natural History Rape Museum

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