Poetry. BODHIDHARMA NEVER CAME TO HATBORO is the first of Bootstrap Productions Positively Past Postmodern Poets Series. "In China and Japan practitioners of Zen used to scour tiny sleeve-books of poetry, packed with the great T'ang and Sung Dynasty writers, for answers to the formal riddles set forth in "Mumonkan" and similar collections. Don't new poems need to appear and the archaic sleeve books give rise to the more recently manufactured volumes? If the response to certain koans not yet conceived don't lie hidden in Tyler Doherty's poems, I couldn't say where else to search. Please do not let the twenty-first century rhetoric deceive you; these poems might lure the Western Barbarian himself to Hatboro" --Andrew Schelling.

Bodhidharma Never Came To Hatboro and Other Poems

Literature & Fiction

Doherty, Tyler

Poetry

Bootstrap Productions

Cultural Writing. COSMOS & DAMIAN is a lyrical exploration of corporate folkways, "where the intersections and findings are so rich and complex that no single genre can contain it. Part poem, part anthropological/architectural study, part socio-historical document, part memoir, Michalski walks us through the everyday life of Corporate America" -Robert Fitterman. Here in the mulit-vocal regions of episodic recollection, we are invited to stalk a hidden corporate lifeworld and locate the cellophane caesuras between profane and sacred spaces. David Michalski is the editor of the online journal XCP: Streetnotes.

Cosmos & Damian: A World Trade Center Collage

Michalski, David

Poetry. Art. "If Derek Fenner were a machine I'd call him the Peculiar Anomalous Singular Main Frame that factors sequences of instructions from every corner of American Avant Culture. But Derek Fenner is not a machine, he is a compassionate human whose work--whose works--as a publisher, artist, teacher, and poet--dive into the crossroad of that which is absurd about America and that which makes it beautiful--its car rust and small town newspapers and street life and television screen faces and generations of stealthy cults of bookish Blakean-Warholian basement dwellers. He drives his work with the fuel of Wallace Berman's precept--art is love is god--what more can a reader ask for?"--Lisa Jarnot.

My Favorite Color Is Red: Experiments with Lines

Fenner, Derek

Poetry. Written over 2000 and 2001, many of these poems take the form of sketches and personal letters to friends. Mixing the mundane with the unexpected, Gallagher's collection is playful, surreal and irreverent. In "Cedar," he writes, "Pistachio is better than pastiche/ but not as good as Petruchio in the Taming/ of the Shrew? What depends on shadow?/ A twitch of Eros. It can be catchy Snap/ snap snap poets are really funny/ like mousetraps on fingers." In "Val," he writes, "I wrote you a postcard/ but it was too sloppy and I was/ feeling down not because of Lightnin'/ Hopkins but because I broke down/ and took too many barbiturates." As Bernadette Mayer puts it, "i feel like i am writing a poem by ryan, as you can see i have no periods or exclamation points, it makes my role as a weaver difficult, all i can say is equal stuff but i can still use the semi-colon; what do you think of that?" This collection is from Bootstrap Press's "Positively Past Post-Modern Poet Series."

Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs

Gallagher, Ryan

Poetry. ANOTHER ALLEY by Mike County is lyrically tight, filled with imagistic twists and a subtle surrealistic landscape. The poems are quick and clean, yet stumble around a community of poets with slippery banter. This is the second title in the publishing collaboration, B Is for Beans, with Pressed Wafer, which features Boston-based poets. Also available from SPD is the Mike County title COPPER.

Another Alley

County, Mike

History & Criticism

Poetry. Whether working within the confines of short poem, or stretching out into a "domestic novel" the poems collected in THE MORNING are a delight. Tracking the minute changes of the everyday with exquisite attention, Snell's eye and ear enliven whatever they touch. This is a poet who, like Reznikoff, dares to write "in the great world small" and knows enough to let things speak for themselves.

The Morning

Snell, Roger

Poetry. FOR THE TIME BEING brings together for the first time twenty-nine writers from three continents whose work explores and interrogates the genre of the poetic journal. Tracing its roots back to Sei Shonagon and Matsuo Basho through Thoreau's journals and into the work of the New American poets, the poetic journal remains a vibrant and adaptive genre that continues delight. Ever alert to the minutiae of daily lived experience, as well as to the linguistic twists and turns poems are likely to take when writing is oriented towards improvisation and discovery, these pieces enlarge our appreciation of the world in all its Whitmanic scope and splendor. Also included in this volume are an informative introduction outlining the history and characteristics of the genre, essays and interviews on favorite ancestors and aspects of the craft, and a piece dedicated to how to teach the poetic journal in the classroom. A valuable resource for poets, teachers, and scholars alike, this anthology collects under one roof an eclectic grouping of poets whose various attentions enliven our works and days.

For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals

Poetry. Translated from the Latin by Ryan Gallagher: a bluesy, contemporary, fun and salacious version of this ancient lyric poet--it is blues from ancient Rome. Latin and essays included. "Gaius Valerius Catullus is distinguished from all the other writers of antiquity by his vulnerability. He is the most personal of Latin poets, and more personal than any Greek poet including Sappho....if his love poems could only be duplicated in English they would be popular at every level of society and might be sung in night clubs or by rock groups"--Kenneth Rexroth. "I pothered but/ you'll have bothered/ Catullus played Bach"--Louis Zukofsky.

The Complete Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus

Catullus

Poetry. Comprised of "Why I Don't Write Novels" (34 faux sonnets), "Conversion" (short prose), and "Up the Wazoo" (occasional poems), THE RIOT ACT continues Geoffrey Young's compelling engagement with language, history, and personal life in a range of forms, inviting each reader to take refuge in freshly conceived spaces, between the lines. Since 1982 Young has lived in Western Massachusetts. From 1975-2005, he edited and published The Figures, a literary small press. In 1992 he opened a gallery in Great Barrington, where he continues to curate exhibitions of contemporary art. In the spring he teaches a class in Art Criticism at the University at Albany.

The Riot Act

YOUNG, Geoffrey

Poetry. In our "systematically stupefied society" (Franklin Rosemont) what refreshment and joy to find these poem-hits in SOFT LAUNCH by Jim Dunn, "flashes of emotional perception that transfigure the sad remains of the City" (Gerrit Lansing). This is the first title in the publishing collaboration, B Is for Beans, with Pressed Wafer, which features Boston-based poets. Also available from SPD is the Jim Dunn title CONVENIENT HOLE.

Soft Launch

Dunn, Jim

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Bootstrap Productions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bootstrap Productions