Poetry. "This incorrigible book of poems with its Rorschach tests and National Inquirer soap opera rifts puts readers through the lewd twists and tender struggles of pulling our heads out. Part prayer and part acrid white of pulverized meds, THE CONTORTIONS exposes our fearholes, our limited tenderest tongues, and our raw victual hearts. Wanting to touch to a terrible extent, Mauro's uncanny sound work and edgy wit will change your mind and dilate the rest of you"--Dana Teen Lomax. "Mauro's book of brain science encourages language to pop and pulse down the synaptic hallways of our culture. From Freudian free association to soap opera summaries, from pangrammic mnemonics to Rimbaud, these poems are not afraid to breach etiquette and 'dis-remember' the habits of words. Mauro transmits the fantastical double life of language--what it once was and what it now (happily) can be--with visual and sonic nerve"--Jena Osman.

The Contortions

Literature & Fiction

Mauro, Nicole

Poetry

Dusie Press

Poetry. THREE GEOGAOPHIES follows the travels of the poet through seven years and three cities: San Francisco, New York, and Gothenburg, Sweden. Weaving in mysticism, Tarot, and foreign and imaginary language, the story is one of phenomenal romanticism searching for home and, ultimately, love. "THREE GEOGAOPHIES is a travelogue, translating speechridden distance with fragile romance and accident music from San Francisco to New York to Sweden. 'There is always something we hunt: skin.' Be it others' or our own ('I wasn't intact and impermeable then') with the intractability of space skewering geography and time-space changing story in all of its senses. What there is breathes: 'geometry is all about living'; what there isn't facilitates: 'patterns of light cause accidents to happen' and the longer the distance, the more adventurous the storytelling"—Edmund Berrigan.

Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid's Grimoire

Guy, Arielle

Roseate, Points of Gold

Browne, Laynie

Poetry. "Danielle Pafunda is a sick twist. I read her for seer and scar. She sees and scars, most especially my insides. MANHATER doesn't hate so much as it confounds. It mixes me up: finding-me-with its scathing, tight phrases, bit-off and spit-out with the kind of venom you don't manufacture because you're born-with. It finds-me-with its horrormother, a figure both ick and sympathet-ick, both grotesque and ingrown, mommydearest of nightmare and mirror. It finds-me-with its plates of illness—china and petri, 'shard and glisten'—and with its ex-lovers: weep boys and beardeds and dog ones. Always, Pafunda finds-me-with something. I'm always ashamed. And always, always I'm smiling."—Kirsten Kaschock"Danielle Pafunda is at it again, thank goodness: saying what almost no one else will say, as only she can say it. Read her for the reality check; come back for the rhetorical rocket fuel. These poems ask: Can you recognize yourself in Mommy? Can you recognize yourself in the mirror? MANHATER collects the language of the body, the body, the body. The world lurking in its pages 'expels symmetry,' 'surveys...the sunrise / barf,' invites the 'bitch seizure,' will 'shard and glisten' for you. Enter and 'wait for the tremble.'"—Evie Shockley"To read Danielle Pafunda's MANHATER is to occupy a world of exuberantly dreadful, vibrantly horrifying sentences about decay, death, 'penumbral scuzz,' and the parasites that live in the parasites that live in the basest bodies among us. In Pafunda's mantis-like narrator, I hear 'jolly worms' and 'sarcophagus parties.' I hear exhilaration in destruction, in 'gasping bodies of doom.' The speaker in these poems might destroy the love she touches, but in the process she excretes with a syntax that's dazzlingly scary: a direct delivery of humanimal emission; an infection of flesh and body; sentences that discharge what's magically repulsive in carcass, fungus, milk, blood, and goo. Here there is composition in decomposition, spasms of sparkle and rot."—Daniel Borzutzky

Manhater

Pafunda, Danielle

Poetry. "The relation of these histories and whimsies is idiosyncratic and intimate, sweet and unself-conscious, risky and vulnerable. It is also political."—Michelle Detorie "Treadwell's is a difficult but deeply rewarding poetry. It has a precision and a tenderness all of its own."—Nathan Thompson "This is a feminine poetry, marvelous, tough, and unrelenting."—Maureen Thorson "The new is not Hollywood and it is not America and it is not the founding fathers or the avant-garde who, like Jessica Alba, are made of 'lite toxicity.' There is a seductive and false new, a California of 'the naggy sunshine &amp; / the mean &amp; stupid fucks,' but there is revolution, a 'tender cocktail,' and also birth, which in all of its muddiness offers that 'the new animal is / born of the new animal.' These poems are a delicate unanesthetized surgery in no sterile, metallic arena. Treadwell does her work with steady hands but in the unsteady open, extracting what value of the future remains even in a world with the rich 'in their prissy communes,' even among the texting 'platinum herd.'"—Anne Boyer

Virginia or the mud-flap girl

Treadwell, Elizabeth

Poetry. "Jenn McCreary's wry, disarming, dream-imbued reformulations of fairy-tale & folk-tale quests in & now my feet are maps make for an unconventionally pleasurable and challenging read. In point of fact, she turns the conventions of fantasy- inflected diction and dispiriting roles for female characters in on themselves, in large part through as subtle a handling of poetic sequencing and tone as I've encountered anywhere lately. These poems vividly remake the ground they take from a range of familiar sources, are addressed to readers of most ages, and do mean to change the way this world's collective sense of imagination knows itself."—Anselm Berrigan "A celestial recalibration is in the Jenn McCreary line. I love being in there, and it's for us, the biggest possible version of us. 'here is my ghost voice / amplification helmet & here is the engine you built / with your blood—' One day I took these poems to a rock by the water and encountered the protrusion of fortitude from every THING around me through the lens of her book. '& alterwise by owl-light: thistle-blood & born / with a backwards heart, I wasn't always this / fragile.' This book blows my mind, and this isn't a blurb, it's a witnessing. Planets come and go, but the vibratory poems like Jenn McCreary's stay on in the breaking molecules gnawed by light."—CAConrad "Pieces of a life filtered through a fractured mind, somehow made whole by the work itself."—Kristin Hersh "& NOW MY FEET ARE MAPS is a journey poem. The feet are Jenn McCreary's feet, my feet, the feet of anyone who has come through pain and confusion brought on by people or institutions who abuse their power. Jenn McCreary's work is hacked from the 'black box' at her core. She figured out what it said, how to decode it, and recode it into poetry. The power of her images (unhinged in fairytale and play), her apocalyptic humor, her fusion of time, and her perfectly attuned guidance through devastation all serve to help us make sense 'of another dark night / I'm learning to unwait.'"—Stacy Szymaszek

& now my feet are maps

McCreary, Jenn

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