—This bomb-ass, brilliant book is, without question, as serious as a heart attack. The storyworld of REAL survival: Amy Eggert is the only person I know brave enough, badd enuff, to go there. Aiming to challenge—and more than likely, shatter—widespread myth and that which has been cataclysmic in our society like no other fiction I’ve read, Scattershot is the true language of trauma. It never stops talking to you, getting into your head in ways that you’ll never forget. Far-reaching, Scattershot will utterly blow you away. It’s that good—Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding  —Written with a compressed precision, the short stories and prose poems that make up Scattershot are like the random yet deadly pattern produced by a haphazardly fired shotgun: painful, contingent, indelible. Equally poised between quiet empathy and unflinching candor, these are snapshots of everyday life in a neoliberal America that has given up on its social contract and the promise of the better life. What remains is a haunted landscape of broken dreams, broken bodies, and broken minds. Amy Eggert is a poet of our diminished world, and Scattershot is necessary reading— Christopher Breu, author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities  —Amy Eggert’s Scattershot must be what Cathy Caruth meant by “the story of a wound that cries out.” Only here are many wounds growing mouths, yearning to be heard—the grandfather in the assisted living facility crying “this isn’t home,” the four year old son flashing back to his father’s hallway suicide, a woman who pines for ghost babies lost in trees. These stories, in their unflinching exquisiteness, are a live nerve twitching, the body at its limits demanding witness. Eggert’s debut collection is the body almost choking on its own vulnerable song— Sara Henning, author of A Sweeter Water

Scattershot: Collected Fictions

Literature & Fiction

Carman, Jane L

Smith,Jessica

Eggert, Amy L

Contemporary

Lit Fest Press / Festival of Language

Poetry painted on a bomb falling out of a plane. BLASPHEMER doesn't fuck around. Yarrow is wonderfully possessed.—Bud Smith, F-250 Enthusiasm like percolating lava courses through these poems, scraping away all that is dull and obvious. These poems are not so much narratives or experiments in form, but explorations, and not just explorations even, but celebrations of poetic conceits turned inside out so that only the star-crawling blood of the imagination remains.—John Goode, Graduating from Eternity With inquiries into both faith and love, Bill Yarrow's BLASPHEMER provides the irreverent gaze you were looking for in subversive poetics. The hot blush, too.—Heather Fowler, Bare Bulbs Swinging

Blasphemer

Yarrow, Bill

Boyd, Bonnie

Poetry

Joani Reese is a poetry blues angel. Think of Bonnie Raitt with steel strings. Think of an embodied muse who confronts danger and loss with heart, with the kind of music that makes us forget misery for the space of art. In Night Chorus, our poet wails artfully in a disciplined and courageous manner that repairs our sense of loss. When we ask ourselves who are the living poets with vision large enough to sing not just the self but the fragile planet, and especially the most vulnerable women upon it––we look to Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Pamela Uschuk, Fady Joudah, Marilyn Hacker, and now, to Joani Reese.   ––Marilyn Kallet, Director, Creative Writing Program, University of Tennessee, author of sixteen books, including The Love That Moves Me  Joani Reese’s Night Chorus is a symphony of “ferocious love” and longing “tied with gut.” This powerful mélange of poems is wide-ranging in form and subject matter, imagery and sound, “a vibrating string (that) snaps to startle the ear” and the heart. I am taken with the courageous voice of this poet as she “teeters, naked on the cliff edge, wild sky black. Arms spread, she dives through the terrible rain.” And, I follow her, as charmed by her sexy blues rhythms as I am by her keenings of grief as I am by the maturity of her craft. This is one book of deep songs that you will need to buy for all of your friends.--Pamela Uschuk, author Crazy Love, American Book Award, and Blood Flower   What I love about Joani Reese’s first full collection, Night Chorus, is how well it moves and weaves through all spaces and contains fearless characters and language. Reese writes like she’s lit a typewriter on fire and only the truth will put it out. The poems in Night Chorus make me understand again why I feel so drawn to modern poetry. I thank Joani for writing this great book and for letting me read and savor it early. I appreciate the hell out of that.—Bud Smith, author of the poetry collection Everything Neon and the novels Tollbooth & F250   Night Chorus thrums through “fist-broken air,” swells with rich orchestral colors, permeates and transmutes atoms like listening to Rachmaninoff ’s Piano Concerto #3. Reese weaves words that make homes in our mouths, lives, secrets. This collection will swallow you whole and stun you with its bold intimacy. “Below the skull of sky, blood leaves its tail.” Unforgettable and mesmerizing! Night Chorus is necessary and provokes heightened awareness of our existence. —Meg Tuite, author of Bound By Blue

Night Chorus

Domantey, Paige

Reese, Joani

Reliquary of Debt takes on the familiar topics of pilgrimage and travel in order to ask new questions about the intersections of parenting, god, economics, feminism, art, and culture. Margaret Rozga, author of Justice, Freedom, Herbs, calls the collection “a tour de force of poetic innovation and fun.” Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice, says that the book “invites the reader to re-see the art and artifacts of our culture. … “from ‘finger bones’ and frescoes to the Harry Potter Platform 9 ¾. The book awakens an awareness of everyday ‘debts’ we owe for the lushness of food and persistence of memory, for stories like that of Saint Zita’s miracle and the ones we create walking through our days together.” Susan Firer notes the mix of “dense, inclusive, polyglot poems … with dance-party rhythms, fresh language and imagery, imagination and facts.” Sonnets, syllabics, and Skypes; story and lyric; tradition and experiment; poetry and prose; old and new forms, including a sequence of factual-fictional “Wikiprosepoems” about the appearance of pumpkin in Italy and an architectural series that imitates Giotto’s Arena Chapel all figure in this collection, an extended meditation on worship and want. What do we abandon, leave behind, relinquish, and forsake as we journey with fellow travelers in mixed sympathy and antipathy? How do we keep moving forward and at what cost? What do we notice and what do we ignore? How many museums and churches does one family need to see? Who decides, and does it matter?   —Wendy Vardaman travels with a keen eye for off-beat and evocative details of history, art, culture, and her own family relationships. These she savors and preserves for us in Reliquary of Debt, a tour de force of poetic innovation and fun—Margaret Rozga, author of Justice Freedom Herbs, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad and 200 Nights and One Day   —A poetic pilgrimage, Wendy Vardaman’s Reliquary of Debt invites the reader to re-see the art and artifacts of our culture. Through the lens of these gentle, smart, and witty poems, the distance that the notion of “relic” usually conjures falls away, replaced by a vital experience that has the reader’s own “worship-wanting eyes” newly fixed on everything from “finger bones” and frescoes to the Harry Potter Platform 9 ¾. The book awakens an awareness of everyday “debts” we owe for the lushness of food and persistence of memory, for stories like that of Saint Zita’s miracle and the ones we create walking through our days together. This is the poetry of ancient cities, of museums and cathedrals, but it is also the poetry of family, of sacred journey taken together with the sun warm on our backs—Kimberly Blaeser, author of Apprenticed to Justice   —Wendy Vardaman serves up dense, inclusive, olyglot poems of pilgrimage, travel, family, history, art, imagination, relationships and more. With dance-party rhythms, fresh language and imagery, imagination and facts, Vardaman continues in the American line of making traditions: Skype poems, giottos, Wikiprosepoems, Wikilistprosepoems, American sonnets, Abecedarians and scholarly-lyric-hybrids. Read the powerful “Tortelli di Zucca Mantovani,” the second poem in the collection, and you won’t be able to put the book down. You’ll also be craving the title dish. No worry: Vardaman includes a recipe for the famous dish. Not a cook? Trader Joe’s is mentioned several times as a source for imported Tortelli di Zucca. However, poems like Vardaman’s you’ll find no where else but in her surprising, adventuresome collection Reliquary of Debt—Susan Firer, author of Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People: New & Selected Poems 1979–2007

Reliquary of Debt

Vardaman, Wendy

IS Several forms of language – poetry, prose, dialogue, essay, opera – take shape in Is. Once we use language with imagination, the definitions/constrictions of traditional form fall away. All writing = all writing. The Chaos Theory of Literary Composition puts it this way: art is energy. To achieve chaos, which releases energy, the writer subjects the writing to heat {in the Chaos Theory of physics, that heat is literal, i.e. fire), i.e., passion, intuition, defamilarization, disruption of syntax, style, genre, spontaneity, the unreal, the unexpected, etc. etc. etc. That state of chaos reveals new form, that chaos opens fissures along which the energy travels and along which the reader engages that energy. IS, putatively the passive verb, includes in it all that is, all the energy we, as artists, bring to the work. Yet, IS, as what we call the passive verb, is a fiction. Like zero in mathematics, the “is” in our work, in the title to this book, isness, does not exist in the real world, but it functions to make everything else work. There is no object – no noun – no thing – that does nothing, that is not an action. Action = energy. Art is energy. The title IS references this nothing which is not, and this – every word – every world – every thing which is, the action inherent in being, including the heat that creates chaos that reveals new form.

Nakell, Martin

It’s nothing short of stunning what Bernd Sauermann can create in less than a hundred words. Do not ask whether these are poems or small fictions. They are sui generis and they are universal. They are human life captured elegantly and vividly and deeply. Redshift is a remarkable book by a splendid young writer.-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Bernd Sauermann’s newest poetry collection, Redshift, is at once a love letter and a lament: to lives and loves, current and past, as well as to time itself. Delicate yet potent, these precision-cut prose miniatures cull the archetypical trappings of an array of timeless every-days, from the pastoral to the post-industrial, the temperate to the tropical; but all are suffused with the eponymous blush created by the relentless ebb of experience itself. In quietly stunning lines that “break the morning like a dropped glass of water” we are shown the melancholy beauty of a world in which “the years have no pulse, and weeks are silent as light.” In the tradition of all great literature, “[t]ime thrusts its shadow” on these hauntingly beautiful poems, which gently but wisely ease us to our knees “at the altar of a moment.”-Susan Lewis, This Visit Redshift occurs as a result of light's lengthening wavelength – if it made a sound, it would thrum at a lower frequency that only a few could hear. But Bernd Sauermann's listening for us, and he's filed a report that's filled with locomotives and typhoons and cracked teeth and burnt-out volcanoes. In Sauermann's new book of poems, there is a recognition of, and a resignation to, the tyranny of time – not the melancholic's lament, but the clear-eyed adult's exaltation at life lived on its own maddening terms.-Michael Kelsay, Too Close to Call

Redshift

Sauermann, Bernd

Portraits of Uncle Sam in a gas mask, random, detailed hygiene instructions, haiku about lepers cracking their knuckles, stories of dinosaurs massacring the field trip visitors...Jake Giszczynski is all over the place, man. He rhymes “hot pockets” with “crotch rockets.” His last name would get you like a million points in Scrabble.-Nick Demske, author of Nick DemskeI hate it. This book is awful.—Kerrie Giszczynski, author of Jake GiszczynskiFilthy is a journey into the dank wet recesses of an otherwise gorgeous human experience. It pokes and prods us exactly where Giszczynski thinks we need to be prodded. Filthy can be seen as an exploration of the baroque in order to engender a firmer appreciation for the often-overlooked blemishes of a post-millennial society. Featuring photography by Dominique Jackson, Filthy is a literary experience for lovers of art, expression, and all things sticky.

Filthy

Giszczynski, Jake

FULL COLOR INTERIOR. From the author, "It all began on a date night with my wife a couple of years back. We live in a rather boring town, and money was kind of tight, so after a relatively inexpensive dinner at our favorite pizza place we went to browse the aisles of our local Barnes &amp; Noble. We happened upon The Brick Bible by Brendan Smith and loved the concept - the entire Biblical narrative retold in graphic novel form, but with the images being LEGO sculptures. Feeling inspired, we enlisted the help of our daughters to launch our own LEGO Bible blog. We got through the book of Genesis and part way through Exodus before the project sputtered and fell by the wayside. A couple of years later, I was working on my proposal for a paper the first annual David Foster Wallace Conference hosted by Illinois State University, and I gave a second read to the “Original Creative Works” call for submissions. Then a thought came to me. “I like David Foster Wallace,” I thought. “I like LEGOs,” I thought. “So, why not bring those two together,” I thought. I selected some of my favorite scenes from some of my favorite stories, and I began to build. Scenes from “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Forever Overhead,” and “Good People;” along with scenes from the novels: Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King. Even one taken from “This is Water.” I built the sculptures and photographed them and assembled the images into a digital slideshow. Then it was off to Bloomington-Normal for the Conference. At the Conference, I was honored to be selected as a featured panelist for my “Reimagining Wallace” presentation. Then I was shocked to see such a large crowd gathered to view my creations on the very large screen. I did not expect pictures of LEGOs to be such a hit at an academic conference. Inspired by the positive response to my presentation, I went home and continued building more Wallace-inspired LEGO sculptures, now focusing my attention on his magnum opus, Infinite Jest (Go big or go home, am I right?). As my understanding and enjoyment of Dave’s writings continue to evolve, so do my artistic expressions that he inspires. What I love about Dave’s writing is that it not only invites serious academic consideration, but that it also invites and inspires creative response. In my case, that has included blog posts, imitative essays, and now LEGO creations. Who knows what will be next..." --Ryan M Blanck

Infinite LEGO: Reimagining David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest through LEGO

Blanck, Ryan M.

Black and White Interior: From the author, "It all began on a date night with my wife a couple of years back. We live in a rather boring town, and money was kind of tight, so after a relatively inexpensive dinner at our favorite pizza place we went to browse the aisles of our local Barnes &amp; Noble. We happened upon The Brick Bible by Brendan Smith and loved the concept - the entire Biblical narrative retold in graphic novel form, but with the images being LEGO sculptures. Feeling inspired, we enlisted the help of our daughters to launch our own LEGO Bible blog. We got through the book of Genesis and part way through Exodus before the project sputtered and fell by the wayside. A couple of years later, I was working on my proposal for a paper the first annual David Foster Wallace Conference hosted by Illinois State University, and I gave a second read to the “Original Creative Works” call for submissions. Then a thought came to me. “I like David Foster Wallace,” I thought. “I like LEGOs,” I thought. “So, why not bring those two together,” I thought. I selected some of my favorite scenes from some of my favorite stories, and I began to build. Scenes from “Little Expressionless Animals,” “Forever Overhead,” and “Good People;” along with scenes from the novels: Broom of the System, Infinite Jest, and The Pale King. Even one taken from “This is Water.” I built the sculptures and photographed them and assembled the images into a digital slideshow. Then it was off to Bloomington-Normal for the Conference. At the Conference, I was honored to be selected as a featured panelist for my “Reimagining Wallace” presentation. Then I was shocked to see such a large crowd gathered to view my creations on the very large screen. I did not expect pictures of LEGOs to be such a hit at an academic conference. Inspired by the positive response to my presentation, I went home and continued building more Wallace-inspired LEGO sculptures, now focusing my attention on his magnum opus, Infinite Jest (Go big or go home, am I right?). As my understanding and enjoyment of Dave’s writings continue to evolve, so do my artistic expressions that he inspires. What I love about Dave’s writing is that it not only invites serious academic consideration, but that it also invites and inspires creative response. In my case, that has included blog posts, imitative essays, and now LEGO creations. Who knows what will be next..." --Ryan M Blanck

It’s REEL. A concern for sincerity, and a new nostalgia, that will get inside your head and keep vividly playing itself back. This riff off It’s A Wonderful Life is the one-of-a- kind hope for love to rescue us that so many authors not named Jeff Jarot wish they could write and the sort of dreamy results rarely seen in reality or the world of fiction. —Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding Heartfelt and probing, Jeff Jarot’s Zuzu’s Petals illuminates the difficulty of living in a digital present while still longing for a receding, but more human, past. —Curtis White, author of We, Robots; The Middle Mind; The Science Delusion; Memories of My Father Watching TV; and others Like Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Jeff Jarot’s Zuzu’s Petals is a freewheeling and inventive personal exploration that tries to come to terms with a cultural obsession, and in the process gives us new insights into a world driven by technology, pop culture, and consumerism. By turns nostalgic and philosophical, Zuzu’s Petals is a lively and fascinating meditation on who we are and why we always seem to be falling short of those cultural images that continue to shape us. —James Plath, author of Historic Photos of Ernest Hemingway and Conversations with John Updike Zuzu’s Petals earns our respect by tackling difficult and uncomfortable questions through an absorbing narrative and a cast of characters about whom we care. We follow the multi-genre story not only through traditional description and dialogue, but also through exchanges of text messages, a child’s school essay, photographs, drawings, and fantasy scenes rendered in the form of film scripts. In the end, Zuzu’s Petals makes us, in Zuzu’s words, “pay attention” in new ways.—Bob Broad, author of What We Really Value

Zuzu's Petals

Jarot, Jeff

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Books by Lit Fest Press / Festival of Language

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Lit Fest Press / Festival of Language publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Scattershot: Collected Fictions

Blasphemer

Night Chorus

Reliquary of Debt

Is

Redshift

Filthy

Infinite LEGO: Reimagining David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest through LEGO

Infinite LEGO: Reimagining David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest through LEGO

Zuzu's Petals