Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. Edited by Jason Snyder, John Cleary, and Kristine Leja. SIDEBROW 01 brings together the work of 65 writers of innovative poetry and prose into a multi-threaded, collaborative narrative that marks a new direction in publishing. Launched on the Web in 2005 to explore resonances among disparate modes of literary expression, Sidebrow has used the Internet to open up its publishing process, introducing thematic projects and facilitating creative response to pieces curated on its Web site. This inaugural anthology--which includes work by Brian Evenson, Cole Swensen, Chris Tysh, Elizabeth Robinson, Sandy Florian, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Noah Eli Gordon, among others--serves as a first step toward that effort, offering both a snapshot of an collaborative experiment and an invitation to participate in its evolution.

Sidebrow 01

Literature & Fiction

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Sidebrow Books

Poetry. Sandy Florian's ON WONDERLAND &amp; WASTE is a novel in narratives bent on exposing the mind as an instrument of language "not entirely there." Featuring full-color collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie, these 12 lyrical meditations on desire, delirium, duty, and dismemberment destabilize what we can measure of the meaning underlying our experience with a visceral diction that reminds us that "the sharpest of tongues cut their own throats first."

On Wonderland & Waste

Florian, Sandy

Poetry

Poetry. Joshua Marie Wilkinson's SELENOGRAPHY finds words in want of their own life to chart an adumbrated landscape, "a good song played // too patchily / to keep / in your lungs." Side by side with full-color Polaroids by Califone's Tim Rutili, these poems traverse thought and image, object and vestige, contingency and intention, likening the haunted drift through this sounding of words to a river, "easy incomplete but it / took us / like twigs."

Selenography

Wilkinson, Joshua Marie

Fiction. NONE OF THIS IS REAL imagines a not-too-alternate reality of philosophical children, reincarnating chimeras, mutant matriarchies, and kind seers adapting to affliction. These five fictions question what is knowable and what actions can be taken in the face of loss—of family, heritage, ecosystems, agency, and power. A face incapable of masking its sneering rebellions; young sisters in search of their missing mother; a page whose very body extracts meaning from occult readings in response to alienation; a never-ending line for coffee that becomes a surreal site of quotidian wars in miniature; a nightmare future of scientific subjugation and regenerate seekers—this first collection by the author of THE REVISIONIST illuminates the gap between institutional powers and those failed by, or otherwise mortally at odds with, those powers. Drawing inspiration from absurdism, noir, fairy tales, and the occult, NONE OF THIS IS REAL brings the playfulness of contemporary fabulism to bear on today's pressing ethical and political issues, exploring the potential and limits of magical thinking with empathy, subtle humor, and an engrossing mastery of the fictional form.

None of This Is Real

Mellis, Miranda

Contemporary

Poetry. LBGT Studies. In this sequence of prose poems addressed to 2002 American Idol reality TV show winner and insta-star Kelly Clarkson, Julia Bloch engages an America more willing to choose its next Fox, Coke, and Ford spokesperson than its next elected official. Through these letters, Bloch disassembles the faux-political phenomenon of the Fox Network reality TV smash hit, invoking critical questions about celebrity, democracy, femininity, and desire, as well as the mass cultural corporatization of the female body. LETTERS TO KELLY CLARKSON takes up these issues in poems that combine the intimacy of the epistolary form with the sonic intensity of verse. Employing formal methodologies aimed at interrupting and foregrounding the cultural politics of that intimate address, such as cut-ups, aleatory practices, non-narrative prose techniques, and parataxis, these poems mediate the tensions between local pleasure and global capital through the desirous and politicized spectacle of the pop star. "As Julia Bloch turns her razor-sharp gaze to American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, she adopts the beseeching tone of a fan and the intimate address of a best girl confidante. All women know what it's like to be watched, but for Kelly, it's that scary feeling upped a notch, like the viewers' eyes have been pumped full of steroids. The gaze works both ways: the ghost of Kelly Clarkson follows Bloch everywhere, from San Francisco girl bars to Midwestern family reunions. For all their complexity of diction, there's a touching simplicity to Bloch's poems. By taking Kelly seriously, on her own terms, Bloch moves beyond the safety of 'camp' into a realm of genuine tragedy and love. It's a stunning collection."—Dodie Bellamy

Letters to Kelly Clarkson

Bloch, Julia

Poetry. The death of a parent by vehicular homicide, the difficulty of meeting the needs of children with severe autism, the dissolution of identity and relationships in an era of unending genocide and terror by war—these three poetic sequences piece together an intimate mourning, circuitous and sewn, a symptom of grief and the recursive process of grieving. Each poem of this assured debut, encoded by fragmentary attentions that surface before the mind shuts out all signals of time passing without the missing, is a crystalline approximation of coping with loss. Through an exacting poetics of impression and submerge, sped sutures broken thoughts, snippets of conversation, incidents both witnessed and obscured into unexpected configurations until the scar that remains becomes yet another facet language can't account for. "They are so still you can pet the fuzz, but they shudder // I turned the desk on the slant to roll toward it instead of away / only the corner of the corkboard stayed on the wall // Portuguese acres of gnarled brown trees / bark peeled off in wide black rings // In every storefront a church and a man who wants to walk me home to my boyfriend because my skin is so soft // Except there is no cure, only desperate offerings / oxygen therapy, elimination diet, blood transfusion, chelation // We speak in tongues, writhe on the ground/ broken headed//[.]"

sped

Miller, Teresa K.

Fiction. Like a gothic teleplay by Gertrude Stein, filmed by Andy Warhol, and transcribed into a stunning lyrical novel by the very voyeuristic monster at its center, lustful in equal measure for the scintilla of soap opera set pieces and the two women—one master, one slave—trapped in an ever-shifting atmosphere of vamp and apprehension."Deep in this fabulous book someone says 'i watch to aid her loneliness.' The many meanings of that phrase suggest the glittering accomplishment, the rare morality of this book. I have never read a more gorgeous novel in which the beauty is all in the mystery, not in any solution."—Bin Ramke"In gorgeous sentences, Roxanne Carter translates the uncanny paradoxes of intimacy through shadow, ocean, ash. To read BEYOND THIS POINT ARE MONSTERS is to wake in a dream, from a dream, and realize you are in a room illuminated by darkness. Its enchantments are both important and a pleasure."—Selah Saterstrom

Beyond This Point Are Monsters

Carter, Roxanne

Poetry. THE COURIER'S ARCHIVE &amp; HYMNAL navigates a purgatory made nearly pastoral by a necrotic vision of consumptive rivers, ghost mazes, corpsethieves, and stalkerish moons. With an exacting, halted diction, Joshua Marie Wilkinson swerves us deeper toward the source of this dark archive, stirring our courier to contemplate Basho, Beckett, Kafka, Matta-Clark in hope of materializing a "name for no becoming, stammering through wind." The result is a hypnotizing meditation of mood, mind, perdition, and image. In other words, book three of Wilkinson's No Volta pentology picks up exactly where its predecessors SELENOGRAPHY and SWAMP ISTHMUS leave off. That is to say, beyond the good myths, to a decidedly singular poetic territory "recasting the future freshly black."

The Courier's Archive & Hymnal

Poetry. "FOR ANOTHER WRITING BACK extends to strangers and creatures the same quizzical care we extend to those we love; it gives us a way of seeing that is very close to listening. Part reverie, part reflection, these lyric sequences examine childhood, 9/11, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, giving birth, the dailyness of marriage, family gatherings, friends living with cancer, a lizard come into the house to die—all with a distinctive, intimate quiet. Attentive to what separates us and to what unexpectedly draw us close, Bleakney's vision expresses, in the most stunning terms, not only the depth of our inwardness, but how we might seek shelter in one another."—Joanna Klink

For Another Writing Back

Bleakney, Elaine

Poetry. Anthology. THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS gathers together the work of 50 talented poets of disparate backgrounds and traditions, providing a constellation of the most exciting, innovative poetry evolving today. Named for the online poetics archive The Volta, THE VOLTA BOOK OF POETS navigates contrasting styles and forms to showcase poetry in its dissimilar pleasures, presenting difference as a means for inspiring a new way to think about poetry, and to inspire readership for the poetry communities and presses radiating out from the poets collected in this essential anthology, including Rosa Alcalá, Eric Baus, Anselm Berrigan, Edmund Berrigan, Susan Briante, Sommer Browning, Julie Carr, Don Mee Choi, Arda Collins, Dot Devota, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Graham Foust, C.S. Giscombe, Renee Gladman, Noah Eli Gordon, Yona Harvey, Matthew Henriksen, Harmony Holiday, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, John Keene, Aaron Kunin, Dorothea Lasky, Juliana Leslie, Rachel Levitsky, Tan Lin, Dawn Lundy Martin, J. Michael Martinez, Farid Matuk, Shane McCrae, Anna Moschovakis, Fred Moten, Sawako Nakayasu, Chris Nealon, Hoa Nguyen, Khadijah Queen, Andrea Rexilius, Zachary Schomburg, Brandon Shimoda, Evie Shockley, Cedar Sigo, Abraham Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Mathias Svalina, Roberto Tejada, TC Tolbert, Catherine Wagner, Dana Ward, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Lynn Xu.

The Volta Book of Poets

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