Poetry. [ONE LOVE AFFAIR]* meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much as study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion. As with Jenny Boully's debut book THE BODY (2002), [ONE LOVE AFFAIR]* is full of gaps and fissures and "seduces its reader by drawing unexpected but felicitous linkages between disparate citations from the history of literature," a work that is "filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination" --Christian Bok. Told through fragments that accrete through uncertain meanings, romanticized memories, and fleeting moments rather than clear narrative or linear time Boully explores the spaces between too much and barely enough, fecundity and decay, the sublime and the disgusting, wholeness and emptiness, love and loneliness in a world where life can be interpreted as a series of love affairs that are "unwilling to complete."

[one love affair]*

Literature & Fiction

Boully, Jenny

Contemporary

Tarpaulin Sky Press

Fiction. In the process of constantly disappearing, the unhinged, unmoored and unnamed narrator of WHERE I STAY travels through a cracked North America, stalked by his own future self and the whispers of a distant love. From Arco, Idaho, to Mexico City, he flees along the highways and dirt roads of a landscape filled with characters in transition: squatters, survivalists, prostitutes, drug runners, skinheads, border guards and con-men. WHERE I STAY is a meditation on desperation, identity, geography, memory, and love--a story about endurance, about the empty spaces in ourselves, about the new possibilities we find only after we have lost everything. "Refreshing, pitch-perfect kind of steering that is innovative not only for the genre it might get called into, but for experiential and language-focused texts of every stripe"--Blake Butler. "A gifted journey through borderlands between text and image, glassy prose and suggestively indirect prose poem, facts and fictions, sanity and the other thing"--Lance Olsen.

Where I Stay

Zornoza, Andrew

Poetry. Distinct, clear, and free of flourishes, Max Winter's debut collection of poems, THE PICTURES, examines war, boredom, death, love, decay, happiness, and worship through a series of moving and still images. In one poem, from a group of "moving" pictures, three soldiers bide their time in a barren landscape, awaiting destruction; in a "still" picture, a group of stonesinvite us to pay closer attention to them; in another still picture, a woman stands with her mouth open, fists clenched, words unimportant. Sight is unmysterious but wondrous in this book; the poems demonstrate that to look at something or to read it is to experience it, along with its attendant sadness or joy. The "pictures" collected here are communicative andprofound, quick to read but long to develop.

The Pictures

Winter, Max

Poetry

Fiction. Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.

Attempts at a Life

Dutton, Danielle

Fiction. "If Vladimir Nabokov wanted to seduce Nancy Drew, he'd read her NYLUND, THE SARCOGRAPHER one dark afternoon over teacups of whiskey. Welcome to fiction's new femme fatale, Joyelle McSweeney."--Kate Bernheimer. "You thought you knew your own language. This book hands it back to you on a platter and includes the instructional manual for its further use."--Michael Martone. NYLUND, THE SARCOGRAPHER is a baroque noir. Its eponymous protagonist is a loner who tries to comprehend everything from the outside, like a sarcophagus, and with analogously ornate results. The method by which the book was written, and by which Nylund experiences the world, is thus called sarcography. Sarcography is like negative capability on steroids; this ultra-susceptibility entangles Nylund in both a murder plot and a plot regarding his missing sister, Daisy. As the murder plot places Nylund in increasing danger, his sensuous memories become more present than the present itself.

Nylund, the Sarcophager

McSweeney, Joyelle

Poetry. In prose poems, syntactically elusive sonnets, and haunting, haiku-like fragments, one encounters within FIGURES FOR A DARKROOM VOICE a recurring cast of logically-skewed images, inauspicious yet arresting aphorisms, and characters rendered fully bizarre in the lightest of brushstrokes. Imagine a gallery in which Cornell boxes talk back, a Maya Deren film in which the audience dissolves into projector light, a Philip Glass composition played exclusively on medieval weaponry, such are the compelling results of this collaborative work. The texts of Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, illuminated by the ink drawings of Noah Saterstrom, fuse into a voice as singular as it is sinister.

Figures for a Darkroom Voice

Noah Eli Gordon

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Poetry. BODY LANGUAGE, a collection of prose poetry unique both in content and design, is actually two books--"Primer" and "Body"--bound "tete-beche" (sometimes called a "flip book," as it has two front covers). Together the books form a diptych investigating the body in language and language in the body-"a provocative, loopic continuum," says Lisa Russ Spaar, "in which prose poems "defining" body parts (The Spleen, The Pituitary Gland, The Pimple, The Thumb) mesh with an abecedarium/cipher concerning topics as various as fate, reality, and phenomenology. With its trope of clue-like instruction and unique, flip-book embodiment, BODY LANGUAGE creates a kind of hybrid detective f(r)iction, an intrepid mash-up of high and low cultures in which the reader is as likely to encounter Rilke and Proto-Sinaitic inscription as Lacan, Film Noir, The Three Stooges, cell phones, higher mathematics, binary thought, and Coyote and Road Runner cartoons."

Body Language

Self-Help

Cunningham, Mark

Personal Transformation

Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal Issue #15 Print Issue #2 Winter 2008-09

Elena Georgiou

Poetry. From THE ESSENTIAL NUMBERS: "1715": "It is unimportant to me whether anyone reads these poems / or their assessment of them should they, I do not care under / whose name they are published, nor could I care less what / literary critics say about them, praise or condemnation, / nothing could be more vapid than some academic advanc- / ing his career on my efforts or within institutionally accept- / able parameters pushing my reputation this way or that, / most contemporary poetry is shit as is the industry that sur- / rounds it and I want no part of it, if I am harsh so be it, if / I am angry then that is life, if I have hurt my consanguineous / they are co-conspirators in their pain, nothing in this work / bears false witness nor have I broken one commandment, / I am a decent man imbued with a religious spirit and cap- / able of love, I have noticed the world is full of cowards."

The Essential Numbers 1991-2008

Massman, Gordon

Poetry. "STARS OF THE NIGHT COMMUTE haunts in three dimensions, knit by a below-words rumble in the sure rhythm of dreams"--Annie Finch. "Bozicevic's poetry has everything--a mastery of language, a distinct and singular voice and a worldview so visionary and all-encompassing, so as to both terrify and astound"--Noelle Kocot. "How does she do it?"--Eileen Myles. "Absolutely anything can happen next but whatever it is, it will be perfect.... She is able to stretch language to its most ineffable and musical limits while maintaining a masterful grasp of the colloquial.... She is able to perceive with the eyes of language--then render with lyrical immediacy--the experience of our collective sleepwalking soul, who may well soon awaken to discover that its terror was not a dream"--Franz Wright.

Stars of the Night Commute

Božičević, Ana

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