Trembling Pillow Press

Tag Archive: Feminism

FEELINGS

FEELINGS

FEELINGSby Lauren Ireland

$16.00

 

 

 

 

 

January 1 2012 San Francisco

Aren’t the trees    strange.        Little palms, it’s winter

lonesome and watery.        Under the hills    time

lies    sleeping.        Over the clouds    you come     back

zing.        Have you    noticed    the whole night    wants

to kill me    breath of wine    gold sparkling sidewalks

oh    you have no idea    how far I’ve come    to tell you

this:    Beauty is     insane    insanity is    divine    

divinity is    violence    violence is     beauty    I am    yours.

About the Author

Lauren Ireland is the author of three books and two chapbooks and is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She lives in Seattle and online at laurenireland.net

CUNTRY

CUNTRY front cover

CUNTRY front cover

by Kristin Sanders

$16.00 | May 2017


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CUNTRY girl chases her American dream the wrong direction, from California to Tennessee, and reveals how she is simultaneously made, turned on and damaged by the heteronormative wreckage on display in country music lyrics and porn.  In these wall-to-wall poems about voyeurism, sexuality and consent in the Internet age, Kristin Sanders “look[s] back at a man / looking back at the woman” and also back, directly, into the gaze of the gaping reader, putting on display for us the conundrums and complexities around how the feminine self “learn[s] young how to man the automatic grief machine.” CUNTRY is a burning ring of fire. Fall into it.
–Arielle Greenberg, Locally Made Panties and Slice

Sanders writes pornographic poetry with a twang. Like the best genitals, it drawls, drools, hollers, and hides. If Anne Carson’s cunt sang, it would weep duets at the moon with this book.
–Myriam Gurba, Dahlia Season and Painting Their Portraits in Winter

In Cuntry, Sanders exfoliates the porn moments of her life through critical (yet unsolved) reflections of her collision (and collusion) with porn culture. From an initial bedazzlement to a steady deflation of it, Sanders has found a clear bandwidth with which to have a telling of it, all the while scrupulously avoiding the pitfalls of overt titillation, or worse, a studied coyness. These deft meditations are amplified by splicing in dozens of ingeniously ludic, détourned country song lyrics that re-scramble the increasingly fixed coordinates of Porn’s Progress. The result is a brave, risky project that will embolden many of the less brave among us who’ve buckled at such open public testimony. We can, I’m sure, be a bunch more Cuntry now.
–Rodrigo Toscano

CUNTRY is an elegant excavation of Sanders’s twinned obsession with pornography and country music. Effortlessly slipping between poetry, memoir, and music criticism, Sanders disrobes the country song of the 90’s and uses it as a lens to expose our culture’s sanitized images of femininity. CUNTRY not only skewers the objectifying nature of pop culture but also explores the pleasures of objectification, of “lingering in the gaze.” It is a story about how the very desires that make us also undo us. Which is to say, it is a story about failure. Also: singing. The necessity of talking back to the song, the book, or the film because, as Sanders reminds us, “the desire of the cunt is always left out except where I write it in.”
–Elizabeth Hall,  I Have Devoted My Life To The Clitoris

About the Author

Kristin SandersKristin Sanders is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Orthorexia (Dancing Girl Press 2011), and This is a map of their watching me, a finalist in the 2015 BOAAT Chapbook Competition. She has taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; Loyola University, New Orleans; Belmont University; and Louisiana State University. She is currently a poetry editor for the New Orleans Review and a contributing writer at Weird Sister. CUNTRY was a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series.

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orogeny

orogeny front cover

orogeny front coverby Irène Mathieu

$16.00 | Jan 2017

Winner of the 2016 Bob Kaufman Prize, selected by Megan Kaminski


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Orogeny buries deep into rock and soil, silence and speech, into the pulse of what connects us as mothers, sisters, lovers, and ghosts—the quest for home and for a language that can account for both what might become and what has been lost. Searching ecologies, history, and embodied experience, Irène Mathieu’s lyric voice pieces together a world, which is at once our own and a map of possibility, a “fetal dream of ourselves, a sea of curled and floating ideas.”
—Megan Kaminski, author of Deep City, judge of the 2016 Bob Kaufman Book Prize

In orogeny, wisewoman and mythkeeper Irène Mathieu fiercely erects a “pharmacy of noises,” a mountain of love poems to what it means to be precariously human, an awakening fist armed with the might of dreams against the things that plague the earth and us: murder, hate, wars, borders. This collection is a hymn for the puzzling anatomy of survival, the evolution of rage, and the healing prism of wanderlust. These poems serve as “proper rites” against the violence of language that accompanies what has become the world’s textbook physical ruthlessness. Mathieu penetrates the dust and fragments of our earthly existence—all that’s been lost and left behind—and sings it back together. I could “drink these poems” with their old eyes for an eternity, and they would be enuf, all I need.
—Yolanda Wisher, author of Monk Eats an Afro, Poet Laureate of Philadelphia 2016-17

It’s apt that one of the central images of orogeny is that of Pangaea because Irène Mathieu broke me, over & over & over & infinite. Orogeny takes its reader across many different histories–of family, of continents, of violences, of sciences, of dirts, of fears, of soils, of loves–and every one is bigger than the last. It asks its reader, “what do I deserve?” and while the reader stares at it in amazement it answers “everything inside the moon.” In an existence as fractured as this one, orogeny is not just the myth that we need; it’s the then (& now & future) that we deserve.
– Mark Cugini, author of I’m Just Happy to Be Here, managing books editor, Big Lucks Books

About the Author

Irene MathieuIrène Mathieu is a pediatrician, writer, and public health researcher who has lived and worked in the United States, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Peru, and elsewhere. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Callaloo fellow, and a Fulbright scholar. Irène is the author of the poetry chapbook the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press, 2014). She holds a BA in International Relations from the College of William & Mary and a MD from Vanderbilt University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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simple constructs for the lizzies

simple constructs for the lizzies

simple constructs for the lizziessimple constructs for the lizzies

by Lisa Cattrone

$16.00 | April 2016


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Lisa Cattrone dazzles with these investigations of form, plying her linguistic materials until they give out and reveal the something even newer at the core of the new. This work ascends and descends, too, rising like thrown confetti, sinking, then, but still shining with complex softness underfoot.  Nothing happens once in “Simple Constructs for Lizzies,” and nothing Cattrone constructs is as simple as the same old thing all over again. These are the logics of Heraclitus set in argyle delicacy, funny, too, and biting from the heart.
– Anne Boyer

Cattrone’s poems are embedded with questions that hit the reset button to intelligence. One slips into an eternal return, a cycle of psychic life, an internal landscape that feels alien yet personally and recognizably visceral. Something is pulled into you as you are pulled inside-out. There are moments effected of absolute clarity, not due to narrative logic but in the precipitation of crystalline intelligence through a mixed solution of varying modes of anxiety, vulnerability, and compulsion. History’s negative is perhaps the reverse of the sun. It inverts. The centerfold of reproduction/motherhood undefines language and being by touching the insides together.
-Feng Sun Chen

About the Author

Lisa CattroneLisa Cattrone is a mother and high school teacher living in California. She received her BA in Philosophy and MFA in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poetry and essays have appeared in various journals including The Chicago Review, The Awl, The Volta, Lemon Hound, Gulf Coast, The Claudius App, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Interim, Fourteen Hills and West Wind Review, among many others. Her chapbooks Mutations for Jenny and My Secret Life were both published by Horse Less Press.

Aesthesia Balderdash

Aesthesia Balderdash

Aesthesia Balderdash

by Kim Vodicka

$12.00 | June 2012

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“Belatedly—like everything we wait for—Kathy Acker’s great, I mean really great, grand‐ daughter appears…in Louisiana, naturally (or un‐naturally). Her “blood runneth cheesecake” who penneth this collection of see‐sick lyrics drunk w/ semantic play and painful as “all lights…even stars.” Vodicka’s Aesthesia Balderdash sisters the disaster of gender in ways that matter: “chronically, / abashedly, / rosily, cockily, / dazzlingly.” Not for the faint of art, this is poetry that cunts, I mean counts.”
—Laura Mullen, author of Dark Archive

Like its dangerous, seductive cover, Kim Vodicka’s first book seems birthed from the mouth of a southern belle’s rotting corpse, a trellis of roses bursting out her lips. You’ll follow the flowers inside the corpse because the language of flowers is tipsy and strange. Once inside, Vodicka’s bejeweled, poisonous songs will wind their intoxicating vines around your heart. Down into the glittering you will go, where a pack of pearl-girls and a flock of doves “[will] beat the shit out of [you].” Yes, this book will eat you, and the flies will come for you next.
—Kate Durbin, author of E! Entertainment

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kim VodickaKim Vodicka grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana and received her B.A. in English from UL Lafayette in 2010. She is currently working on her M.F.A. in Poetry at LSU, where she is also a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Co-Coordinator of Delta Mouth Literary Festival 2012. Kim is an avid lover of music, hosts a psychedelic rock show, “Shangri-La-La Land,” on KLSU, and is involved in musical-poetic projects. She believes that poems want to be songs very badly, and she can recite most of her work from memory. Her artwork has been published in Tenderloin, and her poems have been published in Shampoo, Ekleksographia, and Dig. Aesthesia Balderdash is her first book.