Trembling Pillow Press

Tag Archive: First books

KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLE

KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLE

KIDS OF THE BLACK HOLEby Marty Cain

$16.00 | June 2017

domestic shipping only

“Inhabiting the space between elegy and prophecy, Marty Cain’s poem floats in a drowning country parallel to the United States of America. Where loss flickers at the edge of each frame, “the earth turns itself inside out” like a teenager in a dreamscape, baptized in tears.” – Lucas de Lima

“If Holden Caulfield had acid-tripped on friendship and death in the aughts—if he’d then fallen through a therapy-hole to ride shotgun in a dark-energy jalopy—he might have dreamed this long, wild narrative lit up on uncertainty and sex. To steal a phrase from Cain: this poem has risen from the dead to eat lesser poems. It glows.” – Cathy Wagner

 “Marty Cain is a new galactic animal and Kids of the Black Hole is his apocalyptic Arcadian habitat, a place where body and landscape merge into electrified litany, where cultural and personal traumas are indexed with the speed and precision of revelation. This poem does not settle for childhood ghosts, prosaic lyric comforts, or Culturally Endorsed Normcore Platitudes As Plied By Many of Our Most Respected Poets. Rather, it presents a vision of white American adolescence that captures its inherent mind-fucking toxicity, its wonders (primeval and digitized), its collusion with empire and absurd consumption, its mad proscriptions that attempt to wreck the body and the spirit before the body has a chance to body and the spirit a chance to spirit. O skeletal radiance of punk rock futurity. O glyphs of mesmerism and molecular vocality. O inner trembling in the assemblage. Inside the hippodrome, a wolven ardor. Inside the belly of the beast, this motherfucker wants out. Marty Cain is one of the most brilliant and inventive young poets writing today.” – Tim Earley

About the Author

Marty CainMarty Cain was raised in Marlboro, Vermont, and holds a BA from Hamilton College and an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Presently, he resides in Ithaca, New York, with his partner, the poet Kina Viola; together, they run Garden-Door Press. Cain’s poems appear in Fence, Action Yes, Gigantic Sequins, The Pinch, Dreginald, and elsewhere. Currently, Cain is pursuing a PhD in English Language & Literature at Cornell University, where he studies experimental poetics and the pastoral.

CUNTRY

CUNTRY front cover

CUNTRY front cover

by Kristin Sanders

$16.00 | May 2017


US Domestic Shipping Only

 

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.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

orogeny

orogeny front cover

orogeny front coverby Irène Mathieu

$16.00 | Jan 2017

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


US Domestic Shipping Only

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

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


US Domestic Shipping Only

 

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.

[ the door ]

[ the door ]

[ the door ]by Jenny Drai

$16.00 | August 2015


US Domestic Shipping Only

Open [ the door ] to stanzas of dream and enchantment, to chambers of magnetic fields, to the mezzanine of spellbinding diction, to the balcony of this passion play. And “how do I wish / to approach autobiography?” asks the poem quietly, thunderously. Like the journal intime and the Märchen, like Klee’s Angelus Novus, the door ] melds archaic time with contemporary measure, blending with delicate accomplished lines “the goddess of cereals,” “the fate of the hive,” and “the Keystone pipeline.” Open [ the door ] anywhere and swoon!
—Norma Cole

Jenny Drai’s [ the door ], like a medieval tapestry, is vivid with color, suggests scene and story, and yet—with the tensile elasticity of textile—warps and shifts the reader’s attention in startling ways. As Drai writes, “again, again, I discover a new route.” This book weaves word and idea, transforming the fabric of language into the skin of the poem. This is no mere poetry collection; [ the door ] commands our full humanity—domestic, transcendent, witty, insistent:
“really it’s about learning to live with one’s feet on the ground   :     while beating one’s bright wings / to keep the room warm”
—Elizabeth Robinson

Flashing with intelligence and urgency, “[ the door ]” opens to glimpses of bees’ exoskeleton frailty, the frailty of our interlaced psychological/social narratives, our own frailties, and what can be broken and remade in the “arterial life” of experience.  Buzzing with unexpected turns and junctures, Drai’s athletically agile language excavates fissures in our intricate collective hive, a “bed of uncertainty and universe” where new openings are threaded.  Readers are immersed in layers and layers of iridescence and injury, governing texts, recoded fairytale, etymologies, and fleet lucid perceptions that form our fabled wing-soft beings.  Identity and history are convincingly unstill in this transfixing collection.
—Endi Bogue Hartigan

About the Author

Jenny DraiJenny Drai’s poetry has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Handsome, Jellyfish, and New American Writing, among many other journals. She is the author of Letters to Quince (winner of the Deerbird Novella Prize from Artistically Declined Press) and two poetry chapbooks—The New Sorrow Is Less Than the Old Sorrow (Black Lawrence Press) and :Body Wolf: (Horse Less Press). [ the door ] is her first full-length collection of poetry. Two additional collections are forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. In addition, a novel she wrote was a finalist in the Subito Press Prose Prize. She has worked every odd job imaginable and lived all over the place in the United States and Germany. She currently resides in Bonn, Germany, where she is at work on another novel. You can find her at jennydraiisferal.tumblr.com or follow her on Twitter @jenny_drai.

Want for Lion

Want for Lionby Paige Taggart

$16.00 | March 2014


US Domestic Shipping Only

Paige Taggart’s Want for Lion is an earth goddess journal that is divine text & scandal sheet, reaching through/across our surfaces with detoxified beauty & the eye of Hecate’s owl.
Hymns & dirges score the transmorphic in layered registers, tracking some reformed species that resembles ours, desperately in need of re-forming. This book is a chariot pick-me-up, w/ invocations of sweet dreams & the nightmares we just might deserve. Some blessings go unrealized until they’re held in the hands. You are holding one now.
– Frank Sherlock

What is the difference between expression and, well, there is nothing else. The question, like Taggart’s book, plots against itself. Maybe it’s a set up, a Möbius strip of language. Or maybe it’s a window into a world governed by a truer anti-logic where “litter is literally glittering,” where poetry is always “kinda screamed.” Her voice is Scarface and titties cloaked in the syntax of study and propelled by a roaring heart.
– Sommer Browning

Taggart’s poems sulk, prance, and attack like a beast she’s tamed into her house cat.  Nature is the beauty and danger beating behind each line.  Taggart holds and waves a flag of honesty at every house party, emotional journey, and private moment, illuminating and obscuring the parts familiar to us all.
– Rachel B. Glaser

There’s a persistent sensation in Want for Lion of being yoked to a mind in full stream. It’s faster than you. It foams in a forest of registers. There is work to be done as a reader to reach this new speed: stumbling, knees ripped, I think I have. “I want to make people feel so small that they think I’m the sky,” says the Poet. I’m here to tell you that’s exactly what happens
– Brandon Downing

Paige Taggart punctures identity papers with inky harpoon ritual, process in every line, gone beyond epiphany package. She is a poet who dares to value attention over status when most poems read like elaborate status updates. Her rhythm shakes me out of screen trance into a labyrinth of the gloriously unfixable self.
– Filip Marinovich

About the Author

Paige TaggartPaige Taggart is a Northern Californian and currently resides in Brooklyn. Want For Lion is her first full-length collection. Her second book Or Replica will be published by Brooklyn Arts Press. She is the author of 5 chapbooks: Last Difficult Gardens (Horse Less Press),  DIGITAL MACRAMÉ (Poor Claudia) Polaroid Parade (Greying Ghost) and The Ice Poems (DoubleCross Press), and forthcoming I am Writing To You From Another Country; Translations of Henri Michaux (Greying Ghost Press). She earned her MFA from the New School and was a 2009 NYFA fellow. She works as a full-time jewelry production manager & additionally makes her own jewelry at mactaggartjewelry.com.

loaded arc

Loaded Arc

loaded arcby Laura Goldstein

$16.00 | September 2013

Also available on Amazon and SPD.

loaded arc is so fine it will rain owls and fathers.
-Bernadette Mayer

What can the lyric postmodern do in the face of large-scale violence and micro aggressions? Laura Goldstein knows. loaded arc, in pages of intense music, pulls us sonically down deep into truths that are knowable because of beauty. This poetry enacts relationships: hurricane Katrina and inequality, fluctuating bank balances and television, attempts at accounting for everything “because the world/is for falling in love with…” and anxious conceptualizations of fatherhood/homeland. In sure sculpted lines, calling up multiple voices and a wide array of sources, and always maximizing The Word’s out-loud potentials—because utterances can be simultaneously sacred and secular—this book is buoyant, is hope, “is clearly room for action and alternatives can be planned … ”
-Jill Magi

Laura Goldstein’s loaded arc is a musical triptych, one powered by an engine equal parts surging internal rhyme and propulsive alliteration. Here, rain’s rhythmic patter mirrors reportage’s inability to render in language the contours of event, then our alphabet goes all allegorical, and we’re left to contend with the historical aftermath of a few more burning bushes. Look out whorled, Goldstien’s parting some sees.
-Noah Eli Gordon

It is written that agony makes for a more earnest prayer. And this is some grindingly earnest prayer here. In the gospels when Jesus is in the garden before his crucifixion, knowing that the time for Judas to “betray ” him is soon nigh, which will lead to his torture and death, he retracts from his homies and prays (as he is wont to do throughout the gospels). The line that I love from this passage is “Because he was in an agony, he prayed more earnestly.” And what follows is the only Biblical record of Jesus petitioning God in prayer, asking God to change his situation. This is an example of why John Donne, I think, said “Prayer hath the nature of violence” or something like that–because the person praying is sort of working against God.
-Nick Demske

“[Like water, these poems fold multiple stories together in a, yes, a flood. As this is poetry, it’s a constrained flood – deftly artifactual.] What I love about Goldstein’s work here is that she enacts philosophical quandaries regarding time, space, thought, and matter AND ALSO conveys a nuanced political posture. This is uncommon: a tightrope feat, loaded and carrying. Enter and be counted.
-Cara Benson

About the Author

Laura GoldsteinLaura Goldstein has published six chapbooks as well as poetry and essays in the Denver Quarterly, American Letters and Commentary, MAKE Magazine, How2, Jacket2 and other fine publications.Laura holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania,Temple University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University and co-curates the Red Rover Series with Jennifer Karmin. She lives in Chicago with her husband, artist Brett Ian Balogh. loaded arc is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Also by this author:

Camera (Make Now Books, 2014)

Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers

Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers

Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerersby Jen Coleman

$16.00 | December 2013


US Domestic Shipping Only

 

Winner of the 2013 Bob Kaufman Book Prize selected by Poet Dara Wier.

The “psalm-poets” of the Reformation wanted to bring etheral ideas down to earth. “Thou, once a body, now but air/Arch botcher of a psalm or prayer/From CarfaxJ come/And patch us up a zealous lay” penned the 18th century psalm-poet Robin Wisdom. 21st century psalm-poet Jen Coleman is involved in her own reformation of psalms as proceeding from the ground up. She details how “The dirt holds eight immutable truths” while acknowledging that she can list but six of them – and they don’t present themselves in numerical order! While it is a mystery that Robin Wisdom predicted the existence of Carfax (insert emoticon of choice), it is no secret that Jen Coleman has reclaimed the psalm for those of us who still puzzle over the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question of what life is all about.
— Tina Darragh

Apocalyptic, raw, and galloping, Jennifer Coleman’s poems are built to unsettle. This is a book that begins with the corporeal and ends with the collapse. Its restlessness is visceral; it’s a trip not to be missed.
–Lisa Jarnot

Unwilling to share secrets that must be told, Jen Coleman’s poems whisper to each other their wisdoms. Our role is a better kind of listening; more like taking action than what we have been taught. “A serious census of the fishes”. I was not prepared to need this book the way I do.
— Buck Downs

I just want to make a list of all the small animals in this book. The krill, the worms, the insects, the bees and their honeys. And also the rivers and the cities. All the ways they mix and meld. The way this book lets a rat be a short-eared bunny and a lingcod be the 15 million unemployed. The way this book also asks “what does it matter, the ocean?” And then explains it, fully, beautifully through psalms that celebrate what remains of the at risk ecosystem.
— Juliana Spahr

There’s this list I’ve been carrying around, 100 things I love about Jen Coleman’s poems. It became 180 with little effort. Is this your first time reading Coleman? Do yourself a favor give it the full  treatment, reading it four different ways: umbrella in the rain, feet in mud, seeds under tongue, underwear loaded with whipped cream, DO IT, DO IT DIFFERENT!! These poems span more than a decade of making poems. Writing poems is one thing, but making them HAPPEN, making them take over your sense of the world around you, that’s a REAL poet’s job!! Coleman!! For years I’ve said WHY doesn’t Coleman have BOOK!? Do you own many books of poetry? Do you KNOW HOW RARE it is to LOVE each poem in a book? Coleman, we’ll refer to her poetry-making by her last name one day soon, like, have you read the Coleman poem with that middle-of-the-night morphing epiphany, “I turn my body over / in my sleep as if it exists / as if it is worth the trouble.” WOW. If I could go back in time I would ask my mother to read this book out loud each week I was inside her. Prepare with poetry that is honed on the great experiments of LIFE!!
–CAConrad

About the Author

Jen ColemanJen Coleman was born in Minnesota in 1970. She earned a BA in Theater from Beloit College, and worked briefly at a circuit board factory, a three ring binder factory, a blanket factory, a gas station, as a theater electrician and as a schoolbus driver. She earned an MFA in poetry from George Mason University. There, she studied with Susan Tichy, Peter Klappert and Carolyn Forché. Her work was further shaped by the Washington, DC, poetry community. While in DC, Jen co-hosted with Allison Cobb a season of the DCAC “In Your Ear” reading series and completed a collaborative chapbook with CE Putnam and Allison Cobb entitled Communal Bebop Canto. Jen and Allison moved to New York in 2000, where they joined Ethan Fugate and Susan Landers in editing six issues of Pom2, “a journal of poetic polylogue.” While in DC and New York, Jen worked for Environmental Defense Fund. Jen and Allison moved to Portland, Oregon in 2008, where they live with their dog, Quincy. In Portland, Jen participated in the 13 Hats collaborative of artists and writers. She co-hosts readings with the Spare Room Collective and works for Oregon Environmental Council. This is her first full-length volume.

Super Natural

Super Natural

Super Naturalby Tracey McTague

$15.00 | January 2013


US Domestic Shipping Only

Kindle Book Available for only $5.99

 

“A hornbook for the fledgling seer. A trickster’s bible. Mystic, domestic, ritualistic, caustic. Tracey McTague’s book invokes the spaces between the worlds with poems that demand to be read aloud, incantations against—or for—those liminal places where spirits flap free. With sensual vulgarity and profane beauty, her poems draw close to the divine, stripping language down to its glowing bones. I know this place; it stalks me. And I believe in these poems”
-Lauren Ireland

Tracey McTague is a “sorceress in sweet depravity/ & general decay.” She calls forth a world crowded with the debris of daily life, lit by “the wide-eyed radiance” of the poet’s mind: Antigone brand condoms and H.R. department emoticons.These poems brim with wonder, but also warning. They gather global gods and folk rituals, as if the present, or, more precisely, the future, required the resurrection of every possible power — hope here residing not above us but in the ways such prayers access “the primordial wisdom in the world as it is.”
-Allison Cobb, author of Green-Wood

Tracey McTague is a streetwise detective of the most unusual details; some of her poems read like a pile of stuff discovered in an alley — mysterious, then interesting, then meaningful, beautiful, and rewarding to the careful eye. Other poems seem channeled from the distant flare of a blinking star; on top of her Brooklyn hill, McTague is a strangely-alloyed antennae picking up eons-old cosmic messages. My favorite poems are the ones that demand to be reread. As soon as I finished this book, I started it anew.
-Shafer Hall, author of Never Cry Wolf

Tracey McTague’s amazing collection of poetry Supernatural, fires up the language. Folklore, nature, and the quotidian meld into bars of gold and silver. These poems dedicated to family and friends, lift off the page and light up poetry’s sky. Grounded in folklore, McTague’s poems can’t be nailed to the wall, they are tricksters, shape shifters that defy our expectations and rules.
-Brenda Coultas, author of The Marvelous Bones of Time

Delivered with the spontaneous mind of “first thought best thought,” each word is also a well wrought amulet stowed in vigrx plus buy in guelph the shelves of the poem. It’s their sense of strangeness, vast associative possibility and sonic kinkiness that makes me feel we can use them as chants to combat commonplace wrong-doers. As she writes, “bird-herald appears/making a joyful noise/& always pays your debts.”
-Stacy Szymaszek, author of Hyperglossia

Edgar Allen Poe famously wrote, “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Indeed, stare for too long at any gorgeous flower and one begins to be stunned by its essential grotesquerie, which then in some mysterious way doubles back to make the blossom more beautiful still. Similarly, Tracey McTague’s poems tinker with the proportion of beauty to strangeness, finding just the right balance, as a Thai chef might with sweetness, acidity, salt, and spiciness. It just so happens that Tracey has one of the most beautiful gardens in Brooklyn…I’m not sure whether she has transferred the skill set of gardening into poetry or vice versa, or whether the dynamic is simply more complementary, but the poems are like enchanted terrariums, tiny organic assemblages in the “syntax of [an] unknown tongue. The lines are short and this economy helps us not to lose such exquisite, sound-attentive moments as “prank mask feasts,” “double bloom Twombly,’ “porch minks,” and “faux pas paw prints.” I almost want to call these “euphoria infested” poems gemlike, with their strange and unembarrassed (i.e. uncontested) beauty, but perhaps it is more accurate to compare them to amber. With her fine and surreal sense of juxtaposition and arrangement, Tracey is sure to work in insects and delicate mischief among the loveliness: there is a “nymph detainment center”, a “chocolate mingle turn-ons at herpes camp” and even a “Cartesian spider monkey [that] yells, ‘Titans – show us your tits’”! To which one can only respond: Tracey! Show us your poems!”
-Nada Gordon, author of Scented Rushes

About the Author

Tracey McTagueTracey McTague lives up on Battle Hill in Brooklyn, down the street from where she was born and across the room from where her daughter was born. She is the ornithologist consigliere for Lungfull! Magazine by day. By night, she is a root doctor, alchemist and hunter-gatherer.

Aesthesia Balderdash

Aesthesia Balderdash

Aesthesia Balderdash

by Kim Vodicka

$12.00 | June 2012

US Domestic Shipping Only

“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.