Trembling Pillow Press

Tag Archive: Word play

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

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.

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.

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.

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.