NEW POETRY
Scorpio
by
Katy Bohinc
Preorder NOW!
10.23.2018
Scorpio's poems are at turns dramatic and mundane as a lust-filled pop song. They take us back to the poet's youth in suburban Ohio and move forward through the economic collapse of 2008 into a present where democracy often seems at risk. One poem hopes that a "SWOLLEN HEART" will "BURN BRIGHTER THAN THIS" while declaring that "MONOGAMY IS LIKE MARXISM" because "IT EXISTS BEST ON PAPER." Another is white hot with the memory of rape while still another explores the simple social awkwardness of a houseguest asking for a towel. Author of the celebrated Dear Alain (Tender Buttons Press, 2014), letters about love, poetry, and philosophy addressed to French philosopher Alain Badiou, Bohinc employs a variety of prose and verse forms to write about eros colliding with ego as all our explanations fail. Much as the scorpion is the ultimate survivor, these poems confront the damage done to us but do not succumb to it, naming Love, personal and abstract, as its remedy.
"Scorpio comes on fast, like a speeding star sent out from a galaxy that is both very far away and deeply here on earth, close with real things. In these poems, Bohinc relentlessly describes in pulsing and various tones a reality where loneliness is impossible and the mistakes of our age can be corrected with an instinctual elixir, where the pressures of society can be alleviated with a sweet internal and holy rage. This book is the essence of poetry: it’s necessary, everchanging, and ferocious." ––Dorothea Lasky
“'Because I go to so many / bullshit meetings all day long,' writes Katy Bohinc, 'I want / a literary song.' This is a book of love songs and songs of despair. It takes place in bad times like these. True to the title, many of Scorpio's best poems are also its scariest." ––Ariana Reines
NEW FICTION
Temper CA by Paul Skenazy
Forthcoming January 8, 2019
The winner of the 2018 Novella Prize, selected by final judge TaraShea Nesbit,Temper CA is our 13th novella, joining ranks w/ Garth Greenwell’s Mitko, Patricia Grace King’s Day of All Saints, Tote Hughes’ Fountain and many others.
About Temper CA
Joy Temper grew up wandering the woods of Temper, CA, a Gold Rush town her family helped establish in the 1840s. Upon returning to her childhood home for her grandfather’s funeral, she discovers that the stories she's long traded on about her hippie upbringing have little to do with reality. Her struggles to face who she once was, and what she now desires, force her to confront family secrets and long-suppressed memories in a novella both familial and romantic, contemporary and historical.
Submissions to the 2019 Novella Prize are closed.
Thank you to everyone who submitted manuscripts. The winner will be announced in the spring. Our final judge this year is Daisy Hernández!
Note: All entrants are eligible to receive a copy of the winning book. Request a thank you copy.
New Poetry in Translation
FASTNESS: A Translation from the English
of Edmund Spenser
Trevor Joyce
ISBN: 9781881163619
October 15, 2017
Order – $17
"Trevor Joyce's superb introduction to his translation of Spenser's English into our English tells us what we need to know about Spenser's time, his method, his politics, Ireland then, and the making of a poetry that is twined around sound, syntax, and sense. This is a bracing book held fast by multitudinous events spinning in unison. We see how the gods behaved towards Earth (a clod of turf in space) savaging herwith bad weather. Wild Irish weather from mountains to sea, season to season, day to day: ever mutable. The held-fastness of the words together give indigenous a new poetic meaning."
–– FANNY HOWE