Dept. of Posthumous Letters

ribbon-wrapped, double chapbook / $20

Poetry by Dot Devota & Caitie Moore

artwork by Brandon Shimoda

Sold-Out

In Dept of Posthumous Letters, Dot Devota and Caitie Moore conduct an epistolary exchange that subverts the logic of the dialogic. “In a letter you cannot listen. You must always be speaking,” writes Devota, as her letters to Moore narrate anecdotes that read like overheard myths—webs of observation, reversal and misunderstanding that signal the presence of an attentive listener. Line drawings by Brandon Shimoda intensify the enchantment that unfolds out of Moore and Devota’s voices. “Have you ever played this game: Horse/Muffin/Bird?” Moore asks Devota. Intelligently-framed questions ranging from philosophical to purely affectionate interlace these poems like veins of honey. “It’s a proportion thing, an order thing. I am, certainly, no part Muffin.”

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The poet Dot Devota is the author of And The Girls Worried Terribly (Noemi Press) and The Division of Labor (Rescue Press). Her chapbooks include The Eternal Wall (BookThug) and MW: A Field Guide To The Midwest (Editions19\). She lives in the desert.

Caitie Moore’s writing can be found online at Harriet, BOMB, Queen Mobs, in her chapbook Wife (Argos Books, 2014), The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race and the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015) and various scattered publications.

(Book design by Isabelle Sawtelle / BankerWessel)

Forensics of the Chamber

by j/j hastain

Perfect-bound Hybrid / $15

I refuse to be full of empty.

There are too many visceral ecologies

that could be rung if they

could only be found.

–j/j hastain

A profoundly generative body of work, this collection of interspersed poems and collages make lush and mysterious visual/verbal gems that reveal the presence of a vital imagination at play. This is truly an inter-species book, part image, part story, part human and part wilderness.

j/j hastain is a queer, mystic, seer, singer, photographer, lover, priest/ess, gender shaman and writer.  As artist and activist of the audible, j/j is the author of several cross-genre books and enjoys ceremonial performances in an ongoing project regarding gender, shamanism, eros and embodiments. See xir most recent book, myrrh to re all myth, here.

Dusking

by Brandon Kreitler with images by Lindsay Packer
Hand-Sewn Folio with letterpressed cover / $12

This long poem by Brandon Kreitler discovers a tension between not-quite-opposites: interior and exterior, presence and absence, wanting and having. Artist Lindsay Packer’s complex light-and-shadow collages, interwoven with the poem, give this book the quality of an extraordinary world between worlds.

Brandon Kreitler comes from Arizona. He is a recipient of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Award. He lives in New York City, where he writes and teaches English.

Lindsay Packer’s work ranges from writing to collage and kinetic installations. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India, where she studied and documented ephemeral imagery. Light, shadow and wonder have been part of her work ever since she made the move from Bangalore to Brooklyn, where she currently tends to her window boxes and her large collection of science textbooks from the 1950s. www.lindsaypacker.com

space

Matter: A Picturebook

by Dorothea Lasky and Matthew Fischer
Hand-Sewn Folio with silkscreened cover / sold-out

Matter: A Picturebook, the second installment of the Side by Side series, takes up language as physical material actively engaged with color, shape and space. This folio of new poems by Dorothea Lasky came about as a kind of reverse ekphrasis. Matthew Fischer, whose gestural abstract paintings serve as “records of personal and social expressivity,” made a painting in response to each poem. The result is a book of five territories to wander into, five intersections of light and sound, five ways of picturing the “matter” of poetry.

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Dorothea Lasky is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: Thunderbird (forthcoming, Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007).

This Landscape

by Paige Ackerson-Kiely & Adie Russell
hand-sewn folio with color artwork/$10

This Landscape, the first installment of the Side by Side series, is the result of a collaboration between artist Adie Russell and poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely.

The Side by Side series aims to create a space where contemporary poetry and art can intersect, making a third, undefined category. In viewing the work and forming a personal understanding of the resonance between language and image, the reader joins in the spirit of collaboration that makes this endeavor possible.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of In No One’s Land (Ahsahta Press, 2007) and The Misery Trail (forthcoming, Ahsahta Press). She lives in Vermont, where she shills fine cheese, co-edits the poetry annual A Handsome Journal and manages her family band, The Blonde Sorrows.

Read Paige’s interview with 12 or 20 questions here.

THIS IS FILLER TEXTAND YOU CANT SEE ME

Adie Russell was born in Pittsburgh in 1971 and grew up around Europe and the US. She currently lives in upstate NY where she is hard at work on a new project titled The Most Extreme Perfect That Exists.

See Adie’s multimedia and video work here: www.adierussell.com

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Links:

11/22/10  Adie Russell to the rescue.