Theater-State Coming Soon

What is Theater-State?

Theater-State by Jack Boettcher will be here before you know it. Go ahead and support Jack and Blue Square Press by (clicking these words and) marking it to-read on your Goodreads page.

Praise for Theater-State:

"[The] paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it" –Matthew Rohrer

"Boettcher’s reticulated sentences themselves contract and unfurl with sometimes enticing, sometimes ensnaring beauty" –Joyelle McSweeney

Theater-State is available for pre-order,

or

you can pre-order Theater-State with Flowing in the Gossamer Fold for $20.

About The Knox Writers' House

"It started with a poem, lazy kids who would rather have someone read to them than read themselves, and a dream (cue Ride of the Valkyries). A dream that the poetry and stories around us could be available to anyone with a computer. That our friends’ voices could deliver their art directly into the ear of anyone who would listen. We began recording our friends, but we quickly grew hungrier.

In the summer of 2010, Emily Oliver, Sam Conrad, and Bryce Parsons-Twesten drove more than 2,000 miles, drank more than 15 gallons of orange juice, ate more than 2 bottles of ibuprofen and recorded over 75 hours of audio -the poems, stories, and interviews of more than 80 writers. From Chicago to Madison to the Twin Cities to Kalamazoo to St. Louis to Kansas City, they covered the Midwest and sought to discover where writing lives. On the campus of the college where they met, they would be shocked to find that someone they knew by sight, someone they had even met a few times, was a writer and they were out to show the world how close everyone is to art, out to show the world who in their city was composing poems, crafting stories and incubating novels. They sought to understand how place influences art, how what you create changes depending on where you are from and where you live and who you read and talk to. In the interviews, they asked writers to introduce themselves and say where they were from, then go backwards and trace the path they took to get there. They asked how their location affected them and what the community was like where they lived -how they interacted with art on a daily basis and what it meant for them to live in Chicago, to know poets in Kalamazoo, to have grown up in New York.

Then, this winter, they took the south. They travelled some 5,000 miles, from Galesburg to Alabama, to New Orleans across to Atlanta, stopping along the way to talk with people, to listen hard and ask what it means to be a writer there, to ask themselves the ridiculous question: can a place have a voice?

The culmination of these road trips is this website. Here, you will find everything they recorded and every interview written out. Click around to find who lives where, who’s writing what and who’s reading who. If you’re a writer and you’re interested in being recorded and adding to the map, please write us. If you know a writer interested in being recorded and adding to the map, please write us. If you like what we’re doing and want to support the life of this project with money and trail mix, please write us. The project owes great thanks to the McNair program and Richter Grant fund and everyone who volunteered their couches and floors along the way. Now, it is powered by sweat and great mix cds, and it’s not stopping here."


This is seriously cool project. When they came to Atlanta they recorded Blake Butler, Heather Christle, Chris DeWesse, Jamie Iredell and myself. The recordings of Heather and Chris are available to listen to now--the rest are forthcoming.

Check out Heather and Chris, here.

The Angel in The Dream of Our Hangover aphorisms, by Mark Leidner

the angel in the dreams of our hangover

The Angel in The Dreams of Our Hangover, the sophomore release from SATOR PRESS, is a quick read full of wisdom.

The design and layout of this book is beautiful. Each aphorism leads very well into the next.

Throughout the 80 or so aphorisms some themes arise and they arise quickly--they are the poet, the West (Western wisdom) and Christ.

The poet: "poets are the unacknowledged law school students of the world."

The West: "whatever ends the West will be remained / the West."

Christ is mentioned the least but is also mentioned first, "a thousand people in a room, a thousand parodies of Christ." One-third of the way into the book "...the West absorbs Christ," and seventeen pages later, "one does not begin a poem, one abandons one's life."

There are dozens of other subjects but the above feel reused with great purpose.

The depth of this small book is what makes it genius. Showing us not only Leidner's powerful use of language, image, and subject, but also giving us a hint at the enigmatic and exciting direction of SATOR PRESS.

Mark Leidner has crafted a sharp read unlike anything I've read so far this year. Highly recommended.


Buy: SATOR PRESS

Montevidayo Interviewed Blue Square Press

David Peak and I were interviewed by Joyelle McSweeney for Montevidayo regarding publishing and genre.

Released Today

Warm Milk Press is happy to announce a new book, ZZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars] by J. A. Tyler. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ is a collaborative project that spans 3 small presses and 1 Online journal.

Here is Tyler's description of the project:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ is wreckage. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ takes place as five distinct works, all built around the same core story. Each narrative is that of a girl who holds the last water in the world, a herd of chaos that takes it from her, and the boy who comes to resuscitate it all. But each story takes this kernel and shreds it in a new direction, incorporates other elements, reshapes the narrative in its own image. And each press that came aboard this project, releasing this wreckage into readers’ hands, worked on the same principle of core unity with distinct press-specific alterations. All that is left is the beautiful static hum: zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thanks to the following presses and their editors and journals, where you can gather
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ:

links:

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [a well]: Greying Ghost (Carl Annarummo)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [the stars]: Warm Milk Printing Press (BS, KW, JW)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [this town]: The Collagist (Matt Bell)
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ [an island]: NewLights Press (Aaron Cohick)

New Review

Baby Got Books reviewed Flowing a couple of days ago. I am grateful. They said it "is fiction that comes from a dark place. I don’t know whether to describe it as a prose poem or a fever dream. I read it in one sitting...and then I went back and skimmed a few sections, postponing sleep as long as possible...it’s a gripping read."