Larissa Shmailo's Blog, page 8
March 11, 2019
My AWP Potland Schedule
I am so looking forward to connecting with friends at AWP 2019 in Portland. Here's where I'll be.
Offsite:
Wednesday, March 27, 3:00 -8:00 pm (I will be reading between 3:00 and 4:00 pm)
Festival of Language
Curator: Jane L Carman with Bill Yarrow, Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Joani Reese and a cast of thousands.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Wednesday, March 27, 8:00 pm
Unlikely Stories and Rigorous
A Celebration and Literary Reading
Larissa Shmailo, Jonathan Penton, Roz (Roz's Page) Spencer, Marc Vincenz, others.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Panels:
Thursday, March 28, 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panel R214. The Critical Creative: The Editor-Poet
Larissa Shmailo, Kwame Dawes, Michael Anania, Sam Truitt and moderator Marc Vincenz.
This panel will offer an insiders' look into poetry editorship and publication from poets who edit prominent journals and presses.
Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, March 28
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panel R223. Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position?. Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Tan, (the one and only) Erica Jong, and moderator Larissa Shmailo
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sex was not repressed in past centuries, but codified. How does contemporary hybrid sex writing crack these codes?
B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
See you there!
Offsite:
Wednesday, March 27, 3:00 -8:00 pm (I will be reading between 3:00 and 4:00 pm)
Festival of Language
Curator: Jane L Carman with Bill Yarrow, Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Joani Reese and a cast of thousands.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Wednesday, March 27, 8:00 pm
Unlikely Stories and Rigorous
A Celebration and Literary Reading
Larissa Shmailo, Jonathan Penton, Roz (Roz's Page) Spencer, Marc Vincenz, others.
Ford Food and Drink
2505 SE 11th Avenue (at SE Division Street),
Portland, Oregon 97202
Panels:
Thursday, March 28, 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm
Panel R214. The Critical Creative: The Editor-Poet
Larissa Shmailo, Kwame Dawes, Michael Anania, Sam Truitt and moderator Marc Vincenz.
This panel will offer an insiders' look into poetry editorship and publication from poets who edit prominent journals and presses.
Portland Ballroom 256, Oregon Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, March 28
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
Panel R223. Hybrid Sex Writing: What's Your Position?. Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Tan, (the one and only) Erica Jong, and moderator Larissa Shmailo
In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sex was not repressed in past centuries, but codified. How does contemporary hybrid sex writing crack these codes?
B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
See you there!
March 10, 2019
Larissa Shmailo Argotist Online Interview by Dean Kostos
https://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Shma...
Larissa Shmailo Interview
DK: I’m especially interested in interviewing a writer who translates. That activity gives the writer/translator a deeper understanding of the machinery of language. For example: Russian (like Greek, Romanian, German, Sanskrit, etc.) has declinations, which indicate whether the noun is an object, a subject, possessive, etc. This allows the writer and translator a degree of fluidity to the syntax that is not as accessible to the writer in English. My question is, because you are both a translator and a writer: How influenced are you by, say, Russian syntax, when writing in English? Does this familiarity with Russian suggest possibilities in English that may not appear to the writer who is not familiar with other languages?
LS: The problem with the fluid positional syntax of a cased language, as opposed to the analytical word-order-determined syntax of Chinese and English, is that as a Russian speaker, you have a tendency to tolerate inversions that are awkward in English. Look at the second tercet of my poem, “My Dead”:
My godchild told me pointedly if she were to attempt
to die that she'd succeed at once; her word she quickly kept,
and took a hundred opiates and drifted to her death.
The “her word she quickly kept” to a Russian speaker seems acceptable; but to a modern formalist, the inversion is wince worthy, indicative of everything that makes contemporary metric poetry seem outdated, unacceptably old school. So, I have to watch myself, since my English-language poetry is informed by my Russian.
The advantage of multilingualism is that you can import the music of other languages into your English poetry. I bring French into “Bloom,” Spanish into “Hunts Point Counterpoint,” German and Polish into “How My Family Survived the Camps,” Russian and German into “Lager NYC.” Even if the reader does not know these languages, they can glean meaning from context and enjoy the phonemes for sound value, much as we enjoy many of the cultural references in Pound’s Cantos when we are don’t know our Ovid.
My Russian encourages me to rhyme in English. Rhyming is easy in Russian with the cased suffixes, but also somehow seems easy to me in English, and I often use end and internal rhyme. Stresses in poetry are also different—Russian words have one primary stress, English words have secondary stresses, so translating complex Russian amphibrach phrases into English can be a challenge, and I also might hear stresses differently.
Like English-language poets, contemporary Russian experimentalists tend to use space, line breaks, hybrid forms, and the “uncolonized caesura” as the noted poet Alexandr Skidan calls it, so there is a commonality of semiotics. The movement toward true multilingual poetry is also international and gaining ground in Russia and the United States; Eugene Ostashevsky defines this form as not just quoting a foreign language, but a braiding, in the sense of Barthes’s codes, together of lingual strands.
DK: Similarly, hybridism has become central in your work. Beyond being a trend, it seems to be an approach to the written word that is in your DNA. Was reading Symbolist prose poems important in your trajectory towards the hybrid text? What other influences can you cite? Have you read The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston? Ostensibly a memoir, it becomes other genres as one turns the pages. Similarly, what is marvelous about your writing is how the sense of place keeps shifting. Nothing can be taken for granted. Assumptions are obliterated, making language, and the ideas behind them, new. Two other novels that upend preconceived ideas about narrative and language itself are Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Are you familiar with these novels? (By the way, Calvino was a member of OULIPO, another aesthetic that shares a lot with your work.)
LS: You have created my reading list here, my friend; I do know and love Calvino. I grew up reading fiction and drama, and yes, French and Russian Symbolist poems, and at age 36, started writing poetry, so it is not surprising that I myself write dramatic prose poems like “Madwoman.” Also remember I am influenced by Pasternak, who engages in multiple genres in Zhivago, which I ape in my novels. I never saw a boundary between poetry and prose, and like a Broadway musical bursting from dialogue into song, my poetry breaks into fiction and my fiction into verse.
Recently, I am experimenting with nonfiction and poetry. My memoir Episodes, in progress, is “an autobio in stories, essays, and poems.” Not chronological, but thematic, in dialogue with the reader, this hybrid autobiography seems to capture and convey the traumata of my past more readily than a linear narrative. And yes, I like temporal nonlinearity in my writing, as is evidenced by my novel, Sly Bang, in which characters take over space-time to create alternate plots. Nonlinearity and chaos theory more represent, as RW Spryszak said of Sly Bang, the actual way the mind works.
DK: Can you name some of your influences? Mind you, there’s nothing derivative in your poetry, prose, or translations. When I suggest influences, I am referring solely to those writers who inspire you to such a degree, that you can’t wait to get to your computer to write. It feels like electricity running through one’s hands.
LS: Joyce with a bullet. I was liberated by Ulysses. “You are allowed to do that?!” I cried—and then set out to innovate more, bend genre more, experiment more. I erased the 18 episodes into 18 poems one afternoon when I couldn’t let go of reading the book of which Joyce said, “I have put so much into it, the professors will be busy for years.” I tried to do this with Sly Bang, put in a literary load of 21st century icons, cultural references, a multiplicity of genre.
I love Kruchenych, whom I translate, for his search for new language and for the mad violation of semantic, dramatic, prosodic forms, as well as for his creation of a new poetic alphabet. I love artistic manifestos, so I love his “Word” and all Futurist manifestos, especially “A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste.” I adore Pushkin and imitate him in poetry and prose, especially his use of epigraphs; I surmise that even failed Pushkin is a contribution. I skipped work and sleep reading Lolita. Now, I am discovering David Foster Wallace, whose suicide affects me deeply; his narrative voice reminds me of Pushkin’s—he befriends the reader with his brilliance, seduces her.
Of the Realists, Tolstoy, especially Karenina, I battle with his murder of Anna; Baudelaire, I have only translated Beauty, though; I would like to translate more; Gogol for his parallel universes and dark humor, ditto Dorothy Parker. I enjoy Rankine, Patricia Smith, Philip Nilolayev, Elaine Equi. But I know exactly what you mean by “electricity running through one’s hands.” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” did exactly that to me—my Norton’s English Poetry flew out of my hands with a shock, and I ran to write “My First Hurricane."
DK: Unfortunately, it seems to me that many writers (poets largely) break into camps. They are “uptown” or “downtown” poets, each having little regard for each other’s aesthetics. One of the strengths of your work is that you blithely shatter those walls, as if, for you, they never existed. You write in free verse and in rhyme. You write metrically so fluently that one is unaware of your adhering to strict metrical feet. And what makes your metrical work exciting is that it is intensely modern—nothing stuffy or archaic. Part of this is because of the ease with which you write in the appropriate metrical feet, given the subject matter.
LS: I am lucky enough to belong to many cliques, neoformalists, experimentalists, spoken word artists, and yes, uptown and downtown. Nineteenth century Russian government was a bureaucracy of ranks, chin, but Chekhov called writers raschinsty, “without rank.” I have moved among the classes all my life, from the homeless to the one percent, and I see no reason not to move similarly among writers and poets today, following what is brilliant and apt.
DK: Speaking of subject matter, you are intrepid in writing frankly about a harrowing past, including coping with mental illness, suicidality, and having been committed to a mental hospital. I ask this question as someone who has fought similar struggles. For myself, I have found that focusing on the machinery of the language (metaphors, cadences, imagery) helps me to shift my focus from the disturbing, painful subject matter to something that is about language, as much as it is about the subject matter. This is not a “dressing up” or diminishing some of the horrors experienced. If anything, your attention to language and the abuses you have experienced makes the experience more vibrant for the reader.
LS: The intellectual problem of communicating the intensity and immediacy of trauma artistically is helpful in processing trauma, providing a distance from pain and a new, more dispassionate neural network for encoding it; eventually, the burned-in horrors of rape, suicide, incarceration, etc., transfer to the intellect away from emotion. It is a resolution, a healing; I recommend writing for victims who wish to move from survivor to thriver status, even though “thriver” does sound a bit like a Peter Rabbit name.
DK: Lastly, I want to know how important it is to you to be so honest, so exposed, in order to lessen the stigma that for too long has kept mental illness in the shadows. I have great respect for what you are doing. As you know, my imminent memoir, concerns suicidality, depression, and time spent in a mental hospital as an adolescent. As the publication draws nearer, I am becoming more anxious about exposing myself so much. You seem fearless in this regard. Is there advice you can give to authors who want/need to write about these narratives? Thank you.
LS: As a cross-addicted person with bipolar disorder, I feel it is my responsibility to “come out,” to empower my peers and educate the (putative) normies. I am not a role model—I still get sick, though less so because of writing and the community I now enjoy as a writer. I challenge the ableist notion that we mad people are to be shunned and ridiculed and impoverished. Persons with physical disabilities are gaining inclusion; why not the psychiatrically disabled? Mental illness gallops among poets and writers, who can act as the front lines of our full acceptance. Our illnesses are so much like “normal” human emotions, fear, elation, rage, that they are all the more threatening—we may be “catching.”
The narratives of mentally ill persons can formulate our challenges and posit potential answers, create community, forge identity; think of slave narratives, feminist writing, LGBT literature. I invite other mentally ill writers to come out, be frank about their experiences. Perhaps David Foster Wallace might be alive today if we started a vigorous literary discussion of mental illness.
Larissa Shmailo Interview
DK: I’m especially interested in interviewing a writer who translates. That activity gives the writer/translator a deeper understanding of the machinery of language. For example: Russian (like Greek, Romanian, German, Sanskrit, etc.) has declinations, which indicate whether the noun is an object, a subject, possessive, etc. This allows the writer and translator a degree of fluidity to the syntax that is not as accessible to the writer in English. My question is, because you are both a translator and a writer: How influenced are you by, say, Russian syntax, when writing in English? Does this familiarity with Russian suggest possibilities in English that may not appear to the writer who is not familiar with other languages?
LS: The problem with the fluid positional syntax of a cased language, as opposed to the analytical word-order-determined syntax of Chinese and English, is that as a Russian speaker, you have a tendency to tolerate inversions that are awkward in English. Look at the second tercet of my poem, “My Dead”:
My godchild told me pointedly if she were to attempt
to die that she'd succeed at once; her word she quickly kept,
and took a hundred opiates and drifted to her death.
The “her word she quickly kept” to a Russian speaker seems acceptable; but to a modern formalist, the inversion is wince worthy, indicative of everything that makes contemporary metric poetry seem outdated, unacceptably old school. So, I have to watch myself, since my English-language poetry is informed by my Russian.
The advantage of multilingualism is that you can import the music of other languages into your English poetry. I bring French into “Bloom,” Spanish into “Hunts Point Counterpoint,” German and Polish into “How My Family Survived the Camps,” Russian and German into “Lager NYC.” Even if the reader does not know these languages, they can glean meaning from context and enjoy the phonemes for sound value, much as we enjoy many of the cultural references in Pound’s Cantos when we are don’t know our Ovid.
My Russian encourages me to rhyme in English. Rhyming is easy in Russian with the cased suffixes, but also somehow seems easy to me in English, and I often use end and internal rhyme. Stresses in poetry are also different—Russian words have one primary stress, English words have secondary stresses, so translating complex Russian amphibrach phrases into English can be a challenge, and I also might hear stresses differently.
Like English-language poets, contemporary Russian experimentalists tend to use space, line breaks, hybrid forms, and the “uncolonized caesura” as the noted poet Alexandr Skidan calls it, so there is a commonality of semiotics. The movement toward true multilingual poetry is also international and gaining ground in Russia and the United States; Eugene Ostashevsky defines this form as not just quoting a foreign language, but a braiding, in the sense of Barthes’s codes, together of lingual strands.
DK: Similarly, hybridism has become central in your work. Beyond being a trend, it seems to be an approach to the written word that is in your DNA. Was reading Symbolist prose poems important in your trajectory towards the hybrid text? What other influences can you cite? Have you read The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston? Ostensibly a memoir, it becomes other genres as one turns the pages. Similarly, what is marvelous about your writing is how the sense of place keeps shifting. Nothing can be taken for granted. Assumptions are obliterated, making language, and the ideas behind them, new. Two other novels that upend preconceived ideas about narrative and language itself are Hebdomeros by Giorgio de Chirico and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Are you familiar with these novels? (By the way, Calvino was a member of OULIPO, another aesthetic that shares a lot with your work.)
LS: You have created my reading list here, my friend; I do know and love Calvino. I grew up reading fiction and drama, and yes, French and Russian Symbolist poems, and at age 36, started writing poetry, so it is not surprising that I myself write dramatic prose poems like “Madwoman.” Also remember I am influenced by Pasternak, who engages in multiple genres in Zhivago, which I ape in my novels. I never saw a boundary between poetry and prose, and like a Broadway musical bursting from dialogue into song, my poetry breaks into fiction and my fiction into verse.
Recently, I am experimenting with nonfiction and poetry. My memoir Episodes, in progress, is “an autobio in stories, essays, and poems.” Not chronological, but thematic, in dialogue with the reader, this hybrid autobiography seems to capture and convey the traumata of my past more readily than a linear narrative. And yes, I like temporal nonlinearity in my writing, as is evidenced by my novel, Sly Bang, in which characters take over space-time to create alternate plots. Nonlinearity and chaos theory more represent, as RW Spryszak said of Sly Bang, the actual way the mind works.
DK: Can you name some of your influences? Mind you, there’s nothing derivative in your poetry, prose, or translations. When I suggest influences, I am referring solely to those writers who inspire you to such a degree, that you can’t wait to get to your computer to write. It feels like electricity running through one’s hands.
LS: Joyce with a bullet. I was liberated by Ulysses. “You are allowed to do that?!” I cried—and then set out to innovate more, bend genre more, experiment more. I erased the 18 episodes into 18 poems one afternoon when I couldn’t let go of reading the book of which Joyce said, “I have put so much into it, the professors will be busy for years.” I tried to do this with Sly Bang, put in a literary load of 21st century icons, cultural references, a multiplicity of genre.
I love Kruchenych, whom I translate, for his search for new language and for the mad violation of semantic, dramatic, prosodic forms, as well as for his creation of a new poetic alphabet. I love artistic manifestos, so I love his “Word” and all Futurist manifestos, especially “A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste.” I adore Pushkin and imitate him in poetry and prose, especially his use of epigraphs; I surmise that even failed Pushkin is a contribution. I skipped work and sleep reading Lolita. Now, I am discovering David Foster Wallace, whose suicide affects me deeply; his narrative voice reminds me of Pushkin’s—he befriends the reader with his brilliance, seduces her.
Of the Realists, Tolstoy, especially Karenina, I battle with his murder of Anna; Baudelaire, I have only translated Beauty, though; I would like to translate more; Gogol for his parallel universes and dark humor, ditto Dorothy Parker. I enjoy Rankine, Patricia Smith, Philip Nilolayev, Elaine Equi. But I know exactly what you mean by “electricity running through one’s hands.” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” did exactly that to me—my Norton’s English Poetry flew out of my hands with a shock, and I ran to write “My First Hurricane."
DK: Unfortunately, it seems to me that many writers (poets largely) break into camps. They are “uptown” or “downtown” poets, each having little regard for each other’s aesthetics. One of the strengths of your work is that you blithely shatter those walls, as if, for you, they never existed. You write in free verse and in rhyme. You write metrically so fluently that one is unaware of your adhering to strict metrical feet. And what makes your metrical work exciting is that it is intensely modern—nothing stuffy or archaic. Part of this is because of the ease with which you write in the appropriate metrical feet, given the subject matter.
LS: I am lucky enough to belong to many cliques, neoformalists, experimentalists, spoken word artists, and yes, uptown and downtown. Nineteenth century Russian government was a bureaucracy of ranks, chin, but Chekhov called writers raschinsty, “without rank.” I have moved among the classes all my life, from the homeless to the one percent, and I see no reason not to move similarly among writers and poets today, following what is brilliant and apt.
DK: Speaking of subject matter, you are intrepid in writing frankly about a harrowing past, including coping with mental illness, suicidality, and having been committed to a mental hospital. I ask this question as someone who has fought similar struggles. For myself, I have found that focusing on the machinery of the language (metaphors, cadences, imagery) helps me to shift my focus from the disturbing, painful subject matter to something that is about language, as much as it is about the subject matter. This is not a “dressing up” or diminishing some of the horrors experienced. If anything, your attention to language and the abuses you have experienced makes the experience more vibrant for the reader.
LS: The intellectual problem of communicating the intensity and immediacy of trauma artistically is helpful in processing trauma, providing a distance from pain and a new, more dispassionate neural network for encoding it; eventually, the burned-in horrors of rape, suicide, incarceration, etc., transfer to the intellect away from emotion. It is a resolution, a healing; I recommend writing for victims who wish to move from survivor to thriver status, even though “thriver” does sound a bit like a Peter Rabbit name.
DK: Lastly, I want to know how important it is to you to be so honest, so exposed, in order to lessen the stigma that for too long has kept mental illness in the shadows. I have great respect for what you are doing. As you know, my imminent memoir, concerns suicidality, depression, and time spent in a mental hospital as an adolescent. As the publication draws nearer, I am becoming more anxious about exposing myself so much. You seem fearless in this regard. Is there advice you can give to authors who want/need to write about these narratives? Thank you.
LS: As a cross-addicted person with bipolar disorder, I feel it is my responsibility to “come out,” to empower my peers and educate the (putative) normies. I am not a role model—I still get sick, though less so because of writing and the community I now enjoy as a writer. I challenge the ableist notion that we mad people are to be shunned and ridiculed and impoverished. Persons with physical disabilities are gaining inclusion; why not the psychiatrically disabled? Mental illness gallops among poets and writers, who can act as the front lines of our full acceptance. Our illnesses are so much like “normal” human emotions, fear, elation, rage, that they are all the more threatening—we may be “catching.”
The narratives of mentally ill persons can formulate our challenges and posit potential answers, create community, forge identity; think of slave narratives, feminist writing, LGBT literature. I invite other mentally ill writers to come out, be frank about their experiences. Perhaps David Foster Wallace might be alive today if we started a vigorous literary discussion of mental illness.
March 5, 2019
". . . "cocaine and acid . .
"Sly Bang is “Rollerball” on a mixture of cocaine and acid. A sex binge that eats men alive. It’s the parts of “The Matrix” they had to edit out because it was just too much to take. Once you check in you will be half way through before you realize what you’re doing. Because for all its twisted logic and refusal to adhere to any known rules, Sly Bang is a world you already know is there.
Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started."
- RW Spryszak
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started."
- RW Spryszak
http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
March 4, 2019
Ragazine Review of Sly Bang
Sly Bang / hybrid fiction by Larissa Shmailo
You knew this is what the world really looked like all along,
A review by RW Spryszak
ISBN-13: 978-1947980983
Spuyten Duyvil – New York 2018
198 pages
I have a problem with what is sometimes known as “experimental” writing. To my way of thinking if your writing is still an “experiment” you are saying you don’t know what’s going to happen here and have no control over anything. If doing automatic writing, that’s one thing. Hans Arp would be proud so long as you don’t sit down and edit the “genius of chance.” But unless you’re doing classic surrealism just throwing it out there to see what burns and what remains stone always fails. Always. In over forty years of this my advice is – do your experimenting in the laboratory. Don’t do it in public. Have the concept baked and ready before you release it onto the citizenry.
This is the very standard that made me fall for Sly Bang. Because that thing – a wild, idiosyncratic, frizzle-haired thing – is put before us fully formed. Guesses gone. Thing triumphant. In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches. Genres and forms bend in and out with ease.
Now hold on for one second right here. In the first place, what I’d really like to know is, how did Larissa Shmailo actually present the idea of Sly Bang to a publisher? As a writer myself, I have enough trouble fitting things into a digestible capsule meant as an explanation to a stranger who wasn’t there when all the work was going down, sweat and all. It would seem impossible to summarize this book into a typical 150-word synopsis that fits the standard query form.
What? Dear Editor, in Sly Bang Nora is conducting an investigation under the auspices of a very high-level intelligence agency heretofore unconvincingly named. Probably. You may think she’s dead by page 50 or thereabouts but not so fast. And it may sound, for a moment as if she only exists as a mutual experience shared by a wild array of characters who help her or try to stand in her way, depending. You see, once in a while Nora’s thoughts become visible holograms that drift through the room. Time warps between the now and the past to the maybe-never-happened at all for her. Nora talks with and interchanges between herself and her “alters” – alter egos that range from the insensible to the predatory.
Yeah, probably not.
I would have no clue on how to write a query for Sly Bang. All I know is I have never read anything like it, and never stopped being carried along by its peculiar madness, my head full of pictures, my ears full of voices.
“Michael regresses, or un-regresses, and becomes a danger to Nora again. Nora is too old to breed using even the most interstellar ovarian technologies…”
In looking over the book while rewriting this review I am, however, quite sure I fully understand how Sly Bang came to be. I wasn’t there when it happened but, having studied Nora’s detectivizing techniques I can trace it back.
First, Shmailo ate the world. The eating helped her soak up every aspect of the popular culture, every nuance and sham of the American Empire. Then, she chewed it all up. This is important. Because Jackson Pollock did the same thing with the visual. Check it. Pollock ate the world and spat it back out again in all kinds of wild colors and shapes. Shmailo did the same, but with words. So, if you look for details, you lose the “Bang.” If you step back, you get it. Other than this I can’t do the standard “this book is like that book.” Or “this work is similar to this author’s oeuvre.” It can’t be done.
Enough speculation. Let’s simplify. Sly Bang is a book about a detective / agent / victim / lover / investigator / spy / psychic target named Nora. How much Larissa Shmailo is one of Nora’s “alters” is a matter of conjecture. Best left to biographers, or the ponderings of those who make picklocks out of metaphors.
“She distracts Ouspensky. She praises his derivative poetry. She writes poetry to him in French and Russian. She flatters him and draws him out to learn his plans, a Scheherazade now, and keeps him from the cavern and its barbaric rituals and her children.”
It’s a simple formula, really. Nora is what a female James Bond trapped in a harsher dystopian version of Blade Runner would be, only six times as promiscuous, with a handful of different personalities who pop up from time to time at the worst times, a serial killer for a sidekick, born of a family that had to pick between Hitler and Stalin, and very susceptible to obvious persuasion when under the influence of that serum she was warned about but allowed them to give to her anyway because a little sweet talk got right through her armor just like it would for anybody else. In the meantime, we slip in and out of realities, personas, get transported from prose to poetry without the need for a bridge until what we discover is a form that has no precedent I can think of.
There will be readers wanting the linear, formulaic prose (there are always such creatures lurking about, just like those who want to destroy and deny our Nora). There will be readers who will be completely thrown off the scent. Too bad they will lose the trail, because here’s the secret;
What Larissa Shmailo is recording here is exactly how the brain works. Shards and bits of memory-pictures. Images flowing into one another like REM sleep but without ever admitting to the dream. And yet? In the heart of it – or perhaps near the spleen of it – there comes a subjective cohesion that tells a story about an agent for good with a penchant for bad in a world of sunlight, gray areas, and things that are just downright disgusting.
If you are used to writers who talk down to or dumb it down for you, you will probably hate this book. If you like writing where the author figures you are in on the same joke because you live in the same world, you’re ready.
Sly Bang is “Rollerball” on a mixture of cocaine and acid. A sex binge that eats men alive. It’s the parts of “The Matrix” they had to edit out because it was just too much to take. Once you check in you will be half way through before you realize what you’re doing. Because for all its twisted logic and refusal to adhere to any known rules, Sly Bang is a world you already know is there.
Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started.
RW Spryszak
You knew this is what the world really looked like all along,
A review by RW Spryszak
ISBN-13: 978-1947980983
Spuyten Duyvil – New York 2018
198 pages
I have a problem with what is sometimes known as “experimental” writing. To my way of thinking if your writing is still an “experiment” you are saying you don’t know what’s going to happen here and have no control over anything. If doing automatic writing, that’s one thing. Hans Arp would be proud so long as you don’t sit down and edit the “genius of chance.” But unless you’re doing classic surrealism just throwing it out there to see what burns and what remains stone always fails. Always. In over forty years of this my advice is – do your experimenting in the laboratory. Don’t do it in public. Have the concept baked and ready before you release it onto the citizenry.
This is the very standard that made me fall for Sly Bang. Because that thing – a wild, idiosyncratic, frizzle-haired thing – is put before us fully formed. Guesses gone. Thing triumphant. In Sly Bang, Larissa Shmailo’s technical skills pop on every page. She is in control of this insanity from the start, and to prove it she floods us with new icons created one after another like stamped plastic ducks. She creates an assembly line of literary riches. Genres and forms bend in and out with ease.
Now hold on for one second right here. In the first place, what I’d really like to know is, how did Larissa Shmailo actually present the idea of Sly Bang to a publisher? As a writer myself, I have enough trouble fitting things into a digestible capsule meant as an explanation to a stranger who wasn’t there when all the work was going down, sweat and all. It would seem impossible to summarize this book into a typical 150-word synopsis that fits the standard query form.
What? Dear Editor, in Sly Bang Nora is conducting an investigation under the auspices of a very high-level intelligence agency heretofore unconvincingly named. Probably. You may think she’s dead by page 50 or thereabouts but not so fast. And it may sound, for a moment as if she only exists as a mutual experience shared by a wild array of characters who help her or try to stand in her way, depending. You see, once in a while Nora’s thoughts become visible holograms that drift through the room. Time warps between the now and the past to the maybe-never-happened at all for her. Nora talks with and interchanges between herself and her “alters” – alter egos that range from the insensible to the predatory.
Yeah, probably not.
I would have no clue on how to write a query for Sly Bang. All I know is I have never read anything like it, and never stopped being carried along by its peculiar madness, my head full of pictures, my ears full of voices.
“Michael regresses, or un-regresses, and becomes a danger to Nora again. Nora is too old to breed using even the most interstellar ovarian technologies…”
In looking over the book while rewriting this review I am, however, quite sure I fully understand how Sly Bang came to be. I wasn’t there when it happened but, having studied Nora’s detectivizing techniques I can trace it back.
First, Shmailo ate the world. The eating helped her soak up every aspect of the popular culture, every nuance and sham of the American Empire. Then, she chewed it all up. This is important. Because Jackson Pollock did the same thing with the visual. Check it. Pollock ate the world and spat it back out again in all kinds of wild colors and shapes. Shmailo did the same, but with words. So, if you look for details, you lose the “Bang.” If you step back, you get it. Other than this I can’t do the standard “this book is like that book.” Or “this work is similar to this author’s oeuvre.” It can’t be done.
Enough speculation. Let’s simplify. Sly Bang is a book about a detective / agent / victim / lover / investigator / spy / psychic target named Nora. How much Larissa Shmailo is one of Nora’s “alters” is a matter of conjecture. Best left to biographers, or the ponderings of those who make picklocks out of metaphors.
“She distracts Ouspensky. She praises his derivative poetry. She writes poetry to him in French and Russian. She flatters him and draws him out to learn his plans, a Scheherazade now, and keeps him from the cavern and its barbaric rituals and her children.”
It’s a simple formula, really. Nora is what a female James Bond trapped in a harsher dystopian version of Blade Runner would be, only six times as promiscuous, with a handful of different personalities who pop up from time to time at the worst times, a serial killer for a sidekick, born of a family that had to pick between Hitler and Stalin, and very susceptible to obvious persuasion when under the influence of that serum she was warned about but allowed them to give to her anyway because a little sweet talk got right through her armor just like it would for anybody else. In the meantime, we slip in and out of realities, personas, get transported from prose to poetry without the need for a bridge until what we discover is a form that has no precedent I can think of.
There will be readers wanting the linear, formulaic prose (there are always such creatures lurking about, just like those who want to destroy and deny our Nora). There will be readers who will be completely thrown off the scent. Too bad they will lose the trail, because here’s the secret;
What Larissa Shmailo is recording here is exactly how the brain works. Shards and bits of memory-pictures. Images flowing into one another like REM sleep but without ever admitting to the dream. And yet? In the heart of it – or perhaps near the spleen of it – there comes a subjective cohesion that tells a story about an agent for good with a penchant for bad in a world of sunlight, gray areas, and things that are just downright disgusting.
If you are used to writers who talk down to or dumb it down for you, you will probably hate this book. If you like writing where the author figures you are in on the same joke because you live in the same world, you’re ready.
Sly Bang is “Rollerball” on a mixture of cocaine and acid. A sex binge that eats men alive. It’s the parts of “The Matrix” they had to edit out because it was just too much to take. Once you check in you will be half way through before you realize what you’re doing. Because for all its twisted logic and refusal to adhere to any known rules, Sly Bang is a world you already know is there.
Even if you had no idea that’s what it sounded like before you started.
RW Spryszak
March 3, 2019
WEDNESDAY!!!
A book release party for Larissa Shmailo's new novel, SLY BANG, featuring Annie Finch, Trace Peterson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Marc Vincenz, Don Yorty and MC Ron Kolm. Videography by Mitch Corber for Poetry Thin Air. FREE. SLY BANG is available from Amazon and Spuyten Duyvil http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang...
March 6, 6:00 pm
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas
(at West 10th)
Free!
Refreshments will be served.
Hope to see you, my friend - link to the announcement here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/14126...
March 6, 6:00 pm
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas
(at West 10th)
Free!
Refreshments will be served.
Hope to see you, my friend - link to the announcement here:
https://www.facebook.com/events/14126...
February 27, 2019
March 6 SLY BANG Launch!
For immediate release
Contact: Sliding Scale
646-326-9816
SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE.
New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “outrageous,” “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs “if you reverse the genders,” and a wild literary ride in general.
The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH), Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz (MadHat), and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers follow.
Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it has garnered excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang.... Copies of Sly Bang will also be available at the book party March 6.
Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).
Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.
Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Lies from Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018. www.livemag.com www.jeffreycypherswright.com
Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. www.larissashmailo.com
Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air
Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.
Contact: Sliding Scale
646-326-9816
SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE.
New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “outrageous,” “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs “if you reverse the genders,” and a wild literary ride in general.
The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH), Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz (MadHat), and Jeffrey Cyphers Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers follow.
Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it has garnered excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil at http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/sly-bang.... Copies of Sly Bang will also be available at the book party March 6.
Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).
Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.
Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Lies from Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018. www.livemag.com www.jeffreycypherswright.com
Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. www.larissashmailo.com
Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air
Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.
February 13, 2019
COUNTDOWN TO VALENTINE'S DAY!
PERSONAL
I want to know
what makes you
tick.
I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.
Tell me
which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you
which villennelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you’ll bite from
which hither you’ll welcome
what
makes
me
forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning
to know
what
makes you
tick.
I want to know
what makes you
tick.
I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.
Tell me
which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you
which villennelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you’ll bite from
which hither you’ll welcome
what
makes
me
forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning
to know
what
makes you
tick.
February 12, 2019
SLY BANG LOVE POEM
A love poem by Nora Volkhonsky, the protagonist of SLY BANG:
We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
Happy Valentine's Day!
We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
Happy Valentine's Day!
February 6, 2019
SLY BANG PRESS RELEASE
For immediate release
Contact: Sliding Scale
646-326-9816
SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE!
New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs (“if you reverse the genders”), and a wild literary ride.
The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH), Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz (MadHat), and Jeff Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers and event flyer follow.
Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it has garnered excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil. Copies of Sly Bangwill also be available at the book party March 6.
Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums areThe No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry.
Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).
Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.
Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Liesfrom Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018.
Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air.
Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/...
Contact: Sliding Scale
646-326-9816
SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE!
New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs (“if you reverse the genders”), and a wild literary ride.
The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH), Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz (MadHat), and Jeff Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers and event flyer follow.
Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it has garnered excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil. Copies of Sly Bangwill also be available at the book party March 6.
Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums areThe No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry.
Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).
Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.
Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Liesfrom Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018.
Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air.
Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/...
February 2, 2019
MORE PRAISE FOR LARISSA SHMAILO’S SLY BANG!
PRAISE FOR LARISSA SHMAILO’S SLY BANG!
If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with nonsensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all-out madness, a battle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds who by all means should stay away from a book like this.
—Darryl Wawa
What do you do when there is an “army of serial killers, mad scientists, and ultrarich sociopaths” after you?
Why, you summon your alter, “Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayevna Romanova, tsaritsa of all the Russias,” and embark upon Larissa Shmailo’s cornucopiac literary odyssey, Sly Bang, of course.
From Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and Lady Gaga’s meat dress to sadistic cult leaders and space Nazis, this sci-fi fantasy thriller is chock-full of surprises at every turn. I mean, the lead character, Upper West Side, Manhattanite Nora, is a multiple personality FBI agent/possible alien with an affinity for serial killers who telepathically communicates with giant prehistoric birds, and as luck would have it, writes uncannily brilliant poetry (journal entries).
Yes.
There is a lot going on in this book.
In my opinion, the (quintessentially Shmailo) “Interlude” is where Sly Bang lives and breathes. It is the much anticipated doorway through which the reader officially exits suspended disbelief, and enters Nora’s world —her real world—and introduces, through beautifully crafted poems, the backstory of Nora; a tragic tale of horrific abuse, betrayal, and ultimately, survival.
This stretch of writing, which jets the reader back to World War II, Nora’s camp family history, is nothing short of masterful, and reminiscent of Shmailo’s previous offering, Patient Women. The poem “Warsaw Ghetto” itself is well worth the price of admission.
Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide full-force culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.
—K.R. Copeland
Sly Bang is a whirlwind. And if you are looking for a sedate involvement with linear literature, Sly Bang is not for you. This is the shock of the new in a whirlpool of the past. Just open the book and hang on. This is visceral energy in words.
—RW Spryszak
Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre— it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy. funny and brutally intense. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ.
—Michael W McHugh aka McQ
Astounding! Will make you recalibrate the word “risk.”
—Maggie Balistreri
If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with nonsensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all-out madness, a battle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds who by all means should stay away from a book like this.
—Darryl Wawa
What do you do when there is an “army of serial killers, mad scientists, and ultrarich sociopaths” after you?
Why, you summon your alter, “Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayevna Romanova, tsaritsa of all the Russias,” and embark upon Larissa Shmailo’s cornucopiac literary odyssey, Sly Bang, of course.
From Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and Lady Gaga’s meat dress to sadistic cult leaders and space Nazis, this sci-fi fantasy thriller is chock-full of surprises at every turn. I mean, the lead character, Upper West Side, Manhattanite Nora, is a multiple personality FBI agent/possible alien with an affinity for serial killers who telepathically communicates with giant prehistoric birds, and as luck would have it, writes uncannily brilliant poetry (journal entries).
Yes.
There is a lot going on in this book.
In my opinion, the (quintessentially Shmailo) “Interlude” is where Sly Bang lives and breathes. It is the much anticipated doorway through which the reader officially exits suspended disbelief, and enters Nora’s world —her real world—and introduces, through beautifully crafted poems, the backstory of Nora; a tragic tale of horrific abuse, betrayal, and ultimately, survival.
This stretch of writing, which jets the reader back to World War II, Nora’s camp family history, is nothing short of masterful, and reminiscent of Shmailo’s previous offering, Patient Women. The poem “Warsaw Ghetto” itself is well worth the price of admission.
Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide full-force culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.
—K.R. Copeland
Sly Bang is a whirlwind. And if you are looking for a sedate involvement with linear literature, Sly Bang is not for you. This is the shock of the new in a whirlpool of the past. Just open the book and hang on. This is visceral energy in words.
—RW Spryszak
Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre— it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy. funny and brutally intense. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ.
—Michael W McHugh aka McQ
Astounding! Will make you recalibrate the word “risk.”
—Maggie Balistreri
