Shome Dasgupta's Blog, page 14
March 17, 2011
Rob Roberge | Working Backwards From The Worst Moment Of My Life
Rob Roberge's Working Backwards From The Worst Moment Of My Life is gritty and raw, and it allows the reader to understand what happens when all is taken away--when we are at the lowest points of our lives. We are able to see the human body, without skin and bones--we are able to see the soul. Roberge reveals to the world what we don't see when we turn and look the other way. This collection of stories is emotional, and pure, and it provides a beautiful and amazing beat to the human heart.
Working Backwards From The Worst Moment Of My Life
by Rob Roberge
$19.95
112 pages
ISBN 978-1-59709-165-7
Red Hen Press , 2010
March 16, 2011
"Pecan" | Used Furniture Review
Thank you to the kind editors of Used Furniture Review for taking my story, "Pecan," an excerpt from a work-in-progress. It can be found here .
March 15, 2011
A Message From J.A. Tyler [A Man Of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed]
[If you don't like my book I'll write you another book on the inside of that book. Order it, read it. If you don't like it, ship it back to me & I'll write a new book for you on the inside of that book. Yes. This is how much I believe in these words.]
[ A Man Of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed :
http://www.fuguestatepress.com/man.html ]
Pick up a copy of J.A. Tyler's latest book from Fugue State Press , here .
March 13, 2011
J.A. Tyler | A Man Of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed
J.A. Tyler's A Man Of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed is filled with haunting and elegant prose, full of imagery that appeals to all senses. Each word, each line, is packed with energy, and there is this epic tension that forms from sentence to sentence:
Glass crumbles and her hair dries, her body
dries, and the towels go up on the rack and the
boat it goes back in her head, the last drips
running down her ankles. A captain and his
sword, the words she doesn't hear. (20-21)
The work is powerful in its silence, meaning, there isn't any forced language, but rather, the fluidity of diction magnifies each poetic scene:
She checks under her fingernails for a piece of
luggage she lost years ago, it had in it one of
her favorite dresses, a halter-top that flowed
with material, exploded color. (29)
Tyler also explains the abstract--those elements which are open for a variety of definitions, and the author provides these mirrors with the repeated use of certain words and sounds which adds to this creation of the intangible while at the same time, specifies, or narrows those fields of definitions:
Forgetting is salt over the shoulder. Forgetting
is giving up. Forgetting is regret and artists
and making words in wounds and opening
wounds and wounding and winding and
wonderful spilling of letters out holes, mouth
and ears and nose. Head, shoulders, knees, and
toes. (67)
These are just a few examples of how Tyler's A Man Of Glass & All The Ways We Have Failed accomplishes a myriad of feats through precision and emotion, and the work, as a whole, is consistent, as it reinforces Tyler's pictorial nature of language from page to page. It's a wonderful maze.
A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed
by J. A. Tyler
$12.00
112 pages
ISBN 978-1-879193-24-6
Fugue State Press , 2011
March 11, 2011
Tentacles, Numbing
My novel, Tentacles, Numbing will be published by Black Coffee Press in 2013. Thank you, Dodie Bellamy , Leonard Chang , Susan Taylor Chehak , Dana Johnson , and Rob Roberge for your guidance and mentorship, and thank you, Black Coffee Press , for the opportunity.
Black Coffee Press 2011 and 2012 Publication Schedule :
Border Theory by Stefanie Wielkopolan (1/11)
A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (6/11)
How To Bury The Dead by Ansely Moon (9/11)
I Didn't Mean To Be Kevin by Caleb J. Ross (11/11)
Orange Girl and Other Poems by Josie Stahl (1/12)
Code For Failure: A Gas Station Novel by Ryan Bradley (4/12)
While You Are Sleeping I Will Evolve Into A Bird
by Nathan Tyree (7/12)
The Blush by Rachel Kendall (9/12)
Can't Kill A Man Born To Hang by Karl Koweski (11/12)
Previous Titles:
She by Thomas Michael
Celluloid Cowboy by Scott C. Rogers
Love Like A Molotov Cocktail To The Chest by Scott C. Rogers
The Handprint on the Windshield by Kevin Richard White
Drinking Until Morning by Justin Grimbol
Losing Daylight by Thomas Michael
P.U.D.Z.S. by Jackson Bates
March 10, 2011
A.K. Ramanujan | No Amnesiac King | Collected Poems
No Amnesiac King
One knows by now one is no amnesiac
king, whatever mother may say or child believe.
One cannot wait any more in the back
of one's mind for that conspiracy
of three fishermen and a palace cook
to bring, dressed in cardamom and clove,
the one well-timed memorable fish,
so one can cut straight with the royal knife
to the ring waiting in the belly,
and recover at one stroke all lost memory,
make up for the years drained in cocktail glasses
among dry women and pickled men, and give back
body to shadows, and undo the curse
that comes on the boat with love.
Or so it seems,
as I wait for my wife and watch the traffic
in seaside marketplaces and catch
my breath at the flat metal beauty of whole pomfret,
round staring eyes and scales of silver
in the fisherman's pulsing basket,
and will not ask, for I know cannot,
which, if any, in its deadwhite belly
has an uncooked signet ring and a forest
legend of wandering king and waiting
innocent, complete with fawn under tree
and inverse images in the water
of a stream that runs as if it doesn't.
Ramanujan, A.K. Collected Poems.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
126. Print.
March 9, 2011
Scott C. Rogers, On Reading
"Reading is like fucking. Raw, powerful and beautiful the better."
{ Scott C. Rogers is the author of the novels Duct-taped Mouth, Celluloid Cowboy and Love Like A Molotov Cocktail to the Chest .}
March 8, 2011
February 28, 2011
Joyelle McSweeney, On Reading
"Art lays its eggs in its own eyes.
If you want to be an Artist, let Art lay its eggs in your eyes and change your vision; and make you into a Seer; and make you shed a swarm of winged, infectious, dirty Art, equipped with wiggy egg sacs and further compound eyes. You can't treat reading like some plastic bottled water you have shipped in from Fiji to refresh you as you lay by the pool, a resource your quaff and utilize. You have to pour Art's acid on your face and let it eat your face and make you a new face, and you have to be looking into a mirror the whole time, and the mirror has to be made of some molten registering substance that records the whole event in a kind of distended smeary disingenuous film. A damage film. If your eyes melt, you know you are doing something right. That's the Art coming out of your skull. How refreshing!
Some artists whose written, visual, and multimedia work has caused me this kind of permanent damage include Jack Smith; Andy Warhol; Nick Demske; Kim Hyesoon; Fi Jae Lee; Artaud; the critics Mark Seltzer, David Gissen and Achille Mbembe; Deleuze and Guattari; Harryette Mullen; Alice Notley; Cesar Aira; Aime Cesar; Kara Walker; Bylex Puma; and Raul Zurita. Also the Internet, Slavoj Zizek, my grad students, WikiLeaks and AlJazeera English. Also, Johannes Göransson's new book, entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate from Christian Peet's dynamite Tarpaulin Sky Press."
{ Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the hybrid novels Flet (Fence Books) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press), as well as two books of poetry from Fence. She edits Action Books and contributes to the collective blog, montevidayo . Please check it out! She also teaches in the MFA Program at Notre Dame .}
