Paper House - Jessie Carty (Folded Word)

Through the 64 narrative poems in this collection, Jessie Carty illustrates one woman's coming of age in the face of neglect and unmet social expectations. However, these are not poems of woe. Instead, Carty flings open closet doors and jumps in, describing the dark recesses with an innocent acceptance of what is rather than what should be. The births of babies and love. The deaths of elders and allusions. The reconstruction of homes and lives. An unflinching honesty folds them all into "boxes in boxes like Russian dolls," waiting for us to lift the lids.

Update May 2011: Paper House won the Northern California Publishers & Authors’ 2011 Best Poetry Book Award! To celebrate this achievement, Folded Word offers a special 3 for 1 sale.

For some more notes and reflections on "Paper House", read Jessie Carty's author talk with Mel Bosworth: on breathing, writing, the internet, scares, yielding, boxes, greed + red, black and white.

Jessie Carty's poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her first chapbook At the A & P Meridiem was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Her print & e-chapbook The Wait of Atom was released by Folded Word Press in 2009.

About Folded Word (+PicFic + unFold + Heron)
Folded Word is an independent press that continually seeks new ways of connecting readers to new literary voices. Though we do sell our books and chapbooks, we offer free poetry and fiction to the public in our Twitter-zines PicFic and unFold, as well as our print broadside, Heron. We also value craftsmanship, both of literary works and the medium in which they are rendered--as demonstrated by our handcrafted Signature Series chapbooks. Folded Word is managed by J.S. Graustein with the support of Rose Auslander, Ben White, and the entire Folded family of contributors.

Jessie Carty: Paper House
poetry collection
84 pages, trade paperback (e-book in Kindle & Mobipocket format available late-April)
$12 U.S. / £8 U.K. / €9 Europe
ISBN 978-0-9778167-4-3

kari edwards: NO GENDER (Belladonna)

kari edwards (1954 - 2006) was a poet, artist and gender activist, her work has appeared in numerous publications, and inspired others. This anthology follows her mandate of reclaiming the very words we speak and write, beginning with our authorial name:

"kari’s authorial “signature” undid the authorial body in favor of a visible obfuscation—strikethru: kari never just signed, but rather crossed out hir name and wrote “NO GENDER.” The erasure—well no, the palimpsestic remaking of the name into a symbol for the dismantling of enforced gender codes is a profound and provocative gesture—the name is still visible behind the NO GENDER, as if behind bars... kari’s genius moved others to their own words, art, action—following a mandate of reclaiming the very words we speak and write—writing our selves, our other(ed) bodies, into a foundational postgender post-genre state. This book is the start of what hopefully will be a much longer conversation." - by Julian T. Brolaski & erica kaufman

With contributions from Cara Benson, Frances Blau, Mark Brasuell, Julian T. Brolaski, Reed Bye, Marcus Civin, CAConrad, Donna de la Perrière, E. Tracy Grinnell, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, erica kaufman, Kevin Killian, Wendy Kramer, Joseph Lease, Rachel Levitsky, Joan MacDonald, Bill Marsh, Chris Martin, Yedda Morrison, Eileen Myles, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Ellen Redbird, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Smoler, Sherman Souther, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Anne Waldman

kari edwards: NO GENDER is a Venn Diagram Production, which is the collaborative intersection between Belladonna Books and Litmus Press. This imprint actualizes the mutual commitment to publishing innovative, cross-genre, multicultural, feminist, and queer work by writers and artists working beyond and between borders.

About Belladonna
Founded as a reading and salon series by Rachel Levitsky at Bluestocking's Women's Bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side in 1999, Belladonna so far has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration in and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a conversation about the feminist avant-garde, what it is and how it comes to be.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of Belladonna's mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Forhtcoming: The Wide Road by Lyn Hejinian & Carla Harryman

kari edwards: NO GENDER
Reflections on the Life & Work of kari edwards
Edited by Julian T. Brolaski, erica kaufman, and E. Tracy Grinnell
204 pages, $18
ISBN: 978-0-9819310-1-2

Further Adventures in the Restless Universe - Dawn Raffel (Dzanc)

When Dawn Raffel was a very small child, her father used to read to her nightly from The Restless Universe--a layman's guide to physics by the Nobel Laureate Max Born. Although she loved the time spent with her father, she didn't--despite his statements to the contrary--comprehend a word of the physics. it was her first recognition that love so often comes with imperfect understanding.
The 21 stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe are about fathers, daughters, mothers, sisters, husbands, wives, strangers, lovers, sons, neighbors, kings, death, faith, astronomical phenomena, and the way the heart warps time. Of her previous work, one reviewer stated, "Raffel takes conventions and smashes them to bits" and another called it "extreme literature." Of Further Adventures, Publishers Weekly says, "Raffel's stripped-to-the-bone prose is a model of economy and grace."

Dawn Raffel's previous books are Carrying the Body (a novel) and In the Year of Long Division (stories). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including NOON, the Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Unsaid, and the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. She is completing a memoir in vignettes.

About Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and champion those writers who don't fit neatly into the marketing niches of for-profit presses. As a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, Dzanc Books not only publishes excellent books of literary fiction, but works in partnership with literary journals to advance their readership at every level. Dzanc is also fully committed to developing educational programs in the schools and has begun organizing many such workshops and Writers In Residency programs. Upcoming from Dzanc are: The Taste of Penny by Jeff Parker, Love Doesn't Work by Henning Koch, and Best of the Web 2010 - the third edition of Dzanc's annual print compilation of the best online fiction, poetry and non-fiction (link: Dzanc Best of Web series).

Dawn Raffel: Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
short story collection
100 pages, perfect bound paperback with french flaps, $14.95
ISBN 978-0-9767177-9-9

Prefab Eulogies - David Wolach (Blaze Vox)

David Wolach’s powerpoems imagine us into a world where prefab texts, codes, lists, templates, and schemas rebel into habitations, “testy machines” and “the dumpster in a field abandoned by an American minimalist.” Prêt-a-lire never had it so right-on funny or fierce. Box it to go and take it away. —Amy King

Wolach says: "This is a transitional book in many ways--though coming out now, much of it is earlier than the poetry I've published in more recent chapbooks. Hence, the book reflects (if anything) a transition from installation and performing arts into the questions of contemporary poetry, with which I'd been engaged for those years, but which I'd only written about--until falling ill, which really meant, for me, being unable to move in ways that I'd been used to in performance and in daily life.
Questions of how to incorporate earlier performance work into this book, larger-scale site-specific installation pieces, or how to translate that set of interests onto the page, became the interesting problems I had to address, hence the "hybrid" or "conceptual" feel to much of the book. So, Prefab Eulogies spiders out of the book itself, onto other platforms, e.g., the BlazeVox Prefab Eulogies website, where one can listen to a live recording of some of Nothings Houses."

David Wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, and curator of the series devoted to the intersection of experiments in texts & radical politics, PRESS. David's new book, Occultations, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books, and will be launched, along with forthcoming books by Brenda Iijima, Dorothea Lasky, and Eleni Stecopolous on April 13th, as part of Belladonna Books' "Year of New Books/New Releases" reading series. (belladonnaseries.org)

About Blaze Vox (+Blaze Vox Journal)
Blaze Vox Books publishes poetry, short stories, experimental fiction, literary criticism (including companions, studies and histories), their catalog includes 160 titles with 25 new releases. Staff: Editor-in-chief: Ezra Pound; acting editor: Goeffrey Gatza. There also is Blaze Vox - The Journal, current issue: Blaze Vox 2k9.

David Wolach: Prefab Eulogies
poetry collection
116 pages, paperback, $16
ISBN: 9781935402688

Cure All - Kim Parko (Caketrain)

Kim Parko’s Cure All is the first-ever out-of-competition manuscript selected for publication at Caketrain. In this collection of linked vignettes, the preoccupations that have driven Parko’s years of written invention—crises of identity, parallelisms, anthropomorphism, transformative horror, epistles, flights of poesy, philosophical interrogations, psychic penetralia—crystallize to form her finest effort to date. Shot through with mysterious reflexivity and haunted harbingers, the pieces of Cure All at once stand ably alone and reflect the whole of the larger narrative arc—a feat accomplished through the distinctive quality of Parko’s imaginative lens. Says poet Amy Gerstler: “Animated by hyperacuity of consciousness, Cure All balances on that fulcrum between smoldering control and pregnant invention, scientific observation and an exacting madness.”

Kim Parko lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and dog. She teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the chapbook The Rest of the World Seems Unlikely (Achilles Chapbook Series, 2009). This is her first book.

About Caketrain
Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed are the editors of Caketrain Journal and Press, a literary imprint co-founded in 2003 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Caketrain's primary efforts consist of an annual journal which, in its seven issues to date, has featured the fiction, poetry and nonfiction of over 200 new and established talents; and a press series that includes chapbooks from Lizzie Skurnick, Tina May Hall, Tom Whalen, Matt Bell, Kim Parko and Claire Hero. Caketrain's other ongoing projects include the free, digital reissue of back-catalog titles and an annual chapbook competition. In May 2010, Caketrain's press arm will issue its two new poetry chapbooks: Ben Mirov's Ghost Machine and Lucas Farrell's Bird Any Damn Kind.

Kim Parko: Cure All
a collection of linked fictions, 2010
122 pages, paperback