Shadow Selves (Conjunctions)

The mirror is human kind's most duplicitous invention. When we look into it do we see ourselves or an other? If we see an other, is that other a lie or some complex extension of a truth we don't quite grasp? And when we set down the mirror and imagine ourselves to be one or the other or some combination of both, who have we become? In this special issue of Conjunctions, the very idea of self is tackled in fiction and poetry that investigates everything from innocent misperception to studied deception, delusion to fraud, crazed misdemeanors to premeditated crime.

Shadow Selves offers a spectrum of permutations on these themes, with acclaimed and upcoming writers such as Elizabeth Hand, J.W. McCormack, Jonathan Carroll, Eleni Sikelianos, Frederic Tuten, Michael Sheehan, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul West, Laura van den Berg, Arthur Sze, Susan Steinberg, Jason Labbe, Jess Row, Rae Armantrout, Melinda Moustakis and Rick Moody.

Conjunctions is edited by Bradford Morrow. The editorial approach is often collaborative, the distinguished staff of active contributing editors includes Walter Abish, Chinua Achebe, John Ashbery, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Mary Caponegro, William H. Gass, Peter Gizzi, Robert Kelly, Ann Lauterbach, Norman Manea, Rick Moody, Joanna Scott, Peter Straub, and John Edgar Wideman.

About Conjunctions
Bard College's literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, art and interviews by both emerging and established writers. For nearly three decades, Conjunctions' contribution to the literary community has been to provide a forum for over 1000 writers and artists whose work challenges accepted forms and modes of expression, experiments with language and thought, and is fully realized art.

Conjunctions 54: Shadow Selves
Paperback, 364 pages
release: June 30
ISBN: 978-0941964708

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

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