Micro-Review Monday over at Black Ocean

Featuring a review of HIT WAVE, by Jon Leon

Ringing Video Contest

Kitchen Press is now accepting submissions of short home-made videos to accompany individual poems from Rauan Klassnik's on-line chapbook "Ringing"

The six winning videos will be posted on the Ringing website and the six winning authors (video makers) will receive their choice of either one Black Ocean book or two Kitchen Press chapbooks (subject to availability) shipped to a U.S. address.

Deadline: June 15, 2009 (winners to be announced and videos posted to website shortly thereafter).

Rules: there are no rules.

Guidelines and Preferences:

1- send all inquiries and submissions to ringingvideo(at)yahoo.com

2- Three or less videos per submission

3- One Video per email. So, if you're submitting 2 videos please send 2 emails.

4- Each Video should correspond to an individual Ringing poem. (There are 19 of them, including cover poem, Death Poems, End-Page poem)

5- Each Video should incorporate, in some form, the words of its corresponding poem

6- If you would like us to send you the mp3 file(s) of Rauan reading one or more of the poems please send an inquiry. You can listen to these on the Ringing website.

7- Since the Ringing poems are short (and the mp3 files of Rauan reading them range from 5-22 seconds only) we'd prefer short videos.

8- All levels of sophistication are welcome

A Million in Prizes

is now in stock and available at SPD and Amazon!!!!!!

A Million in Prizes
Justin Marks

Winner of the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize
Carl Phillips, Judge

“‘I wake, my not-yet-self / projecting back on the life I rise into.’ That’s but one example of the kind of logic (and syntax) that informs the poems of A Million in Prizes, a logic that often resists initial sense, only to reward with a clarity and maturity of insight that make these poems more powerful—more persuasive—with each reading. It’s as if Justin Marks had made a sort of Möbius Strip out of sense and an uneasiness with it, where it becomes difficult to know exactly where one begins and the other ends.

Another Möbius Strip here: the one that’s made from a seeming detachment and a fierce compassion for life in all of its ephemeral ordinariness, what can suddenly resonate where least expected. Salinger, O’Hara, Baudelaire all come to mind, but finally the voice and sensibility here, like the poems themselves, are utterly Justin Marks' own. A Million in Prizes seduces in the best way: subtly, with a poignant wit, and a sly charm.”

––Carl Phillips, from the Judge’s Citation

“With A Million in Prizes, Justin Marks dares to amplify his interior voice, broadcasting from ‘inside the megaphone’ the rumblings of a discontented, anxious self who discovers just enough pleasure in his daily routines, domestic scenes, and misfiring memories to admit ‘how glad I am for the orbit I inhabit.’ His poems are by turns philosophical, nostalgic, and subtly humorous, as he insistently disassembles the barriers between himself and his readers in a generous act of intimacy.”

––Shanna Compton

“Here is a rarely expressed self-awareness that accedes as little to words as it does to the pain of the condition itself.”

––Fanny Howe

It is a rare e-book that does not make me want to live off the grid, that does not make me fear and loathe the very coinage itself: "e-book."

says Christian Peet. Ringing is not one of those e-books

Reviews of Ringing

They're coming in. Here's one by Rebecca Loudon; and Ron reports some nice words from Blake Butler, as well as some interesting Goodreads reviews.

Ringing, Rauan Klassnik

I'm very pleased to announce Kitchen Press' first ever venture into online publishing, Ringing, by Rauan Klassnik.

Click this post for a downloadable pdf of Ringing, as well as a flash version illustrated Rauan himself. There is also a section for comments. We encourage you to not only comment and discuss the poems and collection as a whole, but the site itself--everything from thoughts on the experience of reading the chap in the format it's in to more technical concerns about the functionality of the site, problems viewing it, navigability, etc.


From the book:

Like ships leaning together licking each other’s shoulders, we fall down and dig at the earth. Fervently. Like jackals. Fire’s leaping from hill to hill, and my nerves are swaying like seaweed. I have learned to die. And not to. My veins are filled with milk 11.



All Best,

KP

Dan Hoy reviews HIT WAVE

in Octopus 11

Old With You, Lily Brown

LEAF AT THE END



I climbed a giant leaf at the end

of my imagination. Across

the spotted water, the hill

fastened its yellow bushels.



The imagination asked for all the cities,

for the canopy to get its machines out

and tile the leaves. My friend Lily

assumes what I want and it's so unfair.



The imagination shoves in and pushes

blithely out, a belt of pelicans, a plank

of hard clouds, bunches of doorknobs

halo the street-blighted hills.



I find a pile of antlers in the woods, assembled

for burning. I crawl beneath them and stay

there when the burners come with their fire.

Up in the canopy I dangle, touching nothing.


Order yours now!