Congratulations to Johannes Göransson (translator of our title, With Deer) and Joyelle McSweeney on the birth of their second daughter over the weekend: Majken Rose!

Our newest title, Scary, No Scary by Zachary Zachary Schomburg was chosen by the Huffington Post as one of The Year's 9 Best Books From Small Publishers. The other titles that were chosen are:

Some Things That Meant the World To Me by Joshua Mohr (Two Dollar Radio)
A Jello Horse by Matthew Simmons (Publishing Genius)
Gagaku Meat: The Steve Richmond Story by Mike Daily (biography zine)
Everything Was Fine Until Whatever by Chelsea Martin (Future Tense Books)
The Collected Fanzines by Harmony Korine (Drag City)
Big World by Mary Miller (Hobart)
Ever by Blake Butler (Calamari Press) 
Capacity by Theo Ellsworth (Secret Acres)

Kevin Sampsell obviously knows what he's talking about, so I have already started obtaining every book on his list, and so should you. That's right: I said "should." Someone needs to tell you what to read.

I'm dancing beneath a rainbow over here. Join me!

Small Press Distribution has posted their best-selling poetry titles not only of 2009, but also of the decade (the 00's). Much to our surpise and delight, Black Ocean titles made it onto both lists. We've populated a few "best" lists lately, but the nice things about these lists is that they're not subjective or aesthetically exclusionary; they just mean that people love our books! Which people? You people!

Small Press Distribution's Best Selling Poetry 2009
#4: The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg
#9: Scary, No Scary by Zachary Schomburg
#35: With Deer by Aase Berg (trans. Johannes Göransson)

Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers, 2000-2009
#27: The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg

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I started Black Ocean in 2004, having completed grad school I was feeling aimless about where my creative life was going. I was getting published in magazines, but I wanted to do something more—something beyond my own writing—and I wanted to find a way to disseminate poetry by poets who, at the time, were underappreciated and out-of-print. I actually started Black Ocean because I wanted to reprint the early out-of-print work of two of my favorite poets: Bill Knott (Corpse and Beans, Auto-Necrophilia, Nights of Naomi) and Frank Stanford (Singing Knives, Crib Death, You). Of course, to generate enough clout to even pitch these projects I needed a strong starting stable of writers.

I spent about a year and half brainstorming, getting things in order, putting on live events and acquiring manuscripts. In 2006 Black Ocean launched with four simultaneous releases:

Upon Arrival by Paula Cisewski
Please Stay On The Trail ed. by Matt Hudson
Dear Al-Qaeda by Scott Creney
A Useless Window by Carrie Olivia Adams

I showed up at AWP-Austin that year, not knowing anybody, with one surly anti-social author in tow. Carrie had become Black Ocean’s Poetry Editor by that point, and was already my indispensible Right Hand Woman.  By the end of the conference I had sold enough books to cover all the expenses of the trip, and had made a few friends in the process. That’s also where I saw Zachary Schomburg read, and heard his poems for the first time. I solicited his manuscript from him on the spot.

In 2007 we put out one book: The Man Suit. Carrie and Zach and I felt really good about its content and by the time we arrived at AWP, with the book hot off the press, there was substantial buzz for it. We sold out of it at the conference, and the rest of our catalog experienced a lot of attention as well. Later that year, we were floored when the New York Public Library announced that they had chosen it for their list of 25 Books To Remember from 2007 (sharing this list with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, and only two other poets: Margaret Atwood and Robert Hass). By this time the book had already almost sold out of the first print run, so we sped a second printing up on the schedule.

In 2008, still riding the wave of The Man Suit’s success (and still paying off significant debt) we put out one more title: Rauan Klassnik’s Holy Land. Thanks to Ron’s enthusiasm and tireless tour schedule, Holy Land met with a significant amount of acclaim and derision; the perfect cocktail for a classic in the making. That year we also held our first Open Reading period, from which we discovered the work of newcomer Joe Hall, as well as the first poetry manuscript from novelist Joshua Harmon. That year we also acquired Johannes Göransson’s translation of With Deer, by the radical surrealist poet Aase Berg.

We kicked off 2009 by putting out With Deer and Harmon’s Scape concurrently at AWP. Aesthetically they are very different, but they share an intensely original approach to language and Black Ocean readers seem to have glommed on to both titles with equal interest. Also at AWP this year we learned that one of our first authors, Paula Cisewski, had her second book chosen by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize. In August we released Schomburg’s second opus, Scary, No Scary, printing a special limited edition of 200 in our first ever hardcover. In the Spring of 2010 we’ll be publishing Joe Hall’s debut, Pigafetta Is My Wife, as well as Julie Doxsee’s second collection of poems, Objects for a Fog Death. Additionally, we’ll be announcing our selections from the 2009 Open Reading series in a matter of days.

Sprinkled throughout all of this we’ve had two issues of our literary magazine, Handsome, come together, as well as numerous live events featuring visual artists, performers, film screenings and musicians. Six of our titles have enjoyed many course adoptions, and loads of reviewers have shared their love for our books with their readers online and in print. We also launched a totally new website somewhere a while back, and paid off the small business loan that got us started!

Since my original dream to start Black Ocean, Bill Knott has chosen to release his works in PDF form online and Lost Roads has taken a renewed interest in reprinting Stanford’s work. While those seminal goals have not been realized, I feel immensely fortunate and grateful to have achieved so much else in the past five years. I couldn’t have accomplished all this without the passion of our devoted staff, the faith and talent of our authors and contributors, and most importantly the generosity and support of audiences around the world.

Thanks to everyone for such a joyous half-decade. Your love is the fuel!

Love, Janaka

In celebration of the Zoroastrian-come-Christian birth date for Our Lord and Savior, as well as the Miracle of Hanukkah and the 2009 date for Ashura, Black Ocean will be including a free copy of Rauan Klassnik’s Holy Land with every order off our website, placed between 12am, December 7th, and 12am, January 1st.

What do you need to do to take advantage of this offer? Just go to our online catalog and BUY ANY BOOK AND WE’LL AUTOMATICALLY INCLUDE A FREE COPY OF HOLY LAND. As always, shipping is completely free within the United States. Please note that if you want orders to arrive in time for Christmas you should probably place them no later than December 15th.

You might call this deal crazy. We call it benevolent.

Today was a great day.

I got a copy in the mail of the latest issue of American Poet (the journal of the Academy of American Poets), that has a small write-up on With Deer in their "Books Noted" section. Excerpt:

"The levels of metaphor here and throughout the book keep the mind working to connect the blood of the world and the groteque quality of feelings."

They also mentioned some other books I've enjoyed recently:

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus (Octopus Books)
Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press)
Take It by Joshua Beckman (Wave Books)
The King by Rebecca Wolff (W.W. Norton)

Also found out today that our books are featured over at the Chicago Publishers Gallery, located in the Chicago Cultural Center. And that, is super cool.

Lastly, got the PDF proof of my next poem in North American Review. It's strange because that poem was written a while ago, and so different from the new ones that just came out in my chapbook with Brave Men Press. Nonetheless I am glad it's going into print because I feel it's a seminal narrative piece from my years as an undertaker. They were one of the first people to publish me after I finished grad school, so it's kind of fun to have a poem coming out again with them again years later.

Anyway, all this is to say that I'm reminded (during a personally difficult time) of how fortunate I am for the support and interest this little press has received. I'm immensely grateful that all the hard work we put into publishing these books is appreciated and cared for by other people. I'm also grateful for the attention that my own poems get. It means something to mean something to someone else.

You all are so great.

Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing

Sometimes it’s fun to read a book of poems that’s been written collaboratively and wonder, line by line (or however), who’s written what.  But sometimes that can drive me a little crazy, and it’s better for me to forget all that and read like it’s any other book.  Don’t ever stay the same; keep changing, a chapbook by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney, is not any other book, and every way I read it I enjoy where it takes me.

I’m hooked before I even get past the first two lines:  “With this dead, damp leaf / I thee wed.”  A lot of the lines have question marks in them.  Here are two of those lines, followed by a parenthetical that seems like some sort of definitive answer to something--while the answer itself blows me away:

    That “making is thinking”--can it be true?

    Function perfectly married to form? (It had to be shiny, it had to be this
        gleaming blue.)

Much of the book has a playful quality to it, which I love; one of the poems is titled “13 FACTS ABOUT COCKS.”  But here’s a line I really like because it starts out being playful but ends up being playful and profound:  “The drums--in the signature time signature of her brutish suitor--insisted If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.”

“The best kind of sad” can be knowing you’re getting to the end of a book.  But at the end of this one I also feel reassured--by the writing, and by what the writing has done for me:  “All this has been yours / since the day you were born & even before.” [Erwin Ponce]

11/6 Friday: Janaka Stucky & Johannes Goransson at the EARSHOT Reading Series in Brooklyn.

11/7 Saturday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at the Yes, Reading! series in Albany.

11/8 Sunday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at Paige Ackerson-Kiely's house in Vermont. Don't you wish you were invited?

11/9 Monday: Janaka Stucky & Chris Tonelli at the Slope Editions Reading Series in Turner Falls, MA.

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Janaka Stucky is practicing the perfection of effort while working on silent relationships with knives, whiskey and pugilism. He is also the Publisher of Black Ocean and its literary magazine, Handsome. Some of his poems have appeared in Cannibal, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Free Verse, No Tell Motel, North American Review, Redivider and VOLT. His chapbook, “Your Name Is The Only Freedom,” is available from Brave Men Press.

Johannes Göransson was born in Sweden, but has lived around the US for several years. He is the author of: Dear Ra (Starcherone, 2008), Pilot (Fairy Tale Review Press, 2008) and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books, 2007)—and the chapbook Majakovskij en tragedy (Dos Press, 2008). He is also the translator of: Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonsson, Gingerbread Monuments by Victor Johansson & Klara Kallstrom, Remainland: Selected Poems by Aase Berg and Ideals Clearance by Henry Parland. He is the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes.

Chris Tonelli is the author of four chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, The Trees Around, is forthcoming from Birds, LLC. Chris co-curates The So and So Series and teaches at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife Allison.

Black Ocean is offering a very special Halloween Sale this week! From 12:00 am on 10/30 to 11:59 pm on 11/1 any purchases of Zachary Schomburg’s limited edition hardcover Scary, No Scary from our website will receive any other book in our catalog for free. Simply specify which title you’d like in the notes during PayPal checkout and we’ll include it at no extra charge.

Each hardcover edition of Scary, No Scary comes signed and numbered by Schomburg himself, and includes a limited edition letter pressed mini-broadside from Brave Men Press. This package was created in a limited quantity of 200 and only about half of them remain.

As always, every order receives free shipping from our website. Thanks for your time and enjoy your Halloween!

Put Your Head in My Lap

Swiss artist Urs Fischer says “art works best in people’s memories” by which he means “it’s not just the act of going to see it on the wall.” Fischer is talking about visual art, but, in the case of Claudia Smith’s Put Your Head in My Lap, at least, the same could apply to literature. The 16 short short stories in this 41-page chapbook are compelling and immersive when you’re in the act of reading them, but they get even better when you’ve finished and moved onto recalling them.

This may be because the stories operate like memories, sharp and edgy on some points, like when the narrator of one recalls, “The air smelled of clean laundry and coffee. It smelled so good,” but also blurred and dreamy at other points and seeming altered by the process of recollection as when another protagonist says, “Four years ago, my son wore mittens with elastic at the wrists, so he wouldn’t scratch his face. He looked like a little lobster […] His eyes were a still sky on a rainy day.”

Small details make the stories feel lifelike, inhabited, and even well-documented as if they could almost be nonfiction, like when a protagonist says of a rough time in her life, “I shopped from a list. I made pretzel Jell-O. My grandmother had made it; I Googled the recipe.”  

The final paragraph of the book depicts the speaker of the last story this way: “She is remembering, holding her face up to the flakes the way she’d read about and seen in Christmas movies. It happened, it happened, she’ll say and you can’t take it back.” These stories feel, in the best sense, like they are true things, like they are things that happened. [Kathleen Rooney]