AWP, Hometown Advantage!

This week is the annual AWP Conference, and for the first time in the seven years we've been publishing the conference takes place on our home turf, in Boston. To celebrate, we've got two phenomenal off-site parties planned around town and have reserved two tables at the 3-day bookfair (Tables AA7 & AA8). Please come toast with us, and experience the fantastic books, dancing, and live music we've lined up.

On Thursday, March 7, from 6p-8p we're co-hosting our first party: No Thousands: an Indie Press event (Part 1), with 1913, Action Books, Black Ocean, Octopus Books and Poor Claudia. Nine ground-breaking poets from around the world will be reading short samples from their latest books.

On Friday, March 8, from 8p-1a we're co-hosting our second party: No Thousands: an Indie Press event (Part 2), with Black Ocean, McSweeney's and Wave Books. Seven cutting-edge American poets will be reading short samples from their latest books. Following the readings will be a live music performance by Michael Zapruder, playing songs from PINK THUNDER. The night will close with a dance party curated by Soulelujah DJs Claude Monet and Worth Wagers--spinning Soul, Funk and R&B vinyl 45s deep into the night!

Both venues have a full bar, and our Friday night venue serves up a great dinner menu with a number of locally sourced ingredients.

We hope to see many of you there!

Inside the Mind of Rauan Klassnik

Two recent interviews with Rauan Klassnik, in which he talks about The Moon's Jaw, Twitter, decadence, the charm of churches, and parade floats.
with Drew Kalbach at The Actuary HERE
You see, I can make small pieces. Sometimes those small pieces come decently formed into units, but sometimes also it takes a lot of work to make the units right. Then i have to arrange and sequence those units. This is what i’ve come to, what my brain/DNA/blah, blah has bequeathed to and imposed on me. My work’s evolved within this statuesque (ie, Holy Land is spare and pared down, also, but it’s also quite different from the new book) and i’ll have to see where i can take the stones and stony in my new book.
and with Paul Cunningham at Radioactive Moat HERE
Yes, my poems are filled with death but they are filled also with bright, vivid and lively striving against that death. So, yes, life, decadent, and rotting, increasingly so. But, life. I have no problems with artists trying to impose on things, impose on their subjects, the words, their images, their readers even. In the end, really, artists are trying to enslave their subjects and their audiences. For a period, anyways. But I do feel like some artists are using the wrong chains and electrical boxes, the wrong chocolates and flowers, the wrong starvation, coaxing and rape techniques. The wrong sweet nothings. Certainly I am not real big on socially PC bullshit. Bringing that stuff to your art doesn’t seem, to me anyways, like a good idea.
Order your copy of The Moon's Jaw here.

Wednesday Around the Web

PINK THUNDER gets reviewed on HTMLGIANT: 

Dear People of the Future,

With your lightning powered aggregators, your nanomembranophones, your hydrolytic isomer skin-suit apparatus, it will require an imaginative leap wider than the great San Andreas Canyon that separates The People’s Republic of California from the once great nation of the “United” States to conceive of the cultural landscape in which Michael Zapruder’s Pink Thunder, which I recommend you ingest via light pulse array, was created.

And Rauan Klassnik is hailed "the Jim Jones of Poetry" for his latest Black Ocean title The Moon's Jaw, reviewed on Vice by Blake Butler:

Rauan Klassnik’s new book, The Moon’s Jaw, follows in the black trough of his first, appending the space there with something perhaps even more strangely pregnant. It’s full of knives and silk and peacocks and breast milk and ghosts and fetuses and orchards and wounds and girls and suns. It shifts continually between horny and cruel tones, meditative and exacting tones, stiff and puffy images, swallowed up somewhere in the space between all bodies, where nature mutates and crushes you and grinds against itself forever.

And in the realms of the real, the BASH reading series continues with its 8th installment on February 8 with Darcie Dennigan, Evan Glasson, and Christie Ann Reynolds in Brookline, MA. More info HERE.

PINK THUNDER: What You've Been Missing

Contemplating your next read/listen/poetic experience? In his December review on Huffington Post, Seth Abramson writes, "Without question, if you are yourself a poet and you decide to purchase only one poetry collection in 2013, it should be Zapruder's Pink Thunder" and goes on to say that "[i]f an objective correlative could be said to exist for the myriad phenomena of the present Golden Age of American poetry, it would be Pink Thunder. In short, it's a genre-mixing, community-driven, performance-oriented, collaborative project that represents everything that's right with American poetry and everything American poetry is fast becoming."

Pink Thunder also heads Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books of 2012 list, described as a "curious experiment and a beautiful document." And you'll learn more about the history of the project itself in this review from the LA Times: "...if Pink Thunder has a message, it’s that the relationship between poetry and music is more elusive, more conditional, than that of traditional lyrics in a song. This is the best thing about the project, the way Zapruder uses his music to mirror, or echo, his own reading of the material, and its emotional effect."

If those reviews aren't enough to intrigue you, here are a few sneak peek images from Pink Thunder. You can still grab a copy with the limited edition vinyl directly from us: http://www.blackocean.org/pink-thunder. 


A Special Gift List

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There are gift ideas for your dad, lists for techies, even handmade holidays, and at long last, there are"suggestions for holiday presents to win over your crush & delight your weirdo poet friends" thanks to a special HOLIDAY CRUSH post on the POETRY CRUSH blog. At #2 on the list, you'll find Black Ocean's own PINK THUNDER, our latest excitement from Michael Zapruder--a beautiful object of a thing that comes with a book and a CD (or if you're one of the lucky first 250 orders, a special edition pink vinyl!). J Hope Stein explains: "What I love about this project is the pursuit to find connections with other disciplines and poets.  It’s good for poetry and it’s a really groovy listen.   & In the songs themselves you can feel a highly sensitive being."

Don't feel bad if you end up snagging this one for yourself, there are a number of other great things on this list for your poet friends including the movie Once, some cool jewelry, and some antiques and oddities. If Pink Thunder is at the top of yours or a loved one's list, just make sure to order by the 17th  to receive it by Christmas.

Check out the HOLIDAY CRUSH list here: http://poetrycrush.com/2012/12/05/holiday-crush/

and order your PINK THUNDER album and book here.

Announcing PINK THUNDER

Preorder September 26. Watch this page for the pre-order link--the first 250 orders come with a limited edition pink vinyl 7"!

With contributions from 23 poets, 3 engineers, and over 30 musicians, Pink Thunder presents a musical and lyrical experiment by award-winning songwriter / composer Michael Zapruder, to see what happens when poems are sung instead of spoken. Potent with weird, funny, and singular possibilities,Pink Thunder's playful and startling songs take their form entirely from the shape of the poems from which they are made. The result is a collection of musical readings both compelling and surprising. You are invited to listen.

This full-color hardcover book contains an artist's statement by Michael Zapruder with an introduction by Scott Pinkmountain, and comes with a CD containing 22 tracks. The book also features photographs from the recording sessions and the Wave Poetry Bus Tour and hand-lettered versions of the poems illuminated by Arrington de Dionyso.

Contributing poets include: Joshua Beckman, David Berman, Carrie St. George Comer, Gillian Conoley, Bob Hicok, Noelle Kocot, Dorothea Lasky, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Anthony McCann, Valzhyna Mort, Hoa Nguyen, Sierra Nelson, Tyehimba Jess, Travis Nichols, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Mary Ruefle, James Tate, Joe Wenderoth, Dara Weir, and Matthew Zapruder.

Schomburg Tour Dates

Black Ocean author Zachary Schomburg will be touring the midwest during September (and beyond for a few dates in October) with some great readers--Jenny Zhang, Nate Slawson, Jesse Malmed, Joyelle McSweeney! The tour dates from his blog are listed below, and you can also visit his Tumblr for updates.

9/18. Iowa City, IA. Prairie Lights Bookstore. w/Jenny Zhang. 7pm.

9/19. Minneapolis, MN. Our Flow is Hard Reading Series w/Jenny Zhang. Harriet Brewing. 3036 Minnehaha Ave. 7pm.

9/20. Racine, WI. Bonk! Reading Series w/Jenny Zhang & Nate Slawson. Black Eyed Press. 312 Sixth Street. 7pm.

9/21. Madison, WI. The Project Lodge. 817 E. Johnson. w/Jenny Zhang, Anna Vitale, & Adam Fell. 7:30pm

9/22. Chicago, IL. Dollhouse Reading Series w/Jenny Zhang & Jesse Malmed.7pm

And a few October readings:

10/4. Portland, OR. Marylhurst University. 7:30pm.

10/11. Tucson, AZ. University of Arizona Poetry Center. Next Word Reading Series. w/Joyelle McSweeney.

10/18. Seattle, WA. Seattle Lit Crawl. Comet Tavern.

Blood Lotus Double Review

BloodLotus Journal writes a double review of Feng Sun Chen's "Butcher's Tree" and Janaka Stucky's "The World Will Deny It For You," tracing the lines between poet and poet-publisher: "Paradox, nature, mysticism and spirituality, and loss of human connection are all themes in both Stucky’s chap and Chen’s full-length."

Read it here!

Blood Lotus Interviews Black Ocean Publisher

Read an interview with Janaka Stucky on Blood Lotus and scratch the dirty underbelly of publishing at Black Ocean -- learn about our growth and development, what enthralls our editors and keeps them reading, and a little about what keeps us running. You can read the original interview HERE, and it's also been reblogged on Poetry Foundations's blog Harriet HERE.

We pour ourselves into the editing, design, publication, and marketing of each book because we care deeply about what we do, and because we only publish authors who also care deeply about what they do. Why anyone would settle for mediocrity in the world of publishing is beyond my comprehension. There are so many other paths, so many pleasurable pursuits… Often I think I’d like to spend my days exploring the planet, becoming an athlete an expert duelist or a musician, taking pictures of the sun and the ocean floor, having sex in the morning and just staying in bed for hours… If I’m giving all those things up to be a publisher then I want to be the best publisher I can be.

Web Roundup

Our annual open reading period ended June 30, but there's still plenty happening in our floating world. Our e-newsletter will be out next week with some announcements, but in the meantime, here are a few goodies to keep you going. 

And don't forget to visit us on Facebook and Twitter. 

FJORDS reviewed in Bookslut

Read the latest review of Fjords vol. 1 by Elizabeth Cantwell on Bookslut: click HERE.

'The world is always as it is, and always as it seems,' as Schomburg notes in "The Animal Spell." There will always be black swans and refrigerators and fists and eyes everywhere we look. What can you really do about that but write it down and note the page numbers and try not to let it swallow you up? That is the only honest option.

 

And if you haven't seen the trailer, you can view it here on our Youtube channel.

 

Schomburg in Boise

Black Ocean's own Zachary Schomburg will spend the weekend in Boise, ID, home of our managing editor Ms. A. Minetta Gould. While in Boise Schomburg will conduct two writing workshops, visit Idaho's natural wonders, read alongside local poetry band The True Wheel (a duo consisting and the poet Karena Youtz & her husband Doug Martsch), read with poem films created by local artist John Shinn, and sleep in a swanky hotel. The first reading is at 6PM on Saturday, May 5 and the second is at 8PM on Sunday, May 6. Both readings will take place at The Crux Coffee House and are free and open to the public. 

We will post videos from each reading on our youtube page when they become available. 

FJORDS News

After his thoughtful and generous review of Butcher's Tree, Justin Helms is at it again with a review of Fjords Vol. 1 for his Poets and Prophets series. Read it here.

So maybe we must swallow these poems without chewing. They are (already) tessellations of memory, fantasy, and fear that re-discover the missing beauty of the quotidian.

Verse daily posted a poem from Fjords this week.

And over on the Rumpus, a poem from Scary, No Scary is featured as part of the Last Poem I Loved series.

It was like me. I was the poem already; my own limbs had been torn off when I moved to a farm in the Oregon woods, where I became a sort of tree. 

 

 

FJORDS on Publishers Weekly!

You can find the latest review of Fjords vol. 1 on the Publishers Weekly website. Read it here.

Narrative without losing lyrical beauty, witty without losing gravity, the poems—though fiercely contemporary—still uphold the priorities to delight (“I am working in the ticket booth of the movie theater when you come in and take off my pants”) and to instruct (“Nothing is anyone’s fault, which is something we must remember.

Black Ocean at the Juniper Literary Festival

If you'll be in Boston next month, come visit us at our table at the Juniper Literary Festival. We are proud to be a co-sponsor of the event, and hope to see you if you're local!
12th ANNUAL JUNIPER LITERARY FESTIVAL
NEW WRITERS/NEW WRITING
April 13 & 14, 2012
Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst

On April 13 & 14, 2012 the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers will host the 12th annual Juniper Literary Festival: New Writers/New Writing. Focusing on the ever-changing landscape of new American poetry and fiction, the festival showcases emerging poets and fiction writers alongside dozens of independent journals and presses in a unique national event. Featuring readings by diverse and talented poets and writers, roundtables on crucial creative and professional issues, and a press fair, the festival introduces audiences to vital contemporary writing and explores issues essential to the future of American literature.