Jed Munson's Minesweeper, winner of the 2022 Chapbook Contest (ships March 2023)

Minesweeper is not only poetry, but an exceptional piece of art of extraordinary caliber. Minesweeper sweeps us off our feet with its state-of-the-art bilingual-hyphenated, prepotent field of precocity and its intense algorithmic / microchipic tenderness / terseness / ingemination. It's so supremely well-balanced, so playful, so brilliant. While breaking our hearts with piquant line breaks, Jed Munson relentlessly surprises us with his accelerated gravity of recombineable, scrabblic, vulnerable inventions and cataclysmic candidness. It is a chapbook that defies our limitations and flourishes with dynamic, energetic wit. —VI KHI NAO

"Do not forget," Wittgenstein once cautioned, "that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." One would never forget such a thing when reading Jed Munson's ludic lucubrations, which are as razor-sharp as they are full of risk and rambunctiousness. Engaging with Munson's Minesweeper is to get swept up in a poetics of polyglot playfulness. When the odds are stacked against us, it is heartening to know that there is a fine new player in town. Game on. —MICHAEL LEONG

Jed Munson's poems in Minesweeper get the far out present, the present present, the remembered present, & the shadow present, at minimum, together freaking the scene and sensed. They make rhythm and interr- uption be bound to one another as a multi-lingual record of consciousness, and this happens across a range of tones, textures, and forms in space constantly moving. I dig their angry and amused pleasure in handling and unhandling the steady intermittence of listening. —ANSELM BERRIGAN

EXACTLY!

Eric Burger, Sizzle, preorder (ships Feb 2023)

Oh man, this is a good one. The 19 scenarios in Eric Burger's Sizzle are wild and odd, funny, weird, and lovely. Reading these prose poems, one gets the feeling of punching through the veil between the everyday real and whatever's underneath it, some darkness, some language, much stranger. Ghosts, burning girls, strange beasts, dusk tunnels, holographic universes, goat people, circus freaks, sky piranhas, and mysterious spirals: this book brings the noise.

Julie Marie Wade's Fugue: an Aural History

Go ahead, tell me-what words do you love? For to love a word is to love the sound it makes. To love a word is to hear the bells in it; to use a word out of love is to become a bell-ringer, which is also to say, a campanologist.

In this book-length essay, Julie Marie Wade writes a sonic autobiography, a gorgeous inquiry into language, sound, and history.

Keywords: lyric essay, autobiography, sound, language, memory

[pdf only] / $5

[print + pdf] / $9 + $4 US shipping

The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition

It's the Championship Edition of W. Todd Kaneko's The Dead Wrestler Elegies, featuring all the killer poems and drawings in the first and now out of print edition. And, what's more, the Championship Edition includes all new poems and drawings. It's the most badass and tender book of poems you can buy!

W. Todd Kaneko's The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle. There's nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment, and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. More than a pack of wild horses, more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons, more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you. —MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK

When the lights in the arenas go out, the poems and Kaneko's stunning visual work in The Dead Wrestler Elegies honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko's fierce but tender elegies, we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all. —OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Sheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity's glory and gory days, where the body's currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability, transcendence and decay, Kaneko's lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon, kitsch and myth, the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief. —LEE ANN RORIPAUGH

These larger-than-life portraits are, more deeply, elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother, for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood, of masculinity, desire, and loss, a landscape of fantasy and dreams. —TIMOTHY YU