Pre-publication sale: new books by Sarah Mangold, Valerie Witte, and Mackenzie Carignan

Please support Black Radish Books by purchasing pre-publication copies of our new titles through PayPal. Your book(s) will be shipped as they are released. 

 In a house without a roof is open to the stars, Mackenzie Carignan’s poems make their way into the reader’s consciousness by way of scrupulous perception. Carignan’s acuity creates a vision of the world that the reader trusts even as it proves itself strange, eccentric. “Spectacle and skeptical,” she writes, “they both come from a speck/a fleck/a flicker a sliver/of what we see.” Carignan holds the tension of perception and skepticism aloft keen intelligence. Intellect is augmented, however, by a depth of feeling that makes this book a project of consummate commitment and care. The world, fostered with such tenderness, resists fragmentation: “It seems like disassembly/but it is finally alignment.”   Elizabeth Robinson

Publication date: Dec 1, 2014

Sarah Mangold’s impeccably titled Electrical Theories of Femininity is a book full of kinetic meditations on language, voice and its varied prostheses, and the evolution of evolution of evolutions. Right from the book’s start, Mangold reminds us that “to attend to color then is a part to attend to the limbs of language,” connecting the reader back to the physicality of words, the interior monologue that echoes in tandem with modifiers. Just as Barbara Guest’s poetry invites readers into a visual world where “I am listening for the sound of the fall/of colors” (“The Location of Things”), Mangold also takes her painterly penstroke and finds “there is constant action and the action is in us.” These poems are all action, all current, all magnetic field atomic excitement—they take on the “talking machine” and “consider the real act of moving.” Mangold truly does introduce a new genre of theory—that which is electrical in its consideration of gender and language (“if the hero is a girl”), that demands a space for the female pronoun in this age of machines (“The name of this heroine is mass energy”). Electrical Theories of Femininity is a lyric radical dictionary how-to guide contemporary necessity that cloaks the reader in “potential bodies activated,” a moving beyond device scapegoat to “fired up conversation.” Everyone needs to read this book!  erica kaufman, author of Instant Classic

Publication date: Feb 15, 2015

A Game of Correspondence by Valerie Witte

Publication date: April 1, 2015

Ella Longpre reviews KINDERGARDE at Something On Paper

Ella Longpre reviews Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children (Dana Teen Lomax, ed.) at Something On Paper: " Kindergarde operates as a kind of guide for children, a blueprint of creativity written in the chalk of the avant-garde, where the inhibiting constraint of technique is second to innovation and experiment." 

http://www.somethingonpaper.org/issue-2/longpre-reviews-lomax/

Forthcoming titles from Black Radish Books

Black Radish Books is thrilled to announce our publication decisions from our May open reading period. Black Radish will be publishing six new titles beginning Spring 2015:

Sarah Mangold, Electrical Theories of Femininity
Valerie Witte, A game of correspondence
David Miller, Cant

Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, the meshes
Jesse Nissim, Where they would never be invited
Jen Tynes, Hunter Monies

Amazing writers and amazing work!! Details on our publishing schedule will be available soon. All Black Radish titles are available through SPD and Amazon.

Thanks again to all the writers who trusted us with their work. It was a tremendous pleasure to read so many fine manuscripts.

j/j hastain's creative engagement with Nicole Mauro's TAX DOLLAR SUPER SONNET

Creative Engagement with Nicole Mauro’s Tax-Dollar Super Sonnet (BRB, 2014)



The line of that song written by Imagine Dragons in which the singer sings “paying my dues to the dirt,” has set a tone in me this morning.

For some reason, right now, while reading Mauro’s book for what is probably the eighth time, I feel myself being maniacally magnetized to the phantom presence of Goddesses. What would certain Goddesses say about this book? Would the Goddesses that came forward, themselves magnetized by how Mauro’s work herein has come from energy being applied to husking, be feminist (“This must be man and the terrible is”)? Would the Goddesses needfully “discountenance” man? Would they hunger for man (“with my heart help a little his”)? Even join man in his caves (“we know man and his caves”)? Is this book a form of fertile ground? Is it cosmic dirt?  Is a Goddess, literally, “faith poetically set forth”?

Yesterday, when in a somehow less needy place than usual in my dance practice, I was so grateful when I was able to dance my entire dance as gratitude to the divine. Yes: when I offer it I offer it in an intentionally open-ended way. I want it to be accessible to anyone, to anything, that might need it. Mauro’s strange but notably unstrained lyric touches me now, as a similar form of offer. This is language with no strings attached. The no strings, the feeling that because this space is not pre-designated in the context of content, is the gift of procedural works not obviously focused solely on content as path. There are many ways of having made ones way through something or gotten somewhere by way of it. There are many paths to walk.

While on the path with bare feet and without my shirt I am looking up. It is beginning to rain and rain is falling into my open eyes. When my eyes get full with this wetness being given me (rather than it being a wetness come from me as in the case of human tears), I turn my eyes to the ground (“the land it is formed”).  What I see, delights me: the curled quantities of the sides of old computer paper that I used to make winding nests with as a child. I used to hoard the ringlet reams and now here they are! Remnants of what once was something whole (a whole sheet of computer paper). If not overwhelmed by and driven primarily by its own relationship to delivering content, is a work narrative? Procedural approaches of sieving typical reality into something else, into a place built by way of renovation of a place that once was, but now, is differently, often result in space somehow having been emptied, excavated. That space can then be treated like a bowl--a bowl is a place in which new things can combine.

Forbidden rice beneath hearts of palm cut into the shape of a flower? Ingredients that might have seemed outdated or overused or plain ‘ole boring in how they previously existed in relationship to you, can suddenly be made meaningful--possibly integral to you again. In a book in which political speeches and political spaces conspire to inform a form of unexpected grace, “there be thorns.” Still, the “un-imagined freedom” abounds herein. Mauro has generated a promulgation without any one thing to say. 

-- j/j hastain

Jacket2: Sounding Kindergarde

Jacket2 has yet another feature on Black Radish's Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children -- poets reading their work from the anthology!

Why not pick up a copy, if you don't already have one?

Black Radish Books announces: TAX DOLLAR SUPER SONNET by Nicole Mauro

Black Radish Books' new title is Nicole Mauro's Tax Dollar Super Sonnet, Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet!

Poetry. Features one giant 'super' sonnet composed of text from various presidential speeches (Obama to Washington), and prose poems using Sarah Palin's autobiography, Going Rogue, and Emily Dickinson's Books.

"A procedural-marvel. I find myself wondering on active generations of lyric from within a source text (is that akin to the functionality of Rorschach (embedded-ness of underlying lyric?)). In other words, if we extract (as an activism) are we composers? Are we stewards ('servant's' 'heart') of meaning? A poet is a self-made visionary. Can someone surrogate (yes, as a verb) me (us) a position in vision ('it is true' 'I' 'can')? I think that more than anything else Mauro has offered us a way to enter 'imagined' [] 'freedom:' 'the' 'promulgation.' We need hearth-like replacements of 'counterfeit' 'countenance;' we need to feel our own agency as we are being enfolded in a slurping and slobbering (lovely) story line as it is being unfolded. What a relief to be confounded and found here! Sarah Palin's voice is blasting through an overhead speaker while Mauro wears a mask of Emily Dickinson's face, her three fingers on right hand tucked into middle of palm with her pointer finger and thumb extended ('I am the new Emily Dickinson with a gun'). Mauro moves the mouth of the mask."—j/j hastain
Nicole Mauro has published poems and criticism in numerous journals. Her publications include seven chapbooks and two full-length collections, THE CONTORTIONS (Dusie, 2007), and TAX-DOLLAR SUPER-SONNET, FEATURING SARAH PALIN AS POET (Black Radish Books, 2014). She has also co-edited an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks, INTERSECTION (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008), the first in the ChainLinks book series. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye. She teaches rhetoric and writing at the University of San Francisco.