Author activity: j/j hastain

j/j hastain. whose Black Radish Books title Luci will appear summer 2015, has been busy! Take a peek at what xe has been up to:

Lyric essays: "Amiss and Amok" and "Copulatory Lock" at  Flapper House. And at Caliban, pages 70-75.

Interview at Touch the Donkey.

On collaboration at Harriet, along with others such as Juliana Spahr, Kevin Killian, Cedar Sigo, and jen hofer. Here is what j/j has to say:

For me, merge is a primary basis for proceeding in fulfilling ways.

There are the practicalities of collaboration and there are also the more subtle, vibration-based aspects. I find all of these in the pleasurable category. As long as attunement to the psychic particulars of the collaboration are kept at the forefront of one’s intentions therein, I find the practical and subtle components of collaborations to lend themselves in beautiful ways toward nurture. Is sharing in a shape or a stance a form of divine will? What can we accomplish together in the particulars of the premise or promises of this collaboration?

I work actively with Quan Yin. I appreciate her proclivity toward dispelling loneliness from its root rather than just applying a poultice at the event or experience or infliction of loneliness. I treat all of my collaborations as puja to Quan Yin’s choices, the vastness of her compassion field.

For me, collaboration is only troubling when it ends. I feel affront in my cosmic identities when this occurs, when for whatever reason/s we can’t work out a way to keep the telepathy open and pumping, and it atrophies due to human limit. Elaborate memorial services for such deaths need be made in me in order for them to not have the power to revert me to previous states of disparateness and mourning.

KINDERGARDE WINS 2014 LION & UNICORN AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN NORTH AMERICAN POETRY

Kindergarde Wins Johns Hopkins University Press Prize

Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children has been selected as co-winner of the 2014 Lion & Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

San Francisco, California, November 24, 2014—Sponsored by Johns Hopkins University Press, The Lion and the Unicorn Award will be announced via the publication of an essay discussing the year in children's literature. Judges for this years’ competition were Lissa Paul, Donelle Ruwe, and Craig Svonkin; the journal is edited by Joseph Thomas, PhD.

Published by Black Radish Books and edited by poet, Dana Teen Lomax, Kindergarde includes the work of internationally known innovative writers including Lyn Hejinian, Robin Blaser, Wanda Coleman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Cathy Park Hong, Harryette Mullen, Charles Bernstein, Eileen Myles, Christian Bök, Leslie Scalapino, Kevin Killian, Evie Shockley, Juliana Spahr, Anne Waldman, Juan Felipe Herrera, Rosmarie Waldrop, and many others. Kindergarde is without a doubt the hippest Holiday gift around!

Kindergarde is the first anthology to ever be recognized by the award.

PRAISE FOR KINDERGARDE

Adventurous writings for literary risk-takers and thrill-seekers.  –Kirkus Reviews

...the array of poets stepping up to present avant-garde approaches to writing for young writers is unprecedented; the anthology is a gift to writers of any age. –Rain Taxi

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.

– Ella Longpre, Naropa University

Personally, I love this project a lot because kids are smarter and weirder than many books give them

credit for. –Kickstarter

Kindergarde successfully reaches the anthology’s intended audience of children as well as a wider     

audience: readers of avant-garde literature.  –Carolyn Hembree, Jacket2

A highly celebrated and joyful collection for children from ages 3-15, Kindergarde: Avant-garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children is available through Small Press Distribution and Amazon Books.

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