Good Bacon! (News from our Poets&Authors)

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (E. Kristin Anderson)

Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night  (forthcoming)
by E. Kristin Anderson // @ek_anderson

• EKA‘s A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) was featured as Sundress Pub’s Best Dressed (Wardrobe) the week of Sept 21!

Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen into the Bay (forthcoming)
by Sarah Ann Winn // @blueaisling

• Two of Sarah’s poems from her forthcoming micro chap (Porkbelly, 2016), “HAUNTING THE LAST HOUSE ON HOLLAND ISLAND, FALLEN INTO THE BAY, A GHOST CENTO” & “REVISING THE LAST HOUSE,” are up on The Boiler Journal!
• An interview (“On the ephemeral things I hold dear“) with Sarah is up on Laura Madeline Wiseman‘s blog. A shout-out to Porkbelly is in there, but we’d be posting it anyway. 😀
• You can download Sarah’s e-chap Portage free on Sundress Publication’s website.

How to Leave a Farmhouse by Beth McDermott (poetry)

How to Leave a Farmhouse (Beth McDermott, cover: Nicci Mechler)

How to Leave a Farmhouse engages the landscape, flora, and the manmade, to weave a multi-part narrative of place. Structures are left behind to become a part of the historical and visual character of this land—these poems draw from documents and paintings, then imagine something deeper, crafting something that’s a little bit ekphrasis, a little bit record, and something that’s almost the ghost story of a farmhouse. “What’s intact, you’ve learned, / is the upside of ruinous. What’s ruinous is documented / before it disappears. What disappears—this is what it means / to go out with guns blazing as someone else is taking / the bull by the horns…” | available from our shop

The chapbook measures about 5.25 x 5 inches. Its cover is printed via inkjet on Epson matte photo paper. Each book is handbound & trimmed.

An excerpt from “The Mushroom Farmer:”

A new housing development threatens to budge [her] another time, for the last time.
-Goodness Greeness “Farm Spotlight”

I read about her digging
her heels in

soil that tended to
ball up

on the plow.  The feature
story is her chance

to self-promote,
even though nothing

will save her
from eminent

domain, including
her revulsion

for starter spawn.
Yet her perspective is so

specialized—
the public can’t

translate it.
Who cares

that she uses
manure, which stems

from maneuver?
Here she is

among the fruiting
bodies, shining

her lamp over racks
of shitake.

Their spores require
such sterility—

a room like a cave
with the ground

swept clean.

About the the poet:

Beth McDermott has received first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest and an Honorable Mention for the Associated Writing Programs’ Intro Award in Poetry.  Her poems have recently appeared in journals such as DIAGRAM, Harpur Palate, Terrain.org, and Jet Fuel Review.  She holds degrees from Hope College, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently Visiting Professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL.

About the cover artist:

Nicci splits her time between exploring, telling tales, and painting girls with inky tattoos. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with a pack of roomies & rescue animals specializing in troublemaking and joy. | @damnredshoes | damnredshoes.wordpress.com

Bacon (Good News from Porkbelly’s Poets&Authors)

What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark & hard (stack of books)

My Heart in Aspic by Sonya Vatomsky (cover: Shannon Perry)

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (E. Kristin Anderson)

My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Sonya Vatomsky // @coolniceghost

• Sonya’s full length, Salt is for Curing (Sator Press, 2015) is currently in pre-order. | teaser
• The first review of Sonya’s Salt is for Curing is up at The Belfry.
• My Heart in Aspic reviewed by Anna Elena Eyre via Hyacinth Girl Press.

“Vatomsky’s poetry explores this double edge of femininity in raw and exposing poems that surface in dreams as though they’re the remnants of a toothsome meal. Poems can be a shared breath, and Vatomsky allows us to breathe that breath that at once is an inhale/exhale or a birth and death.” | full review at HGP

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What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark & hard (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Sarah B. Boyle // @pyrrhicspondee

• “On D Block” (the opening poem in What’s pink & shiny/ what’s dark and hard) was nominated by Lunch Ticket for Best of the Net.
• Also nominated by Lunch Ticket for Best of the Net: “Sea and Salt.”

Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night  (forthcoming)
by E. Kristin Anderson // @ek_anderson

• Pray, Pray, Pray is available for pre-order & is set to launch Oct 20, 2015. (pre-orders out sooner!)
• chapbook, FIRE IN THE SKY, is forthcoming in 2016 from Grey Book Press.
• Her poetry is up on The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society!

Pray, Pray, Pray (cover preview!)

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (E. Kristin Anderson)

E. Kristin Anderson’s forthcoming chapbook of poems, Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night. Now available for pre-order.

What folks are already saying about this book:

“It is the most American autumn evening turning to night in E. Kristin Anderson’s spectacular Pray, Pray, Pray. The speaker can’t sleep, but implores the reader to “Put your hand on my back and push.” Comply and crack the spine for these epistolary anthems to love and insomnia. While the poet masterfully assembles the false syllogisms of our contemporary lives, she knows some things are true. For example, “Poems do not lie.” I first met E. Kristin in Minneapolis, at an ethereal dance party celebrating Prince. After reading Pray, Pray, Pray, I imagine her always there, her “mind…an animal, American…down to the bone.” Anderson is “The Kid,” but fresh and female, now dancing and singing under the purple rain by some “halogen miracle.” Let us all join in her praise.”

~Sandra Marchetti, author of Confluence and Heart Radicals

“E. Kristin Anderson’s poems are intimate, brave and driven by a powerful search for calm and security in a world that fails us so often. PRAY, PRAY, PRAY chooses the musician Prince as its muse and–like that musical genius–these poems are equally adept at navigating both the high and low notes of the complex, full life they describe. The voice of the poems is at once exultant and fraught, bringing readers deeply into our America, a country in which “there is only beauty and emptiness,” and anxiety and depression are a “dark secret,” but a pop icon can be “an old friend” or even a savior. These are wonderful, truthful poems. You should read them immediately.”

~Jessica Piazza, author of Interrobang and This is not a sky

Good Stuff

Publications & news from our contributors this week (listed under chapbook titles):

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (E. Kristin Anderson)

My Heart in Aspic by Sonya Vatomsky (cover: Shannon Perry)

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (available for pre-order)
by E. Kristin Anderson // @ek_anderson

• 2 poems from EKA went up at Hermeneutic Chaos.
• You can also find EKA’s work in the latest issue of Room (38.3), theme: Trespass. (print)

My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Sonya Vatomsky // @coolniceghost

• reviewed by Allie Marini for Rhizomatic Ideas // Zoetic Press

“Like most aspic dishes, these pieces are comprised of the offal and gelatin that are the overlooked byproducts of most cooking: these are the squeaky bits, the innards, the organ meats and the boiled-down bones of experience, of love, of violence, of survival.”

Set the Garden on Fire (Chen Chen)

Set the Garden on Fire by Chen Chen (cover: Nicci Mechler)

This is the story of how a man is made up of everything from the cleaver his mother wields in the kitchen to the wonder pulled down from an evening a 13 year old spends draped in the arms of tree under the stars, running shoes laced for a proper leaving. It’s about identity and becoming, and the pain and the beauty in growing up a boy desiring other boys, the son caught between a father’s image and complicated, gorgeously messy reality, and the straddling of at least two cultures & citizenship. Even in the sharper moments, blade-edged and unflinching, this book remains somehow tender. | available from our shop

The chapbook measures about 5.25 x 5 inches. Its cover is printed via inkjet on Epson matte photo paper. Each book is handbound & trimmed.

An excerpt from “Tell me a Story of Deep Delight:”

Tell Me a Story of Deep Delight (excerpt), Chen Chen

An excerpt from the poem at the center of the chap:

The Tale of the Heart & the Knife (excerpt), Chen Chen

About the poet:

Chen Chen holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a University Fellow. He has also received fellowships from Kundiman and the Saltonstall Foundation. New work has appeared/is forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, The Massachusetts Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Best American Poetry 2015, among others. Chen is the winner of the Matt Clark Editors’ Choice Award, from New Delta Review, and the Joyce Carol Oates Award, selected by Ishion Hutchinson. A 2015 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, he is currently a PhD candidate in English & Creative Writing at Texas Tech University and lives in Lubbock, TX with his partner, Jeff Gilbert. Visit him at chenchenwrites.com.

About the cover artist:

Nicci splits her time between exploring, telling tales, and painting girls with inky tattoos. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with a pack of roomies & rescue animals specializing in troublemaking and joy. | @damnredshoes | damnredshoes.wordpress.com

What others are saying about this work:

“Chen Chen has made his poems partly out of anger and partly out of wonder. The wonder comes from the celebration of the beloved and expanding notions of desire. Chen has the intellectual discernment to identify the disparities and rifts and indignities in citizenship and identity. In his chapbook Set the Garden on Fire, he has brought these ideas together with, well, incendiary effect.”

–Bruce Smith, author of Devotions

Myth+Magic Anthology

Myth+Magic anthology (cover: Angie Reed Garner)

Myth+Magic is a collection of modern takes on old myth, fable, and fairy tale. Nothing is quite what it seems to be. Discover it with us? Limited edition (125), bound by hand. This handbound booklet includes poetry & fiction curated by the joint efforts of Porkbelly & Sugared Water staff. | $10

contributors

Suzanna Anderson
Leah Browning
Andrea Blythe
Laura Bylenok
M. Brett Gaffney
Lisa Megraw
Lucas Olson
Marlana Patton
Monica Rico
Sarah Ann Winn

from the editors

Myth+Magic is a special edition outside of the regular submission period & subscription. We asked for updates of classics—new takes on old tales—and original work. Nothing here is quite what it seems to be. There is always more, and we welcome the deepening of the shadows on the path. All the best forests have them.

Included in this edition you’ll find short works inspired folk tale, fable, fairy tale, gods, monsters, myth, magic, tricksters, divination, witchcraft, and herbalism.

Prepare to be enchanted.

Very affectionately yours,

Sugared Water & Porkbelly Press

about the press

Porkbelly Press creates chapbooks in handbound, small editions. Launched in 2014, PP seeks works with a strong sense of voice, place, and just a touch of fabulism, folklore, or magic. We make our home on the banks of the Ohio River, in a little town called Cincinnati, where pigs fly. // porkbellypress.wordpress.com

colophon

40 pages, 5×7 inches, handbound & trimmed. 24lb bright white paper guts & Epson matte cover (inkjet printed). Garamond is our font of choice. Printed in August 2015.

cover artist

Our cover features a painting by Kentucky-born painter Angie Reed Garner. Garner is a second-generation narrative painter from Kentucky. The piece is “under water” (oil paint, 28×22 inches).

excerpts

from “Hunters” by M. Brett Gaffney:

After supper she pulls on boots,
prepares her heart.

The girl is small but carries the gun
like she would a baby, twig fingers light
on its tongue of a trigger.

Her father hoists his rifle, heavy with ammo,
the glint of his knife like teeth in the fading light.

They hunt at twilight, when wild things stumble
onto the roads like drowsy children,
thickets busy with thorns.

from “How to Fold a Dream” by Sarah Ann Winn:

You have to think first of the breakables.
The four mockingbirds growing smaller
on receding fence posts
must be stacked one inside the other
like nesting dolls. Wrap their song in a cyan silk scarf.
Place it in the smallest.
It must be tucked in carefully.

Take down Venus.
Pack it separately – it’s wish laden, fragile.

Reviews

Myth+Magic: A Review – via Christopher Morgan & Alien Mouth.