Friday, November 23, 2012

Forthcoming books from Tinfish Press

 Tinfish Press will be rolling out our new website soon.  Many thanks to those who are making it happen: Jeff Sanner, Luanna Pescador, John Zuern, and Vera Lee.

Here are two books you will find on that new site (as well as the one that is still running at tinfishpress.com):

TO PURCHASE THESE BOOKS, GO TO http://tinfishpress.com, FIND A PURCHASE BUTTON, THEN GO TO THE END OF A LONG LIST.  Our new website will make this all a lot easier.


Coming soonest:



last edited [insert time here], by Ya Wen Ho

Ya Wen Ho's poetry sits on the (pointed, unsturdy) edge of the spoken and the digitized word. In last edited [insert time here], she presents performance texts based on google searches, drawing out accidents that occur when words crack and blend together. In his work on Shakespeare, Garrett Stewart termed this process “lexical bucklings and permutations.” Hence, for Ho, “18 is XVII- / '(aye)_-da' translated into English means 'to take a / sound / beating_two eggs and a wife together,” or “anger / 'issues'_rhymes with 'tissues,' which can either refer to / a class of soft, absorbent, disposable papers or / an ensemble_of jazz musicians played at his mother's / funeral_home directors earn on average...” This short book is a romp through contemporary life, mining the spot where virtual and actual cannot be wrenched apart, except between the syllables of quickly streaming words.

ISBNs: 978-0-9824203-9-3; 0-9824203-9-0

43 pages, $13


Sample:

from “today I will stop procrastinating and clear my desk”:



desk_top pot plants thrive in her new corner
office_politics destroys many a work
ethic_ally I find the planting of trees with fermentable fruit in public places objectionable for the sake of alcohol-poisoned
birds_of a feather flock
together_together
to gather_one ounce of rose essential oil requires
60,000 fresh
roses_are red, violets are blue, sugar is 1sweet and so are
You_tube is a hugely popular video-sharing platform. Other notable examples include Dailymotion, Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo and
more_than 15,000 works are held within the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o
Tama_gotchi is a virtual digital pet.

Poet bio:

Ya-Wen Ho graduated from her BA/BFA(Hons) at the University of Auckland in 2012 and  works as a writer, editor and independent publisher of chapbooks and zines. She has previously been published in The DeformedBravado,JAAM and Poetry New Zealand.


Blurb


Ya-wen Ho's last edited [insert time here] sits in a complex place, and how fortunate for us that this poet negotiates these intricacies with smooth turns between playful, intelligent, and funny. Ya-Wen Ho's poetry stream of conscious word play rushes us through everything from pop culture to population control in China to PhDs driving taxis asking us to try and not "detonate the sleeping dog" and have a fabulous time while (not) doing it.

Lyz Soto, author of Eulogies, Co-Executive Director of Youth Speaks Hawaiʻi, and Co-Founder of Pacific Tongues





Coming in the new year:

-->
JACK LONDON IS DEAD: CONTEMPORARY EURO-AMERICAN POETRY OF HAWAI`I
(AND SOME STORIES)
Susan M. Schultz, Editor
Tinfish Press

ISBN: 978-0-9824203-7-9
0-9824203-7-4
Copyright 2013
$20

 Many white (or, as this anthology calls them, Euro-American) poets have made Hawai`i home, either permanently or for a significant portion of their lives. But in a place marked by communities of writers marked as Local or Asian or Indigenous, there is no such community of Euro-American writers. Euro-American poetry seems to exist at two poles, either as the writing still to be resisted by non-white writers, or as work that comes from somewhere else, and is thus not relevant to Hawai`i’s literature.  This anthology features seventeen writers of poetry (and some prose), as well as their statements about being a Euro-American writer in Hawai`i. It looks at what happens after Euro-American literature has been de-centered, de-canonized.  Jack London is Dead presents writers whose work has been deeply influenced by Hawai`i, and whose poetry adds valuable voices to a complicated mix of ethnic cultures. Featured in this volume are the more experimental of the myriad Euro-American voices among Hawai`i’s many exciting writers.



Contributors: Scott Abels, Diana Aehegma, Margo Berdeshevsky, Jim Chapson, M. Thomas Gammarino, Shantel Grace, Jaimie Gusman, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Anne Kennedy, Tyler McMahon, Evan Nagle, Janna Plant, Susan M. Schultz, Eric Paul Shaffer, Julia Wieting, Rob Wilson, Meg Withers.

Blurbs:
 To contested questions of agency and authenticity in contemporary Hawai`i, this collection makes an important contribution. By clearing a public space for White authors to think (and write) through issues of a positionality compromised by the ruptures of historical violence and present day colonialism, editor Susan M. Schultz has done a brave thing. There are those who will object to this project by challenging the right of non-Indigenous “others” to write about Hawai`i. However, the sensitivity of featured authors to the complex instability of their own standing as White writers in Hawai`i offers a nuanced, layered response to that call of challenge. Without closing our eyes to history, without denying any legacy of oppression or cooptation, and as citizens of the 21st century with so much at stake for a shared planet, it seems to me that this conversation may be one of the most important and difficult, yes, but necessary ones before us.

--Caroline Sinavaiana, author of Alchemies of Distance; Side Effects, A Pilgrimage; and co-author of Mohawk/Samoa: Transmigrations.

The volume exemplifies ways in which ethnicity and ethnic identities are indeed fluid and historically contingent. Through this “experiment,” we see a poignant example of how the positionality of ethnic identities tends to shift quite quickly when one factors in the political, social and cultural circumstances in which such identities are formed and experienced in the contexts of power, discrimination, and belonging.
--Elisa Joy White, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, author of Modernity, Freedom and the African Diaspora: Dublin, New Orleans, Paris

This anthology sets itself the ambitious task of convening a group of white (Euro-American) writers for the purposes of a poetic conversation, both with Euro-American and Hawaiian literary traditions and cultural histories. In convening this assortment of writers – which it hesitates to label a community - its project is not so much to map a genealogy of whiteness as to open out new perspectives on white writers who may find themselves inhabiting positions as both majority and minority practitioners, who may index white hegemony while simultaneously being marked by a lack of legitimacy. The writers represented in this book defy easy categorisation in spite of the apparent self-evidence of the subtitle.
--Anne Brewster, Associate Professor, School of English, Media and Performing Arts at University of New South Wales


While many of the writers are stylistically “experimental,” aiming to convey new experiences of being, the Introduction and Author Statements provide inviting roadmaps that actively include readers—a poignant reversal of the theme of racial and cultural exclusion often expressed here. Jack London is Dead is essential reading for anyone interested in discovering the best of contemporary writing. How we mythologize ourselves and others, the difficulties of expressing our identities in language, the relationship between humans and nature, the sense of being and not-being part of where we are, the complexities of aesthetic heritage—these are abiding themes of art addressed by the exhilaratingly varied writers in this anthology. This volume feels both rooted in a place and rooted in its creators. This collection will be a classic.

--Lauri Ramey, author of Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry, Director of the
Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, California State University, Los Angeles

Both books were designed by Allison Hanabusa.