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
Deformed, Bravado,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: 978-0-9824203-7-90-9824203-7-4
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.
