Poetry Titles | Tarpaulin Sky Press
Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than those offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.
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Aaron Apps | Jenny Boully | Ana Bozicevic | Julia Brennan | Rebecca Brown | Jennifer S. Cheng | Traci O. Connor | Olivia Cronk | Mark Cunningham | Piper J. Daniels | Claire Donato | Steven Dunn | Danielle Dutton | Sandy Florian | Sarah Goldstein | Johannes Göransson | Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson | Dana Green | Elizabeth Hall | James Haug | Claire Hero | Amy King | Paul Koneazny | Gordon Massman | Paul McCormick | Joyelle McSweeney | Teresa K. Miller | Jeanne Morel | Mariko Nagai | Kim Parko | Andrew Michael Roberts | Joanna Ruocco | Lauren Russell | Brandon Shimoda | Kim Gek Lin Short | Chad Sweeney | Shelly Taylor | GC Waldrep | Max Winter | david wolach | Andrew Zornoza
Order directly from Tarpaulin Sky Press and enjoy free shipping in the U.S. as well as better prices than those offered by a certain nightmarish company whose name we shan’t utter.
Bookstores, libraries, and organizations may order from our distributors or order directly from TS here.
Summer
Poetry, 120 pages, paperback. August 2022
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar
Descent
Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)
Womonster
"I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With Womonster, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Womonster is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years" (Johannes Göransson)
Jennifer S. Cheng, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”
SPD Poetry Bestseller
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil
“Exquisite imagination…” (Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”) Exhilarating…An alt-epic for the 21st century…Visionary…Rich and glorious.” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review) “If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life.” (Bhanu Kapil)
Amy King: The Missing Museum
Co-winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize
A Small Press Distribution Poetry Bestseller
"Sometimes the thrill of reading poetry is the sense one minute that you understand the poet so clearly you’re not just seeing through her eyes but, perhaps more importantly, breathing through her lungs. (Lambda Literary) A visceral stunner … and an instruction manual…. King’s archival work testifies to the power—however obscured by the daily noise of our historical moment—of art, of the possibility for artists to legislate the world. (Kenyon Review)
Johannes Göransson: The Sugar Book
“Doubling down on his trademark misanthropic imagery amid a pageantry of the unpleasant” (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); “Göransson is certainly of the Left, but his work is as savagely anti-idealist as Burroughs or Guyotat or Ballard.” (ENTROPY MAGAZINE); “Language smeared with bodily fluid and sex, language spackled with violence and death ... inhabiting that glittering/grotesque duality of Kardashian Family and Manson Family” (AMERICAN MICROREVIEWS).
david wolach: Hospitalogy
"An extraordinary work that takes us into the complex guts of the 'hospital-hotel complex.' Here the body rebels, redacts, pulls, and sings between patient and patient. wolach performs a radical somatics, procedural anatomic work, queer narrativity.'" (ERICA KAUFMAN); "The strange tearing apart held inside that holds you inside, singing static and shrapnel.... Dear 'jesus of the pain.' Welcome to david wolach’s beautiful corrosion." (FRED MOTEN); "holds the space of the clinic we don’t yet have, the dark we need, the chronic we might dream rather than undergo." (ELENI STECOPOULOS); "documents the soft rebellion of staying alive, articulating the transition from invisibility to indecipherability." (FRANK SHERLOCK)
Johannes Göransson: Haute Surveillance
"[A] feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics..... kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen." (BLAKE BUTLER, VICE); "part epic poem, part science fiction, part pornographic film, and all literature" (JOHN YAU, HYPERALLERGIC); "so filled with invention and wit and ferocity that I was compelled to read it, at times against my will, mesmerized, enthralled. (CAROLE MASO)
Jenny Boully: not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
In not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, Jenny Boully presents us with a “deliciously creepy” swan song from Wendy Darling to Peter Pan. As in her previous book [one love affair]*, Boully reads between the lines of a text—in this case J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy—and emerges with the darker underside, with those sinister or subversive places merely echoed or hinted at. "[T]o delve into Boully's work is to dive with faith from the plank -- to jump, with hope and belief and a wish to see what the author has given us: a fresh, imaginative look at a tale as ageless as Peter himself." (BOOKSLUT) "Simultaneously metaphysical and visceral, these addresses from Wendy to Peter in lyric prose are scary, sexual, and intellectually disarming." (HUFFINGTON POST); "Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer—in the best way." (ANDER MONSON)
Johannes Göransson: Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
"I don't know where else you could contract the plague in these words but by ten TVs at once. On the TVs play: Salo, the weather channel, 2x Fassbinder (any), Family Double Dare, ads for ground beef, blurry surgical recordings, porno, porno, Anger (all).... You'll need a machine gun and a body double.... Burroughs and Genet and 'Pac are dead. Long live Goransson" (BLAKE BUTLER); "a discomfiting, filthy, hilarious, and ecstatic piece of literature that is cocked and ready" (BOOKSLUT); "Page after page begins to infect the reader, begins to parasite the reader as host, parasite the host’s inner child ... before immolating the host, the reader" (PANK MAG); "a pile up of sequined things and fleshy things.... The audience is often implicated. After all, torture and interrogation is not borne out of individual will and action alone.... All aboard" (HTML GIANT)
Shelly Taylor: Black-Eyed Heifer
Shelly Taylor's debut collection of poems is a "mosaic of form and language, childhood and adulthood, the American South, horses, gravel roads, and light. It is a riptide pulling its readers out into the deep, powerful currents of nostalgia. It is unrelenting" (TRIQUARTERLY); "Radically innovative use of language" (JIM HARRISON); "Language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent.... Hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category." (JANE MILLER); "A mighty anthem to down home local culture ... the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land.... Abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty" (BRENDA IIJIMA)
Ana Božičević: Stars of the Night Commute
Ana Božičević's debut poetry collection,
Gordon Massman: The Essential Numbers 1991-2008
Gordon Massman's The Essential Numbers 1991-2008, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "Unyielding monoliths of spit and tongue.... Fucked and ready to fuck your head.... Where so much ‘poetry’ can be yadda, these are words saying something hard and loud, and meaning it.... This is the kind of book you can’t ask for until you have it." (BLAKE BUTLER, HTML GIANT); "Gordon Massman is the kind of writer that guts you, revolts you" (SHELLY TAYLOR); "timid people be damned" (BRANDON SHIMODA)
Mark Cunningham: Body Language
Mark Cunningham's first full-length collection of prose poems, Body Language (TSky Press, 2008): "Cunningham tests what allusions, anecdotes, punch lines you know, be they liturgical, canonical, numerical, numerological, historical, mystical, magical, simple, or other.... It’s funny, sad and serious. Ultimately, reflective.... Impressive.... Body Language is a great choose-your-own adventure. There’s something for us all. And that’s fun." (THE ADIRONDACK REVIEW); "Always thought-provoking, always enjoyable and unexpected, the combination of topics of math, language and symbolism via the alphabet and the body as a complex system, turns out to be an appropriate, engaging compendium." (PRICK OF THE SPINDLE)
Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Figures for a Darkroom Voice
Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson passed a notebook back and forth, creating and trading poems and prose-poems. Then they handed these poems to artist Noah Saterstrom. This produced Figures for a Darkroom Voice (2007): "This book glitters" (TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN); "their voice comes across not as a warning, but as an ominous knell" (INTERIM); "These aren't just two guys with three names each; these are two of the poets to watch in the next generation" (POWELL'S STAFF PICK)
Max Winter: The Pictures
Max Winter's first poetry collection, The Pictures, from Tarpaulin Sky Press: "A long-awaited debut by a promising younger poet" (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY); "Inherently fun" (BOOKSLUT); "subtle, thought-provoking" (OPEN LETTERS); "very much worth reading" (OCTOPUS MAGAZINE)
Jenny Boully: [one love affair]*
Jenny Boully's one love affair (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006) meditates on mud daubers, Duras, and the deaths of mentally ill and drug-addicted lovers, blurring fiction, essay, and memoir in an extended prose poem that is as much a study of how we read as it is a treatise on the language of love affairs: a language of hidden messages, coded words, cryptic gestures, and suspicion: "I highly recommend it, especially if you’re looking for a way into the “trans-genre” of prose poetry." (OPEN LETTERS MONTHLY); "Boully’s sentences are a joy in and of themselves" (RATTLE); "A genre-bending back-pocket book.... Gritty and intellectual ... addictive and soothing ... fitting for just about anyone’s bookshelf.... You’re reading the book for second, third, and fourth time." (COLDFRONT)
Summer
Poetry, 120 pages, paperback. August 2022
inside language treacherous lilac
language syrener made for girls
like me for me the lilacs bloom
like little fingerprints hundreds
of bloody little finger prints I can’t hear
you I’m listening to the radio my wife
is feeding me pomegranate seeds
she’s feeding me with bloody fingers
it’s summer it’s summer I can’t
hear you det är sommar
Descent
Winner: 2021 Poetry Society of America Anna Rabinowitz Prize
Poetry Bestseller: Small Press Distribution.
In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary's omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traverses centuries as the past bleeds into the present. “A search for truths felt in one’s bones.” (Brenda Coultas) "An audacious, acid, lyrical re-membering.... Russell speaks to us. Sit all the way down and listen up.” (Douglas Kearney) “Sifting nimbly through all manner of documentation and employing form in revelatory ways, Russell’s poems are as much ascent—into a present shaped by the past—as descent from America’s true heroic figures.” (John Keene)
Womonster
"I was thrilled and moved by this wild book, which moves from an explosive rejection of narrative to the creation of a theater of home, that shabby, beautiful structure built with girly hope, our fortification against loss." (Suzanne Scanlon) "With Womonster, Olivia Cronk shows that we are other people as much as we are our various selves. We are the people who share our lives; we are our loved ones and our aggressors. If this makes us monsters, then everyone's a monster." (Jay Besemer) "Womonster is both a hyper-abject soap opera of beige underwear, dusty crystal, sinks full of bloodied dishes, and a redemptive horror story about the power of becoming the monster." (Laura Ellen Joyce) "Olivia Cronk is one of my favorite US poets over the past 15 years" (Johannes Göransson)
Jennifer S. Cheng, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems
Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”
SPD Poetry Bestseller
Winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, chosen by Bhanu Kapil
“Exquisite imagination…” (Publishers Weekly “Best Books 2018”) Exhilarating…An alt-epic for the 21st century…Visionary…Rich and glorious.” (Publishers Weekly Starred Review) “If reading is a form of pilgrimage, then Cheng gives us its charnel ground events, animal conversions, guiding figures and elemental life.” (Bhanu Kapil)