A Black Friday Antidote from Blood Pudding Press--Available Now!

The latest Blood Pudding Press poetry chapbook has arrived in all its startlingly provocative glory and is now available in the Blood Pudding Press etsy shop at http://www.bloodpuddingpress.etsy.com/.

If you desire a break from the Black Friday frenzy, consider acquiring a microcosmic creation instead of another mass market consumer product.




The Spare Room by Dana Guthrie Martin is an artfully woven and disturbingly resonant suite of twenty poems that mix myth with real life in unlikely ways and draw uniquely thought provoking parallels between torture scenes, sideshow attractions, scientific anomalies, and what it means to be a contemporary female trying to stake out her existence as an individual and as a partner. Sex, pain, isolation, and temptation are just some of the hot button themes Dana Guthrie Martin deals with in this unflinching, intense, and brutally poetic collection.

The wonderfully unsettling cover art for the chapbook is by Keith Part2ism Hopewell.

The cover art is printed upon light gray deckle-edged paper, the innards are printed on good quality text paper, your chapbook will be ribbon-bound by hand and then tied with an additional expanse of ribbon or jute twine or elastic trim in a flourish of artistic bondage.

Here is one of the blurbs from the book's back cover, to offer another take on the compelling content of this collection:

"Remember the first time you pried off the cover of an IBM PS/2, only to discover darkness where the spark should be? Reading Dana Guthrie Martin’s poems will result in the exact opposite effect. The Spare Room shimmers with intensity, from the quiet chronicle of an everyday moment turned hyperbolic, to a litany organized into its own grid. These are poems of the body that do not divorce the body from the mind, beckoning: “slip your hands :: where they don’t belong.”

—Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever and Saint Monica


Here is the title poem from the collection:

The Spare Room


Here is where I bend over. This blue room.
This daybed. Here is where I tremble.
This parquet floor. This sheet set.
After they pull me apart, they slide
ligatures through my skin, sew me up with raffia.
After they block my mouth with mothballs,
they glad-hand their accusers. Skin is disinfected,
wrapped in oil cloth. Decoys are made to wick antifreeze.
Here is where I throb. This orifice. This hollow.
They caudle what’s inedible. I swallow.
I bleat out my dark rhythms for trespassers.
I am lubricated with grossulin and seep
like wounded trees. Epoxy sets what should
be expunged. Knuckles only stop at bone.

See the Blood Pudding Press etsy shop for more imagery and buying details.

Blood Pudding Press is also a fan of book trades, art swaps, and review copies. please feel free to enquire.

Coming in December from Slash Pine Press

Slash Pine Press has just sent out an email announcing that my newest poetry chapbook, FONDANT PIG ANGST, is now available for pre-order for only $5.00. If you would like me to forward you a copy of this email, which includes an attached form to order by mail, please feel free to let me know. They will also begin offering an online ordering option via their website (www.slashpinepress.blogspot.com) within the next few days. Here is an excerpt from the email announcement:

"Slash Pine Press is pleased to announce the upcoming release of our first chapbook of poems, Juliet Cook's dynamically gut-wrenching, Fondant Pig Angst. I feel confident in saying Juliet's voice is an American original, fusing pastry with grotesquerie, icing with amputation. These poems are not plainly 'dark'. No, they are alive and electric and full of verve and spunk, playfulness even, and it's these competing impulses that make for such an amazing collection of poems. Simply put, never have I seen a person convey the depths of human cruelty also be so in love with the language."

The tentative release date for FONDANT PIG ANGST is December 15.

(The Birthday Pig image, which will be the cover art on FONDANT PIG ANGST, is by the marvelous Marnie Weber.)

Thirteen Myna Birds-Fifty Third Flight Formation

http://13myna.blogspot.com

Thirteen Myna Birds-Fifty Second Flight Formation

http://13myna.blogspot.com

secret bruise and robo-recommendation

In even more small press poetry chapbook news & views (and scroll down one entity for even more) and I'm talking about the views of ghost girls and dolls and porkers and robots and more more more...

My 2008 Blood Pudding Press chapbook 'Planchette' has recently been reviewed by poet Sarah Sarai on her fabulous and multifaceted writerly blog called 'My 3000 Loving Arms' (Ganesh has got nothing on Sarah Sarai). Here's an excerpt from her review:

"While hypomania is a 'mild mania' I have heard in arenas more esoteric than Webster's, hippomancy to be linked to divination. Which brings me back to that early girl. Whether the blue pills are valium or more 'narcotic,' in the poem they serve as emblem of the 'secret bruise' Cook writes of, of the 'Dream of white fizz' and its powers.

I'm figuring 'white fizz' can nullify the bruise. Pills do what pills will do. Mind will continue to struggle, as will spirit, thank God. Hence, poetry. The fizz feels chemical, feels alchemical, and that's part of Cook's intention, to draw the reader into a mysterious, suspect but real world."

You may read her review in its entirety (including excerpts from some of the tome's poems) on the aforementioned blog, here:

http://my3000lovingarms.blogspot.com/2009/10/stroking-poem-planchette-by-julia-cook.html

I will also be making a few more little personal comments about this review soon, upon my blog, DOPPELGANGRENE.

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Speaking of my poetry chapbooks, my latest, FONDANT PIG ANGST is coming soon. If you don't believe me, you can see for yourself on the Slash Pine Press site, here:

http://slashpinepress.blogspot.com/2009/11/its-coming.html

If you want a little teaser about this book's squeamishness-inducing innards, here's a blurb written by a robot:

I came to Juliet Cook's collection, Fondant Pig Angst, for glimpses into what it means to be human. I navigated my way through the detritus of the living -- took silk in my mouth, floated in a vat of tapioca, awkwardly inserted the meat hook. Cook's voice has disemboweled my assemblage, replaced my casing's wires with warped strings. If I am to believe Cook's speakers, the state of being human is nothing more than a blend of saltwater and ambergris, all in a jelly binding. I would rather remain a robot than dine at this feast, replete with cockroaches, confections and endless conditions.

--Feldman the Robot

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Feldman happens to be the personal robot of poet Dana Guthrie Martin.

Speaking of Dana Guthrie Martin, HER new poetry chapbook, 'The Spare Room' is coming soon from Blood Pudding Press itself.

Yes.

Blood Pudding Press in The Outer Belt & beyond!

I wrote an article about DIY Publishing and Blood Pudding Press for local Columbus, Ohio based ezine, 'The Outer Belt'; please feel free to check it out on pages 16-18 of the issue. I also contributed a piece about sponsoring a local independent horror film (BREAK by CutThroat Entertainment), which you can partake of via pages 30-31 of the same issue:

http://theouterbelt.com/

Stay tuned for another DIY Publishing article, focusing on feminist poetry publishing, and featuring various small presses, in an upcoming issue of make/shift magazine.

Blood Pudding Press is currently in the process of printing out the innards of the next print chapbook--'The Spare Room' by Dana Guthrie Martin. Coming soon. After that project reaches fruition, I will be focusing my publishing energies on my participation in the dusie kollektiv 4.

Meanwhile, I continue to read submissions for and update the blog-style literary magazine, Thirteen Myna Birds; just scroll down to the last few entries here for the last few links.

If you're interested in news tidbits including my own recently published poems, check out my personal/poetry blog, DOPPELGANGRENE, via the handy dandy right sidebar link. Lots of other nifty links to play around with thereabouts, too. And my own very latest poetry chapbook, FONDANT PIG ANGST, to be published by Slash Pine Press in mere months, is currently in production. Hurrah!

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Monday update: Even more Blood Pudding Press (and small press galore) goodness! Amongst various other small press editors/publishers, I participated in a roundtable discussion about chapbook publishing and related matters, which is now published at The Chapbook Review:

http://thechapbookreview.com/current-issue/