Sunday, February 18, 2007

"Cover them in tarpaulin!"

New from Tarpaulin Sky Press: Max Winter’s _The Pictures_, and Sandy Florian’s _32 Pedals and 47 Stops_.

THE PICTURES, Max Winter.
ISBN: 978-0-9779019-2-0
Poetry. 5" x 7", 76 pages, perfectbound.
$12 list / $10 direct order includes US shipping:
http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/Winter/index.html
* Also available in a limited, hand-bound, hardcover edition.

Sparse, clear, and free of flourishes, the poems in _The Pictures_ examine war, boredom, death, love, decay, happiness, and worship through a series of moving and still images. In one poem, from a group of “moving” pictures, three soldiers bide their time in a barren landscape, awaiting destruction; in a “still” picture, a group of stones invite us to pay closer attention to them; in another still picture, a woman stands with her mouth open, fists clenched, words unimportant. Sight is unmysterious but wondrous in this book; the poems demonstrate that to look at something or to read it is to experience it, along with its attendant sadness or joy. The "pictures" collected here are communicative and profound, quick to read but long to develop.

Winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest, Max Winter has poems appearing recently in Free Verse, New American Writing, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Volt, The Yale Review, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, GutCult, TYPO, and New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000). He has published reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and BOMB, and is a Poetry Editor of Fence.

*

32 PEDALS & 47 STOPS, Sandy Florian.
Chapbook. Poetry/Fiction. 7" x 8.25", 36 pages, saddle-sewn.
$12 list / $10 direct order includes US shipping:
http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Press/Florian/index.html

What's new in _32 Pedals & 47_ Stops is not the rendering of time past, but the experience of time itself passing. Florian’s mode of measurement is a template of sentence structures, paragraph breaks, and tones through which each of her characters pass. Each scene, each moment in time is affected by a shapeshifting personality intent on disruption. As characters and objects appear, disappear, and reappear, one experiences both the evanescence of things and the ghostly accretion of memory, a sense of déjà vu, a sense that something you have experienced is somewhere just out of your mind’s grasp. Throughout these prose poems, Florian “makes strange” the mundane moment by revealing its artificial measurement—and by revealing that there is always something strange happening—in moments that are playful, sad, jolting, pick-pocketing, surprising, puzzling, and beautifully disorienting.

Sandy Florian's first book, _Telescope_, is published by Action Books. Her poetry and prose appears in over 30 national and international journals including Slope, bird dog, Parthenon West Review, Indiana Review, Bombay Gin, and Shampoo.

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