Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Letter Machine Press Announcement

[I got this from Noah and Joshua:]

Dear friends,

Letter Machine Editions is pleased to announce the pre-release of our first full-length collections.

Iowa by Travis Nichols

Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu

Although the official launch for these books is months away, we’re currently offering a limited-time discount of twenty dollars (postage paid) for the pair, which we’ll ship right away: http://www.lettermachine.org/purchase.html

As a fledgling press, we’d be honored if you’d help spread the word!

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Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu

ISBN: 9780981522722
$14, trade paperback, 136 pages, 5.25” x 7.5”

Is there a relationship between the population density of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from the fears of insects? Through a sequence of prose investigations, directions, theoretical performances, and character sketches, Sawako Nakayasu’s Texture Notes presses itself against everything. Here is a book of liminal cartography, where textures are percolated by thought and propelled by feeling, where intellectual frottage meets sunlight, moonlight, the pain of seeing something beautiful and an entire town enamored by a simple rock. Once again, Nakayasu’s writing explodes with genre-bending fury and fine-tuned improvisation, leaving in its wake a largess of feeling for the things of the world.

“[Nakayasu]…pursues speed, crowds, performance and collapse…serious quirkiness across a range of forms…”
—David Perry, Poetry Project Newsletter

“Nakayasu’s distortions encourage a state of deepened perception…”
—Craig Santos Pérez, Rattle

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six, spending various bouts of time in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris as well. She is the author of Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009); Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (Quale Press, 2005); and So we have been given time Or, (Verse Press, 2004). Books of translations include For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut by Takashi Hiraide (New Directions, 2008), which won the 2009 Best Translated Book Award; Four From Japan (Litmus Press, 2006) featuring four contemporary poets; To the Vast Blooming Sky (Seeing Eye Books, 2007), a chapbook of poems by the Japanese modernist Chika Sagawa; and Time of Sky // Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010) by Ayane Kawata. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and has received grants from the NEA and PEN for translating Japanese poetry. Her own poetry has been translated into Japanese, Swedish, Arabic, Chinese, and Vietnamese. More information can be found here: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net

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Iowa by Travis Nichols

ISBN: 9780981522739
$14, trade paperback, 80 pages, 5.25” x 7.5”

In Iowa, Travis Nichols turns the bleak cultural void of Midwestern adolescence into a sequence of stunning prose vignettes. Here, a coming-of-age consciousness articulates the knotty uncertainties of personal, social and familial anxieties in sentences as equally complex as the feelings they house: “The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned, all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats.” With youthful perplexity and zeal, a humorous and caustic violence of reflection drives this meditative, unclassifiable book. The scary truth is that the foreignness of private teenage cant was always asking the right questions. Now, we just have to listen: “Is this the right one thing you haunt? Looking at this one house year after year? Yes. It must be. Not to let you move on. That was the way out.”

“[T]he people who surprise me most are the ones I’ve never ever heard of before…Travis Nichols is [one] with several short sharp prose poems from…Iowa.”
—Ron Silliman, Silliman’s Blog 8/16/05

“A series of dynamic self-histories, richly compiled…stoked with radically expressive image-torquing…”
—Brad Fliss, Octopus [review of a chapbook excerpt from Iowa]

Travis Nichols was born and raised in Ames, Iowa. He now lives in Chicago, where he works as an editor at the Poetry Foundation. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Believer, Details, Paste, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Stranger, and The Huffington Post. With Katie Geha, he co-edited Poets on Painters. Iowa is his first book. His forthcoming books include the novel Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder (Coffee House Press) and an as-yet untitled collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press.

***

Thank you for your support!
Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Letter Machine Editions
http://www.lettermachine.org/

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