June 2010. Click to Enlarge.
32 poems of 32 words on 32 places in Marseilles. Each poem can be read in 32 seconds or less yet contains thought enough for 32 minutes of reflection or more. The author accepts that only 32 people will ever read or see these poems but would not be disappointed to be proven wrong.
“Within months, the street was alive with ambition. With their short ‘80s skirts and high-heels, the Bandito’s waitresses looked more convincing as sluts than I’d ever looked in the clubs. Everyone was going somewhere. Time was no longer so aboriginal. In this new environment, we who just wanted to sleep looked like pale maggots exposed to the sun.”
Chris Kraus is the author of four novels: I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and the forthcoming Summer of Hate. A collection of her art essays, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, was published by Semiotexte/MIT Press in 2004, followed by LA Artland, published in the UK by Black Dog Press. She has taught writing at the European Graduate School and UC San Diego. TRICK first appeared in Working Sex: Sex Workers Write about a Changing Industry, edited by Annie Oakely and published by Seal Press in 2007.
12 pages, staple-bound, available upon request.
Sacrifice Press publishes chapbooks of literary texts that strike us as interesting and special. We’re particularly drawn to self-referential fiction, pseudobiblical poetry, captivity narratives, blasphemous short plays, experimental nonfiction, and other textual puzzles.
Self-obsessed, self-aware, self-referential, self-examining, outrageously self-aggrandizing and endearingly self-deprecating, Joshua Abelow’s ASHES GIFTED is a collection of tongue-in-cheek words and images that could, if it wasn’t such a risky idea, be offered to favorite painters and poets to mix into their work.
I Don’t Want to Name Names
My name is Joshua Abelow. It feels great to write my name. I love the way it looks in print. It looks great typewritten or handwritten. It looks especially beautiful on the face of a big check. Most people call me Josh, but recently a girl from Switzerland told me she prefers calling me Joshua because it’s more beautiful. I told her I was fine with that. My birth name is, in fact, Joshua, but Josh is easier for Americans to say and I grew up in America. I decided to use Joshua, instead of Josh, as my professional name because I like the way the “A” at the end of Joshua lines up with the “A” at the beginning of Abelow. Like this: JOSHUA ABELOW. One of the reasons I decided to become an artist at an early age is because Abelow is an interesting-sounding name. It sounded artistic to me so I figured I must be artistic, too. Famous artists always have interesting-sounding names. I’m not famous, but I’m convinced my name is preceding me in this regard. Fame is just around the corner, like my next lover or girlfriend. A name must look good in print for an artist to become relevant – this is common knowledge. The downside to having a good-looking name is that the work might not live up to the name. What a drag that would be. It happens all the time, but I don’t want to name names.
12 pages, staple-bound, available for immediate shipping.
Doing her share to support the wartime manufacture of superior housewives, Amanda Laughtland delivers KITCHEN TIDBITS, an excerpt from Improving Homes and Lives, a longer manuscript inspired by magazine articles and advertisements from 1943. Postcards to Box 464, her collection of eavesdropped and nostalgic poems, will be published imminently by Bootstrap Productions. From her own kitchen table in the suburbs of Seattle, she also operates Teeny Tiny, a literary zine and mini-chapbook series, soon to expand into somewhat larger-sized books with the publication of Collected Kona by Marcia Woodard.
12 pages, staple-bound, guaranteed to whet your poetic appetite.
In GRANDPA ZINN, Chris Wells tests the Oulipian theory of the textual constraint and its power to produce surreal, subconscious materials. The author, whose presence dominates the seemingly simplistic narrative, makes sure that every letter of the alphabet appears at least once in each sentence, calling attention to the wonderful artificiality of the characters, the situation, and fiction itself. Curiously, this relentless manipulation of language, with its action-oriented agenda and surprising mixture of registers, results in a quiet, complex, subtly humorous and strangely sad story.
12 pages, staple-bound, delightfully pangrammatic.
A one-act excerpt from the ever-relevant theatrical satire Queen of the Bathtub, THE BINDING marked the rise to notoriety of Hanoch Levin, Israeli playwright, poet, prose master, screenwriter, and stage director. First performed in Tel Aviv in 1970, the play received scathing reviews, won nationwide disapproval, and was deemed blasphemous, unpatriotic, and sickening. Following relentless public outcry, condemnation from political, military, and religious authorities, and nightly protests at the theater, the production was forced to close after less than twenty performances.
Translated from Modern Hebrew by Gilad Elbom.
12 pages, staple-bound, beautifully printed on an inexpensive inkjet printer.
A self-conscious narrative evoking the famous biblical scene at Mount Horeb, BITTER HERB opens with a personal introduction: a literary convention that soon exposes itself as a clever fabrication. Calling attention to her own unreliability, the speaker stages a curious series of defining episodes—nebulous memories, manufactured phobias, imaginary facts, conflicting versions—that undermine notions of subjectivity, traditional storytelling strategies, and the very idea of honesty. Ultimately, and despite the recurrent act of self-naming, the speaker’s identity, like that of the Hebrew deity, remains mysterious, unmentionable, and persistently elusive.
