effing blog

from Effing Press: THRENODY by Tom Clark

Threnody
8x10.5, 28 pages
text and illustrations by Tom Clark
w/ iron oxide endpapers
$8.00

The book begins:

Prologue: Dead End

The heavy industries that built our world and shaped our lives are dying. The sounds and sights in these grim cathedrals they’ve left behind—the empty vestiges of their once throbbing rituals, the iron foundries and sheet metal works, the copper smelting and cable manufacturing plants—echo and reflect their death throes. A pall of absence as dense as a toxic cloud hangs over things. Yet time continues to move forward: along rusted tracks and corroded rails, down dark alleys, across suspended gangways, past girders dangling precariously in black air, around blind corners through a labyrinth of internal factory corridors. Time that is the ghostly material medium in which we think and act—compelled onward yet never knowing where we’re going, turned aside, derailed, misled, diverted, confused, disoriented and finally lost—continues to grind on, as long as we keep breathing. This world of time through which we travel, which we have made, and which has made us, has only one direction, forward, and one speed, this speed, and one destination, a dead end that repeats itself over and over.

To order click the Buy Now button in the right hand column or at the effing press website. Or send cash, check, or m/o to Scott Pierce, 703 W. 11th Street #2, Austin, TX 78701.

Stuff

Busy here where clouds are few.  Busy here in the shade. 

The new effing chapbook Threnody is in bindery now and should be available within a day or so.  It's beautiful, it's big, it's tough as nails.  I am immensely proud to have anything to do with this book.  Look for a publication announcement in an effing email, listserve, or blog near you.   

That reminds me, I am going to be using the effing email list more in the near future and beyond to communicate new effing publications and events of which there will be many.  If you aren't signed up and want to stay in the know add your edress here.  Effing spam is not heavy nor bad for the environment and is said to improve bone strength.

So here's to your bones. 

Some other publication news around small press land:

Carve Editions has released Jess Myne's birds for example and Chris Rizzo's Zing.  I got mine the other day and dig em both.  And I always dig the sparse, clean designs of Aaron Tieger. 

Hot Whiskey Magazine is absolutely beautiful.  Great work in there and just a fantastic design overall.  Maybe the coolest looking small press journal I've held in my hands in a while.  Ahh, I remember the days when editors Michael and Jen weren't even sure how to open the layout software.  Now look at em go.   Order this mag if only to smell it.

Wherever We Put Our Hats #3 is just out, edited by Jon Leon.  Simple production, complex poetry.  Get you some.  I really like Jon's taste in poetry and have enjoyed some good correspondence with him lately.

Also received the latest issue of Damn the Ceasars, edited by Richard Owens (no URL).  The production for this loaded journal has gone up a notch too, now with a dust jacket and a nicer text paper.  Still reads the same badass way though.  Order from Richard Owen, PO Box 1223, Montague, NJ, 07827.

There's more but I can't think of it.   Busy at work on Jim Goar's Whole Milk which is gonna be a bonafide beaut!  And Farid and David have delivered the material for Effing Magazine #4 ahead of their deadline.  Who does that?  Badass motherfucking magazine editors, that's who!  Expect the issue in March as promised.

Also busy with the planning of the unAWP Small Press thing. 

I have managed to write some poems and work some more on The Knife Alarm.  Another thing to never finish called Breakfast on a Hill. 

I have 100 babies.

 

hapless dilettante news

you knew about this and didn't even tell me?  not cool.

no time for you blog reader

I'm sitting on a pile of transitivity (says with passive verb) I mean I'm up to my tits in work. Paper stacked all about my feet and the chopper is going the room smells like ink the paper cuts keep coming (I love them) and Floyd is in the window mewing at the finches and Philip's back there painting and the rats have gone on vacation I listen to Surface of Eceon and it still isn't winter nor has it rained in infinite years and last night we read the story The Dipladocus Odes by Tom Clark and I've never laughed so hard my side still hurts.

Massive head(wound)way with unAWP event planning, more about that next week hopefully.  Let me just say though that we've landed one of the very best venues in Austin. 

I'm going through a lot of recordings from 02 and 03 from a project called Airplane Now which I hope to share with ye in good time.  There is approximately 40+ hours of recording so it's taking a while to slice out tracks for your ears.  It's a little poetry mixed with a lot of noise art, that is to say, it's cerebral, no I mean it's not musical, or it's hookfree, but what does that mean, you'll just have to hear it for yourself. 

Do you make eyes at me?  I hope so.  I expect romance to fall on my head any moment now.

Word to your mother, blog reader.

Octopus #7

here

sometimes the spam ain't so bad

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a chant above the sleeping body of Lucas Anderson wrapped in a Navajo blanket

Voices by Doug Warriner, Scott Pierce, and Farid Matuk.  Drumming by Philip Trussell.  Dedicated to Eric Furbish.

lucas_chant.mp3

Hot Whiskey #1 available now

Includes work from Jena Osman, Tim Armentrout, Elizabeth Robinson, Christopher Ryan, Linh Dinh, John Sakkis, Jessica Hullman, Farid Matuk, Robert Roley, Julia Hastain, Dale Smith, Leah Hansen, Anselm Parlatore, Tyler Doherty, Jared Hayes, Joseph S. Cooper, Hoa Nguyen, Lisa Jarnot and Andrew K. Peterson.

The magazine is 8 1/2" x 7" with silkscreened cover and saddle-stitch hand sewn binding. It is 57 pgs.

For information on obtaining a copy or catching up with Hot Whiskey:
http://www.hotwhiskeypress.com/litmag.html 
http://www.hotwhiskeyblog.blogspot.com


Best,

Michael Koshkin & Jennifer Rogers
Hot Whiskey Press
Boulder, CO

voices by scott pierce, farid matuk, and ish archbold

Download converse.mp3