Bøger udgivet af Rose Metal Press

Poetry. Art. IN THE CIRCUS OF YOU is a deliciously distorted fun house of poetry and art by Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross. Both private and epic, this novel-in-poems explores one woman's struggle while interpreting our world as a sideshow, where not only are we the freaks, but also the onlookers wondering just how normal we are--or ought to be. Davis' poetry and Gross' images collaborate over the themes of sanity, monogamy, motherhood, divorce, artistic expression, and self-creation to curate a menagerie of abnormalities that defines what it is to be human. The universe of this book is one in which dead pigeons talk, clowns hide in the chambers of the heart, and the human body turns itself inside out to be born again as a purely sensory creature. This grotesquely gorgeous peep show opens the velvet curtains on the beautiful complications of life.

Poetry. The color, noise, and often cryptic images of classic video games set the prose poems in B.J. Best's BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE in motion, but the poems soar far beyond their nostalgic springboards. And while Mario, Pac-Man, and pioneer families forsaken on The Oregon Trail populate these pixelated landscapes, this book translates the games and plays them in the real world, so an Asteroid becomes just one more star shot with lost love, Space Invaders might have communist sympathies, and God is just as bad at Tetris as the rest of us. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, the book's levels explore how our past virtual lives can inform our present actual ones. A coming-of-age narrative turned love story turned philosophical journey, BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE deftly combines two mediums into vivid poems as lyrical as they are imaginative.

Poetry. Art. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a pick-your-path collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich. Each turn of the page features an ink and watercolor drawing, a poem, and a choice between two sound-alike words that create a variety of paths through the book. The adventure always begins in the same place, but depending on your choices your reading experience moves by emotional meander--leaping, looping, and surprising until it finally reaches one of the possible endings. With its blend of words, artwork, and audience participation, I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is a triple threat.Erdrich and Nelson's collaboration is a delight. There's a perfect amount of distance between the poems and the images in this book--enough to allow for the snap of connection and the fizz of dissonance. Their lyrical invention asks you to choose between homophones to complete a given sentence, creating a surprising portrait of your own disposition at the same time that it produces multiple pathways to the book's splendid endings.--Matthea Harvey Antic, frantic, didactic, and seriously at play in a word territory Erdrich and Nelson make up, find, map, and inhabit. I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE invites anyone who wants to explore it with them to come along, providing handy instructions, guides, surprises, and illustrations, saying to anyone who's inclined to join in, there's plenty of room, you're welcome.--Dara Wier I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is an invitation to adventure in Loren Erdrich and Sierra Nelson's dream mystery. Allured and implicated by the sweet perversity of the mutable body, we're asked to hold rib cages, feel for faces in the mirror, take bunnies by the ears. Each page reverses the work of the image; here, lyric illuminates illustration. I found myself asking, how do you recognize a text without words? How do you recognize a ghost without her sheet and chains?--Sommer Browning At the core of the mobius world of I TAKE BACK THE SPONGE CAKE is joy, a child-like joy of returning to the rhetoric of pick-your-own-path-adventures, a joy of associative play between image and verse, a joy in the terror of homophones and tongue-stuck lovers, and the culminating joy of the text making and remaking itself. This morphing book continually satisfies my urge for more: more absurdity, more darkness, more fun, more fish-man monsters with the orangey teeth.--Mathias Svalina

Poetry. The linked poems in THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE carry the reader past Ozzie Smith and Thomas Jefferson into a world where the moon is an outlaw, a weeping elephant flees from the authorities, the Pinkertons upset the sky, effigies of Phil Niekro are burned, and a society made of words collapses. According to Scott Glassman of Rain Taxi, Goar's clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism that guides us into emotional revelation. THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE is what Alice would have found had she fallen into William Clark's map instead of a rabbit hole; it is an uncanny territory that both delights and disturbs.With America behaving as it does today, we all need to better understand the American beauty of years past and the American beauty that is yet to come. Jim Goar's THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE reinvents a landscape so similar and dissimilar to what we know of a country's terrain that it is obviously a beauty that is yet to be. Or more so, Goar reinvents a country that has no limits because it exists in the alternate space of the supernatural. So that a 'President's signature is printed on the face of the moon' in order to create a world where 'Kansas starts to bleed' so that 'the sun is taken from the sky' and likewise, to make a space where a human-modified moon can exist with us in a plain way, do our bidding, and also fight back. You should read this book. It's not the American story you learned about in third grade. It's the one you wanted to learn. It's the one that was always the true story.--Dorothea Lasky

Fiction. THEY COULD NO LONGER CONTAIN THEMSELVES contains but just barely five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dropped toddlers, attempted drownings, juvenile promiscuity, road trips, and inappropriate therapy sessions compose the multi-voiced family portrait in Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake by Elizabeth J. Colen. Yoga stalkers, guns and gold, babies with iron stomachs, drunkards with t-shirt cannons, and warlocks are the stuff of Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever by John Jodzio. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Evan's House and the Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington. Leukemia, meteorites, Wal-Mart, bocce ball, Charlie Brown's clinical depression, the language of talking crows and of Che Guevara's omelets fill the eggs in How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace. And smallstories about pretty girls who sit quietly and behave themselves (or not) populate the pages of Paper and Tassels by Mary Miller."

Fiction. The four chapbooks collected in A PECULIAR FEELING OF RESTLESSNESS, three of them finalists and one of them the winner of the Rose Metal Press first annual short short chapbook contest, all revel in the succinctness of their form, the underlying tension anchored beneath each story of 1,000 words or less. These stories are peculiar; they resonate with restlessness. They are deft, they are gritty, and they are lyrical. Laughter, Applause. Laughter, Music, Applause by Kathy Fish, Wanting by Amy L. Clark, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix by Elizabeth Ellen, and The Sky Is a Well by Claudia Smith combine four multi-layered portrayals of beautiful uneasiness into a collection rich with wit, grace, and originality.

Poetry. A book-length narrative poem, or a novella-in-verse if you prefer, HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC is a novel-poem with a literary sci-fi bent, a shadow-text to Oedipus written in a style that is up-to-the-minute. With wit, dynamism, and cutting senses of urgency and humor, Iowa Prize winner Peter Jay Shippy tells the tale of Isaac Makepeace Watt, a melancholy man living in a Thebes that is much like contemporary America. The House of Cadmus still rules (and will fall), but they only appear in the poem as media white noise. Isaac's concerns are personal, his father's illness and his own moral decrepitude. There are talking monkeys, plagues, oracles, and nano-robots-you know, the usual agoramania.

Fiction. Edited by Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney. Introduction by Ron Carlson.BREVITY & ECHO is an essential anthology of previously published short shorts by Emerson College alumni. BREVITY & ECHO broadens the scope of this rich and expanding genre with a wide range of flash fiction styles, and celebrates of the continuing legacy of Emerson's writing program. The anthology contains work by Don Lee, Denise Duhamel, Lee Harrington, and many more, as well as an introduction by Ron Carlson and an afterword by Pamela Painter. These tiny fictions the longest weighing in at 1400 words and the shortest at just 55 appeared originally in the pages of such books and journals as McSweeney's, StoryQuarterly, Quick Fiction, What If?, Night Train, failbetter, and Best American Non-Required Reading."

Poetry. Art. Film. Anyone who watches silent movies will notice how often crashes occur-trains, cars, and people constantly collide and drama or comedy ensues. Gregory Robinson's ALL MOVIES LOVE THE MOON is also a collision, a theater where prose, poetry, images, and history meet in an orchestrated accident. The result is a film textbook gone awry, a collection of linked prose poems and images tracing silent cinema's relationship with words--the bygone age of title cards. The reel begins with early experiments in storytelling, such as Méliès' A Trip to the Moon and Edison's The European Rest Cure, and ends with the full-length features that contested the transition to talkies. Of course, anyone seeking an accurate account of silent movies will not find it here. Through Robinson's captivating anecdotes, imaginings, and original artwork, the beauty of silent movies persists and expands. Like the lovely grainy films of the 1910s and 20s, ALL MOVIES LOVE THE MOON uses forgotten stills, projected text, and hazy frames to bring an old era into new focus. Here, movies that are lost or fading serve as points of origin, places to begin.

Fiction. LILIANE'S BALCONY is a multi-voiced novella-in-flash set at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. Built for Pittsburgh merchants E.J. and Liliane Kaufmann in 1935, the house is as much a character as it is a setting. One September night in 1952, Liliane Kaufmann--tired of her husband's infidelities--overdoses on pain pills in her bedroom. From there, LILIANE'S BALCONY alternates Mrs. Kaufmann's mostly true story with the fictional narratives of four modern-day tourists who arrive at the historic home in the midst of their own personal crises, all of which culminate on Mrs. Kaufmann's over-sized, cantilevered balcony. With its ghosts, motorcycles, portraits, Vikings, failed relationships, and many layered voices, Kelcey Parker's LILIANE'S BALCONY is as dizzying and intricately beautiful as the architectural wonder in which it is set.LILIANE'S BALCONY is as layered and audacious as the house at the center of the novella. Parker dances effortlessly between present and past, fact and fiction, nature and interior, lovers and out-of-lovers. The story that emerges is moving and precariously beautiful: a book that in lesser hands might have come toppling down. In Parker's, it's a triumph.--Caitlin HorrocksThe latest from Parker is an inventive novella hybrid, a mix of prose and poetry, past and present, heartbreak and humor. At the core is Liliane Kaufmann, the wife and first cousin of the philandering Edgar Kaufmann, who commissioned architect Frank Lloyd Wright to create the audacious Fallingwater, a Pennsylvania house built over a waterfall. Rippling out from the couple is a cast of characters spanning centuries. Without introduction or background, a different voice narrates each chapter as the iconic home itself becomes a central character. Interspersing fiction with fact (although fact outweighs fiction in this well-researched story), Parker reveals the tragic life of strong, intelligent Liliane, who is slowly eroded by a complicated marriage gone toxic. Adding dimension to her portrayal are three other women, all at different points of self-discovery, all potentially bound for a similar fate as Liliane. Not unlike Fallingwater's structure, which masterfully balances the man-made with the natural, Parker sculpts and controls myriad, nearly unwieldy elements to construct a driven plot that illuminates the perched house and those who live within it.--Katherine Fronk, Booklist

Poetry. Set on the margins of Seattle, beneath bridges and on the banks of waterways, in strip clubs and flooded farmland, the prose poems in TINDERBOX LAWN illuminate the intersection of domesticity and bohemia, orthodoxy and passion. Each untitled block of prose constitutes a novel-in-miniature, with shadow characters and shards of plot. The intensity of Carol Guess's poems builds through lyrical language and recurring images, capturing the moment when the small mad heart at the center of things stalls mid-tick. This is such deep, rich writing. TINDERBOX LAWN feels like dreams you forgot as you walk through your day but it's your life. I mean we never think as deeply as we live and Carol Guess tries to braid those strands and succeeds. I love being in this work--Eileen Myles.