A Ballad for Metka Krasovec by Tomaž Šalamun

My first full book Šalamun experience and a good one full of soaring startles of language and an odd humor and images that sting. Beautiful balance of such things.

I don't like black cherries on the tree.
Who rubbed soot on the she bear?
A fetus, smashed jaw bone, part of the wind pipe missing.
I'd like to be rain, scrubbing the roof.
I'd like all my hair to burn, to be bare.
I died when I took my shoes off.
Ivy entwined me, like a castle.
Inside me there's still chalk,
outside a small yellow briefcase.
It dangles from my hand like a saint hanged
from a tree--the same cherry tree.

The Most of It by Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle has this baffling ability to get into human experience and give it a heartbeat, sincerely, rejuvenatingly (that's not a word?). She proves to capture a moment is one thing, to make it pulse is another thing entirely, extraordinarily.

From "A Half-Sketched Head"

Childhood Memories

There was a long silence during which he seemed to be struggling. Suddenly he looked up at her. "I wish to tell you as quickly as possible that when I was a boy it was my sole responsibility to feed the baby goats from a bottle containing their mother's milk. On one such occasion I managed to spill the goat's milk down my shirtfront--over which I should have been wearing a smock in the first place. And though I can't tell you why, I was wearing my best shirt: perhaps for the like of that alone I deserved to be punished. I went immediately to the washroom and began to rinse out the milk spots, using a large bar of my mother's soap, which was always in plentiful supply since she made it herself. And as I stood there it struck me--my mother's soap was goat's milk soap, with goat's milk I was trying desperately to erase goat's milk. That something could be its own remedy--though I did not then think in those terms--struck me as a rather serious joke. It was my first occasion of panic.

The Fullness of Everything

So stoked that my chapbook, Goodness is a Fine Thing to Chase, is being released by Tiny Hardcore Press in an anthology featuring a chap of rad stories by Christopher Newgent and a chap of awesome lyric essays by Brian Oliu. The book drops in April but you can preorder it now. Looking at that page over and over throughout today has me still shockedhonoredsmileecstatic. Big woots to those two dudes for letting my words hang beside theirs. Big thanks to Roxane Gay for believing in us.

MORE INFO HERE

DO THIS DO THIS

After xTx’s He Is Talking To The Fat Lady and Frank Hinton’s I Don’t Respect Female Expression sold out in less than 48 hours, eager readers have begged for a repress.

But Atlanta-based Safety Third Enterprises only does one run of each release… until now.

To celebrate the second and final print of the two chapbooks, Vouched Books and Safety Third Enterprises are inviting you to submit your own Single Sentence Reviews of Frank Hinton or xTx’s work (the author’s work overall, not just the chapbooks) to contest (at) VouchedBooks.com. We just ask that with your Single Sentence Review you include your name and specify which of the author’s work you are encapsulating.

CLICK TO READ MORE BE A PART OF IT

Standing In Line For The Beast by Jason Bredle

Standing in Line for the Beast by Jason Bredle

Bredle's a poet I genuinely look forward to reading, a talker, a good talker where sometimes he's moping around or jumping up and down or hiding behind personified images of Apocalypse but I keep on following him around, a sad sack and the lonely wind, who is who, I don't know. My admiration for Bredle, especially in this, his debut collection, is how I'm sometimes tired of his listing, his kaleidoscope of images and memories, his lengthiness, yet I can't seem to not care, to give up, to put the damn book down. There's something endearing about the voice that I can't quite explain (YET?). Having read a good deal of his later work first (Smiles of the Unstoppable is unstoppable), I can say while he's certainly matured in his talkative ways, the core guts of the poems still wanders. And thank the goodness for that!

from "While Anne Reads a Lengthy Poem About Her Grandmother's Funeral and Our Mortality"

I'm reminded of some details Bill told me
about his aunt's funeral in Memphis a few years
ago--a paraplegic whose casket somehow
got tipped on its side while being lowered
into the grave during a thunderstorm. The pallbearers,
Bill included, were forced into the mud
in an attempt to turn the casket right side
up, digging and clawing their way in and out
of the hole, slopping around for an audience
of bereft women in black dresses and red
hats. Finally they gave up and left her
on her side, creeping away in their Cadillacs and ruined
suits, the wives angry at the husbands.