Out of Print
Ask
By Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Winner of the 2015 Slope Editions Chapbook Contest
***
Jasmine Dreame Wagner's poems are bold, precise, and lushly imagined. In Ask, she re-envisiones the conventions of online venues such as Twitter, OKCupid, and Tumblr, infusing them with a persistent, inventive lyricism. The result is an exciting reconfiguration of commercial language and culture. Slope Editions is thrilled to create a unique, materially interactive chapbook to match Wagner's fusing of poetry and internet.
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is an American poet and musician. She is the author of Rings (Kelsey Street Press, 2014), Rewilding (Ahsahta Press, 2013), Listening for Earthquakes (Caketrain, 2012), Seven Sunsets, a split chapbook with Melanie Sweeney (The Lettered Streets Press, 2015), and an e-chapbook, True Crime (NAP, 2014). Her writing has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, New American Writing, Verse, and in two anthologies: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012) and Lost and Found: Stories from New York (Mr. Beller's Neighborhood Books, 2009). Jasmine is a dog lover who eats avocados by the bowlful. Her collection of hybrid lyric essays on noise, silence, and aesthetics is due out from Ahsahta Press next year. She tweets enthusiastically: @jasminedreame.
***
Limited edition of 50.
Echo Echo Light
By Kit Frick
Little definitional moons orbit the poems of Kit Frick’s Echo, Echo, Light. This lunar, moody sequence of exquisite outbursts into interstellar space brims with linguistic echoes off the face of a beloved whose gravitational pull constantly draws us in. Its looming and inaccessible presence scares us, but Frick’s almanac might help us "learn to wear the dark," "to face the dark" through the many faces and phases this chapbook tracks. These sonorous poems enact a kind of sonar, pinging celestial bodies to locate themselves in time and space. The moon is utterly renewed here as not merely subject but launching pad for poetry.
--Amaranth Borsuk, author of Handiwork, Between Page and Screen, and Tonal Saw
The voltaic prose poems in Kit Frick’s Echo, Echo, Light, build imperative by imperative, offering us vital instructions for how to grasp what is most essential to our living and how to remain steadfast against the urgent, passing dark. And we’re lucky to receive such a handbook, for contained within these delicate boxes is the beauty to brace us though we spin: How we want to grasp the/sound, hold on. Keep track. Catalogue the/shadows, disfigured by dusk. Their forms longest in this moment, as if fearing the day’s end, as if/they could reach far enough to pull back the light. In these shimmering poems we are ghosted, but we are illuminated too.
--Allison Titus, author of Sum of every lost ship and the chapbook Instructions From the Narwhal
Limited Edition, Hand-bound, with Metallic Stamp cover
Learn more about the author here.
Please Light Up
by Ted Powers
Please Light Up is an experimental chapbook by Ted Powers, the winner of our 2014 Invitational reading period!
Please Light Up is a serial poem that is meant to be read a new way each time. With each poem printed on an individual card, each new reading inverts the experience of a former reading, revealing a new detail of the evolving narrative.
We are excited to experiment with form in this collection---to create a chapbook, an art-object, and a unique, non-sequential reading experience!
Find more from Ted Powers here.
The Body
by Jenny Boully
Comprised of footnotes to a non-existent text, The Body: An Essay is a meditation on absence, loss and disappearance that offers a guarded "narrative" of what may or may not be a love letter, a dream, a spiritual autobiography, a memoir, a scholarly digression, a treatise on the relation of life to book. Christian Bok describes Boully's groundbreaking text as one that "may simply annotate a fantastic biography from another reality, referring only to itself as a kind of dream within a dream...The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void — filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination." First published in 2002 and excerpted in such anthologies as The Next American Essay and The Best American Poetry 2002, The Body: An Essay continues to challenge conventional notions of plot and narrative, genre and form, theory and practice, unremittingly questioning the presumptive boundaries between reflection, imagination, and experience.
Learn more about the author here.
Who's Who Vivid
by Matt Hart
When Caesar said about horses that if the gods hadnt invented them, we would have to, he could have been talking about Matt Hart whose poems are of such immediate, radiant presence, they seem as true and necessary as air. In vital self-sabotages and improvisational self-renewals, the buzz of the mosh-pit pokes us through the sky. The book you now hold in your hands is luxurious with nerve, speed and crash, the work of an explorative explosiveness that is constantly whacked by the world as it is. Welcome to a new realism hatching from the old. Welcome to the human heart. Welcome to the launch site. - Dean Young These poems marry cinema and song, conflagration and precision in a double-ceremony lead by Matt Hart in an enormous cathedral with no roof. The work in Who's Who Vivid is driven by strange narrative and daring associations, experiments that negotiate the terrain between the subconscious and the shag carpet. It is a remarkable display of virtuosity and freshness. These poems are stunning and funny and troubling, deeply serious, off-handedly brilliant. Matt Hart has cast out a net and brought back news from another world, written in the language of this one -urgent, entertaining, candid, and smart. Who's Who Vivid is a sizzling debut by an important new poet. - Laura Kasischke
Learn more about the author here.
Maine
by Jonah Winter
Hypocrite reader, mon somblobble, Jonah Winter will New York School you in the woodshed of his imagination! These poems remind me of Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, in which a tape recorder spews out the blurts and ravings of the heart at inappropriate moments. Maine is a hemorrhage of the goofy, the sinister, and the sublime.
-James Cummins
Jonah Winter's poems are relentless attacks on the status quo. They turn pop culture on its head in hot pursuit of untainted love. And they are funny, if whiplash can be funny. Winter is a serious, new poet, with a talent galore, blazing a trail, along which unknown treasures are sure to be found.
-James Tate
Learn more about the author here.