MAGIC HELICOPTER PRESS

PubGen: Thinking about Matt Cook and his new book

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:04:13 -0400

PubGen: Thinking about Matt Cook and his new book:

Are you getting excited for the release of Matt Cook’s book of poetry, Proving Nothing to Anyone? It’s coming out from PGP on June 4. I just approved the printer’s proof. It looks great.

Who’s Matt Cook? He’s this guy:

(Friese Undine drew that portrait. He also drew the book cover…

We can’t wait for Matt Cook’s Proving Nothing to Anyone from our crazy Baltimore buddies over at PGP. Why did everybody from Milwaukee move to Baltimore, anyway?

This is what nods. looks like going into an envelope. This is...

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:50:55 -0400

This is what nods. looks like going into an envelope. This is what a review copy of The Skin Team looks like going into an envelope. If you look closely you can also see that I am using CS4 versions of the Creative Suite and—mysteriously—both Firefox and Chrome.

NODS. Release Day

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:37:00 -0400

Today, here it is, May 6th 2013, the release day for the first chapbook in the Gobble Editions, NODS. by Carrie Lorig.

We couldn’t be more stoked about this book, and we’re so happy to hiptoss it into the world. Check out the chapbook’s page here for links to excerpts and more info.

And we’ll say GO as soon as we let Abraham Smith tell you want he thought of the book:

“Essentially every line of Carrie Lorig’s interstellar nods. is a train made of skin absolutely Anna Karenina-ing all over you. If you are the fieldcrop we all need to keep our breath fresh, and you know you are, then please do rest all polka-dot-pj’s-assured of this: Lorig’s poems are sweet hail; are banjo locusts; are leather boomerangs bopping you where it matters. The poems hurt good. The poems pock; pock and puncture. You’ll end up feeling like a cricket caught in a wiffle ball by the gravy end. You’ll end up wasted on Lorig’s manna-lush-rush. You’ll end up cut then butterflied whole again. Powerful medicinewoman of the verses, Carrie Lorig is her very own planet, where the astronaut cows and them acrobat horses jitterbug, damn it.”

carrieabigstick: mary recorded me reading IT CAN’T BE LOVE / IT...

Sun, 05 May 2013 16:04:37 -0400

carrieabigstick:

mary recorded me reading IT CAN’T BE LOVE / IT MUST BE LOVE in the broken lamp part of the stone arch bridge above st. anthony falls.

Carrie Lorig reads IT CAN’T BE LOVE / IT MUST BE LOVE from her forthcoming MHP chapbook, NODS. Which you can still preorder for 5 bucks plus shipping here.

nods. on a chair

Thu, 02 May 2013 16:08:07 -0400

nods. on a chair

"She walks a straight line in one direction, because direction is consoling, softening her focus,..."

Thu, 02 May 2013 11:36:27 -0400

“She walks a straight line in one direction, because direction is consoling, softening her focus, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her other hand before descending downstairs.”

- Richard Chiem, via 3:AM.

I’m two stories into Richard’s book, You Private Person, and this is the most excited I’ve been about short fiction since I first read Stories in the Worst Way. I like this story (and this quote in particular) because it exhibits Richard’s expert use of over-arching insight. He’s really incredible at writing characters that know more than any of us could possibly know. I love Richard.

(via markcugini)

H_NGM_N #15 is in the world and MHP represents, with new work from MHP authors Jordan Stempleman,...

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:11:53 -0400

H_NGM_N #15 is in the world and MHP represents, with new work from MHP authors Jordan Stempleman, Evelyn Hampton, and Carrie Lorig.

from “Getting Ready” by Jordan Stempleman

There’s a straight-looking man

in a public park, shaving in the water

fountain, so I make sense of the dogs

who do nothing all day but go along

with their aspirations. I fight against this huge old park

tree, deciding whether to be lax today, hold off for later

for say, enormously concerned.

from “Preface” by Evelyn Hampton

I wanted to write the white-tiled entrance to a building. Inside, someone would be waiting for me. I would speak urgently. With thin, glancing enhancements, I would become someone else.

Outside, a yellow flower would be showing. The back end of a car would also be visible.

A bit of red sauce would still be clinging to a yell.

Everything would have meaning in relation to itself. Everything would be a god (another yell).

from “Scatterstate” by Carrie Lorig

i do my knees for a long time, and i lush out hard. i launch out hard because it frails good. Like flows, like flower rodeos, i g r e w s o m e, i dark some, and grope myself into full glow. i chase glow into shapes. i chase shapes with barbwire rocks. i cut right into the earth. when i cut grass, i shed objects. the lawn has a moan thread that suits me, that burns me into such a clumsy body, that wobbles blotted me into lop hided blooms that drag a ripping sound behind them. the size of your names, what a strong plush into a living stream of the bizarre soft that is always flying me into buildings. my constant is my hands in the dusk mange. my hands write me with sway tongue, and my stomach gets sway, sway open.

carrieabigstick: i will read in dark different places until the...

Wed, 01 May 2013 23:40:34 -0400

carrieabigstick:

i will read in dark different places until the last day of pre orders.

"How else can you spend your days when you have nothing to spend them on? This was a question she..."

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:01:38 -0400

“

How else can you spend your days when you have nothing to spend them on? This was a question she only asked herself. At the end of September, the end of her personal days with no telecommuting in sight, she’d brewed a full pot of coffee when she’d only wanted a cup. She hadn’t even realized it until she was holding the whole pot in her hand.

And this was all she was good at. Packing the wrong lunches, replying all to the wrong emails, backing into telephone poles and parked cars, and never telling her husband.

”

- Mark Cugini says:

“Christy Crutchfield, via Newfound

This story is great because it starts out funny, and then there’s this volta that makes you think, “shit, that’s not good for anyone.” This story is great not because Christy understands tragedy, but because she understands redemption—and how impossible it is for most of us to find. This story is great because Christy wrote it.

(via markcugini)”

"They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing kind of person, and so they left the dictionary out in..."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:27:35 -0400

“They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing
kind of person, and so they left the dictionary
out in the rain and I noticed it,
I noticed it was open to the rain page,
much harm had come to it, it had aged to the age
of ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbow
follows rain in the book, just as it does on
earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to
notice so much but I noticed there is no stationary
in heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand like
there is no tomorrow, while the very aged
will give you a weightless hand for the same reason,
I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlocked
and others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),
I noticed whoever I met in my search for entrance
into this world went too far (but that was their
destination) and I noticed the road followed roughly
the route of a zipper around a closed case,
I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,
and that some birds have the wingspan of an inch
and some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the two
are very well suited to each other, I noticed that.
There are eight major emotional states but I forget
seven of them, I can hear the ambulance singing
but I don’t think it will stop for me,
because I noticed the space between the waterfall and
the rock and I am safe there, resting in
the cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse
(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweed
and rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,
enough astonishment over this fact, so now I will
withdraw my interest in the whole external world
while I am in the noticing mode, notice how I
talk to you just as if you were sitting on my lap
and not as if it were raining, not as if there were
a sheet of water between us or anything else.”

- “After Rain”, Mary Ruefle (via noxtalgic)

carrieabigstick: This NOÖ Weekly presents a bunch of flags that...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:55:14 -0400

carrieabigstick:

This NOÖ Weekly presents a bunch of flags that I’d rather be in the shadow of than my dumb shoulder or the wet ceiling peeling. These are flags I unfold in the closet and glow. -Tyler Gobble

vicemag: An Interview with Harmony Korine In 1998, shortly...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:16:21 -0400

vicemag:

An Interview with Harmony Korine

In 1998, shortly after his feature-length directorial debut, Gummo, Harmony Korine published a novel called A Crackup at the Race Riots. The book is built from an insane collage of images and thoughts, including lists of ideas for movies, titles for novels, suicide notes, joke routines, celebrity rumors, and strange short scenes and dialogues involving rapists, amputees, dogs, vaudeville performers, and manic-depressives. Like all of Korine’s work, it is a rare collision of fun, fucked, funny, sad, and bizarre—the kind of thing you pick up every so often just to buzz your brain. For years the book has been out of print, fetching prices upward of $300 used online, until recently when it was repackaged and rereleased by Drag City. Harmony was kind enough to get on the phone with me and talk about the making of the book.

VICE: The first thing the reader sees when they open A Crackup at the Race Riots is a picture of MC Hammer at age 11. Why did you decide to start the book that way?
Harmony Korine: At the time I was doing a lot of narcotics. I remember basically the process was that I would hear things, or I would see things… I would hear somebody walking down the street, and maybe they’d say something interesting, and I’d put it on a piece of paper. Or I would see a pair of socks hanging from a telephone pole with a Star of David on the ankle, and I would just write that. Or whatever… I’d see someone juggling some toilet paper, and I would describe that. And then I would see a picture of MC Hammer at age 11, and I would just think maybe it all kind of came from his imagination.

The book is a thought in MC Hammer’s mind?
Well, it could be. Like most things in life, it could be. [laughs]

So, if I’m understanding you correctly, you basically started acquiring bits and pieces and then just let them fall as they may on the paper, in the order you found them?
Not exactly. What happened was I would just write everything down. I’d write things in crayon or on the side of the wall in my apartment, or on a typewriter or whatever. You would just see things, you know… cut them out of books. I might hear something really crazy that somebody said on a city bus, like somebody might be spewing some kind of crazy racial rant, and then I’d go back home and write that down, and then I would just look at it for a while, and I would imagine, like, What if it wasn’t that guy on the bus? What if Harrison Ford said that? What if I was actually riding a horse or something, and Harrison Ford was riding a horse, and we were riding somewhere, we could even be racing, and what if he just turned to me, and he said that same exact thing that I just heard? And I was like, Whoa! The context completely changed the humor. That’s basically what the book is. I started thinking about it like that, and there started to be these thematic connections in that way, and after I had amassed all of these fragments, these tripped-out, micro narco blurts, I went back and recontextualized them into something that was closer to a novel, or closer to a novel idea.

Continue

Hi y’all, We are happy to announce that we have teamed up...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:39:38 -0400

Hi y’all,

We are happy to announce that we have teamed up with Mammoth Editions to offer a Dan Bailey bucket. Now you can get the brand new second edition of THE DRUNK SONNETS together with Dan’s second book, HALLELUJAH GIANT SPACE WOLF, for only $15 + shipping, which will save you the price of like one whole book. Go out and buy another book or ten avocados or a few shots or whatever.

CLICK HERE TO JUMP STRAIGHT TO THE SPECIAL DEAL!

We love you,
Helicopters

P.S. I was going to post a picture of the KFC Famous Meal/Bowl or whatever it’s called with the two books inside of it, but looking at a Google Image search sheet of those bowls at 10AM made me feel a little too nauseous to stick it out even for humor’s sake. So I am going with the calmer and still funny regular KFC bucket deal. Stomachs: you’re welcome.

"Ode to the murderer I imagine in every band of trees. To my blood cells, to well-ordered..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:35:00 -0400

“Ode to the murderer I imagine
in every band of trees. To
my blood cells, to well-ordered systems,
to my head absolutely thick
with disease. Ode to the dress I slept in
and wore the next day, to the cilantro
I planted in all the wrong weather.
Ode to the fucking cosmos. Ode to my face
against your face, to poems that want to
like us but don’t. Ode to being
the bloodless one, the neurotic one,
the one ignoring your spiritual journey.
To your clothes in my basement
covered in ink. To I wore this when
we first met to I want to hurt you like this
and then like this. Ode to quitting my job
to stay excited, to exposing myself
to my neighbors, to embedding so many
rocks in my chest. Ode to Tulsa.
Ode to the 900-foot Jesus, to keeping
my hands in my pockets most of the time.
To my brothers and sisters, to all my
enemies, to imagining every way
to die in every possible scenario.
Ode to crying when I can’t find my shoes,
to feeling like God will punish me for
sins I don’t believe in. Ode to taking
pictures in front of strangers’ houses.
Ode to my jacket covered in yellow.
Ode to how I wish you were built
out of wood panels. Ode to staring
out the window in the worst
of the house. Ode to your age,
to my age, to how I react improperly
when reenacting your fate. Ode to
so few phenomenons. Ode to
absolving myself of everything.
To singing what I’m doing, to arguing
what counts as “artifact” and “alive.”
Ode to my wandering pacemaker.
Ode to my big fat heart. Ode to
pretending I’ve never been where
I used to live. Ode to hoping you’re
a goner. Ode to grieving nothing
each time a villain is born.”

- “Poem For What I’m Not Allowed,” Anne Cecelia Holmes (via commovente)

mellow pages promo

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:07:07 -0400

mellow pages promo:

mellowpageslibrary:

Ask Jeeves

Here is what we’re talking about

ratrapsratrapsratraps: Poem from Jordan Stempleman's "No, Not Today"

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:41:52 -0400

ratrapsratrapsratraps: Poem from Jordan Stempleman's "No, Not Today":

ratrapss:

Wednesday

Then, we started in again, after the low hanging branch
really caught up to us, or we, unknowingly, up to it.
I dreamed about one can of mousse and doubtful arithmetic
for every loner in a bathroom alone. And we have a rule
for what’s coming: Be that as it may, we will never be…

Wendy Xu: A NEW THING

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:06:47 -0400

Wendy Xu: A NEW THING:

extrahumanarchitecture:

is that for the rest of this month, poetry month after all, if you order a copy of YOU ARE NOT DEAD from Small Press Distribution, I will send you something in the mail. It will be something you like, hopefully. They will all be different things but may relate (and are not limited) to:

poetry
the weather

Here is my favorite song from Jordaan Mason and the Horse...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:45:11 -0400

Here is my favorite song from Jordaan Mason and the Horse Museum’s incredible divorce lawyers i shaved my head. Check it out and check out Jordaan’s novel The Skin Team, coming in June from MHP!

Robert Vaughn enthusiastically and awesomely reads “Some...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:31:00 -0400

Robert Vaughn enthusiastically and awesomely reads “Some Haircuts” from Evelyn Hampton’s We Were Eternal and Gigantic. Some haircuts are wolverine kits! Thanks, Robert! Follow along below:

SOME HAIRCUTS
—Evelyn Hampton

Some haircuts are red rooms. You walk around them feeling heavy in your blood. You are in love and you are nobody. Nobody could love you because nobody knows you. Not even the red room knows that you are you. You lie down in the red room and the red room does nothing to have you.

Some haircuts are wolverine kits. They wake up next to you blinking. There are pine needles in them and places where you could sit by a fire. You know that one day they will be too terrible to sleep next to, but for now they are just the soft parts of the forest.

Some haircuts are animations. They ride on motorcycles and get run over. Even smashed on the road they lie like someone has painstakingly drawn them on a computer.

Some haircuts cling to hulls and rocks and bulwarks. They are curl-footed and sessile feeders. With their one eye they live within a calcareous shell and have no true heart.

Some haircuts are just haircuts. They shuffle around in the wind. Their hairs break off one by one, becoming lost in the city.

Some haircuts are a madness, a green scream. They shout, Euphoria and corpses!

Some haircuts are making money. Each has a brain that’s racing. The brain’s thoughts are like circuits being stamped by a machine. Each hair is connected to a circuit. Inside the brain the hairs are terribly tangled.

Some haircuts are people. They are a little nothing with sky in it, then a cloud, then sky again.

extrahumanarchitecture: isaidokwow: thedolphinarium: I have...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:13:00 -0400

extrahumanarchitecture:

isaidokwow:

thedolphinarium:

I have a poem in the new issue of NOO. This issue is a lot of goodness. Just go ahead and look at the contributor list if you don’t believe (you should).

Read this issue, this Mike Krutel poem, this Wendy Xu poem, this Anne Boyer poem, this Chris Toll (RIP) poem, this Emily Toder poem, this Tony Mancus poem, this Rachel Katz poem, this Lisa Ciccarello poem, this submit some poems to the next issue http://www.noojournal.com/submissions.htm

NEW NOO, WELCOME BACK NOO, there is a poem in here from YOU ARE NOT DEAD, maybe my favorite from the book.

WE LOVE WHEN TUMBLR HAPPENS LIKE THIS! WHO IS SAYING WHAT! NO ONE KNOWS! THERE IS SO MUCH LOVE! GOULASH!