Bücher veröffentlicht von Bloof Books

Afflicted with sudden blind spots in her right eye, Maureen Thorson consults her doctor. Her diagnosis is AZOOR (acute zonal occult outer retinopathy), a rare condition that has no known cause and is surprisingly difficult to confirm. Because the afflicted eye appears normal, the problem cannot be directly observed-except by the patient herself.Faced with the possibility she may lose her sight, Thorson goes looking for answers, reading and thinking her way through art history, science, poetry, folklore, myth, and film. She engages with Aristotle, who claims that menstruating women stain mirrors red simply by looking at them. She bristles equally at the romantic notion of the blind poet and the clairvoyant one. She desperately wants to assert control. "Writing can't save you from going blind," she acknowledges, but it "offers the reductive simplicity of narrative, with its seductive endings, tidy resolutions."Maybe. When authoritative sources turn out to be mistaken, what then? When oft-quoted wisdom is revealed to be apocryphal, can it still ring true? And when her vision mysteriously clears, as unexpectedly as it dimmed, can she even claim she's been ill? Throughout the essays in On Dreams, Thorson finds herself repeatedly asking not only "what is reality?" but "whose reality?"

The fourth book by Peter Davis, author of TINA, Hilter's Mustache, and Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

"Danielle Pafunda abolishes the stereotype of prissy, dainty girls in her thrilling poetry collection The Dead Girls Speak in Unison. Set in a surrealistic underworld, takes on the collective voice of empowered female corpses and ironically uses quaint language and structure to describe the true nature of women. […] Pafunda’s collection leaves readers craving more of its 'rotten pages.' 'If you’re looking for something pretty,' don’t look here. —Verse, Brittany Capps  • "We don’t often see choral speakers, but speaking in unison gives these 'girls' collective presence, forcing us to face gender violence. [T]he girls gain a certain power in this…raw girls who bypass maturity, who are as rank and offensive as possible. These unrefined girls are deeply unsettling." —The Plot, Heidi Czerwiec • Danielle Pafunda is the author of The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books, 2017), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books, 2008), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005), and the chapbooks Cram (Essay Press, 2015) and When You Left Me in the Rutted Terrain of Our Love at the Border, Which I Could Not Cross, Remaining a Citizen of this Corrupt Land (Birds of Lace, 2014). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry and have been anthologized in Beauty is a Verb: The Poetics of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011),   Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting & Child Rearing (Fence Books, 2007), Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press, 2015) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Penguin, 2015).

Eilbert''s lush, dense debut collection records a woman''s journey to take back sovereignty over her body from the anorexia that has swallowed it. The multiple voices swirl like a collision of hot and cold fronts; they contradict themselves and combat each other in the way that one''s own mind operates in seeking a singular voice of reason to follow. Eilbert''s array of referents can be dizzying, but her intoxicating language is sure to keep readers under her spell. -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ΓÇó Swan Feast is an appropriately enigmatic title for a book in which everything-rage, joy, grief, fear, pain, hope-will happen to you, and more than once, and in more than one way. This gamut of intense emotion is probed by the speaker in relation to two implicit, guiding questions: What is beauty? and What is hunger? Everything happens in this book. Let it happen to you. -THE RUMPUS ΓÇó Trust us on this one: You want to remember Natalie Eilbert''s name. -TIME OUT NEW YORK ΓÇó SECOND EDITION. This title has been redesigned and updated since its initial release in April 2015.ΓÇó Trust us on this one: You want to remember Natalie Eilbert''s name. -TIME OUT NEW YORKΓÇó SECOND EDITION. This title has been redesigned and updated since the its initial release in April 2015.

"Sharon Mesmer''s poetry is a stream of indomitable spunk . . . tough and lush . . . a fabulous tissue of language which floats out to inhabit other bodies, opens their mouths and makes them speak." -Alice Notley"Parodying the come-ons of capitalism, Mesmer surprises us with access to something we hadn''t considered wanting, an arch anger that is surprisingly accepting of the compromises situations push on people, while at the same time smoldering with acidic resentment, as if Mesmer forgave the compromiser only to feel doubly incensed at the leveraged situations prodding us to inauthenticity." -Jacket, Stan AppsGreetings from My Girlie Leisure Place is Sharon Mesmer''s fifth collection of "tough and lush" poetry. Unwaveringly energetic and relentlessly wry, Mesmer fashions poems from the flashiest trash of the American sensibility and the Internet''s muckiest dumping grounds, with a swagger and intelligence all her own. Hers is a generous spriti: "I want to expose myself," confesses one piece, "for love of the people."Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation by Daniel Bismuth, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005), and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and the New School. Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988.

It''s hard to resist using a game show announcer''s voice when discussing Jennifer Knox''s latest collection, Days of Shame & Failure. Knox knows how to draw human complexity out of absurdity and kitsch (and vice versa) without positioning herself above it. She is one of us, sharing our fear and wonder, and we feel this sense of community as if there were five million other viewers-a spin on Whitman''s "multitudes"-watching along with us to see how she makes it out of each lyrically harrowing poem. Is that camp? Is it satire? Who cares! "Whatever it is," as one poem reports, it gives me "a real, really felt feeling," and that''s what I''m a sucker for every time. -Gregory Pardlo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for DIGESTJennifer L. Knox is one of our funniest writers, but what places her work in a realm of its own is the empathy that surrounds, contradicts, and occasionally undermines the joke, sending us far beyond the punch line. Written from the far edge of vast experience, these poems lyricize the post-beatdown quality of middle age. The marvelously capacious Days of Shame & Failure is the work of a genius at her peak, the best book yet from one of our most brilliant and sui generis American writers. -Sarah Manguso, author of ONGOINGNESSJennifer L. Knox is an iconic American poet whose work has been compared to Richard Pryor, Sarah Silverman, cartoonist R. Crumb, musician Randy Newman, and magician Doug Henning. None of these comparisons is quite right, however. Knox''s work is unmistakably her own: surprisingly empathetic, utterly original, both funny and frightening, like America itself. And like the best comedians, she is never merely funny: each of her speakers has something important to say. Knox''s poems have appeared four times in the Best American Poetry series and in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present and Best American Erotic Poems, as well as in such publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and McSweeney''s. Her first three books of poems are also available from Bloof Books: The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me.