Hey fam,
We’re now on Bookshop! Buying our books through Bookshop is a great way to support independent bookstores, small presses, and authors. Check out our recent titles available through Bookshop now.
SPRING 2020:
be/trouble
by bridgette bianca
POETRY / AFRICAN-AMERICAN
This is the Los Angeles not shown on television and movies: the everyday minituatea of Black Angeleno life. If you’re lucky enough to be a part of it then you know this heritage was handed from one generation to the next.
bridgette bianca moves beyond witness and holds us accountable in the harsh-tender way we do when we love someone, but love ourselves more. White and institutional nonsense, beware. This collection is essential to understanding what it means to be alive in the United States of America in 2019.
–Sara Borjas, Heart Like a Window Mouth Like a Cliff
The Depression
by Mathias Svalina & Jon Pack
POETRY / SHORT FICTION / PHOTOGRAPHY
A dream-like collaboration of fables and photographs, and a surreal and shifting deep-dive into clinical depression, THE DEPRESSION absurdly expresses the mind and life as we both know it and don’t.
I went on a state-sponsored summer exchange trip to Germany when I was 16. I arrived in Munich with 49 other kids from all across the US and was picked up by my very excited host family, who screamed like they won the lottery when they saw me. I was then spirited to their home for lunch, a short walk in a fragrant wood, introductions to the giant family dog Oskar, dinner with the punk older sister and her staring boyfriend, then back home to unpack and crawl into bed. I hardly slept on the flight and had never felt so tired nor so discombobulated, being newly arrived among kind and strange strangers. The floor seemed to undulate, my bones felt like they were made of acid. Everything shone with brilliant unfamiliarity. I was alive in a different way–more fragile, unnerved, a sense of absurdity like a veil over my face… And that’s what this book feels like in me. Hugs.
–Sueyeun Juliette Lee, author of No Comet, That Serpent in the Sky Means Noise
We’re excited about American Symphony by Suiyi Tang!
Read all about it at: The Accomplices
American Symphony: Other White Lies is an existential travelogue that reminds me just how much the hyper-conscious 21st-century self sometimes longs for abandonment; if only we could unshackle ourselves from the conditions of our era, our origins, even our memories. Tang’s prose is at once futuristic yet nostalgic, deeply interior yet fantastical, and freely associative in search of its own set of truths. The worlds Tang has built linger, and their insistent weight is sure to incite revelations big and small.”
– Grace Shuyi Liew, author of Careen
“You see,” the difficult conversation would begin, “I am actually a flower.” Check out Bloom, an excerpt from the book at: Vol. 1 Brooklyn
Find more excerpts from her book at Cardiff Review & at The Offing Mag
Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies is a polyphonic work that shatters genre boundaries and subverts our ideas of the singular “self” or the singular voice. It contains multitudes, each dynamic sentence twisting blade-deep. It’s truly symphonic: at once lyrical and essayistic, humorous and visceral, this novel will rearrange your insides. It’s unrelenting and immersive and peppered with breathless moments of language (“she was much too buoyant to be buried.”) I was lost and found in the span of these pages.”
– K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies
W’re excited about Between Appear and Disappear
But we’re not the only ones
“An unforgettable and perfect book.”
–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan
“The blood of Mai’s ancestors run through her syllables. She takes photographs of sentences she abandoned in childhood—that loss of memory, that theme of what photography exposes. Written in the breath of a man in love, a novel, a poem, a photo album, this delirium of river language is finally a treatise on writing. ‘Her breath remains in my mouth.’ She told him the Vietnamese legend of a story that never begins, darker than any darkness when her family pushes their unsteady boat into the water. They fear arriving as much as they fear drowning. ‘Every word is a goodbye.’ She escapes sentences. Her body lay against him like moonlight. Doug Rice has written a beautiful- beyond-words American River.”
–Sharon Doubiago, author of My Father’s Love, Love in the Streets, and Hard Country
To try a sample and begin to see for yourself, go here
…John [Gardner] taught me to see in other ways, through other art practices. John painted as a way of seeing more slowly, more intimately. I have used photography in that way in my life. To understand something about the negative space of photography and the negative space that can be made vivid in a sentence.
– From an interview with Doug Rice by Joe Milazzo, at Entropy
TODAY IS RELEASE DAY FOR THESE AMEOWZING TITLES. Order them now!
American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang
BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND
EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / HYBRID / NONFICTION / SPECULATIVE MEMOIR / ASIAN-AMERICAN
American Symphony is a portrait of a portrait, a mirror’s reflection of someone that’s gone missing, a speculative memoir that takes cues and challenges from works by Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Jenny Zhang. S has made it her duty to be the editor, piecing together how ! had disappeared, picking apart the words that ! had left behind in hopes of discovering what went wrong. Through a captivating assemblage of literary pieces, S solves the puzzle, inadvertently creating an impression of what people remember most of the missing and the dead. Melancholic and bravely honest, Suiyi Tang has achieved something thought to be impossible, taking linguistic fortitude and bending it into a new shape, achieving new emotional heights.
Where in the American literary landscape has there been a place for a text like Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies? Here is the work of an Asian American female millennial—fiercely intellectual; embodied; by turns, exuberant and melancholic, artistic and theoretical, personal and political—that deserves to be read and heard amid and beyond the usual cacophony of praise for young white writerly yearnings.
In a voice that is wry, shattered, and undeniable, American Symphony takes a torch to the myths of the “model minority,” the available female “Oriental” sex object, and the technically-brilliant-but-not-creative “Asian” while also ripping through the raced and gendered lies undergirding our ideas of nation and aesthetics. A brilliant debut. –Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice
BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND
MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / HYBRID / EXPERIMENTAL
Some memories are transformed into myths at the very moment that they are remembered. Stories are told for those who have vanished, for the loves that have been lost. Language is borne out of this absence.
In spare yet luminous prose, Between Appear and Disappear is a lyrical love story of Mai and Doug, and of the way that memoir is turned into myth.
Between Appear and Disappear is a secular prayer, a body prayer, between seeing and saying, between experience and representation. It is the only book that I have ever read in my life that is truly corporeal, which is to say truly embodied by and through desire in language. I will hold it close to my heart for the rest of my life. Kind of I wanted to eat it. Definitely I slept with it under my pillow. It is an unforgettable and perfect book at a time when we need books to be exactly what they are, gloriously, unapologetically, mercifully, real.
–Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan and The Chronology of Water
Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich
BUY NOW FROM AMAZON / BN / INDIEBOUND
HYBRID / FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL FICTION / CREATIVE NONFICTION / MEMOIR
Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a multi-genre collection that examines grief, violence, heartbreak, and the universal challenge of living in a body that is always vulnerable. In this greyscale kaleidoscope of the familiar and the uncanny, muted voices shout, people commit to devastating choices, and mundane moments are filled with silent hauntings. A sleep paralysis and a séance of voices long dead, this collection’s characters illuminate both our own darkness and our strength, revealing how love can emerge from the most impossible of conditions.
In this hybrid collection of works, Hillary Leftwich speaks to us in her own deeply authentic, inimitable voice. Innovative in approach and breathtaking in execution, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock is a haunted and haunting work of art. By turns gut-wrenching, dark, funny, and ultimately transcendent, this is a must-read book by a writer of considerable depth and originality.
–Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018
Also, coming in 2020 & 2021:
– be/trouble by Bridgette Bianca
– The Depression by Mathias Svalina and Jon Pack
– Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
– The Secret Lives of Negroes by Ernest Hardy
– Secret Lumpia by Pamela K. Santos
A great review of to afar from afar by Soham Patel is up on The Bind.
From “The Apparitions of Language: Reading Soham Patel’s to afar from afar“”
6. Meanwhile, the poem “in airplane” finds chaos and confusion in the presence of violence. Drone patterns interrupt the structural integrity of language. Thoughts form in strata. A triangle breaks the poem into clusters. Lines are arranged in ambiguity. I felt briefly lost. I didn’t know in which direction I was supposed to move, what path my eyes were supposed to follow. “in airplane” evokes this feeling of uncertainty, brought on by the presence of a foreign object. More than that—a drone, a symbol of American intervention, the icon of globalization, of violence committed from a distance.
Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s Entering the Blobosphere is reviewed on Empty Mirror.
Mike Corrao, author of Man, Oh Man, writes:
Entering the Blobosphere reads like cultural theory that has been infected by an unknown organism. The subject of this investigation manipulating its own description. Much talked about, but its presence spectral, looming behind the writer’s ear. In the same manner as bell hooks, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres, Laura Hyunjhee Kim approaches theory not as an explanation of other art forms, but as an art form of its own.
The text’s movement is arrhythmic yet soothing. It shifts between investigation, explanation, and musing. Each transition introduced by large typesets and mutated epitaphs. The movement of the text never feels unwarranted or dishonest. It behaves in the same manner as its subject. The cellular blob attempts to understand itself. Beginning with confident dictations, then moving into an exploratory phase, then defining the details of its ontology.
Yesssssss!
Gabrielle Civil is featured on NYLON magazine. She speaks with Ilana Masad about her work, her book Experiments in Joy, art, and performance.
From “Gabrielle Civil’s Art Is an Experiment in Joy”:
What happens for me when I’m making a performance, is that I create the box, the frame, the context. I create a space in which I can do whatever I want to do and be whoever I want to be, for however long that performance is, whether it’s three minutes or an hour or two.
Megan Kaminski, author of Deep City, is reading our very own Janice Lee.
The Sky Isn’t Blue offers insight into the very nature of perception and observation. The themes of longing, connection, and loss play out in various permutations throughout the book, through remarks on color, episodes of Agents of Shield, and interactions with human and non-human persons.
It’s definitely a book that should be on everyone’s list. Grab yourself a copy.
We will be at the AWP Book Fair. Come by T2009 for books, totebags, free swag, and your copy of the Portland Literary Map.
Don’t forget to check out Entropy’s Guide to #AWP19.
Off-Site
Center Justify
7PM-10PM / PSU Native American Student and Community Center, 710 SW Jackson St / Facebook Event
An #AWP19 OFFSITE EXTRAVAGANZA co-sponsored by The Accomplices (Civil Coping Mechanisms, Entropy, Writ Large Press), De-Canon: A Visibility Project, Whitenoise Project, The Operating System, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University, and NASCC.
Featuring readings from Nastashia Minto, Douglas Kearney, Alex DiFrancesco, Erick Sáenz, Marwa Helal, Theodore Van Alst, Gabrielle Civil, & more. Free dinner (meat & vegan dumplings and fried chicken from XLB) while supplies last.
Author Signings at T2009
Thursday March 28
- 12PM-1PM Mike Sonksen
Friday March 29
- 11:30AM-1PM Rocío Carlos
- 1PM-2PM Mike Sonksen
- 1PM-2:30PM Alex DiFrancesco
- 2PM-3PM Gabrielle Civil
Saturday March 30
- 11AM-12PM Mike Sonksen
The full Spring 2019 Catalog is released today. Are you excited? We’re excited. Meow meow. Order your copies now!
Experiments in Joy
by Gabrielle Civil
MEMOIR / PERFORMANCE ART / BLACK FEMINISM / #RECURRENT
More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound
Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.
Civil has made a book into a performance space and living archive. Words dance and bodies speak: together they invent languages of keen pleasure and ardent thought… Read, watch, listen and dream. Be transformed. —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland: A Memoir
Losing Miami
by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
POETRY / BILINGUAL / ENVIRONMENTAL / #RECURRENT
More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound
Losing Miami is an experiment in grieving the potential loss of Miami to rising sea levels. What are we losing if we lose Miami, a seemingly impossible city formed out of Caribbean migration and the transformation of language? This book asks how we cope with loss at such a grand scale, all while the world continues to rapidly change.
In Losing Miami, Florida figures as the locus for family, exile, and climate change in this beyond-book, which commemorates and elegizes the id-beauty of the state. Like Eduardo Galeano, Ojeda-Sagué speaks in fictions and dreams and hurricanes in order to capture the myriad currents that shape the geography and history of the state, particularly in the Cuban-American community that he describes with tenderness and acuity in an inspired approach to inscription. —Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Cruel Futures
Letters to My City
by Mike Sonksen
POETRY / ESSAYS / LOS ANGELES / WRIT LARGE
More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound
The poems and essays in Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members, to interrogate all sides of Los Angeles, its streets, its people, its neighborhoods, as a means to examine the postmodern metropolis.
In innumerable essays and performances, frequently in public schools, he has opened a new generation’s eyes to LA’s extraordinary history of underground and underdog cultures. What Whitman was to Brooklyn, Poet Mike is to contemporary LA. —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
Psychopomps
by Alex DiFrancesco
MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / TRANS/LGBTQ / CCM
More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound
Psychopomps follows DiFrancesco on the search for family, marriage, relationships with other trans people, attempts to build community, and for the elusive link to ancient beliefs about the special spiritual role of the trans individual in society.
Psychopomps is a collection of essays that examines not just the ways in which we are torn apart, but more importantly, the ways we knit ourselves back together. DiFrancesco has a deft hand with language and a keen insight into herself and others, and this collection captures what it means to be young and bent toward justice in this moment in time.
–Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
(the other house)
by Rocío Carlos
POETRY / BILINGUAL / MEMORY / GHOSTS / #RECURRENT
More Details / Amazon / BN / Indiebound
(the other house) is a book, a poem, a book of poems, that is also ghost document and prenatal correspondence. It was written as the author read through the draft of a manuscript for The Yellow House, by her friend, the poet Chiwan Choi. Ghost because it is a letter of the dead to the dead, but prenatal because the manuscript it addresses hadn’t been published yet. Her notes and questions eventually became a conversation with the text itself, with the speaker of the poems, with no one in particular, with the dead, with old lovers, with her own work, and with the author herself. This book is a response, a map, a thread of hauntings, a reconstructed memory of loss and the body, language and desire.
The Other House is less a blueprint and more of a map, a legend, and a history of a home assembled piece by piece from a language made from mismatched tongues. Carlos refuses convention at every turn. She takes your rigid expectations and returns them as polished stones. With Carlos, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. This book reminds me of everything I love about poetry.
–Joseph Rios, author of Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations
2019 Membership
Want all of the 2019 titles for one low price? For serious cats only. Get all of our 2019 releases (that’s 10 books!) for one low price of $100. (Books will be shipped as they are released in the spring, summer, and the fall, for a total of 3 shipments). Meowza!
[PLUS Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs by Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama, American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang, Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice, Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich]
Buy Now
$100
Includes shipping / For readers in the United States only
~(=^‥^)_旦~ ~(=^‥^)_旦~ ~(=^‥^)_旦~ ~(=^‥^)_旦~ ~(=^‥^)_旦~ ~(=^‥^)_旦~
SPRING 2019:
Experiments in Joy
by Gabrielle Civil
MEMOIR / PERFORMANCE ART / BLACK FEMINISM / #RECURRENT
Gabrielle Civil’s Experiments in Joy celebrates black feminist collaborations and solos in essays, letters, performance texts, scores, images, and more. Following her explosive debut Swallow the Fish, Civil now documents her work with From the Hive, No. 1 Gold, and Call & Response—whose collaborative Call inspired the title. The book also features her solo encounters with artists and writers, ancestors and audiences. Here you will find black girlhood, grief, ghosts, girls in their bedrooms, lots of books, dancing, reading, falling in love, fighting back, and flying. With lots of heart and the help of her friends, Civil keeps reckoning with performance, art and life.
Civil has made a book into a performance space and living archive. Words dance and bodies speak: together they invent languages of keen pleasure and ardent thought… Read, watch, listen and dream. Be transformed. —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland: A Memoir
Losing Miami
by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
POETRY / BILINGUAL / ENVIRONMENTAL / #RECURRENT
Losing Miami is an experiment in grieving the potential loss of Miami to rising sea levels. What are we losing if we lose Miami, a seemingly impossible city formed out of Caribbean migration and the transformation of language? This book asks how we cope with loss at such a grand scale, all while the world continues to rapidly change.
In Losing Miami, Florida figures as the locus for family, exile, and climate change in this beyond-book, which commemorates and elegizes the id-beauty of the state. Like Eduardo Galeano, Ojeda-Sagué speaks in fictions and dreams and hurricanes in order to capture the myriad currents that shape the geography and history of the state, particularly in the Cuban-American community that he describes with tenderness and acuity in an inspired approach to inscription. —Carmen Gimenez Smith, author of Cruel Futures
Letters to My City
by Mike Sonksen
POETRY / ESSAYS / LOS ANGELES / WRIT LARGE
The poems and essays in Letters to My City combine two decades of field experience, research, personal observations, and stories told to the author, a third-generation Los Angeles native, by his grandfather and other family members, to interrogate all sides of Los Angeles, its streets, its people, its neighborhoods, as a means to examine the postmodern metropolis.
Psychopomps
by Alex DiFrancesco
MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / TRANS/LGBTQ / CCM
Psychopomps follows DiFrancesco on the search for family, marriage, relationships with other trans people, attempts to build community, and for the elusive link to ancient beliefs about the special spiritual role of the trans individual in society.
Psychopomps is a collection of essays that examines not just the ways in which we are torn apart, but more importantly, the ways we knit ourselves back together. DiFrancesco has a deft hand with language and a keen insight into herself and others, and this collection captures what it means to be young and bent toward justice in this moment in time.
–Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir
(the other house)
by Rocío Carlos
POETRY / BILINGUAL / MEMORY / GHOSTS / #RECURRENT
(the other house) is a book, a poem, a book of poems, that is also ghost document and prenatal correspondence. It was written as the author read through the draft of a manuscript for The Yellow House, by her friend, the poet Chiwan Choi. Ghost because it is a letter of the dead to the dead, but prenatal because the manuscript it addresses hadn’t been published yet. Her notes and questions eventually became a conversation with the text itself, with the speaker of the poems, with no one in particular, with the dead, with old lovers, with her own work, and with the author herself. This book is a response, a map, a thread of hauntings, a reconstructed memory of loss and the body, language and desire.
The Other House is less a blueprint and more of a map, a legend, and a history of a home assembled piece by piece from a language made from mismatched tongues. Carlos refuses convention at every turn. She takes your rigid expectations and returns them as polished stones. With Carlos, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line. This book reminds me of everything I love about poetry.
–Joseph Rios, author of Shadowboxing: poems & impersonations
Summer 2019:
Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs
by Laura Hyunjhee Kim
BLOBS / NONFICTION / THEORY / CCM
Fall 2019:
Navigating With(out) Instruments
by Traci Kato-Kiriyama
POETRY / Writ Large
American Symphony: Other White Lies
by Suiyi Tang
EXPERIMENTAL / FICTION / CCM
The Sky Forever
by Kimberly Alidio
POETRY / EXPERIMENTAL / Writ Large
Between Appear and Disappear
by Doug Rice
HYBRID / MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / CCM
Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
by Hillary Leftwich
FICTION / SHORT STORIES / CCM
CCM + ENTROPY + WLP = THE ACCOMPLICES
Three independent publishing entities with common goals of publishing vital and exciting literature, building and participating in community, and contributing and promoting good literary citizenship, have joined forces.
THE ACCOMPLICES is made up of Civil Coping Mechanisms: publisher & promoter of kick-ass independent literature, Entropy: a magazine and community of contributors that publishes diverse literary and non-literary content, and Writ Large Press: an indie press that uses literary arts and events to resist, disrupt, and transgress.
As we go forward, we will join our ideas, talents, and resources to push even harder in the work that each of us have done in the past, without losing our individual identities and without betraying the work we have each done. We vow to not lose the characteristics that have made each of us unique and important.
From The Accomplices—Janice, Michael, Peter, Judeth, and Chiwan
We’re coping. No, we’re thriving.
We’re excited to share with you the full FALL CATALOG for 2018 today, including all titles from The Accomplices (Civil Coping Mechanisms & Writ Large Press).
????
Out Today (Oct 4, 2018):
Coldwater Canyon
by Anne-Marie Kinney
NOVEL / LITERARY FICTION / LOS ANGELES
Kinney’s precise and considered prose examines the insistence on reshaping the past through the lens of one’s own trauma and conceived desires as a means of moving forward. Why do we so often look for solace and redemption through others, pushing ourselves to do anything for them, even when it harms everyone involved?
Hot, gritty, swirling, hypnotic and sensual… an unhinged, sweetly sinister sun-baked noir; all danger, doomed love, and compassion.
—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
The Fat Kid
by Jamie Iredell
NOVEL / LITERARY FICTION / EXPERIMENTAL / WESTERN
A haunting and pulls-no-punches book about a struggling, damaged son and his brutal, damaged father, and the strange uncanny man who seems master of both of them. Kind of like what might happen if William Faulkner started a novel about fathers and sons, had a heart attack, and then David Lynch was called in to finish it.
—Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
I don’t write about race
by June Gehringer
POETRY / MEMOIR / AUTOBIOGRAPHY / ASIAN-AMERICAN / LGBTQ
[T]his book doesn’t write about race, it writes about the meanings we make. “I write about erasure,” Gehringer writes, and “I write about silence.” But this isn’t just a story, it’s a space. We, as readers, enter into accountability for our dealings with race, transness, family, and class… how it really feels to be placed in proximity to those who fail to love us.
—Ginger Ko, author of Inherit
Sad Laughter
by Brian Alan Ellis
NONFICTION / HUMOR
Writing is like trying to make sense of an inside joke you have with yourself but haha joke’s on you ’cause the joke is more sad than funny.
Ellis is the rock and roll king of sad. Most happy people only wish they could be as sardonic, humorous, and at once morose as Ellis. But they can’t.
–Elle Nash, author of Animals Eat Each Other
Released Sept 2018:
Learning
by Andrew Choate
MEMOIR / CREATIVE NONFICTION / SELF-HELP / MYSTERY
Free of hierarchical notions about where or from whom one gets an education, Choate gleans knowledge from disparate sources… His father — a mercurial lover of film and art — at his most vulnerable provides the aching center to this text but from there it radiates out in beautifully penetrating waves, touching food, music, sex, and all kinds of dark matter.
–Margaret Wappler, author of Neon Green
Tom Sawyer
by Joseph Grantham
POETRY / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
In TOM SAWYER, Joseph Grantham is pulling it all back and stripping the language clean. These are poems about broken hearts and growing up, packed full of jokes and weirdo thoughts from a weirdo mind. When I think about Joseph Grantham, I think, ‘Ah…finally…the last living person who doesn’t judge or shout for a living.’ What sweet poems, from a sweet sweet man.
—Scott McClanahan, author of The Sarah Book
Aaaaaand what to look forward to in 2019:
Spring 2019:
- Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (Poetry, Bilingual)
- Psychopomps by Alex DiFrancesco (Memoir, Creative Nonfiction)
- Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil (Memoir, Performance)
- (the other house) by Rocío Carlos (Poetry, Bilingual)
- Letters to My City by Mike Sonksen (Poetry, Essays)
Fall 2019:
- American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang (Experimental, Fiction)
- Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice (Hybrid, Memoir)
- Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich (Short Stories, Fiction)
- Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama (Poetry)
- The Sky Forever by Kimberly Alidio (Poetry, Experimental)
Reviewers & Interviewers: Download a PDF of our Fall Catalog and get in touch about review/press inquires (the5accomplices@gmail.com)
It’s back to school time!
With summer drawing to a close and the academic year approaching, we wanted to share with you some of the teaching guides we have for our books. All of our authors are always available for Skype class visits or email interviews. For a full list of all of our teaching guides available for immediate, check out our Teaching page here.
ICON by F. Douglas Brown offers a baroque reflection of ourselves through our own personal histories, and how it might pertain to the global history at large. Can be used for classes such as Poetry, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, African-American Studies, American/Contemporary Literature, and Narrative Studies.
Gabrielle Civil’s Swallow the Fish is a memoir in performance art that explores the medium from within its beating heart. Adding its voice to black feminist conversations, it combines essays, anecdotes, and meditations with original performance texts to confront audience, motivation, and fears. Can be used in classes involving Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Performance Art / Performance Studies, Feminist Literature, Gender Studies / Women’s Studies, and African-American Studies to name a few.
Drowsy. Drowsy, Baby by Jared Joseph is a book and the translation of a book. It is a scroll named Jenny, after Noah’s unnamed wife, both pictured and absent. Like Edmond Jabès, Yoel Hoffman, and Susan Howe, Jared Joseph viscerally merges questions of linguistic, textual, and memorial representation with the persistent violence of religious narrative, historical trauma, and familial haunting. Can be used in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Contemporary American Poetry, American/Contemporary Literature, Experimental Writing, Comparative Literature, and Translation Theory.
Wendy Ortiz’s Bruja is a Dreamoir—a narrative derived from the most malleable and revelatory details of one’s dreams, catalogued in bold detail. A literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind. Can be used in Creative Writing, Hybrid Forms, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Experimental Writing, Feminist Literature, Gender Studies / Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Xicanx & Latinx Studies.
How to Keep You Alive by Ella Longpre asks the impossible question of how one maintains a separation between past and present, memory from self, and inheritance from present body. Blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in a way that mirrors the attempt to capture what it is like to survive and to persist, How to Keep You Alive absorbs and sees the world through a lens of violence and trauma while struggling to maintain a present life in a body that continues to resist, to touch, to create rituals, to see, and to render the unseeable visually brilliant so the unsayable becomes a prayer. Can be used in Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Memoir/Anti-Memoir, Experimental Writing, Hybrid Forms, Feminist Literature, and Queer Literature/Bisexual Literature.
In his radical memoir, As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs uses the constraint based techniques William Faulkner employed for the construction of As I Lay Dying to create a deeply personal and philosophical portrait of the year he became a father. Blending elements of fantasy and confession, Higgs confronts parenthood by divulging his most intimate fears, secrets, sorrows, and hopes as a writer, husband, and teacher. Can be used in classes involving Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Composition, American/Contemporary Literature, and Experimental Writing.
Get a-meow-zing deals this week(end) on select bestselling titles & new/forthcoming books from The Accomplices. Not only are these great deals, but you can get snag some of our forthcoming titles before they are officially released. Whoa. This sale will end Tuesday, September 4 (at 11:59PM EST).
Choose from the following titles:
? TOM SAWYER by Joseph Grantham (CCM, Forthcoming Sept, 10 2018) – TOM
? LEARNING by Andrew Choate (WLP, Forthcoming Sept, 10 2018) – CHOATE
? I DON’T WRITE ABOUT RACE by June Gehringer (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – RACE
? COLDWATER CANYON by Anne-Marie Kinney (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – KINNEY
? SAD LAUGHTER by Brian Alan Ellis (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – SAD
? THE FAT KID by Jamie Iredell (CCM, Forthcoming Oct, 4 2018) – FAT
? HOLLYWOOD NOTEBOOK by Wendy C. Ortiz (WLP) – HOLLYWOOD
? BRUJA by Wendy C. Ortiz (CCM) – BRUJA
? ICON by F. Douglas Brown (WLP) – ICON
? TO AFAR FROM AFAR by Soham Patel (WLP) – AFAR
? ABDUCTIONS by Chiwan Choi (WLP) – ABDUC
? THE YELLOW HOUSE by Chiwan Choi (CCM) – YELLOW
? HOW TO KEEP YOU ALIVE by Ella Longpre (CCM) – LONGPRE
? SWALLOW THE FISH by Gabrielle Civil (CCM) – CIVIL
? THE SKY ISN’T BLUE by Janice Lee (CCM) – LEE
? THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza (CCM) – FLOWERS
When ordering, please remember to include your selected titles in the boxes.
(Note: It seems that on some mobile payment systems, it’s skipping the Special Instructions box. If so, just shoot us an email here with your selections. Thanks!)
All prices include shipping. This offer is only available in the United States.
2 for $25
SALE HAS EXPIRED.
4 for $40
SALE HAS EXPIRED.
All titles will ship after Thursday, September 6 and will arrive in approx. 2-4 weeks.
Email us with any questions or concerns.
We’ve got a lot of great things coming up, including new projects from The Accomplices, and new titles from all 3 of our lines: CCM, #RECURRENT, & Writ Large Press. Get excited.
September 2018
- Learning by Andrew Choate (Writ Large Press)
- Sad Laughter by Brian Alan Ellis (CCM)
- Tom Sawyer by Joseph Grantham (CCM)
October 2018
- i don’t write about race by June Gehringer (CCM)
- Coldwater Canyon by Anne-Marie Kinney (CCM)
- The Fat Kid by Jamie Iredell (CCM)
February 2019
- Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague (#RECURRENT)
- Experiments in Joy by Gabrielle Civil (#RECURRENT)
- (the other house) by Rocío Carlos (#RECURRENT)
- Psychopomps by Alex DiFrancesco (CCM)
- Ghosts are Just Strangers That Know How to Knock by Hillary Leftwich (CCM)
- Letters to My City by Mike Sonksen (Writ Large Press)
- Navigating With(out) Instruments by Traci Kato-Kiriyama (Writ Large Press)
October 2019
- American Symphony: Other White Lies by Suiyi Tang (#RECURRENT)
- Between Appear and Disappear by Doug Rice (#RECURRENT)
- Mama Wata by Omotara James (Siren Songs)
- The Depression by Mathias Svalina; photography by Jon Pack (CCM)
February 2020
- Myth of the Garbage Patch by Maya Weeks (#RECURRENT)
- Emotion(al) Anthropology: The Secret Lives of Negroes (Show Tunes for a Show That Hasn’t Been Written Yet) A Post-American Project by Ernest Hardy (Writ Large Press)
Didn’t go to #AWP18? Or just want to get in on a great deal on new titles from Writ Large Press & Civil Coping Mechanisms? Take advantage of our sale. Select new titles on sale, this month only.
SHOP THE SALE
Civil Coping Mechanisms is having an End-of-the-Year Holiday Sale!
This is happening for a limited time only! From now until December 31, 2017, you can get 3 CCM Books for only $25 or $30. That includes shipping. Following the link below to see the selected titles and to get your CCM holiday bundle now.
SHOP HOLIDAY SALEFor questions on the holiday sale only, direct questions to janice@entropymag.org.
WLP + CCM + ENTROPY
Three independent publishing entities with common goals of publishing vital and exciting literature, building and participating in community, and contributing and promoting good literary citizenship, are joining forces.
THE ACCOMPLICES is made up of Civil Coping Mechanisms: publisher & promoter of kick-ass independent literature, Entropy: a magazine and community of contributors that publishes diverse literary and non-literary content, and Writ Large Press: an indie press that uses literary arts and events to resist, disrupt, and transgress.
Writ Large Press will continue to experiment and push limits with events that engage and bring together the public. On the WLP publishing side: WLP books will publish as an imprint within the CCM catalog with editorial autonomy, WLP’s ‘small print’ chapbook series will remain exactly as it is currently structured, and local publishing projects will continue to be created and presented.
As we go forward, we will join our ideas, talents, and resources to push even harder in the work that each of us have done in the past, without losing our individual identities and without betraying the work we have each done. We vow to not lose the characteristics that have made each of us unique and important.
– From The Accomplices—Janice, Michael, Peter, Judeth, and Chiwan: we’re coping.
MAINLINE SELECTIONS
Another MAINLINE down and now it’s time for me to go on and on about how tired and exhausted I am (when am I not?). Yeah, but that’s nothing new and not like it’s changing any time soon. Rather, I want to take a moment to express my sincerest gratitude and appreciation to not only our MAINLINE winner, Bud Smith, and our finalists–Julia Madsen, Brian Alan Ellis, Devin Kelly, Corinne Manning, and Carleen Tibbets–but also everyone that took part in the contest. It isn’t easy being a writer, constantly flanked by rejection and doubt; MAINLINE isn’t an easy contest, the transparency of the daily frontrunners list, the feeling of anxiety as being a contestant in wait to see if your name comes up. It’s not easy. Really, it can be terrifying. But you submitted anyway, and that shows an amazing amount of courage and professionalism. You’re willing to put yourself out there, even if it means completely shattering your comfort zone. Thank you for taking part in this contest. What’s more, thank you for taking part in our community. Together, we’re coping.
– MICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER
WINNER:
Bud Smith – Same Clothes as Yesterday
FINALISTS:
Julia Madsen – In the Event of Amnesia the City Will Recall
Brian Alan Ellis – Failure Pie in a Sadness Face
Devin Kelly – My Lover, Don’t
Corinne Manning – We Had No Rules
Carleen Tibbetts – Dossier for the Postverbal
From Same Clothes as Yesterday (Bud Smith)
I’ve never been to college. I don’t have any education past high school, but I write.
I’m that weirdo that thinks that anybody can make art and everybody should make art.
It doesn’t matter who you are: Your life can be improved by making some kind of art.
I’ve got no formal training and I’m pretty much the only guy I know working construction who reads books at all, but—
I write.
The closest I’ve come to attending college is NYU when I went there with a crew to torch apart the duct work system (big enough to walk through) in the nether regions of the building.
College was in session at the time and I’d walk through the campus in my work clothes, looking at the kids who went there like they were creatures from another planet.
They were looking at me the same way.
#RECURRENT SELECTIONS
First of all, thank you so much to all those who sent in their inspiring and heartbreaking manuscripts. The response was overwhelming and I’m so glad the call for submissions resonated with so many people. It affirms to me why #RECURRENT exists. It was incredibly difficult though to narrow down the selections. I cried, held my breath, sighed in awe, racked my brain, and was held in wonder. Ultimately, I decided to take on a couple more titles than my initially intended two, and to help me with this cause, I’m also excited to be introducing John Venegas as #RECURRENT’s Assistant Editor.
You guys, I can’t express how excited I am to be bringing these books out into the world. They’re going to blow you away.
– JANICE LEE
#RECURRENT / 2017 SELECTIONS:
Gabrielle Civil – Swallow the Fish
Christopher Higgs – As I Stand Living
Ella Longpre – How to Keep You Alive
Jared Joseph – Drowsy. Drowsy Baby.
FINALISTS:
Jaclyn Watterson – Ventriloquisms
Meghan Lamb – Significant Others
Sara Finnerty – Katherine in the Desert
Joseph Han – Dear Who Abandoned Me
Isabelle Davis – Light Curtained It
Rae Gouirand – Glass is Glass Water is Water
Linda Michel-Cassidy – Welcome to Paradise
Stacy Hardy – An Archaeology of Holes
Excerpts from the selected manuscripts:
From Swallow the Fish (Gabrielle Civil):
To swallow the fish, you had to have something more than a reason. In a way, you had to reject reason itself. You had to have spirit (and perhaps spirits and the spirits too). Especially as a nice black girl, as a strong black woman. You couldn’t just get away with whatever. Hell no. You could be crucified for that, or worse gain a bad reputation. Animal murderer. Race traitor. Nasty girl. Acting crazy. Acting up. Performing. Anything could happen to you. Anything could happen. It couldn’t be pretense or something to do for kicks. It had to be real. There had to be some black art, some power, some need and conviction that warranted that kind of transformation. A particular kind of magic. . .
From As I Stand Living (Christopher Higgs):
Each time a book comes into the world I get really sad. It is a terrible, miserable experience. I dislike it immensely. There really is no reward for it, except posterity. The only thing that gives me any pleasure about publishing books is the knowledge that someone in the future will read it. Now, in this moment, it’s awful torture. Right now I wish I hadn’t published any books. The book comes out and no one talks about it, or if they do talk about it they talk about it for a second and then it’s over. If you talk about it too much you become an asshole. Self-promotion is looked down upon. In spite of that, I post about it and then refresh my Facebook and Twitter pages incessantly to see who has liked or re- tweeted my post, and mostly no one does and this makes me very sad. I am terminally sad when it comes to writing. I hate it. I really do.
From How to Keep You Alive (Ella Longpre):
A bone person, someone you see through. They live alone in a cornfield. When he speaks, what is behind him. Standing, heavy with empty. A creek appears in the frozen ground, he is bleeding. A creek appears in the sky. The father and son are caught in a circle, what happens to a circle under water. When we try to put out the fire. Another way to be locked in a room, another way to be lost in a room. A locked door, He said, why didn’t they break it down.
From Drowsy. Drowsy Baby. (Jared Joseph):
Claude Lanzmann interviews the survivors: He survived but is he really alive Claude Lanzmann asks the translator, asks indirectly his survivor interviewee, instead of asking him directly (though there is no direct, there are only directions, the director chooses them, because Claude doesn’t speak Polish nor Hebrew and the translator does, and because, well that’s the question coming, does Claude speak trauma? Do the survivors? Do the dead?) which I think is really cruel. Why are you telling me this story then Claude asks (I wipe out resistance) Because you’re insisting on it. We don’t get to know why Claude is insisting on it. Why does he smile all the time Claude asks same man, and the answer is mysterious by nature but it’s obvious too to the perceptive viewer, because it isn’t so far from crying, but it is the preferable option, and the survivor knows this and the survivor says this.
THE 2017 CATALOGUE:
(So far. Stay tuned for more exciting news/announcements)
Russell Jaffe – Civil Coping Mechanisms (Red)
Sarah Certa – Civil Coping Mechanisms (Blue)
Chiwan Choi – The Yellow House
Gabrielle Civil – Swallow the Fish
Christopher Higgs – As I Stand Living
Calder Lorenz – One Way Down (Or Another)
Scott Esposito – The Doubles
Ella Longpre – How to Keep You Alive
Bud Smith – Same Clothes as Yesterday
Mathias Svalina – The Depression
Jared Joseph – Drowsy. Drowsy Baby.
Siân S. Rathore – Wild Heather
– Janice Lee
#RECURRENT IS REIMAGINING STORYTELLING. IS INNOVATIVE LITERATURE. IS WRITING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS.
I’m excited to announce the the #RECURRENT series is open for submissions. At least one manuscript will be selected for publication in 2017.
What is #RECURRENT?
#RECURRENT is an ongoing series of exceptional writing at Civil Coping Mechanisms. The series seeks to push the boundaries of narrative with books that seek to reconstruct, reimagine & expand on existing narrative spaces. Not bound to genre or category, #RECURRENT books are intuitive, instigative, innovative, sensitive, perceptive, heart-breaking, and honest. The first two #RECURRENT titles at CCM are Gaijin by Jordan Okumura and Blind Spot by Harold Abramwitz. (The previous edition of the series at Jaded Ibis Press also published Crepuscule W/ Nellie by Joe Milazzo and Family Album by Jason Snyder.) The series is edited by Janice Lee.
What am I looking for?
More than anything, I’m interested in writing that gestures towards intimacy in different ways, in writing that isn’t afraid to reveal or retreat, and writing that makes us feel all the feelings.
I’m especially looking for manuscripts by women, non-gender binary individuals, writers of color, or individuals from marginalized backgrounds.
I’m also especially interested in works of prose: fiction, nonfiction, essay, hybrid works.
Guidelines:
Email your entire manuscript to janice@entropymag.org in a doc, docx, or pdf format. (If you send a pdf, I may need a doc or docx file later.)
Please include “#RECURRENT Submission” in the subject of your email.
Include any context or relevant details about the work, what category you might include it in (ie. fiction or nonfiction), and whether you feel the work is in dialogue with any other writers or works.
Also include a brief bio.
Deadline: October 1, 2016.
#RECURRENT IS REIMAGINING STORYTELLING. IS INNOVATIVE LITERATURE. IS WRITING THAT MAKES YOU FEEL ALL THE FEELINGS.
– Janice Lee
When I started the #RECURRENT series initially with Jaded Ibis Press, it was with the intent to feature 3 particularly innovative novels that both carried on the legacy of the novel as an important, historical & unique literary structure, as well as to reimagine the novel as interface and interactive narrative.
I’m excited to officially announce that #RECURRENT is continuing and reborn as an ongoing series of exceptional writing with Civil Coping Mechanisms. [insert \m/ METAL \m/ here] The series will push the boundaries of narrative with books that seek to reconstruct, reimagine & expand on existing narrative spaces. Not bound to genre or category, #RECURRENT books will be intuitive, instigative, innovative, sensitive, perceptive, heart-breaking, and honest.
More than anything, I’m interested in writing that gestures towards intimacy in different ways, in writing that isn’t afraid to reveal or retreat, and writing that makes us feel all the feelings.
#RECURRENT, a new series at Civil Coping Mechanisms, is excited to present 2 titles in 2016.
Gaijin by Jordan Okumura
(June 2016)
Deeply embedded in the novel Gaijin, by Jordan Okumura, is an unsettling nostalgia for family and for her Japanese culture, haunted by whispers and by abandoning, by illness and isolation, by silence and trauma. The novel attempts to simultaneously track a personal rupture and a family, through the painful and awkward reclamation of the self after sexual violence and the evocation of a patriarch who is half dreamed, half real.
Lidia Yuknavitch: And what is the measure of self inside grief? Jordan Okumura’s novel Gaijin is a body song. By weaving stories of loss and myth, Okumura brings an identity to life, half real, half imagined. I was mesmerized from start to finish.
Guest Edited by Laura Vena.
Blind Spot by Harold Abramowitz (forthcoming August 2016)
This brilliant, poetic novel weaves a new structure for narrative, forces the reader to consider the complex and profound structures hidden in a record of time, each observation of the utterly quotidian transforming into a lyrical evocation of essential significance. Each repetition is a surprise, and each consideration an impossible enigma. Narrated by a mysterious and clairvoyant consciousness, Blind Spot, is both blind and honest, isolated and compulsive, and achieves with such magnificent beauty a reconceptualization of seeing and reading that one might enter this book through its first lines and wish to never come out again.
TC Tolbert: It’s one thing to write a novel about trauma – to tell a coherent story, to create (and be comforted by, to whatever extent) a narrative arc of pain and loss. But it’s something else entirely to find oneself inside a series of imagistic and syntactical loops – a Venn diagram of partial thoughts (or dreams or memories) that become more certain and more troubling each time they refuse to relate or resolve. Harold Abramowitz’s Blind Spot is not about anything – about, from the Old English, ‘outside of.’ Instead, it’s a kind of prayer made out of attention (Simone Weil). Incantatory and somatechnic. I fucking love this book. Abramowitz writes the mind and body (in trauma, in everyday life) from the knotted and careful inside.