Gina Abelkop’s Darling Beastlettes is now available through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.

Description:
“A murder / glided in last night, nested / in your bouffant, stayed / for months.” This mix of violence and humor offers just a glimpse of Abelkop’s poetic vision whereby in poem after poem she explores the gritty and sometimes sinister side of sexuality in mock-romantic and surrealist fashion. With a biting wit she takes aim at shattered domesticity, while also exploring the often bizarre and disturbing realm of gender politics. This is an ominous, sometimes Gothic universe where the jagged terrain of the human body becomes a canvas for uncanny scenes full of perversity and complexity, beauty and brutality. Each poem feels like a collage made from snapshots, memories, or the fractured mise-en-scène of wives and women – historical, imagined, mythological, fabulist, and cinematic. While grappling with fear, desire, lust, and uncertainty, the frenzied inhabitants of Abelkop’s world oscillate between prayer and cannibalism, love and violence, laughter and sex.

From Darling Beastlettes . . . .

Mrs. de Winter Rides Again

I pleasured and came dreaming about him slaughtering
her. As a fantasy, I liked it rather well.
I can put on any dress I like and he loves. I can drive

to any balmy province and still he has bludgeoned her
down, because she was a trollop and I am his wife.
I am a plain and kind wife. I am the wife he loves.

If she’d rotted from the inside out everyone
would’ve mourned. Instead now they haunt, me
and you and anyone who’s ever loved to see a beautiful,
live thing, which is everyone. Don’t you forget it.
It’s why I’m the wife and she’s the corpse.

It’s why I wake up and smile. I can forgive anything
so long as he loves only me. It’s this powerful gust
of air and I can’t stop it churning through me,

blasting me skinless. I don’t think I have a choice. I think
I enjoy not having a choice, some days. Other days,
I weep in the library because were I to choose otherwise—

if such a choice existed— I’d cease to fantasy. I’d go to sleep
at night and wake up remembering nothing. I’d never
smile. I’d probably draw everything my eyes chanced upon.

Author Bio:
Gina Abelkop’s recent work can be found in Action, Yes, Encyclopedia Vol. II: F-K, Everyday Genius, Delirious Hem’s “Seam Ripper” series and Octopus. She is the founder and editor of Birds of Lace (http://birdsoflace.wordpress.com), a DIY feminist press started in 2005, as well as co-editor of the online journal Prayers for Children (http://www.prayersforchildren.be). She blogs regularly at The Moon Stop (http://themoonstop.blogspot.com).

Be sure to check-out Gina’s own webpage for a glimpse of the various inspirations for the book, as well as some intriguing visual, textual and musical references.

Our reading period is now over. Thanks to all who submitted. As always, we will read each manuscript closely, and we hope to make an announcement about our next publication shortly.

If you’d like to submit a manuscript, try us again in 2012. You can follow our announcements on this website and on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Apostrophe-Books. Thanks again for your interest in Apostrophe Books.

The editors at Apostrophe Books are pleased to announce our third open reading period. We will accept manuscript submissions between September 1^st, 2011 and October 31^st, 2011. For guidelines and details, please go to our SUBMISSIONS page.

An exhibit featuring Eva Lundsager, a painter based in St. Louis, opens at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in NYC this fall. The title of the exhibit is a line from Jessica Baran’s poem “Atlantis”: “And Stillness is There and Then Some.” We hope to arrange a reading with Jessica at the gallery (or nearby) while the exhibit is up. More details to follow. . . .

Click HERE for images of Eva Lundsager’s work from the exhibit in Art Forum.

For more information about the gallery and the exhibit click HERE.

We’re pleased to announce that Gina Abelkop’s, Darling Beastlettes has been chosen for publication as the next book in the Apostrophe series. Thank you to everyone who submitted during this reading period. We received an abundance of extraordinary work.

Portrait of Gina Abelkop by Susanna Troxler

Apostrophe Editors on Darling Beastlettes:

“I’m scared I’ll swallow my own tongue, mistake / town children for feed and cut their throats in a fit of hunger” writes the narrator in “The Diary of a Girl Beastialist.” Abelkop’s bizarre work challenges not only the idea of a well-crafted poem, but also the very way in which language is sexualized and eroticized, and how words themselves are in fact, always, ‘darling beastlettes’ that can build a symbolic edifice (sometimes phallic, sometimes religious, sometimes feminist, sometimes fairytale), but also topple it in the same stanza. Her work is compelling, exciting, weird, witty, unsettling, violent, and comic. Abelkop redefines the uncanny through surrealist gestures, altered syntax and surprising, nightmarish anecdotes. The verse and prose combine memory with nightmarish fantasy, and fragmentary narrative while also engaging a kind of profound feminist critique. This critique is more a ‘creepy undercurrent’ than an explicit directive that imbues the text with a sometimes oneiric, sometimes hyperreal atmosphere:

“The first time I had sex I laughed so hard I bled

out of my nose. My boyfriend said he’d like to see me cry.

We were talking about different things, then.”

(from “The Glass Tree (A Romance) “)

Each poem is like a collage made from snapshots, memories, or the fractured mise-en-scène of wives and women – historical, imagined, mythological, fabulist, cinematic, and very real. Here’s a brief glimpse from the poem, “Happy Housewifery”:

Happy Housewifery

I brought up the pines like a sticky prize

welded fast to mine, those thorny hips blue

and welted yellow from sharp late night fights

meant less to exorcise than conjure: few

gasps of lucidity are required

to propel the vision forward. Over

satellite wires I amend desire

taut in my fast fist to bargain, proffer

all this black thrush surging desperation.

Reduced to bed, kitchen and red whore mouth

I purr: imagine, all that attention

to canon, then happiness in the house!

It’s the prick that gets me, blood flowering

so good and hard you’d think God made the body.

On Gina Abelkop:

Gina Abelkop lives in Berkeley, CA, where she dances to the sounds of new wave women and wears floral print frocks. Recent work can be found in Action, Yes, Encyclopedia Vol. II: F-K, Everyday Genius, Delirious Hem’s “Seam Ripper” series and Octopus, amongst others. She is the founder and editor of Birds of Lace (http://birdsoflace.wordpress.com), a DIY feminist press born in 2005 from a desire to proliferate the great glut of nastily shimmering work that lives and breathes around us, and co-editor of the online journal Prayers for Children (http://www.prayersforchildren.be). You can read about her big feelings and rampant fangirling at The Moon Stop (http://themoonstop.blogspot.com).

Abelkop on the writing of Darling Beastlettes:

Darling Beastlettes began in New York and ended in San Francisco, a cross-country slop fest of scavenged, made-up histories and real life atrocities, mean rug-burned love and sordid attempts to crawl out of it, obsessions with women in bonnets or glitter or black curls, and the sneaky veins that connect what is grotesquely feminine from dark, candle-lit days ‘til now. Wives dream dreams and throw their veils to some ash-raining wind, mushroom-chomping circus daughters speak candidly with God, mangy half-girls find ways to stay alive, and everyone revels in the sharp stink of love for better or worse.

The book will be available soon through SPD and Amazon. Stay posted!

POETS & TRANSLATORS

Janet Kaplan, Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Goransson, and Sarah Gambito

Monday, May 23 · 6:00pm - 8:00pm

The Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia Street
Greenwich Village, New York

Looks like it’s shaping-up to be a busy spring for Apostrophe authors. Here are some links to upcoming events as well as recent reviews. Details about upcoming readings can always be found on our EVENTS page.

Upcoming Readings by Paul Foster Johnson:

1. Monday, March 28 @ 8pm
w/ Chris Glomski
Poetry Project Monday Night Series
131 E. 10th Street, Manhattan

2. Friday, April 1 @ 7pm
w/ Rob Halpern and Julia Bloch
Multifarious Array Reading Series at Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street, Brooklyn

Upcoming Readings by Jessica Baran:

1. Friday, April 8

Golden Age Bookstore in Chicago (http://www.shopgoldenage.com/ followed by a screening of Altman’s 3 Women

2. Saturday, April 23rd

BONK! Reading series in Racine, WI, w/ Arielle Greenberg:

http://bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com/calendar/

Performance & Review Links:

Recent Review of Amy Wright’s Chapbook: JOURNAL

Video of Amy Wright Reading: Tennessee Women Writers Literary Reading