Carolyn Hembree wins 2015 Louise Bogan Award

Nous-zot author Carolyn Hembree was been awarded 2015 Louise Bogan Award Winner for her ms Rigging A Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape A Plague. The annual award is for a book of poems contributing in an innovative and distinctive way to American poetry. The book is slated to be published in the spring of 2016. An excerpt from Hembree's manuscript appears as a 2015 NZP chapbook: Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls.

Copies are still available!

Sun Creatures by Bridget Lee now ready for shipping

Ready to post tomorrow morning -- I finished stitching Bridget's chaps today. Order a copy of Sun Creatures, or any of the others NZP titles at the Nous-zot online store.

Bridget Lee's Sun Creatures

Nearly ready to begin printing Bridget Lee's chapbook, Sun Creatures, lyric and innovative all at once, these poems meditate on bees, the one who keeps them, and the environmental crisis and the root of our world.

Cover art by Karinna Gomez, 37 pages, Japanese stab binding with pale yellow vellum endpapers.

Pre-order a copy now, just $8.00 plus shipping.

sun creatures by Bridget Lee, $8.00

excerpt

Out by the train-tracks where small red poppies persist in growing   bees go. Out by the trash bins, buttercups,   addled with bees.    These fragments are what I can’t see between. These are what I retreat from. I’ll call the sun a train with a hundred wheels. I’ll call it bearing down. Throw poppy    apple   vetch   from the windows of cars.   Cast them as questions    what are we   what are we   what are we?

from Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Sueyeun Juliette Lee NOW AVAILABLE

Meditations on the potencies of light, light's timbers and resonances on spirit and being.
Full-color cover with vellum oversheet, photograph by the author. 24 pages, hand-sewn. $8.00.

the aerial nature of celestial blue

what comes to life

with the smallest cloud

in solidifi ed blue

suffers an enormous loss

such is life for

the blue sky in a wildfl ower

or blue eyes at dusk

that distant blue infi nity

rises sternly in the soul

vibrates in no sonorous crystal

tonalizes only in the

swift muscular engine

we call clarity, not day

concourse of correspondences

limned with blue hands

active in its dynamics

of dematerialization

dream after the fi nesse of ancient galleries

whose calm hallways in infi nite attention

remain, counseling

a possessed good

such a minimum of substance

in which the bell rings

of its own accord

Orders shipping for Spring chapbooks today

All order for Spring titles are going in the post today. Spring subscription orders will receive the final chapbook of the series, sun creatures by Bridget Mendel Lee, in May.

annie won's Nous-zot chapbook so i can sleep: reading for shipping

annie won's so i can sleep is going in the post today! Have you ordered your copy?

Colors, colors, colors

What to choose?  One? A series of three? A rainbow?

Spring and all

As I work on layout for annie won's chapbook, I have been mulling over the press. What I love best about making chapbooks are the discoveries. I have published some astonishing women poets with Nous-zōt, often discovering the work I want to make books for through reading. Both Metta Sama's chap and the just published Speaking in Tongues without Skulls by Carolyn Hembree have their origin in reading their work in journals. As for annie won's chap, I discovered her intensely visual, innovative work at a reading in Providence, RI, where I was also a guest. Poets are everywhere, its true, but Nous-zōt poets are something special!

Here is a first pass at designing the cover for annie won's before i can sleep.

Cardstock color? Peach? Butter yellow? Something soothing, I think. Perhaps a series in three colors: peach, yellow, warm pink.

Have you ordered your copy yet? Your can order the full spring series or any of Nous-zōt's titles individually at the online store.

SPRING 2015 Nous-zot Chapbook Series: Buy All 4 and SAVE

Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls
by Carolyn Hembree

AVAILABLE for purchase now: $8

Half-letter chapbook Cornflower blue metallic vellum cover, silvery vellum endpapers, side-sewn Japanese stitching. 34 pages.

Buy ALL FOUR Spring chapbooks and SAVE: only $25 plus shipping includes:

• Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls, Carolyn Hembree

• from aerial concave without cloud, Sueyeun Juliette Lee

• sun creatures, Bridget Lee

• leave the light on, Annie Won

j/j hastain interview at Speaking of Marvels

Nous-zot author j/j hastain talks about her chapbook APOPHALLATION SKETCHES at Speaking of Marvels:

"The piece “A Totem You Can Wear” is a strange little drama, an opera mid-pronunciation, an opera in which the she in the shape, is the shape and the he in the shape is hitched onto her. She lets him stay there. He lives off of her. The notion of feral synthesis is the drive which accompanies the content that exists in all of the pieces within this work, but so, where such synthesis meets sound, there at the bottom of the sea, where the earrings are inter-tangling, getting lost in the dust of the disappearing reef. Something ancient and magical is happening. Maybe it is because such earrings, entangled on reef bodies, will catch the eyes of folks above the surface of the water as they are throwing things into the sea that damage the reef. Maybe it is all to slow down the process of humans throwing things into the sea. Maybe the glints will encourage people to swim in the sea with as much awe and awareness as is possible for them to do in their own bodies should they focus enough."

XXX and Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls

The final Fall 2014 chapbook, XXX by Maria Damon, and the first Spring 2015, Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls, by Carolyn Hembree, will begin shipping by March 1. Pre-order now!

Nous-zōt Press Spring 2015 Titles

Nous-zōt Press is delighted to announce it's Spring 2015 titles:

• Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls, Carolyn Hembree

• from aerial concave without cloud, Sueyeun Juliette Lee

• sun creatures, Bridget Lee

• leave the light on, Annie Won

Carolyn Hembree's Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls will be first up in February. 

More details soon! Pulling the final chap for Fall together now: Maria Damon's XXX:

 

Muriel Leung recommends Metta Sáma's After “Sleeping to Dream”/After After (Nous-zōt Press, 2014)

Muriel Leung, writing for BLOOD JET RADIO recommends "Four Chapbooks to Read by Four Badass Women Poets," including Nous-zōt Press title After “Sleeping to Dream”/After After (2014) by Metta Sáma!

Leung writes:

"Begin at either cover and read until the end. Turn the book over and read another collection entirely. I love a book that toys with the idea of how we traditionally read and Sáma’s chapbook takes the idea of what she calls the “reverse ekphrastics” to lyrically stunning new heights. In After After, Sáma fixates on Argus Panoptes, the hundred eyed giant of Greek mythology and in After “Sleeping to Dream,” the classical takes a modern turn with contemplations on art that traverses natural, bodily, and domestic planes. The level of play operates not only linguistically but also in the handling and reading of the book—a joy in each turn.

"Run by poet Marthe Reed, Nous-zōt Press also features other great titles in its online shop here.

"How to best enjoy this chapbook: FKA Twigs’ “Water Me” plays while you enjoy a piece of pineapple upside down cake, sliced horizontally from the middle first. Brew some mulled wine and invite a lover over at night. If they turn bird and disappear in the day, then so be it."