We are pleased to announce the publication of two books from our 2013 CutBank Chapbook Contest. Lily Hoang calls Dennis James Sweeney’s new chapbook, What They Took Away, which was just published by CutBank Books Press, “an epic apocalypse of life stripped of tedium, of obtrusiveness” and a “magical miniature world showcas[ing] the terror of erasure and the wreckage of return.” Now you can read this “book of oracular providence” yourself.
Also available is Anne Barngrover & Avni Vyas’s Candy in Our Brains, an experimental collaboration between two very fine poets.
Interviews with all three authors will be published online soon.
Each book is $10. They are available for purchase via our safe and secure online bookstore.
Please submit to the 2014 Chapbook Contest here: https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit
What They Took Away
by Dennis James Sweeney
2013 CutBank Chapbook Winner
Release date: January 23, 2013
17
(From What They Took Away)
When they took away literary journals, all the porcupine caribou in the continental United States died.
No porcupine caribou has ever lived in the continental United States. They live only in Alaska, where they freeze and suffer eating lichen until each winter the snow covers it over. Then the animal people argue for their rights and we argue that our lights must not be turned off and the caribou goes about its business, far away from anything any of us know, towering antlers breaking the landscape for the no one who is there to try and see it.
Click here to purchase via our safe and secure online bookstore.
Candy in Our Brains
by Anne Barngrover & Avni Vyas
Release date: January 23, 2013
Arson of the Old Year
(From Candy in Our Brains)
Bourbon opens like a lotus on your tongue in December and sets up a smokehouse in your mouth. Remember those fortunes you tied to the iron gates? Break the strip of paper, and they release like Luna moths, fluttering slivers of lime. Nowadays, you don’t mean prayer the way serfs used to. Nowadays, prayer is a stalled motor and you light your smokes in gasoline. Red ignites the fog but you are only a signal flare away from the river’s wet belly. The flame, an umbilicus twitch, the air’s worm. You walk over bridges. You walk from gate to gate
smelling the air for stale blood. A near-dead raccoon shudders to life and then can’t stop bleating. How many small animals pray by way of half-eaten flower, of half-drunk river? We can’t sleep with the gray light in our eyes. Never let your feet face the east lest they burn up dancing on the sun. Always drain the lighter fluid in the last minutes of the old year before fireworks bust up the sky.
Click here to purchase via our safe and secure online bookstore.