Books What I Got at AWP or Just After

Best bargain:

FC2's $5/ea

Most expensive:

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (not pictured) (~$26.50) (worth it)

Best design overall:

Absence Where As by Nathalie (Nathanaël) Stephens (Nightboat)

Runners-up:

Flowers by Paul Killebrew (Canarium); Selenography by JM Wilkinson (Sidebrow)

Biggest "OMG-Where-Have-I-Been?" Press:

Canarium

Cleverest book cover, 4th best design:

Pathologies by William Walsh

Best use of a pop reference in design:

When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother by Melissa Broder (for the Some Girls nod)

Best designed journal that 9th Letter should learn from:

Annalemma

Best journal to touch:

Bateau

Most excited to read but probably won't:

La Medusa by Vanessa Place

Most awed by so far:

Black Life by Dorothea Lasky

Best bathtub read so far:

Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis

MLP The First Year

I'm excited about this one. Mud Luscious put together an anthology of the chapbooks so far. Preorder it here for $15. Look at this list:

ken baumann, shane jones, jimmy chen, brandi wells, blake butler, nick antosca, sam pink, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, ryan call, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, & michael martone

Things I Recently Ordered

Most of the books I've been buying lately are in pre-order stage, so I keep forgetting if I ordered them or not. So I thought I'd make a list.

Working backwards:

The most recent three coinsides from Brave Men Press. The poem, "Night of 1000 Murders," by Mark Leidner is pretty fantastic.

Claudia Smith's chapbook, Put Your Head in My Lap, from Future Tense.

James Iredell's difficultly/brilliantly titled Prose. Poems. A Novel. from Orange Alert. This contains "Before I Moved to Nevada," which was published in This PDF Chapbook.

DRUNK by Daniel Bailey. There's a pretty good trailer for this book at YouTube. On Tuesday I was visiting with a friend at a hip rocker-type bar and I turned around and saw how many empty beer bottles were in the place and I thought about how many problems could have been solved with the money spent, the energy spent, the time. And how many problems were solved with the beer. It seemed about even, for a Tuesday.

The contest winner everyone's talking about: How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace. I actually received this one already and read part of it in the tub this morning. I said this about it in a conversation about chapbooks:

The construction of the book really brings the form to its apex. The size, the quality of cover stock and cover art, the professional printing and hand construction actually contain some kind of electric power, I think. You hold that book and suddenly understand what a chapbook is. You read it and you know – these pieces are made for this form.

From Colin Basset's Bear Creek Feed, I ordered the limited edition chapbook of poems, Falling Stars to Smash Motherfuckers in their Face by Jillian Clark. This collection has more to it than just a great title.