Awaiting Time - by Helen Shepard (CC#104)

Crisis Chronicles Press is very pleased to celebrate the December holidays by publishing Awaiting Time, a duende-infused poetry collection by the inimitable Helen Shepard. 

Where are you?

United States $10.00 USD Elsewhere $13.00 USD

Awaiting Time is 48 pages, perfect bound, 5.5x8.5" and features 37 of Shepard's most engaging works, some in Spanish but mostly in English, including "Listening to Flamenco," "Ilusiones," "Más Ilusiones," "Blood Stains," "Garden of Delights," "I Need to Take Apart My Thoughts," "Circular Reincarnation," "Living with Eternity" and "When Blue Was Green." ISBN: 978-1-64092-974-6. Cover art: Ya tienen asiento by Goya. 

Available for $10 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA.

Helen Shepard of Oberlin, Ohio, taught for decades at Lorain County Community College and retired as an Associate Professor of Spanish. For many years after, she continued giving courses for their Center for Lifelong Learning. Helen has lived all over, from American Samoa to Spain, and traveled extensively. Her previous publications include "Camilo Castelo Branco and the Portuguese Inquisition" in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies. She has presented poetry at Snoetry: A Winter Wordfest, the Cleveland Museum of Art and countless other noteworthy locations. To find out more about Helen, please visit www.helenshepard.com or contact her on Facebook.

Drinking From What I Once Wore: Selected and Recent Poems - by Chris Stroffolino (CC#103)

Crisis Chronicles Press is ecstatic to announce the publication of Chris Stroffolino's long-awaited new book, Drinking From What I Once Wore: Selected and Recent Poems.

Drinking From What I Once Wore is 6x9" perfect bound, over 100 pages, and features cover art by Rachel Thoele.  ISBN: 978-1-64092-970-8. This volume features 49 works including "Cusps," "The Dart of the Eel," "First World Problems," "Variations of 21st Century Pop Songs," "2 Dramatic $onnets for the Con$umer $ociety," "Commercial Interruptions," and the Pushcart Prize nominated "Questions for Google Home."

Where are you?

United States $12.00 USD Elsewhere $15.00 USD

Available for $12 US from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Blvd., Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

Love for Chris Stroffolino and Drinking From What I Once Wore: 

"Maybe all life is preparing for 'The test/ We can only pass if we waste no time/ thinking we can study for it.' If so, Chris Stroffolino's carelessly brilliant poems would be as invaluable as cliff notes. In any case they come in handy."  

—John Ashbery, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

"There is no line of thought in [Stroffolino’s] poetry that can’t or doesn’t kick out a set of veins pumping blood to and from the dramatic qualities of its existence or an inverted conversion of the optimal antidote to its own fiercely depicted frailties. Chris has fought in his writing for a poetry that is intimate, musical, invested equally in Shakespeare & Joe Strummer and intensely personal without giving up the demand of rhetoric to be a necessity of passion rather than a muted counterbalance. His new book varies the tempo and carries these things through.  

—Anselm Berrigan, author of Something for Everybody

Chris Stroffolino
photo by Jaime Borschuk

"Edgy and hip."  

—Noelle Kocot, author of Phantom Pains of Madness

Chris Stroffolino is the author of 4 full-length books of poetry, as well as the memoir Death of a Selfish Altruist, two books of essays in poetry and culture criticism and, with Dave Rosenthal, a study guide to Shakespeare’s 12th Night. He currently lives in Oakland, California, where he has taught writing at Laney College since 2008.

Meet the Author:

3/14/2019 (7:30 pm) - Chris Stroffolino and Friends at Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California 94704.

This Year's Crisis Chronicles Press Pushcart Prize Nominations

Crisis Chronicles Press has had the honor of publishing many excellent books by very talented poets this year. Alas, the Pushcart people only allow us to make six nominations. I would have preferred to have chosen twenty, as there were so many worthy candidates. But after some lengthy and very difficult deliberations, I finally narrowed down the field and submitted the following Pushcart Prize nominations:

"Serving"
by Kari Gunter-Seymour — from Serving (March 2018)

"Eclipse Myths"
by Steven B. Smith — from Where Never Was Already Is (April 2018)

"William Randolph Hearst, Diving Alone, San Simeon"
by Christine Howey — from Citizen of Metropolis (August 2018)

"Afterlife"
by Rikki Santer — from Dodge, Tuck, Roll (September 2018)

"assembly line doll head roach motel"
by Juliet Cook — from Malformed Confetti (October 2018)

"Questions for Google Home"
by Chris Stroffolino — from Drinking From What I Once Wore: Selected and Recent Poems (December 2018)

Best of luck to all of you!

Malformed Confetti - by Juliet Cook (CC#102)

Crisis Chronicles Press is delighted to announce the publication of glitter witch Juliet Cook's new darkly delicious full-length poetry collection, Malformed Confetti, on 16 October 2018.

Where are you?

United States $12.00 USD Elsewhere $15.00 USD

All hail the Queen of Grotesque, Juliet Cook! Her imagery is monstrous, distorted and unnatural — an unmistakably unstable mixture of estranged dollcanos and blood. These poems plunge into “your neckline, your mouth, your eyes”— into the absurdities of existence, and Cook can barely contain all that is coming apart, even “a stuck tongue keeps breaking.” Malformed Confetti is alive! And absolutely “plotting an insurrection.”

—Susan Yount, editor of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal

Juliet Cook’s full-length collection, Malformed Confetti, is a visceral examination of the body: bones, blood, teeth, breasts, ovaries, eyes, throat and thighs. Cook’s poetry is elemental grindhouse feminism; confronting what is most difficult with the unblinking eyes of a coroner. Lush and guttural, Cook leads us on a journey through a harrowing cycle of creation and destruction.

—Kelly Boyker, author of Zoonosis and Poetry Editor at Menacing Hedge

In her second full-length collection of poetry, Juliet Cook offers up a menagerie of beaten, bloodied, insect infested, ink ingested, broken girl bits.  Her words cut into the eyes with nettles and burs, leaving nothing but an empty socket, a hole to be filled with desire “rooted in sick compulsion.” Cook stares unflinchingly at the sugar and spice and everything nice to reveal the dark nature of such malformed conceptions of beauty and womanhood.  Each graphic image is threaded with the red yarn of things that are forbidden to say, so Cook cracks the skull open as easily as the shell of an egg.  She stares the darkest horrors of the mind straight in the eye to say “Doesn’t mean I still can’t maneuver up. / Maybe I just don’t want to / with you." Her poems in this collection leave the reader dazzled by blue blood and dead birds made out of the vocabulary of what it means to be a capital P Poet.

—Tracie Morell, author of Matilda's Battle Waltz

Poetry that devours you. That isn’t afraid to put its best twisted doll foot forward. I like to read Juliet’s poetry in the buff because her words keep me modest as I rail against the perversity of playing with shit and all the anorexic nightmares that go along with it. Her pound cake poetry fits perfectly in your misshapen pie hole. Swallow her words like a handful of blue-tinged tacks because there’s no standing on ceremony in this land of ravenous parasites and machinated halos. Her well-chosen and ill-fated albino words aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty as the maggots begin singing an emaciated melody and there’s nothing left but her Tilt-O-Whirl porno star mannerisms. This collection of Malformed Confetti  will leave you in traction as it’s rolled fresh from the oven and acts as a tranquilizer or dark red cloud burst depending on your dissolution or poisoned discord and how prepared you are to walk into the silently screaming fires.

—Charles Cicirella, co-author of Ether Bisque

In Malformed Confetti, Juliet Cook conveys both a rare elegance and grotesque violence simultaneously. This book is unafraid; it is not ashamed. It takes unabashed risks, and turns language into something that is breathing, and alive with vigor. In this landscape of “secret luminarias” the body is devoured like food, and her “tongue unroots from its dank cave”; “bones are tapered syllables” and “hollow flutes.” There is a vulnerability embedded in the anger and gore, and though some may say we are “forbidden to talk about hunger,” Cook speaks of it fearless of her rivals.  

—Lisa M. Cole, author of Dreams of the Living and Heart Full of Tinders

Nominated for an Ohioana Book Award, Malformed Confetti by Juliet Cook is 113 pages, perfect bound, 5.5x8.5" and features cover art by Simona Candini. ISBN: 978-1-64092-973-9. Available for $12 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 535 Parkside Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44143 USA.

Read an interview in which Juliet Cook talks about embodied poetry and writing Malformed Confetti, at Rogue Agent.

Meet the author:

Tuesday 16 October 2018 at 7 p.m. during Poetry Plus featuring Juliet Cook at Art on Madison, 14203 Madison Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio.

Sunday 11 November 2018 at 6 p.m. during Uncloistered Poetry at Calvino's Restaurant & Wine Bar, 3143 W Central Avenue in Toledo, Ohio.

Wednesday 13 March at 7 p.m. during Sara Minges & Juliet Cook at Mac's Backs, 1820 Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Malformed Confetti book trailer by Susan Yount: 
https://youtu.be/mYcdyX864Ic

Juliet Cook [photo by Darryl Shupe, processed by Cook]

Juliet Cook has been writing poetry for more than 25 years. Her poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines, both online and in print. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including a collaboration with j/j hastain called "Dive Back Down" (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), an individual collection called "From One Ruined Human to Another" (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, 2018), and with another individual collection, "Another Set of Ripped Out Bloody Pig Tails" forthcoming from The Poet's Haven.

Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX in late 2008, ten years ago now. Her more recent full-length poetry book, A Red Witch, Every Which Way, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her MOST recent individual full-length poetry book is this one, Malformed Confetti.

The poems within Malformed Confetti range from 2008 to 2015. In early 2010, Cook suffered from an unexpected Carotid Artery Dissection, which lead to an Aneurysm which lead to a Stroke. Later in 2010, while on the brink of divorce and temporarily living with her parents, Cook began to assemble and submit an earlier version of this manuscript. As time went on, she revised it, added more recent poems, and rearranged it, forming it into a dissected but interconnected discombobulation of pre-stroke and post-stroke work.

Cook's poetic style has undergone changes over the years, but her passion for poetry lives on.

Cook also sometimes creates semi-abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures.

Cook also runs her own tiny independent press, Blood Pudding Press, which sometimes publishes hand-designed poetry chapbooks and sometimes sells art.