Chapbooks

Carrie Murphy’s Meet the Lavenders (2011) introduces us to the fictional 1960s girl group The Lavenders, a threesome with dreamy dreams immersed in the pursuit of all that is girl group-related. A complex, adoring and intimate view of a musical and social phenomenon that usually doesn’t allow a scratch below the perfectly manicured surface.

Meet the Lavenders has a cover created by Rhani Remedes, with illustrations by Susanna Troxler and Remedes.

Watch a trailer forMeet the Lavenders:

chapbook trailer for Carrie Murphy’s ‘Meet the Lavenders’ from Birds of Lace on Vimeo.

Excerpt:

Identical Sequin Girls

Even our pee is perfumed. Watch us
synced up over microphones, leave
in baby-colored cars, hairspray in
the rearview.

I wear blue & she a darker blue & she a darker,
when we dance our arms arc the same.
Lipstick, bat lash
in time. Swivel,
sash.

I’m cat-eyed & unstarching,
pink, altoed, & smoothed
over. He loves me
more, drove me home, a
stiff-hair suspender boy
wrote our words & try
to dance.

I met him at the candy store!
I licked the rainbow
in a spiral but I’m still
nice &

only wear leather when we sing.

He tongued me up while I dreamed
#1.

SONG: Tonight’s The Night

Tonight is the night
When I’m feeling alright
Next to you
Not feelin’ blue

Compact mirror me,
I’m sixteen! I like cooking
& I’m kicky in stripes.

Wigs with bangs
after bobs go out because nobody
has seen Jackie in years. What’s
wrong with pinning a star
to your ear & calling it
glitter?

*********
$5
purchase here

______________________________

Ponyboy, Sigh: A Word Problem (2011) is a hybrid story-essay by Leon Baham wherein Ponyboy, of The Outsiders fame, is submerged in a queer (un)conciousness that swins through the murky waters of desire, fear, love, brotherhood, race, violence, mothers, tenderness and memory. A complication of faggotry with an inquisitive chorus and echo like a bloody cave.

Leon Baham is from the Inland Empire. He now lives in Seattle. He is currently working on his first long book titled The Book of Imaginary Boys.

An excerpt:

Anything happened when they met. They could have said not a word and pushed their lips together immediately, neither of them knowing really how to kiss another man. They could have seen each other around for three months glancing out of the corners of their eyes. Johnny could have seen Ponyboy in the shower and fled quickly with his half erection. Ponyboy could have followed him. Ponyboy could be Johnny’s father. Johnny could be any age younger than Ponyboy. Ponyboy is 17. Ponyboy could be a space invader and Johnny could be an earthling. Anything was how they met the point is that they were looking from eye to eye on the others face. Ponyboy with a shit eating grin. Johnny looking like a saint as he will be throughout the rest of this story. A plain bored face of ecstasy. Johnny was close to God and Ponyboy was faithless.

********************

21 pages
$5
Purchase here

_______________________________

Kristina Marie Darling’s Footnotes to a History of the Victorian Novel (2011) is a poem in footnotes, wandering the ghosted halls of Victorian aesthetics in a spooky version of the whole story. This offering uses vintage wallpaper hand-sewn onto the pages with a tiny trinket and antique bobbin lace adorning the cover. All text is typed out on an IBM Selectric II typewriter. Footnotes can also be displayed as a poster on your wall, as it folds out accordian-style.

An excerpt:

5. In a little known version of the myth, Penelope realizes that her household has been usurped by the maids. Each disconcerted by her new posture. A chorus rising from their cool white throats.

__________________

12″ x 19″ fold-out poster
$12
purchase here

****************************

Perhaps a Girl Elsewhere (2011) contains poems that engage with feminist aesthetics and lyrical dazzlements equally, stapling themselves to your skin with ardent, playful ferocity. Exciting, smart poems with shards of love slid inside them.

Adam Strauss has two E-chapbooks: Nation-State (BlazeVox) & Address (Scantily Clad Press). He has poems forthcoming in Cricket Online Review and Parthenon West Review and has work up at Delirious Hem’s memorial for Leslie Scalapino. He loves the works of Gwendolyn Brooks. Visit him online here.

Excerpt:

Awe

The woman—perhaps
A girl elsewhere—

—“Too pretty for eyelashes”—
With 3 eggs

Stuns me. My
Feminism

Dictates I question
Awe—am in it.

____________

16 pages
forest green cover w/neon green innards
$5
purchase here

***************************

C. Exigua (2011) is a collection of three short stories by Jackie Wang. Topics covered include runaway tongues, dirt/crumb revolutions, childhood memories, vomitous faces, disgusting shows of romance (see: vomitous faces), and all the varied complications and wondrous connections amongst such things.

Original illustrations for the cover & within by Caroline Bren
32 pages
$5
purchase here

***********************

In the opening story of Rohin Guha’s Relief Work (2010) we are treated to
vomit, Steve Madden shoes, diarrhea, and the euphemism “eat-hole.”
Later there are blow jobs, teenagers, mothers, grandmothers, ghost
dogs leaving ghost shits, and a keen yearning for connection and
continuity; if you’re smart–and you are–then you know that all these
things are little glowing marks on the axis of life that can only be
puzzled out long after the fact. In Rohin’s world, we go home, live,
drink coffee, unfurl, fuck and fall asleep with the puzzle pieces
stuck to our cheek. We wake up and laugh at the reddened indentations
on our faces, and even though our small tragedies make us ache
something terrible, we call our mamas and tell them we love them.
Relief Work is a smart, funny, nasty little darling wretch of a
mama, and you will love her. Promise.

Relief Work is Pushcart Prize-nominee Rohin Guha’s first chapbook.
read an excerpt here
56 pages
cover artwork by Paul K. Tunis
$7
purchase here

************

Fabulous Essential (2009) is the first chapbook of poems from Niina Pollari. Niina’s poems jump from the river and walk on land, live in the sky and eat you alive. Textures made of words to slick your body with a loving pulse: Fabulous Essential plays firmly in the land of the living.

Niina Pollari is a writer/translator lost in Brooklyn. She contributes to editorial duties in the staff of At-Large Magazine and curates the Bushwick Reading Series. She also oozes edifying verbiage at http://de-cidered.blogspot.com.

read reviews of Fabulous Essential:
The Chapbook Review

Galatea Resurrection

Excerpt:

Out Here Everything

Your blue slip weirds where the night bird waits
to pick your stockings
to raggedy. Girls,

remember. Even this
has a strong purpose, unwicked. Stash
your afraid and smile with your game face,

your hunting face. Emails will open themselves
without your limp long fingers
and the ghost minnow handshakes

they emit. You’re staircases up to houses
no-one visits. The creepers in the walkway

will know soon as you’re cold, but the legs
underneath you have a good running start, and you
have been under this weather before.

Niina reading from Fabulous Essential at The Birdwisher release party:

________

Printed in stoplight colors w/hand-stamped covers
18 pages
$5
purchase here

******************

blood and jasmine when i dreamed her (2010) is a lyrical narrative tracing one woman’s life, family and psychic landscape. Beautiful and life-blooded to the fullest, the way your dreams are at their realest. blood and jasmine is Christine Vi-Van Nguyen’s first chapbook.

Christine reading from blood and jasmine when i dreamed her at The Birdwisher release party:

Christine Vi-Van Nguyen reads from ‘Blood and Jasmine When I Dreamed Her’ from birds of lace on Vimeo.

Excerpt:

Storytelling

I’m listening to a ghost story.

I’m nineteen and I’m not sure how much I believe in ghosts.
The night is warm, like those summers when I was five, ten, twelve,
and the moths cast beautiful shadows against the walls before settling down on the surface of the lamps to die.

I hear a soft sizzling noise.

My aunt says,
shhh, shhhhhhhhh

her eyes sparkle, and I can’t tell whether it’s a joke, part of the performance
or, in some strange way
the latent heat of the day dissipating, the lulling drugging pull of the jasmine
everything is serious.

My mother asks if everyone is ready
the crickets are crying their song to the moon
and I’m thinking of the taste of the hollow of Elias’ throat

My mother’s voice is difficult, deep and breakable, and I feel like I’ve waited too long.

I think of incense dying like gray angels gone against the spackle of my ceiling.

My grandfather, painting cranes.
The red feathers. The white.
Scratchy couches, and the smell of mungbean, of roast pork. Of fruit in front of black and white pictures in blue bowls, and fragile porcelain before dead faces.

Of the smell of jasmine in the evening, and a heat-wave summer.

It was a heat-wave summer.

Serving tea on a coarse off-white linen tablecloth.
The way the moon shone.
The way things tasted on my tongue, a warm remembering that is gently jasmine,

And telling ghost stories.
My mother’s eyes.

Her voice, saying

Every story is a ghost story. There are always ghosts.
________________

hand-stamped vintage wallpaper covers
$8
purchase here