Choose Your Own Adventure Poetry

You're Going To Die, Jess Wigent by poet and novelist Jess Stoner is a choose-your-own-adventure style book of poetry and winner of the 2010 Equinox Poetry Chapbook contest.

This long overdue chapbook is printed in an edition of 100 on Arches Text Wove, staple bound along three interlocking spines, intricately folded and contained within a highly reflective mylar sleeve.

It is available for just $15 at fact-simile.com

Jess Stoner writes book reviews for Necessary Fiction and her prose and poetry appear in Caketrain, Alice Blue Review, Everyday Genius, Horse Less Review and other handsome journals. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Denver and now lives in the brisket and sweat of Austin. Other books by Jess Stoner include I Have Blinded Myself Writing This (Short Flight/Long Drive Books 2012)

Click here to order your copy of this limited edition Fact-Simile chapbook.

Sincerely,

Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
Fact-Simile Editions
www.fact-simile.com

April's Poetry Trading Card Features Kazim Ali

Fact-Simile Editions is pleased announce the release of our latest poetry trading card featuring new work from Kazim Ali.

Kazim Ali is a poet, essayist, fiction writer and translator. Recent books include Fasting For Ramadan (Tupelo Press 2011), Water's Footfall (Omnidawn 2011), The Fortieth Day (Boa Editions (2008) and The Far Mosque (Alice James Books 2005). Ali is also the founding editor of Nightboat Books, a nonprofit organization that seeks to develop audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries.

This new poem (The Door Between You) by Kazim Ali is April's Poetry Trading Card from Fact-Simile Editions. These limited-edition poetic collectibles are printed on recycled paper and available for just 99 cents on our website.

Subscriptions to the entire 2012 series are just $10 plus shipping and, as always, our 2010 and 2011 Poetry Trading Cards are still available individually or as a complete set.

Happy Reading,

Travis Macdonald & JenMarie Davis
Fact-Simile Editions
www.fact-simile.com

j/j hastains "new forms and meditations for the pressurized libertine monk" reviewed by Aimee Herman

Publisher: Scrambler Books
PubDate: 1/10/12
ISBN: 978-0-578-09770-1
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $13
Pages: 99




What is hybrid; or more importantly, how can language turn into itself in a way that looks and feels transformed? j/j hastain removes the familiar of a line or image. In doing this, there is a metamorphosis occurring on the page through photographic documentation and caption to the (sometimes) blur. Questions are being asked and the answers move far beyond the binding. “Does a practicing monk have a sexuality?/ a marrow etiquette?” How is one viewed/how does one view? j/j hastain challenges the need for answer by elongating the inquiry. There is a darkness within the retrieval of turn-ons and desires in this book, which cannot be entirely described as poems. Instead, read the moans captured "cells" like Rorschach tests allowing room for each pair of eyes to see/interpret something else. Choke on these configurations and revelations of self, and watch for a bubbling up of emotions to emerge. There is a change, a shift, a remodeling of body: “you so perfectly inseminating me/ turns my vagina into a cosmic eye.” Be prepared to travel, gather up passport and necessary documents. Readers will not be the same after this voyage onto planet j/j hastain.

-Aimee Herman

Buy the book here.

female semen into femme womb: review of a womb-shaped wormhole by j/j hastain

Publisher: BlazeVOX books
PubDate: 8/1/2011
ISBN: 9781609640750
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $16.00
Pages: 119


Over drinks the other night, I was talking to another poet who said that contemporary poets have moved away from myth. This might be true in a world of word games and carbon copies. However, a womb-shaped wormhole by j/j hastain is not lamentable in this way. “by funnel and by phallic” hastain gives over a “monotone-less monument” in which a mythological avatar, known as the unicorn, gets to know the virgin, while swimming into the virgin & becoming the virgin, thus drawing “the body of the beast to a submissive stance.” I swim in the myth of this; as reader, I enter a new virginity in which the unicorn is tamed, thrown into “positional rest.”

Of course the language here is often sexual, primordial, begging the most eloquent sex rites of ancient scenes where The Great Rite is enacted. A swell up in which “… the unicorn might tear the impending /virgin / into bloody bits.” This is not apologetic, but it is “beloved poise” through which an unseasonal ritual takes place. This is the uncovering of a sacred space that is not a line, but chora uninterrupted & thrashing.

Certainly many traditionalists will be made uncomfortable with this poetics of penetration, for the reader will be unicorn as well as virgin. There is a potency achieved, however, by taking on each of these roles, to reach into the tender regions, to swirl the “pits of papyrus” & feel the mantra.

There is a “she-alternate” which describes the you or the me or the I or the you. “… I no longer have a stopping point / there is no end to you.” This poetics of rewritten virginities, of being made pure via a letters of “utmost secretions,” truly articulates the mood of orgasm, going well beyond the Reichian tone & giving “so much / upcoming grind.” Thus, this is not just a book to be read, but a book to make out with. To feel & experience the “rhizomic resuscitations.”

-Debrah Morkun

Buy a womb-shaped wormhole HERE.