NEW GROWTH :: ANNOUNCING FORTHCOMING CHAPBOOKS FROM THE OS
Welcoming our 2019 / 7th Annual Print::Document Chapbook Series Titles, and our Inaugural 2018–19 Digital Chapbook / Pamphlet Titles.
It’s hard to believe that 2019 will mark our *7th* annual chapbook series! There was no way to know, back in that first experimental moment, what would grow out of the seeds planted there.
We received an unprecedented number of submissions for our four print slots in 2019, so much so that it made us reconsider the modes in which we might make space for texts such as these — and inspired us to begin a digital, by-donation digital chapbook series, which will occasionally appear at bookfairs as sliding scale by-donation pamphlets, as well as on our website in perpetuity.
We’re continually rethinking what it means to be a publisher whose primary mission is access and archival preservation of humans and work that challenge the norm — which means that in the next year you’ll also be welcomed to an open source online library of OS texts, since it’s primarily elite institutions that are able to invest in publications like ours, keeping that “free” access to our materials, ironically, in mostly hands that frequently can already afford to reach them. Keep your ear to the ground on that.
But I digress!
Today is a day for celebration, as we welcome nine new creators into the OS family, with four print:document series chapbooks and four digital chapbooks. All forthcoming chapbooks are available for preorder (or pre-donation) as a series or individually at our online store, and via discounted annual subscription.
PRINT::DOCUMENT CHAPBOOKS 2019
Knar Gavin — Vela.
Vela. wonders about media ecologies/mediumicity, and wanders among vegetal life, fruits and animals, asking questions about entities not-just-human, and about proximity — how close it close? What vela lie beneath, or above, the variegated vellum that we are? I like to think my poems are worried about archives, too, yet capaciously so: what does the body archive? What does it send, and what does it re-seethe? What should the poem being doing about the Anthropocene, beyond re-marking it, and how can the poem engage meaningfully with other-than human intelligences and temporalities? There are these things, and then the poet shows up every now and again — I guess as a sort of rattled shy kid who nonetheless still loves the world, and never wants to stop glossing it — or trying.
Knar Gavin attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Birdfeast, Poetry, BOAAT, Caketrain, Booth, the Journal, Storm Cellar, Yemassee, Print-Oriented Bastards, Quarterly West, SoftBlow, Glittermob, Heavy Feather Review and elsewhere. She writes the occasional folk song and rides bikes with Team Laser Cats, a Philadelphia women’s cycling squad. Her tumbles can be found at knargavin.tumblr.com.
Ryu Ando — [零] A Phantom Zero
‘[零] A Phantom Zero’ is an 8-part piece inspired by ‘the Drake Equation’.
Ryu Ando’s writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pidgeonholes, Liquid Imagination, and other venues. His first book of poems, The Lost Gardens of the Hakudo Maru, is available from a…p press. Somewhere between L.A. and Saitama. This is where his characters exist and from where their voices carry. Lost and found. In Japan. In America. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither. Somewhere else entirely. https://ryuando.wordpress.com
Kristina Darling and Chris Campanioni — Re:Verses
“What I want is the intimacy of anonymous encounters within the text itself, and yet to be effaced and revealed, even and especially by my own authorial departure. And it would take the form of a repetition or a reversal; a re: verse in which we correspond lyrically; a re: verse in which our correspondence becomes the poem.
Of course, an integral part of any correspondence is the space between things, those slender apertures lit up with waiting. It is in these liminal spaces that possibility accumulates. We write toward this space, in response to its silences.”
— — —
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty books, including Look to Your Left: The Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2020); Re: VERSES (with Chris Campanioni; The Operating System, 2019); Je Suis L’Autre: Essays & Interrogations (C&R Press, 2017), which was named one of the “Best Books of 2017” by The Brooklyn Rail; and DARK HORSE: Poems (C&R Press, 2018), which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held both the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; three residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Morris Fellowship in the Arts; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among many other awards and honors. Her poems appear in The Harvard Review, Poetry International, New American Writing, Nimrod, Passages North, The Mid-American Review, and on the Academy of American Poets’ website, Poets.org. She has published essays in The Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, and numerous other magazines. Kristina currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly, an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Review of Books, and a contributing writer at Publishers Weekly.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press). He has worked as a journalist, model, and actor, and he teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Baruch College and Pace University. His “Billboards” poem that responded to Latino stereotypes and mutable — and often muted — identity in the fashion world was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. A year earlier, he adapted his award-winning course, “Identity, Image, & Intimacy in the Age of the Internet,” for his first TEDx Talk. He edits PANK, At Large, and Tupelo Quarterly and lives in Brooklyn.
Magdalena Zurawski — Don’t Be Scared
From the author: “Don’t Be Scared is a poem/essay generated from my experiences in the classroom. It attempts to implicate the classroom itself in a longer narrative of modernity and democratic struggle and in that sense it deploys my academic ‘upbringing’ for political ends.
Litmus Press published Magdalena Zurawski’s poetry collection, Companion Animal, in April of 2015. Her novel, The Bruise, was published in 2008 by FC2. A poetry collection, ‘The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom,’ will be out from Wave Books in Spring 2019. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
DIGITAL CHAPBOOKS 2018–19
Rachel Zolf — The American Policy Player’s Guide and Dream Book
The American Policy Player’s Guide and Dream Book takes as its source an 1892 publication of the same name, which can be found in its entirety here.
The author writes: “Instead of recopying as supposedly neutral ideological representation, I chose entries by feel, thinking of the Amerikkkkan nightmare as I went along. Then I went over it once more.”
Rachel Zolf’s writing and other artwork tends to queerly enact how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Their five books of poetry include Janey’s Arcadia, Neighbour Procedure and Human Resources, all from Coach House Books, and a Selected Poetry is forthcoming. Films Zolf has written and/or directed have shown internationally at such venues as White Cube Bermondsey, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Their work has won a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Trillium Book Award for Poetry and been a finalist for two Lambda Literary Awards, among other honors. Zolf lives in Philadelphia and is nearing completion of a theoretical text called A Language No One Speaks: The Dangerous Perhaps of Monstrous Witness.
Gyasi Hall — Flight of the Mothman
Flight of the Mothman is a chapbook that attempts to navigate the impact of familial legacy, bi-racial culture, and various types of media on personal identity by examining specific moments throughout his family’s history and recasting the author as West Virginia’s famous Cryptid. It’s about Truth, Cartography, Dungeons & Dragons, and being black while listening to your favorite emo bands.
Gyasi Hall is a poet, playwright, and cereal enthusiast from Columbus, Ohio studying Creative Writing and Film Theory at Otterbein University. He is the Poetry Editor for Otterbein’s literary magazine Quiz and Quill, and his work has been published/produced by Thoughtcrime Press, Z Publishing, Get Lit, and MadLab Studios, among others.
Sue Landers — Mass Transitions
From the author: “In 2017, I used the New York City subway system as my studio space, riding each and every subway line from end to end to better understand my city in this time of late capitalism, the early stages of a Trump presidency, and climate change. From these explorations came Mass Transitions, a set of poems and photographs that captures (some of) New York in this current moment. I appreciate the Operating System’s engagement with the archives, queerness, and hybrid works — all concerns of my work as well.”
Sue Landers is the author of three books of poems, most recently ‘Franklinstein,’ which takes Gertrude Stein and Benjamin Franklin as its muse to tell the histories of one Philadelphia neighborhood. Her poems have appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Brooklyn Rail, The Offing, and elsewhere. Landers lives in Brooklyn where she works as the executive director of Lambda Literary.
Eric Benick — The George Oppen Memorial BBQ
The George Oppen Memorial BBQ could be considered a ritual, an invocation, a celebration, a protest. Its characters and landscape are an amorphous, chimeric Promised Land where retributions are real, demagogues are punished, and freedom is a call for both daiquiris and rumination. It is a network against austerity and homogeneity. It is a commune with enough space for the deepest of privacies. It is a place to destabilize the Western canon, to make cracks about Schopenhauer, to exile white messiahs, to mourn Fred Hampton, and Fela Kuti, and Federico Garcia Lorca. It is a brief rupture in time and space where possibilities are freed of their enclosures, where unrest is realized and invigorated. It is the moment when all the lights go out, right before the riot starts.
Eric Tyler Benick is co-founder and editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of chapbooks. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Vassar Review, Reality Beach, Bad Nudes, Graviton, decomP, Souvenir, Fruita Pulp, Fog Machine, and elsewhere. He is a current MFA candidate for Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
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