from LET IT BE OUR RUIN

I was taking back some books to the university library when I saw a poster taped to a wall announcing a lecture that night on Martin Fierro given by some professor from the University of Rio Cuarto. There was definitely a lineage from that epic poem to Nicasia’s lyrics that also ran through Andean ballads and the songs of Yupanqui and Cafrune. Not only in the shortness of breath, their honesty and lack of sentimentality, or the way their voices plunged at the end of the line, or how they measured their silences, but also in the content of their poetry, the midnight rustlers and knife duels, the dry mountain passes and merciless landowners. 

The professor from Rio Cuarto was a good talker even if I didn’t understand his ideas most of the time. He stood up there at the lectern with his unbuttoned collared shirt, his hairy hands flailing around, saying that the poem was a map of the Pampas, and that it could be charted and surveyed. He said something about how the eight-syllable payada form mirrored the gaucho’s rhythm, it was hurried and efficient, each stanza spoken by someone who was gathering up his poncho and about to ride off, tossing the last mate leaves onto the embers. 

The few of us who were there at the lecture joined him afterwards at a bar across the street from campus, the same bar that Fuller used to busk in front of with the homeless kids who were trying to go to Austin. Some older guy who looked like a professor bought him a martini and we sat at a big table where he kept talking in between sips. Slamming his fist on the table, he talked about how Argentina was a kindred spirit of Texas, with their blood ethics of the land, the fatalistic perception of the cowboy, while a bunch of academics politely indulged him. After he finished his drink, a young woman in a long dress, who said she was a grad student, bought him another one. I was about to leave after the first beer, but then he started talking about music, how both places were united by a lyrical understanding of space, of distance, an improvisatory and relentless mode of composition.

After most people left our table, he said he had a confession to make. He wasn’t a student a literature, but a fanatic of music. Yeah, he was invited there to be some token for his country, giving another lecture about his national epic, but really what he’d been researching the last few years was protest music during the dictatorship. 

The grad student stood up and went over to the bar and joined another group of people, the Argentine keeping his eyes on her while he talked over his plate of chicken alfredo. Soon, it was just the two of us sitting there, him, waiting for the grad student to come back, and me, asking him everything he knew about Argentine music.

“Are you a student at the university?”

“I was. A few years back.” 

He nodded his head slowly, looking at me like he didn’t understand why I knew so much about his country’s music. 

“What do you think about Nicasia? He was the only musician who disappeared, wasn’t he?” 

He put his fork down and pushed his plate away, giving another glance over to the grad student at the bar. He looked back at me, then down at his empty glass. He said something in Spanish to himself that I didn’t understand.

“You have so much more to learn. You think disappearing in some way changes the music? It’s more important, more full of power, if the artist is a victim? I wish you luck, sir.”

“I never said it made his music better.”

“But why ask about it then? You didn’t ask about the music, about his life before? You ask because you know nothing.”

He looked from table to table, and again towards the bar, lifting his finger and pointing it out the window behind me. 

“Everyone here. They know nothing. And I don’t have your answers. Want to know where is Nicasia? If he disappeared? No one knows. He was gone. What do you want to know?”

He leaned closer across the table, spitting into my beer.

“I have a better question. How does someone disappear two times? That’s a better one, but I know nothing.” 

Even though we were alone, I felt embarrassed, like the people at the bar could still hear him chastising me over the laughter and music. I got up and went into the bathroom and locked myself in a stall, looking at the tile floor and the piss stains in the grout. The floor was shaking from the music. I still hadn’t paid for my beers yet. I thought about how I could pay and leave without passing by his table. If I couldn’t make a reckoning with myself about what I was doing there, what was there to say to him? He was right. I might’ve been researching for nearly a year about the history of his country, read a few novels, collections of poetry and short stories, scrolled and zoomed in and out of maps, and listened to every type of music I could find, but I still didn’t know anything about Nicasia. I hadn’t heard the third album yet. I didn’t know what he experienced during those years just after he returned from Spain. If I wanted to stop obsessing about the country, I had to find the third album, the one Fuller had talked about. All the research I was doing was just a distraction from trying to find it. If I heard it, then maybe I could give up. 

I walked out of the bathroom and paid the bartender. The professor wasn’t sitting at the table anymore. He was surrounded by the grad student and her friends, waving his arms around again while spit sprayed everywhere. On the way out I was going to stop and tell him thank you, tell him how much his words helped me, but when he saw me, he grabbed me by the shoulder and said he was just talking about me. 

“I’m telling them how much you know about Argentina. It’s very impressive.”

The grad student with the long dress asked me if I had family from there. Someone else asked me if I was in the Spanish department. “No, he’s not,” the grad student said. “I would’ve seen him around.” 

I heard more muttering from them, some laughter.   

​I took the professor’s hand off my shoulder and told him I felt like the character Juan Dahlmann in that Borges story, “The South,” the sickly librarian who takes a train far away from Buenos Aires to the provinces and gets taunted by a ranch hand in a bar next to a train station and agrees to a knife duel with him, deciding he’d rather die defending his pride than as an invalid in a hospital bed. He looked at me with a tense smile and raised his glass while the other people in the group laughed some more. ​

We are delighted to see Lee Tyler Williams's LET IT BE OUR RUIN included with so many other exciting forthcoming books (by such great publishers!) in Entropy's Small Press Release list, curated by Jacob Singer. Take a look. Buy some books. ​

A wonderfully-written review of Brooke Larson's PLEASING TREE by Amy Takabori in Dialogue: a journal of Mormon thought: "Larson’s interactions with trees and other earth things are central to her 'earthling' wanderings through the Arizona desert, New York City parks, and Israel in her collection of personal essays, Pleasing Tree. Throughout, Larson masterfully balances humor with profundity, using her insights into plant processes to explore questions like 'how did I get here?'" Read the full review here. 

We're excited and honored to see Patti White's experimental novella Particularly Dangerous Situation listed in Jacob Singer's Small Press Release list at Entropy Magazine. 
Check out the full list here. 

​Tacoma Weekly gives a mention to the new edition of Laura Krughoff's short story collection Wake in the Night. Laura lives in Tacoma and is an assistant professor at the University of Puget Sound. 

​The new edition of her story collection is available on the Arc Pair Press website, Amazon, and select bookstores. Read the article here. 

Let It Be Our Ruin
by Lee Tyler Williams
Arriving Winter 2020

Crisscrossing through the small towns of Argentina to find a rare rock album, a middle-school teacher from Texas is forced to confront his understanding of the past. Through the language of music, Let It Be Our Ruin examines the myths of identity and historic realities. Rumors about a musician whose fame peaked during the Argentine Dirty War and teenage gossip about a high-school friend harmonize with the stories of nations to create a composition about grief, the multiple ways of speaking truth, and the blues.

Listen to the playlist accompaniment on Spotify! It's composed of 1960s - '80s Argentine music and Mississippi delta and Chicago blues. 

ORDER HERE: Let It Be Our Ruin

"Let It Be Our Ruin is a profound and elegiac novella about exile and friendship. Williams is a graceful, stunning new talent. Following the quest for a mysterious rare album and an Argentine musician whose legacy was nearly forgotten after the Dirty War, Let It Be Our Ruin reveals the vast and intimate ways in which music and loss binds us across myth, language, and shattered histories."  ~ Michael Zapata, author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

"On the surface, Lee Tyler Williams’s novella is a story about a music collector who embarks on a trip to find an obscure record, but at its core, it’s a story about history, loss and love. Its trip into the wilds of obsession asks us to look at what drives us (those shadows of fascination we cannot shake from us). Encyclopedic and shrewd in its cultural observations, Let It Be Our Ruin is an enthralling bifurcated ethnography that sings a wondrous song and we’d be well served to listen." ~ duncan b. barlow, author of A Dog Between Us, The City, Awake, and Of Flesh and Fur 

"Lee Tyler Williams has written a charring and delightful quest novel that is a must read for anyone who has sought the answers to the universe's deepest questions in music and travel. Part bonfire ash and part bougainvillea petals, Let It Be Our Ruin is a gem for wayward souls to snuggle against. A super cool novella!!!" ~ Brian Allen Carr, author of Opioid, Indiana

Particularly
​Dangerous Situation
​by Patti White
Arriving Winter 2020

A devastating tornadic storm hits Alabama after erasing the state of Mississippi. Among the survivors are a distraught weatherman, a woman strapped to a dental chair, a man carrying a dead cat, and a golf-club wielding real-estate agent who encounters the undead. In this experimental novella, White’s poetic prose captures the endless trauma of catastrophe: the physical and emotional disorder, the chaotic and contingent patterns of events. Here, the reader will find no neat resolution. Life after grand-scale destruction and near-death experience is effectively another kind of cyclone: spinning and relentless, a state of free fall through dense and violent clouds.

ORDER HERE: ​Particularly Dangerous Situation

​Patti White is the author of four collections of poems, Tackle Box (2002), Yellow Jackets (2007), Chain Link Fence (2013), and Pink Motel (2017), all from Anhinga Press. Recent chapbooks include A is for Aphasia (2013), Kontakion (2014), and District Flood (2014). Her poetry has appeared in journals including Iowa Review, North American Review, River Styx, Nimrod, DIAGRAM, Forklift Ohio, Parcel, McNeese Review, Slippery Elm, Vine Leaves, Waccamaw, and New Madrid; her nonfiction can be found in Gulf Coast and Mulberry Fork Review. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

"The title of Patti White’s Particularly Dangerous Situation may refer to a storm, perhaps even an apocalyptic one. It might refer to some collective delusion, or it might refer to the situation of living in a world that can produce such a storm. In the end, however, White’s dangerous situation comes down to the intellectual and artistic risk this lyrically narrative collection makes: turning disaster into art. White—who lived through a tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011—has a survivor’s sense of devastation tempered by an artist’s desire to transform the world. With a poet’s sense of language and gifted storyteller’s pacing, White channels voices (like Faulkner in As I Lay Dying) which provide lenses for understanding a loss that each one struggles to conceive, but the struggle to tell their stories on their terms provides the terra firma of this unique novella. After all, as White writes, '[We] are caught in a narrative that might not be survivable.'” ~ Jeff Newberry, co-author of Cross Country

"Poet Patti White concocts with this stunning and stuttering prose engine, Particularly Dangerous Situation, a Medusa-haired memo war on the fly, a transcript of Traumatic Stress Disorder before it gets a chance to be Post. I kept thinking of what black and white disasters were befalling Kansas when Toto wasn’t there anymore. White’s draining novella is all Coriolis effect and falling isobars of emotion, rich in vortices and bowing echoes of booming syntax. Diaphanous and occluded, the book is a catalogue of jagged and jittery clouds—mackerel smacked, nightmare’s tails, an Old Testament hardware store of hammers and anvils." ~ Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding

"Particularly Dangerous Situation consumes and entrances. In fact I became Jonah in the belly of a twister built by White. Each page—each sentence—is another edge, ledge, ledger, conflagration. And yet for every collapsing absence in this tour-de-force, White's poet-steeped prose wills a luminous architecture by which to know the way. And just as I finished this scorcher, I began it again. There is no finer compliment than that arc traced by leaping back to word one. This is White at her finest. I urge you toward PDS today!" ~ Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man

Pleasing Tree
by Brooke Larson

Nominated for the 2020 AML Award for
​Creative Nonfiction! 

Nominated for the 2020 CLMP Firecracker Award for
​Creative Nonfiction!

Brooke Larson’s essay collection Pleasing Tree explores the human relationship with the wilderness. Beginning with a Mormon-founded experiment in primitive survival, teenagers hike the Arizona desert while Larson shines light on the effects of prolonged exposure to the outdoors, to lands considered inhospitable to life. Recalling Biblical and religious sojourns, Larson maps her own travels from the desert to Salt Lake City to New York City to Jerusalem, observing the life that curls in a leaf, the bug that spews cinnamon-flavored goo, and the water that occasionally floods the desert. Her essays track the impact the often unnoticed has on the human psyche, discovering the awe upon the recognition that even the desert’s heart beats. This collection crawls with insects, communicative plants, and poetry. It pulses with blood and breath, excrement and the bodies of the living. (Personal Essays/Lyric Essays)

Brooke Larson is a writer, collagist, and sometimes wilderness guide. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. A chapbook of her poem-plays, “Origami Drama,” is available through Quarterly West.​

ORDER HERE: Pleasing Tree

I and You
by J. David Stevens

The four stories in J. David Stevens’s I and You focus on immigrants and their families, characters trying to find the merge point between the China of a previous generation and America today. A teenage son puzzles over his father’s obsession with American football. A Texas lesbian falls for an international graduate student. A divorced middle-aged woman tries to right an old wrong in the life of a man for whom she serves as caregiver. Through episodes where intimacy falters in the face of palpable distance, characters must confront unknowable details in the lives of even those closest to them: parents, lovers, confidantes. These are ghost stories of a kind, tales of what was lost and what was let go during the cultural journey from East to West. (Realism/Short Stories)

J. David Stevens's Mexico is Missing won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction in 2006. His work has appeared in a variety of national magazines, including Harper's, The Paris Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, River Styx, and Mid-American Review. In addition, several stories have been anthologized in collections from W.W. Norton and Longman, as well as in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Series. His most recent nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Post Road, River Teeth, Sonora Review, and Denver Quarterly. He lives in central Virginia with his wife and two children, where he teaches at the University of Richmond. ​

ORDER HERE: ​I and You

"Stevens's stories powerfully demonstrate the never-ending process of adaptation, questioning, and learning that migration forces upon us all, immigrants or not. The unknown, the other, isn't just the new culture or race, but the family history that remains hidden, left behind. Stevens is at his best when he explores the emotional repercussions of having to find one's way through life with this incomplete knowledge. His characters' stories are full of failures and disappointments, unexpressed desires and pains, but Stevens gives us a ray of hope at the end, in the child who finally draws a straight line in calligraphy class, the caregiver who gains a better understanding of the husband who left her, the lover who finds a calling for Chinese cooking. Ultimately, these are stories of empathy and love in the everyday world, where people reach out to each other and keep practicing, even if the end result is imperfect." ~ Patricia Campion, The Collagist

"The ways in which [Stevens's] characters perform their 'liminal identity,' reacting to the dueling social pressures of China and America, give the stories a quiet yet potent drama." ~ David Amadio, Cleaver

The Paper Life They Lead
by Patrick Crerand

​Received Honorable Mention in the Writers' Bone 2018 Best Books List!

​ORDER HERE: ​The Paper Life They Lead

Wake in the Night
​by Laura Krughoff

ORDER HERE: ​Wake in the Night 

REVIEWS:
​jmww

INTERVIEWS:
Florida Writer Podcast
Radio Tacoma, 101.9 FM, Tacoma, WA
​Q & A

Mouth Trap
by Rebbecca Brown

ORDER HERE: ​Mouth Trap

REVIEWS:
Heavy Feather Review
Entropy Magazine

INTERVIEWS:
Q & A

Particularly Dangerous Situation 
by Patti White

Available January 2020

Excerpt...



Weatherman

      When I say that it is best to be two-dimensional during a storm, I mean that pieces of paper travel well in the wind. A tornado can carry a photograph 200 miles and set it down without a crumple or tear or even a hint of dampness. So if you cannot hunker down in a safe place you must become as paper. Think of flatness. Extend your arms and press your body to the ground. Then if the tornado takes you, it will bear you up in tendrils of cloud, in long white fingers of condensation. The storm will let you drift and waft and settle like a leaf on a field of cotton. Or on a patch of concrete. In either case, it is better to be light and flat, to be paper, to carry an image of something long past and fading.
      When I say that a tornado can carry paper a great distance, I mean that cattle will be transported to another pasture and skinned alive or dead by whirling gravel. That rocking chairs will appear on alien porches and pickets from a wrought-iron fence will arrow into a bed of bearded iris. A crystal teardrop from a chandelier, a boxed set of state quarters, an empty suitcase, a teacup and saucer, these will be caught in a divergent current until dispersed by the collapsing supercell. When I say a tornado can carry paper I mean the updraft will lift trucks high above the ground and crash them down on your head. Trees will be plucked up out of the earth and replanted elsewhere. And no one will know where anything came from. Except for the cancelled checks and receipts and you will see those on television, along with the child's shoe and the skeleton of a cat.
      When I speak of these things perhaps you will think of the Biblical rain of frogs. Or the rain of blood that soaked Richard the Lionheart. I tell you these signs and wonders are in fact so commonplace they appear in meteorology textbooks. Frogs get sucked up as a waterspout passes over the pond. Rain becomes infused with Saharan dust or the soot from coal fires or the spores of microalgae. Trentepholia in the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone. Iron oxide from dried swamps. The small detritus of the world borne aloft and mixed with the humid air of the Deep South. This is what you will see: A red rain staining your clothes. The frogs sliding off your skin and hopping away.
      No one ever forecasts displacements or discolorations. But what I want to tell you is that whatever falls from the sky was once a part of the earth. That some things will fall more slowly or in places more unexpected than others. And that it is well to be two-dimensional in a storm. Think of flatness. Be the paper.

We have a cover for the forthcoming novella by Lee Tyler Williams! (Thanks to Alban Fischer!)

Crisscrossing through the small towns of Argentina to find a rare rock album, a middle-school teacher from Texas is forced to confront his understanding of the past. Through the language of music, Let It Be Our Ruin examines the myths of identity and historic realities. Rumors about a musician whose fame peaked during the Argentine dirty wars and teenage gossip about a high-school friend harmonize with the stories of nations to create a composition about grief, the multiple ways of speaking truth, and the blues.

Coming Soon! Winter 2020!

A devastating tornadic storm hits Alabama after erasing the state of Mississippi. Among the survivors are a distraught weatherman, a woman strapped to a dental chair, a man carrying a dead cat, and a golf-club wielding real-estate agent who encounters the undead. In this experimental novella, White’s poetic prose captures the endless trauma of catastrophe: the physical and emotional disorder, the chaotic and contingent patterns of events. Here, the reader will find no neat resolution. Life after grand-scale destruction and near-death experience is effectively another kind of cyclone: spinning and relentless, a state of free fall through dense and violent clouds.

"The title of Patti White’s Particularly Dangerous Situation may refer to a storm, perhaps even an apocalyptic one. It might refer to some collective delusion, or it might refer to the situation of living in a world that can produce such a storm. In the end, however, White’s dangerous situation comes down to the intellectual and artistic risk this lyrically narrative collection makes: turning disaster into art. White—who lived through a tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011—has a survivor’s sense of devastation tempered by an artist’s desire to transform the world. With a poet’s sense of language and gifted storyteller’s pacing, White channels voices (like Faulkner in As I Lay Dying) which provide lenses for understanding a loss that each one struggles to conceive, but the struggle to tell their stories on their terms provides the terra firma of this unique novella. After all, as White writes, '[We] are caught in a narrative that might not be survivable.'” ~ Jeff Newberry, co-author of Cross Country

"Poet Patti White concocts with this stunning and stuttering prose engine, Particularly Dangerous Situation, a Medusa-haired memo war on the fly, a transcript of Traumatic Stress Disorder before it gets a chance to be Post. I kept thinking of what black and white disasters were befalling Kansas when Toto wasn’t there anymore. White’s draining novella is all Coriolis effect and falling isobars of emotion, rich in vortices and bowing echoes of booming syntax. Diaphanous and occluded, the book is a catalogue of jagged and jittery clouds—mackerel smacked, nightmare’s tails, an Old Testament hardware store of hammers and anvils." ~ Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding

"Particularly Dangerous Situation consumes and entrances. In fact I became Jonah in the belly of a twister built by White. Each page—each sentence—is another edge, ledge, ledger, conflagration. And yet for every collapsing absence in this tour-de-force, White's poet-steeped prose wills a luminous architecture by which to know the way. And just as I finished this scorcher, I began it again. There is no finer compliment than that arc traced by leaping back to word one. This is White at her finest. I urge you toward PDS today!" ~ Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man