GRVLND Bundle
the first three GRIEVELAND books (ZOETROPE, Character Limit, and Love & Solidarity) for one price.
Kevin Latimer’s ZOETROPE is a frantic protest set in a grieving and illogical world. These poems and poemplays examine what it is to be black and grieving in America. At the end: some place, no disasters exist.
Originally released digitally as “Unemployment Insurance” on International Labor Day, Brendan Joyce’s full-length Love & Solidarity arrives on 9/3/2020 with reworked poems from the original release & a third section, exit strategies, which explores the summer of insurrection, mass death & love.
Brendan Joyce’s Character Limit makes excellent use of Twitter as both method of composition and constraint in poems that slap against the limits of wage slavery & the sprawling, gentrified city:
how to be a good girl by jamie hood
*DIGITAL EDITION available here
full length book of hybrid work — 6 x 9 | 170 pp.
release date: December 8th, 2020
cover art: Emilia Olsen
cover & book design: Angelo Maneage
ISBN: 978-1-7353527-4-9
how to be a good girl mingles diaries, poems, drafts, fragments, literary/cultural criticism, & love letters to unfurl hybrid interrogations of femininity, fucking, & surviving trauma. as the text journeys from the ice age to climate crisis & devours figures & texts as expansive as levinas, plath, the ronettes, after-school-specials, fairy tales, & the romantics (among others). how to be a good girl dismantles contemporary formulations of womanhood to ask: how far will one woman go in her longing to be fathomed as good, & what pound of flesh must be paid to live through this.
Jamie Hood on HTBAGG in Vogue Magazine & VICE
PRAISE FOR 'how to be a good girl'
“HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL is an utterly compelling blend of lyricism, diary, and criticism that has become my go-to for invoking the brilliant trans-eye view of the agonies and pleasures of heterosexuality, Hood gives voice to ideas I don’t know I need until she speaks.”—Torrey Peters, author of DETRANSITION BABY
jamie hood is a poet, essayist, memoirist, & miscellanyist. her work has recently appeared in The Rumpus, Peach Mag, The New Inquiry, Teen Vogue, & Transgender Studies Quarterly. jamie lives, writes, bartends, babes, & dog moms in brooklyn. how to be a good girl is her first book.
ZOETROPE by Kevin Latimer
full length book of poetry — 6 x 9 | 89 pp.
release date: 8 . 8 . 20
cover: Angelo Maneage
ISBN: 978-1-7353527-0-1
digital edition available here
excerpts:
"[ black ] boy in space is all the rage
on the evening news.
in space, your body means
your body & that’s it.
in space, i am stuffing a comet
into my mouth, look at that!"
Kevin Latimer’s ZOETROPE is a frantic protest set in a grieving and illogical world. These poems and poemplays examine what it is to be black and grieving in America. At the end: some place, no disasters exist.
praise for ZOETROPE:
"In times that seem unimaginable, the imagination can become necessary to our survival—and to our understanding of death. Kevin Latimer’s debut collection of poetry, Zoetrope, continually asserts the productive potential of imaginative transformation, while exploring the complexity of fantasy in a landscape of horrific news and disheartening labor." - Zach Savich in The Kenyon Review
"Kevin Latimer’s ZOETROPE is a vividly grieving machine, but “this is not a disaster story.” “Am I alive now?” the poems ask, knowing that “a boy in space is all the rage,” while landing means inhabiting a world where “capital punishments” abut “weird edges.” “Hellions / everywhere.” Helium too. It’s the atmosphere. Violence *is* the cosmology, Neptune says. And then: “No one / is shooting & that / is not a mistake.” It’s bad optics for the authorities. “And then the marches begin.” It’s good to be on the move. Look around: just a little darker now past the turn of days.” -- Bill Carty, author of HUGE CLOUDY
"...when I read Kevin’s work, I’m reminded of that feeling that, I think transcends any other feeling while reading poetry — I’m reminded of what a poem can do. To be reminded of that is such a beautiful thing. It’s that feeling when you read a poet break a line mid-word, or deliver in 5 lines what you’ve tried to do in 100, or deliver in 100 lines what you thought could only be 5, or refuse punctuation, or re-use punctuation, or shift perspective, tone, dialogue, anything, I don’t care — to read poetry is to have the potential to be reminded of what a poem can do. And to read Kevin Latimer’s poetry is to always be reminded of what a poem can do." - Devin Gael Kelly on VERTIGO.
"In Latimer’s ZOETROPE, “joy & grief are dancing on every sidewalk,” and there’s a sky, pink and filled with balloons, and there’s a boy dancing into and through a world where a black boy “run[s] from the police,” where “Tamir rips dandelions from the street,” and where daisies grow in grounds drenched in death. And even so, Latimer creates a world where black boys fly & dream & live & become astronauts that “dance around the sun.” “I want to speak to all this bigness” asserts Latimer. And he does..." - Noor Hindi
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Kevin Latimer is a poet and playwright. He is the co-editor-in-chief of BARNHOUSE, a writing collective. His poems can be found in jubilat, Poetry Northwest, Passages North, Storm Cellar, & elsewhere. His plays have been produced by convergence-continuum. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Love & Solidarity by Brendan Joyce
full length book of poetry — 6 x 9
release date: 9. 3. 20
cover: Matt Mitchell
digital version here
Originally released digitally as “Unemployment Insurance” on International Labor Day, Brendan Joyce’s full-length Love & Solidarity arrives on 9/3/2020 with reworked poems from the original release & a third section, exit strategies, which explores the summer of insurrection, mass death & love.
“If we’re going to have this conversation
it’s going to be in politicians on fire.”
Bio: Brendan Joyce is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio. His poems have appeared in Johannesburg Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail & Pandemic Publications & on Twitter.
Character Limit by Brendan Joyce
full length book of poetry — 6 x 9 | 72 pp.
release date: 9. 3. 20
cover: Vin Tanner
digital edition available here
Brendan Joyce’s Character Limit, 67 poems originally written live in a single thread on Twitter over three weeks.
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Praise for Character Limit:
Brendan Joyce’s Character Limit makes excellent use of Twitter as both method of composition and constraint in poems that slap against the limits of wage slavery & the sprawling, gentrified city:
“Come on, this isn’t a city
it’s just a fight we’ve been refusing to have.” -Nikki Reimer, author of MY HEART IS A ROSE MANHATTAN
"Character Limit catalogues what I can only describe as recognizable ruins. School supply lines, childhood cafeterias, freight turbines, neighborhood blocks & church basements etc. This sprawling “Sewer main under god’s house,” as evoked in no. 13. There is no exaggeration here. These are familiar spaces for any among us who’ve weathered & been weathered by the exploitative cycles of office labor or the food service industry, the expectations of obtaining a college degree & burdens of student loan debt, or simply (is it really that simple? was it ever?) staying alive each day with a positive number in the bank account." -Constantine Jones in Glass Poetry Journal
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Bio: Brendan Joyce is a poet & busboy from Cleveland, Ohio. His poems have appeared in
Johannesburg Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail & Pandemic Publications & on Twitter.