ZOETROPE by Kevin Latimer
Only a few left!
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
praise for ZOETROPE:
"The zoetrope is the simulacrum of movement. The eye animates, the imagination sustains, and through this apparatus, the image is given life. 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. “Little did they know in the depths.” But then, the wisest say, you read. And when you do, find poems, like these, with teeth: it’s “the only way god knows how to show himself.” -- 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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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.
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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.
Character Limit by Brendan Joyce - PRINT
*this is a pre-order for the print edition
digital edition available here
full length book of poetry — 6 x 9 | 72 pp.
release date: 9. 3. 20
cover: Vin Tanner
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.