Announcing Sarah Nichols’ “Press Play for Heartbreak”
September 6, 2021
We are so excited to announce the release of Sarah Nichols’ Press Play for Heartbreak, a Vella Chapbook Co-Winner, and the sixth and final title to be released from our lineup selected from our 2020 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
Sarah Nichols uses the alternative music albums she invokes in Press Play for Heartbreak—by Depeche Mode, The Cure, Joy Division, Radiohead—as a conduit, incantation, exorcism, an archive of obsession. Reading about her experiences with these songs is “like finding a diary after the end of the world…. You can’t say you weren’t warned. This comforts me somehow.” But comforting in the way that the tongue constantly seeks the wound from the pulled tooth. The effect can “make guilt sound like something you’d want,” a mix of pain and pleasure, high and withdrawal, regret and relief. These pieces emphasize the ache, the -algia, of nostalgia for which there is no analgesic except listening to more music, preferably in a dark room.
— Heidi Czerwiec, author of Fluid States
I challenge you to find someone who blends pop culture with craft as seamlessly as Sarah Nichols does. Press Play is the newest example of her brilliance in this subgenre. “I guess I’ve never cared for reality that much,” she writes in “A Life in Nine Songs: Depeche Mode’s Violator.” Who does? And why bother? Living in the glow of music you love is the far better alternative, and Sarah will tell you why with the expertise that comes only from loving something fully and without remorse.
—Kolleen Carney Hoepfner, Editor in Chief of Drunk Monkeys, and author of A Live Thing, Clinging with Many Teeth
Announcing Christen Noel Kauffman’s “Notes to a Mother God”
August 31, 2021
We are so excited to announce the release of Christen Noel Kauffman’s Notes to a Mother God, a Debut Series Chapbook Co-Winner, and the fifth of six titles to be released from our lineup selected from our 2020 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
In “Notes to a Mother God,” Christen Noel Kauffman’s brilliant new lyric essay collection, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the human and the animal, sound and love, are revealed as illusory. In this gorgeous act of evaporation, a fresh engagement of motherhood is illuminated, one that miraculously manages to interrogate not boundaries, but exhilarating overlaps: this book dares to examine the spaces shared by the cleaving body and the spider’s web, a whale’s eye and the birth of a daughter, the Luna moth and guilt, the giant squid and empathy, memory and the seabed, death and a dream of an orchard. Throughout, Kauffman’s sumptuous essays do the essential work of exposing the plants and animals that many of us have ignored or mistakenly deemed as merely quotidian, as innately incantatory. And here, that incantation is howled by mothers actual and ghostly, sung, essentially, to quote Kauffman, into “the crevice of your neck.” This is a beautiful and breathtaking debut, as expansive as it is intimate.
— Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Flight of the Diamond Smugglers
Notes to a Mother God gorgeously captures the contradictory moods and modes of new motherhood. In these exquisite pieces, Christen Noel Kauffman helps us understand the familiar and the foreign, the surprise of loneliness and the hunger for intimacy, and the magnetic tides of both desire and despair. Like motherhood itself, Notes to a Mother God is powerful, raw, and often dark, but with a marbled beauty that is as wondrous as it is undeniable.
—Randon Billings Noble, author of Be with Me Always
We are so excited to announce the release of Ja’net Danielo’s The Song of Our Disappearing, a Debut Series Chapbook Co-Winner, and the third of six titles to be released from our lineup selected from our 2020 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
These are poems of quietly devastating grief, life-haunted poems of absence, breath-taking for their clear, lyrical language, their precise and loving rendering of the physical world, their nuanced explosion of image into image, poems that move beyond elegy toward a deeper imagining. Here, death is a kind of disappearance, yes, but also a mystery, a transformation, “the swarm of cells rearranging themselves/ into something other/ … of never before;” here, each existence, human and otherwise, is “a brief but holy thing.” Reading these poems I was reminded of how, while the shape of our grief changes over time, grief also changes us, alters us permanently, becoming part of who and what we are, deepening us, making us also more holy in its wake.
— Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
Grief recasts everything, suddenly and sharply. It uproots the ghosts—of our childhoods, our ancestors, our collective and private memories—and transforms the concrete world we thought we knew into one now fluctuating and liminal. The Song of Our Disappearing navigates the bewildering aftermath of a father’s death, finding a clear and rising voice somewhere between the stark hospital room that holds the ventilator’s sharp hiss and the remembered dust of the racetrack where hooves pull clouds from the ground. Elegy becomes an act of metamorphosis as Ja’net Danielo excavates both past and present to reveal a song unearthed from the ash of the heart—a lyric guide for walking with, listening to, and being transformed by the losses that haunt us most.
—Julia Bouwsma, author of Midden and Work by Bloodlight
I can’t helped being knocked out and also deeply inspired by the summoning voice and vision of Ja’net Danielo. The poems in her debut collection The Song of Our Disappearing are breathtaking in their rich and fulsome physicality, their deft shaping of personal, familial, and corporeal landscapes around her, and the pitch-perfect songs that burn brightly through crucial and complex human concerns of death, grief, longing. So much to admire here, and to look forward to in this poet whose generosity of spirit and breadth of imagination match the vibrancy of natural and lived in worlds she observes so carefully, inhabiting desire through poetry that honors “the language of horses […] “those beautiful machines […] Not of blood, but of dust—a song unearthed from the ash of the heart.”
— Michelle Bitting, author of Broken Kingdom
Announcing Jason B. Crawford’s “Twerkable Moments”
June 1, 2021
We are so excited to announce the release of Jason B. Crawford’s Twerkable Moments, a Vella Chapbook Co-Winner, and the second of six titles to be released from our lineup selected from our 2020 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
Twerkable Moments is a summertime Michigan house party in the early 2000’s, and a Springtime cookout from just last week. Jason asks “Who among us is not built of a party” while moving from a sweaty dancefloor near the bar to a backyard, reclaiming space and self along the way. Who among us hasn’t tried to learn a dance from someone older and failed? Who among us hasn’t done the dance with all the confidence we could muster, anyway? These poems are a teaching, an invitation to remember and to learn. A celebratory invocation of joy in spite of, joy that survives and traverses, and joy that for damn sho’ twerks.
Twerkable Moments pulsates with rich sounds and searing imagery, transforming the page into a three-dimensional universe that takes all of our senses to navigate. I am enamored with the magic Crawford has woven in these poems, where dancing is not merely dancing, but world building. In these stanzas exist a mythic space without limitations, where dancing boys could be wolves or “glitter could cast a spell and bring all my dead/ loves back to life”. Twerkable Moments does not turn its gaze away from the omnipresent dangers that lurk just beyond the page,“ The hunters/ or their arrows/ or bullets”. Rather, it celebrates the body’s survival despite. At the center of these poems lies the question: “What joy have you brought for us to/ feed on?”. I leave this collection well fed and breathless.
– Jihyun Yun, author of Some Are Always Hungry
In their collection Twerkable Moments, Jason B. Crawford populates these pages with beats and bodies, music lyrics that take over us before we realize we’re even singing along. To read these poems is to wade through a night club where the music works like a hex, where in the midst of the dancing crowd our speaker gropes for love and acceptance. And the dancefloor serves as a perfect metaphor for the Black and queer body trying to survive in these poems; surrounded by chaos, violence, and cultural appropriation, the speaker of this collection gives in to the corporeal joy of dance. But dance is not only about joy or survival, it’s also about reclamation. Crawford writes, “This is mine / and I will take it back / one ass cheek / at a time,” fashioning the Black, queer, and dancing body into a weapon. And whatever is slain in their wake, Crawford reminds us to always look back at it.
–Taylor Byas, author of Blood Warm
Announcing Juliana Chang’s “Inheritance”
March 19, 2021
We are so excited to announce the release of Juliana Chang’s Inheritance, a Vella Chapbook Co-Winner, and the first of six titles to be released from our lineup selected from our 2020 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
Juliana Chang’s Inheritance tells a deeply moving tale of immigration, love, and family, in poems taut with a longing that spans oceans, and decades, and generations. “Dear god,” Chang’s speaker pleads at one point, “give us a new story,” and in these poems, lucky for us, she has written exactly that. This is a soulful, serious debut.
—Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine
This admirable debut volume of poems speaks to the many complex legacies of the immigrant psyche: those of language, of longing, of unspoken traumas and unlikely joys. These vivid tableaus, ranging from girlhood to womanhood, reveal a young writer of great empathy and discernment, and invite us to join in the redemptive act of wonderment.
—Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker
We have another two titles that are most of the way through production, so keep an eye out for more books coming soon!
Announcing Amanda Hope’s “The Museum of Resentments”
September 2, 2020
We are so excited to announce the release of Amanda Hope’s The Museum of Resentments, a Debut Series Co-Winner and the fifth book to be released from our lineup selected from our 2019 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
This collection received the following praise:
“‘I am good at affliction,’ writes Amanda Hope, ‘and sky.’ This is true. The poems in The Museum of Resentments offer lament and potent imagery in surprising and insightful pairings. Hope’s portraits of domestic disintegration and its aftermath are sometimes confrontational, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes tender, sometimes stark, and always stylish and compelling.”
—Natalie Shapero”“Amanda Hope writes, ‘Listen: I am going to hide myself in this poem/ in the heart of it, and maybe someone (you) / will find me’ which best describes her notable debut collection. Hope is a master of metaphor and simile which she employs to create a meta-experience for the reader and meanwhile she’s ‘ignoring for the sake of metaphor…’. Yes, she is hiding behind her own truth-spinning which is nothing short of human. I encourage you to find her!”
Some updates on the contests (but no big announcements yet!)
August 19, 2020
As the summer winds down and we get deeper into August, some anxiously anticipate their first pumpkin spice latte or breaking our their sweaters. There are also a number of writers who are anxiously anticipating our 2020 contest results.
Sadly, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for these, as we are seriously behind schedule.
Typically, we shift all of our focus more towards manuscript reading once the previous year’s titles have been released. We still have two of those to wrap up — although they both seem very close! We are reading submissions, but substantially slower than we normally would be able to. Also, you would think that the last thing COVID-19 would impact is a small press — and you’d probably be right, if I wasn’t a teacher. The vast majority of my summer has been consumed with course design, adaptation, reinvention, coming up with back-up plans, and trying to keep on top of any changes that the university announces. In general, what is usually already a pretty intensive preparation for Fall has turned into something extremely fraught and many times more exhausting (and time consuming) than it has ever been before. This is in addition to just having a very difficult year personally with a lot of challenges with my health and the health of my family. (Also, my primary editing computer quit on me at the end of June. Is Mercury just, like, permanently stuck in retrograde now? Can someone look into this, please?)
In the messages I’ve received asking about the contest status, I’ve been estimating sometime in October. I am hopeful that this is possible. If anything changes in these unpredictable circumstances, I’ll be sure to keep folks in the loop. I’m a writer, and know how hard it is to wait for these things.
Thank you, as always, for your patience and your support of Paper Nautilus. Please know that, even in stressful times like these, I never lose sight of how lucky I am to get to do this.
Announcing Chase Burke’s “Lecture”
July 28, 2020
We are so excited to announce the release of Chase Burke’s Lecture, a Debut Series Co-Winner and the fourth book to be released from our lineup selected from our 2019 contests. The book may be ordered here or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
This collection received the following praise:
“The characters in Chase Burke’s Lecture are aspirants and schemers, searching our omnipresent corporations and pop culture for whatever cracks might appear, anywhere one might escape into something more successful, heartfelt, or ultimately authentic. What a lucky journey to join in on, carried along in Burke’s smart and witty prose.”—Matt Bell, author of Scrapper“Burke’s Lecture expects us to pay attention—whether in museums and libraries or in our own homes and workplaces—and to be receptive to the gift of human connection however it may appear. Novel pages turned into airplanes for passersby to find and feel ‘affected in some way,’ a letter written on a submarine ‘to a good friend,’ a shared cigarette with a co-worker after a serious disaster, a person waiting for their ‘brother to come home.’ So read these stories, this Lecture, and take notes: otherwise, like one tourist pleading desperately with our president, we are doomed to exist here having ‘never felt so lonely.’”—Molly Gaudry, author of We Take Me Apart and Desire: A Haunting“The irrepressible Chase Burke has delivered this irresistible book, Lecture, a baker’s dozen of nattily disheveled short short fictions. I think of them as lithesome literary GIFs, frenetic yet graceful, starring a bevy of Buster Keatonion characters, dolled up in stoic animated deadpan as whole cabinets of sentient cookware and cutlery as well as showrooms of kitchen sinks swirl around Escheresque tableaus of pensive rumination—emphatic, empathetic, bemused, curious circumventions, undeniably understated. Chase chases heroically the chaotic chaos just under the placid surface of exact and exacting attention. Each and every static kinetic piece is another delicate pas de deux with locomotive, ready, set, stop and going all the way, while you, dear reader, are all the time hanging on, effortlessly and eagerly, to your slightly too small pork pie hat.”—Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding
We are so excited to announce the release of Conor McNamara’s When I Think of the Randolph Mountains, a Debut Series Co-Winner and the third book in our lineup selected from 2019’s contests to be released. The book may be ordered here, or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
This collection received the following praise:
Conor McNamara has written a powerful portrait of West Virginia, mountain roads, pipeline work, cold nights, loss and enduring hope. Beautiful and understated, When I Think of the Randolph Mountains is a masterful collection of stories that stay with you long into the night.
—Vincent Chu, author of Like a Champion
In aching bursts of spare, understated prose, Conor McNamara captures the loneliness of working as a pipeliner in wintry West Virginia. When I Think of the Randolph Mountains is at once a moving portrait of a young man—heartsick, far from home, deep in debt—and a searing look at the brutal emotional and physical toll that simply staying out of poverty takes on American workers. Though rooted in the particulars of small towns like Burnsville and Buckhannon, the story taps powerfully into the anxiety of placelessness, its narrator in every sense disoriented, always at risk of losing traction. Yet he never misses an opportunity to name the people he meets as he follows the pipeline—Ms. Amanda, the Exxon station clerk; Yogi, owner of the Motel 79; Mike Workman, a land inspector from the gas company—and we sense that no matter where the work takes him next, his alertness to human connection will come with him.
—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Madeleine is Sleeping and Ms. Hempel Chronicles
Conor McNamara is out there at work. He’s Studs Terkel and he’s the guy Studs Terkel is asking what the job is really like. He’s a poet and this is his American dream with a bloody nose. Come in close. He wants to tell you how to pass your drug test, how to swing a machete, how to be in love with the dirt and the grime and the rain and the unexpected sunshine bursting out from behind the dark clouds hanging over the piece of shit roadside motel that is tonight’s temporary home sweet home.
Announcing Maya Salameh’s “rooh”
March 20, 2020
We are so excited to announce the release of Maya Salameh’s rooh, a Vella Chapbook Co-Winner and the second book in our lineup selected from 2019’s contests to be released. The book may be ordered here, or under the Books menu, in case you’re looking for some other new reads to pick up.
These poems received the following praise:
“Maya Salameh’s rooh deftly works the familiar into the defamiliarized, in poems crackling with exuberant fluency. I read these poems and language feels boundless, looking feels boundless, form feels boundless. I read these poems and feel the possibilities of poetry stretching, evolving, breaking open to make room for the true refreshment that is Maya Salameh’s voice—its mischief, its enormous eyes.”
—Safia Elhillo
We have four more titles that my interns and I are preparing for production, and we can’t wait to have them ready for the world.
And if you have a manuscript of your own, keep in mind that we’re open for chapbook submissions in poetry, fiction, literary non-fiction, and anything in between until April 20th. We know this is a challenging time for almost everyone — especially emotionally, but also financially for a lot of folks. If you need a submission fee waiver, don’t be afraid to reach out.
Wishing everyone wellness and comfort.
Paper Nautilus 