LA PENDAISON (The Hangman’s Tree) There is a Japanese proverb that says any person who can fold 1000 cranes is granted one wish. This is the part where a crane folds 1000 people. This is the part where the swallow slays the dragon. This is the night. This is the night. 1000 people hang from one tree. There is this part I never told you. Half of those people used to be my neighbors. The other half were my friends.

$18             Poetry/Art | $18 Perfect-bound. 116 pp, 8.8 x 5.9 in. March 2011 ISBN 9780982617748

Read a review in Glasstire here and New Pages.

Check out the Phoned-In reading from the BOMB blog.

Read an interview at Best American Poetry here.

ABOUT KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA

More a play or unfilmable film than a book of poems, more a wish than a journey, Kings of the F**king Sea opens with a prologue to guide the reader.

Kings of the F**king Sea unfolds to reveal a world that exists on the edge of society but is subservient to it, a world of artists, poets, merchants, sailors, and soldiers who break themselves against the sea and the vast unknowable opportunity it represents. As one poem goes, “The world invents, the sea discloses, and irony isn’t a necessary tool for successful men.” On the sea, as in art, some make it and others die nameless, destitute of love, forgotten.

Conceived by poet Dan Boehl and artist Jonathan Marshall, Kings of the F**king Sea is the culmination of their four-year friendship and collaboration. The book features full-color images of Marshall’s drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures, working in tandem with the poems to flesh out a beautiful, broken, psychedelic, and necessary tale of artist expression and its failure.

I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now Kings of the F**king Sea. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl’s poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it’s always too late–that our adventure is a constant failure–their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough.
—Zachary Schomburg

“There is no level / in my mind, in other words / the world.” Are you about to read this book? I think you must be ready. Dan Boehl’s poems are a talisman, a supernatural scaffold over our neglected conscience. Everything happens, and it stings, and is beautiful when it’s not awful.
—CAConrad

Author Bios:

Dan Boehl’s chapbook Les Miseres et les Mal-Heurs de la Guerre is now available from Greying Ghost. He writes art reviews in Austin and works for the University of Texas…as adults looked on.
Read a poem here.

Jonathan Marshall is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
See more here.