News

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Come visit Birds, LLC at Table R21 and pick up Sommer Browning's new book BACKUP SINGERS hot off the press and all our other titles on SALE.

Thursday Feb 27th Birds, LLC with Barrelhouse Books, Coconut Books, Factory Hollow Press, Fence Books, LSU Press, Magic Helicopter, Monk Books & Wave Books present:

THE READING: A night of Poetry, Dancing, and Beer with


DARA WIER (Wave Books)
JUSTIN MARKS (Barrelhouse Books)
SOMMER BROWNING (Birds, LLC)
MONICA MCCLURE (Birds, LLC)
NIINA POLLARI (Birds, LLC)
LAUREN IRELAND (Coconut Books/Magic Helicopter)
LUKE BLOOMFIELD (Factory Hollow)
BRANDON DOWNING (Fence Books)
MATT RASMUSSEN (LSU Press)
LONELY CHRISTOPHER (Monk Books)
ALINA GREGORIAN (Monk Books)
Followed by Dj Justin Case to spin &
DANCEPARTY from 10pm to 1am.
8 to 10pm Reading
10pm to 1am Dj and Danceparty
@ LoFi Performance Gallery (walking distance from the AWP Conference) 429 Eastlake Ave, Seattle, WA 98109

2013birdsbestof1

Dan Boehl

Elisa Gabbert – The Self Unstable.

I am picking Elisa's new book, because "Duh."

Ana Božičević

Cool Memories – Ben Fama.

Sommer Browning

I Want My Hat Back - Jon Klassen

I used to like this book until I read it to my little kid 3,657 times:

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Amos Tutuola

The Nineties - Lucy Ives

Two books that are the opposite of each other in nearly every way. Tutola's book is a magic book about horror, adventure, pain, and longing. It follows a boy who is lost in the land of ghosts and trying to get back to his mother. It is full of repetition so I felt myself reading it like a song. This helped me cope with the scariness and sadness I felt. I was lost in that book, too. In Ives' book I was never lost. She describes the world of a girl in the 1990's of a certain class and means almost scientifically, with lists and proper nouns. It was anchored in familiar places, names, and things and that cultivated in me a kind of sarcasm about myself.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures - Phoebe Gloeckner

By Some Miracle a Year Lousy with Meteors - Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis & Cynthia Arrieu-King

Jon-Michael Frank

Mythologies – Roland Barthes

2666 – Roberto Bolano. A book to sell your soul to.

Book of Frank – C.A. Conrad. Time as your dead mother and poems on the impossible love of masturbation.

Agapē Agape - William Gaddis

Lost And – Jeff Griffin. White trash beauty and what it means to love.

The Narrow Circle – Nathan Hoks. A book that shattered concepts in my brain and left little grasshoppers in there giving the night an interior voice.

Sign You Were Mistaken – Seth Landman

My Dead – Amy Lawless

Murmur In The Inventory – Erica Lewis

Snowflake/Different Streets – Eileen Myles

Buenos Aires – Chad Reynolds. Where Chad Reynolds disrobes and tortures a man with life.

The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather - Sampson Starkweather

Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald. Memory is a whore.

Debts & Lessons – Lynn Xu. A read this book in a white room. It put colors in my head.

Elisa Gabbert

Bough Down – Karen Green

Taipei – Tao Lin

The Unknowns – Gabriel Roth

Nervous Device – Catherine Wagner

Dan Magers

Rise in the Fall – Ana Božičević

Believers – Andrew Durbin

Cool Memories – Ben Fama

Mood Swing – Monica McClure

Liner Notes – Andy Mister

Justin Marks

Black Aperture - Matt Rasmussen

Buenos Aires - Chad Reynolds

Increment - Chris Tonelli

Emily Pettit

Rise in the Fall – Ana Božičević

Collateral Light - Julia Cohen

Cool Memories – Ben Fama

Moods - Rachel B. Glaser

My Enemies – Jane Gregory

Nineties – Lucy Ives

Sign You Were Mistaken - Seth Landman

My Dead – Amy Lawless

Theatre Of The Cow – Lizzie Lee Lenson

My Life’s Work – Guy Pettit

The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather - Sampson Starkweather

Because You Love You Come Apart – Bianca Stone

Last Difficult Gardens – Paige Taggart

Sorry Was In The Woods - Michelle Taransky

You Good Thing - Dara Wier

Joseph Silvers

Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings – Peter Pettinger

Robinson Alone - Kathleen Rooney

Sampson Starkweather

From the Artist’s Private Collection - Eric Amling

Believers - Andrew Durbin

Orange Roses - Lucy Ives

My Dead – Amy Lawless

My Life’s Work - Guy Pettit

Last Difficult Gardens - Paige Taggart

Bianca Stone

The Late Parade - Adam Fitzgerald

It Becomes You – Dobby Gibson

Soul In Space - Noelle Kocot

Mood Swing - Monica McClure

Because You Can Have This Idea About Being Afraid of Something – Emily Pettit

Chris Tonelli

The Self Unstable – Elisa Gabbert

Mood Swing – Monica McClure

Aorta – Christopher Salerno

A Home Big Enough For Remembering – Kiely Sweatt

Friends,We’re very excited to announce our next title: Backup Singers by Sommer Browning.

Browning follows up her sold out debut, Either Way I'm Celebrating, with an even rawer and starker, and again darkly humorous navigation of friendship, marriage, and motherhood. The result is a more overtly political assessment of the absurd deficit between what we're confronted with and what we're equipped with to deal with those confrontations: "It's a girl, / and the wires she needs // open her hands / before they're fists."

Browning combats this deficit with relentless anaphora and repetition, reducing seemingly impossible relationships to their most basic element--a love that begets an unconditional loyalty: "I’m here! I didn’t run!"

Look for Backup Singers to be available exclusively at the Birds, LLC table at AWP!

Love,

the Editors

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Friends,

We’re very excited to announce that The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather is now available exclusively on the Birds, LLC site.

Written over ten years, these are indeed four separate books with their own forms and voices and preoccupations that also coalesce to form the outlines of a novel whose subject is a poet making up himself.

The poems themselves, as Jared White puts it in his introduction, are "a phantasmagoria worthy of Arthur Rimbaud but a 'Rimbaud chugging Robotussin.®'" They interest themselves in the purity of experience and are comprised of everything from experimental translations, emails and dreams, to spells, prose, advice, and mythologies (among other things).

The First 4 Book of Sampson Starkweather completely questions and reinterprets what a first book—or any book—of poems can be.

As always, thank you for your support of Birds, LLC and indie publishing at large.

Love,

The Editors

rally

Dan Boehl 

Redivider's 10th Bday Party: AWP offsite event & reading
Thursday, March 7, 6-8pm
Boston Beer Works, 61 Brookline Ave, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Facebook Event

Ana Božičević

The Rally
Thursday, March 7, 8pm
The Distillery, 516 East 2nd St, South Boston
Facebook Event

Monk Books and Wonder reading
Friday, March 8, 8pm
Emmanuel Church
15 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02116
Facebook Event

Out of Gender: A Denunciation of Vanessa Place's Boycott Project
Saturday, March, 6:15-7:15pm
MIT, 4-163Facebook Event

Sommer Browning

Buckets of Glorius: A Reading?
Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Rescue Press, & Transom
Thursday, March 7, 7pm
The Harvard Advocate, 21 South St, Cambridge, MA
Facebook Event

Elisa Gabbert

Literary Firsts
Saturday, March 9, 5:30 pm
Middlesex Lounge, 315 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge MA
Facebook Event

Dan Magers

Sixth Finch & Vinyl Poetry Reading
Friday, March 8, 3-5 PM
Commonwealth Salon, Boston Public Library
700 Boylston St, Boston, MA
Only 3 blocks from Hynes Convention Center!
Facebook Event

Sampson Starkweather

The Rally
Thursday, March 7, 8pm
The Distillery, 516 East 2nd St, South Boston
Facebook Event

Sixth Finch & Vinyl Poetry Reading
Friday, March 8, 3-5 PM
Commonwealth Salon, Boston Public Library
700 Boylston St, Boston, MA
Only 3 blocks from Hynes Convention Center!
Facebook Event

Chris Tonelli

Fuck Poems Anthology Wet Brunch
Saturday, March 9, 11:30am
LIR, 903 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02115
Facebook Event

Bull City Press
Thursday, March 7, 1:00pm
Table F17, AWP Bookfai

Friends,

We’re excited to announce that Emily Pettit's Goat In The Snow has been short-listed for The Believer Poetry Award.We are super proud of Emily and her brilliant book. Snag a copy at the Birds, LLC table B7 next week at AWP!

Other AWP tidbits:

Get hot-off-the-press copies of The First 4 Books of Sampson StarkweatherON SALE EXCLUSIVELY AT AWP, plus Ana Božičević’s Rise in the Fall­ and all the whole Birds, LLC catalog.

Come hear Sampson, Ana, and Rise in the Fall artist Bianca Stone at The Rally.They’ll be reading with other dope poets from Factory Hollow, ImmaculateDisciples, Rose Metal, Sixth Finch, and Wonder.

As always, thank you for your support of Birds, LLC and indie publishing at large.

Love,

The Birds

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SALE! Through January 2nd all Birds, LLC books are just $10: The French Exit, Either Way I'm Celebrating, Goat in the Snow, Kings of the F**king Sea, Partyknife, and the Trees Around.

But that's not all!

We've put together a list of our favorite books we read in 2012 and we're posting that list here to help you find the perfect gift for the earnest or ironic literary type in your life.

With no particular formatting conventions, here come the recommendations:

Dan BoehlAntigonick detail, Bianca Stone

Anne Carson's Antigonick, New Directions, 2012. I bought it simply for Bianca Stone's unconventional depictions of Ann Carson's recalibrated cast of characters. But then you get Carson, too. Win, win. From the Guernica review:

"It may be tempting to dismiss the illustrations as merely quirky—one of the Chorus bears the Star Trek insignia on its chest, while elsewhere a figure wears a football helmet. But these touches serve to heighten the absurdity and dark humor of the senseless world Carson has created."

Ana Božičević

Lauren Berlant's novella/dictionary entry called Desire/Love. You can buy it or download it. Because "Without fantasy, there would be no love."

Sommer Browning

Ann Kim's Lobster Palaces, Flood Editions, 2012. Her incredible music will lullaby you into a wondrous stupor. These spacious poems are gorgeous, light things. These poems are much much more mysterious than that.

Jon-Michael Frank

Kenneth Patchen's Because It Is, New Directions, 1960. It is a titan. Because It Is was also compiled in a volume of Patchen's work called We Meet, with an introduction by Devendra Banhart.

Elisa Gabbert

I recommend Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press, 2011) for poetry people who like fiction and fiction people who like poetry. It's a very funny and philosophical look into the mind of a writer: the ego that believes itself both genius and fraud.

Caroline Gormley

My recommendation is Dear Jenny, We Are All Find by Jenny Zhang. It's an amazing first collection with loads of wit and intelligence.

Dispatch from the Future by Leigh Stein, another first collection full of humor and talent.

Michael Johnson

I haven't read any small press books that aren't Birds' recently so I'm going to recommend, without ever having read it, the second edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology which is due to be released March of next year. The last edition is interesting partly because it is so big, partly because it has so many different kinds of people in it and partly because of the 18 essays on poetry by various authors. If you are able to meet any of these authors, I recommend doing that in addition to reading their poems/essays/writing.

Dan Magers

I'd say Dana Ward, This Can't Be Life.

Justin Marks

A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, CAConrad, Wave Books, 2012.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson, Wave Books, 2009.

Mother Was a Tragic Girl, Sandra Simonds, Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012.

Mercury, Ariana Reines, Fence Books, 2011.

Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010.

Brink, Shanna Compton, Bloof Books, 2012.

Emily Pettit

TOO BRUTE! TOO BRUTE! by Dakotah Burns (Agnes Fox Press), JUNK PARADE by Anne Holmes (Dancing Girl Press), I SAW THE DEVIL WITH HIS NEEDLEWORK by Bianca Stone (Argos Books), THE ICE POEMS by Paige Taggart (DoubleCross Press) - chapbooks!

Matt Rasmussen

My recommendation is The Cat and the Cuckooby Ted Hughes. Not a new book, but if you're a poet and you know a kid (2-6 or even older) who loves animals, this book would make a unique gift. Check this stanza from "Goat," "Though nobly born / With a lofty nose / I'm as happy with the Thorn / As I am with the Rose" or this opening stanza from "Toad," "The Toad cries: First I was a thought. / Then that thought it grew a wart. / And the wart had thoughts / Which turned to warts."

Joseph Silvers

I've gone through Zach Schomburg's Fjords, Vol. 1 several times since I bought it in March. Every time I read it, it takes me to a whole other world within this one, and it's a good place to be.

Sampson Starkweather

Jacqueline Waters, One Sleeps the Other Doesn't, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011.

Joe Brainard, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, The Library of America, 2012.

Lisa Robertson, Magenta Soul Whip, Coach House Books, 2009.

Christopher Nealon, The Dial, Song Cave, 2012.

Elieen Myles, Snowflake/Different Streets, Wave Books, 2012.

Thom Donovan, The Hole, Displaced Press, 2012.

Bianca Stone

Matthew Dickman's new book Mayakovsky's Revolver. His skills sharpen; the grief evolves even further; I loved it.

Chris Tonelli

Chris Vitiello's Obedience (Ahsahta, 2012) With Obedience, Vitiello further exposes the acts of writing and reading--in time--and the relationships that are possible between author and reader.

Friends,

We’re pleased to announce that the So & So reading series and magazine have merged with Birds, LLC! To mark the occasion, So & So founder and Birds editor Chris Tonelli and editorial assistants Michael Johnson and Joseph Silvers have revamped the So & So site. It now exists on its own and as a tab on the Birds site. Among other things, it now contains:

  • A Series page with details about upcoming readings and an archive of past readings.
  • A Media page with links to videos of readings, interviews, broadsides, the So & So Facebook page for you to “Like” and Twitter to follow.

Be sure to check out the latest edition of So & So Magazine, featuring poetry by Vincent Cellucci, MRB Chelko, Jackie Clark, Adam Day, Joe Fletcher, Jennifer H. Fortin, PJ Gallo, Evan Glasson, Alec Hershman, MC Hyland, Matthew Johnstone, Christopher Shipman, Marcus Slease, Mike Smith, and Joseph P. Wood.

We’re also excited to announce that Caroline Gormley has joined the Birds family as an editorial assistant. Welcome aboard, Caroline!

Thanks for supporting Birds, LLC and independent presses in general!

Love,

The Editors

Friends,

We’re pleased to announce that the So & So reading series and magazine have merged with Birds, LLC! To mark the occasion, So & So founder and Birds editor Chris Tonelli and editorial assistants Michael Johnson and Joseph Silvers have revamped the So & So site. It now exists on its own and as a tab on the Birds site. Among other things, it now contains:

  • A Series page with details about upcoming readings and an archive of past readings.
  • A Media page with links to videos of readings, interviews, broadsides, the So & So Facebook page for you to “Like” and Twitter to follow.

Be sure to check out the latest edition of So & So Magazine, featuring poetry by Vincent Cellucci, MRB Chelko, Jackie Clark, Adam Day, Joe Fletcher, Jennifer H. Fortin, PJ Gallo, Evan Glasson, Alec Hershman, MC Hyland, Matthew Johnstone, Christopher Shipman, Marcus Slease, Mike Smith, and Joseph P. Wood.

We’re also excited to announce that Caroline Gormley has joined the Birds family as an editorial assistant. Welcome aboard, Caroline!

Thanks for supporting Birds, LLC and independent presses in general!

Love,

The Editors

Friends,

We’re crazy excited to announce our next two titles, Rise in the Fall, by Ana Božičević (Fall 2012), and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, by Sampson Starkweather (Winter 2013).

A few words about these amazing books, as well as videos of Ana and Sampson reading from their work:

Ana Božičević is both a poet's poet and the people's poet. Rise in the Fall, her second full-length collection, is a revolutionary book and an ars poetica for the polis in which she excludes nothing. Navigating literary history, gender, sexuality, economics, family and friends, she is at ease employing both the universal political statement and the lyric "I". A Croatian émigré, Božičević approaches the English language with a playful objectivity, bouncing back and forth from the conversational to the grand: "This is the whitest shit / I've ever written" she notes in her half-myth "About Nietzsche." Her critique of our time and place is at once empathetic and crude, tender and grotesque. Lucky for us, "beauty [wins] in all its casual terror and pain."