qarrtsiluni news blog

Our first print edition is finally available! After a serious flirtation with Amazon’s CreateSpace service, and not liking the results, we realized the truth of the Zen adage “first thought, best thought,” and went with Lulu.com. Here’s the storefront of our publishing partner, Phoenicia, and here’s what it looks like. As we say in the announcement post at the head of the issue archive,

This first foray into print publishing represents a big step for us. We want to test the viability of offering a print edition, feeling that print still does carry a certain kind of legitimacy in the world of contemporary literature which our writers definitely deserve to have, and we also feel that hard copies of published work could help us increase the journal’s already excellent reputation and broaden its base among critics, reviewers, and some readers and writers as well. If this volume is well-received by you and others, we are also considering an anthology from qarrtsiluni’s first three years, as well as an annual chapbook contest. None of this will affect or distract us from our primary focus, which is our online publishing and web presence.

All proceeds from “Journaling the Apocalypse” will support future projects like these. This is all a labor of love for us, though like any non-profit arts organization we hope someday to have a small income stream that can at least pay a small amount to the artists and writers and guest editors who make the whole qarrtsiluni experiment burst forth into reality. This is our first step in that direction, and we hope you’ll take it with us.

Qarrtsiluni contributor Alistair Noon’s first chapbook of poetry has just been published by Oystercatcher Press, and may be ordered here. Oystercatcher “specialises in contemporary, cutting-edge poetry,” according to the press release, which lauds Noon for his “worldly intelligence, striking verbal dexterity and a technical accomplishment by no means common in today’s poetry world.” We can’t resist reprinting the sample from the publisher’s site:

Mikhail the Domestically Detested
and George the Unfortunate Progenitor
have thawed in Iceland. Yugoslavia is at war.

Someone is strumming unplugged,
the sounds reeling down a stairwell.
Where’s the melancholy, alcoholic nose
of Belkin, with his squirrelish name
and ear for slang and news?

Qarrtsiluni contributor C. E. Chaffin has a new book of poems out from Diminuendo Press. Order information and a sample are here. We’re pleased to see blurbs from two other Qarrts contributors, Kate Bernadette Benedict and Norman Ball. Kate says,

The unexpected light in these poems is a certain sort of light: faint, slant, the light of twilight or a fading penlight or a barely discernible sliver of moon. Yet the poems pierce and burn.

And we love this quote from the sample poem:

Everyone is Jesus to me,
everyone who leaves
a space to occupy.

We’ve rewritten our page on how to make an audio recording to include a couple of new suggestions, most notably: you can use a camcorder. Dave just discovered how easy it is to extract audio tracks from videos.

Qarrtsiluni contributor Sarah J. Sloat has a new chapbook forthcoming from Tilt Press. Order here. Sarah says,

22 poems for $8. That’s 36 cents a poem!

Between the covers you may find:
a javelin (p. 8), an Esso station (p. 2),
musical chairs (p. 11), pilaf (p. 5),
“your name on a grain of rice” (p. 15),
more rice (p. 19), valentines (p. 21),
a biblical allusion (p. 17), the Andes (p. 12),
day-old wine and a hydrogen bomb (p. 6),
a metaphor (p. 22), a puppet village (p. 10),
a statue of Lautreamount (p. 16), Jesus (p. 13),
assonance (p. 18).