Happy Birthday Mom and Dad. 

Octopus hero, Denny Schmickle , just got noticed for his cover design work over at this place. He designed The Man Suit cover, and talks about it here, and Baus' Tuned Droves. Check out this guy's rock posters.

I'm reading poems tonight with Matthew Dickman on the campus of Portland State University. SMU 238. 7-9. It looks like we're taking questions afterward. You better bring it. I'm an open book.

5 Octopus Books Announcements

1. Eric Baus's Tuned Droves
2. Shane McCrae's One Neither One
3. Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts
4. Subscriptions for 2009-2010
5. T-Shirts

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1. Our second full-length poetry book, Tuned Droves by Eric Baus, is now available on our website, at SPD, and on Amazon. In his follow-up to the acclaimed THE TO SOUND (Verse Press/Wave Books 2004), Eric Baus's second full-length poetry book is a continuation of his experimentation with the elongated lyric prose form.

Read advance praise on the Poetry Foundation website and at The Cambridge Book Review.

2. Our latest chapbook, One Neither One by Shane McCrae is now available at our website . McCrae brings a haunting cut-up & surrealistic aesthetic to bear on the mutable thinkings about race.

3. Octopus Books will hold an open reading period for full-length poetry manuscripts in April of 2009. Manuscripts must be submitted between April Fools day and April 30, 2009. We prefer you submit your manuscripts electronically. To submit, purchase the $10 reading fee through paypal from the button on the Octopus Books website on the "Submit" page, then attach your manuscript in an email to octopusbooks@gmail.com. In the subject line of the email write your name and "Manuscript Submission." There is no need to introduce yourself in the body of the email. Your email will be handled anonymously by an intern. Your manuscript will be forwarded in a different file without any identifying markers and read blindly by the editors and other readers. Do not include your name on the manuscript.

If you choose to submit by mail, send manuscript to: Octopus Books; 1031 SE 21st; Portland, OR 97214. Include your email address and a $10 check written to "Octopus Books." We will still notify you by email. Also, include your name on the packaging, but not on the manuscript itself.

4. You may now purchase a two year subscription from Octopus Books and receive everything we publish through 2010. This includes 3-4 full length poetry books including Boris by the Sea by Matvei Yankelevich (Fall 2009), The Difficult Farm by Heather Christle (Fall 2009), and 1-2 other books published from our open reading period in the fall of 2010. This also includes 4 or more chapbooks including Shane McCrae's One Neither One. $56 (includes shipping). Use paypal here. 

5. Octopus T-Shirts are available for purchase through this post only, and not on the website. $12 (includes shipping). You may use this link to paypal to make your purchase. Indicate in your notes which size you would like (S, M, L, XL).

Sincerely,


Zachary Schomburg & Mathias Svalina
Editors
www.octopusbooks.net

Issue #3 of Dear Camera is up! If you like my poem-films, you'll like this issue. 

A chapbook of mine, I Am a Small Boy, was just published by Factory Hollow Press. The poems in it are selected from a larger in-progress manuscript called 1977-2050. You can now buy it if you want. It was published simultaneously with Ben Estes's chapbook, Lamp like l'map, with me as the illustrator. Ben illustrated my chapbook. Here are some examples of our drawings. The one with the legs is Ben's drawing about a poem of mine about leg feelings, the other one is my drawing about a poem of Ben's called "Vault."

I walked away from AWP with 16 new books/chapbooks of poems to read. I budgeted for 2. This is my top three of the books I am most excited about reading. It was a very tough call. I am excited by all of them, sincerely. The size of the images in this ranking also reflects, roughly, how excited, in comparison, I am about reading them. Imagine the remaining 13 books to be about 3/4 the size of Maximum Gaga. 

When We Broke the Microscope by Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen (Small Fires)

With Deer by Aase Berg translated by Johannes Goransson (Black Ocean)

Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum (Action Books)

I translated 3 poems by Irina Shostakovskaya in the New Russian Poetry anthology featured in Jacket 36. 

Come get your Octopus tshirts!

Mmmm...Chicago on Valentine's day. See you there. 

My Intro to Lit test today on Ghost World: Short essay question: What about this?

The PressPressPress blog goes wild the week before AWP. This reads like a headline that probably wouldn't make the front page. 

I have two poems and one poem-film in the second issue (the dear whispered phrases & devotions issue) of Dear Camera, a new online poetry magazine put out by Cinematheque Press. The 3 poems are from a new manuscript called 1977-2050. 

If you come to our Octopus table at AWP, you'll also find your other new favorite small press there, The Cupboard. You can pick this beauty up: A New Map of America by Louis Streitmatter and edited by James Brubaker. I totally have a subscription.

That's right. Free buttons. Come to the Octopus table at the AWP bookfair and Mathias will pin one of these wherever you want. 

BT Shaw and I had a nice little email chat and it ended up in the Sunday edition of The Oregonian and here. Hello, newspaper readers in the state of Oregon.