Asteroid (trailer) from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

Last spring, I drove around the country in support of Scary, No Scary and decided to make a feature-length road-trip poem-film while I was at it. Here is a trailer for the film, Asteroid, which will be released by Rabbit Light Movies in June 2011.

Genya Turovskaya’s second chapbook with Octopus Books, New Year’s Day, is now available for purchase just in time for the first day of your new year. $8. 

If you purchase New Year's Day by midnight at the end of New Year's Day, Octopus Books will you send any full-length title from our catalog for free (and, as always, with free shipping). Be sure to write which title you'd like in the paypal purchase comments field.

New Year's Day consists of poems of crisis & potential. The past washes away & the present is pure possibility, yet the speaker in the existential moment can only feint & jab at emotional grounding. Turovskaya’s crystalline lyricism conveys a fraught depth through both restraint & exclamation, remaining consistent in their heartrending exactitude.

Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator and practicing psychotherapist. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Calendar (UDP 2002), and The Tides (Octopus Books 2007). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Aufgabe, Octopus, jubilat, Supermachine, Gulf Coast and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator (with Stephanie Sandler) of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP 2010) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She holds an MFA from Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Associate Editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.

Octopus Books' own Heather Christle, and her The Difficult Farm, made the top 50 best selling books of 2010 at Small Press Distribution. SPD is having a 2010 Kiss Off sale, which means you can buy this book, and 49 other great best selling poetry titles for 30% off. Congrats Heather!

This is where I live: where young people go to retire. Portlandia is premiering a month from now. Of course, no one I know here has a TV, so we'll have to gather around the website.

Poor Claudia 4 is out. The SRVIVL issue. It's not exactly Russian Futurism, but it kinda looks like it. Portland, represent.

Some pieces from a new book, Viking,  continue to get serialized in the second issue of Dear Navigator, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's electronic poetry/art magazine. The whole book will be published by McSweeney's in 2012.

I have talented film-maker friends from my days in Lincoln, NE. Elisabeth Reinkordt has just finished co-producing a feature-length documentary called When We Stop Counting that examines the education of 6 Hispanic high school students in the public school system of Crete, NE. And Jake Gillespie has finished his second dvd of experimental shorts, Telegraph Telegraph. Represent.

Black Ocean is holding a fund raising campaign this month called the Big Black Heart Campaign to raise some operating costs for next year. Of course, you can buy a book, but if you've already collected them all, you can buy other things like broadsides and t-shirts, or a personal postcard, phone reading, or private reading from an author. Apparently, that means if you pay enough, I (or any author you'd choose) could find myself with a pocketful of poems on a plane pointed at your place. In the name of poetry!

Octopus Books is going to have a table at the Publication Studio's Publication Fair again this year. Sunday, December 19 from 11 am to 7 pm at The Cleaners downtown. It's free, but the books will cost you, so come with a $20 bill and ask me about our special deals.

I've signed on to be a faculty mentor at the University of Nebraska Low-Residency MFA program in poetry starting this winter term. If you need an MFA in poetry, I can help you with that. Here is a trucking map to Nebraska City.

Moving Poems has put up another poem-film of mine. They've posted five of them now. If you haven't wasted an entire day watching 40 or 50 of the films from this site, maybe that should be your day tomorrow.

Black Ocean editors and authors are picking out some good holiday break poetry reading for you over at the Black Ocean blog. I picked Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey.

According to Small Press Distribution's open house display, it looks like Scary, No Scary is #13 since August. It's had a good fall. If Oregon trips up against Oregon State this weekend, SNS might get a BCS bowl bid.

They're on their ways.