#Metonymy Press

[theoffingmag]

I come from a long line of doomed women.

— Valérie Bah, The Rage Letters

[geeklyinc]

Small Press-o-Mania!

Small Press-o-Mania!

In our recent podcast I talked about how small Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror presses are really doing some amazing work. And then I totally blanked on the specific recommendations. So here they are, fifteen small presses for you to check out, complete with links and apologies to the publishers I really do love.   Neon …

[makeshiftlove]

Super thrilled to receive my copy of The Haunting of Adrian Yates by Markus Harwood-Jones!! Metonymy Press offered me for the opportunity to work on the book illustration and design and it's so thrilling to see it in print-- I'm excited to finally read through the entire story (✧∀✧) Also the book arrived with nifty postcards of the cover, which I LOVE!!

(This cover is also brought to you by the Toronto summer fog, CN Tower stock photographers, that one book of ghost stories we had in the house with really vivid painted illustrations that has a prominent place in the back of my mind's eye, Elden Ring, and the full moonrise~)

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: This body was never made by Tara Propper

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/this-body-was-never-made-by-tara-propper/

This body was never made is a meditation on #grief and its attendant fears surrounding the #body – the body’s frailty, lineage, and legacy. Its #poems paint portraits of #maternal #loss, of a fractured #family, of nature’s eloquence, and of transcendental beauty. While This body was never made does not solve the problem of death, it embraces the “night sounds” that accompany an awareness of the body’s temporality, resolving in the chapbook’s final lines, “There is nothing in this room but shapes of us—amorphous/organs ascending and descending underneath the bed sheets.” In this collection, still-life speaks, seascapes listen, and math provides counsel, reminding us that #life exists before and beyond the body.

Tara Propper has earned her MFA in poetry and PhD in English. Her poetry has appeared in the Southampton Review, Janus Unbound, Literature Today, Ekstasis Magazine, Shuili Magazine, Taj Mahal International Literary Journal, Moveable Type, Vagabond City Press, and P – Queue. Her scholarly work has been published in Composition Forum, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, and Resources for American Literary Study. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Languages at the University of Texas at Tyler.

PRAISE FOR This body was never made by Tara Propper

Cerebral, lyrical, witty, loving and grief-worn, Tara Propper’s life-infusing poems in the collection, This body was never made, reveal an immense talent, a rare gift to the world of poetry. In a sky of many, Propper is singular. The poem “Seascape at 4:42 PM” concludes: “One chiseled cloud makes a metonymy/ of itself. Cotton mammals lurk above/ both pure and untrue. /4:43 PM drops/its un-blessings. It’s the ugliest of day–/and most aware.” Propper’s poems are sinuous tracings that unnerve the tick of the clock; a lot happens between 4:42 PM and 4:43 PM, a lot that is “most aware.”

–Star Black, author of three books of sonnets: Waterworn, Balefire, and Ghostwood; a collection of double-sestinas, Double Time; and a book of collaged free verse, October for Idas

Tara Propper’s This body was never made tests the precision and range of mathematical concepts in particular and, more broadly, any intellectual construct we use to understand the stunning input of our senses. Can a fractal describe a pregnant female body? A miscarriage? Rage? Death? This body was never made also tests the language with which we express these concepts, using rhymes, chimes, puns and syntactical play to push words to their limits: “Outnumbered, she let the numb root.” The raw power of these poems comes from the pressure they are under to bridge the rational and the anything but.

–Julie Sheehan, author of Orient Point and Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise and Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University, NY

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[queerafricans]

An opportunity for queer Arab writers! Deadline's on the 15th of September!

[reccurrenstrangeness]

If I had the power to redefine “strange” in the dictionary, I would change it to have two different definitions. One being “a series of events that occur around us, while not common they are also not unfamiliar” and the other being “the sense of queerness, of not fitting into a binary.” I named this blog recurrent strangeness to emphasis how these strange events around us are actually more common than we think. These definitions of strange were created based on my own introspections both of my own life and what we have learned throughout the readings. If we queer the unfamiliar, will it make it familiar? Will queerness allow us to be more in touch with ourselves and our environment that we inhabit? All of these incredible authors made me remake my own definition of strange and opened my eyes to the wonderful and intense theory involved in queer ecology. 

Relating this project to my own life was an emotional experience. Being able to connect the lessons from class to my own life has been a journey I’ve tried to take across this entire semester. Putting it into words was a really fun, but also freeing experience. Most notably, Undrowned has left the biggest impression on me. I’m planning on keeping it and its lessons close to my heart forever. This is why I picked a quote from this magnificent book for my final picture. Thanks to the readings and lessons I’ve learned in ENG533, even when I feel alone I will never be alone, because someone will always be with me. Myself. I now feel so at home in my own body and in my environment. Thank you so much Professor Ensor for a semester so amazing I can’t express it with words.This has been my favorite class I’ve ever taken. I’m really grateful for the chance to learn from you and the others in both of my classes I have you for.

Works Cited

Angus, C. (2021). A Natural History of Transition. Metonymy Press. 

Bass, R. (2006). The Lives of Rocks. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bendrof, O. (2015). The Spectral Wilderness. The Kent State University Press. 

Grover, J.Z. (1997).  North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts. Graywolf Press. 

Gumbs, A.P. (2020). Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. AK Press. 

Lorde, A. (1997). Uses of the Erotic. Out & Out Books. 

Johnson, A. (n.d). How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time. Orion Magazine. Retrieved from https://orionmagazine.org/article/how-to-queer-ecology-once-goose-at-a-time/

Proulx, A. (1997, October 13). Brokeback Mountain. The New Yorker.

Vachon, C. (Producer) & Haynes, T. (Director). (1995). [Safe]. [Motion picture]. United States: Sony Pictures Classic. 

[graywyvern]

( via / "i give my little stars to children" via )

Questions for Further Study.

"Retvrn to cursive handwriting, memorizing poetry, and mental math." --@respublicararch

Sad Alien.

"the words"

ensorcelment revert from ASSES eyepatch matching this smart SHIRT

i solo'd on the lunar bongos played backup on funest SITAR

nor wrixle as my toe-marks shrink in this dark wood where rooks ERASE

Graywyvern's sticks shall serve to seed another dryght as gale winds STREW

"In The Burden of Being Burmese (Zephyr Press, 2015), ko ko thett, a Burmese living in exile among Anglos, is well aware of being a metonymy, that his book (whether he likes it or not) will be taken as representative, as speaking truth to power on behalf of the oppressed, but declawed into commodity exchange."

"Fundamentalism is a kind of necrophilia, in love with the dead letter of a text." --Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003)

The Metaluna Files.

[smokefalls]

Title: Personal Attention Roleplay Author: H. Felix Chau Bradley Publication Year: 2021 Publisher: Metonymy Press Genre: fiction, queer lit, short stories

This was an engaging collection of short stories that primarily placed queer mixed-race Asian Canadians (primarily in Eastern Canada) at the center, many of whom are struggling with loneliness and/or relationships of some kind. I was really taken to the way that Chau Bradley considered different forms of attachments, platonic or otherwise, and the ways they can manifest in complicated ways. What I also found interesting was that Chau Bradley never offered any sort of closure to their stories, which I felt added another layer of loneliness to many of these characters’ lives. Some stories ended with a bittersweet taste in one’s mouth, especially because you might have wanted more for that story’s protagonist. Other stories ended with a pit in one’s stomach, due to the tension that arose over the course of the story (I think especially of the final short story in the collection, “Soft Shoulder”).

I don’t think this short story collection will quite work for everyone, especially if you’re looking for something lighthearted. There certainly is humor, but it is the sardonic kind that Chau Bradley brilliantly delivers. I did feel that some stories lacked, but the stronger ones really shone.

Content Warning: toxic relationships; body dysphoria; domestic abuse; racism; references to death, pandemic, bullying, sexual assault, and lesbophobia

[outskirtspress]

Review of Outskirts Press from Self-Publishing Author John Natale-Morariu, author of "METONYMY"

“My suggestion is that one should receive a confirmation of one’s choices for example did my free order go through or why didn’t you get my choice of cover confirmation would have been great. That said all reps were patient and helpful and I apologize for my lack of online tech skills.” — John Natale-Morariu JFLN-M is an artist living in Manhattan New York. About the Book Click here to…

[kinayah]

إطلاق سلسلة كتاب كناية..

يسر مؤسسة Metonymy Kinaya الثقافية المستقلة، وبالتشارك مع دار النشر North Mag Press و دار Moment للكتب والنشر، أن تعلن عن إطلاق مشروعها النشري بعنوان كتاب كناية Kinaya Books، وهو سلسلة كتب دورية لا تتوخى الربح، تصدر رقمياً و ورقياً بواقع 84 صفحة لكل كتاب من قطع Statement الوسط الطويل وبغلاف موحد بتصميمه غير متضمن للصور فيه، مع ورق كريمي صديق للبيئة قليل التكلفة، عدا الأعداد الخاصة التي ستصدر ضمن…

[lgbtqreads]

TBRainbow Alert: YA Starring QPoC, Part 2

TBRainbow Alert: YA Starring QPoC, Part 2

Click here for Part 1!

Not Your Backup by CB Lee (June 4th)

Emma Robledo has a few more responsibilities that the usual high school senior, but then again, she and her friends have left school to lead a fractured Resistance movement against a corrupt Heroes League of Heroes. Emma is the only member of a supercharged team without powers, and she isn’t always taken seriously. A natural leader,…

[smallpressdistribution]

We're so excited for Addie Tsai's forthcoming queer YA novel from Metonymy Press! Read more about this exciting work in her interview with Spectrum South!

[biandlesbianliterature]

Anna Marie reviews Small Beauty by jia qing wilson-yang

Anna Marie reviews Small Beauty by jia qing wilson-yang

[The book and this review (although briefly) has these content warnings: transmisogyny, transphobic physical assault, death/grief] I read this book in one day and it was the best decision! Like the ghosts/people who resurface throughout the novel I have felt its presence ebb in and out of my consciousness as I go about my life for the past week. It is a kind, sensitive, introspective and honestly…

[sharpened--edges]

For Freud, mourning is a healthy response to loss, as it is about ‘letting go’ of the lost object, which may include a loved person or an abstraction which has taken the place of one. Melancholia is pathological: the ego refuses to let go of the object, and preserves the object ‘inside itself’. […] In Freud’s critique of melancholia, the emphasis is on a lost external object, that which is other to me, being preserved by becoming internal to the ego. […] However, the passage in grief is not simply about what is ‘outside’ being ‘taken in’. For the object to be lost, it must already have existed within the subject. It would be too narrow to see this ‘insideness’ only in terms of a history of past assimilation […] We can also think of this ‘insideness’ as an effect of the ‘withness’ of intimacy, which involves the process of being affected by others. […] Each of us, in being shaped by others, carries with us ‘impressions’ of those others. Such impressions are certainly memories of this or that other, to which we return in the sticky metonymy of our thoughts and dreams, and through prompting either by conversations with others or through the visual form of photographs. Such ‘withness’ also shapes our bodies, our gestures, our turns of phrase: we pick up bits and pieces of each other as the effect of nearness or proximity.

Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 159–60.

[lokeanwelcomingcommittee]

HI! I am just beginning to feel attached to Loki. I would like to know if he supports creativity and music, or is he somethin else.

oh he's definitely something else let me tell you wha-

Anyway, hi anon! My bad jokes aside, there's not really anything in terms of an overt mythological and social link like you would have with, say, Óðinn and poetry. With that said, you'd likely be hard pressed to find a Norse god that does have a comparative situation with one of the arts, but music and artistic or crafting endeavors certainly seem to be appreciated by most deities, Loki included (our art tag has a number of examples).

While as always recreating something historical to the letter or even necessarily having an offering based on previous information or accounts isn't a, well, necessity, I did read something recently in a paper that's relevant to this ask: it's from William Sayers' "Scarfing the Yard with Words ("Fostbrœðra saga"): Shipbuilding Imagery in Old Norse Poetics," which perhaps obviously is not essential 101 material, but if you ever have an interest in ships or poetry in the future, you know where it is. In any case, the relevant excerpt:

The association of poetry and woodworking, in particular ship building, does not have mythological antecedents to authenticate it, at least not in the preserved stories for which Snorri is our only source. But it does seem very much at home in early northern culture, and for a self-reflective simile, metaphor, or metonymy-- poetry talking about poetry-- poets and their public did not have far to look. The supernatural and organic origins of poetry are complemented by proclaiming its secular affinity with human handicrafts, the skilled production of aesthetically pleasing, effectively functional artifacts.

For context, if the title wasn't a spoiler the article's all about poetry and ship building metaphors, hence the focus; I promise I am not demanding you build a boat (I will demand that if you do for some reason you should submit pictures). The notable thing here is that skálds weren't just making poetry/ship metaphors, they were making references to the actual process of the craft: specific things like joining and planing along with comparisons to the actual construction process and tools/materials used, and doing so favorably-- they recognized that even if there wasn't a specific myth or story behind the craft, other arts or handicrafts were certainly comparable to and indeed, complimentary to ones that did. (A skáld's not going to compare their work to something that doesn't make it look good, ya know?) Again, I don't think boat-building necessarily has to be a modern ideal, especially since part of the reason Sayers theorizes it's so prevalent with the Norse is that seafaring was important to the culture, and that may well be different for many folks today. But the main idea-- that the effort and skill put into any craft, and I might say creating in general, is a thing held in high regard whether it has a specific myth or story behind it or not-- is a pretty good one, IMO.

In any case, anon, I hope some of that kind of tangential storytime was helpful or interesting to you (or at the very least, the links, haha). Best of luck and feel free to write again if we can be of any further assistance.

- Mod V

[vellichortalks]

Book: Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

Author: Kai Cheng Thom

Genre: Fiction(LGBTQ+, Trans girl)

Language: English

Pages: 188

Publisher: Young Zuban (in 2019)

First Published in: 2016 by Metonymy Press

𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲:

It’s a story of a trans girl who grows up in a crooked house in a city called Gloom, where the sky is always grey, a place she escapes from, to become a woman, to become herself, to become anything she wants.

It’s not a story of an ordinary trans girl. It’s a story of a dangerous girl who is the greatest escape artist and knows how to kill a man with her bare hands. She is wild, she is fierce.

Leaving behind that crooked house and Gloom, she reaches the place of her dream, the City of Smoke and Lights, where anything can happen if you dream it. It’s a place full of fabulous femmes and fierce trans women. It’s a place where she finds sisterhood, companionship, where she arises, emerges and fights for herself and for the femmes.

𝐌𝐲 𝐑𝐞𝐯��𝐞𝐰:

The book is so so so different. It’s not the usual trans story we always read, where the society doesn’t accept a trans, it’s not about the pain and the suffering. It’s about being untamed and savage, it’s about raising your weapon and crushing those who maltreat you, shattering their bones to wreak vengeance.

Yeah it does set forth the reality, the things trans women go through. But it’s about coming to the fore to stamp out whoever comes against you and tortures you.

𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐭𝐲𝐥𝐞:

Narrative gripping and profound.

This book has a very magical narration. That’s one of the best things about the book. It seems so dreamy and unworldly. The writer has fictionalized all the realities incredibly.

𝐓𝐨 𝐖𝐡𝐨𝐦 𝐈 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐝:

If you wanna read a very whimsical book about fierce trans women then please go and read it soon.

I won’t recommend this to a beginner, because the narration involves a lot of fantasy, which may get difficult to comprehend.

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If you wanna read this book, click here for the paperback, click here for the audio book.

Spread love and read more books🖤 @vellichortalks