IT'S BOOK PRIZE TIME -- SLOPE EDITIONS CAN'T WAIT TO READ YOUR SUBMISSION!

Slope Editions is accepting full-length poetry manuscripts for its 14th Annual Slope Editions Book Prize Contest. This year's contest will be judged by Douglas Kearney. The deadline is March 15th. The winning poet will have his/her book of poems published in 2016 by Slope Editions.

Poet/performer/librettist Douglas Kearney’s third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. His second, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was a National Poetry Series selection. His work has appeared in a number of journals, includingPoetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, and Callaloo. He lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley and teaches at CalArts.

Entrants to the Slope Editions Book Prize may also be considered for additional Slope Editions publications.  Entrants being considered for these publications will be notified. We offer sincere thanks to all entrants and readers for supporting Slope Editions and small press poetry.

Eligibility: Any American poet writing in English is eligible, unless that person has a close personal or professional relationship with the judge and/or Slope Editions staff. Past or current students of the judge are ineligible to enter; entry fees will be returned in these cases. Any manuscript that has appeared or is forthcoming as a printed book, e-book, or chapbook will NOT be considered. Please do not include your name or any personal information anywhere on the manuscript. Manuscripts that are not blinded will not be read.

Submission Formats & Fees:

We are no longer accepting paper submissions.

Electronic ($25): 40 to 90 pages as formatted in standard 8 &1/2 by 11 MS Word or PDF document submitted through Submittable. Your name should not appear anywhere within your manuscript.  Please include a title page with book title only, a table of contents, and an acknowledgements page with manuscript.  $25 entry fee, payable through Submittable, must accompany all submissions.

Submit by March 15th, 2015.

Submissions are entered here: http://slopeeditions.submittable.com/submit

Notification: We do NOT accept notification SASEs or postcards.  Please check the Slope Editions website for announcement of contest winner. Notification SASEs or postcards will NOT be returned.

Revisions: The winner will be able to revise his/her manuscript before publication. No revisions will be considered during the reading period.

“The answer is: Don’t just cog the machine.

Hold it under till it casts out the ghost.”

—Kit Frick, Echo, Echo, Light, Contest winner, 2013

We are happy to announce the opening of our Third Annual Chapbook Contest! Winner receives $100 + ten free copies! Submissions will be accepted through submittable, slopeeditions.submittable.com; please check there for guidelines & details!

 

We are so excited to announce that we will be publishing James Schiller’s book of poems YES I UNDERSTAND AND WISH TO CONTINUE in Spring 2015! This is an amazing book—influenced by disintegration loops, witchcraft, and Schiller’s experience of keeping a hive of bees in a glass box in his bedroom as a child.

About this book, Matt Hart said: “If you like eating pipe bombs for breakfast and pissing off your friends, read these poems. If you don’t like those things, read these poems. If you love everyone so much that it actually makes you sick, then definitely read these poems.”

We are thrilled to be able to bring this exciting book in the world!

Review: 'An Instrument for Leaving' by Monika Zobel (2014)

by Brandon James Anderson Bertolt Brecht was a 20th century playwright, poet, and director. After gaining fame in his native Germany, Brecht sought refuge after the Nazi Party came into power. He m…

Brandon James Anderson reviews AN INSTRUMENT FOR LEAVING in Michiganders Post

What we did in our meeting today // happy happy Easter from Slope!

Attention:

Are you interested in reviewing Monika Zobel’s AN INSTRUMENT FOR LEAVING? If so, contact hanna@slope.org!

"This is the only way to listen
to thunder. I count
backwards, all the way

backwards to lightning—that moment
before knowing, before wanting
when you were still

the only music, unheard of”

—from AN INSTRUMENT FOR LEAVING, by Monika Zobel

Order here

The Poetry & Cruelty Hotline, Vol. 8

Sure, April is half-spent, but we’re just getting started. This installment of The Poetry & Cruelty Hotline features gems from J Hope Stein, Kenyatta Rogers, Keith Wilson, Kit Frick, Seth Landm…

Listen to a poem from Slope author Kit Frick, author of ECHO, ECHO, LIGHT in the latest installment of The Poetry and Cruelty Hotline.

the sun is out & so is Monika Zobel’s AN INSTRUMENT FOR LEAVING, the winner of our 2013 Book Prize! Here’s what Dorothea Lasky has to say about Zobel’s book:

"Zobel’s poetic hauntings here are like the uncanny feeling of a strange bird in the hand, inescapably present, humming to the dark, smuggling us off with her in an odd and beautiful motionless flight."

order now—-www.slopeeditions.org

ANNOUNCING OUR 2013 PRIZE WINNER!

We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2013 Book Prize, selected by Dorothea Lasky:.

Thanks to everyone who submitted

The Believer Logger: "GOD BLESS YOUTHFUL BASTARD BRAVERY"

believermag:

An Interview with Ben Kopel

In his book Victory, Ben Kopel’s poems present the grim and petty unapologetically – “sad, thin-skinned kids” huffing Pine-Sol in a parked car, the necessity to “stay up late / smashing bottles / against the levee / for nothing” – but there’s also a fierce…

goatinthesnow:

TWO PEOPLE TALKING

Hosted by Kelin Loe

In the inaugural episode, Dorothea Lasky and Kelin talk about indigo, energy, elephants, blood and guts. Dottie reads poems from her 2nd and 3rd collections, Black Life and Thunderbird. The episode is a collage of their conversations and her poetry.

Flying Object Radio

sean-kilpatrick:

EPISODE 1 – CHEW THE SCALES OFF WHAT PASSED US

Gil is tutoring a child.

GIL

Oops. (Flicking lighter) Outlasts anyone. Whatever scourged us best be universe-length and terribly following through on its lingerie. Little Aigner, why are we so far less than our groceries? (Claps him against the wall) The twentieth century quit our wallowing in because. See the batch that sagged its bowel? Everyone’s ten ton sacrifice contributed the bidet. Bang, I was thronging the squad, scooting falderal, finicky up my clay. Ready a mass shooter. Our vicar draped in news. Got your cum-caught hosanna for munitions. (Whaps forehead) This is America. We’re especially asleep through our corpse. I pick my wet dreams over anybody’s peace. The squabble whupped by carts. Who will count their flab to know? The shush and clop. How coochies rile. Rile, coochies. We do the bank’s nostalgia. Procreate them stamps, bitch. Proud about the bible. Open just the same. Terminal chamber pots for laundry. Or working class chroma. Loutish wiggard diner fiendings. No handouts for anyone this disguised. Impute left or right prepuce? Goons in the coma of our daughter. No, rather, college-drill the stroller about proletariat whatnot. Marx-fetish, crawling the umpteenth sphincter for lawyerly academic boiler plate argument intellectual hunky-dory snark professorships. Ah, spiffy. Ah, shone best for last. Yuppie entitlement. Marathon winners. Clout of Whole Foods enema gassing uppity. You survived a million proms. So crowded with baby wipe compassion the piety there could outlast any blue ribbon sadist. I hate you all and am no more than you. Except my hate scores bottommost. Disgorge all faculties, sexy. Analysis is the shutout scratch we poll like a Möbius strip. Let’s keep getting pregnant, kid. Beg your clot replenished from every status, every swole roid hydroplaning its apparel. No fucking success starts by breathing.

Edmund enters, oil-slicked, holding a dipstick for trucks. Pries Gil off.

EDMUND

Little Aigner cares little for your points about the stank outside. But looky hence. No nonsense separates oneself. True how breath stereotypes its user. Wrong from every angle: thus human, thus okay. Why not live as a cinder in it? From what height you’re not deeper in the assist: be evil, not deep. All actions reverb, petrified? Sure, look in my doomed pants without thinking. You lie down to protest planetary rotation. Most of what happens here gives motion a bad name? If people still prance, your hate’s paltry. Cheer up. I suggest pussy. So it can flee. Interpret for its needs, then flee. We’ll hump the best purpose without. I’ll help you sad the right way.

LITTLE AIGNER

Love the girl who leaves till you’re tinier than she, the scissors turning in her voice, depressed a lot. Mauled yourself a god for petty others’ petty takings. You can’t even spit because this girl.

GIL

(Sweating) Edmund, check his fucking oil, please.

EXT. FIELD – NIGHT 

EDMUND

(Wiping blood off dipstick) The future might have less plaque on it. Pinkie swear.

http://www.amazon.com/Gil-Nihilist-Sitcom-Sean-Kilpatrick/dp/1621051048

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781621051046-0

PITCH

Gil’s a misanthropic titillation free of brains, copulating in unpaid rent, obsessed with rubbing yogurt on gals’ riblets, hindered by too much earth, its hostile armchair sociologists, bitching word salads, no contingent advancement, and philanthropy: the most fungal pretention. People initiate petty discord to the tune of instinct, opinion, their own stank procreations, and are not worth saving. We’re banning any development or insight. The three mains are the loveable scoundrels typical of some sitcoms, played here to the full extent of implication for actor and viewer. They avalanche their speech, fight without provocation, process no manners or personal space, detest their shit jobs or shit college, cross-societal haters afflicted by irreverent tantrums, clumped verbal retardation, congested asides, monologic Tourette’s, clumsy dialects, language garage sale, a perpetual static reinstated line to line, the worst wrong the better. Lines spasm through clenched teeth, between bouts of self-harm. Everyone is jounced with Zulawski-level manias. Birth is the enemy, theirs or anyone’s. Always in the background extras riot without explanation. Characters can interchange race to spit on race. Gil and Edmund engage in brief, unplanned physical assaults and dancing mid-sentence. Maybe someone runs up, fellates one of them, decides not to finish. People find Gil, have reasons to read a book against his head. The call to prayer is constant and wetly malfunctioning. Everyone jerks through their blocking. Gil is blank, ugly, abhorrent, a regrettable human quotation mark. Starr’s deadpan attitude is an effected fashion. Even her name promotes irony in its contemporary definition. She’s your petite and self-denying hipster, a goddamn people person. But she can sing. Edmund is a full-blown sociopathic auto mechanic who likes to fuck. Hereby indifferent to their caste, dealt the petted tribes we’re jammed into somehow proud, a status yuppies dearly pet - everyone functional is a yuppie by now – this is a backwards lecture, pissing its pants.

Ideal theme song: Death Grips – World of Dogs. Shot [adult swim] length, YouTube backdrops, cardboard budget.

Covers - Matthew Revert / Art - Sam Pink