SLY BANG PARTY NEXT WEEK MARCH 6!

For immediate release
Contact: Sliding Scale
slidingsca@aol.com
646-326-9816

SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE!

New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs (“if you reverse the genders”), and a wild literary ride.

The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH), Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz(MadHat)Jeff Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers and the event flyer follow.

Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it is garnering excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil at Sly Bang. Copies of Sly Bang will also be available at the book party March 6.

Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence. Her poetry albums are The No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry.

Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).

Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.

Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Lies from Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018.

Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air

Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.

St. Petersburg Review at KGB tomorrow!

A METONYMY

The Wall is a metonymy for institutional racism and atrocities like the policy of family separation. Ditto Trump's national emergency, which is based on wholesale lies that everyone, Trump supporters included, knows are lies. These lies are now the basis for a radical, largely unlimited expansion of presidential power. If your antennae aren't twitching grave danger right now, you don't know history, or haven't learned from it.

AWP PORTLAND OFFSITE: UNLIKELY BOOKS AND RIGOROUS

St. Petersburg Review Issue 9 Launch!

Rope

When I watched the coverage of the 2012 Republican Convention, I saw Obama posters with thick nooses saying "Rope." I also saw the president depicted as a monkey. "This is the Tea Party, the lunatic fringe," I thought (it *was* 2012). How naive I was. I am a Manhattan dweller, a writer, surrounded by all nations jubilantly making art; I was concerned mostly by the prejudice against mentally ill people that directly affected me. These past two years have schooled me about what we are up against: 35 percent of our nation, 100 million people, who hold their noses or not, but support Trump because he and they are racists. And tens of millions who call racism good fun, or heritage. So, I'm learning. Because I have skin in the game -- as long as there are people wearing black face, there will also be people like Trump mocking me, discriminating against us all.

SLY BANG PRESS RELEASE

For immediate release
Contact: Sliding Scale
646-326-9816

SLY BANG BOOK RELEASE PARTY
Jefferson Market Library
425 Avenue of the Americas at West 10th Street
March 6 at 6:00 P.M.
FREE!

New York City. On March 6, an elite group of poets and writers will convene to celebrate Larissa Shmailo’s new novel, Sly Bang. Called “astounding,” “genre-bending,” and “like nothing else,” Shmailo’s second novel has been recommended to readers who like Gogol, Kafka, Burroughs (“if you reverse the genders”), and a wild literary ride.

The notables assembling for the evening at the historic Jefferson Market Library will read from Sly Bang and respond with readings of their own work. Appearing will be Annie Finch (Spells: New and Selected Poems), Trace Peterson (EOAGH),Thaddeus Rutkowski (Haywire), Marc Vincenz(MadHat), and Jeff Wright (Kathy Acker Award). Emceeing the night will be Ron Kolm of the Unbearables and the Fales Collection of the New York University Library. Bios of the readers and event flyer follow.

Sly Bang is available from Amazon, where it has garnered excellent reader reviews, and from the publisher Spuyten Duyvil. Copies of Sly Bangwill also be available at the book party March 6.

Author Larissa Shmailo is a poet, novelist, translator, editor, and critic. Her new novel is Sly Bang; her first novel is Patient Women. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country,#specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence . Her poetry albums areThe No-Net World and Exorcism, for which she won the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the first Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych, performed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and theaters and universities worldwide. Shmailo also edited the online anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. 

Annie Finch’s most recent books are Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan) and Measure for Measure (Random House/Everymans). Her poetry has been performed at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installed in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and published in Poetry, Paris Review, The New York Times, and The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. A graduate of Yale with a Ph.D. from Stanford, she teaches Five Directions Workshops and performs Poetry Witch Ritual Theater. Forthcoming in 2019 are The Poetry Witch Book of Spells (Wesleyan) and the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket).

Ron Kolm (emcee) is an editor of the 6th Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift and A Change in the Weather. He's had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, Maintenant, Live Mag!, Local Knowledge, The Opiate and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.

Trace Peterson is a trans woman poet critic. Author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007), she is also founding editor and publisher of EOAGH, which has won two Lambda Literary Awards, including the first given in transgender poetry. She is coeditor of the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and coeditor of Arrive on Wave: Collected Poems of Gil Ott (Chax Press, 2016). Her second full-length book of poems is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2020.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Sarah Lawrence College, and the West Side YMCA, and is a staff copy editor for Artforum magazine. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Marc Vincenz’s tenth collection of poetry is Leaning into the Infinite. He has translated many Romanian-, French- and German-language poets, including Herman Hesse Prize winner, Klaus Merz. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, impresario, and poet. He is the author of 16 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press, and Fake Liesfrom Fell Swoop. He received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College after studying with Allen Ginsberg. Currently, Wright stages events at KGB Lit Bar, Howl! Happening, and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a regular contributor to American Book Review and ArtNexus. He is a Kathy Acker Award recipient and Pushcart Prize nominee for 2018. 

Videography will be by Mitch Corber for the television show Poetry Thin Air.

Spuyten Duyvil would like to thank the Jefferson Market Library and New York Public Library Programs for their generous support hosting the Sly Bang Book Release Party.
https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2019/03/06/book-release-party-sly-bang-larissa-shmailo

PRAISE FOR LARISSA SHMAILO’S SLY BANG!

If you are looking for something to get out of your ordinary line of thinking, Larissa Shmailo’s Sly Bang ought to do the trick. The book is a psychological sci-fi filled with nonsensical gadgets, absurd dialogue, and all-out madness, a battle royale of good against evil, of womanhood against male perversion that follows William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in reverse, if we consider the gender roles of the protagonists. Lovers of Nikolai Gogol’s Madman’s Diary and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Franz Kafka’s stories will also enjoy this book, as opposed to religious and concrete minds who by all means should stay away from a book like this.

—Darryl Wawa

What do you do when there is an “army of serial killers, mad scientists, and ultrarich sociopaths” after you?
Why, you summon your alter, “Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayevna Romanova, tsaritsa of all the Russias,” and embark upon Larissa Shmailo’s cornucopiac literary odyssey, Sly Bang, of course.
From Nietzsche’s “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and Lady Gaga’s meat dress to sadistic cult leaders and space Nazis, this sci-fi fantasy thriller is chock-full of surprises at every turn. I mean, the lead character, Upper West Side, Manhattanite Nora, is a multiple personality FBI agent/possible alien with an affinity for serial killers who telepathically communicates with giant prehistoric birds, and as luck would have it, writes uncannily brilliant poetry (journal entries).
Yes.
There is a lot going on in this book.
In my opinion, the (quintessentially Shmailo) “Interlude” is where Sly Bang lives and breathes. It is the much anticipated doorway through which the reader officially exits suspended disbelief, and enters Nora’s world —her real world—and introduces, through beautifully crafted poems, the backstory of Nora; a tragic tale of horrific abuse, betrayal, and ultimately, survival.
This stretch of writing, which jets the reader back to World War II, Nora’s camp family history, is nothing short of masterful, and reminiscent of Shmailo’s previous offering, Patient Women. The poem “Warsaw Ghetto” itself is well worth the price of admission.
Generously infused throughout with humor, ebullient psychosexualism, and quasi-hypothetical political scenarios, this manic mind-trip, where alternate realities collide full-force culminating in orgasmic fits and fantastical flurries, Sly Bang is a bit like eating chocolate cake on a roller coaster. Crazy. Delicious. Chaos.

—K.R. Copeland

Sly Bang is a whirlwind. And if you are looking for a sedate involvement with linear literature, Sly Bang is not for you. This is the shock of the new in a whirlpool of the past. Just open the book and hang on. This is visceral energy in words.

—RW Spryszak

Larissa Shmailo's sci fi thriller Sly Bang is a twisted and compelling thrill ride of a novel that not only transcends the form of that literary genre— it blows it up. It's a novel about an attempt to destroy the universe by reverse engineering the Big Bang. It deals with taboo subjects and is raunchy. funny and brutally intense. I also like that's there's a character named Brave McQ.  

—Michael W McHugh aka McQ

Astounding! Will make you recalibrate the word “risk.”

—Maggie Balistreri

NEW DISPATCHES FROM THE POETRY WARS!

Proud to be a contributing editor to DISPATCHES FROM THE POETRY WARS - new Winter edition is here! Check out the ginormous index of anthologized writing!
DISPATCHES FROM THE POETRY WARS