Seth Berg, winner of Dark Sky Magazine’s 2009 Poetry Contest and author of Muted Lines From Someone Else’s Memory will be participating in Oh, Bleek Strategies, an event that includes literary, musical, kinetic, and multidisciplinary performances that creatively play around with and pay homage to Oblique Strategies. Oblique Strategies is a deck of creative strategy cards created in 1975 by Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno. This event is free and open to the public.

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I can see a braid in that place we see without eyes. The braid is made up of strands that are the writers of the 12th Annual Cork International Short Story Festival. The braid is enormous and endless. Pulsates with light. Terrifying if it wasn’t so beautiful. This braid can tease and caress and choke. Can hold down, raise up, and hurl any which way. It can sail through air, the jumprope, and bite deep, the whip. Braid can work its way inside you. Fill you up till you’re squirming, gulping, enraptured. Till you’ll never be the same. Braid is velvet. Is barbed wire. Is brave. Braid is a weave of mystery and genius.

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Occasionally, the most surprising (and rewarding) reviews arrive months after a book’s release. Take this review of Stephen Sturgeon’s TREES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, thoughtfully written by Lisa Katz and published in The Quarterly Conversation, it came out yesterday, September 6th, six months after Sturgeon’s book was released:

Sturgeon’s poetry is fueled by this tension between circumstantial accident and individual imagination. In the opening poem, “Confabulators,” the speaker asks, “What do you speak after penguins enter / the trembling bear-baiting ring?” In other words, how do we attempt to explain the accidental, the unexplainable, using language? The choice of penguins and a bear-baiting ring seems random, and “trembling” is a bizarre way to describe an inanimate object. But the answer is in the title: we confabulate. The title describes both those who talk informally and those who replace fact with fantasy in their memory. Thus we create a new reality through language whenever we speak or write.

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Now through the end of August, Dark Sky Books is offering a two-for-one deal on Hunters & Gamblers and Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City.

$15 for both.

Listen to the King: VISIT THE DSB STORE RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND AND ORDER SOME COPIES OF THEM TWO HOUNDDOGS

– I sat down to discuss Hunters & Gamblers with an internet chatbot. The following transcript is verbatim. No words have been changed or altered in any way. The conversation took place on 8-3-11, from 10:03am to 10:26 am.

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