Thanks to the lovely Erin Morrill, Bad Press has for U.K./E.U. distribution a number of copies of Marianne Morris’ chapbook Iran Documents, published in the U.S. by Trafficker Press last year.  These will be available for a limited time, and only to U.K./E.U. customers.  More info about the book is available via this interview with Marianne Morris & David Brazil; and Michael Cross has posted some excerpts from the book at his Disinhibitor blog.

They are £5 plus p&p.  

And, thanks to the lovely Rosa van Hensbergen, we also have a handful of Marianne’s DSK chapbooks for distribution, again for U.K. customers only.  These are £4 plus p&p. More info can be found on the Tipped Press homepage.

Click here to buy Iran Documents, click here to buy DSK, or order em both for £11.

There’s a review of Sophie Robinson’s The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair up at For Book’s Sake.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we are gathered here today to welcome into the world such material objects of considerable mass as these you see now gathered together in their lump summed mass above, constituting in their congregation The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair, a book of poems by Sophie Robinson. 

This publication is Bad Press’s first perfect bound collection, and also, therebyhenceforcewith, its heaviest, which caused a degree of quantum, ecological and ethical consternation for a moment or two until today’s board meeting, at which it was roundly decided that the congregation is worth its mass by way of being comprised completely and only of AWESOME POEMS.  This book is full of blinding one-liners, perfectly formed love lyrics, and kick-ass couplets.  HOORAY!

“I love these poems, these scratched accounts of the bars, kitchens and hospitals, bathrooms and bedrooms of East London. Paris is nicer than Hackney, but we’ve got all the decent cologne, all the toothpaste and scissors. If we’re too tired too riot, well, the mixed drinks and melodramatic moments of Sophie’s poems will probably change that. These are love songs to make us crack, gag and hum, wolfishly, all over Dalston Junction. It deserves it. All of this can be seen from the roof of the 243 Waterloo-Hackney bus, if you know how to look. Shall we do shots?” - Sean Bonney

In the UK these are £7 plus £1.75 p&p, and in the U.S. they are $10 plus $4 p&p, which you may send us henceforthrightwith whomsoever you shall.

Thrilled to our boots at Bad Press to read Rich Owens’ enthusiastic review of Sam Solomon’s Life of Riley, thinking about the lyric as a space of multiplicity.  Bye bye, Ophelia.  Get thee to a binary. Etc.

Thinking about Samuel Solomon’s Life of Riley (Bad Press 2012) while reading through Yeats’s “Introduction,” the 1937 prefatory note composed for an edition of his complete works that never appeared, I found myself struck by the following claim: “A poet is justified not by the expression of himself, but by the public he finds or creates; a public made by others ready to his hand if he is a mere popular poet, but a new public, a new form of life, if he is a man of genius.” Beyond calling out the extraordinary belatedness of recent critiques of self-expression at all times linked with an irrepressibly bourgeois desire to recuperate genius as an operative concept, this statement from Yeats is fascinating for its attention to the formation of publics. But rather than imagining a public as a social formation that one participates in building with others, we are offered here one of two options: if we are “mere” poets, we can move blindly along with an uninspired herd; or, if we are artists of genius, we can single-handedly construct a new form of life like some sort of megalomaniacal one-size-fits-all vision of good living. There are unquestionably other possibilities, i.e. aligning oneself with a broader, more lateralized collective effort to construct a “form of life,” or ways of feeling and grasping, capable of meeting the confluence of demands disposed in the present. Solomon’s Life of Riley angles toward such an alignment, each of the poems grounded in a strategic deference that subordinates the narrativized self to a more collective endeavor without surrendering, and arguably by way of, an otherwise self-indulgent lyric excess.

Hot off the press - the second run of Amy De’Ath’s Caribou.

there’s a lovely pinning up on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Blog of Samuel Solomon’s long-awaited review of the Bad Press consortium release from 2011, Untitled Colossal Parlour Odes (as well as of a group pamphlet from Grasp Press, now out of print, featuring poems by Francesca Lisette, Timothy Thornton, et al).  Sam’s original review was posted at the Lana Turner Journal.

There are a handful of UCPO’s left at the Bad Press HQ - get ‘em.  You can send us £6 / $14 and get both UCPO and Sam’s new chapbook Life of Riley all in the same bundle of love (if u wanna).

Bad Press poet Amy De’Ath