Sunday Small Press Spotlight: Evelyn St. Press & Tin Fish Press

SUNDAY SMALL PRESS

SPOTLIGHT

EVELYN ST. PRESS AND TINFISH PRESS

EVELYN ST. PRESS

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of information on Evelyn St. Press other than their website and some books they published. I'm familiar with them as they published Santo de la Pata Alzada: Poems from the Queer/Xicano/Positive Pen by Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano as well as two other books edited by Herrera y Lozano.

Queer Codex: Chile Love
poetry anthology by queer men of color
Edited by Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
co-published with ALLGO Queer Codex 

Rooted!
poetry anthology by queer women
Edited by Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
co-pub

Affirming Flame: Progressive Texas Poets in the Aftermath of September 11th 

Edited by Jennifer Margulies

ISBN-10: 0972391002 2002

This vital collection of work by Texas poets and artists features moving and challenging responses to September 11, 2001. Affirming Flame presents the voices and visions of people making art who did not want to make war. These are prayers and other communications with the divine, eulogies, nightmare snapshots, love poems, lyrical manifestos, bulletins telling the news that the news did not tell. This book is a historical document and a record of the persistent human need for poetry in times of grief, healing and transformation. It is a collection of creative resistance and an unlikely anthology of hope. 

Santo de la Pata Alzada: Poems from the Queer/Xicano/Positive Pen
by Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano

"Uncompromising and hopeful" -- Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, University of California, Santa Barbara

"this is/beauty that illuminates your heart/humor that lands so deep/you bleed without feeling the cut." -- Sharon Bridgforth, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The Bull-Jean Stories and Love Conjure/Blues (Redbone Press)

These poems of love and resistance testify to the survival of a young Xicano coming of age in the U.S. and Mexico, coming out, facing HIV, and facing himself, body and soul. Bilingual (English and Spanish).

Voices for Racial JusticeEdited by Sharon Bridgforth and Jennifer Margulies
co-published with YWCA of Greater Austin  

The Panza Monologues by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga
co-published with ALLGO

 

TINFISH PRESS

Tinfish Press was founded in 1995 in order to facilitate conversations between experimental writing (written mostly outside of Hawai`i) and the important writing being done in Hawai`i. Writers like Lisa Kanae, whose Sista Tongue (2001, 2008) is one of our most important titles, have a lot to say to writers in other places who think about language and power issues, and whose work uses non-standard languages and forms.

"We began with a thin journal that was xeroxed and stapled, and moved into chapbooks with the publication of Joe Balaz’s Ola in 1996. Since then we have published 19 issues of the journal, many chapbooks and a couple fistfuls of perfect bound volumes. Our designs, all by artists with ties to Hawai`i, are strikingly non-standard. We publish work from the Pacific region, concentrating on language issues, colonialism, Buddhism, place, and poetic form. Above all, we seek to create alliances between writers whose work crosses national and aesthetic borders."

As Tinfish publishes writers from around the Pacific, they published Chamorros and Filipino writers.

Barbara Jane Reyes writes out of Modernist and Filipino traditions; Craig Santos Perez owes a lot to both Charles Olson and to his Chamorro grandmother; the Hawai`i writers of Tinfish 18.5 reach to traditions as various as Hawaiian chant and flarf. 

"All of our publications are designed by graphic artists with links to Hawai`i under the direction of our Art Director, Gaye Chan."

Eulogies
E U L O G I E S
Elizabeth Soto • 2010 •  $14
Designed by Michelle Saoit

but so much noise there was no end to the chatter between engines clack clacking belts and pulleys feet walking talking talking through vocal corded mouths radio wireless television
no end no end noendnoendnoend to this new tongue he had not been there he did not know native no langue no franca no knowledge no friends saying you matter to some part of the universe this part here today now you matter and someone is telling you even if you can’t understand any part of anything they are saying whispering in your deaf ears something will ebb through something will translate something will make sense someday you will hear you will know what they are saying behind closed doors walled rooms wrapping padlocked and captured 

F R O M _ U N I N C O R P O R A T E D _ T E R R I T O R Y

F R O M _ U N I N C O R P O R A T E D _ T E R R I T O R Y
By Craig Santos Perez • 2008 • $15
Design by Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul

In the preface to his first book, a lyrical epic on the violent convergences of colonialisms on Guam (Japanese and American), history, family, and language (Chamorro and English), Perez writes: “On some maps, Guam doesn't exist; I point to an empty space in the Pacific and say, 'I'm from here.' On some maps, Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, 'I'm from this unnamed place.' On some maps, Guam is named 'Guam, U.S.A.' I say, 'I'm from a territory of the United States.” On some maps, Guam is named, simply, 'Guam'; I say, 'I am from Guam.'” Written in the spirit of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée and Barbara Jane Reyes's Poeta en San Francisco, Perez's book promises to add significantly to a growing canon of Pacific poetries. 

P O E T A _ E N _ S A N _ F R A N C I S C O
By Barbara Jane Reyes • 2006 • $13
Design by Karen White & Colin Wilkinson

Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco is a linguistic tour de force, incorporating English, Spanish, and Tagalog in a book-length poem at once lush and experimentally rigorous.  From the vantage of San Francisco, Reyes looks outward to the Philippines, Vietnam, and other colonized places with violent histories.  As she said in a recent interview, “It’s almost a cliché, the phrase, ‘the personal is political,’ but certainly, this is a strong consideration in my work.”  And yet, it is not only violence that concerns Reyes: “I am interested in how we come to love in this world, despite the historical circumstances, the conquests, the wars, which have created us as a diasporic people, as exiles, and refugees.”  This is an ambitious, sweeping and necessary work.  Reyes has won the James Laughlin Award for a second book from the Academy of American Poets for this volume. 

NEW BOOKS IN JUNE 2010

Intersecting Inequalities: Women and Social Policy in Peru, 1990-2000, Jelke Boesten

Pennsylvania State University Press (June 30, 2010)

ISBN-10: 0271036702

"In this provocative study of poor women's organizations in Peru in the 1990s, Jelke Boesten raises most of the fundamental issues of transnational feminism and development facing the world today. 

Focusing on reproductive rights, domestic violence, and poverty relief, Intersecting Inequalities examines some of the ways in which women's local organizations in the global South, particularly in Peru, have wrestled with authoritarian and violent governments, tangled with women's national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and faced down mates and other family members who wanted to maintain existing social relations. 

Avoiding easy answers, Boesten points to some of the successes and pitfalls in seeking health care, freedom from violence, and adequate food supplies to show how women's groups can promote either progressive or right-wing political policies. 

This gripping book is a must-read for historians of transnational feminism, policy makers, leaders of NGOs, and others hoping to create new institutions to solidify social citizenship and justice for women around the world." --Temma Kaplan, Rutgers University, author of Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements and Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy. 

"Intersecting Inequalities is an innovative, nuanced exploration of women's organizations and state policy frameworks in contemporary Peru. By using the lens of intersectionality to frame her study, Boesten provides us with a remarkable account of how gender, race, ethnicity, and class intersect to (re)produce marginality in the lives of indigenous and mestiza women as they interact with public institutions, NGOs, and even feminists. 

Her interdisciplinary approach challenges the very foundations of traditional social science fields and begs us to ask pressing questions about how neocolonial societal institutions and neoliberal policy processes continue to stratify Latin American societies and create irreconcilable differences among women--the supposed beneficiaries of modern feminism." --Amy Lind, University of Cincinnati. 

As the only male head of state to address the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, Alberto Fujimori projected an image as a promoter of progressive policies to improve the condition of women, especially the poor, in society. And indeed the Peruvian government did pursue such policies during his tenure in such areas as poverty relief, population control, and domestic violence. 

These policies are used as case studies in this book to examine the relationship between gender/race/class/ethnic divisions and the state in its project of nation-building. This investigation reveals that policy meant to further womens development and emancipation often reproduced the marginality it was supposed to fight and depicts the strategies women developed to negotiate with and challenge the state.

Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina 

(Cultural Studies of the Americas) , Regina A. Root

Univ Of Minnesota Press (June 25, 2010) ISBN-10: 0816647933

Following Argentina’s revolution in 1810, the dress of young patriots inspired a nation and distanced its politics from the relics of Spanish colonialism. Fashion writing often escaped the notice of authorities, allowing authors to masquerade political ideas under the guise of frivolity and entertainment. 

In Couture and Consensus, Regina A. Root maps this pivotal and overlooked facet of Argentine cultural history, showing how politics emerged from dress to disrupt authoritarian practices and stimulate creativity in a newly independent nation.

Drawing from genres as diverse as fiction, poetry, songs, and fashion magazines, Root offers a sartorial history that produces an original understanding of how Argentina forged its identity during the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1852), a critical historical time. 

Couture and Consensus closely analyzes military uniforms, women’s dress, and the novels of the era to reveal fashion’s role in advancing an agenda and disseminating political goals, notions Root connects to the contemporary moment.

An insightful presentation of the discourse of fashion, Couture and Consensus also paints a riveting portrait of Argentine society in the nineteenth century—its politics, people, and creative forces.

Women's Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean: Engendering Social Justice, Democratizing Citizenship

Elizabeth Maier (Editor), Natalie Lebon (Editor), Sonia E. Alvarez (Foreword)

Publisher: Rutgers University Press (May 9, 2010)

ISBN-10: 0813547296

Women’s Activism in Latin America and the Caribbean brings together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who analyze and document the diversity, vibrancy, and effectiveness of women’s experiences and organizing in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past four decades. 

Most of the expressions of collective agency are analyzed in this book within the context of the neoliberal model of globalization that has seriously affected most Latin American and Caribbean women’s lives in multiple ways. 

Contributors explore the emergence of the area’s feminist movement, dictatorships of the 1970s, the Central American uprisings, the urban, grassroots organizing for better living conditions, and finally, the turn toward public policy and formal political involvement and the alternative globalization movement. 

Geared toward bridging cultural realities, this volume represents women’s transformations, challenges, and hopes, while considering the analytical tools needed to dissect the realities, understand the alternatives, and promote gender democracy.

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Upcoming this week of June 13:

Are chapbooks losing their chapyness? Part II

Barrio Del Diablo, Part II

El Paso Writer Update