Drunken Boat Media, the book publishing arm of Drunken Boat, will publish three full length books each year beginning in 2018, including non-fiction, poetry, and an anthology of literary translation. Drunken Boat Media is committed to seeking out, publishing, and promoting works of literature from marginalized and underrepresented communities, centering the voices of those whose voices are often pushed from the center. Drunken Boat Media is invested in art and literature that challenges traditional understandings of genre, form, and aesthetics, creating space to introduce new methods of world-building through language.
Drunken Boat Media books are distributed through Small Press Distribution.
Review copies available by request.
Anomalous Press is the chapbook imprint of Drunken Boat.
Letterpress-cover first editions of 100, with a paperback edition following.
All titles available as ebooks.
Review copies available by request.
Distributed through Small Press Distribution.
The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider
by Janis Freegard
$10.00
Poetry, 42 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-00-0
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PRAISE FOR THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF ALICE SPIDER:
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety" - these words weren't first written for Alice Spider, but they should have been. She is a heroine for our times - a multitasker of the human spirit and a joy in all her manifestations. Cherish her, and take her to your hearths.
-Mary Cresswell, author of Trace Fossils
The Anatomy of a Museum: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Icelandic Phallological Museum But Were Afraid to Ask
by A. Kendra Greene
$10.00
NonFiction, 44 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-26-0
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PRAISE FOR ANATOMY OF A MUSEUM:
"Like a dream both feverish and freezing, Anatomy of a Museum works on the reader elementally. It's at turns hilarious and horrifying, nonchalant and twitchily interrogative. It's as much about the ways in which we draw borders-both physically and ethically-as it is about an Icelandic penis museum. All of this adds up to the oddest, and most fun engagement of environmental consciousness I've read in some time."
-Matthew Gavin Frank
"In the great tradition of Lawrence Weschler, Kendra Greene has written an essay about a hidden wonder of our world with the kind of ardent vim that makes us ponder why said wonder isn't a household name. Greene's voice is probing and hilarious; her sentences are vivacious and wild. This is the gold standard by which all future essays about Icelandic penis museums will be measured."
-Elena Passarello
"An interesting story about one of the strangest museums in the world."
-Jón Gnarr, former punk rocker, taxi driver, and mayor of Reykjavík
Body Split: When Tongue Was Muscle / I Wanted Just To Be Soft
by Sarah Tourjee and Temim Fruchter
$10.00
Poetry/NonFiction, 96 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78131-4
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I Wanted Just to be Soft is part anatomical travel log, part prayer book, part emotional collage and part new anatomy. This collection of lyric prose pieces is built from accounts of trying to find balance between hardening and softening, being guarded and being open, and learning, slowly and tenderly, about vulnerability, knowing one's selves, and letting one's selves be known. The arc of the book traces physicality, queerness, identity and relationship through the stories the body tells. Whether it's an exploration of tear ducts, fingernails, shoulder blades or nude art modeling, each piece in the collection moves through the experience of being as present as possible for this world and not only all of its heartbreak, but also its wild and beautiful color.
When Tongue Was Muscle is a small book that searches the abstract reaches of language in order to name the corporeal and ethereal multiverses of a human body. A book of limbs, prose poems, questions, and incantations.
Book of Interludes
by Grace Shuyi Liew
$10.00
Poetry, 29 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78130-7
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To interrupt is to crystallize the line between belonging and unbelonging-in order to shatter it. Book of Interludes is a series of interruptions/interventions in varying forms: here are prose poems that double back into parentheticals, free verses that speak sternly of hesitance and equivocation, and short essays that rise out of specific cities into unspecified doubt. The book incites its readers to interrupt themselves in their readings in order to, over and over, enter a space of intermission and alienation, with all its glaring light and no clear exit path.
Cargo
by Pia Deas
$10.00
Poetry, 26 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78132-1
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Cargo offers an intimate examination of the contemporary African American experience. These semi- autobiographical poems of love, loss, and longing, explore the impact of a racialized legacy in shaping one woman's coming of age in the United States, Colombia, and Germany. Rather than tell a straight-forward chronological narrative, each individual poem stitches together disparate experiences so that the lines of each poem resonate against each other in meaningful and evocative ways. Together, these poems work as a book-length meditation on intersecting and intertwining identities of race, class, and nation. Tonally and thematically, Cargo shares a legacy with the African American blues, which expresses communal grief and love as embodied by the experiences of an individual . Ultimately, Cargo emphasizes the necessity of pride, self-definition, and self-determination as expressed in one woman's journey.
Drown/Sever/Sing
by Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas
$10.00
Hybrid Fiction/NonFiction
ISBN 978-1-939781-27-7
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If Rudyard Kipling were alive, and Colombian, these are the stories he would wish he could tell.
The Everyday Maths
by Liat Berdugo
$10.00
Poetry, 50 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-03-1
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WINNER OF THE 2012 CHAPBOOK CONTEST SELECTED BY COLE SWENSEN
Liat is a master of the non-sequitur, knowing just how to put two completely unconnected statements together in a way that reveals their complete affinity. Inventive, humorous, and very, very smart, this is a book truly like no other-and a sheer delight.
-Cole Swensen
Ghost
by Sarah Tourjee
$10.00
Fiction, 38 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78102-4
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An unusual enigme-à-trois, deftly told. An intriguing young writer.
-Robert Coover
"The worst of all offenses was that I did not even know he was upon me, if he ever was upon me." Less a book than a hollowing, a keening, an excavation, an echo chamber, suffused with doubt and dread and longing- haunted and gorgeous.
-Carole Maso
His Days Go By The Way Her Years
by Ye Mimi, translated by Steve Bradbury
$10.00
Poetry, 29 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-21-5
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FINALIST FOR THE 2013 BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD IN POETRY
This slim, but nonetheless substantial volume showcases poet and filmmaker Ye Mimi's fascination with dreams, grotesque imagery, playfulness, and sensitivity to sound. In his translations, Bradbury has crafts English poems that sing in their new language and deftly play with its possibilities. This book was the finalist in the Anomalous Press Experimental Translation Chapbook Contest, selected by Christian Hawkey.
Mimi & Xavier Star in a Museum That Fits Entirely in One's Pocket
by Becca Barniskis
$10.00
Poetry, 24 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-22-2
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In this dramatic poem in three acts, Barniskis introduces readers to Mimi Sprig and Xavier Box, tiny adversaries engaged in "an almost secret war." Their poetic monologues shimmer with longing as they circle, listening for signs of life and learning to read each other. Mimi and Xavier Star in a Museum That Fits Entirely in One's Pocket was a finalist in the Anomalous Press Poetry Chapbook Contest, judged by Cole Swensen, and is being co-released as an LP with music by composer Nick Jaffe.
Mystérieuse
by Éric Suchère, translated by Sandra Doller
$10.00
Poetry, 28 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-04-8
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An act of obsessive ekphrasis and aleatory transcription, &Eaccute;ric Suchère's Mystérieuse mirrors, in its procedural elegance, the intermedial space of comic books, a form that hovers between writing and drawing, word and image. With Sandra Doller's beautifully paced translation from the French, itself attentively redrawn on the page by graphic designer Sarah Seldomridge it becomes clear that delight proliferates- the raison d'être of translation- when media jumps thru media.
-Christian Hawkey
Outer Pradesh
by Nathaniel Mackey
$10.00
Poetry, 28 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-04-8
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WINNER OF THE 2015 YALE BOLLINGEN PRIZE FOR POETRY
Drawing inspiration and language from spiritual traditions including Hinduism, Gnosticism, and the Dogon of Mali, Outer Pradesh is a new collection of poetry in Nathaniel Mackey's ongoing poetry series Song of the Andoumboulou. These five poems sing the sacred and profane, blurring their definitions in moments of self-reflection and altered states of consciousness as the poem travels, searching.
Stone Collector
by A. Kendra Greene
$10.00
NonFiction, 27 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78133-8
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A lyric essay from Iceland's east fjords, The Stone Collector examines, over decades and by degrees, how one woman's daily walk sparked a private collection and public attraction. Most every day of her life, Petra took a walk; and most every walk, Petra found a stone. Petra's jaw-dropping collection of jasper and onyx and agate and amethyst and scolecite and calcite and chalcedony and spar spilled filled the house and spilled out into the garden. Her neighbors fretted over the strangely feminist act of spending so much time in the mountains. Her children grew up with strangers in the garden, strangers who saw the collection from the road and drew close. Tour guides brought busses and Geologists wrote letters and Petra served coffee in her kitchen, as the public pressed her collection into becoming a museum. This is the second installment in A. Kendra Greene's series on Icelandic museums.
The Surrender
by Scott Esposito
$10.00
NonFiction, 113 pp
ISBN 978-1-939-78129-1
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Fantastic. Luminous. Go buy it.
-Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland, Cranioklepty, and Afterlives of the Saints
Esposito writes with nerve, honesty and passion about a long journey towards new freedom: These three brave, beautiful, and very personal essays on life, gender, fear, art, desire. Stars.
-Naja Marie Aidt, author of Baboon and Rock, Paper, Scissors
Scott Esposito's The Surrender is a page-turner, moving and intellectually engaging... The Surrender is not only an essential read for gender studies, but for anyone who must live with doubled identity, and this is many of us: immigrants, refugees, exiles, nomads, translators...
-Don Mee Choi, author of Hardly War
Scott Esposito is one of the most perceptive critics now at work in the United States... It will soon be difficult to ignore The Surrender in any serious discussion on gender or desire. In our deeply riven and misogynistic societies, this text should be essential reading for everyone. It is simply thrilling to watch a peculiarly refined sensibility redraw the contours of the possible.
-Aashish Kaul, author of A Dream of Horses and The Queen's Play
Riveting and educating. Meshed. Restrained. Esposito's style is really something. Careful. As measured as the secrecy in the act.
-Anakana Schofield, author of the Giller Prize finalist Martin John
Smart and sensitive, written with great lucidity, these essays combine acute art criticism with fearless self- examination, suggesting new ways to consider our relationships with culture.
-Juliet Jacques, author of Trans
Third Person Singular
by Rose Marie Waldrop, with art by Keith Waldrop
$10.00
Poetry, 26 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-25-3
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An Introduction to Venantius Fortunatus for Schoolchildren or Understanding the Medieval Concept World Through Metonymy
by Mike Schorsch
$10.00
Poetry, 26 pp
ISBN 978-1-939781-25-3
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An Introduction to Venantius Fortunatus for Schoolchildren is a manifestation of the sheer and adventurous wit of Mike Schorsch as much as it is a strange, beautiful, and meditative song to society. It's an absolute wonder to be summoned into this book-and now you too have been summoned-no backsies. Schorsch's tenacious voice is one of modern energy and doubt engaging with antiquity. He mines the kind of authentic care it takes to hold parenthetical action -"(pending supernatural intervention and/or time travel)" while also considering "even / the bishop, that honored man who thinks / I have so many female friends." Some of the questions asked here will only be answered with difficulty; the key of Mike Schorsch's generosity is that they are always explicitly addressed to all of us.
-Amanda Nadelberg, author of Bright Brave Phenomena and Isa the Truck Named Isadore
From beginning to end, this is a book of telling contrasts between vastly different sensibilities, values, beliefs, customs, and modes of expressing and interacting with the world. This much one might expect from a book of translated poetry by a forgotten medieval saint. That it should, at least indirectly, critique the crass materialism of contemporary middle-class life might also not be terribly surprising. What, after all, could show more profoundly our weddedness to things than prayerful rumination on the immaterial spirit? That it should be hilarious and marvelously irreverent in achieving all of this is its greatest virtue, better even than a DeLonghi sandwich maker. Compare and contrast.
-Russell Valentino, translator of Materada by Fulvio Tomizza and The Other Venice: Secrets of the City, by Predrag Matvejevic among many others