You Da One
“I am addressable”—Jennifer Tamayo’s You Da One, is a maliciously filial exploration of packaged familial relations. Professional Detail: suggest face-to-face interplay with the severed head of Gwenyth Paltrow in Se7en. Is that your daughter? Is she a box? Tamayo posits a slick surface of home and determinate location only to scrape it through a landfill of epistolary detritus, Spanglish, and pop music. Daddy-daughter playtime becomes a sweet serial narrative, caught and unraveling on the jagged edge of obedience. There is no manicured heaven here, nor any logic of quotation, simply the primordial spit of techno-banality from which emerges the thrill of the partial. Look into those $50 bona fide baby blues: you (the one) you’re on a lawn, your hand is in a bowl of grapes. Look at the camera, darling, smile for Mommy in your best interior composition!
Trisha LowBy turns violent, political, romantic, incestual, cerebral, bodily, and personal, this second full-length from Tamayo (Red Missed Aches) bears the formal markings of the hypermodern in its deployment of digital, pop, and intertextual elements. Written after her first trip back to her native Colombia in 25 years, the book is indebted to Rihanna, Barthes, and Aimé Césaire, whose texts she mines voraciously. Those influences, as well as the spectres of Alfred Molina and the author’s father, haunt the page, intermixed with screen captures, cheap internet advertising, deliberate misspellings, and pun-ridden Spanglish.
Publishers WeeklyJennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, latinx poet, essayist, and performer. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor y Ana. Her books include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011) selected by Cathy Park Hong for the Gatewood Prize (2010), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013) and YOU DA ONE (2017 reprint Noemi Books & Letras Latinas’s Akrilica Series). Her essays and poetry has been widely published including in Poetry magazine, Best American Experimental Poetry, Mandorla: Writing from the Americas, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Angels of the Americlypse; An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. She has held fellowships from NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and CantoMundo. Currently JT is studying the liberatory possibilities of voice and voicing. You can find their writing and art at www.jennifertamayo.com.
Reviews and News
2016 Winners of the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry
The editors of Noemi Press are excited to announce the winners, finalists, and semi finalists for the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry.
Winner: Indictus by Natalie Eilbert
Finalist: Careen by Grace Shuyi Liew
We will be also publishing Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime by Chaun Webster and A Problem and Some Space by Hannah Ensor
SEMIFINALISTS
The Devil’s Workshop by Xavier Cavazos
Hagia Animalia by Sara Biggs Chaney
Medusa Reads La Negra’s Palm by Elizabeth Acevedo
The Leaving Impulse by Rachel Martin
Manipur by Robin McLachlen
The Historians of Redundant Moments: Novel in Poems by Nandini Dhar
Northern Ledger by Kate Partridge
Probable Garden by Bronwen Tate
Saints and Cannibals by Robert Lunday
Winter Swimmers by Carolyn DeCarlo
Woman, Yielding by Andrea Blancas Beltran
un/documented—kentucky—songs by Steven Alvarez
2015 Winners of the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry
The editors of Noemi Press are excited to announce the winners, finalists, and semi finalists for the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry. We received about 400 poetry submissions this year and thank all the writers who submitted for trusting us with their work.
Winner
Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung
Finalists
Natality by E. G. Means
MOUTHS by Claire Marie Stancek
We will also be publishing finalist Vanessa Villarreal’s manuscript Beast Meridian in the Akrilica series.
Poetry Semifinalists
They Go In Pairs by Samuel Ace
Arcadia, Indiana (a tragedy) by Toby Altman
You Can Take It Out by Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
Red of Split Water-A Burial Rite by Lisa Donovan
Century Worm by Todd Fredson
Actual Echo by Matthew Mahaney
A Turkish Dictionary by Andrew Wessels
Karen Lepri included in a poetry roundup at West Branch Wired
Five new books, including Incidents of Scattering by Karen Lepri, reviewed by Matthew Ladd at West Branch Wired.
Review of Between Grammars at Entropy
Vogel describes her early experiences of reading and writing as “a bridging between [her] voice and [her] body,” as a kind of communion. “Language slowed the world for me,” she recalls, “it gave me a sense of tactility, a skin to encase my thinking.” Vogel’s visceral experience of language is palpable in Between Grammars; there is a sense of tactility ever-present. Beyond the philosophical exploration, reading this book is as much a sensory experience as an intellectual one, the text shot through with light, sound, and touch.
Rain Taxi review of The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying
Armendinger is a master at using fragmented language with precise purpose. His poems experiment with language and form—this collection includes a poem delivered in the form of an instant messenger conversation, and a poem placed as a footnote within another poem—but never read as mere avant-garde posturing. Instead, Armendinger again and again finds new ways to use defamiliarized language to access the unsayable.
It’s a rare and wonderful thing to find a poet who can so powerfully, vividly, and gracefully engage with the problems of language and the world. The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying is a vital book: experimental, substantial, fragmented, unified, unsettled, and unsettling, Armendinger’s work is key reading for all those who care about what our broken words can do.
Two Poems by Chloe Garcia Roberts at Boston Review
Read “Once When Light Returned After a Blackout, I Found My Face Pressed Into a Wall Asking for Help” and “Outside My Window a Tree Is Singing Flowers So I Cannot Sleep, I Cannot Sleep” at the Boston Review. Chloe Garcia Roberts’ debut book of poetry, The Reveal, will be published by Noemi Press this fall.
Profile in Poetics: Danielle Vogel
Danielle Vogel’s book BETWEEN GRAMMARS is forthcoming in 2015, and in this profile she shares her “holy books” including Whitman, Plath, and Woolf, among others!
Women’s Quarterly Conversation: Profile in Poetics: Danielle Vogel
Read a new poem by Brent Armendinger at Bloom
At Bloom Literary Journal, you can read the poem “Casual Sex” by Brent Armendinger, whose book The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying is forthcoming in January, 2015.
Change Machine voted Best of Atlanta!
Bruce Covey’s Change Machine voted Best of Atlanta. Congrats Bruce.Rain Taxi review of Boxing the Compass
Sandy Florian’s Boxing the Compass defies categorization, subverts genre, and reframes our ideas of what story and language can do—all the while remaining intensely readable. In fact, upon “finishing” the book, this reader had to read it again. Perhaps a reader doesn’t ever “finish” a book like this, preferring to keep it at hand so that he or she can pick it up on a whim and reread random passages, such as: “she // unfolds her body the same way some people unfold letters from their lovers who’ve set sail, slowly, with caution, minding the curled edges of the cracked pages, that fading blue ink of time,” or “[she] steps onto the // sidewalk turning northeast on that landmass, concrete composite of well and of shell, of hole and of bowl, of buds from that ever budding past, so buckled by history and crumpled by memory, so embedded with remnants of crocodile eyes crying crocodile tears on these crocodile days . . .”
$18 Paperback | Reprint with new poetry, published 2017
ISBN-13 978-1-934819-67-8