Elegy for the Builder's Wife

After a reprieve, Blue Hour Press is pleased to bring you its next book.

If maps are documents of distance, then Nick Courtright’s Elegy for the Builder’s Wife is an atlas. Each poem in the collection can complete a chronicle the surveyor’s work cannot — the territories of fog, how trees can become landmarks, the continents chipped from paint. Courtright, navigating the same terrain as Lorca, finds icons of longing, passion, and sacrifice in the liminal spaces, and in the process, he charts what, for the mapmaker, is impossible — the incomplete, the rended, and the influence of time on everything, still or in motion.

Nick's book can be found at www.elegyforthebuilderswife.com.

Lumièrethèque

Here at BHP, our one-year anniversary came and went in a flash. For those who've been following the press faithfully, or for anyone who has just found us, a quick glance will show you just how busy we've been in the past twelve month. Nine top-notch chapbooks, our first successful open reading, and some splendid buzz. Thanks to everyone who's enjoyed, contributed, spread word—you were crucial to Blue Hour's fantastic infancy.

Our tenth chap (and a slightly belated first anniversary gift) is Andrew Zawacki's Lumièrethèque:

Like magnetic tape manipulation, the temporal and visual of Andrew Zawacki’s Lumièrethèque is warped and looped, reversed and slow-motioned until the grain of the moment is visible. Zoomed to evocative abstraction, Zawacki’s “clips” twist with Murnau-esque mise en scène; like details of Veronese, their cropping implies a multitude outside the frame. Zawacki provides shaky cam footage of cathedrals, jump-cuts, converts analog to digital and back. At Lumièrethèque’s hand-cranked heart are questions raised by video tracking, galleries of anachronism, line and syllable: how does the simple act of perception fracture—and how could it not?

My Heart Draws a Rough Map

Nary a week before the end of the month, here is October's chapbook, My Heart Draws a Rough Map by Howie Good.

Howie Good’s My Heart Draws a Rough Map proceeds like a softly-spoken B-movie. Not content to just beat, the heart grieves, gives in to melancholy, takes long walks, plays baseball, makes demands like Edward G. Robinson. Drawn outside of the self, the heart doesn’t just get saddled with emotion, but is an observer, a conversationalist, enigmatic. As equally wrought with primary colors and ominous dark as child’s crayon portrait of her parents come to life, My Heart Draws a Rough Map maintains a simple surreality, tongue in cheek, and heart on sleeve (and atop roof, and on board train, and in a hundred other places).

This chapbook is wonderfully complemented with artwork done by the talented and quite sweet Mia Christopher. Please visit her website to enjoy more of her whimsical, wistful work.

Reunions

Blue Hour is proud to announce its first release of the fall, Reunions by Brooklyn Copeland.

The spring of Brooklyn Copeland’s Reunions is of birds and bees, but far from the picture book couplets that conjures; these birds, blind from direct sunlight, loop in disorientation, and the bees, stingers firmly attached, travel in packs. Copeland, in swaying, tangling lineation, pinpoints spring’s inherent seediness, that its green is as much flora as fake jewelry, that its relationships, like plant-life, grow weed-like—ugly, stubbornly, everywhere. Everything that can twist—roots, tongues, limbs—does, making the pleasure of the poem the untangling.

Brooklyn's terrific poem bodes well for the upcoming season of chaps. Hope such a spring-influenced chap meets with autumn's chill wherever you are, and that you return throughout the fall for more beautiful online literature. As always, check us out on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter.

Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful!

Consider this an early Cinco de Mayo gift:

Alexis Orgera’s Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! proves that whimsy is nothing if not coupled with melancholy. Orgera, riding shotgun on a road trip through salt flats and suburbs, undercuts her jeremiads with jokes, never snaps a picture of a landmark without someone sad and strange in the frame, twiddles the radio knobs until she finds something disturbing but danceable. Providing “Driving Directions to the Apocalypse” along the way, Orgera gives the reader a map that perhaps looks less like a U.S. atlas than a trashy TV Guide; Orgera slyly makes the argument that both are indistinguishable. With good tea brewing and mild insomnia, any reader of Dear Friends, The Birds Were Wonderful! will find the journey, in turns, terrifying and a hoot.

After thoroughly enjoying Alexis' chapbook, why not send us your own? Our submission period is newly opened, and we're hungry for unpublished chaps. Check out the guidelines and submit, won't you?

They Kissed Their Homes

It's tax time, and you know what that means—a new chapbook.

Christopher Cheney's They Kissed Their Homes is an album of everyday landscapes foregrounded with disquiet. Like warm Polaroids, the poems develop clause by clause; their subjects—the mundane, extraordinary, savage—colorize and sharpen; a nameless, faceless population pulls into focus. Together with the work of photographer Estelle Srivijittakar, Cheney’s declarative snapshots gain collaborative energy, grow even more lucid. The result is a catalogue of the countless small oddities of our American quotidian.

Read, comment, enjoy. And, please, stay on top of things through our RSS feed, Facebook group, or mailing list.

Guidebook

I am proud to announce our newest and most ambitious chapbook yet, John Gallaher's Guidebook.

With Guidebook, John Gallaher invents an idiosyncratic mythology of small town America in which driveways yield to carnivals, interstates wind their ways to to the edges of cliffs, and circuses erect themselves in backyards. Gallaher lights homes with refrigerators, clouds forecasts, and signs divorce decrees, puppeteering the lives of a gargantuan everyperson cast as he explores equal amounts of wishes and disappointments. Reading like a novelization of a Fellini film by Sherwood Anderson, Guidebook mixes genres, dizzies itself in language, politely makes meta, and affirms Gallaher as one of the most perceptive, poignant, and surreal minds participating in America's contemporary literature.

Please read, and please please let us know what you think, either here or by email. New chaps will be released in the coming month, so subscribe to the RSS feed or mailing list and stay in the loop.

Airport

Just in time for Spring, a fresh chapbook.

In BHP’s fourth release, Airport, Emily Kendal Frey turns on the tropes of terminals and ticket desks, baggage claims and chain restaurants, letting them “shift and breathe.” Frey, with both a sense of loss and humor, crafts a lucid lyric cycle from the raw material of commuters, vacationers, and separated lovers. Airport is a work of brushing bodies that inhabit a distilled emotional weightlessness, and the airport plays host as a backdrop of physical time.

Please read, please enjoy, please send your comments. BHP would love to hear from you.

Residential As In

Chapbook #3 comes courtesy of poet MC Hyland. Residential As In, like all great poetry, explores space. As the title eludes, residency defines and redefines itself inside each of the book's stanzas (truly "rooms"), which fill with the belongings and dust the living leave. It's a dynamite of a read, and we do hope you'll enjoy.

The Victory of the Strange Heart Beating

Just in time for the new year, our next chapbook has been released—The Victory of the Strange Heart Beating by Cristiana Baik. Powerfully disjunctive lyrics intersperse with "sound procedures" to ask questions about the fluidity of language and the nature of experience (and how the two are impossible to divide). We're proud to present it, and excited for you to read it.

Stardust

Hello, all. We're Blue Hour Press, a web-based publisher interested in exploring the possibilities of poetry and prose on the internet. Our books will always be free of charge, and available to read online and in PDF format, for printing off, stapling, and coveting.

Along with our debut, BHP has just published its first chapbook, Stardust by Kate Lorenz. It's a beautiful, icy examination of disaster, preservation, and disappearance.

Please keep an eye out for more books in the future, and in the meantime, enjoy Stardust.