COME OUT, VIRGINIA

Title: Come out, Virginia

Author: Donna Vorreyer

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 978-1-61584-283-4

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: djvorreyer@gmail.com

ROCKETMAN, THE NASH RAMBLER OF LOVE

Title: Rocketman, The Nash Ramble of Love

Author: Bruce Matteson

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: N/A

List Price: $37.50

Inquiries: nakedmannekin@gmail.com




R O C K E T M A N S E Z :

If you get raised stupid
It can take years to undo
That kind of intense training
And if you do finally manage
To pop your head out of your ass
You’ll be lucky to have time
For a little fresh air
But you never really get the stink off
And may well be known to your peers
As a shit head
Your entire life

FOURTEEN, BY BILL YARROW

Title: Fourteen

Author: Bill Yarrow

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 978-1-60584-282-7

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: nakedmannekin@gmail.com


I'm proud to say I am the owner of one of these beautiful little books. I love everything about it. The look, the layout and especially Bill's poems. It's everything a book of poems should be. Get one today!

Darryl Price

FINAL NOTES, BY JP REESE

Title: Final Notes

Author: JP Reese

Publisher: Naked Mannekin

Format: 7.5 x 5" Chapbook

ISBN: 1-933126-09-4

List Price: $10.00

Inquiries: FinalNotes16@gmail.com






Praise for JP Reese's Final Notes from poet Sam Pereira, whose books include The Marriage of the Portuguese (L'Epervier Press, 1978), Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987), and A Cafe in Boca (Tebot Bach, 2007):

Too many times, the idea of a “chapbook” substantiates the claim that poetry has little, if anything, left to say. In JP Reese’s Final Notes, nothing could be farther from the truth. We get snuck up on with lines like “Danger rests in believing the honest blue of the sky.” Remarkably understated, it becomes a sort of poetic fortune cookie, not to be tossed aside, but held on to as our journeys progress.

Another example is the stunning poem “Evanescence,” where we come away feeling the addictive nature of commingling in darkness. There is joy in this knowledge that warmth, however it is made aware to us, is momentary in its dynamic, but worth taking. The poem “2008, What I Wanted” offers wisdom beyond anything that might be stated here about it. This is a manifesto to the world on how not to treat those left breathing.

JP Reese has the skill of an artist and the soul of a survivor. The proof is compiled in a perfectly lean volume that needs to be read with admiration for years to come. Those looking to find that most rarified of beings, a genuine poet, need look no further.

© 2012 Sam Pereira


Susan Tepper, author of From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story, Deer and Other Stories, and What Might Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G:

It isn't often one reads a book of poetry that is both immediate and visionary. Such is the case with "Final Notes," a searing new collection by JP Reese. These poems float, they gut-punch, they bleed, they cry out for more space in a shrinking world.

Marc Vincenz, author of Upholding Half the Sky, The Propaganda Factory and the forthcoming Pull of the Gravitons:

The poems in JP Reese's Final Notes are deeply personal: letters, sketches, faded photographs, white noise emerging from dreams. Late at night, a cold calm permeates the house, a great sigh emanates from the bones. In precisely that moment clarity arrives. But clarity is not always revelation; it may be realization rather than resolution. Perhaps it is that instant you stop searching for meaning that change occurs and renewal begins. In these wrought iron imagistic poems, Reese invites us inside her four fissured walls. Here man and woman lose their desire yet somehow fall together in grace, a father repairs a chair in the company of bees, a parent’s aspirations for her son remain unfulfilled, even the self becomes invisible in its own reflection. Thirst may never be quenched, for as our children dance, gravity waits patiently in “the clay beneath our feet.” And in the night-silence of corridors, still the unspeakable speaks.

EXACT CHANGE ONLY

This issue of ECO contains some of the finest work we have ever published. Our editorial staff spent days sequestered away in a Motel 6. Hours and hours of arguing raged like the Poetry Battle of Gettysburg. In the end only 12 poems were left standing.

Esteban Colón took a short leave of absence after Thanksgiving to de-stress from this ordeal.

The task then fell to Matt and me to produce an issue that looked as artistically cool as its content. We thought about being all fancy and shiny and bright and new. We thought about making the book sing when you opened the cover. We spent hours talking about fonts and layouts. At one point, Matt tried to kill me with a printer.

Some of this may be true. Honestly speaking, we felt a need to get back to our roots on this issue. To remind ourselves that among the goofy and weird that we project, we really try to be artists. I hesitate to use that word. What I will say is that we like this thing we’ve made, and we hope you do too.

David Buddha 309 Hargarten
Managing Editor, ECO

THINGS TO COME . . .

MIST

In his groundbreaking obra Niebla, Miguel de Unamuno gives us that apocalyptic moment when his protagonist Augusto Perez stumbles across his Lord Creator at work at his desk. No pillars of salt, no burning bushes. Just pen and Ink. I never liked the ending, so I changed it. By what right? Unamuno provides the answer himself: it is my prerogative.

--Matt Barton

Seeing and hearing something happen doesn't guarantee knowing what happened any more than knowing what happened guarantees understanding what happened. Matt Barton's "Mist," for example. The story is not complex. The characters tell you what they want you to know in language that is strict and not at all tricky. No cheap games are played to the wool over your eyes. Oh, there are games played, they're just not cheap. A good thing, because if it were walk-in-the-park simple it would be boring. And this piece of work is anything but boring. In other words, think of Matt Barton's "Mist" as a parable written by Eugene Ionesco, adapted by Gary Shandling, and directed by David Lynch. Enjoy.

--Charlie Newman