Recent Arrivals, Family and Friends

I live very far away from most of the books I would want to buy. The English language bookstores that are here, or the stores that have good English language sections, usually have an okay selection, but they're less likely to include the indie and small press books that make up the bulk of my (relatively small) book purchases. So I ship them here, through Book Depository since they don't charge for shipping, or else I have books sent to family in the US who will bring me a bunch when they visit or hold for me until I come back Stateside. One part of this means that I almost always buy books/get a hold of them late.

That's the case with the recent delivery of books that came to me with a visiting relative from the States.

The recent book haul. Karl Marx looking on disapprovingly.

To be clear, there's a lot of books here and not all of these were my purchases, some were gifts. But of the books that I did buy, a large number of them I should have gotten a while ago and also belong to a special section of my book collection.

I recently rearranged the book shelves. Partly because my family and I had just moved into a new apartment and partly because I just needed the change. One change that I decided to make was to group all of the books by family and friends together. This family and friends shelf I quickly realized was probably the most meaningful collection of books I had and prominently posed it under my shelf of published work (mainly lots of copies of the Voyager Record and the entire run of Gigantic Sequins I've worked on) plus a few print journals which shares the shelf with my wife Karen Marron's published work (soon to receive a new resident with her upcoming chapbook from Gold Line Press, BASS 1998).

The family and friends additions this time include fellow Gigantic Sequins editor LaTanya McQueen's book of essays, And It Begins Like This from Black Lawrence Press, Jay Besemer's The Ways of the Monster from The Operating System, and The After-Normal, an abecedarium of climate disaster lyric essays, because I consider any book from Rose Metal Press family. There's also Visola Wurzer's Untitled Misregistration from Major Arcana Press, a boutique publisher who also happens to be friends and fam, Peter McDaniel. A long poem I wrote and Karen translated into Hebrew called HOME/בית will be coming out from this same press soon, I'll keep you updated here. Visola's book is a gorgeous and unconventially designed foldout booklet, and if you want to get a hold of one, try contacting her here or on Twitter. There's also Gigantic Sequins 10.1 here, which is two issues back but still so good. I love each of these books as dearly as I do their creators and highly recommend any and all of them for your own book shelves.