Archive for January, 2011

Halal Pork & Other Stories, Get your early review copy

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

UpSet Press is glad to announce that Cihan Kaan’s Halal Pork & Other Stories is now available for early birds. Slated for a Spring 2011 release we can offer the book for reviews. Review copies of HP are now available through the UpSet Catalog, to obtain your copy use the links below.

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Halal Pork & Other Stories By Cihan Kaan

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Kaan projects an avant garde, post 9/11 world, from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. It’s a place where Coney Island meets Mars; where hijabi girls are punk rock dervishes; where identity salesmen count pigeons at insane asylums as a cream cheese conspiracy brews in gitmo; where rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day; where the transgendered are holy; and where the bacon is halal. Kaan offers up five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn.

Authors Website: cihankaan.com
To order from Amazon click here.


Read the official interview with the author at the UpSet Press Blog: Interview with Featured Author of 2011, Cihan Kaan

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Born Palestinian, Born Black: The Gaza Suite

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad’s first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author’s preface, and new poems, under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher’s note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.

“It’s lucky for us to have this new edition of Born Palestinian, Born Black, Suheir’s first book, published more than ten years ago. In the decade since, Hammad has achieved an international reputation as a poet. These poems are the groundswell from which her future work and political commitment springs. Like June Jordan, like Mahmoud Darwish, it is the passion and penchant for lyricism that is the true engine of these poems…” – Kazim Ali, The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions)

Authors Website: suheirhammad.com

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The Comeback’s Exoskeleton, by Matthew Rotando

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

“Incorporating the density of Spanish surrealism and a sprawling Whitmanesque line, this amazing first book finds Rotando engaged in a poetic biathlon which draws equally from maximal and minimal traditions. There are tight, economical poems, free verse forms derived from the sonnet, poems leaping about the page, but my favorites are the wonderful prose poems tumbling over and under themselves toward gnomish statements that feel both didactic and self-parodying.”
Tim Peterson, Since I Moved In (Chax Press)

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Theater of War: The Plot Against the American Mind, by Nicholas Powers

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

“In this detournement of political statements like the U.S. National Security Strategy Report, a reader will inquire when is “the truth” blurred; conversely, when does Powers’ alternative reading come painfully close to the real? The author’s hard-hitting, farcical longer-form poems might have constituted a part one, dissolving into the more empathetic, injured fragments. But his choreographed admixture embodies how emotions come. Anger interspersed with hurt; a loudly reinterpreted official voice, broken by still louder whispers.”
Bruna Mori, Derive (Meritage Press)

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