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So now, a little update

Unthinkable Creatures is a little side project, and I've been busy with life the last few months, which is why I haven't published anything recently. Thanks for your patience and for continuing to read, send submissions, and support the small press community in the meantime.

Later this summer or early this fall we'll publish Trash by Adam Crittenden. Excited to put out these weird and clever poems about disposability and accumulation.

Next weekend I'll be doing a small second print run of quiet in the body by caelan tree. pre-order by friday if you want a copy.

i also made a small set of three instant-book zines, also available on the unthinkable creatures etsy.

happy summer, readers and friends!

kristen

#unthinkable creatures #caelan tree #quiet in the body #chapbooks #zines

woah, there are only 2 copies left of quiet in the body

but there's a lot of other lovely chapbooks, prints, and patches in the unthinkable creatures store!

#caelan tree #quiet in the body #unthinkable creatures #chapbooks #patches #zines

"you have to find a way to say it" -- caelan tree on writing, translation, and 'quiet in the body'

[[this evening i sat down (virtually/metaphorically) with caelan tree to talk about quiet in the body: a workbook...]]

kristen:how would you describe the book in 1-2 sentences?

Tree: (haha, you already described it so well) quiet in the body is not as concerned with being a book of poems as it is with asking questions. I think what's important to me about it is that I don't have to know the answers - I want it to be a really individual experience.

#caelan tree #quiet in the body #unthinkable creatures #interviews #gmail chat #poetry #translation

look at that happy face! look at those gr8 books!

#caelan tree #quiet in the body #unthinkable creatures

Avoidance Sestina You thought you would forget— in the basin of this new, foreign town— the dissolution of your body into vicious quaking in the instant you hear that person’s name, but the confusion of vigilance comes with you, following as you leave New England, comes melting with Southern sweat between your thighs. You will not forget any multitude of homes as you go, but you believe—really—that small-town avoidance will get easier the instant you leave a place, the exact second your body steps over the Maine borderline, becomes another body entirely in Louisiana. A hurricane comes and goes, and you are entrenched, in an instant, in the work that brought you here. You will not forget what happened up north, though the children of this town will keep you with them as long as they can. But some things happen too fast: debris, cigarette butts in your bike path, or the wobbling body of a second-grader who has never left this town topples into a seat, vomit splashes across his desk, and he comes to you, streaked with salt and bile. It is good to forget the mass of your hometown in that instant so you can walk him to the school nurse, who gives him instant soup and water. His mother does not pick up the phone. But still other things materialize more quickly than you can forget them: a text message in the minutes that follow, your body folding in. From your mom: UR EX BROKE INTO THE HOUSE comes, her staccato abbreviation, all the way through every tiny town

in a less than a second between Maine and your new town— and next: WAT DO U WANT ME TO DO, and in an instant you are on guard against that person, who comes pursuing you across Appalachia and the muddy river, but has no idea where you are now, this place their body has never seen. You cannot forget, will not forget all the terror of your hometown though in this new world your body is no longer under fire. The instant the screen flashes, the unnamable panic sets in, but you must return to children, think what to do, wait for what comes.

from quiet in the body: a workbook by caelan tree

coming soon-- being assembled this weekend!!-- from unthinkable creatures, available for pre-order from now until 9/10)

#caelan tree #unthinkable creatures #quiet in the body

Intaglio Poems like moths press against the window trying to reach the light. Lawrence Ferlinghetti You do not know how to stop tearing open wounds on your shoulders, and the sheets on the only bed in the house are stained with drips of watercolor, and bloodspots, and this is not about trusting older men with your paper body: these are unnamable beasts, but I know that you are lucky, you can craft these things into what can’t be said aloud with markers and chicken-scratch writing. And that your mother cannot. She carries lines, raised thick on her forearm: her name, K A T H I E, etched in white. She was cured, she says. When she was a teenager. Of borderline personality disorder, by a witch doctor. But we know scars are more than crosshatched tissue. You carry these mirrors, like it or not: swollen flesh, buried creatures pressing from inside skin, like moths against windows yearning for light. there are no surgeries to remove all the embedded birds but maybe I want to hold them here, tuck them away like marbles

--from quiet in the body: a workbook by caelan tree

coming soon/available for pre-order now from unthinkable creatures

#caelan tree #unthinkable creatures #quiet in the body

Trans/itional It takes some 74 days for untouched vegetables to decompose, though we know there is no exact science to deterioration or renewal, whether injected or surgical. Churning compost speeds the process, but we must remember sun, the weight of week-old oatmeal in metal buckets on our shoulders, bees on the lawn, the goats’ hollers from under the awning, and cut flowers. The rule is don’t go barefoot. Also immeasurable: how long it takes for garlic mustard stubble to grow from the face of the compost heap. We create new topsoil every day with bodily invasion of hormones and foreign plant matter. Morning brings fly larva ornamentation swirling around the necks of plastic bottles, rotten goat milk, two wethers bawling the ache of scours. Weaning is not so delicate. Whether we carry breast, scar or muscle when wiping shit from yearling foreheads or squirting vinegar down their throats, these bodies could be anyone’s. The shift in season brings new labor, rooted beyond our names, held to the ways we ask our bodies to move.

from quiet in the body: a workbook by caelan tree

(coming soon and now available for pre-order from unthinkable creatures!)

#caelan tree #unthinkable creatures #quiet in the body #chapbooks

unthinkable creatures mega-update post! including upcoming titles!

Unthinkable Creatures Chapbook Press is now 1 1/2 years old! Thank you for reading, purchasing, blogging about, and sharing these little books. I feel very grateful for and humbled by the brilliant, clever community of writers and artists that I work with. Read on for a few short updates about what we've been up to in the Unthinkable Creatures studio!

UPCOMING TITLES BY AMAZING POETS THAT I'M SO EXCITED ABOUT:

I'm happy to formally announce the next 3 Unthinkable Creatures titles:

quiet in the body by Caelan Tree (September 2013)

nostrums: a handbook of the unborn by Valerie Wetlaufer (November 2013)

Trash by Adam Crittenden (January 2014)