New Scrap Chap by Mikey Swanberg

We are happy to announce that we are almost done with the next chapbook in our Scrap Chap series.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Delivery, written by Mikey Swanberg and illustrated by Christopher Dean Hayes, comes out in June 2013.  Mikey is a poet living and working in Chicago.  Hear him read some of his poems here.

Christopher Dean Hayes is an artist and a musician also from Chicago.

Stay tuned for pictures of the making of the book, exciting poetry reading announcements, and an actual press release with a glimpse at some poems and illustrations.

Scrap Chaps is our series of chapbooks made from the scrap produce while constructing Rabbit Catastrophe Review.  They are lovingly designed by Michael Jones.

RCR Issue #5 Now Available

We heard a statistic once (unconfirmed, possibly completely made-up) that most new independent literary journals fold after two issues.  RCR05 marks the two-YEAR anniversary of Rabbit Catastrophe Press.  Five issues of the review and a growing catalog of fabulous ScrapChaps.  To brag about all this, we’ve gathered a grandiose collection of writing and art:

Poetry from Paul David Adkins, Tracie Renée Dawson, Charles Decker, Jennifer Gravley, Caitlin L. Heinz, Joni Lee, Bianca Spriggs, and Changming Yuan.

Fiction from Matthew Dube, Dawn Wilson, and J. Edward Vanno.

And art (mysterious and beautiful) from the incredible Dmitry Borshch.

This issue is a brigadier.  It is a blunderbuss.  It is your friend that was loud and inappropriate at your holiday work party but is actually a very lovely fellow to be around.  It is that bad kid from your past who grew up to find glory. Mythical and biblical. Semiotic and diluvian. You might develop a phobia of immolation, bearded deacons, or Mayor Koch after consuming this issue, but you also might finally learn to dance or read a map.

This is also the first issue that features our newly implemented one-word bio restriction.  Our contributors rose to the challenge.  Here are the bios rendered into “poetry” (with function words added for clarity):

SuiGeneris artist

(and) untenured hyracotherium

killn (some) bacon.

(They) change

effervescence

(and) velleity

(way out)

beyond

(a) tiny wave.

Who is what word? You’ll have to read the issue to find out.  Here is a real poem from inside its pages:

Revival

by Jennifer Gravley

Pacing the short hall between our bedrooms

whose white walls we’ve grubbed up, I pound

the King James I’ve pinched from the TV top,

preaching to my sister who fidgets as if

feeling the hard bench bite, waggling her fist

for her funeral home fan, rocking as He knocks

her convicted heart, until the altar call,

which I haven’t good and finished

before she bounds from the wood floor and runs,

skips really since it’s only two steps, plunges

to her knees, arms up to bury her face

in the cedar-chest moaners’ bench, praying

the garbled-up pitiful pleas we’ve heard

only as music, as sounds torn from their meanings.

Then we know she’s saved because she jumps up screaming.

RCR05 is available at rabbitcatastrophe.blogspot.com, Morris Bookshop (Lexington, KY), Prospero’s Books (Kansas City, MO), and Woodland Pattern (Milwaukee, WI).

A Review of Children of Reagan

A lovely and smart review of Children of Reagan by Phil Estes (2012) written by Tim Greenup at Bark.  Thanks Tim!

RCR#5 teaser

RCR#5 comes out in January!

Stray Scraps

Hello Internet. We have a pile of left-over thread scraps from binding Karl's book. Anyone have any suggestions for how to use them? Our goal is zero waste.

Everything is Loose

Everything is Loose by Karl McComas-Reichl is available.

If you live in the Kansas City area, make sure you track down Karl and buy a copy from him to support your local author.  We hope to have them available in a few bookstores in Kansas City, Lexington, and Milwaukee real soon.  Otherwise, you can buy them right here for $5.  Don't forget that we still have copies of RCR Issue #3 and #4 for sale as well.

Coming Soon From Rabbit Catastrophe Press...

Everything is Loose 
by Karl McComas-Reichl

 Everything is Loose is the latest ScrapChap of poetry by the wonderful writer Karl McComas-Reichl.  The poems are beautiful and strange and very hard to describe.  McComas-Reichl is not necessarily writing about this world, but it all seems familiar.  It might be our world but with different rules.  His poetry is shockingly fresh, sometimes tender, sometimes funny, but always unexpected. Here is a list of our attempts to describe the book which we ultimatley rejected but are going to list here anyway:

-grounded in uncertainty
-part magic realism, part vegan adventure story
-Gene Hackman meets Q-Tip... finally!
-Everything is Loose is loose.
-post-poetry or super-poetry?

Here is an excerpt from Everything is Loose.

             

               IX

Moving to California in the
middle of the night with no 
stuff. Trying to find our new 
house based on the salvia plant 
that is supposed to be grow-
ing in the front yard. We end 
up finding Danielle Wheeler’s 
house towards the dawn side. 
It has a small small small 
fenced-in yard with bleached 
grass. She is loading her three 
horses and thirty or so ducks 
into a U-haul for the night. I 
help her close the back door 
and lock it; this seems natu-
ral. She hugs us both for a 
long time and I think that per-
haps I should tell her that one 
of our horses has fallen off 
the mountain.

Karl McComas-Reichl is also an accomplished musician, and you can learn more about him here.

RCR now open for submissions

We will be reading for issue #5 until Dec. 1st.  Please send us your best poetry, short stories, and artwork.  For this issue, we're going to instate the one-word bio.  We'll let you all figure out how that's going to work.  Send it along with your submission.  We're hoping for a formidable dictionary of writers.

RCR #4 Is Available

Say hello to issue #4!  We have changed things up a bit this round and we are very excited to present you with our first attempt at making books without glue or jigs.  This issue was handmade with a Japanese Stab Binding that we learned at a workshop given by MC Hyland at the Midwest Small Press Festival in June.  We were scrambling to put this guy together at the last second and Kris Ange came through with a remarkable cover design just in time to ensure a July release. 

 RCR won't stop changing.  Progress: it's not just the ironically eponymous theme of the opening piece of issue 4, in which Aaron Anstett imagines a sort of nightmarish community college night class in self-improvement.  While Greg stayed up late learning how to stitch the new binding, Robin accidentally sewed an underlining seam of progress throughout the collection.  But progress comes with the baggage of nostalgia and regret for the past. And always present, the never-ending question "What next?" Dillon J. Welch drops in unexpectedly on the tenants of his old house in "Bienvenue." Emma Ramey realizes "I have always wanted, yet what do I have to dream?" in  "Tenant." Mercedes Lawry wonders what would have happened "if only the out-of-control truck wouldn’t hit the pedestrians" in "Tabloid Fodder or Simply Life." In Billy Howell's "Remains," an obsession with a benign cysts leads to the assumption of a past life as Alexei Romanov.  Richard Boada revives ghosts on the Mississippi.  Sally Molini warns us of "another long spell of Curious Choices" up head.  Progress requires the moments of reflection and observation that occur in many other pieces in the issue.  But it does not necessarily ask "Is it better? Are we right?" 


Issue #4 is a short, but focused issue.  We are lucky to have had the opportunity to publish such a talented group of people.  The list of contributors is as follows:
Aaron Anstett
Richard Boada
Scott Ditzler
Billy Howell
Mercedes Lawry
Sally Molini
Joseph Mulholland
Katie Jean Shinkle
Emma Ramey
Dillon Welch 

Also we would like to say a special thanks to:
MC Hyland
Robert J. Baumann
Jenna J. Rolle
Krista Callahan-Caudill
The Morris Bookshop
The Midwest Small Press Festival
Eric Casero's Table

We've Been Reviewed

There's a lovely review of Rabbit Catastrophe and many of the other great presses from the Midwest Small Press Festival up at The Write Now Coach blog here 

Thanks Write Now Coach!