Celebrate Either Way I'm Celebrating: Join Sommer Browning for A Week of Tweets: Draw Genitals, Exchange Insults, Collaborate on Exquisite Corpses, Tell Jokes & Guess Rebus Puzzles (whatever the hell those are)‏

Starting Monday Oct 24th Birds, LLC will celebrate Sommer Browning's EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING!

Sommer will be tweeting all sorts of awesome over at @vagtalk. There will be poems, jokes, and cartoons galore. And if you participate in any of it, you'll get 50% off her book EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING (if you already have it, you can get 50% off any BIRDS, LLC book!)

So start following her on Twitter and join in!

Oct 24 Day 1 -- Twitter Genital Day -- Tweet your own hand drawn image of a) boobs b) butts or c) front butts. I will collect them all and post them on my website (this can be anonymous). Let's work to make the largest online repository of front butt drawings in the world!

Oct 25 Day 2 -- Twitter Insult Day -- I will tell one joke about each one of my followers based on your bio, photo and FBI background investigation...Can I do it? Probably not!!

Oct 26 Day 3 -- Twitter Exquisite Corpse -- Let's write a 1000 line poem! Tweet a line of a poetry and I'll collect them all and post them on my website.

Oct 27 Day 4 -- Twitter Joke Day -- I will turn any subject you tweet to me into a very funny (or unfunny) joke.

Oct 28 Day 5 -- Twitter Rebus Puzzle -- During the day I will tweet Rebuses of poets' names -- Guess first and win the drawing!

Tune in to the tweets! In the meantime, you can read reviews of EITHER WAY I'M CELEBRATING at the Faster Times and Pank Magazine.

Czech out Sommer's Website (with Satanic Bed Bath & Beyond comic)

Birds, LLC is pleased to announce the publication of Partyknife, by Dan Magers, in February 2012. This is Dan’s first full-length collection, and we’re really excited to be working with him on it.

The cover will feature artwork by Matt Bollinger, the artist responsible for the cover of Dan’s H_NGM_N echap, White Collar Worker: I Am a Destiny.

We’re excited to announce that Emily Pettit’s Goat in the Snow will be available in time for Christmas.

And in case you hadn’t heard, Emily has been named the new Publisher of jubilatmagazine. Big congratulations to her.

"...there is so little I can realistically explain without simply saying: read this book. I might only, as a reserve, say what this book is not: Kings of the F**king Sea is not a standard poetry collection. Kings of the F**king Sea is not predictable poetry on any level. And Kings of the F**king Sea is not ever what you expect it to be even when you are starting to expect from it. Dan Boehl has done here what you must sail upon. Buying this book is building a boat."

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

"Amidst the utter absurdity (which, I suppose one should anticipate, given the title) there are moments of great poignancy, as promised in the book’s epigraph from Whitman, which bears repeating, especially these days:

I observe the famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d to
preserve the lives of the rest.
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the
poor and upon negroes, and the like.
All these—all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

With this in mind, Boehl has concentrated his imaginative efforts upon the lines between life and art, and between war and life. He writes, in “(Shipwright) European Oils”: “He went off to war while the older ones, the alcoholics in khaki pants, dripped paint all over the place, worried about the redness of red and blackness of black.”

In lines such as these, one senses guilt, the kind of guilt Bataille describes as inherent to the artistic endeavor. That is, there is something that needs to be done, and meanwhile, the writer writes, the artist makes art. Sees, hears, and is silent, except for his useless words."

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE

"Time is the great enemy. On the micro scale it moves too slowly, on the macro scale it moves too fast. Days are long, years are short. I don't see how anyone can be alive and aware and not obsess about time, all the time. Who said all poems are about death? All poems are also about time, since death is ultimately about time." -Elisa Gabbert

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE...

"Boehl’s work is filled with high and low cultural references. Its reoccurring cast of characters including artists, poets, merchants, sailors, and soldiers are all in search of a false freedom to be found on the open sea. From Dr. Mengele to Jack Spicer and Walt Whitman. From Rothko and Motherwell to David Bowie, Spiderman and The Green Goblin. KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA is a collection of word and image that is beautifully tragic, wrenchingly heart breaking, occasionally humorous and always intelligent. And as the poem (Minstrel) If I had a Boat and the press release state, ‘“The world invents, the sea discloses, and irony isn’t a necessary tool for successful men.” On the sea, as in art, some make it and others die nameless, destitute of love, forgotten.’"

Read the full review with Jonathan Marshall's images here

"Tonelli asks the reader to immerse themselves in a work so candid and open that it serves as a “self that touches all edges…that fills the four corners of night.” But not only does this apply to Tonelli’s Gesamtkuntswerk, but also to the metaphor of trees he remains loyal to. It appears that such a common and simple object as a tree must be a trick of some sort, but when pushed further we see it for what it is, the object behind the idea. The ideas presented in the four sections that make up The Trees Around differ in content, form, and message.

"The Trees Around is definitely one of the gems of 2010."

Read the full review here.

"Pinsky who? ELISA GABBERT is our kind of poet. "Take me to the library; I'm in the mood to get murdered," she writes in a poem called "BLGPM W/ DTHWSH" in her first collection, The French Exit. Gabbert — whom Bookslut has called the Zoe Saldana of letters --..."

-Read the full article in the Boston Phoenix here. 

"Reader beware. Even with such emotional and human gestures, The French Exit is no catchy-hooks-got-you-on-the-first-listen sort of book. It intrigues and hides and even frustrates the first time through, enough so that you find yourself wanting another listen, and then another, and as the full complexity of what is happening unfolds, quantum like, you realize you’re holding a dazzling book that richly rewards those willing to sound and puzzle it out."

Read the full review here.