Undersleep is Out!

So, if you look at my blog I imagine you've already received this announcement at least once, but Julie Doxsee's book is out from octopus Books. It's our first full-length book after eleven chapbooks & four broadsheets over the past two years. Of course I'm excited about this book so you can hardly think I'm going to be unbiased but this book is incredible. Doxsee's writing is like having these flashes into a fully functioning world that overlaps ours but also exists fully-formed outside of rational access.
When I first read Julie's work it was an anonymous submission to our chapbook series. I was blown away by that poem, The Knife-Grasses. It is an intensely concentrated yet effortless work of language & image. Over the past years, as I've read more & more of her work it's caused me to change the way I think about poetry & my own writing process. It's affected the way I hear a poem make its meaning. It has become an essential touchstone for me in understanding the new wave of poetry happening right now. Her poetry is work that truly needs to be in the public conversation of the art.
This is a book I can stay up all night reading & re-reading. A book that makes me want to call up my friends & read them poems over the phone. A book I want to put in every poetry student's hands. A book that continues to amaze me every time I open it up. I think you'll like it too.
Here's the announcement we sent out today:
Undersleep by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
$12
www.octopusbooks.net
In her debut collection, Julie Doxsee's finely wrought lyric poems create a world operating according to the rules of dream-logic. Both exquisite and unsettling, her poems twist the reader with every line break and surprise of language.
Born in London, Ontario, Julie Doxsee is a professor of writing and literature at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of the chapbooks The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press). Forthcoming publications include the book Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean) and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books).
Praise for Undersleep:
Spare, bright, and sharp these poems spark, tossing up unexpected words, making strange connections, inventing vocabulary, and in general, cracking open the natural world and letting us watch it tick. Intimate and worldly at the same time, Julie Doxsee is a surprising and deeply gifted poet, and this, her first book, glows in the dark.
—Cole Swensen
These are the secret nighttime children's tales that parents aren't allowed to read, the winking sparks sent up from the bonfire. They flicker into a vast vaulted space where all is black around. Here, the body of language is stripped of its flesh. And the poem-bones begin to dance—the joints of human language and its articulations. It's a little bit scary.
—Eleni Sikelianos
The debut full-length poetry collection by author Julie Doxsee, Undersleep features a fluidly brief economy of words that nonetheless evoke ripples from the reader's unconsciousness. Touched with the emotional longing, Undersleep shines with the brilliant promise of a half-formed dream. "Peripheral": Paradise is not a thing to keep. / Shadows are little nighttimes / for pronouncing / night's hymn. // Night's hymn / cannot contain / doses of / Paradise. Sleep / is a movement through not. // Undersleep thickens want as it prods. / Make the proper substitutions above.
—Midwest Book Review
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Forthcoming from Octopus Books this fall:
Eric Baus' full-length book Tuned Droves
Matthew Rohrer's chapbook They All Seemed Asleep
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Julie Doxsee will be in America during the first weeks of August, giving readings
Minneapolis & Chicago readings: Details TBD
Saturday, August 9th
Brooklyn, NY: The Melville House
Reading with Matvei Yankelevich
& X-ing Press poets Justin Talyor & Jeremy Schmall
Sunday August 10th
Richmond, VA: Chop Suey Books
Reading with Sommer Browning, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina
Monday August 11th
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Reading with Mathias Svalina
Wednesday, August 13th
Washington, DC: The Washington Literary Salon
Reading with Mathias Svalina
Thursday, August 14th
Providence, Rhode Island
Reading with Mathias Svalina
Friday, August 15th
Amherst, MA
Reading with Betsy Wheeler & Mathias Svalina
Saturday, August 16th
Boston area: Brookline Booksmith
reading with Janaka Stuckey, Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina
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Octopus Magazine will be accepting submissions during the month of August. Email a friendly amount of poems and a brief cover letter to octopusmagazine@gmail.com.
We are still reading reviews and recovery projects for the upcoming issue of Octopus.















