Monday, October 20, 2008












olywa press is pleased to announce

the publication of its debut chapbook


Laura Jaramillo’s The Reactionary Poems

$8 (includes shipping), 25 pages, stapled and glued
off-white guts, letterpressed cover
SOLD OUT! THANKS!

In The Reactionary Poems, Laura Jaramillo zeroes in on the minutiae dotting the landscape of contemporary Queens and finds herself feeling, well, a little aggro. Given that it’s not quite morning in America, what might her dystopian nonprofit workplace have in store for her now? Who knows. But in response to the office, the ad copy, the mortgages for all credit scenarios, the aspirations to an “authentic but stylized” solitude, Jaramillo opts not for innovative poetry’s satirization-through-emulation but rather to observe, to say, to react. What results is a book that takes the Maximus that is Jaramillo’s Benjamin-steeped long poem B and shrinks it into an Objectivist-inflected Minimus counterpart that is small so that her “anger / doesn’t lose its / scale.”

From the book:

TECHNOLOGY PLUS THE ABSENCE OF LOVE

The morass, aging super-
models, mid-90’s danceable
soft rap and wading
through this—
Who’ll be the dirty
agonist in the future face
an oval Buddha to escape
the rain in a corporate
arcade


Laura Jaramillo is a poet from the borough of limitless opportunity, Queens. She holds a BA from Bard College and a MA in Creative Writing from Temple University. Her poems have appeared in Pocket Myths: The Odyssey, P-QUEUE, Cross-Connect, Tribilingual, The Bard Papers, and For Godot.


Click here for a review by Ryan Eckes at PhillySound (scroll down to Dec. 5).
Click here for a review by Joe Massey (scroll down to July 30, 2009).








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