Zigzagging lines draw your eye through this kaleidoscope visual poem of natural and diagrammatic imagery. One of her many experiments with symmetry and synecdoche, "oleander 7" is by repeat Blasted Tree contributor Catherine Vidler. An edition of sixty 4.75” x 4.25” leaflets featuring the floral poem have been produced on glossy photo paper set into card stock covers. “oleander 7” can be viewed online and copies of the leaflet are in The Blasted Tree Store.
FLASH HAIKU - Rob Taylor
The winner of The Blasted Tree's sixth flash haiku contest, held on social media over Labour Day long weekend, is Rob Taylor! We've published the haiku into 2.5" x 2.5" mini-leaflets in a limited run of 75 copies. Rob’s poem was selected for it’s simple, domestic imagery, unfolding across generations through currents of life, death, and primordial language. Copies of the haiku are available from The Blasted Tree Store on granite-grey paper.
BUY FLASH HAIKU: ROB TAYLOR MINI-LEAFLET
Quite a few exceptional entries came in this time, so we are awarding two runner up prizes and a bunch of honourable mentions. Congrats to Mark Laliberte and Catherine Vidler, whose visual haiku entries earned them Blasted Tree book bundle prizes! You can see their kick-ass poems on our Instagram story for the next 24 hours. Shout-outs also to Mandy Alzner, Gary Barwin, Amanda Earl, Khashayar Mohammadi, and mwpm, who also entered stand-out poems. Honestly, we could go on and on, so thank you to everybody who participated in the contest!
Poetry Chapbook - What the Barn Can't Kill by Jerrod Schwarz
Within a body of agribusiness texts — abattoir equipment manuals, butchery textbooks, and rancher’s almanacs — lie the bones of a slaughterhouse poetics. In What the Barn Can’t Kill, Jerrod Schwarz extracts those bones through a process of digital erasure, revealing a haunting collection of visual poems, hidden until now behind a locked barn door. The Blasted Tree has published a limited edition of sixty chapbooks printed on recycled newsprint paper and bound in hand-stamped covers, each one unique. View the collection in the gallery below, chapbooks can be found in our online store.
VIEW WHAT THE BARN CAN’T KILL
Photo booklet + video - crystal and clay by sophie anne edwards
"crystal and clay" is a selection of durational ecopoems from the series Interview with a River by multidisciplinary poet and geographer sophie anne edwards. The Blasted Tree presents two parts of her Interview series, each 'co-authored' by the river's natural processes, in a video poem and photo booklet. A numbered edition of one hundred, 5” x 8” hand-bound photo booklets are available now from The Blasted Tree Store, and you can watch the video poem version of “crystal and clay” following the link below.
view crystal and clay
Poetry Chapbook - gó go gó by Franco Cortese
gó go gó is a kaleidoscopic series of interlocking multilingual and visual poems, each derived from the chapbook’s titular poem, itself a densely multilingual lipogram of two-letter words ending in ‘o.’ By subjecting gó go gó to various methods of manual and automated translation - including verbatim, machine, and text-to-image procedures - experimental poet Franco Cortese pulls a seemingly nonsensical text through a series of sense-making operations, forging surprising new poems with each iteration. A limited edition of sixty 8” x 10.5” hand-bound chapbooks are available now from The Blasted Tree Store, and gó go gó can be read online using the link below.
READ gó go gó
Poetry Broadside - SUSTAINS APPETITE by Kevin Stebner
“SUSTAINS APPETITE" is excerpted from Kevin Stebner’s manuscript of Game Genie poems. Written entirely within the Nintendo peripheral UI, this series draws on a limited set of letters and word lengths to craft poems which very well could be Game Genie cheat codes. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of sixty 13.5” x 11” broadsides featuring “SUSTAINS APPETITE” on white card stock, available now from The Blasted Tree Store.
READ SUSTAINS APPETITE
Poetry Chapbook - Anonymous (Widow) Anonymous (Wife) by Natalie Simpson
A hybrid erasure/list poem by Natalie Simpson, Anonymous (Widow) Anonymous (Wife) names the 978 people identified as female in the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, a database listing every person recorded in written sources in England from the sixth to eleventh centuries, nearly 20,000 names in total. By singling out female names and occupations, Simpson highlights how very little we know about historical women relative to their male contemporaries. The Blasted Tree has produced a numbered edition of 4.75” x 3.75” chapbooks featuring the poem, each covered with mixed skin paper-parchement manufactured in Europe over a century ago, rivet-bound, and detailed with a deerskin leather thong, available now in our online Store.
READ ANONYMOUS (WIDOW) ANONYMOUS (WIFE)
FLASH HAIKU - derek beaulieu
The winner of The Blasted Tree's fifth flash haiku contest, held on social media earlier this week, is derek beaulieu! We've published the haiku into 2.5" x 2.5" mini-leaflets in a limited run of 60 copies. derek’s poem was selected for it’s unconventional approach to the form, electing to substitute syllables for Space Invaders descending in haiku formation. As always, selecting a winner was quite a challenge, and reading through the submissions really brightened our week, so thanks very much to everyone who participated in the contest! Copies of the haiku are available from The Blasted Tree Store on metallic grey paper.
BUY FLASH HAIKU: DEREK BEAULIEU MINI-LEAFLET
Poetry Longsheet - A Decision Re: Zurich by Ethan Vilu
Part lyric poem, part used book listing, “A Decision Re: Zurich” journeys through bookstores across Europe and North America, into cluttered basement curios where you’re as likely to find an apparition as an antiquarian treasure. Ethan Vilu hybridizes the personal and the public, one interjecting in the other, as private obsessions and concerns are wont to do. A limited edition of 50 longsheets featuring the poem have been produced on light blue Speckletone paper for the Starry Dynamo Arts Market in March, 2020, available now from The Blasted Tree Store.
Read A Decision Re: Zurich
Poetry Artist Print - Book1 by Ramsey Hedayat
After a short conversation regarding visual poetry, asemic writing, and using computers to generate material for art, Ramsey Hedayat, accountant by trade, produced a spreadsheet that generates page-fulls of 8bit-looking lines of pseudotext. Using nothing but a random integer formula and conditional cell formatting, Hedayat’s spreadsheet can spit out a near-infinite number of unique pages. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 40 signed and numbered artist prints, each featuring a one-of-a-kind visual poem from “Book1,” available now from our online Store.