Without Form is a meticulous erasure of the Holy Bible, only its chapter and verse notation spared by repeat Blasted Tree contributor Ben Robinson. This ambitious visual poetry project encompasses all sixty-six books of the Bible—over one thousand pages—published in print in its entirety and animated for easy online viewing. The Blasted Tree has made each biblical book (“Genesis,” “Exodus,” etc.) into its own chapbook, some upwards of fifty pages long, others just a single page, all bound into white card stock and a tissue paper flyleaf with white thread and an ultra-minimal dust jacket, every cover unique, and only one of each chapbook produced. View the animated poem as an amorphous field of numerals by following the link below, and copies of our limited edition chapbooks are in The Blasted Tree Store.
Objet Littéraire - Purple Rain: 100 petals for Kate Siklosi by Kyle Flemmer
An unconventional objet littéraire celebrating the creative kinships fostered between like-minded visual poets and publishers. Over the summer of 2020, The Blasted Tree's Kyle Flemmer collected and pressed 100 petals as they fell from the vines of his Clematis Etiole Violette. Each petal is numbered with archival gold ink, preserved in a small plastic sleeve, and accompanied by a letter printed on ivory linen paper. The resulting objet is presented in a dark purple envelope, itself numbered in gold, available now in The Blasted Tree Store.
View Purple Rain: 100 petals for Kate Siklosi
Poetry Leaflet - The Hostage Tells a Love Story by Shane Neilson
A lyric poem exploring the inter-generational legacy of mental illness, and how it colours relationships both within and exterior to the family. Shane Neilson handles this troubling inheritance with an aching tenderness and clear-eyed grace, telling a story of love in the face of frightening unpredictability. The Blasted Tree has released a limited edition of fifty 9” x 6” leaflets on ivory linen paper bound in black string-and-button closure envelopes. You can read “The Hostage Tells a Love Story” online, and copies of the leaflet are available for purchase from The Blasted Tree Store.
READ THE HOSTAGE TELLS A LOVE STORY
Poetry leaflet - oleander 7 by Catherine Vidler
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.
view oleander 7
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
Fiction Chapbook - Mickey the Bricky by Jimmy T. Cahill
Things are looking up for punch-drunk prisoner Mickey the Bricky when he’s transferred from hard labour into The Gallery, a studio where inmates mass produce paintings for sale in department stores, that is, until the prison decides to modernize its operation, putting Mickey in danger of being left behind. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 50 chapbooks featuring this equally colourful and tragic story by Jimmy T. Cahill, each printed on grey paper and bound in black card stock with an overhead projector transparency. Mickey the Bricky is available to purchase from our online store, and you can read the story online following the link below.
READ MICKEY THE BRICKY
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.