Kenningeditions.com has been fully redesigned. Use Paypal to purchase books more easily and, for domestic shipping, enjoy free shipping for orders of three or more items. There is a new subscriptions scheme. And through November 1st, subscriptions are sale-priced (30.00 instead of 35.00 dollars). Also discounted through the 1st is our brand new title, which we are proud to announce:
The Compleat Purge, by Trisha Low. ISBN: 9780984647552 (2013) $15.95 in paperback and somewhat less as an ebook. Buy the paperback directly from the press for $12.00 through November 1st, 2013.
Trisha Low is just another feminist, confessional writer trying to find a good way to deal with all her literary dads. She siphons the remix culture of social media into the binge and purge cycle of an engrossing read, with the emphasis on gross. She reads the diaries of teenage girls, their blog comments and love letters; she dresses like one in performance then throws up fake blood on herself. She once surveyed the reactions of Catholic fathers to scripted confessionals she made regarding rough sex with men, secretly recorded the conversations, and transcribed the tapes. The results were anthologized by a major university press. Her first book, THE COMPLEAT PURGE, consists of the last will and testament of one Trisha Low, who seems to commit suicide annually; the legal documents accumulate into a coming of age story. It goes on to chronicle the sexual fantasies of indie rock fangirls, who may or may not be exorcising the effects of abuse through their blithe avatars (the guy from The Strokes, etc.). Then Trisha Low finds herself trapped in an 18th century romance novel in the most punishing way, but for whom—we’re not really sure. “How is Poetry complicit in the urge to falsely ‘heal’ societal wounds into the silent fixity of It Gets Better? What better place to look than the teen girl, whose cut wrist is an abject fuck-you; whose cute Band-Aid and its artificial ‘healing’ is really just your sentimental fantasy.”
Trisha Low is committed to wearing a shock collar because she has so many feelings. Remote controls are available at Gauss PDF, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, TROLL THREAD and others. She lives in New York City.
Barbara Browning: Trisha Low’s been leaving us periodic notes about what we can keep of hers if she should happen to go off the deep end. She’s also been leaving us her email password, her ATM PIN code, and an astonishing amalgamation of amatory fiction, IMs, craft patterns, magic spells, and film noir in which every romantic interest is a MacGuffin. Low says her virtuosic appropriations owe less to conceptual poetics than to her adolescent days of punk vandalism. Never mind if this booty was shoplifted—it’s stunning, and I promise, you’ll want to keep everything she gives you.
J. Gordon Faylor: Trisha Low is always dying. Age, place, fictional rendering—all are subsumed to an origin already negated. She and her doubles evacuate with unmoving horror their teenage mania, displacing it, emptying the identities about whom its despair circulates. Once, maybe, this Trisha Low generated bodily heat, ate breakfast, loved and desired. No more. The Compleat Purge razes its confessional charms like effigies, foreclosing Low’s final vixi to her own secrets before they too are obliterated in time immemorial. “He had gone from her sight, he had not lifted his bowed head, he had not looked back.”
Kim Rosenfield: Like hands reaching out from the grave in the final scene of Brian Di Palma’s Carrie, Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge reaches out to beg the question: “what’s happened to the real Trisha?” In Low’s epically eloquent new book, she hands us the keys to a crypt wherein identity is theorized as an act of para-suicide and girlhood a version of being buried alive. The Compleat Purge reframes Freud’s infamous query: “What do women want?” by breathing new life into shifting ideals of feminine identity, sexuality, and erotics before the culturally determined ones land us in a coma.
Sianne Ngai: In this darkly girlish feat of self-on-self drag, Trisha Low counters the more ascetic mode of conceptualism with a corpus of gestures—some joyful, some painful—that turn the mass-mediated young female body inside out, then outside once again. Her sharp intelligence and exuberantly vandalistic spirit leap out on every page.
Get your own at Kenning Editions, Small Press Distribution, or Amazon. Also available by subscription.