(continue) purple red yellow







(continue) a limited edition of 21 prints (11.5” x 15”) in three colors available online and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Aug 5-26 for the show CREDIT. (continue) is made of all the “page turners” from the book CREDIT by Mathew Timmons and CREDIT is quite a page turner. Purchase a print now.
choose a color: purple | red | yellow



PARROT 5 Loquela by Allyssa Wolf Out Now! from Insert Press!




PARROT 5 Loquela
by Allyssa Wolf

Now Out from Insert Press!

Sold Out!

The PARROT series was originally issued by Blanc Press (Los Angeles) from 2005-2010. Insert Press is reissuing facsimile editions of each title from the PARROT series and releasing a Limited Edition hand-bound set of the collection at the end of the run.

PARROT will print the work of Harold Abramowitz's A House on a Hill (A House on a Hill, Part One), Amanda Ackerman's I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck, Will Alexander's On the Substance of Disorder, Stan Apps' Politicized Pretty Picture, Amina Cain's Tramps Everywhere, Teresa Carmody's I Can Feel, Allison Carter's All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions, Michelle Detorie's Fur Birds, Kate Durbin's Kept Women, K. Lorraine Graham's My Little Neoliberal Pony, Jen Hofer's The Missing Link, Maximus Kim's Break Bloom Burn, Janice Lee's Fried Chicken Dinner, Bruna Mori and George Porcari's May I take Your Order?, Joseph Mosconi's But On Geometric, Vanessa Place's Forcible Oral Copulation, Amarnath Ravva's Airline Music, Stephanie Rioux's My Beautiful Beds, Ara Shirinyan's Erotic in Czech Republic, Michael Smoler's Pieces of Water, Brian Kim Stefans' Viva Miscegenation, Mathew Timmons' Complex Textual Legitimacy Proclamation, and Allyssa Wolf's Loquela.

Covers of Parrot are handprinted by the amazing printmaker, Maggie White. You can find out more about her work here: http://maggiewhiteprintmaking.blogspot.com/ methinks you'll like what you see.

Read some recent press on the PARROT series, including a review of PARROT 1 and an interview with editor Mathew Timmons. And Coming Soon, PARROT 6 Viva Miscegenation by Brian Kim Stefans! There are only a couple PARROT subscriptions still available, so get yours now!

Sign up for the Insert Press & Blanc Press mailing list here!

Insert Press offers a few different ways to become a subscribing member and to support the press.

The Insert Press Full Subscription includes everything produced by Insert Press for $133.00. You may subscribe to Insert Press separate from the PARROT series for $50.00. You may subscribe to the PARROT series only for $81.00. You may order the Limited Edition hand-bound set of the PARROT collection, signed and numbered 1-50 for $100.00. You may also Donate to Insert Press and if you include your address, we’ll send you something very exciting, just because you’re so nice!

See details below:

Subscribe to Insert Press now for $133.00 and receive everything Insert Press has published to date including Three Column Table by Harold Abramowitz (only a few copies left available only to subscribers!), Absurd Good News by Julien Poirier, Handsome Fish Offices by Ara Shirinyan plus a year's worth of new titles including Bruna Mori's forthcoming Poetry for Corporations, the Ups & Downs anthology (a collection of writings and imagery from the installation series, The Ups & Downs), all 23 of the individual titles in the PARROT series, and anything else we publish this year.

Subscribe to Insert Press! and the PARROT series! for $133.00







Or subscribe to Insert Press! separate from the PARROT series for only $50.00







Or subscribe to PARROT for $81.00 and receive individual titles from the PARROT series as they are released.







Or Pre-Order the Limited Edition hand-bound set of the PARROT collection, signed and numbered 1-50 for $100.00.







You can also Donate to Insert Press and if you include your address, we'll send you something very exciting, just because you're so nice!





From Penn Sound - LA-Lit Clouds! plus.



Re-posted from Penn Sound

The summer rolls on and we keep updating some of our most-beloved series. In the spotlight today is LA Lit, the Los Angeles-based program hosted by Mathew Timmons and Stephanie Rioux at Betalevel. Over the past two years, we've brought you thirty-three episodes, broadcast between 2005 and 2008, including wonderful, in-depth readings and conversations with poets including Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Will Alexander and Lee Ann Brown.

This week, we've updated our LA Lit series page, adding a number of new materials. First, we've added a pair of "Poetic Service Announcements" from 2006, featuring Alexander, Diane Ward and Guy Bennett. We've also posted the show's last three episodes (for the time being) — featuring Vincent Dachy, Lisa Samuels, Harold Abromowitz — which were produced in the fall of 2008 and the spring 2009. While the series is on hiatus at present, it certainly went out in style, with the two-day Clouds Conference, celebrating LA Lit's third anniversary. Recorded on November 21-22, 2008 at Betalevel and the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, the conference featured a number of readings as well as two wide-ranging panel discussions, and its roster — including Sawako Nakayasu, Teresa Carmody, Mark Wallace, K. Lorraine Graham, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, Stan Apps, Ary Shirinayan, Lisa Samuels, Amarnath Ravva and Christine Wertheim, along with Alexander, Bennett, Timmons and Rioux — is not only a who's who of contemporary poetics, but also a testament to the richness of LA Lit's editorial perspectives. PennSound's newest team member, Katie Siegel, has carefully segmented the conference recordings so that individual tracks are available for each reader and panelist, allowing listeners to browse at will. To begin listening, click here.

Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts by Vanessa Place from Blanc Press



Los Angeles, 07.13.10—Blanc Press is pleased to announce the release of Vanessa Place’s Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, the first of the three-volume series, Tragodía. Forthcoming from Blanc Press this fall are Tragodía 2: Statement of the Case, and Tragodía 3: Argument.

Purchase a copy now through lulu.com

A statement of facts is a legal document which sets forward factual information without argument. These documents are used in a variety of legal settings, ranging from appeals to filing vehicle registration paperwork. The goal of a statement of facts is not to put forward an argument, but rather to present factual information in a clear, easy to understand way. That said, many lawyers may make implicit arguments in a statement of facts, using a variety of tricks to sway the reader to one point of view or another. Typically these arguments are designed to paint someone in a favorable light, or to dismiss the reliability of someone else.

Tragodía is composed of the three parts of an appellate brief: Statement of Facts, which sets forth, in narrative form, the evidence of the crime as presented at trial; Statement of the Case, which sets forth the procedural history of the case; and Argument, which are the claims of error and (for the defense) the arguments for reversing the judgment. Place’s Statement of Facts project involves reproducing Statements of Facts from some of her appellate briefs and representing them as poetry.

“What is a fact? “On February 28, 2005, seventeen-year-old Amanda was living with her mother and her twelve-year-old sister in Lennox.” Yes, that seems like a perfectly neutral factual statement made by Amanda in her police testimony.

But next we read, “When Amanda came home about 8:00 p.m., the lights were off and the doors were unlocked.” Are these facts? Not necessarily: Amanda might be inventing the scenario, although these facts can be checked against the testimony of her mother Sandy, who was out at the laundromat when the incident occurred. But by the time we get to “Once inside, Amanda made something to eat, then went to the bedroom, and laid on her mother’s bed to watch a movie,” we’re in the realm of interpretation so that the surreal account of the sexual assault scene that follows is less than factual.

Vanessa Place, herself an appellate criminal defense attorney who specializes in sex offenders and sexually violent predators, has assembled a remarkable sequence of narratives, taken almost verbatim from court testimonies she herself reviewed: her cases are entirely “real.” But what is the “real” anyway? What is the difference between fact and the interpretation of fact? Between fact and truth? And what do these “true” stories tell us about the society we live in, and the way we apportion innocence and guilt? Telling it straight turns out to be the most mysterious—and poetic—way of telling it there is. No novelist could invent horror stories as compelling—and puzzling—as these actual case studies. Statement of Facts is a superb piece of conceptual writing.”
—Marjorie Perloff


You might have supposed that the hallowed technique of cultural appropriation had exhausted itself in the wake of the Duchampian ready-made, the spend-thrift citations of Pop, Burrough’s lapidary cut-ups, or the critical twist given to all this by New York postmodernism in the 80s. But by re-presenting appellate briefs of sexual offense cases, attorney-cum-wordsmith, Vanessa Place has come up with another take on taking. Here the uncanny juggernaut of the Law collides with the excruciating strengths and fragilities of victims, voice is overwritten by context, and morality by salient indignation. In other circumstances we would take our hats off, but given her profession, she deserves a citation.
—John Welchman


By repurposing legal prosecution and defense documents of violent sexual crimes verbatim, Statement of Facts takes on issues too messy to benefit from further elucidation which only grow more disturbing presented in their purest case material form. For some, what Statement of Facts brings into the public square is salacious, but Place is in effect saying: ‘I move the ball out of this arena and take it into this arena’ in order to pump up the socio political volume on this legal/moral battlefield. Her definition of injustice is sweeping. Statement of Facts does not care what the reader thinks about content and in essence, Place’s relationship to content is like Oprah Winfrey’s to money. It is straightforward, and you are free to project onto it whatever you need to. However you respond to this fierce book, it is indisputable that Statement of Facts has carved out a place for itself as a touchstone of poetic push back. As Pasadena Superior Court Judge Gilbert Alston famously quipped in his dismissal of a 1986 rape case because the victim was a prostitute: ‘A whore is a whore is a whore’—Statement of Facts counters by unflinchingly reminding us ‘a rape is a rape is a rape.’
—Kim Rosenfield



Of Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms, Mary Kelly said, “I learned more about the impact of conceptualism on artists and writers than I had from reading so-called canonical works on the subject.” Place is also author of Dies: A Sentence, La Medusa, and The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law. Place is co-director of Les Figues Press, and a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her most recent work is available in French by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits, and by Blanc Press, as the forthcoming English trilogy, Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, 2: Statement of the Case, and 3: Argument.

TRAGODÍA 1: STATEMENT OF FACTS
Hardcover, with dustjacket, 430 pages
Blanc Press, June 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-934254-18-9
Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.5 x 1.25 inches
$45.00 – available for purchase through lulu.com