About the Books.
Emily Skillings’s highly-anticipated second collection of poems, Tantrums in Air, is a wild romp through verbal reality, marking her as one of contemporary poetry's shining stars of humor, insight, and edge. Skillings writes through various poetic forms, reminding the reader how tenuous the line can be between a poem and, say, an Amazon review of the poet’s first book. Featuring a ballet in four acts--"part ghost, part sponge / a lump of pure refusal"—addresses to past loves—"I circle the circle / Of a compact mirror, open"—and an unconventional treatise on education, Tantrums in Air is smart and honest, reinventing both what’s possible and what we should expect from poetry.
The Time of the Novel: A disaffected young woman seeking self-estrangement and withdrawal from the world decides to quit her day job as a bookseller to live out, or live in, an experiment: to become a full-time narrator. She moves through sentences, afternoons, a rented apartment, an artist’s studio, a party, the post office with the flowering focus of a realist novel, transposing physical and social life to the space of fiction. As she chronicles the process of becoming a subject in writing, the narrator confronts her fantasy of uninterrupted interiority—and its limits.
What is “fiction” and how does one “enter” into it? Composed in the tense of Literature, Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel is a book about detours, psychic swerves, and surprising encounters with the Real as it converges with the written.
About the Authors.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017). Tantrums in Air is her second book. She is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2021). Skillings is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Skillings teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. She lives in Brooklyn.
Lara Mimosa Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing. She is the author of THRESHOLES (2020) and The Somnambulist (2016). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of artist residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, Marble House Project, Jentel, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She also teaches in XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU. She was born in the Bronx.