Subbed In announces new catalogue of books
In early 2018 we launched our second annual Chapbook Prize, hoping to find the next book we would publish. We had an overwhelming response to the callout with more than 100 entries. We were staggered by the quality of the submissions received and after much deliberation narrowed the list of finalists down to 14.
We had the funds and resources to publish one of these finalists’ books but given the overwhelming quality of the work we decided to launch a Pozible crowdfunding campaign to fund publication of at least two more titles.
After five weeks the crowdfunding concluded, far exceeding our target and raising $5325. We never imagined we'd be publishing more than one finalist from the 2018 Subbed In Chapbook Prize, but here we are! The generosity of those who supported our crowdfunding campaign means we are now in a position to publish six titles from our shortlist.
We are absolutely thrilled to announce our new catalogue of forthcoming books:
When I Die Slingshot My Ashes onto the Surface of the Moon by Jennifer Nguyen
HAUNT (THE COOLIE) by Jason Gray
blur by the by Zhi Yi Cham
The Hostage by Šime Knežević
If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams by Eloise Grills
wheeze by Marcus Whale
Meet the authors and learn a bit about their books below.
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When I Die Slingshot My Ashes onto the Surface of the Moon
by Jennifer Nguyen
⦚Poetry⦚
"Poetry is / can / be anything ... everything", says When I Die Slingshot My Ashes onto the Surface of the Moon. She is sleepy, but they cannot sleep. "It is 4:44 a.m loneliness, this restlessness." The soft hue of blue from the TV bathes the room via a 24/7 lo-fi livestream. ‘Poems are troubled into existence’ – When I Die, she read that somewhere, but cannot remember where, but it has stayed, it is the underpinning of this chapbook and all that contains with/in/out/. "Where did these bruises come from? The heart, the brain, the heart, the soul? How do I live? How do I keep on living?". I don’t know, is the honest answer. I must, is the honesthonest answer. I am. I am. You too? You too. Together? Together <3
Jennifer Nguyen (she/they) is a queer, Vietnamese–Australian writer, poet and editor. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in Subbed In, Scum Mag, Rabbit, Bowen Street Press Review, among others, and has performed her writing at West Writers Forum and Melbourne Writers Festival. She is a current fiction editor at Rambutan Literary, editorial mentee at Djed Press and was previously a creative producer at Emerging Writers' Festival. Jennifer is a member of West Writers Group based at the Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC). Twitter @jennguyennifer
HAUNT (THE COOLIE)
by Jason Gray
⦚Poetry⦚
HAUNT (THE COOLIE) is a neo-hoodoo meditation and exorcism of racial bigotry from a decolonial, Mauritian-Australian perspective.
Jason Gray is a Mauritian-Australian writer who writes about youth, being Xennial/Milliennial, being bi-cultural, POC restorative masculinity, displacement and suburbia in a media-addled, late (anti-)capitalist hellscape. Twitter @jasongray85
blur by the
by Zhi Yi Cham
⦚Poetry⦚
blur by the is a collection of fractures that make not quite a whole. It is a giving of permission to the self, to exist as messily as ( i s ). These poems are a record of navigation through longing and dis [ place ] ment of the body and of place, a shattering of expectation(s) of the self and of family, often through dreams, food and eroticism. This is an attempt at freedom.
Zhi Yi Cham is a Malaysian woman currently based on Ngunnawal country, which now exists as the esoteric wormhole known as Canberra. She is a believer of deep joy mediocrity which, for her, primarily consists of greasy foods. She is a messy Sagittarius who aspires to full time tenderness. Her work has appeared in daikon* zine, Ibis House, Peril and Australian Poetry among others. She is an alumnus of Toolkits: Poetry 2016 and the Winter Tangerine: Sing That Like Dovesong workshop 2018. Twitter @chamzhiyi
The Hostage
by Šime Knežević
⦚Poetry⦚
The poems in The Hostage explore the give and take of desire, being taken by language, art, or a higher-power, and the curious drift of experience.
Šime Knežević is a writer and artist. His poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and zines in Australia, UK and Germany including Ambit, Australian Poetry Journal and Magma. He lives in Sydney.
If you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams
by Eloise Grills
⦚Poetry⦚
If you’re a snack-motivated sexpot with limited critical faculties when it comes to pop culture and a tendency to overshare, clap your ass.
If you’re dead inside and you’re crying out to be woken up there (a la Evanescence) and you really want to show it if you’re sexy and you know it slap your hams
… and then read this book.
This is a good book for bad people, no judgement. A good book for people who like a procession of dog’s dicks, groundhogs, asses, nose picking, depression and bisexual innuendo; I forget what else. A poetry collection like nothing else but actually like a lot of other things. Like chicken soup for the soul, except someone misheard and they used chicken poop instead. And now they have chicken poop instead of a soul.
Eloise Grills is an award-winning visual essayist, a poet, educator, research assistant, disability arts worker, photographer and memoir editor for Scum Magazine. Her comics chapbook, Sexy Female Murderesses, is out with Glom Press in December. If you're sexy and you know it slap your hams is her first collection of poetry. Twitter @grillzoid
wheeze
by Marcus Whale
⦚Poetry⦚
A wheeze is the sound air makes when it hits the constricted trachea, the sound of meat meeting air. wheeze is a collection of poems about the ghostly possession of the body. It's desire as a force and not a lack. It's Pazuzu from The Exorcist. It's compulsive journalling. It's the reading someone else's body language as a gothic form of divination. It's the dark art of crushing, when the consuming thought of that distant other person enters you through the windpipe like a second body.
Marcus Whale is a musician and artist working on Gadigal land. He has made music as part of groups Collarbones and BV, as well as work under his own name, releasing the album Inland Sea in 2016. Primarily forming an electronic world around his singing, these songs navigate diverse sound worlds slipping between pop, club, experimental and contemporary classical music.
In recent years, this work has expanded to include performance, sound, text and video in a visual art context, with work at Underbelly Arts Festival, Liveworks, Sugar Mountain Festival, alongside club performances. Often produced in collaboration with other artists including Athena Thebus and Eugene Choi, these works unravel mythologies of queered desire and shame, often utilising the high drama of religious ritual.
Forming a companion to this performance work, he has a writing practice across poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including Devotionals, a debut collection of poems published by Ruin Press in 2015. Twitter @marcuswhale
To keep up to date on how the books by these wonderful people are progressing, please follow Subbed In on facebook, twitter, or instagram. If email is more your thing, please do sign up to our emailing list.
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