Zen and the Art of Bicycle Delivery is now available

The latest Scrap Chap, Zen and the Art of Bicycle Delivery by Mikey Swanberg and illustrated by Christopher Dean Hayes, is now available.

The tiny poems of Zen capture those seemingly insignificant moments that occur between strangers: a peak inside someone's cracked door, a girl crying for joy at the coffee shop, a kind word from a doorman.  

 Set on the slippery streets of a Chicago winter, the overtly un-zen narrator of these poems navigates through these small moments on a fixed-gear, cataloging them in alphabetical order in an attempt to cycle toward some state of enlightenment.
  -->
                   h

dear boyfriend and girlfriend
living somewhere on north jannsen
i fell down on the ice
and my first thought
was to protect your food
forgive me for for a moment
not being a real human being
i hope you couldn't taste it

You can purchase this book at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee, WI;  Morris Bookshop in Lexington, KY, Prospero's Books in Kanasas City, MO, and at rabbitcatastrophe.blogspot.com

 Mikey Swanberg is a poet living and working in Chicago.  Christopher Dean Hayes is a artist and musician also from Chicago.

Time for the Midwest Small Press Festival

Rabbit Catastrophe Review will have a table at the Midwest Small Press Festival, May 31st - June 2nd in Milwaukee, WI.

Karl McComas-Reichl, author of Everything Is Loose, will be doing a reading on June 1st at 1:30 at The Polish Falcon

And if the planets align, Mikey Swanberg, author of our latest Scrap Chap, Zen and the Art of Bicycle Delivery, will be reading as well.

Hope to see you there!
http://www.midwestsmallpressfestival.org/


New Scrap Chap by Mikey Swanberg



We are happy to announce that we are almost done with the next chapbook in our Scrap Chap series.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Delivery, written by Mikey Swanberg and illustrated by Christopher Dean Hayes, comes out in June 2013.  Mikey is a poet living and working in Chicago.  Hear him read some of his poems here.

Christopher Dean Hayes is an artist and a musician also from Chicago.

Stay tuned for pictures of the making of the book, exciting poetry reading announcements, and an actual press release with a glimpse at some poems and illustrations.

Scrap Chaps is our series of chapbooks made from the scrap produce while constructing Rabbit Catastrophe Review.  They are lovingly designed by Michael Jones.

RCR Issue #5 Now Available

We heard a statistic once (unconfirmed, possibly completely made-up) that most new independent literary journals fold after two issues.  RCR05 marks the two-YEAR anniversary of Rabbit Catastrophe Press.  Five issues of the review and a growing catalog of fabulous ScrapChaps.  To brag about all this, we’ve gathered a grandiose collection of writing and art:

Poetry from Paul David Adkins, Tracie Renée Dawson, Charles Decker, Jennifer Gravley, Caitlin L. Heinz, Joni Lee, Bianca Spriggs, and Changming Yuan.

Fiction from Matthew Dube, Dawn Wilson, and J. Edward Vanno.

And art (mysterious and beautiful) from the incredible Dmitry Borshch.

This issue is a brigadier.  It is a blunderbuss.  It is your friend that was loud and inappropriate at your holiday work party but is actually a very lovely fellow to be around.  It is that bad kid from your past who grew up to find glory. Mythical and biblical. Semiotic and diluvian. You might develop a phobia of immolation, bearded deacons, or Mayor Koch after consuming this issue, but you also might finally learn to dance or read a map.

This is also the first issue that features our newly implemented one-word bio restriction.  Our contributors rose to the challenge.  Here are the bios rendered into “poetry” (with function words added for clarity):

SuiGeneris artist
(and) untenured hyracotherium
killn (some) bacon.

(They) change
effervescence
(and) velleity

(way out)
beyond
(a) tiny wave.

Who is what word? You’ll have to read the issue to find out.  Here is a real poem from inside its pages:

Revival
by Jennifer Gravley

Pacing the short hall between our bedrooms
whose white walls we’ve grubbed up, I pound
the King James I’ve pinched from the TV top,
preaching to my sister who fidgets as if
feeling the hard bench bite, waggling her fist
for her funeral home fan, rocking as He knocks
her convicted heart, until the altar call,
which I haven’t good and finished
before she bounds from the wood floor and runs,
skips really since it’s only two steps, plunges
to her knees, arms up to bury her face
in the cedar-chest moaners’ bench, praying
the garbled-up pitiful pleas we’ve heard
only as music, as sounds torn from their meanings.
Then we know she’s saved because she jumps up screaming.

RCR05 is available at rabbitcatastrophe.blogspot.com, Morris Bookshop (Lexington, KY), Prospero’s Books (Kansas City, MO), and Woodland Pattern (Milwaukee, WI).