Arousing Notoriety / Your Trouble is Ballooning

80 pages
“Split side,” with chapbooks by A. Minetta Gould and Amber Nelson
Cover art by Kelly Packer
Released in October 2010

A 2011 No Tell Motel Best Of

Arousing Notoriety is a collection of poems about affairs between peculiar characters named Banjo and Bear, Russia and Half Organ and Strong Heart. Gould edits the online journal Lonesome Fowl and is the Associate Editor for Black Ocean. She has recent work published in Columbia Poetry Review, Unsaid, and New Orleans Review. Another chapbook, Dutch Baby Combo and The Boys are Talking about Restless at Five Points, will be available from Spooky Girlfriend Press.

Your Trouble is Ballooning is comprised of eight sections of dense and lovely mysteries. Nelson is the co-founder and editor for alice blue. She has recent work published in H_ngm_n, Coconut, and Columbia Poetry Review. Another chapbook, Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV, will be available from Slash Pine Press.

What a strange batch of lovers: Banjo, Bear, Bow Tie, Half Organ, Russia, and Strong Heart. But love is a strange affair, and A. Minetta Gould’s language, wry, rowdy and ingenious, mocks it up, down, and all around.
—Catherine Wagner, author of My New Job

Arousing Notoriety operates in the realm of dream logic, and by that I mean Gould gestures through apparent acts of pure consciousness that appear stripped of mundane symbolism—exposing the impulsivity of language. In that sense, what we see here are poems of desire without want or lust—poems of desire in its most elemental state, utterly at play.
—Janaka Stucky, publisher of Black Ocean books

Amber Nelson works in the tension between meaning and making.: a music of shifts and sleights. Intention is not imposed but what emerges, not the isolate personal “I” but the pulse of American culture and history. “In the correspondence of assassination/ In the simmer green floor that jettisons”—please read!
—Stacy Doris, author of Knot