Exciting Things in the Mail, VI

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It's been awhile since an "Exciting Things in the Mail" post, but quite recently, after moving to a new state in a new region, I've gotten some rather exciting mail. I love mail. I probably say that every time I post an update like this... But mail when you have a new address is especially great. It's like, "I am here! I really live here! Look, there's my name!" So all the best mail that I've gotten since I moved to Louisiana has been especially wonderful:

Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo
& Laura// from Strand Books
I ordered this book from Strand Books recently, when I was going through the syllabi and making sure that I had every book my professors had assigned. (See, what I am doing down here in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is going back to school, to get my PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.) I bought most of the books within the first week of being here, some from school, some from Amazon. For these last few, though, I shopped around some indie booksellers, including Strand, to see if I couldn't order from somewhere I prefer to support. Strand happened to have a copy of this title, for my Early American class, available for very cheap. Now, I could have included each and every book I got in the mail in this post, but this one is special because of the pink flowered bookmark you can see lying across the cover. When I worked at Strand back when I was getting my Masters from NYU, we would always find things that people left in books. We called these things "treasure" and, a lot of the times, we taped them up on the walls of the sections or pocketed them, or left them in the books for the people who would buy them to find. Whether this bookmark was intentionally placed into this book because whoever found it on the shelves for me and  mailed it to me is someone who recognized my name or whether this was some of that lovely treasure that people who sell books to Strand didn't bother to hunt for before turning their title over, it made me insanely happy when the book arrived. It was like a little secret message from someone, somewhere out there. Thanks, Strand.

Three Hyacinth Girl Press chapbooks!

Next up are these three chapbooks from my publisher, Hyacinth Girl Press. I was without an address for a bit, and I have a subscription to the 2015 season of all chapbooks coming out from HGP, so when I was finally settled down here, Margaret had those that she'd been waiting to ship sent off to me. They were some of the first mail to arrive to me here, and I was grateful! Included are Traveling by M. Mack, The Midway Iterations by T.A. Noonan, and My Mother's Child by Pamela L. Taylor. I am so happy to share a publisher with these poets, and I'm looking forward to when I can read these. HGP books are always beautifully rendered: they're tied with ribbons, they're well thought-out layout wise, they're colorful, and their quality of writing is always superior.

Beach Story by Brian Warfield! 
Finally, Beach Story by Brian Warfield! This was sent to my Dad's house when his address was my mailing address, and I only came across it after I moved here. Warfield told me once how much he loved "little" books, books that you could fit into your pocket, books that were small in size but not in vision. He may not have said all of those things exactly, but he expressed a sincere love for small presses that were literally small, and that was the first thing I thought of when I saw Beach Story. For what I know, Warfield has been working on this novella for awhile, and I'm looking forward to the day when I sit down and read it. That's the beauty of the packaging of a novella. It's something you know you can just sit down and do, and finish. Warfield's writing is often adventurous in emotion if not plot, and I'm looking forward to adventuring into this little book.



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