Tender Buttons Press

Sonnets, first published in 1989 as Tender Buttons Number 1 is widely considered to be one of the most generative and innovative works of contemporary American poetry, radically rethinking the traditional sonnet form. This expanded 25th Anniversary edition includes a new preface by Bernadette Mayer, an editor's note by Tender Buttons Press publisher Lee Ann Brown, and a selection of previously unpublished archival material including the Skinny Sonnets, described as "Hypnogogic Word Playing in Reporters' Notebooks" which further expand our map of Bernadette Mayer's ground-breaking works of writing consciousness.

Edited by Lee Ann Brown. Cover art by Sophie. Book design by Wayne Smith.

In CUNT NORTON, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy "cunts" The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature. The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems ("the greatest fuck poem in the English language," according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. "These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well," Bellamy writes. Even as CUNT NORTON dismembers the history of English poetry, "cunting" Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy's cunted texts breathe life into literary "masters" with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion.

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups - first published in 2001 and recipient of the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry— was immediately a controversial and celebrated work. Using the "cut-up" method of William S. Burroughs, Cunt-Ups is a work of sex magick, based on source texts from old lovers and Jeffery Dahmer transcriptions. The resulting spell queers everything around it.

Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art's On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist's writing and lifework. Have a look at her collection When the Sick Rule the World, from Semiotext(e). Her essay, "The Beating of Our Hearts," was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian she edited for Nightboat Books WRITERS WHO LOVE TOO MUCH: NEW NARRATIVE 1977-1997.