"...It’s just as well I waited before reading Gary Cummiskey’s new poetry chapbook, Romancing the Dead, published by Tearoom Books. Sure, there’s plenty of razorwire, but it’s not the razorwire that will get you. It’s the big, hollow, echoing melancholy below the jagged, surreal surface. Gary’s deadpan surrealism is December on the Highveld, with its blisters of hot tar and endlessly bleached afternoons that hide the sinkholes quietly opening up below.
(And I love the cover, with its austerely retronostalgic look. The design sensibility over at Tearoom Books is totally lovely.)"
First published on Messy Things With Words
New Tearoom Books Titles
Gary Cummiskey's Don't Stop Until Incinerated is a short collection of poems that inhabit a desolate, disquieting place, a place in which the fabric of reality is threadbare. Cummiskey has mastered the art of minimalist unease, yet there are also moments of dark humour in these 26 starkly elegant poems, characterised by his iconoclastic surrealism.
New Tearoom Books Titles
30 Poems by Pravasan Pillay collects a selection of poems written mostly between 2003-2006 and published in South African journals. The themes of the poems are old, new and broken love; sex; marriage; failure; vanity; and quitting smoking.
Tearoom Books Titles
Loop is Tearoom Books' writing zine. It will be published primarily as free e-chapbooks. Issue 2 comprises a selection of poetry. Click on the cover for more information.
Tearoom Books Titles
Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay, was released in January 2009. Glumlazi, Pillay's debut, is a collection of short poems, concerning revenge, sex and the blues. The majority of poems run no-more than two lines. Available at R40 including postage. For order information, contact tearoombooks@gmail.com
OTHER
(Book) Shaggy: 14 Rather Amusing Rambles by Anton Krueger and Pravasan Pillay. Second Print Run. Prepare yourself for a cast of some of the most manipulative, ingratiating, disillusioned, egotistical, inauthentic, spiteful narcissists operating in contemporary South Africa. Within these pages you will encounter fourteen first-hand shaggy stories told by a rogues gallery of scheming misanthropes whose speeches are full of sound and fury, signifying very little. These hilarious blowhards will make you snigger, cringe and wish your cousin had rather given you Spud 5 for your birthday. Published by BK Publishing. Price: R135. To order a copy write to: andrea [at] bkpublishing [dot] co [dot] za