LOCKDOWN CORRESPONDENCES by Bill Shute available from KSE

 

A Wyatt Doyle photograph adorns Bill Shute's latest collection, Lockdown Correspondences. 

From Kendra Steiner Editions: 

Lockdown Correspondences contains three book-length poems: Tomorrow Won't Bring the Rain, Complementary Angles, and Two Self-Portraits (After Murillo), all written and originally published during the COVID lockdown (2020–2021), combined in one hardcover volume.

"These three works were published independently in 2020 and 2021 and have been well-received, though I myself never thought of them as any kind of trilogy or any unified series of works. However, a number of readers (I've gotten at least a dozen e-mails and texts on this subject) have suggested to me that I should consider combining the three pieces into one book, presented as a document of the pandemic/lockdown, and they argued that there is a consistency within the images/content and form/structure which is perhaps clearer to the reader-consumer than it was to the writer-creator. They also suggested that readers looking for literary responses to the pandemic, now that it is more in the rearview mirror with each passing day, would locate these works more easily in the literary marketplace if they were marketed as 'pandemic poems' in a more obvious manner. I'm certainly happy to oblige, and thus Lockdown Correspondences was created (and this combined volume costs less than the three individual volumes, while also being hardcover). It is also an excellent one-volume introduction to the post-2016 phase of my poetry."

The cover photograph is an original work by Wyatt Doyle of New Texture, whose most recent book (with acclaimed visual artist Jimmy Angelina) is Be Italian!

Shute's work is rooted in the post-Projective Verse poetics of Blackburn, Berrigan, and Eigner, but completely his own. A career-spanning Selected Poems (Junk Sculpture From the New Gilded Age) was published by Moloko Print in Germany in late 2021.

His earlier poetry books include Twelve Gates to the City, Satori in Natchez, Riverside Fugue, Point Loma Purple, and Bridge on the Bayou.

He also wrote the introductory essay to the recent collection Ed Wood, Jr.: When the Topic Is Sex (Bear Manor Media), a 540-page collection of the filmmaker/author's early 1970s non-fiction pieces for adult magazines, and has been a contributor to Ugly Things magazine for 35+ years.

Shute lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

Wyatt Doyle's "And the red death held sway over the dollar store" @ Gallery 30 South, 03/01–03/26

"Doyle’s eye and his camera’s eye capture those moments of junk-store epiphany, of accidental revelation, which lurk un-noticed in the most taken-for-granted parts of everyday run-down America." —Bill Shute, Kendra Steiner Editions 

Abandoned places, decaying spaces, toys nobody wants. Things that are gone, things that remain. “And the red death held sway over the dollar store” at Pasadena’s Gallery 30 South exhibits photographs by Wyatt Doyle from his acclaimed collections Dollar Halloween, I Need Real Tuxedo and a Top Hat!, Buty-Wave Is Now Closed Forever, Jorge Amaya Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and recent work. 

Photography with a narrative bent, capturing people, places, and things, from California to Tennessee and back again. Through March 26. Books and signed, limited edition prints available via the gallery. The show is available for online viewing here.

I NEED REAL TUXEDO AND A TOP HAT! Out Now

I Need Real Tuxedo and a Top Hat!, a collection of photos and stories by Wyatt Doyle (Stop Requested), is available now from New Texture.

Click HERE to purchase the 88-page trade softcover edition for $16.95, or the deluxe, 104-page expanded hardcover edition with superior image reproduction and additional content for $29.95.

Preview the book below:

Out Now: DOLLAR HALLOWEEN by Wyatt Doyle!

Dollar Halloween is a new book of photographs by Wyatt Doyle, focusing on the glut of cheaply manufactured Halloween decorations, toys, and knick-knacks created for and sold in American dollar stores. Preview the limited edition hardcover in its entirety via the Issuu embed above. 

Doyle's introductory essay to the book follows: 

Los Angeles is a dollar store town. With significant blocs of its population composed of recent immigrants, low-income laborers, and entertainment-industry cannon fodder—all working for peanuts—dollar stores help ensure the continued survival of the working poor by offering grocery essentials at a buck apiece. If you’ve got a dollar, you’ve got a dinner…or something, anyway, until a dinner comes along.

The ubiquity of the 99 Cents Only chain makes the brand the Starbucks of their weight class (at least in Los Angeles), and their high-ceilinged, well-lit interiors provide familiar and reassuring echoes of their more expensive cousins (unlike most smaller, ethnic, or independently owned discount shops). 

When a medium-sized 99 Cents Only in my old neighborhood outgrew its location, the company opened a much larger store, barely a block south—only to retain the original location as well. Even with the roaring success of the new superstore, there was no discernable drop in business at the old location, just a few yards away. Both stores continue to thrive.

*     *     *

Halloween decorations are curious items to begin with. The trappings of the holiday are so deeply ingrained, so traditional, they’ve all but lost their meaning. A date or the time of year is enough to move us to festoon our homes with make-believe rotting corpse parts and an ever-growing variety of sparkly death totems.

And where there’s a need, or even a mild desire, a dollar store stands ready to fill it, for whatever you’ve got in your pocket. Come autumn, their aisles swell with an onslaught of flimsy window decorations and off-brand Halloween tchotchkes. Most made in China, few sturdy enough to survive a single use.

Plastic jack-o’-lanterns and fastener-hinged cardboard skeletons are familiar, but the uncontrollable compulsion to foist more and more stuff on each other leads to the introduction of dozens of ultimately disposable decorating ideas to the seasonal shelves each year. And if Walgreens wants to sell you their version for $9.95, you’d better believe there’s a factory in China crapping out something like it that’ll wholesale for pennies and still turn a profit.

The haste, disinterest, and cynicism in the products’ manufacture are often reflected in the product. At times the low production standards and cheap molds add a layer of unintentional deformed menace to an expression, or lend an accidental resemblance to some obscure movie monster; other items, the process renders unrecognizable. Thin, plaster skulls crusted with cheap sequins, possibly topped by a bat- or spider-shaped glob…plastic severed limbs, heads, and masks, their spray-on painted details applied out of register…armies of gaudy Grim Reaper figurines, familiar year-round from the windows of the city’s many Santeria botanicas…and occasional malformed, misshapen rejects that appear to have collided with another product somewhere down the assembly line. Most of it dusted with glitter, all of it junk. When you handle one, it leaves paint on your fingers. Throw it away, and bits are left behind.

copyright © 2015 Wyatt Doyle

Purchase Dollar Halloween in limited edition hardcover here.