The Eohippus Chapbooks - Everything we feel is real! The emohippus greeting card beckons you to express yourself in new ways. Thinking tightly causes pain. Feeling alleviates fate. Pages and pages of real emotion

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The new scent of narrative. eohippus n°5 is here!


eohippus labs n°5 series
Sum Total
Allison Carter










The eohippus Tract Series is a growing library of pamphlets seeking to disseminate works of opinion, idea, and the otherwise uncategorizable text.





Tract Series #7
SURGE: An Oral Poetics
Opal C. McCarthy

From tract series #7: “A vair slipper. This is footwear for a virgin, made from the coats of squirrels with grey backs and white bellies. In the original Cinderella, the prince fitted her with a vair slipper, not glass. If I wake up in the mirrored morning and see their girl, the only choice left to me is what to put my foot in today: shard or squirrel? I choose my mouth.”

Tract Series #6
The Other Worlds
Janice Lee

From tract series #6: “I once arrived in a small town, stepped off a green bus to inhale a strange and pungent gas. I stood in the pouring rain with a gun to my head, while the street lights changed color and the water seeped into my socks. UFO is an unfortunate misnomer: unidentified flying object, since, as we know, they are hardly flying, they are hardly objects, and they are so readily identified and categorized by the birds who see them, another shiny object in the sky.”

Tract Series #5
The Secret of Milk
Cara Benson

From tract series #5: “To begin, I wanted to engage with language (dialogically and/or dialectically) of milk consumption and commercial dairy practices. (I think I want(ed) a relationship with an abject subject.) There is a time to present and, like Reznikoff, allow the reader to come to her own conclusions (she does anyway, right?). And then, as David Cope says, there is a time to kick down the door so the poem does not recede into the closet. Or as Eileen Myles puts it, where was the A=I=D=S poems? No subject object verb agreement, no.”

Tract Series #4
Inalienable Recognitions
Will Alexander

From tract series #4: “According to the Western psyche human worth is summoned through conflict, through the clashing of fragments across the ozone. History then accrues as the perfect cholera of density, so that its necessity transpires through heaps of counted bodies which configures in the rational mind as honed embryos in the system.” 

Tract Series #3
How Hate Got Hand
Michelle Detorie

From tract series #3: “I dislike nature shows: the animal porn, the emphasis on ‘the hunt,’ the sly suggestion that ‘animal’ naturalizes or justifies human brutality. I dislike the way one is expected to assume that there is a logical and natural distinction between ‘the cultivated’ and ‘the wild,’ or the implication that cultivation is less violent than wilderness.

Tract Series #2
Handbook of Poetic Language
Stan Apps

From tract series #2: “Is the highly formalized language of newspapers or legal documents normal? This language is successful, in the sense that is is accepted by society. Perhaps it would be better to begin by arguing that poetic language consists of any language that is noticeably different from the language of successful prose.”

Tract Series #1
Theory of Language
Amanda Ackerman

From tract series #1: “When Nature stopped being a language, or at least in the reciprocal sense, or at least in the deictic sense (as when a flower turns a particular color in order to attract a certain kind of bee), we were left only with the cultivation of the sign, and the despair over the seeming arbitrariness of the word…”

The Eohippus Chapbooks
Published by Eohippus Labs
 
I was really fucking excited when I received these chapbooks, recognizing familiar names like Amanda Ackermann (Theory of Language– Tract Series: #1), Janice Lee (The Other Worlds – Tract Series: #6), and a fantastic “greeting card” featuring hints at things to come, and those already published by the press. These are minimalistic, almost proletarian books printed in drab grays and browns and whites that have become sort of addicting as a result. Within each, the primary focus is language, and how far things can be pushed within the framework of a neatly packaged product that feels like the inside of these various authors’ minds. My favorite, perhaps, is Opal C. McCarthy’s succinct treatise on Ariana Reines and the question of whether a “blowjob [is] regal?” I’m reminded of the Parrot series published by Insert Blanc Press, in that these are not poems, but not quite prose either. As I said, each one of these fantastically-slim chapbooks exists in a world all its own, and their respective authors are the only ones with anything like a key to what’s going on. Looking at these books I’ve insulted through neglect these past few months, it’s these I feel the strongest sense of nostalgia for. I’ll likely carry them around in my backpack this semester and mark them up beyond recognition until I feel I’ve shared something significant with each author, as this after all seems to be the point of such grassroots publishing and literature that seems, mostly, to be “for writers” or at least those curious about new approaches to the field of words. - Grant Maierhofer