After a short conversation regarding visual poetry, asemic writing, and using computers to generate material for art, Ramsey Hedayat, accountant by trade, produced a spreadsheet that generates page-fulls of 8bit-looking lines of pseudotext. Using nothing but a random integer formula and conditional cell formatting, Hedayat’s spreadsheet can spit out a near-infinite number of unique pages. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 40 signed and numbered artist prints, each featuring a one-of-a-kind visual poem from “Book1,” available now from our online Store.
Poetry Leaflet - graphing our feelings by Barwin, et al.
A collaborative visual poem by Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Erin Brandt-Filliter, Kyle Flemmer, Helen Hajnoczky, and Kate Siklosi made with dry transfer lettering at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity on January 24, 2020. Six poets in arms overcame the Chartpak curse, hunger, and tiredness to graph their feelings in turn around an adult beverage or two. We’ve produced a limited edition of 50 leaflets featuring the visual poem on graph and photographic paper, available now from The Blasted Tree Store.
VIEW graphing our feelings
Drama Chapbook - Rat Queen by Tyler Hayden
Our first foray into drama is a crass and cruel script by Calgary-based author Tyler Hayden. In Rat Queen, two lab rats joined at the tail must come to terms with their inevitable death(s)-by-starvation after having been abandoned in their cage. With only a water bottle of LSD left, can the rats’ newfound mental abilities avert disaster, or will they succumb to madness and an ignoble death? Rat Queen is Waiting for Godot beyond the pale, a mammalian romp through lust, boredom, hunger, horror, and hallucination. We’ve produced a limited edition of 40 chapbooks featuring the play, each bound in grey felt with a waxed pink yarn rat tail, available now from our online store.
READ RAT QUEEN
Poetry Leaflets - A Triptych of Andrews by Andrew Brenza
Three visual poems by Andrew Brenza layering the author’s own name over and over itself to form kaleidoscopic waves of constructive and destructive interference, something like the textual equivalent of saying an ordinary word until it starts to sound bizarre. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of fifty 3.75” x 3.5” leaflet sets containing all three poems on separate sheets. Each set comes tucked in a black paper sleeve with a descriptive card, available now from our online Store, and “A Triptych of Andrews” can be browsed using the link below.
VIEW A Triptych of Andrews
Poetry Chapbook - Keyboards: 14 poems for Tom Jenks by Catherine Vidler
A series of visual/textual poetry by prolific Australian poet Catherine Vidler. Keyboards: 14 poems for Tom Jenks is composed of glitching textual artifacts, an array of digital ephemera unraveling across the page like code through a corrupted processor. As the series go on, each poem invading and overwriting the last, it devolves into rich fields of pixelated letter forms. Keyboards has been produced in a limited edition of 50 chapbooks, hand-bound in blank prototyping circuit boards and aluminum tape, then sealed in translucent anti-static bags (normally used to ship computer hardware). 50 copies of the chapbook are now available from The Blasted Tree’s online Store, and the full sequence of poems can be viewed in the image gallery by following the link below.
VIEW KEYBOARDS
Additionally, Vidler has prepared an audio accompaniment to the series entitled Song-Sonnet for Two Keyboards, which can be downloaded from The Blasted Tree’s Bandcamp.
Poetry Chapbook - Time-Sensitive Material by David Dowker
Time-Sensitive Material is a collection of poems by the inimitable David Dowker. Intricate and deeply meditative, these poems turn the soil of language, bringing fertility to the stuffiest, most jargonistic corners of discourse. Philosophy, natural science, and linguistics decompose and are deployed in recombinant sequences: “ambigrammatical, becoming animalism.” A limited edition of 50 chapbooks have been produced on ivory linen paper, each hand-bound in a distressed parchment cover with a tissue paper flyleaf, available now from The Blasted Tree Store. Time-Sensitive Material can be read online using the link below.
Read Time-Sensitive Material
Poetry Chapbook - a peal of thunder, a moment of by katie o'brien
a peal of thunder, a moment of is concrete poetry based on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” katie o’brien’s project has involved chopping up Beethoven’s musical score and layering the staves so it’s difficult to make out the original phrase - blurring the material to reflect the disoriented memories they have around losing their grandmother ten years ago. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of 50 hand-bound chapbooks of a peal of thunder, a moment of, available now from our online Store, and the full sequence of poems can be viewed online by following the link below.
VIEW A PEAL OF THUNDER, A MOMENT OF
Multimedia Chapbook - The Sims in Real Life by Ben Robinson
Ben Robinson’s The Sims in Real Life makes use of YouTube’s auto-captioning function to put words to clips of otherwise nonsensical gibberish. The poem is made from captions generated for a video wherein a prankster acts like a character from The Sims video game series, jabbering unintelligibly at strangers. The Blasted Tree has produced an edition of multimedia chapbooks featuring a booklet of this poem plus a bonus CD loaded up with digital content, including an introduction by the author, production images, and more. Copies from the limited edition of 40 chapbooks, each tucked with its disk in a slim jewel case, are available to purchased from our online Store.
Read The sims in real life
Visual Poetry Broadside - A Labyrinth Is a Rabbit Hole by Luke Bradford
“A Labyrinth Is a Rabbit Hole” is a visual poem in Luke Bradford’s signature style, fitting the letterforms of a short sentence into the shape of a rectangular maze. The maze created by the sentence is, of course, solvable, while the sentence remains legible from a distance. The Blasted Tree has produced a limited edition of fifty 10” x 17” broadsides featuring Bradford’s visual poem, available now from our online Store. “A Labyrinth Is a Rabbit Hole” can be previewed online using the link below.
Read A LABYRINTH IS A RABBIT HOLE
Poetry Leaflet - Gag Tag : Tact Act by Franco Cortese
Our second publication by experimental poet Franco Cortese, “Gag Tag : Tact Act” is a loosely-constrained lipogrammatic poem using only the letters found in the names of the four nucleobases (adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine). A limited edition of sixty 5” x 7.5” leaflets featuring the poem have been produced on toothy Dreadnought Grey paper, available now from The Blasted Tree’s Store. Read “Gag Tag : Tact Act” online by following the link below.