A Cloth House was beautifully reviewed by Thomas Michael Duncan at PANK:
A Cloth House will put a death grip on your heartstrings. It’s a mystery that unravels on every page and, above all, a beautiful examination of the way our lives and memories are shaped, by love and anguish, birth and death, blessings and tragedies.
Joseph Scappellato asks me some broad questions at The Collagist blog, with the request that I answer only in excerpts from A Cloth House.
J/J Hastain shares a creative engagement with A Cloth House up at Big Other today. So many kind words about the book, but I think what I like best might be the memories of xir own:
After reading Joseph Riippi’s A CLOTH HOUSE I am overwhelmed with many sentiments concerning the psychic and physical sensations of home. Home is not always a positive place to remember. There are often dramatic effects as we attempt to recall it; recoils, tremors, anxiety attacks. There are the ways your mother’s face looked a little more ghostly when she was up after 10:00pm (“The kind of face my mother was wearing on the other side”). There are the ways that though you never wanted to, you were forced into ‘dead heading’ the roses once a week; how you tarried there a little too long before throwing all of those gorgeous petals away—how sometimes you filled your pockets with them and then as if it were a subversive act to do so, laid them under the grapefruit tree with tears in your eyes.
Thank you, J/J.
In which I answer some questions about reading, writing, starving, and sweating.
Volume 1 Brooklyn offers a delightful write-up of Monday’s Franklin Park Reading Series with Heidi Julavits, Toure, Fiona Maazel, Leah Umansky, and me.
Thrilled to have an excerpt of A Cloth House in the latest issue The Collagist.
Franklin Park Reading Series: Betrayal Night
Monday, April 16, 8-10pm
Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden
618 St. Johns Place, between Franklin and Classon Avenues
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Featuring:
HEIDI JULAVITS (The Vanishers)
TOURE (Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?)
FIONA MAAZEL (Last Last Chance)
JOSEPH RIIPPI (A Cloth House)
LEAH UMANSKY (Barrow Street)
Now that A Cloth House is out I’m writing stories again. “Station,” a new favorite, is up at elimae this month.
5 x 6 chapbook. Six colored letter pressed covers w/ punch out. Repurposed end papers. Each copy is unique and hand numbered. Printed on high quality 24# copy paper. Printed and bound in an edition of 100.
“Joseph Riippi’s poems? Imagine if Confucius, a Grimm Brother, and Lou Reed were to somehow procreate. Well, this book would devour their offspring. His writing blends countless styles with a modern twist that will stick to your sternum like no other chapbook we’ve published.”
- Carl Annarummo, Greying Ghost Press
“Joseph Riippi knows how to grow an elegant surface and a darkly remembered underbelly together. In Treesisters, he elevates the dematerialization of childhood to the disappearance of a sibling—and only-children too will be dazzled.”
- Melissa Broder, author of Meat Heart
