About The Book
In Mortar, Christopher Shipman confronts the legacy of his grandmother’s murder and the weight it presses across generations. Moving by accretion—prose, lyric, and fragmented poems, each layering fact, dream, and invention—the collection returns to the brick with incantatory force, at once the weapon of the crime and the figure of its aftermath. “The night is long, I mean generations,” Shipman writes, and the poems enact that long night’s tension, always approaching the house of the murder, always on the verge of witnessing the violence itself, “like the scene in the movie that scatters birds.” Alongside these hauntings, life persists: a father with his daughter, a husband pursuing simple dailiness. Restless, inventive, and tender, Mortar transforms trauma into lyric witness—a fearless book haunted by what it cannot release. —Kerrin McCadden, author of American Wake
112 Pages. Perfect Bound. Poetry.
Order from Brick Road Poetry Press
About THE BOOK
At long last, ~getting away with everything is the follow-up to Vincent A. Cellucci and Christopher Shipman's 2014 Unlikely Book, _a ship on the line. Whereas _a ship on the line focused on the Mississippi River, ~getting away with everything is all about New Orleans, and the bittersweet ways in which the authors chose to leave it. This massive tome (weighing in at 248 pages of poetry!) is beautifully designed by Vincent A. Cellucci, with back and front cover collages by Christopher Shipman.
248 Pages. Perfect Bound. w/Vincent Cellucci.
Order from the publisher Unlikely Books
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about the book
Just when you thought it was safe to look into an aperture, your murderer returns to take his second shot. “This is your story,” he says. This is The Movie My Murderer Makes: Season II. Sharks circle the shore; wasps drop to the floor; a snake slips through your dreams. Who has directed you? How long has your murderer been following you? We won’t spoil it for you.
52 Pages. Perfect Bound. Prose Poetry.
The Publisher: The Cupboard, is now closed
Praise:
"Surprising and eerie and tender, [Shipman] takes us deeper into the carnage of memory, exposing the ways an inability to turn off the recording mechanism makes murderers of us all."
-Laura Mullen
"[...] a compelling, moving, and sometimes absurd book about what it means to live the examined life in the 21st century."
-Brian Evenson
"Shipman simultaneously writes an autobiography and challenges the premise of all autobiography."
-Rodger Kamenetz
About the book
A book of poetry. A poet. Well, right off the bat, we’ll see you your poet, and raise you two stooges. When most Americans think of a poet, and without invoking the Barry Manilow rule, they might picture a lone malcontent, tapping on restored Underwood, inky possum-snout dowsing a notebook. But the truth is that most poets are interesting people to meet and talk to. Even if a certain reading wasn’t quite your jam, you can have a great conversation with The Poet later at the bar, or at the store, or in the park.
186 pages. Perfect Bound. w/Brett Evans.
Order from the Publisher: Lavender Ink
Praise:
"Gamut, consider yourself run: Keats moves from grief to hope, horror to hilarity, subtle subversion to guerrilla mischief, without ever losing Evans’ and Shipman’s trademark collaborative cool."
-Amber Qureshi
About the book
A cloud, a bird in parenthesis, a ballerina; the theater curtain itself: welcome to the whacky cast of characters of Metaphysique D’Ephemera, the experimental play interspersed with prose poems about the Wompus Cats, fearsome fabled troublemakers the speaker came to know at his Arkansas grandfather’s knee.
123 pages. Perfect Bound. Experimental.
Order from the Publisher: Kattywompus Press
Praise:
"For those of us who still consider poetry a kind of magic, here comes Christopher Shipman’s Cat Poems: Wompus Tales & A Play of Despair complete with mythic boxes turned black attics, memory turned cat ephemera, bird turned rabbit turned prince turned language, fragment turned knife , and you, reader, you are there too. You turned 'heart in a collection of smaller hearts' available for breaking and mending."
—Jennifer Tamayo
About the book
_a ship on the line is a book of battleship verse-charges to determine the depth of technology’s effects on the personal and the poetic. The pair hold the line of the poem and dare to update naval warfare's final goal to syncing.
121 Pages. Perfect Bound. w/Vincent A. Cellucci
Order from the Publisher: Unlikely Books
Praise:
"From the river to the game of Battleship to the idea of technology, somehow creating synchronicity in the line itself, these images echo deeper themes of loss and a struggle to make sense of one's history in the face of what seems a world bent on destruction: 'while the men who end / the world / carry on ending it / at unprecedented speeds' Shipman and Cellucci 'sing with shivering mouths' and the lines they float 'hide love / & hit' their mark." —Megan Burns