Tucson to Brooklyn, Boston to Denver, back South to Tucson, East to New Orleans & Alabama's neon corn-husk of a coast halted by the concrete monsters haunting Florida all the way thru to Big Cypress, the Everglades, where we broke down & were carried off by mosquitoes with an appetite bigger than a semi engine's, & were dropped off at the site of our latest failure-miracles hustling poems on corner that didn't give much of a damn, Miami, Miami, peace--to Kansas City--where some sky scraper sugar plopped train tickets to Los Angeles, San Francisco [where we maintained our record of ever having missed one scheduled gig...sorry Somerville, we love you]

2016 NYC Chapbook Series

Oi! You are bad-ass! After how well last year's contest rounded out, with amazing writers / events, we were confident in launching 2016's. Even with that, we were staggered smiling with the support & 102 submissions that hit our inbox within the 48hr window. 
This page is our central hub to share updates in-regards to this year's contest / publishing production, but Christopher Morgan has also started a N! Tavern series exploring under the hood details of how we're running this. Along with this, we've have a lot of new jazz cooked up, but in keeping to N!'s fun w/ last minute giggles, we'll be dropping breadcrumbs (rather than neon flashes) as we move forward, till the right time to leap comes.  
Like last year, winners debut at the 2016 N.Y.C. Poetry Festival, & have the option to represent themselves & N! on stage. Following their debut, the books will be distributed online / taken across country with our traveling bookstore, Books & Shovels, at a 'pay-what-you-can' rate. We do this to better provide an accessible amp for our authors, & to avoid clipping potentially excluding price-tags to lit's throat. 
With this year's Books & Shovels tour, we do not have a route concreted except for closing out at Lit Crawl San Francisco. We are open to suggestions for cities / events / venues. If you see we're passing thru your residence, we'll trade you a book from our shelves for a shower. 
& moving forward, we have decided upon 2016's winners / finalists! We're stoked to begin busting this year open with such talented writers, & to have some old / new faces jumping on-board to bring this all together.
Shout out to Craig Mullins of Bottlecap Press joining up with us again to print + ​Chuck Young lending his art expertise to help us work with tNY's extensive network of artists to find the right cover for each winner. Love to Pat Perry + Ryan Humphrey + Aniela Sobieski for contributing their art to the chaps <3
nostrovia nyc poetry festival
NYC Poetry Festival, 2015
traveling bookstore
Books & Shovels, Tucson Poetry Festival, 2016
traveling bookstore
Books & Shovels, Flagstaff, AZ

Winners

Nostrovia! is thrilled to announce our three winners for the 2016 NYC Chapbook Contest (!) :
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about to hit the road for their debut

I Can Remember The Meaning of Every Tarot Card But I Can't Remember What I Texted You Last Night

the orgasm and when it’s happening
is everything but then it ends and
it’s nothing

asking when did we become wolves
Elle Nash is a writer who lives at the foot of the Rockies. She is the founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine, and her most recent work appears in Reality Beach, Hobart Pulp, Enclave/Entropy Mag, and Blunderbuss Magazine. She always puts too much faith in the cards. Elle is on twitter at @SadErotica
Elle's I Can Remember the Meaning of Every Tarot Card But I Can’t Remember What I Texted You Last Night is a collection of vulnerability and love despite rocky times, telling these stories through the tarot's knowing eye.
"The poems in this chapbook are those of a witch, a warrior, a wolf, a goddess with claws. Elle Nash is able to balance the hilarious and tragic, the heartbreaking and the furious. She will slay you, and you will love her for it."

–Juliet Escoria, Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist Press)
"Elle Nash’s 'I Can Remember the Meaning of Every Tarot Card But I Can't Remember What I Texted You Last Night' is a winner of Nostrovia! Press’ 2016 N.Y.C. Chapbook Series for reasons written not in stars but in sweat on tangled bedsheets, in the crushed spaces of apartments and the expanse of memory, nostalgia, bitterness, and grief. Refracted to us through the lens of the tarot, the poems here are both mythology and autobiography, legend and confession—it is impossible to read them without wondering precisely whose hot entrails are spread out during this divination, and whether the truths being whispered in the dark are the author’s, the world’s, or one’s own." 
​–Sonya Vatomksy, Salt is For Curing (Sator Press)

Make A Fist & Tongue The Knuckles

I've burned the dress I never wear & taken back my summer
plumage. We're both hollow boned & ribs floating away
from tiny coals. Confession: I've never not

wilted under somebody's thumb
but lately there's a woman with an ax
& a floral jacket & I'm her.
Emily O'Neill is a writer, artist, and proud Jersey girl. Her debut collection, Pelican, is the inaugural winner of YesYes Books' Pamet River Prize. She is the author of two chapbooks: Celeris (Fog Machine, 2016) and You Can't Pick Your Genre (Jellyfish Highway, 2016). She teaches writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and edits poetry for Wyvern Lit.
Emily's Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles comes prepared to finish the burial, sharing knives made from ruin to acknowledge the monsters dwelling in ourselves and others.
"The boys in Emily O'Neill's poems are softies but act like they're bad. The girls, however, don't pretend: 'Leave marks or I don't learn.' These poems fill with sensory data, knives and joy and fury, then zip past you at breakneck speed like the brightest fastest ride on the boardwalk. There is no standing still."
​–Niina Pollari, Dead Horse (Birds LLC)
"To hear a version of yourself in the confessional—uncleaning a body much like your own. I’m terrible / at math & monogamy, / but I try exquisitely. It’s hard for me not to see Emily O’Neill’s poems as glowing, iridescent on the page—the dark of the pool after midnight with its cold water lapping at the edges. There are ways to get lost properly. But intimacy isn’t as simple as a freckle colony or a hip surfacing from the tightest pair of jeans. The want or need to hold that stranger’s hand as they lead you further into the bar. What I mean is O’Neill isn’t the tongue or the fist. She’s the hand. To properly read these poems requires an honest look at yourself with no apologies to be made. Unburden your knuckles / of expectation. Undress… What I mean is, toast to these poems at your next awful brunch."
​​–Alexis Pope, That Which Comes After (Big Lucks)

I was Talking About Love-You Are Talking About Geography

Most nights they just sort of lie there—they don’t
really do much. A new kind of nightlight,
pulsating next to our faces, humming
louder as their fans grow angry with dust.
Bob Sykora is a former high school teacher. He is currently an MFA candidate at UMass Boston and the poetry editor at Breakwater Review. He was born in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California, but has bounced around quite a bit since then. He still likes Chicago best.
Bob's I Was Talking About Love—You Are Talking About Geography is longing in a digital age, mixing wildness with self-deprecation to create snapshots of love on the decline.
"Bob Sykora explores a post-recession wasteland where the ‘the anxious dreams/ of flushed alligators deflating in the dry heat’ mirror a second coming (of age) when sleeping with computers is more common than with lovers and gas is “four dollars a gallon.” With lyrical prowess, Sykora reinvents the American sonnet, among other forms, spinning unicorns, gas station restrooms, Netflix, and butt spasms into simultaneous elegy and delight." 
​–Emily Jaeger, The Evolution of Parasites (Sibling Rivalry Press)
"In his surprising, funny first chapbook, 'I Was Talking About Love—You Are Talking About Geography,' Bob Sykora hands it all over. Seriously, we get it all: 'everyone else’s internet / life,' 'a Todd / we can all root for,' 'some surface to bash / my head on while my friends discuss / the joys of joint bank accounts,' all of it. These poems look at the ways our daily interactions with screens make us ever-present, and ever-absent. They lay everything bare, but don’t take themselves too seriously; they are good, honest, charming company, 24-7, here with us while we are all 'terrified / of this new type of love.'" 
–Jill McDonough, Where You Live (Salt Publishing)

Distribution

nostrovia chapbooks supporters
2016 Chapbook Supporters <3
If you want to get a vibe for how we like to distribute / promote, dig into last year's 6000+ mile journey from Oakland's Beast Crawl to their debut at the N.Y.C. Poetry Festival (here's how that tumbled together), & back west to Lit Crawl San Francisco, down to Tucson, & east east east to New Orleans. We kicked it around the Midwest, regrouping with homies in Kansas City before shooting to Salt Lake City, where vehicular troubles coerced us South back to the desert. I type this in a grungy lil Tucson cafe before rolling into work with those classic dishwasher-janked fingers.​

Finalists

& here's some work from each of our finalists!
  • Sara Adams / Swallowing Shark
  • Z.Z. Boone / They Whisper
  • Catch Business / PREDICTIONS
  • Meg Eden / Sometimes I Dream of Drowning
  • Francesca Kritikos / It felt like worship
  • Elle Nash / i can remember the meaning of every tarot card but i can't remember what i texted you last night
  • Emily O'Neill / Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles
  • Jackson Nieuwland / I Am A___
  • David Rawson / The Martian Tends the Tree
  • Bob Sykora / I Was Talking About Love--You Are Talking About Geography