PP/FF: An Anthology [Paperback]

Peter Conners (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2006

A one-of-its-kind anthology, PP/FF: An Anthology is an attempt to investigate, delineate, and play with the territories in-between prose poetry and flash fiction. To this end, we have collected work from 61 of today’s top innovative writers – work that pushes boundaries, plumbs interstices, and redraws the lines of what we think of as fiction, poetry, and writing genres themselves. The resulting book is both a great read, anywhere you open it, and a wonderful text for teachers of creative writing. PP/FF: An Anthology brings today’s writing avant-garde to the people, without sacrificing the concerns of art.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Editor Peter Conners is founding co-editor of the online literary journal, Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction. A collection of his poetry, Of Whiskey and Winter, will be published by White Pine Press in Fall 2007. Two previous collections of his poetry and prose, While in the World, and The Names of Winter, were published by FootHills Publishing. Conners works as Marketing Director/Associate Editor for the poetry publisher BOA Editions. He lives with his wife and two sons in Rochester, NY.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Starcherone Books (July 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970316518
• ISBN-13: 978-0970316516
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,657,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter Conners is author of the memoir, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead (Da Capo Press, 2009). His new book, White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, was published by City Lights in November 2010. He is currently at work on an oral history of jam and festival bands titled JAMerica to be published by Da Capo Press in fall 2013.

His other books include the prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter and the novella Emily Ate the Wind. His next poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in their Trees, is forthcoming from White Pine Press in spring 2011. He is also editor of PP/FF: An Anthology which was published by Starcherone Books in April 2006. He lives in Rochester, New York where he works as Publisher of the not-for-profit literary press BOA Editions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars "Which way to live?" and other perpetual questions, June 7, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: PP/FF: An Anthology (Paperback)

Once again feisty little Starcherone Press runs in and scoops the field, ensuring PP/FF a long life in bookstores, in classroom use and for course adoption at programs sympathetic to the daring and experimental. Peter Conners, one of the most noted US prose poets, here takes on a gigantic challenge, as he struggles to produce a solid critical mass of what he considers the exciting "flash fictions" and "prose poems" of today. Wearing the heroic flippers of the editor, Conners has waded through the dregs of this material and pulled out a whole variety of plums of different sorts. His biggest challenge, of course, is in re-defining "flash fictions" and "prose poems" so that the different, some would say diametrically opposed, genres seem to meet in a place where boundaries dissolve.

For example, Ed Taylor's cunning monologue, is it a prose poem or a flash fiction? I would answer, both. No wonder Conners has created a title (PP/FF) in which only a slash mark separates the two acronyms he's trying to shake up like a bottle of root beer in one hand, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in the other. Now, shake! As Conners points out, "strict adherence to given definitions of form and genre (prefabricated marketing boxes) are debilitating to a writer's creativity and do a disservice to readers." Look at the way the DA VINCI Code became a publishing sensation. It isn't only that readers like an exciting mystery, but in Dan Brown's novel they felt they were transgressing genres and actually finding out something about Christ's real life too, thus creating a dual appeal that torques up the action both at the cash registers and within the reader's brains. From Stuart Dybek's spooky "Fedora," with its strange images of an assassin's face revealed in blue flare, to Kenneth Bernard's grotesque tale of a nun whose antiquated sense of good and evil warped generations of child charges, you get a wide range of human emotions, -- and these are only the two first stories in the collection, and not even the best ones at that.

Some of the pieces are more clearly prose poems than flash fictions, such as Noah Eli Gordon's poem in which ampersands dot every line like Christmas ornaments on a tree of blue spruce. Daryl Scroggins invents the "flash novel" in his ambitious, Lawrentian salute to the bildungsroman modernism perfected. Lists and quotes dominate Harold Jaffe's "Clown" piece, which verges on the homophobic, its multiple murderers linked in sexuality as straight society views all gay men as clowns. Again and again I go back to Ed Taylor's exceedingly brief "Pilgrim," which resonates long after the book has been closed and life goes on, in the vein of Kerouac, Celine, Haldor Laxness. "Which way to live? While angels meringue on some pin's head I wade out to wait for the light, & Bob and Bing now swing my way, got up in blue. They help me off the sawhorse I copped & say, don't block the limos of justice."