BLUNT TRAUMA PRESS
Give us cold words, stinging words, tempestuous words, haranguing words, blasphemous words: blatantly-erotic words, fabricated words, even walking dead words, just so long as they’re words we and our readers can squeeze literary love juice out of. There are no barricades here, no barbed wire and no pre-conceived ideology on what is “good” and what “is not”.
We prefer our words to be smeared rather than typed, we look for prose and poetry that will incubate and gestate and finally be born from a reader’s consciousness into the darker recesses of their sub-conscious vault. We remain stoically unlabelled and consequently free to select and solicit words that slither smoulderingly to publication. Blunt Trauma Press is not after all, a typing pool – we prefer to describe ourselves more as a gene pool of creativity, and a genre-less one at that. Here at Blunt Trauma, as our name implies, we’re interested in the after-effects of being sensually bludgeoned with prose or poetry; exactly when and where the adrenalin kicks in, and at what precise time in the process of sensory molestation the jaws-of-life or defibrillation are called for. These are the intrinsic philosophies of Sean King and Teri Louise Kelly, the co-founders of Blunt Trauma Press. Welcome to the world of zero gravity word turbulence.
For any general inquiry in respect of Blunt Trauma Press services, authors or products please head to our contact page.
‘Death Peace’
Written by Dominic J Clark. Details soon.
Cultivores eBook Trailer – Teri Louise-Kelly
After the diseases, the eradication policies and the storm, descendants of the survivors inhabit a world overrun with true blue idolatry of the Old People’s pop-culture. In Capital Investment, the slogan-mad Corporation rule in alliance with the immortality-chasing Chic Creatures, while the majority of New People toil on locos trying to replace a number with a title.
Meeting what he thinks is the fabled carrier of the faiths, one untitled man becomes the emissary’s guide through the lands of Cultivation; where circular time is bought and sold, blue is more precious than gold and the math predominates. Accompanied by The Drifter, a former Corporation assassin, and machine girls, prototypes of the (ideal) women of the future, together they journey to the mythological Urban Jungle – the vine-encrusted super city standing resolutely testament to the Old People’s ambition and ego.
For one it is a mission to reinstate the faiths, for another a quest for knowledge, and for the Drifter, a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of Evangelista, the ruler-in-exile. What awaits them in the remains of the past though is betrayal and irony; a choice between unstable order or another pointless war – the choice which is no choice at all. Cultivation is a world divided by frighteningly familiar parallels. A world where having a name means everything, and where those who control the present – control the past.
“Cultivores is a savagely ironic take on human existence post-climatology atrocity, a Wizard of Oz-esque trek through Naked Lunch’s sci-fi pantheon, where pop-cult ideologies reign and Orwell’s prophetic 1984 is fast-forwarded to a bizarre conclusion.”
‘The Right Hand Angle of a Continuous Curve’
Somewhere in California Jack Henry sits on a bar stool waiting with the patience of monuments, it’s not necessary to know what or who he’s waiting for – that’s his damned business. Jack Henry writes with the passion of an addict about to inhale and the insight of a loner out on a desert highway looking for a ride. In ‘The Right Hand Angle of a Continuous Curve’ Jack Henry continues to seek solace in the memory of the women he never really knew, didn’t really want to know, and a few he knew too damn well. Jack has no qualms about drinking alone, accepting rides from strangers or sleeping in unmade beds. Sometimes it’s easier to just not give a shit. Sometimes it’s easier to stand out on the highway alone . . . sometimes you find a piece of writing with the urgency of a lover about to f**k, and sometimes you get f****d. On the continuous curve Jack Henry’s driving, there are no emergency exits – buckle up.
‘Bullshit Rodeo’
“I never did find God in a lip gloss, not even a kiwi-flavored one. I’m spending my spare change on glow in the dark dinosaurs and survival of the fittest chapbooks. I’m walking after midnight in the Garden of the Damned. There are miles and miles of televisions glowing blue. Zombies sit on sofas and carpet squares munching on microwave popcorn watching the world around them turn into a Dali painting. The killer butterflies are on the loose. The tigers are pouncing. Clocks are frying on the beaches like expired eggs. And splattered across the sky the viscera of one martyr too many sacrificed in the name of Homogenized Global Consciousness. Long live Fox News! Glory in the highest to Rice Krispies and Dr Pepper and Miracle Whip and Splenda! All the edible little girls like fuck dolls in training shower with Boys Love Chocolate Mangoes Body Wash and clean their hair with Boys Love to Sniff Glazed Donuts While Unhooking Your Bra shampoo. I am out to sea, self-righteous and stoic and maniacal with freedom.”
Welcome to the Bullshit Rodeo. You are here.
‘Empire of the Mind’
You’d have to know Sean King, to understand what makes him tick, think, abstain and engage. ‘Empire of the Mind’ is a towering sentinel, standing guard over one man’s vulnerabilities. A rare work of blood-stained word compilation, stripped back to a bare light bulb swinging in an empty room. Through the whores, the self-loathing, the desires, the blood-suckers and the loss that resonates throughout with a merciless thud, Sean King steps into, rather than away from, the cynical honesty we all possess. And yet, even then, as he stands there, smoking gun in hand, body at his feet, wondering why, he can still yank back the blinds in rage and see beauty. Sean King is a unique voice, one stained by life, propelled by anger, and controlled by love. ‘Empire of the Mind’ is not so much a book, as a use manual for life. By the time you’ve read it, you’ll know as much as you’ll ever need to know about its creator.
‘The Colour of Your Blood’
Somewhere between a blood-splattered St George’s cross and a safety-pinned Union Jack, Teri Louise Kelly’s protagonist, the blue-eyed boy of England’s dreaming, findshis allegiance waning and his will to fight abating. Torn from the tranquillity of the post-war years into a new vision of anarchy stretched across all fronts, one boy’s struggle to understand his race bleeds out slowly into a gutter already overflowing with aborted history, discarded ideologies and racist undertones. A story recounted in a unique, offbeat voice, The Colour of Your Blood, is a novella transfused with the love and hate patriotism and heritage inspire; planted stubbornly on a Clockwork Orange battlefield. A work that both occupies and encapsulates; satirically and sublimely, the ever-changing face of a nation through three of its most turbulent decades. Thirty years of English swinging, kicking, clubbing, bombing and pogoing – all culminating in yet another war and a lick of mascara; thirty years that shaped a nation and almost sunk the Royal boat once and for all.
‘The Other State’
None of it exists, not life, not death. There is no end, no beginning, only a continuous middle – a thread of saliva stretching through time. Somewhere between, between borders, parochialism, between he said, she said, the dead walk, and the living morph. In a sun-drenched land, disappearance is as easy as, emergence as common as. The living don’t care, the dead don’t tell tales and the law has two blind eyes. Looking for a few minutes more than the regulatory fifteen, Lizzie Madalena, a twenty-something nobody from a dead-end Australian suburb, finds infamy as a biker’s bitch. Only, these bikers aren’t regulation either, cross them and it’s your life, breed for them – same deal. And the only thing these carnivores despise more than a cheat is a cheat who cheats with their sworn enemy – inadvertently or not. Somewhere between purgatory and pain, there’s murder. Somewhere between human life and death, there’s a killing field. In The Other State there are no stays of execution, no clemency, no plea bargains – the metal cage arbitrates and the winner takes everything, down to the soul.
‘Like the Dog I am’
“When he told me he needed a fountain pen, I dismissed it as normal, what normal passes for anyhow in this world we inhabit. And then, later, I thought, hold on, he’s going to stick that nib into his vein and write a book out of his own blood. A few moments of panic and then normality grabbed me again, bit me hard on the cheek. I could see him doing it too, hunched over his desk, the one with the cartridges on it, madly scribbling verse in his own métier. Later, compelled by gnawing cold and dead bang fusion induced by god’s nectar, I called. He mumbled something, late-night obscenities -caffeine-inspired rage of the insomniac. I let it go at that, all was well in our small page of the global book. He rang me later, as the moon bowed out and the big yellow ball gripped folk’s throats again. Here, it’s finished. He told me coldly. How could he write a poetry book in . . . I cut myself short, Hank had done it once out of fear, fear of losing the artery of creation. I read it, went to a bar and ordered tequila. I was after the lime and salt, something to mask the sting his words had left in my mouth. He wrote this book for you because you are the axis. I don’t know who you are, but I know who he is, he’s a dog, a dog that roams the night looking for tomorrow. When he told me he needed a fountain pen, I knew why, I just didn’t know he’d slaughter language with it.”
‘Verbal Alchemy’
Deep inside the belly of the beast that’s caked with the status quo, politically correct meat puppets in denial that the Los Angeles riots even happened, and suckerfish still living in an age when Kerouac ruled the roost, ‘Verbal Alchemy’ was born like a cell in a Petri dish. Straight out of an existence backwashed with dance hall girls, street dwellers and dead heroes who communicate through visions, Michael N. Thompson is merely the chronicler for these slices of purple mountain majesty. Having a fascination with serial killers is just the cherry on this macabre sundae.
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