Category Archives: Books

Poems. Lydia Tomkiw. Collected.

Dan Shepelavy from ‘Universal Exports of North America’ is the the publisher & editor of a new, comprehensive re-issue of the hopelessly out-of-print poems of Lydia Tomkiw.
It features an introduction by poet and Tomkiw’s teacher Paul Hoover, a recollection by poet and close friend Sharon Mesmer, and an assessment of Algebra Suicide by music critic/Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins.

Besides each book also includes a download of Algebra Suicide’s 1986 debut album Big Skin – significantly the only time a book & record were released simultaneously, with the same poems, in the same order.

Today available only splattered on the re-issue LP Compilations by Dark Entries (Feminine Squared and on Still Life) but luckily also saved in it’s original form but from a 2nd gen source at archive.org.

This is most likely the only chance to get all of her out of print collections and more for a reasonable price and as someone who collected Algebra Suicide and Lydia Tomkiw works for years I know how expensive (if for sale at all) a copy of “Popgun Sonatas” can be.