Four Way Books

"In a Beautiful Country" Noted as a Notable Book of 2011 from the Academy of American Poets

2012-02-01T12:50:00.004-05:00

Four Way Books author, Kevin Prufer, has his latest poetry collection, In a Beautiful Country on the list of Notable Books of 2011 from The Academy of American Poets. Congratulations, Kevin!

"A natural follow up to the themes in his previous collection, National Anthem, the poems of In a Beautiful Country are meditations on one's connection to faith, love, and country— and the loss of all three of these ideals.

In the poem "To the 20th Century" Prufer personifies the period, ending on a stark note:

And if it finds no comfort from your visit,
put a pillow to its mouth, and, so, be done
with it."

To read the rest of the review, click here. To see what other books were on the list of Notable Books of 2011 from The Academy of American Poets, click here. (There's another one from Four Way!)

"Breaking and Entering" is a "Book to Watch For" Says Oprah

2012-01-30T12:30:00.004-05:00

Oprah has put Breaking and Entering on the list of 17 books to look for in February. Congratulations to the author, Eileen Pollack!

"The Shapiros have fled to Michigan to start over following the suicide of one of Richard's patients, a woman he secretly loved. Richard begins working at the local prison, a breeding ground for racism among guards and inmates. Louise becomes a social worker at the high school, where a janitor broadcasts vitriol as "Michigan Mike, the Voice of the Militia." The Shapiros' neighbors, also proud members of the paramilitary group, host an annual Tax Blast, using 1040 forms as shooting targets. When, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, news surfaces that McVeigh had attended a militia meeting at the neighbors' farm, it becomes increasingly difficult to know who's harmless and who's not. Louise tells herself that she "can distinguish among the scents of her enemies and her friends, of safety and disaster, of passion, hate, and love," even as the lines of loyalty blur—in her community and her marriage." To read more, click here.

To get a copy of Breaking and Entering, and to learn about Pollack's other Four Way Books publication, In the Mouth, go here.

Upcoming Readings: Jonathan Wells

2012-01-23T16:10:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Wells, author of Train Dance (Four Way Books) has a few solo readings coming up.

On January 27th he will be reading at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD . The reading will be free and open to the public. It will be held in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium at 8:15pm.

On February 7th, Wells will read at FSU in Tallahassee, FL. It begins at 8pm at The Warehouse which is located at 706 W. Gaines Street.

On March 19th, Jonathan Wells reads at Aspen Winter Words. He will read at The Gant at 5:30pm. Follow this link to learn more about the event and purchase tickets.

Eileen Pollack Wins The Grub Street National Book Prize for Fiction

2012-01-23T16:01:00.003-05:00

Four Way Books author, Eileen Pollack, has won The Grub Street National Book Prize for Fiction for her latest book, Breaking and Entering. Congratulations, Eileen!

"Of Breaking and Entering, Margot Livesey wrote: ..."With great empathy and intelligence, Pollack explores these two opposing hearts of darkness - how Liberals see Republicans, and how Republicans see Liberals - while at the same time charting the vicissitudes of the Shapiros' marriage. Her compelling plot and resonant characters make Breaking and Entering a hugely enjoyable novel; the moral complexity of her themes makes it an important and timely one.”

To read more about Eileen Pollack's award and The Grub Street National Book Prize in general, follow this link.

Letras Latinas Blog Interviews Four Way Books Author Rigoberto Gonzalez

2012-01-23T15:54:00.004-05:00

"In his newest collection of poems, “Black Blossoms” (Four Way Books, 2011), Rigoberto González presents us with a brave exploration into the lives of women and their journeys. As much as Black Blossoms is a tribute to the violent lives of women who would otherwise go uncelebrated or at least unacknowledged, it is also very much a work of place. Place in the sense that these “black blossoms” collected here in this book are allowed—through the splendor of poet’s imagination—to re-bloom in all their precarious and delicate ways. They together form a place, a garden of sorts that cannot exist without one another; it is as if these voices have found a home in each others company." To read the full interview, click here.

For more about "Black Blossoms" and books from Four Way, visit our home page.

"Breaking and Entering" is Reviewed in "O, The Oprah Magazine"

2012-01-23T15:17:00.004-05:00

Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack and published by Four Way Books received a wonderful review in O, The Oprah Magazine's February edition.

"In her novel Breaking and Entering (Four Way), Eileen Pollack delves beneath the surface of blue state/red state stereotypes and brilliantly portrays an American made up of "smaller countries" with polarizing politics and alienated citizens. Richard Shapiro, a therapist, and his wife, Louise, leave Northern California and move to southwest Michigan in 1995, several months before Timothy McVeigh blows up the Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City." Read more of the review in the magazine or at this link.

"Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century" Reviews Four Way Books' "Blinking Ephemeral Valentine" by Joni Wallace

2012-01-23T14:43:00.004-05:00

"The images are meant to be inhaled deeply, like a mind-bending drug. Reading this volume, sometimes I felt like I was in a theater, watching a beautifully conceived and executed animation. The poems have a narrative element in a hybrid-cinematic sense, an original blend of imagism, narrative and language poetry. Wallace’s mothers could be H.D. and Gertrude Stein; her poet-sister Harryette Mullen.

From “Star-Spangled Valentine Shagged in Drab”:

I fell hard for the Wide Open,
your scrap yards and tree-lined rivers,
parking lots etched into prairies.
All this inside myself, a broken
bottle gleaming. Tell me a story,
begin with a flag unfurled
and a sun-warmed body of cows,
black/white and black.

Wallace conjures up a defunct television game show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” where participants traded what they had for the possibility of something more valuable, hidden behind a door. They were often disappointed. Wallace’s game of love is quite solemn. What valentines wait behind doors numbered one, two and three? " To finish the review of "Blinking Ephemeral Valentine", go to this link.

To learn more about Joni Wallace's collection, visit Four Way Books online.

New York Times Sunday Book Review Picks Breaking and Entering as an Editor's Choice

2012-01-23T14:28:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, January 22nd, The New York Times Sunday Book Review added Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack and published by Four Way Books on their Editor's Choice list. Congratulations, Eileen!

"Whatever our politics, there are times we can all feel like foreigners and outcasts in our own country, just as Louise becomes a foreigner in her own marriage. And it is Louise who carries the novel, with her good impulses, her fallibility and her wish for a transforming passion. We always hope that people can change, reassess, realign. It is fitting that Louise, at the novel’s end, provides just enough hope to bring the story home." To read more about The New York Times' take on Breaking and Entering, go to this link.

To learn more about Breaking and Entering and Eileen Pollack's other book published by Four Way Books, In the Mouth, click here.

Four Way Books author and Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea Presented by Kingdom Poets

2012-01-23T13:42:00.004-05:00

Kingdom Poets are thrilled to present Sydney Lea, the author of ten collections of poetry (including Young of the Year published by Four Way Books), two collections of essays and a novel, as a Christian who speaks about faith in his writing.

Jeanne Murray Walker wrote of his new collection, Six Sundays Toward a Seventh, “In this book Sydney Lea invites us to take a spiritual journey . . . By the end of Six Sundays, the narrator and the reader step together into radiant light. What is so moving about Six Sundays is not only its wrestling with spiritual questions, but also Lea's affirmation that life is a spiritual journey and that this journey is of paramount importance.”

To read more about Sydney Lea's take on faith and his poem, Barnet Hill Brook, click here.

Interview with Rigoberto Gonzalez

2012-01-18T17:18:00.002-05:00

Words on a wire:

Expanded interview with Rigoberto Gonzalez also talks about the highlights of his career, and about his memoir, “Butterfly Boy.” Listen here.

Interview With Four Way Books' Author, Eileen Pollack

2012-01-18T12:34:00.003-05:00

Author Deborah Diesen who has a blog called Jumping The Candlestick, interviewed Four Way Books' author, Eileen Pollack for "Michigander Monday".

"Breaking and Entering is my second published novel and my first book set in Michigan. Just after I moved here, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and stories about the Michigan Militia were all over the national media. I was fascinated to learn about the far rightwing views of many militia members, and equally interested in the conservatism and fundamentalism of other residents of my new state. I spent a day as a visiting writer in a public school to the west of Ann Arbor and was stunned to find out that most of the biology teachers were creationists. And yet here were my husband and his coworkers in Ann Arbor studying genetics, believing as deeply in evolution as their fellow Michiganders believed in creationism. I grew close to a friend living in a town where the minister was making vitriolic anti-Semitic sermons every Sunday. Her husband, who is Jewish, protested the sermons, and their children began to be harassed. Soon afterward, their house burned down. My friend was pretty sure that she and her family had been burned out on purpose; the town fire marshall, in fact, found evidence of arson, but he accused them of burning down their own house to collect the insurance. All that gave me an idea for a book--a book in which I tried to figure out how people so different from one another could all be Michiganders, could all be Americans, and how we could ever hope to make a democracy work with citizens who felt so passionately about such disparate beliefs."

To read more of the interview, go to this link. And to learn more about Eileen Pollack's books from Four Way Books, click here.

Fiction Writer's Review Announces "Breaking and Entering" as Book of the Week

2012-01-18T12:14:00.005-05:00

Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack, published by Four Way Books, has been picked as Book of the Week by Fiction Writer's Review.

"It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Eileen Pollack’s work at FWR. In fact, as our Founding and Features Editor, Anne Stameshkin, noted in an addendum to a 2009 interview with the author that we published on the site, Eileen Pollack–and her Contemporary Novel class at the University of Michigan–was one of the inspirations for the creation of Fiction Writers Review. So it’s with particular pleasure that we announce her new novel, Breaking and Entering, as our featured Book-of-the-Week title. Congratulations, Eileen!

And we’re not alone in our admiration for this new book or Pollack’s work. In her laudatory review of Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books, 2012) in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, author Jen Thompson writes: Pollack is an engaging writer with a first-rate eye for the telling sociological detail, like the Militia Babes calendar in the Banks’s farmhouse."

To read more about Fiction Writer's Review's response to Breaking and Entering, click here.

There is also a chance to win a signed copy of Breaking and Entering if you are a follower of Fiction Writer's Review's Twitter account! To follow their Twitter, go to this link. Books will be given away next week.

If you want to learn more about Breaking and Entering and Four Way Books, visit our website.

AWP Off-site Reading in Chicago

2012-01-16T13:35:00.003-05:00

Join us on Thursday, March 1st from 6-7:30pm at Weather Mark Tavern in Chicago for an AWP Off-site Reading. It's about a 10 minute walk or 2 minute cab ride from the Downtown Hilton (conference hotel).

Readers will be from Four Way Books, Persea Books, and Autumn House Press and include: Joan Aleshire, Tina Chang, Patrick Donnelly, Patrick Ryan Frank, Sarah Gorham, Rose McLarney, Jonathan Wells, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Laura Cronk, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Amy Newman, Patrick Rosal, Alexandra Teague, Sheryl St. Germain, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Martha Rhodes, Philip Terman and Judith Vollmer. Each poet will read for 2-3 minutes.

The reading is free and open to the public. To read more about it and RSVP, you can go to the Facebook event page.

Hope to see you there!

2012 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry

2012-01-16T13:16:00.004-05:00

It is now time to get your submissions together and submit to Four Way Books' Intro Prize in Poetry!

Submission dates are January 1 -- March 31, 2012 by online submission manager or regular mail. The postmark deadline is March 31st and the email deadline is by 3 am EST on April 1st.

The contest is open to any poet writing in English who has not already published a book-length collection of poetry.

This year D. A. Powell will be the judge and the winner gets a published book-length collection and $1,000.

For important information about how to submit online (preferred) or by mail, and guidelines for the contest, click here.

C. Dale Young's Poem "The Second Fallacy" as Monday's Poem for The Chronicle of Higher Education

2012-01-16T12:48:00.008-05:00

Four Way Books author C. Dale Young has his poem, "The Second Fallacy", published in The Chronicle of Higher Education for "Monday's Poem".

The Chronicle’s poetry blogger, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Few cognitive constructions are as fluid and fallacious as memory, that conspiracy, that conjuring, that supreme fiction of recalled, reconstructed, recreated experience. How fickle, mutable, and faulty are the brain’s recollections.... In C. Dale Young’s “The Second Fallacy,” which is, among other things, a meditation on the vicissitudes of Mnemosyne, a bougainvillea plant provides the Proustian cookie trigger, the occasion for a psychological foray that is part rhetorical theorem, part id-haunted confession. By indicating that the poem is giving us not the first but the “second” of what could be an even longer enumeration of fallacious errors in a line of reasoning, the title situates the poem in the midst of an a priori and ongoing argument. " Read the rest of the article on their Brainstorm page.

To read more of C. Dale Young's poems, go to Four Way Books' website for his most recent book, Torn.

Pollack's BREAKING AND ENTERING Reviewed in the NY Times!!

2012-01-13T16:30:00.002-05:00

In the Shadows of Oklahoma City

By JEAN THOMPSON

Published: January 13, 2012

Eileen Pollack’s new novel, “Breaking and Entering,” takes place in rural Michigan in 1995 — the epicenter and high point of the militia movement, before increased scrutiny and revulsion at the Oklahoma City bombing put some militia groups out of business and sent others underground. (Though not a militiaman, the bomber Timothy McVeigh attended their meetings and spent time on a Michigan farm with his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols.) The Oklahoma City attack comes about a third of the way through Pollack’s book, a real-world event that informs and shadows the fictional ones.

...

Pollack is an engaging writer with a first-rate eye for the telling sociological detail, like the Militia Babes calendar in the Banks’s farmhouse. There is tension and menace when Richard or Louise encounters some new misunderstanding or threat. But since the author’s intent is to explore intolerance, hatred and evil, it is not enough that these forces merely simmer and self-perpetuate. The stakes are raised, and escalating consequences play out.

...

Whatever our politics, there are times we can all feel like foreigners and outcasts in our own country, just as Louise becomes a foreigner in her own marriage. And it is Louise who carries the novel, with her good impulses, her fallibility and her wish for a transforming passion. We always hope that people can change, reassess, realign. It is fitting that Louise, at the novel’s end, provides just enough hope to bring the story home.

Read the rest of the review here.

Poetry Reading for Parents with Tina Chang

2012-01-10T16:15:00.004-05:00

Four Way Books' author, Tina Chang, is reading tonight at a poetry reading, "A Robert Burns Celebration", by Pen Parentis in New York City. The reading will be from 7 to 9pm and will be in the Libertine Library at Gild Hall on the second floor at 15 Gold Street. It's free and open to the public.

This is the perfect event for the busy parent who wishes they could go back to the days of being able to go to readings without having to worry about a crying baby. Rekindle your love of poetry and take a night for yourself amongst people who can understand your pain and your passions.

For more about Tina Chang, check out her new collection from Four Way Books.

Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea at Montgomery Town Library

2012-01-10T16:03:00.003-05:00

Even before Sydney Lea became Vermont Poet Laureate, he was being called the “heir-apparent to Robert Frost,” in part because his virtuosic poems tell dramatic and keenly-observed stories about rural northern New England’s people, creatures, and landscape. Pulitzer Prize Finalist, winner of the 1998 Poet’s Prize, Sydney Lea has also been called “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” When he isn’t writing, he is often walking or working outdoors, promoting nature conservation and literacy, or spending time with family. On Sunday, February 5 at 3 pm, Lea will read some of his poems for us and talk about the process of creating them. He welcomes your questions as well.

Whether you’re a lover of poetry already or just curious, please come—it’s not every day a Poet Laureate visits our neck of the woods. And if you think you don’t like poetry, then absolutely make sure to carve out a piece of your wintery Sunday afternoon for this special occasion (you don’t know what you’ve been missing!) Prepare to be inspired.

Sunday, February 5 at 3 pm. Refreshments. Free.

Reposted from Montgomery Town Library

"Vista" by C. Dale Young as The Academy of American Poets' Poem of the Day

2012-01-10T15:54:00.004-05:00

Visit poets.org to read "Vista" by C. Dale Young.

Visit Four Way Books' website to see C. Dale's most recent collection, Torn.

Tom Healy to Chair Fulbright Committee

2012-01-05T13:42:00.004-05:00

from the Best American Poetry blog:

Tom Healy, poet and contributor to the BAP blog, has been named chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarships Board. Here's an excerpt from the State Department's official announcement:

The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB) elected Tom Healy as chairman at its quarterly meeting in Washington, DC on December 6, 2011. The Board elected Susan Ness to serve as vice chair.

Tom Healy of New York City and Miami was appointed to the FSB by President Obama in 2011. Mr. Healy, a poet and writer, teaches at New York University. He is a visiting professor at The New School and has also taught at the Gorée Institute in Dakar. He served as president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and received the 2006 New York City Arts Award from Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his work to rebuild the downtown arts community after 9/11. Mr. Healy is a trustee of the Miami Poetry Festival and public arts presenter for Creative Time. He was a member of President Clinton's White House Council on HIV/AIDS and has traveled the world for microfinance projects and AIDS prevention efforts. He studied at Harvard and Columbia Universities.

Eileen Pollack: At Home with the Militia, from Ann Arbor Online

2012-01-04T12:35:00.004-05:00

Eileen Pollack

At home with the militia

by Keith Taylor

Eileen Pollack, former director of the U-M creative writing MFA program, has never been afraid of taking on big themes and big subjects. Among her former students--including several who have gone on to enjoy large international reputations--she is famous for always suggesting, if not insisting, that their stories and novels be about something. She uses her own fiction to wrestle with uncomfortable political and social issues.

In Breaking and Entering, her recently released novel, she has done it again, but this time the subject is closer to home. Pollack's protagonist, Louise Shapiro, and her husband and child have moved from the Bay Area to rural southwestern Michigan. Louise is more than a little smug, self-righteous, paranoid, and desperately lonely. She has reason to be lonely: her therapist husband, Richard, has withdrawn from her, forcing his family to move after a client he was infatuated with killed herself. He has taken a job as a therapist in the local Michigan prison, and the job is clearly the most useful thing he has ever done, even as it alienates him even further from his wife.

As the old joke says, even paranoids have enemies. The novel takes place over the spring and summer of 1995; very early on, the characters learn about the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City and, soon after, about Timothy McVeigh. Some of Louise's neighbors are members of the Michigan Militia, and their meeting ground is the Sportsman's Gun Club down the road, where, on his way south to Oklahoma City, McVeigh may or may not have stopped for a beer. The janitor at the school where Louise works part-time as a social worker hosts a radio show where he shouts racist and anti-Semitic rants. "Mike from Michigan" is his radio moniker, and none of us who've been around here for a while have to stretch very far to find tha model. Louise's Jewish husband is fascinated with the gun culture espoused by his militia neighbors, using that interest as yet another way to withdraw from his wife.

Louise takes up with the local Unitarian minister, and their affair becomes the center of her life, moving from passion into the realm of obsession. It is clearly doomed from the start, and the unraveling of it all--the inevitable failure of the love affair and the cultural and physical assaults on Louise herself--becomes the center of this novel. As the title indicates, Louise breaks--or is broken--but whether she is ever able to enter is the uncertainty and profound sadness that Pollack leaves with us.

Eileen Pollack reads from Breaking and Entering at Nicola's Books on Wednesday, January 18.

Sydney Lea on Poetry Daily

2012-01-04T11:59:00.002-05:00

Read Sydney Lea's poem "Young of the Year" at Poetry Daily:

Young of the Year

A small hare's stride displays itself in snowdust up on this knob
that we call The Lookout. Young of the year.
I whisper the term our old folks use to name
a prior spring's wild things—or the year itself, young year.

New grandfather now, have I a right to the phrase? I speak it no matter.
To me its assonance appeals;
its heft of optimism and forward-looking
correct a mood. It's a counter-cry to my vain appeals

to some power unseen that it remake me into a youthful man,
that it change this world. I scrutinize
a certain mountain's western flank, ravines
turned to fat white rivers in winter. I likewise scrutinize

myself in relation to mountain. I used to charge her up and down
in a slim few hours. Today I wonder
if I'll climb there again, my strength and stamina less
than once they were. What isn't? The mountain. The mountain's a wonder.

With inner eyes I see its trees, knee-high at 4000 feet.
I see myself step onto aprons of stone
at her summit. I'd never have dreamed how much I'd love it,
loving that child. In youth the thought would have turned me to stone.

On The Lookout's granite, a wisp—unidentifiable, blooded—of fur.
So many hundreds and thousands of victims
in a cruel season. Behind the mountain an airplane
aroar to put me in mind of bombers searching out victims.

In time it may even be that I'll prefer to see her from here,
not here from her. I mean the mountain.
Wonders never cease, it's rightly said.
Those inner eyes go back and forth from infant to mountain,

where even now in January the hardwoods' fraught tight buds
display their purple, enduring signal
of spring. Which will come. Which has never failed to come.
Already the girl and I have developed private signals:

I can waggle my tongue at her, or flutter my fingers, and make her smile.
I can lie back humming in uncanny peace,
child on my chest, and I can remember how
I held her father. But I think I hold her better. Peace:

perhaps it's for this one exchanges his further dreams. And perhaps I know
what's worth the knowing here on earth,
among its weather-decked hills, its beasts and birds
in their ceaseless cycles, migrations. Of course the glorious earth

will take me back, of course the young-year hare give profligate birth.

SYDNEY LEA

Young of the Year
Four Way Books

A nod to C. Dale Young's TORN in NPR's Best American Poetry of 2011

2012-01-02T15:22:00.003-05:00

Truth and Beauty: 2011's Best American Poetry

by David Orr, NPR

One of the few things almost everyone can agree on about contemporary American poetry is that no one can agree on much. At present, poetry is a jumbled landscape, with no single, dominant style and few living figures whose importance is accepted in more than one or two of the art form's tiny fiefdoms. Although some might find this state of affairs discouraging, I think there's good reason to be optimistic — poetry often needs to undergo periods of confusion to achieve the clarity for which we'll later remember it. Here are five books that suggest that even if American poetry isn't entirely sure where it's going, that doesn't mean it's gotten lost.

[...]

And because no critic can refrain from recommending more books than he's supposed to, you might also consider:

Torn by C. Dale Young (Four Way Books) — Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and Torn demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision.

Congratulations to Debra Allbery! Fimbul-Winter is Book of the Week

2011-12-21T13:10:00.002-05:00

Book of the Week: Fimbul-Winter, by Debra Allbery

BY JEREMIAH CHAMBERLIN

This week’s feature is Debra Allbery’s new poetry collection, Fimbul-Winter. The book was published last year by Four Way Books and was the recipient of the 2010 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. Allbery is also the author of a previous collection of poems,Walking Distance, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh. New poems are forthcoming in theChronicle of Higher Education, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives near Asheville, NC, and is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is also a recent contributor for Fiction Writers Review, writing on the influence that Sherwood Anderson’s life and work had on her development as a young poet.

Like Anderson, Allbery grew up in Clyde, Ohio, the small town that served as the model for Winesburg, Ohio, and the stories in his famed 1919 collection of the same name. In her essay “A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings,” Allbery writes of this place and her childhood:

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus.

It wasn’t until Allbery was an adolescent, however, that Anderson and his work entered her awareness. Her father, “a champion reader,” brought home a college literature textbook that he’d picked up at a garage sale. “Red cloth binding and about four inches thick,” she writes, “it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “A Death in the Woods.” She continues:

My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

In her conclusion to this essay, Allbery returns to the place and author who would so fundamentally shape her career, writing:

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine…Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.”

Though perhaps no homage to Anderson is more fitting than Allbery’s poetry itself. Here is Section 4 of “In the Pines,” from Fimbul-Winter, reprinted with permission from Four Way Books:

Death in the Woods
The story is about the storyteller,
about getting the telling right.
The narrator is recalling the winter
he and his brother, just boys, found a woman
frozen to death in the woods.
She’s been made old before her time
by a hard life, hard men. She’s beautiful
in death, of course. Her clothes worried
from her body by a pack of dogs
that have circled her dying, left an iced zero
around her in the clearing. It’s that circle
in the story that always gives me solace,
the drumbeat of that path, the dogs running
nose to tail. And the boy, now a man,
can’t stop telling this story. He invents a life
for the woman in an effort toward honor,
he erases it and starts again because
to be done with it is a disservice. The point
of the story is to keep her cold mystery,
keep that circle drawn around her
higher and higher, a glass wall, keep everyone
from getting any closer.

An Essay by Debra Allbery in Fiction Writers Review

2011-12-15T13:12:00.001-05:00

A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings

BY DEBRA ALLBERY

Somewhere in my files is an abandoned poem called “The Three Stories My Mother Told Me about Herself.” My mother not being a storyteller by nature, nor one given to confidences, these were cautionary tales—lessons learned, now presented for my benefit. The first, on the wisdom of doing what you are told, was about the time she was supposed to wait after the picture show for her father to come walk her the three or four miles back to their rural southern Ohio home, because there were gypsies camped in the woods. But my mother, displaying a disobedience, or, at the very least, a daring I never witnessed in her as an adult, struck out boldly on her own. My grandfather, on his way to meet her, saw his daughter coming, hid in the trees and then jumped out to frighten her—to startle her, she said, back into her good common sense.

Read the rest of the essay here:

http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/a-story-teller%E2%80%99s-story-a-poet%E2%80%99s-beginnings

Jamie Ross' VINLAND in Warwick Review

2011-12-06T17:35:00.002-05:00

Michael Hulse / Warwick Review

Jamie Ross, Vinland

The title poem of this exhilaratingly-pitched collection—extraordinarily the first by a writer in his sixties—announces a voice that is not quite like anything we've read anywhere before:

I say it is rain for the rooster. And the fog,

and the dispersion of the small. And I say

it is rain for the sound of despair. For

the clutched breath in a child's dream

when the mare goes blind and licks

a wound. For the light I cannot reach. For

my father is building his boat.

That attunement to the primal and the mythic, coupled with the ability to make wholly familiar words perform unfamiliar tasks or appear in unfamiliar guises, is Jamie Ross's hallmark. There's nothing capricious about his writing, nothing wilful or obscurantist: the making for him is a palpable act of passion, an urge to pressure words into revelation. When the pressure runs white hot, the result is the ecstatic pile-up in the twenty-two line sentence that stunningly takes up most of "Peterbilt." Small wonder Brigit Pegeen Kelly chose this collection as the winner of a US

competition—Ross shares here ambition to re-create the given. Poem for poem, Vinland is as sharp, bright and breath-taking collection as any I've seen in this first decade of the century, brimful of excitement and tranquility alike.

Review of BLACK BLOSSOMS in On the Seawall

2011-12-06T17:13:00.004-05:00

from Ron Slate's On the Seawall:

Twenty Poets Recommend New and Recent Titles

Recommended by Elaine Sexton:
Black Blossoms by Rigoberto González (Four Way Books)

The first word in Rigoberto González’s excellent collection is “strawberries,” followed by a stigmata, and in subsequent pages and poems: a red shirt, ruby heart, a red lake (as the lung of a bottle of cranberry juice), bleeding skulls, and more. It seems red is the dominant color fueling Black Blossoms, an encyclopedia of red, with gray playing second fiddle fusing a vivid succession of phantasmagorical poems with “the sutured centers of ... gray vaginas,” “gray wings/ crushed into exotic fabrics too thin for winter,” elephant trunks, and a lover, whose “skin shades to gray.” A sweep of geographies from Mexico to Madrid, New York to Seattle carry these tightly structured narratives with references as far reaching as Otto Dix and Goya to Lizzie Borden and the Brothers Grimm. Peopled mostly by the stories of women – their struggles, their voices – each poem sings and stings with the dark heart of the familial, often employing the intimate triangulations of mother/father/child as characters mature but never leave their emotional baggage far behind. Betrayal, revenge, abandonment stain like watermarks.

In “Blizzard,” a speaker of unspecified gender, in the back seat of a car, relates to the news of another couple trapped by a storm, who “survived one week on saltine crackers and body heat.” And continues:

Mine is a tube of toothpaste in my bag and a man
in town who thanks me for opening my left nipple like a rose
at the prompting of his lips. When he turns his back to me
in bed his skin shades to gray and I know about the dead
who roll their eyes up to memorize the texture of their graves.
If I should freeze to death the muted explosion of my heart
will not betray me. The science of weather will have
its own sad story to tell when I am found, ten-fingered
fetus with a full set of teeth locked to a knucklebone.

In this book, the dead refuse to stay dead. The speakers are often women, as with seven of the poems that comprise the final section of the book. We hear from a mortician’s mother-in-law, his sister, his daughter, his Goddaughter, and step into their complex inner lives. In “The Mortician’s Bride Says I’m Yours,“ a confession:

As I rub my foot with oil I also mourn the pain
slowly vanishing. It’s one more precious possession gone.
Oh the devastating truth of loss, oh mercy. I have been
parting with myself since birth ...

The 30 poems in Black Blossoms offer a sampler of magical realism, muscular syntax, and searing lament. Each voice inhabits gender, class, and historical context with an uncanny authority as the author shifts from poem to poem. Rigoberto González, who is also the author of a memoir, two novels, two bilingual children’s books, and a collection of short stories, is a wordsmith of the first order. He returns to poetry with this third collection, full of biting metaphors and memorable portraits, a singular pleasure to read.

[Published October 11, 2011. 76 pages, $15.95 paperback]
Elaine Sexton’s poems and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, Pleiades, Oprah Magazine and elsewhere. Her most recent collection is Causeway (New Issues, 2008).

Library Journal Calls BEAR, DIAMONDS AND CRANE One of the Best Poetry Books of 2011!

2011-12-06T13:11:00.004-05:00

Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, Claire. Bear, Diamonds and Crane. Four Way Bks. ISBN 9781935536130. pap. $15.95. The author explores family, love, and loss, particularly among several generations of Japanese Americans, in beautifully distilled little gems that explore the very limits of poetry—and of life: “Maybe you’ll agree that when you filter,/ you translate. You filter and you lose.” (LJ 11/15/11)

See the rest of the list here:

http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2011/12/best-of/best-books-2011-poetry/

Kevin Prufer on Houston Public Radio

2011-12-06T12:57:00.003-05:00

Click this link to listen to Kevin Prufer on Houston Public Radio's The Front Row:

http://www.thefrontrow.org/articles/1322865078-Public-Poetry---Kevin-Prufer-and-Ken-Jones.html

Sarah Gorham in Shelf Unbound

2011-12-05T17:20:00.002-05:00

Flip to page 43 of the new digital issue of Shelf Unbound to read a poem from Sarah Gorhams newest poetry collection, Bad Daughter.

Review: Jonathan Wells’ “TRAIN DANCE

2011-12-01T13:40:00.000-05:00

From Fogged Clarity: An Arts Review

by Scott Hightower

“Train Dance” Jonathan Wells
Four Way Books, 2011, 978-1-935536-14-7, $15.95

Train Dance may be a first book… but it is an inaugural collection by a seasoned imagination. With a touch of haunt, a pinch of surrealism, and heaps of good literary taste, Jonathan Wells’ poems pull out of the terminus: “An innocent scull rows, / sixteen knees and elbows, a fraction of a centipede going slow. / I wait there and the train plunges through me” (“The Dream Line”).

Train Dance is divided into four sections. The opening section is a haunted coast through “stations of the night when… the body still tingles with astonishment at what it has and hasn’t kept.” The poems have all of the urban haunt of Cavafy and the slight bitter-sweet melancholy of the well-adjusted immigrant. Two poems are actually comically based; one having to do with a GPS system which renders friendly voice prompts and is named “Ms. Magellan,” and the other having to do with Yoga… dog yoga.

The second section turns to more inhabited poems; the speaker of the poems laying claim to a ticket… a pass that turns out not to be just his ticket to ride the city’s train, but also his ticket in the lottery of the city. Couplets and a villanelle share the sun, city, and Hispanic and Hebrew rhythms of the streets. It is a city chorus of syncopated rhythms and intergenerational and international relationships:

My brother sleeps upstairs on an inflatable
mattress (that air was once my breath).

There won’t be time before he leaves at
dawn to recall the grapestand under

the stars near Kandahar, or our friend Joe,
emerald smuggler or Green Beret, seized at the border

with Iran, shouting, “I’m a Christian” as he was
led away by guards to the barbed wire enclosure.

… A summer squall leaves leaves few traces on the lake:
a little air still in the sails, an extra wrinkle in the waves.

(“A Visit”)

Section three moves further out into the geography of relationships. The transports are clear: father, son, grandson. The moonlit landscapes of boulevard trees, buildings, and urban fugues give way to nostalgic sunlight, trees, and Indian summers. The poems look backwards and forwards. The poet wrestling with time and oceans; is immersed in a consuming element:

Come to me. Say my name.
The sun made me ten stories tall
when I walked in the lines
of the labyrinth keeper’s rake. One story
made me wiser than I am and I could feel
the geese fly out of me although
they barely moved their wings.

(“Please, Hold”)

The final section of the collection moves in closer to the ineffable. Perhaps there is a dash of Yeats, a pinch of Heaney. Clearly, ceremony. There is a sonnet entitled “Speechless.” But what we are coming to is not the other terminus…but the caboose! Train Dance lets us disembark, graced and wanting more.

Scott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club: Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

2011-11-28T16:26:00.003-05:00

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

BRIAN SPEARS BIO ↓ · November 23rd, 2011 · filed under BOOK CLUB BLOG, POETRY, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan about her poetry collection Bear, Diamonds and Crane.

This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan. Every month The Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts a discussion online with the club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview.

Brian S: Well, even though it’s just the three of us right now, we should probably start talking about the book.

Camille D.: I’m just down the street from Stanford. The game’s on in the room I’m in.

Claire: That’s right. You’re in California. Where I’m from!

Camille D..: I know! I recognized so much of the landscape of CA. An emotional landscape.

Claire: Yes, Northern Calif. is an emotional landscape for me and my family.

Brian S: One of the few places I’ve lived where I would gladly move back, if I could afford it.

Claire: I’m in Houston, but my heart will always be in California.

Brian S: And Houston is, coincidentally enough, where I was born, though I moved from Texas when I was young.

Claire: Yes, I would love to live there if I could afford to and if my husband and I could find good paying jobs.

Camille D.: How about we start with that question. The loss in these poems is so palpable, but at the same time, there is this very present presence of past and place.

Claire: Yes, and hopefully there’s a sense of the future.

Camille D.: There is a sense of future. Especially with all those mentions of of your niece and nephew. I found those really interesting.

Claire: I wrote this book with them in mind.

Camille D.: Can you speak more about that?

Claire: They will have questions about our family.

Well, my father passed away on Sept. 27th, 2011. Vince and Emma know that Grandpa lived at Manzanar. I want them to know their family history. My mother’s parents were very good about telling me about their history. But in 2011, it’s difficult to sit the two down and say, “Let me tell you about our family. . .”

It just doesn’t happen that way. At least not in conversations.

Camille D.: Oh my goodness, Claire, that was so recent. My deep condolences to you. I’m actually amazed by your ability to be so clear headed in writing when you were in the midst of dealing with the loss so immediately.

Brian S: I liked the way you dealt with how kids pick up on things even when you don’t tell them, like in “At Seven and Nine, My Niece and Nephew Know.”

Let me add my condolences to Camille’s as well.

Claire: It’s been difficult, but I feel that my father is with my mother. He’s where he should be.

Thank you.

My parents were very close. They shared the same birthday. Sept. 21st.

Camille D.: I’ve been talking a lot to people about the need for poetry. One of the reasons I’ve presented is that it provides language for us in time of trauma or in sacred spaces like memorial services and weddings. But one of the other uses is that poetry can be such a fluent repository for history. It sounds like you have consciously used it in both these ways.

Claire: My father passed away one week after their birthday.

Camille D.: That’s my sister’s birthday, too. Gorgeous spirits came to us on that day.

Claire: Yes. I like the term gorgeous spirits.

Camille D.: You’re welcome to share it.

Brian S: Was there a sense, in that poem, that your mother’s illness caused them to grow up a little more quickly?

Claire: Yes, I do think it caused them to grow up.

Vincent had a profound understanding of my mother’s illness. Emma took a while to understand how serious my mother was. I guess my mother’s passing was their first experience with death.

Camille D.: People often ask me if they should scared about writing about and/or to people who are alive. There’s a real responsibility there. How did you face down that responsibility while you were writing?

Claire: There are things that Vince and Emma may forget with time. I wanted to capture them at certain ages.

Brian S: I would imagine it’s also difficult writing about relatives who have passed, since there’s a desire to tell and hear only the good things about them. Was that an issue for you?

Claire: No. My family embraces the negative and positive qualities of a person. In Snow White you have the seven dwarfs. One is grumpy, sleepy, etc. If someone is grouchy or ill-tempered, they don’t see that as a fault. It’s just the person’s personality. So I was labeled “the sensitive one.” That was who I was.

Brian S: There’s a moment in “Diamonds and Crane” where the conversation goes “Did you look back, did you write back?” and the response is “No. You ask too many questions,” which sort of brings us back to that question of how we tell our children our family stories. That’s always a problem, isn’t it?

Because we as adults don’t always want to give up our secrets.

Camille D.: Is that part of how you come to be able to write in such a balanced manner? I see that as a poetic way of seeing the world, seeing all its nuances. But I think you might be saying there is something perhaps cultural there. Or maybe not cultural but at least part of your family’s world view.

Claire: My grandmother was open about telling us things about my grandfather, but very discreet about her side of the family.

It’s cultural, yes.

Camille D.: And yet, even though you say it’s cultural, you also say you were marked as particularly sensitive.

Claire: I never thought of my writing as “balanced.” That’s interesting.

Yes, I remember that my mother told someone that I was the sensitive one. My mother, by contrast, was tough.

Camille D.: One of the things that drew me to your book is that is seemed to be two sides of the coin all the time. Brief, stanzas, big ideas. Florid descriptions, spare language. Eastern worldviews, Western materials.

Claire: So you mean it’s bi-cultural.

Camille D.: Will you talk a bit about your choice of forms. You range so much. I’m interested how much you are led by form or if the content drives the form or if and how your method varies.

Brian S: I get what Camille is saying, and I feel the same way. I’ve been considering assigning this book for a class I’m teaching in the spring which deals with culture and identity for just that reason.

Claire: I think that content drives the form.

I don’t think of myself as a form driven writer, even though I make use of forms like the villanelle, haiku, sestina. . .

You can read the rest of the discussion here!

The Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews BREAKING AND ENTERING by Eileen Pollack

2011-11-28T16:01:00.003-05:00

From Association of Jewish Libraries: Nov/Dec 2011

Pollack, Eileen. Breaking and Entering. Tribeca, NY: Four Way Books, 2012.
386 pp. $18.95 (9781935536123).

“When a client of Louise’s husband Richard commits suicide, the couple is plunged into a dark period. In an attempt to recover both professionally and maritally, they move to a small town in Michigan, just before the Oklahoma City bombing. In some ways, this move seems like it might bring this family together, but in other ways they are as far apart as ever. Can Louise and Richard figure out how to fight their personal demons and come together as a family again? There are many issues facing these characters and the way they deal with them is both complex and interesting. Pollack takes on many controversial and emotional issues in this novel about which readers are sure to have strong opinions, including intermarriage, cheating, and racism. The writing is very good and makes the book an easy read. This book could be really great for book club discussions. Readers will care for this family and root for them to succeed. This book is recommended for Jewish libraries and public libraries.”

Debbie Feder, Director, Library Resource Center,
Ida Crown Jewish Academy, Chicago

Life in Full: Sydney Lea on former Vermont state poet Ruth Stone

2011-11-28T15:50:00.002-05:00

from the Burlington Free Press:

Editor's Note: This column was written before former Vermont State Poet Ruth Stone died Nov. 19. Current state poet laureate Sydney Lea writes about how Stone, in a few words, evokes life while writing about loss.

I want to pay a brief and inadequate tribute to Ruth Stone, my predecessor as Vermont Poet Laureate. Ms. Stone is remarkable in every way: 96 years old and all but completely blind, the woman still generates some of America's most compelling poetry.

Compared to her, I'm a mere youngster, just shy of 69. And yet, like anyone blessed to live past middle life, I feel a profounder sense of loss with every year: dear friends and family die; faculties and physical resources fade; I anticipate more funerals than weddings. I scarcely expect to reach 96, but if I did, such losses as I have known would surely have lost themselves among the multitude that followed.

It is entirely understandable, then, that at her great age Ruth Stone should be a chronicler of sorrow; but in fact she suffered gut-wrenching loss even before she reached 50. Her husband committed suicide half a century ago, and to one extent or another, we sense the man's presence (or rather his absence) in all Ms. Stone's work. She has described her own work as "love poems, all written to a dead man." Consider the following:

Poems.

When you come back to me/ it will be crow time/ and flycatcher time,/ with rising spirals of gnats/ between the apple trees./ Every weed will be quadrupled,/ coarse, welcoming/ and spine-tipped./ The crows, their black flapping/ bodies, their long calling/ toward the mountain;/ relatives, like mine,/ ambivalent, eye-hooded;/ hooting and tearing./ And you will take me into your fractal meaningless/ babble; the quick of my mouth,/ the madness of my tongue.

By my reading, the speaker here finds herself looking forward from winter to the warmer seasons so brilliantly evoked by her meticulous attention to natural detail. That will be a fecund time, a time when poems return to her; and yet "when you come back to me" seems poignantly to suggest the return as well of an absent lover. The tragic subtext here is that the human "you" will not come back after all, that the speaker must settle for what she calls "fractal meaningless/babble."

Lyric poetry, however, more than any other mode of discourse, can contain opposite impulses without lapsing into mere self-contradiction. While this is, yes, another Stone poem about grief and loss, and about the resulting erasure of meaning, it's also about "the quick of my mouth," the life-force that this valiant woman enacts by means of her own eloquent speech The "madness of my tongue" is the madness of desolation — but also of exhilaration. The reader can all but hear the sound of spring freshets in her diction.

For me, "Poems" captures in very short span what it is to be human. Our lives do not consist of a simple good day/bad day dialectic, it seems; for as long as we draw breath, we experience pain and fulfillment simultaneously.

Ms. Stone invites my admiration and gratitude: the very music of a phrase like "fractal meaningless/babble" makes me feel more alive, no matter the losses that I, like anyone, have known, and that I am bound to know further.

Publishers Weekly Reviews Eileen Pollack's Forthcoming Novel, BREAKING AND ENTERING

2011-11-21T14:28:00.002-05:00

Breaking and Entering

Eileen Pollack. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $18.95 trade paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-935536-12-3

Louise Shapiro is thoroughly beset in this thorny, lucid novel. Her bad luck begins in California, where her husband abandons his psychology practice and takes a job in a rural Michigan prison. Louise struggles to adjust to the heartland, which seems overpopulated with religious nuts and militia members. Her husband drifts away into a rebellious, gun-toting fugue, and the lover she takes becomes remote in his own way. Contributing to and reflecting her malaise is the ominous sociopolitical climate: the Oklahoma City bombing occurs midway, and throughout Louise grapples with the suddenly vivid awareness that the country is full of people whose worldviews are almost incomprehensibly different from her own. Her increasingly nuanced view of the sociopolitical divide is reflected in Pollack’s sensitive portrayals of both liberal Louise and her ilk, and their conservative counterparts. Weaving the personal with the political, Pollack (In the Mouth) creates an encompassing haze of dissatisfaction and misdirected passion. Despite the unrelenting misfortune, though, the tone is more solemn than dark; there’s a beautiful contemplativeness, and a believable sense of redemption in the end. Louise is jarred into a kind of awakening that might not have occurred in comfortable Berkeley, and is, if not happier, more enlightened for it. Agent: Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (Jan.)

LEO Weekly: [Sarah] Gorham's poetry has teeth

2011-11-21T13:27:00.003-05:00

Book: Gorham’s poetry has teeth

BY ERIN KEANE

‘Bad Daughter’ By Sarah Gorham. Four Way Books; 67 pgs., $14.95.

Mothers — everyone’s got one somewhere, and our feelings about that inescapable fact are as personal and nuanced as fingerprints, those unique, inescapable markers of self. Since every mother is a daughter herself, the particular intergenerational ways in which women relate (oh, the banality of daytime talk show vocabulary!) is fundamental to the ongoing work of understanding our own human puzzles. And so Louisville writer (and editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books) Sarah Gorham’s new collection of poems, “Bad Daughter,” is not mere girl talk, nor is it a sentimental glossing over of the exquisite violences, large and small, that families visit upon themselves.

I don’t know whether to give a copy of “Bad Daughter” to my mother for Christmas or to hide it when she visits, which is to say this is no benign little memoir in verse, thank God. Gorham’s poems have teeth.

Indeed, in her poem “Homesickness,” Gorham poses an unsettling thought on the nature of life replacing and replicating itself: “What is a mother but a tooth’s way of producing another tooth?” In this collection, mothers are remote and mysterious, recriminating voices haunting from a distance, yet at the same time so close, a constant echo swirling through the daughter’s head. In the poem “Floaters,” a plain thesis (“The fear in a mother’s voice/that you’ll never be useful or clean”) plagues both mother and daughter — the fear of not raising children right, and of not living up to your own raising.

The poet uses her vantage point as mother, daughter and grandmother to examine the life cycle from points delightful and disturbing — a baby girl is an intoxicating, otherworldly creature, “skin like spun sugar, fingers pink fiddleheads” and “a fresh cutting,” while the aging woman “full of stirs and folds, whips and dark layers” who must approach the baby, a gateway to a strange alternate reality, with reverence.

But neither is the unnatural experience spared, as Gorham examines in “Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow,” which former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected for the 2006 edition of “Best American Poetry.” In this poem, the woman’s eye observes the snow falling and collecting on the grotesque metal still-life of a hundred younger selves: “an elephant girl, a misshapen/Phantom of the Opera mask/covering half her motionless face.” And that tooth pushing out another tooth, undone:

How often resurrection’s a slight miscalculation of past, present, and future. A cow nudging its dead calf. A little girl’s eyes in winter, opened rigid and wide.

This poem is followed by what could be the film trailer of the collection, a memory-poem of girlhood. “When we were good we were” foreshadows events of future poems while examining the feminine and its evil twin, the ladylike, in its careful deconstruction of how to be good at being a girl — so “precise, mindful of our tools.” In the turn, Gorham’s bold metaphor startles: “When we were bad, we were extravagant/like cruise ships through a canal.” The poem closes with the rejection of the ladylike bird in favor of the unbridled dog rolling in manure, a strange and satisfying twist on the expected images of fertility, and a celebration of the wild glory that reverberates throughout the collection.

BK Poet Laureate Tina Chang Celebrates Her Newest Poetry Collection With a Reading Tonight in Boerum Hill

2011-11-18T13:22:00.001-05:00

The poet laureate processes 9-11

BY JULIET LINDERMAN

The Brooklyn Paper

Brooklyn’s poet laureate has regained her voice.

Park Slope’s own Tina Chang will celebrate the release of her first book since being named the Brooklyn poet laureate last year on Nov. 18 — a collection that took her 10 years to complete.

The poems that comprise “Of Gods and Strangers,” weave together the story of Chang’s struggle to cope with Sept. 11, and examine her role as an observer of world history as economies collapse, foreign wars rage on, and the city continues feel the pain, and attempt to heal, 10 years after the Twin Towers fell. But make no mistake: Chang’s book isn’t therapy — its elements are personal, but they’re also universal to Brooklynites, and everyone else living in contemporary society.

“I came to terms with what it means to be alive, survive, try to cope and live as a human being,” she explained. “This book is about what it means to live in the modern world, and what it means to live in war; the self that is situated here in New York, and the self that relates to other parts of the world.”

After Sept. 11, Chang experienced an extended bout of writer’s block that she was ultimately able to overcome in order to finish “Of Gods and Strangers” — after being appointed Brooklyn’s official disseminator of verse in February, 2010.

“After 9-11, so many writers and artists were reflecting right away, but I experienced a silence,” Chang said. “Becoming the poet laureate of this borough became cathartic — when I stand in front of a classroom full of 7-year-olds and see how excited they are about finding a form of expression, I know that words really do have power.”

Tina Chang reads from “Of Gods and Strangers” at 61 Local [61 Bergen St. between Boerum Place and Smith Street in Boerum Hill (347) 763-6624], Nov. 18, 7 pm. For info visit www.tinachang.com.

Reach Arts Editor Juliet Linderman at jlinderman@cnglocal.com or by calling (718) 260-8309.

11/19 Elise Paschen and Kevin Prufer Reading at the Chicago Poetry Center

2011-11-18T13:01:00.002-05:00

Elise Paschen and Kevin Prufer Reading
Saturday, November 19, 2011 - 3:00pm

Poetry Center of Chicago Office

78 E Washington St., Pedway EastChicago, IL

Take the Cultural Center elevatior to the Pedway level, and turn left. Poetry Center office is on the left.

+

Elise Paschen is the author of several poetry collections including, most recently, Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009) and Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, Ploughshares and The Hudson Review, among other magazines, and in anthologies such as A Formal Feeling Comes and The POETRY Anthology, 1912—2002. She also has edited numerous anthologies, including The New York Times bestsellers, Poetry Speaks and Poetry Speaks to Children. A co-founder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kevin Prufer is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which are In a Beautiful Country (Four Way, 2011) and National Anthem (2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly. He is also Editor of, among others, New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008; w/Wayne Miller) and Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and numerous other national awards, he is Professor of English at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

MORE Magazine Reviews Eileen Pollack's Forthcoming Novel, BREAKING AND ENTERING

2011-11-18T12:12:00.001-05:00

Book Review: 'Breaking and Entering' by Eileen Pollack

A compassionate, humorous new novel about the ambiguities of modern life.

by Lynn Schnurnberger

Photograph: Avery Powell

After his patient commits suicide, a shattered Richard Shapiro and his wife, Louise, both therapists, move from upscale, liberal Marin County, California, to a rural Michigan village in 1995. But so much for the great escape: Louise takes up with a magnetic married minister, and Richard befriends members of the local militia, which has ties to the Oklahoma City bomber. Set against the backdrop of a divided America, Breaking and Entering by Eileen Pollack is a novel laced with compassion, humor and wisdom about the ambiguities of modern life. (amazon.com)

Sarah Gorham Reads Tonight at 7pm at Carmichael's in Louisville, KY

2011-11-17T16:06:00.002-05:00

Louisville poet and publisher, Sarah Gorham, explores the “Bad Daughter” in us all at Carmichael’s [Books]
by Erin Day

The term “hysteria” can trace its rather curious roots back to the ancient Greeks. Often attributed to Hippocrates, “hysteria” began its journey to the modern English lexicon as a term used to describe the movements of a woman’s uterus as it flew about her body, causing disease and driving her wild. A fun fact. While it is now clear that the female womb remains stationary, the idea of the wild or “bad girl” still remains an alluring taboo in our society. Grabbing misbehavior by the horns, Louisville poet Sarah Gorham explores the risky business of being a Bad Daughter. Unleash your wild side with her at Carmichael’s Bookstore, tonight at 7pm.

Sarah Gorham is the founder of the Louisville-based publishing house, Sarabande Books, a heavy player in Louisville’s literary scene. But Gorham’s talent is not limited to behind-the-scenes when it comes to the world of books. A forceful writer, Gorham is the author of four collections of poetry, including The Cure, awarding-winning The Tension Zone and Don’t Go Back to Sleep. Her work has been featured in numerous publications such as Best American Poetry, The Nation, Antaeus, American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, DoubleTake, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Ohio Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest. Gorham is a well-lauded poet, with awards including the Carolyn Kizer Award, the Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the Prairie Schooner Reader’s Choice Award, among many other fellowships and grants. Her latest poetry release, Bad Daughter, has been hailed by both critics and fellow poets alike.

Characterized by a combination of several lyrical forms – “mortality tales”, ironic prayers, sonnets and meditations – Bad Daughter surveys concepts such as envy, detachment and immorality in the lives of “bad” women and the sense of self forged in the ruckus. Described by fellow poet, Linda Gregerson, as “the book of a poet writing at the height of her powers and confidence”, Bad Daughter delves into the generations of bad daughters, sisters and their mothers and the powerful force of being female.

Get in touch with your inner demons and head out to Carmichaels’ Frankfort Avenue location to hear selections from Bad Daughter. Gorham will be on hand reading her work, and be available for signatures starting at 7pm. Bad Daughter can be purchased in paperback at Carmichael’s for $15.95. Check your hysterics at the door (it’s good to keep the uterus in place) and embrace your bad side for an evening.

Carmichael’s Bookstore has two area locations 1295 Bardstown Road and 2720 Frankfort Avenue

West Branch Reviews Monica Youn's IGNATZ

2011-11-17T14:40:00.003-05:00

“Foundations of Wonder”: Popular Culture in Three Recent Books
by Chris Cunningham

We do not, with sufficient plainness, or sufficient profoundness, address ourselves to life, nor dare we chaunt our own times and social circumstance…Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy, and the temple of Delphos, and are as swiftly passing away…Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844

Within a dozen years of the publication of Emerson’s essay, Whitman answered the older writer’s call as plainly as he knew how, offering a poetry peopled not with gods and goddesses but with as many American selves as he could catalog, decorated not with hothouse roses but with the unadorned green of grass, and written in an idiom that drew its music as much from American colloquial speech as from the English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

It’s been a long time since one could complain that American poets fail to address their own times, or that we lack poets who, in Emerson’s words, dare “to write [their] autobiography in colossal cipher.” Indeed, one of the hallmarks of American poetry since Whitman is an active engagement—thematic, formal, stylistic—with the American present. The most powerful effect of this engagement has been the rejection, following Whitman’s example and Wordsworth’s Preface, of traditional poetic diction in favor of the “language of common men.” At the same time, poets have been equally willing to take up what Emerson called the “raw and dull stuff,” the “barbarism and materialism” of American culture, to make poetic art. “The experience of each new age requires a new confession,” wrote Emerson. All three collections discussed here carry Emerson’s project forward in one way or another, engaging and using American popular culture and colloquial speech to sing their own times and ways.

I

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip, which ran from the mid-teens to the 1940s, offers a corrective to the world’s most famous comic mouse. In place of Disney’s cheery, whistling, hail-fellow fellow, Herriman’s comic presents Ignatz, an unapologetic cynic, whose recidivist brick-throwing continually lands him in jail in the Dali-esque desert of Coconino County. A less well-nourished mouse than Mickey, Ignatz is drawn with skinny legs and scrawny tail, a compact body, flat, clawed feet, and a long, rat-like nose. In his recurrent abuse of the hopelessly amorous and self-deceiving Krazy Kat, Ignatz is more like Bugs Bunny without the charm and dapper dress: in each full-page comic, Ignatz devises some new way to connect a brick with the back of Krazy Kat’s head, which impact Krazy takes as a token of Ignatz’s affection—for Krazy, abuse is how it feels to be in love.

And so this is the romantic duo that Monica Youn selects for her collection, which traces a speaker’s—the volume’s Krazy—serial romantic failures through four destructive relationships. Just as, say, the Demeter/Persephone story offers a mythic template by which poets can explore the mother/daughter relationship, Youn adopts the tragicomic eros of Krazy/Ignatz as a way to understand a certain kind of romantic self-destruction: for Youn, Ignatz is not so much an individual—although each of the men the speaker loves has his own distinctive character or physical features—but rather the name of the way the speaker loves, a serial beloved whose secondary qualities may change but whose essence is betrayal.

The first section has at its heart an intense, sexually charged relationship, as we see in the surreal “Landscape with Ignatz”:

The rawhide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbled blue spine of the sky.

The bone-spurred heels of the canyon prodding the gaunt blue ribs of the sky.

The sunburnt mouth of the canyon biting the swollen blue tongue of the sky.

The hangnailed fingers of the canyon snagging the tangled blue hair of the sky.

The blistered thumbs of the canyon tracing the blue-veined throat of the sky.

The sleep-crusted lids of the canyon blink open…your soft, your cerulean eye.

As in the original comic strip, Ignatz’ eroticism is mingled with intimations of violence. Suggestions of rough sex run throughout this section, whether thematically, as in this poem, or on the level of simile and metaphor. The section opens with a bloody sunrise: “A gauze bandage wraps the land / and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates. // A series of slaps molds a mountain, / a fear uncoils itself, testing its long / cool limbs.” Or again, in “Ignatz Oasis”: “When you have left me / the sky drains of color // like the skin / of a tightening fist.” And yet, almost as soon as things are good—and the good here is certainly ambivalent—things are bad, for Ignatz leaves and the next poem announces his “wedding,” leading immediately afterwards—from Krazy’s romantic perspective—to his “Death.”

Ignatz is resurrected in the second section as a self-regarding, “gloaty giant,” a self-important hero in awe of his own god-like “sufficiency” (“The Labors of Ignatz”). Youn simultaneously dramatizes and satirizes this Ignatz in mock-heroic diction in the prose poem “Afterwards Ignatz,” where Ignatz’s departure from a party for a walk on the beach takes on an ironizing epic grandeur:

Afterwards Ignatz rose and without taking his leave of them opened the sliding glass door and vanished onto the lightless beach. And there were those who later said that he never opened that door, that the molecules of glass parted at his touch, or still others that he stepped through the glass door as some of his brothers might move swiftly through a downpour while never being wetted, for as his brothers were to the common run of men, so it is said that Ignatz was to his brothers. But the truth of it was that Ignatz slid open the door, stepped through, and slid it shut again so smoothly and swiftly that to distinguish one action from the other would be to count the blades of a flying helicopter, and that good door, well-greased in its gasket, did not betray him by a single ill-timed creak, so that by the time that they say that he had gone from them, his dark head was already lost in the black waves of sand and the black waves of water.

Again, Ignatz betrays the besotted Krazy, when his epic self-regard takes a spiritual turn in the form of Augustinian asceticism:

in medias res Ignatz remarked,

Sometimes I don’t like

fucking. Whoosh!

The third and fourth sections follow similar trajectories, retracing two more times the path from eros to loss: the third lover, a blue-fingernailed man first seen slumped in a chair at a Free Clinic, attracts and then burns the speaker, leaving her a “moth sobb[ing] brokenly in the middle of the room” (“Ignatz at the ________ Hotel”); the final Ignatz seems safely domesticated, a sleepy lover apparently content in the “sylvan bower” Krazy creates for him, until this flighty, “winged Ignatz” escapes from his birdcage into the neighbor’s bed.

The collection ends not because Krazy comes to some culminating self-understanding—on the contrary, the speaker recognizes over and over her own self-destructive impulse, does what she knows she shouldn’t do. As she says in “Invisible Ignatz” (quoted in its entirety):

I would forget you were it not that unseen flutes
keep whistling the curving phrases of your body.

Or again in “Ignatz Recidivist,” whose seven short lines rehearse the direness of Krazy’s situation:

to blush
to blame
to bleed
to bless

helpless
helpless
helplessness

The poem’s anaphoric infinitives not only take these actions outside of the conjugated time of any individual relationship but also underline the sheer repetitiveness of Krazy’s romantic failures, which repetition we hear again in the head-shaking hopelessness of the final tercet. Indeed, what is striking here is precisely the lack of emotional progress or growth. In this sense, the comic strip is the ideal means for expressing Krazy’s dilemma. As a narrative form, the comic strip is simultaneously static and iterative, re-enacting versions of the same story—without character or plot development—year after year: Charlie Brown will always fall for Lucy’s football trick, Calvin will always cause trouble for the babysitter, Blondie will always be shocked by Dagwood’s huge sandwiches. The comic-strip genre thus rehearses formally—as Krazy and Ignatz rehearse thematically—Youn’s vision of romantic-erotic defeat.

Indeed, the problem for Youn’s Krazy seems to be sexuality itself. The challenge ultimately is to imagine a right relation between man and woman, between what, in a different context, Youn calls the hard and the soft:

…if this is a lesson in how something harder and something softer can achieve a mutuality if the harder thing has a curvature that suggests an accommodating mindset and the softer thing is willing to relinquish some measure of contingency so the softer thing can come temporarily to rest and if a test were devised on the subject of this lesson then what would be gained for one who took this test and passed it or one who took this test and failed?
(“At the Free Clinic Ignatz”)

In the context of the larger prose poem, Youn is describing the man who will become the third Ignatz sitting in a “secondhand classroom desk” chair, but the stakes are higher than how to design comfortable seating for high school students: rather, the problem is whether—how?—one can “achieve a mutuality” between two beings apparently willing to make accommodations on both sides in order to come, at least, “temporarily to rest.” But the prospect of “mutuality” and “rest” seems almost impossible to imagine, much less describe. Embedded within a series of hypotheticals and concluding inconclusively in an interrogative swirl of subjunctives and conditionals, the poem loses itself in a syntax and diction as baroque and abstractly euphemistic as late Henry James.

Understood in this way, Youn’s collection is almost gothic—sexual violence, emotional self-destruction, repeated romantic failure. But there is a tension in these poems between their explicit emotional content and the style and form in which that content is given voice. Herriman’s Krazy Kat is a singer, often pictured with a stringed instrument that looks like the bastard child of a sitar and a banjo. And indeed part of the fame of the Krazy Kat comics is due to Herriman’s own voice, his stylized ventriloquism of the American vernacular, Krazy and Ignatz and Officer Pup speaking in an urban demotic rendered in dropped g’s, apostrophes, and creative spelling. Youn’s Krazy is also a singer, her four linked love songs to Ignatz serving as epigraphs to the four sections, offering lyric expression of more or less traditional romantic love:

O Ignatz won’t you play me
like a filigree flute?
I’d trill any tune it might
please you to hear.

“O Sweet Adeline,”
“Au clair de la lune,”
Your song my only voice,
your breath my only air.

But Youn’s mercurial voice is harder to pin down, ranging tonally from irony to eros and formally from terse, fragmentary lyrics to substantial, sometimes garrulous prose poems. And yet, what ties these poems together is the way they handle their emotional content. Youn draws on a range of techniques to craft a poetics of emotional restraint: her use of the third person, the personae/characters of Ignatz and Krazy themselves, irony and satire, violent enjambments, imagistic juxtapositions, and fragmentation create poems that invite aesthetic contemplation and appreciation rather than emotional engagement. In the end, we are less moved by Krazy’s loss—or outrage or desire—than by the often startling, careful beauty with which these emotions have been sculpted.

Gonzalez and Chang on The Poetry Foundation's Best-Sellers List!

2011-11-15T17:33:00.002-05:00

See the Best-Sellers List here!

BEHIND THIS WEEK'S LIST

Four Way Books has a couple of recently published collections on this week's contemporary bestseller list. Black Blossoms by Rigoberto Gonzalez explores the private lives of working class women, rooting his poems in the female body and employing language that's been described as "lush," "sensuous," "graphic," and "grotesque" (Publishers Weekly). Also from Four Way, Of Gods and Strangers by Tina Chang meditates on history (“How the past/ holds onto us with its short leash/ and yelping") and raises questions about poetry's responsibility to bear witness to darkness and disaster.

About the List
Our poetry best-seller lists are based on data received from Nielsen BookScan, which tracks sales from more than 4,500 retail booksellers. Retailers included in the list include both large, high-volume retailers such as Borders and Amazon.com, and more than 400 smaller, independent bookstores. We generate the lists each week by tallying the number of books sold for recently published volumes of contemporary poetry, poetry anthologies, and children's poetry. The contemporary poetry best-seller list is meant to reflect the current market for new poetry, and so excludes translations and new editions of classical works. Our small press list is based on Small Press Distribution's poetry sales to bookstores and individual customers, which are reported to us on a monthly basis.

Chamber Four Reviews Sarah Gorham's BAD DAUGHTER

2011-11-10T15:12:00.003-05:00

REVIEW: Bad Daughter
By ROMAN GLADSTONE

Chamber Four

You can already tell by the title of her new collection that Sarah Gorham has a sly, subversive sense of humor. From modified “prayers” saturated with irony to a five-part reflection on bureaucratic and other absurdities associated with a frankly horrific accident, Gorham regards the world with a disengaged, puzzled fascination, and at its best it is as if you see things through her eyes for the first time. Her poem, “Detach,” captures this attitude, evident throughout her poetry:

Detach

Thank the stars for distances between
stars, for broad mountain meadows
that shrink your troubles to ants
carrying leaves five times their size.
The sun is 91 million miles away;
not too far, not too close. Be like that.
Perch in a look-out tower, overseer of campfires
and dangerous breezes. You’ll spot the heat,
pick up the phone. Let others
put their faces in the fire.

The world is a wondrous place if you twist your head and look at it from a different angle. “Odd place for a sculpture,” she begins the poem, “Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow.” Indeed, Gorham’s logical leaps from line to line are breathtaking. “I long for babies,/but never more than mountains./My view of the Jungfrau: peaks like starched/petticoats I could bury my face in./She is a cold confection, a meringue/I feel in my teeth. When I am/in the presence of mountains,/there will always be enough sex./But never enough mountains,” she concludes the poem, “Three Sides to the Mountain That Are Really One.”

Gorham is truly one of those poets you don’t want to have to “explain” so much as simply “show,” bring to the reader’s attention. Look at this! And this! It’s the overall tone, a sort of Dickensonian playfulness, that’s really enchanting about her verse. Her poetry can pop and sparkle with the wisecracking wit of a Dorothy Parker. Take this sonnet, for instance:

Compost

“No woman should call another fastidious.”
- James Thurber

She had in mind dahlias, a stretch
of dianthus, Jack-in-the-Pulpit or two.
For this rot. In candid view!
Enough to make her retch –
the certainty of being touched, mussed,
dog-snouted till the prettiest sheen
turns brown, black-brown, black-green.
Once they called this mush fastidious.
Now it’s the woman’s touch, tight
as she flips a grub-infested
compost heap. Breath held, over-dressed
in fleece, gloves, clogs, apron, hat.
It’s garden variety metamorphosis –
plain disgust to petal-perfect daintiness.

Gorham’s prayer poems–“We Are Bold to Say,” “Prayer During a Fast,” “Parting Prayer”–likewise display this charming irreverence. “I confess that I have/sinned against you/by what I have eaten/and by what I have/not left uneaten,” she writes, in a cadence reminiscent of the Al-Chet prayer Jews recite on Yom Kippur (Gorham is Jewish on her father’s side, she notes in “Accommodation”). It’s as if she has taken the Almighty aside and nudged Him in the ribs. “Eternal God, charitable one/you have reluctantly included us/your back-up guest list,/for the birthday of your Jesus Son/who will be two thousand ten/this December if the faithful have it right…” she writes in “Parting Prayer.”

As the title of the collection suggests, there is a potent theme of mothers and daughters going on throughout this collection. “What is a mother but a tooth’s way of producing another tooth?” she writes in “Homesickness,” and in the metaphor we see the almost claustrophobic bond she elaborates on all over these poems. “To my child I became my mother, and her mother, and hers.” ( “Accommodation” )

Part Two of this three-part collection opens with a Jewish proverb as its epigram: “What the daughter does, the mother did.” And then the first poem in this section, “Sixteen,” focuses on a mother and her rebellious daughter, who “conjured the toughest boy of all/to push my love aside.” “On the Birth of a Daughter,” which concludes the collection, ends with the admonition, “When your daughter matures, the tree must be sacrificed./A phoenix will alight there/only when the queen steps down.//You must step down.” And yet how difficult stepping down must be! As the epigraph to the third part advises, “Researchers have found that certain cells escape from a fetus, persisting in the mother’s bloodstream decades after she is pregnant. These cells migrate to wounds in the mother’s body.” Wow.

You could call this “fatalism,” but that sounds too harsh. Still, there is very much the attitude that “the child is father to the man,” or at least that daughters become their mothers. “Immortality,” another baby poem, concludes: “Touch that fantastic little foot. The baby is an implant, a fresh cutting./She will take. She will take you away.”

“Prick and Twinge”–daughter injures herself, requires medical attention and a mother feels guilt through negligence–“Barbeque”–a girl learns to eat with utensils (“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”)–“Lost”–she loses her mittens (“The brain is a wicker basket”): so many poems about the quotidian events that bond parents and children. And then there is “Passeggiata,” a poem in which the relationship between a college-age girl and her mother has become attenuated, part of the letting-go that never really lets go.

But all of these poems are rooted and related in the endearing detachment with which Gorham regards the world, the fresh metaphors with which she envisions and presents to us the world around her. And so, concluding on another sonnet, this reviewer shows Gorham and doesn’t try any longer to explain:

Pond in Winter

A garden pond rimmed with stone
has frozen over, but under the ice
(like a soap-streaked shower curtain,
or distant light pollution),
a dozen goldfish churn the water
flourishing their Isadora fairy fins.
Above, a cat follows the orangey action,
pretend-yawns, skids, saunters
with sprawled claws. Winter insulates –
with just an inch of oxygen
the fish respire, feed, swim,
while our cat is a frenzy of gesture,
paws drumming: You are going
to die. If not now, in Spring, in Spring.

An Interview with Sarah Gorham, by Rachel Andoga

2011-11-09T15:15:00.002-05:00

Rachel Andoga talks with Sarah Gorham about her newest collection, Bad Daughter.

Rachel Andoga: The relationship between mothers and daughters is central to the book-what is it about that relationship in particular that drew you to launch a book-length investigation? Did you know that the book would organize itself around mothers and daughters? What surprised you as you investigated this bond from both sides?

Sarah Gorham: I'm the eldest in a family of five girls, had two daughters, one of whom has two daughters herself. Suffice it to say, I'm surrounded by daughters and mothers, and have now experienced all identities: daughter, mother, grandmother, and hopefully great-grandmother! My last book, The Cure, focused on a family recovery from alcoholism (among other things); it was clear to me as soon as I finished it, this would be the next step.

RA: In "Salon," the speaker struggles to remain "polite" despite the "foul water / stir[ring] under her 'nice' membrane." Many of the poems in Bad Daughter seem to celebrate what Poe called "the imp of the perverse," that impulse to indulge the worst in ourselves, especially in the context of female relationships or "feminine" environments like in "Salon." What draws you to this idea and how does it play out throughout Bad Daughter?

SG: "Bad" behavior is interesting to me, when it's not the result of mental illness. What strains will play out in continued difficulty through adulthood, what strains will make a more rounded, successful, assertive woman. If you speak to anyone in my birth family, they'll have stories of my terrible behavior (biting, scratching, bullying, shouting, shirking of responsibility) at home. Some of that acting out allowed me to take the kind of risk in my later life that led to successes. I love the language of bad behavior itself: permission to say the unpredictable, the utterly honest, even the mean. It's also where I've found my sense of humor.

RA: You play with form so compellingly throughout the collection, sometimes dipping into more traditional, classically recognizable forms like sonnets or prose poems and, at other times, turning these forms on their head, as in "Scaffold for a Sonnet," which not only plays with form but also comments on it. What is your relationship with traditional form and how do formal conventions operate in Bad Daughter?

SG: I managed to get through high school, college, and grad school without writing a single poem in form (this was definitely the era of free verse). My husband Jeffrey Skinner suggested I write an acrostic, then a sonnet, then a villanelle, when I was having trouble starting up again after grad school. What I love is the forced march towards something new: form yanks you away from the stuff you always write.

RA: Similarly, you seem to work with rhyme in these poems as a way closing or undercutting a striking moment. What role does sound play for you in your free verse poems?

SG: I think I have a good ear and love toying with music in all my writing: poetry and prose. Writing that lies flat (sonically) on the page is just not doing enough, not employing all the possibilities. You can obviously hear the difference when a writer reads her work. When I rhyme or alliterate (is there such a word?) I'm moving the line along as if it were a refrain, but also celebrating similarities between words. Then comes the verse, so to speak, which should sing out in a new key or everyone will get bored.

RA: Many of these poems seem to revel in the grittiness of the physical realm (both of the human body as well as natural landscapes). For example, "After the Accident" details the specific injuries and an operation following a car accident and the epigraph for the third section of the book explains how fetal cells can continue to exist in the mother's bloodstream dozens of years after she gives birth. What appeals to you about this kind of physicality, especially as it relates to the book's central concern of mothers and daughters?

SG: Here's a secret. My husband and I had a motorcycle accident out in the country. He was more seriously injured than I was: eighteen rib fractures, collapsed lung, chest tubes, then MRSA from his several operations. He nearly died. I cracked my chin, broke my toe, knocked my teeth back (and pushed them in place myself!) and suffered road rash in areas you'd never want it. So, I stole much his hospital experience and fused it into mine.

That said, the minute focus on body, the specific details are just another expression of the sharp honesty I was hoping for in this book. Also, all these women in my life are linked by DNA, which can appear to be gentle as braided hair or stringent as piano wire. What are we but a collage of body parts, something borrowed, something new.

RA: What have you been working on lately?

SG: I've been writing essays for the last ten years and have assembled a collection, called Study in Perfect. It's a natural progression from the longer lined poems I wrote for Bad Daughter, not to mention the subject matter. Some titles include: On Selfishness, On Lying, On Sentimentality, etc. And Study in Perfect (a segmented essay spread through the collection) of course, which is really a study of imperfection. They've all been published in good literary magazines. Now the trick is finding a book publisher for this kind of thing. You think it's hard in poetry!

* * *

Rachel Andoga is a poetry candidate in the Masters of Fine Arts program at Arizona State University. A graduate of Davidson College, she recently received a first-place award in the Academy of American Poets’ Katharine C. Turner Prize as well as runner up in Yemassee’s 2011 Pocataligo Poetry Contest. She has forthcoming work in an anthology titled …AND LOVE…, published by Jacar Press in 2012.

Newly-Appointed VT Poet Laureate Sydney Lea in Burlington Free Press

2011-11-07T14:31:00.005-05:00

from the Burlington Free Press:
The following is a slightly abridged version of Sydnea Lea’s acceptance speech Friday on being designated Vermont Poet Laureate:

I want immediately to start this commentary with some modesty, dismissing the notion, for example, that the opinions of poets are brighter than others, and particularly that poets are more “sensitive.” I’ve known barbers, loggers, and waitresses more sensitive to those around them than many poets. If poets do possess an enhanced sensitivity, it is surely only to language.

I have always hoped that my own words might speak to and sometimes for people whose command of them is less developed than mine. Yet even my poet’s claim to eloquence can collapse before me. I don’t want to strike an anti-intellectual pose here, because I have greatly benefited from scholarly intellects, nor some phony pose as poet of the people. Yet I’ll insist that if those with fancy educations like mine have no exclusive claim to brains, still less do they have one to lyric expression. Certain yarns and poems have had the profoundest influence on my view of the world. I heard most of these early on, from a cherished group of northern New England men and women with scanty formal education; but those testimonies have stayed with me at least as vividly as those of literary lions who sleep in more visited graves.

I have learned, too, in large part by association with my dear introducer Mary Leahy of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, that a sophisticated demeanor is no indication of a deeper humanity than that of many who struggle with the daunting challenges of illiteracy or sub-literacy. The accomplishments of such people make my own seem minuscule; they humble me.

But a little humility never hurt anyone. I know that in this poetry-rich state, there are people who have as good a claim to my new distinction as I do. I’m conscious too of the mastery that precedes me in the work and person of outgoing laureate Ruth Stone. Self-congratulation would erect barriers between my work and fabulously rich relationships and narratives, available from those fellow poets, yes, but also from many another citizen. With that in mind, I mean during my tenure to visit as many of Vermont’s town libraries as welcome me. I’m a long-time trustee of my own town’s library, and so understand the centrality of these institutions to community life. I’ll make my visits, though, not to spread wisdom but to garner it.

In “Hyla Brook,” one of my favorite poems by Vermont’s first poet laureate, Robert Frost celebrates a brook so small that it’s “A brook to none but who remember long.” With Hyla Brook, he says, things are “other far/ Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.” The poet concludes, however, that “We love the things we love for what they are.”

Like Frost I am no native, but like him too I do love our tiny state. I love Vermont for what it is: an enclave of civility amid the virulence of our current national life; a cauldron of inventiveness when many of us seem stuck in our tracks; a repository of humor at a time when Americans appear addicted to grimness; and –as the response to Irene demonstrated– a context for collaboration at a moment when, as one of my dear old native friends puts it, “people sometimes forget how to neighbor.”

Let us remember the imperative to neighborliness. Let us remember, in the words of another great poet, W.H. Auden, that “We must love one another or die.”

Pansy Poetics Reviews BLACK BLOSSOMS by Rigoberto Gonzalez

2011-11-02T17:17:00.003-04:00

On Rigoberto Gonzalez's New Collection "Black Blossoms"

I believe the dead listen to us. After his poetic mentor, Ai, died, Rigoberto González wrote quite movingly about her: "Even in my third book (which I dedicate to her memory) I can still detect traces of her influence--we shared a love for the dark and disturbing narratives and gave them homes on the page."

Never mawkish in his elegiac statements regarding Ai, González has always appeared respectful and honorable. No doubt Ai appreciates his prose tributes, but I strongly believe what would matter most to her is the development of his poems. With Black Blossoms, his new collection, González has performed the ultimate tribute: he has made his poems better than hers. I have no doubt she is still listening and learning from his work.

As an undergraduate, I was introduced to Ai in my first poetry workshop. I remember reading Cruelty and The Killing Floor and being shocked and relieved that someone could write about lower middle-class people with such determination. Ai truly strove to have an empathetic imagination and risked the potential failure and the predictable criticism that comes with it. I can still remember various Ai dramatic monologues: a boy who has just murdered his family; an aborted fetus; James Dean. Over the years, when I've returned to the poems of Ai, I've grown more ambivalent about her work. It's too easy to say that the poems are sensationalistic, exploitative. It is one of inevitable dangers of writing persona poems; it's a pretty boring knee-jerk liberal criticism--you're exploiting a certain class of people. However, truth be told, sometimes Ai did just that.

González's poems, though, offer a generous and urgent corrective of her occasional limitations. Through his extraordinary use of figurative language, he reveals that a wholly self-conscious aesthetic can triumph over a flat, journalistic one. To defend Ai, I think that her desire to tone down the language was most likely the belief that understatement works best when dealing with sex and violence. By rarely, if ever, challenging this assumption in her work, her books become somewhat repetitive. Through what I see as honorably defying Ai, González reveals the breadth and depth of what a personae poem can do.

One of González's recurring trademarks is his obsession with similes. Due to spiritual reasons, I've always been suspicious of them. Why not accept the fact that everything in this universe is on some level uniquely its own? To imply that something is "like" something else is to ungenerously take away from the thing's specialness. But in Black Blossoms, González's book, which consists largely of persona poems, the figurative language is used less to compare but to show a different side, a nuance, or a shocking oddity of and within the same thing.

In the poem "Flor de Muerto, Flor de Fuego," González exhibits this masterfully. Here's the opening. Pay particular attention to the two similes embedded in the rhetorical questions:

Cempoalxochitl. Marigold. Flower,
the scent of cold knuckles delights you, as does

the answer to death's riddles:
What's the girth of the hermit tongue once it retreats

into the throat and settles like a teabag?
What complaints do feet make when they tire of pointing

up and fold flat like a fan of poker cards?

Or take notice of the unexpected similes in the poem "Floricuatro":

Every birthday you eat a year off your mother's life--your mother plucked
in parts, petal by petal like the schizophrenic daisy, stares down as her heart

bubbles out vulnerable as yolk.

The list could go on indefinitely. But I must add one last one which is the opening of "The Mortician's Daughter Dies Each Night":

"When my father laughs my stomach scatters in the wind like hay."

Teabags, a fan of poker cards, a schizophrenic daisy, yolk, and --yes!-- even hay. What an odd and fascinating list of things juxtaposed in a single book of poems. By inserting these sort of images in a book that deals significantly with the grotesque, decaying bodies, political injustice, and violence, González's relies on similes to create an intimacy with the reader (you might not understand mental illness, but you can imagine a daisy!).

At the same time, he pushes the reader away by forcing them to remember that all they're doing is reading a poem with strategically artful language. The self-consciously slippery poetic language acknowledges that these personaes, these "scoundrels" (to use Ai's word) cannot be captured. They haven't found a home in life or on González's pages. He's acknowledging them in a supremely graceful and ethical way. Also, he gives the grotesque, the tragic some sort of relief. Rather than affirm the horrible with a comparison to a grotesque object, he offers the reader a kind of momentary solace; he doesn't want to add insult to injury.

Another prime example of how González achieves this is through metaphor in the poem entitled "Mise-En-Scene." After the title, it appears "after Lizzie Borden." Then the actual poem begins:

You are not a woman
you are not a ghost,
or the shrill that makes the neighbor's hounds abort.

You are not a space between buildings,
not wind tunnel or porthole
through which the indigent cat slips in and out of its coma.

You aren't the hermetic door with its back to the street,
You are not the center.
You are not the interruption of the window

surprising the postman as he skips the tin mailbox once more.
Every person in this house has died.
You buried your mother with a plum pit in her throat...

This poem is merciful. González allows the narrator of the poem acknowledges his own failure in his need to "capture" Lizzie Borden. Gender is but only one of ways González does this, creating a wonderful, peculiar jitteriness

You are not the dress
that opens from the outside like an iron gate,
you're not the stupid woman

with her finger shoved inside her mouth.
When she goes up in flames
she will melt into the fruit bowl.

You are not the fire, you are not the bowl.

There's what I like to call a discursive lyricism operating in González's poems. Although the poems are long-lined (at least much more so than in his last book, Fugitives and Other Strangers), González interweaves just the right amount of figurative language with a necessary talkiness in the speech of these tragic personaes.. To limit, as Ai did, your characters' speech into "chopped" prose, isn't fair--they deserve the space, a large enough space, to explore their thoughts, motivations behind their unsavory actions. Paradoxically, as the personae of Marisol in "The Mortician's Bride Says I'm Yours" says, "Sound is death because it's /irretrievable and every time I speak I die a little more."

If it wasn't sacrilegious to insist, I would say that through the splendor of Gonzáalez's poems, he allows them to live once again in every delicate, precarious way they deserve.

Rigoberto González's Black Blossoms is available for purchase at Four Way Books.
Posted by Steve Fellner

An Interview with Rose McLarney

2011-10-31T17:31:00.004-04:00

An Interview with Rose McLarney
by Justin Bigos

Justin Bigos: Rose, there are many things to admire in your forthcoming, first book of poems, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. The book contains voices, and yet I sense a voice; stories, and yet I sense a story. You have a poem titled “Ars Poetica,” and another titled “Poet,”but there are many poems in this collection that could stand for the whole, the way a leaf of a fern looks like a fern. It’s a big question, but can you talk a bit about how you see these poems speaking to each other? And how did that help you arrange them into the pages of a book?

Rose McLarney: These are my ambitions for The Always Broken Plates of Mountains: A cast of speakers, like a chorus, express the thoughts of people who share a rural background and landscape. The landscape is more than the physical setting in the Appalachian mountains—it’s an atmosphere created by weaving together stories of both personal and larger cultural loss. The poems are not only about romantic love, but perhaps more significantly, about faithfulness to place. Though the perspective in this sequence varies, the poems are united by a characteristic voice. The voices are alike in that they are understated and musical, with tendencies to defer and deflect, as were the voices around me as I grew up. The voices are also united because they speak of love and loss, experiences that are so utterly un-unique that perhaps the only way they can be interesting is to use them as points of commonality.

At least that’s what I hope happens in the book. A significant time for me as a writer was a morning when I was shuffling through my many poems and began to think that they weren’t necessarily redundant because they addressed the same themes, or necessarily at odds because their speakers were different, but that they could work together. Now, reading and writing poems in series and sequences is a kind of acknowledgment that, though poetry can look so concise and definitive, you can’t express a thing well enough all that quickly or easily. Or I can’t. Sequences give me a chance to make the admission that I may never articulate what I want to completely, yet show my continuing best efforts.

Of course, while series allow me to try out different iterations of an idea, they are also limiting. A number of the poems I write just wouldn’t fit in this book. (For instance, some of my greatest pleasures are rather exotic cooking and experimental music and those subjects have no home in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains.) I’m well into working on my second book and, for it, I am trying to write distinctly different poems about another country, another continent, from another point of view, and there will be poems that won’t find company in this collection either.

In answer to your question about how the poems are arranged in the book, they are grouped by and progress through an arc of tones (though nothing as neat as a plot triangle). My intention was for the book to feel as if it resolved—even if the resolution at which it arrives is a message about disappearing, keeping quiet, being still. (Those may be some of the predominant messages I got from mountain culture. I don’t want to romanticize it. Of course, that instruction in humility may have also prepared me to inhabit personas.)

JB: I admire the various qualities of imagery in the book. In your poem “At the Mountain State Fair,” you write, “Rides are lighting up the night,/ shaking people and making them shriek.” The imagery resides in the music of the lines: the long i sounds in the first line, which rises in pitch—suddenly shaken by the long a and sh-sounds and jerky rhythm in the second line. You’ve managed to create the sense of a roller coaster in only two lines. In another poem you write the indelible image of bridesmaids climbing a silo to line “the steel tower/ with fuchsia, powder pink, red, and orange satin.” The image is striking in its colorful juxtaposition. How do poems let you know if they require different qualities of image? Are you mostly listening to the lines or seeing what they summon?

RM: My ideas tend to originate from images. Every night, I make myself write one image from the day in a notebook. The notebook is in no way a journal—you could read it and have absolutely no ideas of the events that had occurred. But the notes give me something to search through for commonalities, and allow me to start poems from a concrete, grounded source.

Only after I’ve got a sense of what I want the poem to say do I let sound drive it. I don’t turn to sound as a source until later because, as much as I am drawn to music, I understand it less and coherence and clarity are big concerns of mine. Yet, sound is essential—and I’m appreciative that you noted it in your analysis—because it is often what lets writing achieve some sort of transcendence, something I didn’t expect, and it is what can save my poems from being overly rational arguments or simplistic equations of image and meaning.

JB: One of the recurring concerns in the book is story. Story is often associated with the South, and your poems both embrace and toy with that association. In your poem, “They Said It Was Too Late,” you write of meeting a man “who told the kind of stories/ I wanted to hear.” In “Jubilation, Then,” the speaker says, “Once, stories . . . were like explosions of elderberries.” And in “Disclaimer,” the speaker mentions a place called “Lover’s Leap,” named for a Cherokee girl who killed herself out of love, but actually is just a place where “a coon hunter” fell over—and lived. The final stanza of the poem: “and you can see why they tell the story/ the way they do,/ and why I prefer their stories.” While the poems embrace story, as it is connected to place, the speakers seem to understand that story is ultimately a fiction, a work of art—and therefore to be savored. How much is your book a defense of story, in the Southern tradition—if it is such, and if there is such—and how much of this is just Rose McLarney being Rose McLarney?

RM: While I value the way poetry can stay in a moment and I have never been particularly interested in what happens—in events, in action, in change, in leaving—I am interested in story in the sense that I am interested in how the manner of telling makes the meaning. We all know that eyewitness accounts are not dependable evidence, that any two people’s memories of events and exchanges differ. So, whether it’s about a region or a relationship, when you choose to tell a story with nostalgia or condescension or another tone, you are making the history it will survive as longer than whatever the actuality was. If you can stand the story-teller role, there’s a way in which what you know well never is really lost.

The poem you mentioned earlier, my “Ars Poetica,” is not literally my story, which should give you an idea of how thoroughly I take advantage of personas. The speaker’s rarely Rose McLarney. I’m not all that fascinating and I worry about being liked too much. That’s why I am constantly espousing the idea to my students that what could really be most liberating in writing poems is not confessing their autobiographical secrets but becoming someone else.

Perhaps even worse than that for my students, if they misapply my writing advice to their personal lives, is my suggestion that there are truths truer than the truth. To elaborate on what any fiction writer knows: While the chalk mine in “Ars Poetica” might have been a couple counties away from the school I attended, or a man’s diction was not quite so refined, if it is the image of that stripped mountain or the summation of his words that best and most economically illustrates what I want the reader to register, isn’t the altered version the more accurate?

All that said, the poems are representative of, emblematic of, and indebted to direct experience of the landscape and culture in which I live.

[...]

Read the rest of the interview here!

C. Dale Young's TORN in the Bellevue Literary Review

2011-10-31T16:53:00.004-04:00

Poetry and Medicine:

Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

C. Dale Young [...] takes his time. A reader might be forgiven for thinking that a man who practices radiation oncology full time while teaching poetry in a graduate program, and working as poetry editor of the New England Review would be rushed. However, each of his stories unfolds slowly, and while he may loop back to adjust a detail, his narratives move resolutely forward. The main subject of the book is the loss of faith—in the Church, in love, in the body, in America, in mentors. The book is about how to move forward in the face of betrayed trust. What saves Young is his sense of awe. He asks to see the branching scars of a man hit by lightning out of intrigue, not medical necessity. Young embraces tenderness in the absence of faith, a quality he meditates about beautifully:

Tenderness? How do you
define that? I define it this way: the care to address
another’s concerns with the same exacting care one expects
for himself. And this is dark. It has always been dark. (58)

Young’s vision is bodily. He knows that to open the body is to find blood and guts. He can never lose the knowledge of what we are made of.

It may mark me as naïve, but I found the racism of his training shocking. In one poem, a doctor quizzes him “in plain sight, in front of all the nurses, the residents, / the interns, the clerks, the other students. She wanted / you to answer incorrectly, wanted to shame you” (70). But even after he passes the test, her cruelty trumps his success:

she announced to everyone that you were the best
minority student she had ever had. And you took it.
You wanted to be like a duck, to let it all wash off of you.

But even in that praise, there was venom. Even in praise,
she found a way to shame you, single you out. And you hid
behind correct answers. But now you must make it personal.(71)

For Young, there is a sense that poetry is a form of redemption, which he needs more than ever, now that salvation is off limits. Poetry replaces faith, for it too can bring structure to a chaotic world in need of order and meaning.

In a sequence of poems about religion, Young addresses God as both visceral and intimate, calling to mind Carl Phillips or Jack Gilbert. In one poem, Young finds himself sinking into a sea of men, in violation of Catholic edict, but also because of it. In Young’s sense of sin, one feels that “formal feeling” of baroque sorrow that points backward to frenzied pleasure.

… In every man, God
had placed himself. In every man, I sought

to touch that God. Silly, I know. Silly.
What I wanted then was to break God’s heart—
I wanted him to snap my neck, break my back. (35-36)

The thrill of Young’s work (paradoxically) is that it takes place in slow motion. The collision is set in motion early in the poem, and inexorably, the impact approaches. The endings of his poems are devastating precisely because they have been coming for so long. He makes us wait, but always delivers. As he says of God: “He lifts me up/ to remind me of my foolish fear of heights” (38).

Poetry has never exactly been the province of the happy. Since the advent of writing, the poet has been a malcontent, a surly outsider wondering why things can’t go her way. Sappho may be the Queen of Lesbia, but she still can’t make that girl love her. James Merrill may have been born with a silver spoon the size of an oar, but he still can’t reassemble the jigsaw of his broken home. So it ought not to be surprising that the poetry of these healers would express such frustration with the medical establishment. But it is surprising to realize how consistent their complaints are about the arrogance of doctors, of the cruelty in placing the profession before the patient, of the need for humility when our culture can only value boasting.

In the title poem “Torn,” Young’s attending sends him to “stitch up the faggot”—and though “told to spend less than 20 minutes, I sat there / for over an hour closing the wound so that each edge / met its opposing match” (85). In the end, what it is needed is time; what is needed is kindness; what is needed is skill.

+

Jason Schneiderman is the author of the poetry collections Sublimation Point and Striking Surface.

Donate to the Asian American Writers Workshop Project on Kickstarter to Win a Private Workshop with Monica Youn!

2011-10-24T17:04:00.003-04:00

Support PAGE TURNER: Asian American Literary Festival on October 29, 2011 and choose from a collection of rewards that highlight the breadth and depth of Asian American talent. Among other prizes offered to donors, you can win a 1-hour private poetry workshop with Ignatz author (Four Way Books, 2010) and National Book Award Finalist Monica Youn!

Click here to read more about the project or to donate. And don't forget to come by the Asian American Writers Workshop on Friday, November 4 at 7pm to hear Monica read with fellow Four Way Books authors Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan and Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang! 110-112 W. 27th Street, Sixth Floor (buzzer 600), $5 Suggested Donation

Monica Youn, the author of Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010) and Barter (Graywolf, 2003), lives in New York, where she is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, focusing on election law issues. Her political commentary has appeared in Slate, Roll Call, and The Huffington Post. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. For her work on Ignatz, she has been awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

"It's No Contest" - New Four Way Books Submission Opportunity for Emerging NYC Poets

2011-10-24T13:09:00.003-04:00

Dear New York City Emerging Poets (5 borroughs):

Please consider submitting your first or second poetry collection to us through our new "It's No Contest" Program.

We will read your manuscript with a mind to selecting it for publication until December 15, 2011.

FWB editors hope to find one or more manuscripts to publish between fall 2012-2013.
Your manuscript should be comprised of 40-80 pages of text.
Please include a cover page with your name and contact info. You must live in NYC.
You may also include an acknowledgments page and a bio if you'd like.
The manuscript should be emailed to editors@fourwaybooks.com until December 15, 2011.
Please email your manuscript in word, rtf, or as a pdf. IF we cannot open it, we will get in touch with you.

This is a new opportunity for emerging NYC poets and we hope to continue the program.
Stay in touch with FWB for future developments through our website, emails, Facebook, and Twitter.

The Courier Journal Reviews BAD DAUGHTER by Sarah Gorham

2011-10-24T13:00:00.003-04:00

from the Courier Journal:

by Dominic Russ

Disarming as it is honest, Bad Daughter — like the unruly child the title suggests — refuses to stay seated as it makes a mess of the dinner table. With pluck and tenderness, Sarah Gorham’s fourth collection of poems pulls back the veneer of American family life and feels out the complicated layers of satisfaction and disappointment hidden within the procreative imperatives that drive one generation into the next. Parents who lovingly watch their sons and daughters become parents of their own, inevitably stand vis-à-vis with their own posterity as they contemplate the faces of their children and grandchildren, no matter how adorably plump their cheeks may be. Likewise, despite the best intentions, the birth of every child launches each parent into unknown trajectories of love and despair, of fear and comfort. The traits we loathe in ourselves often find reincarnation in our onetime darlings, leading mom and dad to relive their childhoods through the lens of their children and re-evaluate the adults they’ve become. Though this often makes us more keen (and perhaps forgiving of our parents’ faults), ultimately the child the parent once led into the world leads them out of it.

From poem to poem, Gorham’s latest collection deftly assumes multiple perspectives as it tackles life as a parent, child, wife and grandmother. True, critics often avoid point of view in the lingo we apply to poetry, but it’s precisely her employment of point of view that allows this collection to permeate generations and peek into every room of the household. From the lulling, nursery-rhyme cadences of “Our House” to the phone call tandem of “Passeggiata” that traces the growing estrangement between a mother and a daughter away at school, the author carves out a full family spectrum. Fathers and husbands work their way in too, as the narrator of “Dusk” discovers revitalization in an aging marriage with these touching lines:

“We touch each other’s faces in the dark
the reason floats up slow —
why we married so long ago.”

Though unflinching and astute in her observation of family dynamics, Gorham never misses the opportunity to make us laugh. Yes, nature can be cruel with all kinds of hazards and accidents — some as charming as the evasions of a child to escape blame for a needle stuck in her foot, others leading to the surgeon’s table after a crash on a country road — but still the author reminds us to keep our humor as she slips the occasional laugh-out-loud jab. Lines like: “When we were bad, we were extravagant / Like cruise ships through a canal” and “Memory is a ditzy court reporter” chuckle alongside such playful interrogations as “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?” and the more cryptic “What is progress but a deer chased through the forest / by Slovakian curses?”

Perhaps the most arresting feature of this collection arrives through Gorham’s uncanny ability to match the physical to the psychological through an exact appropriation of unforgettable details. In Bad Daughter these correlatives achieve a sort of sentient clarity as the author somehow sneaks the ephemeral into the tangible, the transcendental into the concrete: the blossom of a small girl’s hair sinking into a bath tightens into a mother’s and daughter’s teeth that match up like a zipper; the way a grandmother must slake her appetite to procreate (a newborn — the author reminds us — is a drug) upon something equally large and impassive, such as the Jungfrau peak in the Alps.

In the end, Bad Daughter manages to guide the reader through the ambiguities of family life, leaving us fuller and wiser when all the pages have been turned and we return to our own households.

Gorham lives in Louisville with her husband, author Jeff Skinner, and is the editor-in-chief of Sarabande Books.

The Common Issue 2 Launch - ft. Daniel Tobin, Katia Kapovich, Philip Nikolayev and Jennifer Acker

2011-10-24T12:51:00.001-04:00

10/28/2011 @ 7:00 pm

Brookline Booksmith

Join three stellar poets and Editor Jennifer Acker as they launch the second issue of local literary magazine The Common. Dedicated to highlighting short stories, poetry and essays with a strong sense of place, The Common serves as a local mixing-ground for ideas. Their second issue features work by Daniel Tobin, Katia Kapovich, Philip Nikolayev, Major Jackson, Ilan Stavans, and more.

Location:
279 Harvard Street
Coolidge Corner
Brookline, Massachusetts
02446-2908
United States

BEAR, DIAMONDS AND CRANE by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan is the October Selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club

2011-10-24T12:38:00.002-04:00

Why I Chose Bear, Diamonds and Crane

Rumpus Poetry Club Board Member Camille T. Dungy on why she chose Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s Bear, Diamonds and Crane as the October selection of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club:

Out of the deepest
wound, a new bloom, black ink on
beige flower petals.

“The Gift of Inheritance”

The long and the short of it: That’s why I chose Bear, Diamonds and Crane.

I appreciate the moments of distillation in Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s latest book.[1] The poems tell stories of displacement and connection. They reach deep into history but feel very much of the now. They tell incredibly personal stories, but they reveal the communal connections between her own experiences and so many others’.[2] There are poems about war between nations, between neighbors, within families, within the self. There are poems in which women fight their own bodies, using food, drugs, denial to protest the realities of their own flesh.[3] There are haiku, and lists, and fat chunky columns of text over two pages long.[4] Kageyama-Ramakrishnan moves from the misty world of poetic nuance to the direct confrontation of dramatic narrative and just as quickly back again.[5] The constant disorientation and reorientation is part of the wonder of this book. [6] Out of her deepest wounds, poems.[7]

***

[1] I also like the way she’s not afraid to stretch into ideas, and how she lingers on one loss for a while, as if she knows that the totality of loss can’t be confined to one meditation.

[2] I am particularly interested in the ways that Kageyama-Ramakrishnan made the disclosure of Japanese, Japanese-American, and Indian cultural histories part of the fabric of her poems. The texture of so many of the pieces depends on descriptions of lives fully lived. The cultural and historical details I’ve just mentioned are as much a part of the descriptions of these lives as are her sensory details: her colors, her tastes, her sounds.

[3] Then there are the poems of desperate desire to hold onto the body. Poems that confront the terrible consequences of a body fighting itself.

[4] It is as if the poems are formally working against the confines of the body. As if they are warring with themselves and each other to decide what sort of body would best hold the poet/spirit.

[5] Frequently, her thoughts seem to overflow beyond the confines of the poems. The notes section of Bear, Diamonds and Crane grows into an integral part of the book. In reading it, I sense even more the enormity of history and emotion Kageyama-Ramakrishnan is tackling in these poems.

[6] That connotative pun was not originally intended, but I will keep it now that it is written because it seems of a piece with the concerns of this book.

[7] We who read the poems experience both direct and indirect reenactments of the processes by which she came to bear these wounds.

OF GODS & STRANGERS by Tina Chang Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

2011-10-24T12:31:00.001-04:00

Of Gods & Strangers
Tina Chang. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (100p) ISBN 978-1-935536-17-8

Chang’s high-intensity second collection tracks her needs, desires, and disappointments and her quest to fit them into a trans-Pacific history: one notable series sets her inner life beside that of the Empress Dowager, the last imperial ruler of China, who died in 1908. The dowager poems, scattered throughout the book, sometimes portray the poet as empress, or create a study in contrasts between two household roles, two nations, two intricate webs of needs: “How the past/ holds onto us with its short leash/ and yelping,” Chang writes; “existence is a small/ lit match hurled toward you./ You dodge it and smell smoke.” Chang’s portrayals of modern life tend toward bright colors, strong statements, and can be cartoonish: “An urge for urgency, my soul hangs like a puppet,/ knocks between my lungs, bends to the song of the sister/ peach tree: Love me when all the ripe clusters drop.” Chang sets poems in postearthquake Haiti, in Sri Lanka after civil war. Traveling, reading the news, Chang’s persona also goes out to the clubs. Yet what stands out most are her looks back at history: “The Empress Dowager Contemplates Her Lineage,” “The Empress Dreams After a Poisoned Meal.” (Oct.)

BAD DAUGHTER by Sarah Gorham Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

2011-10-24T12:28:00.003-04:00

Bad Daughter
Sarah Gorham. Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (84p) ISBN 978-1-935536-16-1

The clear-eyed poems of Sarabande Books publisher Gorham’s fourth collection of poems charts the sometimes transcendent, sometimes terrifying, often uneasy spaces that open between mothers and daughters who then become mothers themselves. “The baby is a drug, for she makes us hungry and delirious,” opens one poem that celebrates the at-times intoxicating bliss of motherhood, while another insists on a sort of opposite: “When your daughter matures, the tree must be sacrificed./ A phoenix will alight there/ only when the queen steps down.// You must step down.” The ingenious “Scaffold for a Sonnet” makes a mighty leap between the soft, clean-your-room scolding of “Your clothes/ spread across the floor.// Good citizens—/hang them/ by their shoulders” and “a rose/ fastened/ to a lattice// arrests the sun.” More quotidian connections join a mother and her grown daughter: “There’s always the mail. And the cell phone, like a human cobweb.” Finally, it’s the daughter who leads the mother deeper into these poems, which can also inhabit a dream space that only the bond between a parent and child makes visible, where, “If you follow the dog into slumber,/ you’ll find an oval of grass” and “I hold my daughter’s hair like a dog’s lead./ ‘Now you follow me,’ she cries.” (Oct.)

A Conversation with Poet Sydney Lea in the Iron Horse Literary Review

2011-10-21T15:39:00.004-04:00

A Conversation with Poet Sydney Lea

Poet Sydney Lea visited the campus of Texas Tech University on September 22, 2011. A few hours before his reading that evening, Lea was kind enough to answer questions from students and faculty. What follows is an excerpt from that conversation.

Q: Why would a guy have a truck full of stunks? [laughter] You don’t quite get at it in the poem, which I think is beside the point, but I still ponder it and ponder it to this day. [The poem in question is titled “Fathomless” and appears online here.]

A: Well, I think the point of the poem is, “Why?” I don’t have an answer, that’s the thing. Quite a long time ago I walked into a little general store, and it smelled like every skunk in Vermont lived there. I couldn’t figure it out, but then I traced it to an individual who was walking around and smelled like he had taken a bath in skunk spray. Then when I went out into the parking lot, I noticed he had all these dead skunks—I say in the poem it was in a truck, but it was actually a Bronco. And I felt like somebody should’ve spoken up, said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

But I didn’t, and nobody else did either. I felt bad for the couple of old women, whom I knew, who ran that store, you know, both of them eighty or so. They were too polite to say anything, but clearly it was gonna be a long time before people walked in there without saying, “What the hell? Did you have a skunk under the house or something?”

And then, ten years later, I just happened to smell a skunk, and I thought of that and I began pondering why, but I don’t think the poem answers the question. . . . I don’t know why.

Q: I guess I’ll ask the real question I want to get at, considering that poem and maybe some of just your general aesthetic. There seems to be a lot of restraint in that poem, because you’ve just juxtaposed the death of your brother with this horrid experience that happens at the same time. That smell recalls all this stuff, and you refrain from trying to figure out how these two things are connected, other than by the smell. Can you talk about how, in your work and in the stuff that you like to read and in other poetry that’s out there, how you think restraint works, and how it should work?

A: That’s a good question. I remember way back in the seventies, I applied for an NEA fellowship, and in those days you could write in and get a report—I didn’t get one [a fellowship], and so I wanted to know, and I read several critiques, and you know, [feigning arrogance] obviously they were crazy, stupid. But there was one that said, “Trivial subject matter. Verbose treatment.” So I think he was twitting me (or she) for not being sufficiently restrained. I thought you were going to ask a different kind of question . . . but since you didn’t, I’m going to try and address that. [laughter]

Q: You can answer the other one. [more laughter]

A: No, um . . . [sighs]. I don’t know that I would have an answer, that I can draw a line in the sand and say, “You go too far, you’re not being restrained enough.” In fact, and I’ve quoted this sometimes in workshops with my own students, I remember that an early mentor of mine (speaking of not always being completely restrained) was Richard Hugo, and he invited me to send him some poems, one at a time over a period of time in the early eighties. I think I had one book out, but I’d been working on another one. I sent him a poem and I said, “I’m afraid that it might be corny.” You know, I might have gone too far. And he wrote to me back, and he said, “If you’re not risking being corny then you’re really not in the ballgame at all.”

So it’s a matter of stepping up to that line. The things that we call “corny” are just too much of a genuine thing, right? An overstatement of things that are genuine enough, or else they wouldn’t have fallen into the great sort of poet-well of sentimentality.

But as to when you know that is, I still trust my wife. She’s the only person I show my work to now, and she’s pretty good at detecting that line. She’s the kind of critic I want, because she’s very literate but she’s not literary. She’s good at detecting that and saying, “You’re just going over the top here, you’ve already made that clear.” And the other thing she’s good at detecting is when I’m just sort of faking it. She has her own little series of marginal comments—you know, most editorial comments are like stet or del or whatever, maybe a little carat—she’s got one that’s NASG, which is New Age Sensitive Guy, which means I’m faking a little bit. She says, “I know you well enough, you’re not that good. Come on!” [laughter]

But I’m very reliant on her, and particularly in that way, because I think in my case, I’ve got one of these sort of all-you-can-eat personalities. I’m inclined at times [to fake it]—I hope less as I’ve gotten older; I think I’ve learned a little the matter of restraint. I think it’s often a matter of learning to trust yourself, you know, that what you’ve observed and what you’ve rendered and what you’ve said is adequate, that it doesn’t need to be expounded upon so that the reader will get it.

And I know that myself, in teaching especially beginning writers, one of the more common things I will see is that urge to explain. Especially at the end of the poem, when everything has been made perfectly clear. It’s what I call the Arthur Miller ending, you know, when you watch the play and everything’s perfectly clear, [at the end] there’s a character who comes on stage and tells you what it was all about. And there’s a curious way in which, as a reader, I feel condescended to. It’s like, “You thought I was so damn dumb that I didn’t know this, so you had to put in all this extra explanation.”

But I think—I hope—the capacity to say enough and not too much is something that, like anything else . . . anything you do for a long time seriously and regularly is something you get better at, whether it’s shooting baskets or writing poems. . . .

New Review of In a Beautiful Country in Mixer!

2011-10-20T17:13:00.003-04:00

Review: In a Beautiful Country, by Kevin Prufer
by Allison Harden Moen

Mixer Blog

As the blue and white pills spilled on the cover suggest, Kevin Prufer’s fourth collection of poetry, In a Beautiful Country, is reminiscent of a self-medicated half-drunken dream. As such, it acts as the aperitif to National Anthem: the former is sober enough to mourn the loss of a society, whereas the latter whispers from the daze of one too far gone.

Immediately in the first two stanzas of the title poem, Prufer lures readers into his world of resignation, subverting expectations of beauty and love into what reads like a twisted advice column:

A good way to fall in love

is to turn off the headlights

and drive very fast down dark roads.

Another way to fall in love

is to say they are only mints

and swallow them with a strong drink.

Perhaps, herein is where Prufer’s greatest strength lies: by revealing the darkness underneath the “good” surface. In this “beautiful” country, falling in love equals committing suicide; love is violent like “broken glass” and is likened to scissors. In this poem and throughout, Prufer shatters images of the loving, darling and angelic, and tosses them like broken shards of glass to be crushed under the feet of their traditional definitions.

Similarly, in “Love Poem,” Prufer exhibits anything but the traditional idea of love. The speaker woos his love by describing the bomb he’s making, warning his love to be “careful of when it decays, careful, it may implode.” The theme of destructive love also reappears in Prufer’s series of “Ars Poetica” poems exploring the philosophy of his art.

Readers of his previous collections shouldn’t be surprised to see he includes a series of “Ars Poetica,” this time devoting six pages to the topic. In the first poem of the series, Prufer employs a metered form, which is rather ironic considering the majority of his work doesn’t take on such constraints. This iambic tetrameter poem speaks of how art is birthed out of destruction: a bomb blows up a barn and makes the speaker think of art. The barn burns, and a poem rises from the cinders. The speaker thanks the “kindly God” who “tore the town apart” for the sake of the art that resulted. Perhaps in the following lines, Prufer most clearly sums up his aesthetic, and the theme of In a Beautiful Country altogether:

The artist’s mind does well

to look on human ill

and find in it

some beauty.

Turn the page, and the second “Ars Poetica” is less straightforward. In this landscape, a phone rings, and a brand new poem appears out of the first snow of spring. Finally, in “Four Artes Poetica,” Prufer uses four visceral snapshots to represent his art — each taking place in an empty yard. In the first, art is a blind eye “bloodshot and enraged” inside the center of an onion. In the second, it is personified as a heart “like a giant insect / in a cage” that devours squares of pages. In the third, it is a butterfly dissected. In the fourth scene, the yard becomes blank like an empty page, and out of this emptiness “a little ink pulsed out.” It is a trapped art, but it survives nonetheless.

Formwise, Prufer maintains his signature, somewhat rambling free verse couplets primarily throughout. Yet herein also lies his greatest weakness: his inability to know quite where to end. A handful of poems, particularly “Love Poem” and “In Some Parts of the Movie We’re Comrades,” seem perfectly complete after the first page, only to continue on with a stanza beginning with “then …” or a second page of continuing exposition. The overall effect isn’t completely lost, just watered down a bit.

Consequently, Prufer manipulates page breaks to his advantage with a great deal of skill in the striking “Burial Hymn in Winter,” one of the collection’s strongest poems. Here, after the en dash on the bottom of the page, I wanted to read more but found a blank page.

Prufer also sprinkles in a few metered pieces, such as “Cartoon Featurette,” written in ballad stanzas; “What I Gave to the 20th Century,” a hybrid-style sonnet based in a Petrarchan-type rhyme scheme; and “The 20th Century,” also a hybrid sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme, showcasing his ability to utilize metered verse just as effectively as free verse.

Finally, in the concluding poem, “Postscript,” Prufer ties the collection together in a matter-of-fact fashion, cataloging the previous 109 pages like items on a grocery list:

Here is my receipt for the paper

Thank you. It snowed the whole way to the store,

which was crowded with secretaries. Thank you

for reimbursing me for my expenses.

It is as if Prufer is stating to readers: here is my best attempt to create beauty, take it or leave it. Though the world from which his poetry arises is falling apart, balancing on an ever-spinning wagon wheel, Kevin Prufer manages to do just that — and give it wings.

Kevin Prufer Readings: Tonight and Monday 10/24!

2011-10-17T13:39:00.007-04:00

Thursday, October 20

Cleveland, Ohio. John Carroll University. 7:00pm. Rodman Hall, Room A. With Wayne Miller.

Monday, October 24

Louisville, KY. The Sarabande Books Reading Series. 7:30PM. 21C Museum Hotel, 700 West Main Street. With Nicole Cooley.

Monica Youn Reads Oct 23 at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn

2011-10-14T16:29:00.002-04:00

http://www.bookforum.com/events/location=2751

Oct 23, 2011 7:00pm-9:00pm
John Haskell! Monica Youn! Matthew Derby! Camden Joy! Lonely Christopher!

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238-3803

John Haskell is the author of a pair of novels, most recently Out of My Skin (FSG) about the spiritual journey of a Steve Martin impersonator and the collection of short stories, I'm Not Jackson Pollock. His work has been praised by Nick Cave, A.M. Homes, Geoff Dyer and Ben Marcus.

Monica Youn is the author of the National Book Award finalist Ignatz, a collection of poetry themed around George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strips series, which ran from 1913 to 1944 and featured a love triangle between a police officer dog, a good-hearted cat and an anarchist mouse. She is also the author of Barter and active as a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice and has appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Matthew Derby is the author of Super Flat Times: Stories (Back Bay Books, 2003). His writing has appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and The Believer, where he served in various editing capacities from 2003 to 2007.

Tom Adelman / Camden Joy - Tom Adelman is the author of a pair of unusual, thoughtful, literate baseball books, including the best-selling Long Ball about the 1975 World Series. Under the pseudonym Camden Joy, he wrote five books that transformed his obsession with rock music into novels and rants about figures, including Frank Black, Liz Phair, David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven, The Eagles and Al Green. These beautifully hand-printed books presaged the Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. His work has been praised by Dave Eggers, Jonathon Lethem and Dennis Cooper. He will perform a series of songs from his recently released concept album about the government's presidential coin program.

Lonely Christopher is an American poet, fiction writer, dramatist, and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry volume Into (with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman) and the fiction collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse from Little House on the Bowery, Dennis Cooper's imprint on Akashic. Currently he is directing his first feature length film, MOM, which he also wrote. His latest chapbook, Poems in June, is newly released from The Corresponding Society.

In Frost's Footsteps: Sydney Lea in the Burlington Free Press

2011-10-10T14:00:00.003-04:00

In Frost's footsteps: Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea

Burlington Free Press

by Sandy Pollak

It was the mid-1970s, and Sydney Lea was an English professor at Dartmouth, bound by the cliche of the tenure track: publish or perish. He pulled out of hiding his dissertation, in hopes of finding within it the seeds of an article or two he could write to meet the academic requirements.

"In those days, you didn't need to publish a book no one would read," Lea said. "But a couple of articles no one would read."

When he opened the document he had written to earn his Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, "it was like looking into an abyss," Lea said.

"I spoke aloud," Lea recalled last week. "I said, 'I don't want to do this when I grow up."

He was 34.

Instead, Lea wanted to write poetry. He had had written some verse years earlier - the standard "break-up with your girlfriend poetry that we all do, and hope will disappear into the great void."

Nonetheless, staring into the abyss of his past scholarship, Lea recognized he wanted to write.

"I decided to let the chips fall where they might, and where they would," Lea said.

Last month, the chips fell in a big and wholly unexpected way for Lea: Gov. Peter Shumlin named Lea poet laureate of Vermont.

Lea, 68, who lives in Newbury, will formally assume his position Nov. 4 at a ceremony at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier. He succeeds Ruth Stone of Ripton and will become the seventh poet to hold the title that first belonged to Robert Frost.

"It never occurred to me that I'd be on the list," Lea said. "I could think of at least half a dozen people to which it could go," he said. "I have to say that if I had thought about it, I find it more gratifying than I would've thought.

"I really love Vermont. I love just about all the things about it. To get that kind of ratification, it feels right. I've been writing the right kinds of things for my locale, and to have it acknowledged is very gratifying."

Lea is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including the 2011 collection, "Young of the Year" (Four Way Books). He has four books in the works, including the planned 2013 publication of "I Was Thinking of Beauty." [...]

Read the rest of the article here.

Collier Nogues to read at UCI Bookstore Author Series

2011-10-07T16:59:00.006-04:00

Collier Nogues and Ryan Ridge

Wednesday, Oct 19, 2011
5:00PM
The UCI Bookstore

210-B Student Center
Irvine, CA 92697-1550

Free and open to the public
Refreshments will be served

Collier Nogues’ eye opening work, On the Other Side, Blue, explores the human relationships everyone has with death, family, place, landscape, history, love, and marriage—all brought together by one of the most natural human emotions, grief. Nogues directly takes on each subject, with vivid true-life stories from her own experiences and then incorporates her superb writing style to enhance the story. Beautifully, this allows her to be both a participant in and an observer of the act mourning, identifying similarities and variations in the ways grief encompasses a full range of emotions.

A UCI lecturer, Collier Nogues grew up in the Texas Hill Country and on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. She completed her MFA at UCI in 2008. Since then, she has been writing and teaching in Oregon as well as in Southern California.

*

UCI Lecturer Ryan Ridge’s edgy novel, Hunters & Gamblers, is perfect for any reader looking for a dark, humorous story about people just trying to find their way in life. Exploring a broad array of characters, from an ammo-less infantry drummer to a bleeding medic, and everything in between, this novel keeps readers engaged at all levels and challenges them to keep up with this epic tale of misfits. Ultimately, the characters reach a desperate end where revelations are plentiful. Ridge, with his clever, dark and cynical writing, has created his own unique and masterful style that adds a sense of refreshing originality.

Ryan Ridge is an acclaimed author with a talent for fiction that has been fully employed in his new novel, Hunters & Gamblers. He currently teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Contact bstore@uci.edu for more info

New Tumblr Site for the Silent Auction!

2011-10-06T13:30:00.003-04:00

Visit our new Tumblr site for next week's silent auction for photos of some of the items you can bid on or purchase!

Come bid on tickets for the 2012 US Open (Tennis); cupcakes from Coquette Bakery; a tour of Central Park with Justin Martin, author of GENIUS OF PLACE: The Life of Frederick Law Olmstead; a tour of Rockefeller Center with Daniel Okrent, author of GREAT FORTUNE: the Epic of Rockefeller Center; a personal training session; a cookie decorating class; a Vermont retreat; buy an antique watch watch or a designer hat, or a number of fun gift certifcates to places like Trader Joe's, Freshdirect, Tribeca Grill, or BIRD boutique in Brooklyn; and more!

Tuesday, October 11 at 58 West 10 St. in NYC at 6pm

And don't forget to purchase your tickets here or at the door.

Joel Brouwer to Read at The Poetry Project

2011-10-05T15:53:00.003-04:00

Joel Brouwer and Abraham Smith

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church

Monday, October 10, 2011
8:00 pm

131 East 10th Street

New York, NY

Abraham Smith’s poetry collections are Whim Man Mammon (Action Books, 2007) and Hank (Action Books, 2010). Summers, he’s farmhand for Hawks’ Highland Farm, Ladysmith, WI; falls, winters, and springs, he is Instructor of English at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL.

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, poet Joel Brouwer is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Syracuse University. Brouwer is the author of several collections of poetry, including And So (Four Way Books, 2009); Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book; and Exactly What Happened (1999), winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University. He has also published several chapbooks. Brouwer has been awarded fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His essays and book reviews have appeared widely, including in AGNI, the Boston Review, the Harvard Review, and the New York Times Book Review. He has taught at Southern Illinois University and the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Brooklyn Rail Interview w/ Tina Chang!

2011-10-03T16:57:00.005-04:00

TINA CHANG with David St.-Lascaux

by David St.-Lascaux

David St.-Lascaux, poet and contributing writer for the Brooklyn Rail, sat down to talk with Tina Chang, the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, whose new collection, Of Gods and Strangers, is slated for release in the Fall of 2011 by Four Way Books.

David St.-Lascaux (Rail): In the initial "Slumber" stave of "Episodes," you wrote:

I always find myself back
in the Dust Room where
my face is broken in the reflection
of fine porcelain. I have so many
white dresses I will soil for no good
occasion. Common things
call to me: crickets, at night black ducks
drowning in the weeds.
There is nothing complicated about this
except sleep walks to lie down
in the shape of my body.
Lewis Carroll wrote at the end of "Life is But a Dream":

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

My first impression of Of Gods and Strangers was that it is essentially oneiric: that its author is recording ornate dreams, sleepwalking, or hallucinating a Ouija board doppelgänger (the Empress). What's happening here? How was Gods invented?

Tina Chang: It's such a beautiful introduction to use that for the book. I have to admit that this is the first time that I'm talking about the book. It seems rather dreamlike to be talking to you, another person outside of myself, about it. So much happens in the imagination of the writer as they're making a book. This the first time I am giving order to the whole process of what I was going through as I was writing.

I use the word doppelgänger and it's exactly what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the Empress Dowager (all of this was written after 9/11) and I couldn't help but feel like I was in a dreamlike state after that happened. Right after 9/11 at first I think there was a sense of powerlessness, in fact I actually just wrote about it for a Brooklyn paper as I was reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. My immediate reaction was that I stopped writing for a while. I became very silent. I felt a huge sense of powerlessness. I always thought that phrase "habit strong" affects all people, that I could change your world with my words. It was why I became a poet to begin with, and then after 9/11 I thought: What are the reasons for all of my words? What can I really say about my world, my situation, g*d? If I wanted to say anything about g*d, is that the core of all conflict in the world or is it people's interpretation of g*d that offers the conflict, or the wrong interpretation of g*d? And are there wrong interpretations of g*d?

I wasn't able to answer those questions, so I felt deeply powerless in my endeavors and I became silent for a long time. It wasn't until I had co-edited an anthology called Language for a New Century [ed.: with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar] that I began to discover these incredibly strong voices from around the world, and at the same time I was doing research on the Empress Dowager of China. Now here is a person suddenly I could connect to, and why was this? She wasn't only a doppelgänger: she was a ghost to me, an alter ego; she was all of these things to me. Here was this woman in a time when women were supposed to be powerless and lifeless. She was a very powerful figure during that time period. She was an unknown peasant who came into power because of her wiles—some people say because of her manipulation, and because of her power she rose to a point where she was ruling China. And it was through this doppelgänger that I thought I had a hook; I could attach myself to her, and through her I felt that I could gain this power, this power to write again.

In fact many of the poems in regard to the Empress are persona poems: they're not written as me. I was living my life through her. I began to slowly gain my power back again. And talking about it feels emotional especially with the passing of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It was about the fall of myself as a writer and a poet, and then regaining that power through this figure in time. You reference this idea of dreams, and I use this image of the dress to stand in for a figure or shape. I say that we inhabit these bodies, and inasmuch as can inhabit them we can let them grow. Who are we here in this lifetime? Our lives can pass so very quickly! What are we doing here at this moment of time? What is our purpose? All of these things are called into question in this book. I wouldn't use the word therapeutic, but it did assist me in gaining my voice back, once again.

Rail: In "The Full Faces of Dogs are Barking," You write:

… The last thing
to do was fall asleep, the body so spent, it lay
in exhaustion like a flat tire. That felt like truth
but it was more threatening. I once saw a dying horse

The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker identified five markers for morality in "The Moral Instinct" in the New York Times. Remarkably, no one [surveyed] identified truth as a moral value. Why do you think that is, and what is the importance of truth in your poetry?

Chang: Something that was really affecting me at the time on a personal level was the sense of truth and what the truth is. The word truth pops up in many of my poems. At the time, I was being untruthful about my entire life. I felt like I was living many different lives, and not telling the truth to totally different people, and I think it was to keep up an end of myself. Writing this book allowed me to shed the notion of the façade, so masks come up a lot in relation to the truth.

I was trying to explore what truth was. Even now when I talk to my students in class I always say truths are separate from one another. And in this lifetime, we need to find ways to have our truths compromised. Everyone's own sense of truth was conflicted with each other's around the time of 9/11. Everyone's interpretations of either the Bible or the Quran; at the moment when they're sitting there with the text, they think, this text in front of me is the truth, and I will follow that truth to the end. And I thought "If that is truth, then I don't think I can follow it." I had to go out on this journey to discover what that is, and by the end of it I found it was something personal. The closest I could get to truth was what I was writing in my poems. Writing this book is the most truthful I've been in the last ten years. The entire book is not about sex or intimacy: it's about the interplay between truth and g*d, or truth and g*d in relationship to what intimacy is—our relationships to one another. In regard to truth, it becomes eventually a personal interpretation, almost on the same level as prayer. Everyone's relationship to it is singular, internal and different from another's.

Read the rest of this wonderful interview here, at The Brooklyn Rail.

Sydney Lea Featured in Valley News

2011-10-03T15:25:00.002-04:00

In Select Company
By Nicola Smith
Valley News Staff Writer

When he was in early 30s, poet and essayist Sydney Lea was on the long march toward an academic career. He'd received both a bachelor's degree and a doctorate from Yale, writing his comparative literature dissertation on 19th-century supernatural fiction. He had an appointment at Dartmouth, teaching freshmen English composition, and giving classes on the American novel and English romantic poetry. So far, so good.

But, Lea recalled in an interview at his Newbury, Vt., home, something in him chafed at committing himself to the path he'd set himself on. And while reviewing what he calls his “inscrutable dissertation, inscrutable even to its author,” he had an epiphany.

“I looked at that scholarship of mine when I was in the vaults of Baker Library and said, this is not what I want to do when I grow up.” He was 34 at the time.

Now 68, Lea can savor the road taken. His career has embraced poetry, fiction and essays, with works published in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Sports Illustrated and Gray's Sporting Journal. He founded The New England Review in 1977. His 2000 book of poems Pursuit of a Wound was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. And now he has been awarded a post that represents, if not a final accolade, then at least a singular flourish.

On Nov. 4, in a ceremony at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier, Lea will take on the role of Vermont Poet Laureate with Gov. Peter Shumlin in attendance. It comes with a stipend of sorts: $1,000 for the four years. But money isn't the point.

“I'm really honored,” said Lea, a burly, bearded man who seems, initially, uncomfortable talking about himself, but who warms to the idea of talking about writing, writers and the pleasures of reading. He sits on a porch on the back of the home he shares with Robin Barone, his wife of 28 years, and gazes searchingly at the trees that surround the property, as if they might yield answers.

“I never imagined I'd have this honor, but if I had, I would never have imagined it would gratify me as much as it does. I knew I had been nominated, but it had never occurred to me I'd be the one,” he said.

It is an honor that has been accorded to a select few, beginning with the appointment of Robert Frost, who served from 1961 until 1963. After a gap of 26 years, then-Gov. Madeline Kunin resurrected the position in 1989, naming Galway Kinnell to the four-year post. Since then, it has been held by Louise Gluck, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Grace Paley and current Poet Laureate Ruth Stone. The criteria are these: A poet must have a long association with Vermont, amassed a respected, critically acclaimed body of work and consistently show excellence in her or his work.

The Advisory Committee that made the selection cited Lea's poetry for its “dramatic intensity, narrative momentum, and musicality,” and praised his “extraordinarily evocative descriptions of Northern New England's landscapes, animal and plant life and the seasonal panorama.”

Of his work, poet Cleopatra Mathis, who teaches at Dartmouth College, wrote by email, “His love for both the land and the people of New England is unsurpassed by any other poet I can think of writing now. Like Frost, he lives the present through the past, elegiac and elegant and yet conversational and idiomatic.”

Lea began writing poetry when he was a teenager growing up in suburban Philadelphia. These poems addressed themselves to, he said, the usual kind of adolescent angst, like break-ups with girlfriends. He didn't begin to seriously engage with the idea of poetry as an avocation until after college, but even then it seemed unobtainable.

“It never occurred to me to apply to MFA programs,” he said. “I thought to have a career as a writer involved some secret that people weren't telling me.” As a younger man, he said, he was not accustomed to thinking highly of himself. “I used to be unduly fearful of not making a good impression,” he said. A former professor once described him as being both “volatile and shy.”

But writing poetry felt natural to him. “I really did feel some confidence. Even when I was suffering rejections, as I still do, I thought I knew what I was doing.”

Even so, it took some time to find his natural voice, a voice that echoed out of the woods and fields and rivers of Northern New England. Here he formed a spiritual kinship with the woodsmen and women who logged and hunted in its forests, and gathered at night around campfires or in bars to drink, smoke and tell stories. This was the New England he'd first experienced when his father took him at age 9 on a canoe trip in northern Maine, a vast, remote and wild place as far from suburban America, and what Lea calls the “plastic octopus” of strip malls, gas stations and car dealerships, as you can imagine.

In 1963, his family bought a camp in Washington County in northernmost Maine, on the border with New Brunswick. He has returned every year since, along with his family and children, and now grandchildren, and is active with forest conservation there. He has also pursued a lifelong interest in hunting and fishing, a passion picked up as a boy at his grandfather's farm in Pennsylvania and nourished with a steady diet of Field & Stream and the works of, among others, the turn-of-the-century naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, who wrote scores of books, including Wild Animals I Have Known.

“I am old enough that I knew older men and women in Northern New England who came before the age of power tools, and they were fabulous raconteurs,” Lea said. “I just loved their voices, the last true woodsmen and women.”

Uninterested in trying to mimic their actual speech patterns through dialect, which can often sound forced or patronizing (unless, Lea said, you happen to be a genius like Mark Twain), he aimed instead for “capturing something of the lilt of their voices in poetry.”

It is their stories, and the stories of the farmers and anglers around him, that fuel his poetry. This has led him to be designated by some as a “regional” poet. But one of the compensations of getting older, he observed, is realizing that he doesn't have to be universally liked to be happy or to succeed and that he can write what he wants to write, not what others might expect or urge him to do.

“If you start writing to someone else's expectations, you don't do very well. I was writing what I was meant to write,” he said.

As Poet Laureate, Lea, who has also taught at Middlebury College and returned to Dartmouth to teach in the MALS program (he's now retired from that), intends to go out to the state libraries to read. When he found out he'd been named to the position, he went to the Vermont Library Association and printed out a long listing of the libraries in the state. There are, he said, some 330 in all, which, for a population of 600,000, is, he said, “amazing.” He has sent out query letters to the libraries, asking if he can come speak.

“The more remote or unlikely the library, the happier I'll be,” he said.

He has read at Lions Clubs and fish and game clubs and, just last week, at colleges in Texas and a writers' workshop in Dallas, an experience that he enjoyed up until the moment the audience was unhappily riveted by what sounded to Lea like 20 rounds of small arms fire outside. The quiet stretches of the Upper Valley look pretty good to him, for that and numerous other reasons, as they have for the 43 years he's lived here.

Among Lea's reasons for picking libraries as his brief, apart from his interest in literacy, is that he wants to dispel the idea that modern poetry is the province of the academy and the intellectual elite. “I'd like to think that people not affiliated with the choir can understand what I do,” he said. “I think there are a lot of people who have shied away from poetry because it's too baffling. The problem can be sometimes be on the other side of the desk.”

Look at Frost, he said. “H was an unusual genius. Everybody can get something from him. You can't get it all but you can get a lot. He's not obscure.” Equally, Lea rejects “the notion that poets are more sensitive than other people. That's arrogance of the worst kind. Going in there with a little bit of humility never hurt anybody. The payoff for humility is you get to know people a little bit better.”

Although he'd undoubtedly demur at the comparison even while acknowledging the influence, Lea has established himself as one of the heirs to Robert Frost, writing narrative poems that are conversational, with all the revealing slips, affectations and elisions of speech. They stand alone on the page as little sculptures but achieve their full weight when spoken aloud. Most poems do, of course, but it's in the patterns of how people talk that Lea records the characteristics of an era, a region and a country.

In his poem "The Plainville Testament," published in his 1996 collection To the Bone, which was a co-winner of the 1998 Poet's Prize, Lea recounts a very New England tale of an old man Billy Fields who confides to his lawyer the truth about a dark incident in his past. Accused of letting a younger man die of severe injuries without getting him help, the old man rambles on in a haze of explanation and self-justification. The lawyer lets him spill forth and afterwards jots down what he heard. The lawyer writes “to hear the voice of Billy, to watch the landscape quicken as I listen.”

At poem's end, the lawyer sums up the principles that keep him listening and writing. They're sentiments that seem to epitomize Lea as well.

Tonight, recording this for you and you

--outsider, native, woman, or child--

but mostly for myself, as I've confessed,

I'll lie here with my story, cool, a while.

A little time, while the moon plays on The Bald Man,

I'll hold to it, and you can judge the rest.

***
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.

Review of Sarah Gorham’s Bad Daughter in The Journal

2011-09-30T17:30:00.004-04:00

The Journal Magazine

Nick McRae // 35.2 Autumn 2011 // 09.23.11

Sarah Gorham. Bad Daughter. New York: Four Way Books, 2011. Paper, 80 pp., $15.95.

Reading Sarah Gorham’s poetry brings to mind perhaps the most memorable and oft-quoted lines from Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to but they do.” That analogy, of course, is a humorous oversimplification. Gorham’s work deals with family dynamics and the fact of human imperfection without Larkin’s ironic snideness, but with the wisdom, mature playfulness, and genuine pathos of Larkin’s most compelling work. In her previous collection The Cure (Four Way Books, 2003), Sarah Gorham told us the story of a family bowing under the weight of the father’s alcoholism. Her new offering, Bad Daughter, explores the complex and often fraught relationship between mothers and daughters. In “Homesickness,” the speaker tells us, “Genes are a kind of blue letter from a mother / to her daughter: Good news, bad news.” These are indeed poems of “bad news” and “good news”—of pain and joy—and, as in the best work of many poets, the two work together to form the powerful emotional landscape of this collection.

In Bad Daughter, that landscape is never an easy one—never black and white. There is an exhilarating darkness in poems like “Immortality,” in which the speaker says of a baby, “Remember when the names for little things weren’t sickening? // Touch that fantastic little foot. The baby is an implant, a fresh cutting. / She will take. She will take you away.” The play of violence and wonder in these skillful lines makes plain the irony in them without veering into sarcasm. Even darker is the poem “Barbecue,” which employs a less subtle violence in one of the collection’s most evocative metaphors. Here, the speaker compares four sisters to the four tines of a fork:

[…] Sisters—they were that close,
jockeying for love in a cage
with silver bars. The origin of the fork

was a spear in an animal’s heart.
You’ve heard of knife scars
on a plate? Blame it on the knife,

though the fork held the weakling down.

The metaphor is complicated. The knife here is not the parents, as one might expect, for the speaker will “mind / her parents’ appeal for peace” and “place her knife back on the table.” There is no easy, moralistic reading for poems such as this, and that is the power of Gorham’s work; she investigates the difficult, often unsettling nature of family dynamics without self-pity and without pointing fingers. Bad Daughter reminds us that family is not static but, rather, an ever-evolving relationship: “To my child I become my mother,” Gorham says (in “Accommodation”), “and her mother, and hers.”

The joys of Bad Daughter are not to be found only in these questions of family. Gorham, with the skill and confidence of a master artisan, crafts poems in an array of styles and forms that never impose themselves on the work, but seem always necessary: from prose poems like “After Pindar” and “Bob White” to rhyming, shortened-lined sonnets like “Compost” and “Pond in Winter” to the free verse of “Our House” and “The Sacrifice,” whose lines move elegantly around the middle of the page. Each poem, whether directly addressing the complexities of daughterhood announced in the title or not, plays an integral part in constructing Bad Daughter, a collection that is gracefully made, challenging, moving, and unquestionably whole.

Young of the Year Reviewed in Off the Coast

2011-09-30T17:07:00.004-04:00

Rebuke and Consolation

Young of the Year by Sydney Lea

With his first book, Searching the Drowned Man, published in 1980, Vermont-based poet Sydney Lea established himself as one of the finest limners of New England. As an intimate of the natural world, Lea knows how to read signs of wildlife, but he is also an empathetic portraitist, especially of individuals who live hard lives. Like Philip Booth, Wesley McNair and Maxine Kumin, he turns local knowledge into bigger picture verse, defying the regionalist label in the process.

Lea's latest book is part memoir, part portrait gallery, and part a wrestling with old age. The book's opening section features past exploits and encounters filtered through the lens of time. "The 1950s" is something of a confession: members of the high school hockey team took advantage of a homely girl nicknamed Rink-Rat. Here, the ugly braggadocio of youth becomes shame. "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" resurrects a Philadelphia nightclub, Pep's Musical Bar, in 1965 where a young white man, there to hear the Adderly sextet, comes to understand underlying racial divides by way of Wilt Chamberlain, who owned the place.

The second section offers portraits of neighbors in the author's neck of the Vermont countryside. The opening poem, "Recession," exemplifies Lea's prosodic mastery: a seamless sonnet with nuanced half-rhymes about a local Quik-Stop. "Dandelion Pickers" is van Gogh and Richard Hugo, an homage to figures seen in a passing field. Empathy runs strong here, be it for an elderly pastor losing his grip or for Stump, hauler of refuse, who sports a hideous hernia and mystifies everyone with his cheerful "hail-fellow-well-met" attitude.

Part III, "Birds, A Farrago," is a remarkable 14-section medley of musings of an older man dealing with post-viral arthropathy, a debilitating condition that all but shuts him off from his family—wife, children, grandchildren—and the feathered creatures that are his familiars: tern, loon, crow, jay, grackle, junco, kite. Each bit of progress toward recovery is accompanied by these birds, "future and memory both, / rebuke and consolation."

Lea wraps it all up in the final section with five poems of differing formats that reflect on family, nature, home, time passing. "Dispute with Thomas Hardy" and the title poem, "Young of the Year," are considerations of the poet's life and world, alternately angry—"the cretin / politicians rattling swords, / as if, by counter-logic, war / transmuted the earth into something saintly"—and loving: making a granddaughter smile with the waggle of a tongue.

Don't let the cover of this book misguide. While the photograph of a white snowshoe hare relates to what lies within, its Hallmark cuteness may lead you to believe you're in for a group of nature poems. No, no, no. Beyond the bunny lies a stunning collection by an old(er) master who continues to bring us resonant visions of the north.

—Carl Little

Jonathan Wells in The Paris Review

2011-09-29T17:12:00.002-04:00

Echo in Madison Square Park

by Jane and Jonathan Wells
from the Paris Review Daily

“A poem is never finished, it is abandoned,” said the sculptor Jaume Plensa, quoting Paul Valéry on a sunny September morning in New York City, as he watched Echo, his forty-four-foot sculpture of a female head, being dismantled piece by piece.

My husband Jonathan Wells and I are Flatiron residents. We had lived alongside Echo since she arrived in May and, for Jonathan, she had become an object of fascination and reverence. He had been working on a poem about her for months but found himself unable to conclude it. He had refamiliarized himself with the myth of Narcissus and Echo; he had learned all he could about Plensa and the nine-year-old neighbor in Barcelona who had inspired the piece, a child who had taken shape in the statue with the timelessness and serenity of a Buddha. On this, the statue’s last morning, Jonathan recognized the Catalan sculptor standing between the cranes and the crew.

“I always hoped my work would inspire other artists,” Plensa told my husband, as they discussed myth, marble dust, art collectors, and teaching schedules. “Please send me your poem.” After watching Echo come apart, Jonathan knew he had an ending. Here is what he sent to Plensa:

Echo

White as x ray bone she rises through
The trees in stone as if she were sublime,
As if she knew what this grace was
And she was only nine, framed
Between her errands and her games.
Her nymph’s body surges underground
Not knowing what this buried love
Is for.

Beneath her neighbors play Frisbee
On the grass and strangers take her
Photograph. The final sun pours
Into her sealed eyes and mouth as though
She were the saint of radiant stillness
Who says this marble flesh is a prison
Stone yet the mind flies with
The confetti of birds, soars into
The beliefs of summer.
Silence succumbs to air and the blossoms
Sail down, the clocktower’s fretted hands
Notched against her ribs.

Questions flood her blood
And darkness, flee and then she’s gone,
Taken from our vanquished arms but
She still speaks in the autumn leaves,
In the furrowed bark, in the singsong
Of the childrens’ swings.

Jonathan Wells’s collection, Train Dance, will be published by Four Way Books in October.

Listen to Sydney Lea on Vermont Public Radio

2011-09-29T15:09:00.005-04:00

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/92126/

Vermont's new Poet Laureate, Newbury writer Sydney Lea has been described as "a man in the woods with his head full of books and a man in books with his head full of woods."

VPR's Jane Lindholm talks with Lea about his poetry, his new role, and how he plans to use it to promote poetry around the state, including visiting as many community libraries as will have him. Lea's latest collection of poems, from Four Way Books, is called Young of the Year.

Upcoming Readings with Four Way Books Authors

2011-09-27T13:38:00.004-04:00

Friday, September 30 - Debra Allbery reads with Rachel Howard

Warren Wilson College Homecoming MFA Reading, 2 pm

Warren Wilson College

Asheville, NC

Sunday, October 2 - Monica Youn reads with Matthea Harvey

Sunset Reading Series, 4pm

Chapel of Our Lady Restoration

Cold Spring, NY

Thursday, October 6 - Joni Wallace reads with Mary Jo Bang

University of Arizona Poetry Center, 7pm

Poetry Center - Helen S. Schaefer Building

Tucson, AZ

Tuesday, October 11 - Debra Allbery

Denison University Lecture Series, 4:30 pm

Barney-Davis Boardroom

Granville, OH

Saturday, October 15 - Monica Youn reads with Martin Espada

Icons in Culture, Brattleboro Literary Festival

Brooks Memorial Library

Brattleboro, Vermont

Oct 28 - Collier Nogues reads with Troy Jollimore and Dean Rader

7:30pm at Mrs. Dalloway's

Berkeley, CA

Sydney Lea Reads Tonight at Texas Tech University

2011-09-22T13:36:00.002-04:00

Texas Tech University Contemporary Authors Reading Series

7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
9/22/2011
English 01, Basement Auditorium

Texas Tech

As the first event in this season's Contemporary Authors Reading Series sponsored by the Creative Writing program, poet Sydney Lea will give a poetry reading on Thursday 9/22. Lea’s ninth book of poetry is Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011). His book Pursuit of a Wound was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; another volume, To the Bone, won the Poets’ Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, and has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in major literary journals as well as magazines ranging from The New Yorker to Sports Illustrated. He is the founding editor of The New England Review, and has taught at Yale, Middlebury, Wesleyan, and Dartmouth. He lives in New England, where he is active in conservation and Basic Education movements.

Publishers Weekly Starred Review for Rigoberto Gonzalez's Black Blossoms!

2011-09-20T16:36:00.004-04:00

Black Blossoms
Rigoberto Gonzalez. Four Way

The poems in Gonzalez’s third collection are rooted in the female body. Death and decay also thread through the collection, manifesting in lush and sensuous imagery. In the title poem, Gonzalez addresses barren women in dark, graphic language that borders on the grotesque: “when the sun sets next it will// blossom with the blackest mushrooms and the moths/ will lay their eggs on your leathery smiles.” Gonzalez’s poems depict the body as a space that carries burden and loss, the site of a fleeting life: “this is the part where the woman enters./ This is the part where she leaves. Her life/ so quick it could have been missed had she left no evidence of the blackbird to construct/ its nest.” Each of us is insignificant and replaceable, Gonzalez seems to say: “borrowed body, in the time you must vacate,// let another take your space./ Don’t worry about whom or when since the girl/ who comes after is already here.” The last section (of four) is told through the voices of the female characters surrounding a mortician. Lust and marriage, birth and death, weave together in their observations and confessions. The mortician’s wife observes, “sound is death because it’s/ irretrievable and every time I speak I die a little more.” (Oct.)

Forthcoming FWB Author Alex Dimitrov Talks to L Magazine

2011-09-15T12:08:00.002-04:00

The L Mag Questionnaire for Writer Types: Alex Dimitrov

Posted by Mark Asch on Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 8:56 AM

Alex Dimitrov, who lives in Manhattan, reads tomorrow night at Pete's Candy Store as the Multifarious Array poetry series kicks off its fall season. His first book of poems, Begging For It, is forthcoming from Four Way Books, and he is at work on a second. You can read his poems at his blog.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?

It’s great when people I don’t know write to me, over Facebook or Twitter or email, and say that they strongly respond to a particular poem. I remember one person told me that he enjoyed the stripped down, accessible nature of my poems and that it provoked a visceral, emotional response in him. I love that. My best friend Rachel recently told me that one of her friends described my poems as Romantic, as being in dialogue with Romanticism. I love that too. It’s really important to me that my poems connect with people on a personal level.

What have you read/watched/listened to/looked at/ate recently that will permanently change our readers' lives for the better?

So much. I love Henri Cole’s new book of poems, Touch. Owen Jones’s new and first book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. I like Nico Muhly’s last CD, A Good Understanding. I’ve been raving about Riccardo Tisci’s last collection for Givenchy to everyone. Anthony Goicolea’s photographs. Terence Koh’s recent work. I’m so into Dorothea Lasky’s poems. This one, “The Poetry that is going to matter after you are dead” is one of my favorites and you can hear her read it here.

Whose ghostwritten celebrity tell-all (or novel) would you sprint to the store to buy (along with a copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so that the checkout clerk doesn’t look at you screwy)?

Leigh Bowery. He should be more famous than he is. I’m sure many of you guys know about him, but for the people who haven’t had the pleasure to know, he was a performance artist—and all around star, dandy, queer goddess—in the 80s and 90s in New York and London. My friend Mark Bibbins, whose poems I also love, introduced me to him by showing me the documentary Charles Atlas made about Bowery, The Legend of Leigh Bowery. Everyone should see it. It’s crazy and inspiring.

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

When talking about her early years in New York, Madonna said something like, “If you can’t say ‘I’ll die if I don’t do it,’ you should not do it.” I don’t really see the point of being alive if I can’t create, if I can’t make something out of life. For some reason that translates to writing poems. If my creative work has even the minor possibility of bringing relief or pleasure to me and other people, I’m going to keep doing it. Many days I’m paralyzed by the thought that I have all these graduate school loans as a result of my MFA degree, and that we live in a world that doesn’t value the arts and artists as much as it should, and values poets even less so. But being a poet and living in New York with my friends are the most important things to me. I’m not really interested in living another life, even if that other life is easier or more stable and secure—whatever that means. I don’t really feel like I have a choice, is I guess what I’m saying. I have to live this life. I have to be a poet.

What would you characterize as an ideal interaction with a reader?

Off the page, it would be talking to someone who’s had an experience with a poem after hearing me read it. I wish there was less of a barrier between the poet and the audience at a poetry reading. I wish we could talk about what poems actually mean to us, and how they help us live. I’d love to just pass my poems around before a reading and ask people which ones they’d like to hear, even if their responses were based only on the titles. The visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres said that, “For most of the work I do, I need the public to become responsible and activate the work.” I think about that a lot. How can I do that with poems? I want to. I really believe that poetry can enrich people’s lives, especially today when consumer culture is constantly pushing us toward soundbites and the same ten words, toward instant gratification and not thinking or reflecting about our emotional and intellectual lives and what’s actually happening in the world. It’s the culture of emoticons. I hate emoticons. We’re not encouraged to express or think about how we really feel and investigate those feelings. We’re encouraged to rely on easy and empty symbols, words, images, etc., that have become a norm and fail at any kind of real or meaningful communication. And every day I have to fight, quite consciously, like everyone else, against all those negative impulses we’re told to give into. Poetry helps me do that.

Have you ever written anything that you'd like to take back?

Not yet! But I’d like to sleep with Owen Jones, whose book I mentioned earlier. I’m probably going to regret telling you that. It’s ok, he lives in London so I can’t run into him on the street. I’ll have a new crush by next week anyway.

First Books: A Conversation with Jennifer Denrow in Thermos Magazine

2011-09-14T13:06:00.004-04:00

First Books: A Conversation with Jen Denrow

A number of THERMOS contributors have recently published first books. Stay tuned for conversations with them here. First up is Jennifer Denrow, who appeared in our second issue and whose book California was published by Four Way Books in 2011.

TH: How do you see your work in what’s happening now in poetry? Are there other first books out there that you feel like yours is friends with?

JD: I’m always trying to think about that: what’s happening now. Sometimes I will write down the first or last sentences in a book of poems and then do that to other books of poems and compare them. There’s something in the syntax of some of the poetry now—a directness that the language, filled with indefinite references, counteracts with. Maybe it’s an intelligible indefiniteness—I feel like the poems are disclosing everything through the syntax, while at the same time creating, through diction, an environment where nothing can be known.

[...]

In terms of how this obsesses me in my own work, I guess the first poem in California can be considered. Or, it may be easier with something smaller: “Things Reappear”:

Because the chair in front of you isn’t a base you don’t touch it when you pass by. The other players foul you for this.

See. What is, isn’t, but it also still is. It’s so hard to tell anything now. Everything means. And it means a lot. Also it is empty. The chair is the base that needs to be tagged because the players are there and they say it is, but also it’s not because it’s just a person standing in her living room. Basically this is what keeps happening through the book. Over and over again. Really in everything I write. I’m always trying to get inside the center of what something is, but I also need it to always have the possibility of being everything, or at least something else. It would be claustrophobic if I did understand something as itself. So I keep doing this thing where I need to arrive at a certainty through my correspondence with what is external to me, but I also need it to never be one thing. Is this about God, I wonder?

Read the whole conversation at Thermos.

2011-09-14T12:38:00.002-04:00

Headed to the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend? Head to the Main Stage Sunday at 10am to hear Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang read with Justin Long-Moton (New York Youth Poet Laureate), Mark Strand (US Poet Laureate 1990-1991) and Jean Valentine (New York State Poet Laureate). Introduced by Alice Quinn of the Poetry Society of America.

Sydney Lea Reading in Arkadelphia, AK September 20

2011-09-14T11:38:00.002-04:00

September 20, 2011 at 7 p.m.
Arkansas Hall Big Stage
Henderson State University
Arkadelphia, AR

FREE!!!
(also: free coffee & fancy cookies!)

Sydney Lea's ninth collection of poetry, Young of the Year was published by Four Way Books in April of this year. Lea was founder and, for thirteen years, editor of New England Review. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, Lea was a poetry finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize. He has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of naturalist nonfiction. In 2011, he retired after forty-two years of teaching at various American institutions: Yale, Wesleyan, Middlebury and Dartmouth Colleges, and for thirteen years, the Vermont College MFA program. Lea is active in conservation efforts in Maine and Vermont, and is a longtime board member of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education.

This event is sponsored by the Ellis College Margin of Excellence Fund and the Office of Student Services.

Four Way Books' First Silent Auction!

2011-09-12T16:55:00.002-04:00

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11

NYU's Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House

58 West 10 St. NYC

Doors open at 6:00,

viewing begins at 6:30,

Bidding from 7:15-8:15.

$20.00 admission / $25.00 at door
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE!

Bidding Tables open at 7:15 and close at 8:15
Wine and cheese and fun!

Among items up for auction:
Tickets to the 2012 US Open / Tennis
Fine wine
Art: prints and paintings
Fancy chess Set
Decoupage
GIft baskets
Gift certificates
Poetry manuscript editing by Jason Schneiderman and April Ossmann
Vintage pocketbooks
Glittery scarves
and more being sent to us every day . . .

More Sydney Lea: Shenandoah Lists Young of the Year as Recommended Reading

2011-09-09T17:30:00.003-04:00

Young of the Year by Sydney Lea (Four Way Books, 2011)

From Shenandoah

How often do I see that a poet (or even a mystic) has written with conviction that he or she accepts, even embraces the grand circle dance of the natural world, which will of course guarantee the poet’s eventual demise, dust to dust and all that? And how often do I respond “bullshot,” or something similar? But when Sydney Lea concludes the final, title poem of this collection with accepting “of course”s – “Of course the glorious earth// will take me back, of course the young-year hare give profligate birth” – I nod and am wholly persuaded. This is in part due to the ways the poem’s previous forty lines address what is past and passing and to come and partly because the whole volume weighs the woe and the weal of life with such meticulous honesty and imagination, right down to the “steaming purple pip” of a sparrow’s heart, but my response is also a function of my on-going admiration of Lea’s poetic stamina, his decades of poems that run without rushing, his extended narratives that haul along a whole landscape and an invisible world of delicious and perilous particulars, not call and response so much as cry and “countercry.”

This volume offers a whole trophy case of excellent poems, some of which appeared in Shenandoah, but I want to call particular attention to “Dubber’s Cur,” in part because it’s dedicated to the late John Engels, a poet deeply mourned but not widely enough remembered, or memorized. Lea’s narrative recounts the sophisticated (“French bread,” “organic,” “foreign car”) speaker’s on-going scraps with a less polished (“common law,” “Scrawny pony,” “junkheap ramble”) neighbor’s dog, the cur of the title, who makes sorties into French bread’s yard, snarling and pissing and annoying the house dogs no end. In what could easily become a class war concluding with shotgunned rocksalt and the narrator’s victory strut, Lea finds a stronger virtue than protecting one’s demesne. He does not blame the renegade, but turns the question of passion and mission on his reader who “may have sensed/ a near-exalting rightness/ in doggedly keeping at it, just as Dubber’s cur/ keeps at his climb, shows up.” The extended empathy and forgiveness, the willingness to project and understand are all important to the poem and in some way a tribute to Engels, one of our most sorrowful losses of recent years, but the real point is the poetry, the pace and shift of language, the restraint and abundance, the interrogated certainty. I can think of people who would read “Dubber’s Cur” and not want to devour the whole collection, but I might not much care for their company.

The Brooklyn Paper: Tina Chang on 9/11's Legacy of Words

2011-09-09T17:10:00.002-04:00

Chang: 9-11’s legacy of words

BY TINA CHANG

for The Brooklyn Paper

After 9-11, I encountered battles both internal and external. As a writer, I felt that words had begun to fail me. Theey seemed flighty, ephemeral, opaque, misleading, and ultimately powerless. Approaching my art form after the loss of so many lives felt like an impossible task. Journalists sought just the right vocabulary to guide and nurture the country, but I was unable to comprehend how grammar, syntax, or how the use of stanzas or line break would do their larger job. I was confronted with the question, “What is the role of poetry?” or “How can my words matter now?” It all felt insufficient to describe what happened to our city and its people.

I closed my books. I put my pens away. I placed my writing journals in storage boxes. I even stopped reading. I wandered my apartment looking out the window, occasionally making phone calls to loved ones, and then I sat for hours without sound.

But a friend had a project, an anthology called “Language for a New Century,” which gathered the voices of poets from the Middle East as well as poets in the United States. Editing it took almost 10 years — but it was necessary to get me to believe in words again: their meaning, their significance, and their sheer power. All the struggles between reality and imagination played itself out on the pages as I read poems of outrage, redemption and, yes, love.

I cannot say for certain whether we are stronger or weaker as a people. We live within a shared experience, but I also realize there are losses I cannot comprehend though poetry. Our humanity which, like the word, is as resilient as it ever was.

Consolation

By Perveen Shakir

(Translated by Baidar Bakht and Leslie Lavigne)

Now, that I have closed the doors

of the city of love

upon myself

and have thrown the key

of each gate

into the jade-eyed sea of oblivion,

this little timorous feeling

is so consoling.

Beyond the forbidding walls of the prison,

in a small lane

of the old walled city,

there is a little window

still open in my name.

From “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond.”

Tina Chang is the poet laureate of Brooklyn and author of “Half-Lit Houses” and the forthcoming, “Of Gods & Strangers.”

©2011 COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER GROUP

Congratulations to Sydney Lea, the new Poet Laureate of Vermont!!

2011-09-09T16:52:00.003-04:00

The Vermont Arts Council is pleased to announce that Governor Peter Shumlin has appointed Sydney Lea of Newbury, VT as Vermont’s next Poet Laureate to succeed Ruth Stone, whose four-year term ends in 2011. A public ceremony honoring Mr. Lea will be held on November 4 at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. The ceremony will be attended by Governor Shumlin as part of an evening celebrating the arts in Vermont.

Sydney Lea lives in Newbury, Vermont, and has been a Vermont resident since the early 1990s. He is the prolific author of a number of collections of poetry, including Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011); Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books, 2005); Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000); To the Bone: New and Selected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1996); Prayer for the Little City (Scribner’s, 1989); No Sign (University of Georgia Press, 1987); The Floating Candles (University of Illinois Press, 1982), and Searching the Drowned Man (University of Illinois Press, 1980).

Syd Lea has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” Renowned as a prose writer as well as poet, he has also published a novel and two books of essays that combine the precision of an active naturalist and ecologist with the erudition of a multilingual professor of literature. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. Lea co-founded the literary quarterly New England Review in 1977, oversaw its move to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, and edited this esteemed journal until 1989. His poetry collections have earned special critical acclaim, with Pursuit of a Wound, (2000) named one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, one of the nation’s highest honors for a single collection of poems.

Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. Lea has also been very active for the past quarter century in land conservation and the promotion of literacy. (www.sydneylea.net)

The Advisory Committee found Sydney Lea’s poetry to be virtuosic in texture and form, yet likely to be engaging to a diversity of readers and listeners because of the work’s dramatic intensity, narrative momentum, and musicality, and because of this poet’s extraordinarily evocative descriptions of northern New England’s landscapes, animal and plant life, and the seasonal panorama. Through all of his books, Lea has paid particular attention to the stories of generations living alongside one another in north-country villages, including the interactions of “old-timers” and relative newcomers. He continues the tradition of Vermont poets who are both singular — one of a kind — and broadly accessible.

The Notre Dame Review on Kevin Prufer

2011-09-08T16:56:00.004-04:00

From the Notre Dame Review:

Since Fallen From a Chariot (2005), NDR contributor Kevin Prufer has gone on in National Anthem (2008) and the present volume to complete an impressive trilogy of post-9/11 books that demonstrates how a deep vision and an often stunning lyricism need not be incompatible in poetry. Marie Howe spoke of the “courage and compassion” of his poems in National Anthem, adding that his poems “should be read on Fox News and CNN.” The poems in In a Beautiful Country would be too much for either, but his treatment of love and art in the context of contemporary history and the imperatives of moral witness should be read in our hearts. Prufer is an absolutely necessary poet.

Visiting Writers Series with Poets Rigoberto Gonzalez and Amanda Auchter

2011-09-07T17:37:00.002-04:00

September 15, 2011
at Austin Peay State University

The Zone 3 First Book Award winner Amanda Auchter reads with the Zone 3 competition judge Rigoberto Gonzalez.

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry, and of the chapbook, Light Under Skin (Finishing Line Press, 2006). Recipient of awards and honors from the Bread Load Writers’ Conference, Bucknell University, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere, her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, and on Poetry Daily. Auchter lives in Texas, where she teaches at Lone Star College-Cy Fair and edits the literary journal, The Pebble Lake Review.

Rigoberto González is the author of the memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also the author of two award-winning poetry collections, two children’s books, the story collection Men Without Bliss, and the novel Crossing Vines, winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Fiction Book of the Year Award. The recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, he is a contributing editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle. González is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. www.rigobertogonzalez.com

This event takes place in the Gentry Auditorium, Kimbrough Building.

Collier Nogues' September Reading Schedule!

2011-08-23T16:22:00.005-04:00

Come hear Collier Nogues read from On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way Books, 2011) in Olympia, Enterprise, Cambridge, and Milwaukee! (Read the starred review from Publishers Weekly here.)

Saturday, September 3, 6:00 PM

Orca Books

509 E 4th Ave, Olympia, Washington

Wednesday, September 7, 7:00 PM
at The Coffin House, sponsored by Fishtrap http://www.fishtrap.org/index.shtml
400 East Grant Street, Enterprise, OR

Friday, September 9, 8:00 PM
Timothy Gager's Dire Literary Series

Click here to view the Facebook event page
The Out of the Blue Gallery

106 Prospect St., Cambridge, MA

http://www.direreader.com/

Thursday, September 15, 5:00 PM
Cardinal Stritch University
6801 North Yates Road, Milwaukee, WI

Friday, September 16, 7:00 PM
Woodland Pattern's Redletter Reading Series

720 East Locust Street, Milwaukee, WI

Collier Nogues, author of On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way Books, 2011) grew up in Texas and Okinawa, and has since lived in New York, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Fishtrap, Inc., in Enterprise, Oregon. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, and teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and Laguna College of Art and Design.

Farrah Field in PW's Review of The Best American Poetry 2011

2011-08-22T16:56:00.003-04:00

From Publishers Weekly:

The Best American Poetry 2011
Edited by Kevin Young and David Lehman. Scribner, $16 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-4391-8149-2

This year’s volume of poetry’s most popular annual anthology contains the usual eclectic mix of famous and up-and-coming poets; Young, this year’s editor, is in fact among the series’ youngest, though he is himself as well known as any of the other editors have been. His picks are all over the aesthetic map; there’s no better way to show them than to quote lines, so here goes: poetry fans will recognize names like Robert Pinsky (who describes a horn, probably a sax, as “the golden trophy. The true addiction”) and Carolyn Forche (“The water shimmers with imaginary fish”) and will be delighted to meet relative newcomers such as Jaswinder Bolina (“I am grateful for the man now nuzzling with my ex-lover”) and Farrah Field (“No one here has visited a functional hospital”). Wonderful, too, are the aphorisms of James Richardson (“How proud we are of our multitasking. What is Life but something to get off our desks, cross off our lists?”) and the sonnets of Olena Kalytiak Davis (“fuck! I have two loves too, i really do”). There are also several-page poems by the likes of Robert Hass and Paul Muldoon, for those with concentration to spare. As ever, there is something for every poetry lover, as well as for readers who might not yet know they love poetry. (Sept.)

Huffington Post: Carol Muske-Dukes on Sydney Lea's Young of the Year

2011-08-22T16:50:00.003-04:00

From the Huffington Post: Scattershot Poetry Reviews--

Syd Lea's Young of the Year (Four Way Books) might seem predictable at first in its narrative of advancing age and family life, its memories of youth and jazz. Small town New England is familiar poetry-territory but Lea is so skillful at injecting emotion into his terse yet lyrical syllables -- the world is uncommon again:

"Under the garish fast-food billboard/which insults a field on Route 10/always in tilth before the farm/like so many others went down/and its owners dispersed -- under that come-on/for the famous Happy Meal/two men of indeterminate age/are plucking dandelions."

It is that tart economical diction and tight syntax that yet reveal a broader empathy -- a soaring sensibility. People are homeless and hungry, the landscape often ungenerous, but in many of these poems, kindness is the miracle. Miracles abound in this book.

Nick Sturm Reviews David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments

2011-08-22T16:39:00.002-04:00

from John Gallaher's blog, Nothing to Say and Saying It:

Highly dynamic, irreverent, subversive, and driven by a kinetic music that often breaks into riot, The Nervous Filaments is equal parts burning car and predatory rain, an unstable, hugely intelligent electrical box that bleeds [...]

[...] These poems singe with their limber, imagistic abilities. Reading this book sometimes feels like holding an array of transparencies up to one another, aligning divergent frequencies and worlds in an attempt to see what shines through. Indeed, without due attention it might be easy to dismiss them as totem poles of non-sequiturs, if such a thing even exists. However, there is an uncommonly brave depth to be found in this book. Dodd Lee is a master of attention at the molecular level, casually juxtaposing line, image, and syllable in a fierce, uncompromising weather that accumulates into a brazen aesthetic project driven by place, experience, and a serious conviction in poetry as art.

Read the rest of the review here!

Interview with Jennifer Denrow in the Sonora Review

2011-08-10T16:03:00.004-04:00

The Sonora Review: An Interview of Jennifer Denrow by Whitney DeVos

Whitney DeVos: Being a CA native, [your thoughts on your most recent collection California are] what I’m most interested in hearing about—the disembodied place and the poetic voice of the 21st century—and how California (or California) speaks to both.

Jennifer Denrow: I had to write something before about California and I said this: California is about the role of California in the contemporary imagination, as an imaginative trope within a dislocated psyche. The escape here has to do with the inability to make things mean—it feels like if I try hard enough there can be a resolution via the imagination. But sometimes when we make things they overcome us. It’s difficult to know the appropriate boundary for imagination—at what point it moves from an attempt to decipher the world into a construction of the reality of the world. I can’t ever tell the difference but I continue to try.

When you say “disembodied place”, I think that’s right—dislocation feels prevalent, necessary (for me, anyway). I think it’s important to stay inside uncertainty, to think about place and imagination as inseparable—I feel like I’m always trying to determine what place is, how it works. Fanny Howe says in “Bewilderment”: “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” Maybe when you say the “voice of the 21st century” this is the voice . . . .

WD: As regards bewilderment and imagination—how do you see these relating to our position in history, our collective consciousness, etc.? Also, poetry? Any advice for a young contemporary writer?

JD: I think imagination and bewilderment are tops—wonder, for me, is the most important emotion—to be able to maintain wonder and be in the world (in order to be in the world, maybe). I can never know what anything means. It feels like I want to—like the correspondence I try to create with everything that’s outside of me is purposed to result in meaning, but I don’t think that’s it—I think it’s more like trying to understand how everything can mean so much and wandering around inside the suggestion that it does. It feels like an invitation I have to remain attentive to.

In terms of how this relates to our position in history, or in poetry, I’m not sure. There is something in the way things are made—or in the way they are made to be to one another: I was standing in a hole the other day, a hole in the beach, the sand had been moved, etc, and this couple walking by (it was dark) approaches, very suspiciously, and the woman says what’s going on here. And the man says, hey, you’re standing in a hole, why are you standing in that hole, and I said because it’s something i do—and then he said, so you know you’re in a hole and I said yes, I love holes. This was all very mysterious for the couple but for me it felt regular. I don’t know why thinking about wonder and our place within history and poetry made me think of this story but it did.

It feels necessary to always make things mean—maybe that’s what that story was about. they had probably narrativized my hole-standing to equate to some great act of faith, or maybe they thought I was stuck, or maybe they thought I had fallen into the hole and didn’t know and they were going to help me by telling me I was there. I don’t know. Maybe they were just drunk.

When it comes to advice, I’m not sure of that either. I know what’s important for me—that I continue to look at things, past the point of seeing them, and then past that, into not seeing them, and then staying out there, as far as I can inside of them, for as long as possible and seeing what that feels like and what can happen inside of that. Maybe other people have to do different things. Maybe obsession. I think that’s good advice.

WD: It feels necessary to always make things mean—I can definitely relate to this… sometimes it is so hard! But necessary, of course, in the face of everything that asks us to find things meaningless or—everyone who tells “us” (poets/artists/English majors) that we are “just overthinking everything”. as humans, we are people of stories and meaning (ceremony seems relevant—and our loss of meaning within, lack of rights of passage, connection with nature, self reliance, commercialization of holidays (“holy days”)…

JD: Meaning, it seems, comes from reference. And that’s why it’s so hard. Because everything feels like hypertext. One thing means not only itself, but it also means what happens when you click on it and when you click on it, you have all of the information of the new thing which is also the old thing and that of course means something else as well. There’s the thing about Stein making a rose mean a rose again, but then what happened—between then and now? Everything means so much. That’s why indefinite and demonstrative pronouns are so important. They are words dependent on external reference, some relation is indicated—to say this is here means nothing unless you can see or have some other reference to this and here. But now, these words feel complete without information outside of themselves because nothing is one thing anymore.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe nothing has ever been just one thing . . .

WD: What is at stake for us today, as “Californians,” Americans, humans, citizens of planet earth, attempting to make meaning etc.?

JD: What’s at stake: is it loss of wonder?

WD: I wonder, how we can court/cultivate wonder in a world in which we may Google everything, or in which places we’ve never been look exactly how they looked on “Planet Earth” or in some movie, etc., What can things mean in a world in which the survival of wonder is at stake? How do we create worlds in which meaning is integral? Is the point of art to create a mirror/a two way mirror/a different mode of being?

JD: I know. Wonder is so hard to keep. I was reading this article about David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who thinks about time. He says when we’re young, the world is unfamiliar so time takes forever to pass because we’re learning about the world, but as we age, time speeds up because we’re familiar with what’s here. That’s why it’s so hard—familiarity: it can mess everything up. His research was centered on near-death experiences or moments of fear when everything slows down. The best thing he says is that we’re in a time lapse—that our brains need time to figure things out and then what is figured out is revealed to us. That the brain is constantly making decisions about the information that’s important/necessary for us to have is something I like to think about. What else is really happening? What gets censored? How can anyone tell if what we get is the right stuff—it’s necessary for survival, I’m sure, but is it the right stuff?

There’s a book. It’s called The Truth About Stories and in it is written that “the truth about stories is that’s all we are.” That feels right to me.

WD: But if dislocation is prevalent, how does this speak to place? Where might we locate ourselves? Within language itself? Within the wor(l)ds of others?

JD: My estimation of place is very porous. I think everything is a place. I think people are places and I think my arm is. it seems like we locate ourselves in relation to the material around us or in relation to an emotional state or a psychological one. I’m here is one of my favorite declarations because it feels so true. And I don’t know what it means. I’m always wanting to say to people, maybe I do say it, we’re here. I like that there is something we can agree on–that we can know, momentarily, one thing that unifies our experience. I don’t know how to determine place, but I feel like I’m always in it. In something. Here. I always feel like I’m here and that seems important.

WD: I’m here. I have a good friend, and one of his favorite things to do is overhear people on their cell phones telling the people on the other line where they are. I like when people explain their jokes.

JD: That’s so funny—listening to where other people are. Isn’t it weird that everyone is somewhere. I love it when people explain jokes—but that’s mostly because I’m so slow at jokes. Sometimes it takes me so long to understand it and then I have a hard time figuring out how it’s funny. This is my favorite joke: what did the zero say to the eight?

Nice belt!

You should just make that joke the interview.

An Interview with Paul Lisicky

2011-07-28T14:05:00.003-04:00

Ryan Holden interviews Paul Lisicky about his forthcoming book, Unbuilt Projects (Four Way Books, 2012):

The title of the collection seems to offer an ironic take on how some might perceive flash fiction pieces. Was this a conscious gesture on your part? Did the title become apparent as you were working on the individual pieces in the collection?

The title was a happy accident. I was at a museum in Miami; there was a show for a prominent midcentury architect, and I saw the title “unbuilt projects” below some renderings on the wall. It seemed fascinating and poignant to me that the architect’s best buildings were never realized. (I wrote about one of those in the piece “Modernism.”) The metaphor stood for so many things relevant to my book--not just the form, but the mind of the mother, who’s in the process of losing her memory. I liked the way that title talked back to Famous Builder, my second book. The pieces in that manuscript are fuller, more narrative, while any number of the Unbuilt Projects pieces play with disjunction, leap, gap, tone shifts. You might say the unbuilt.

Some of the pieces, especially “Mothers in the Trees,” reminded me of the way myths were presented in some of my childhood books. How did you cultivate that mythic feel in your stories? How strong is the influence of fable in your collection? Were there particular mythologies (or individual stories) that had strongest influence?

I’d never let the mythic element into my previous books, but you can feel it try to nudge its way in. Just about all the pieces were written during the time of my mother’s last illness; dementia tore up everything I thought I knew about narrative, truth, character, identity. The mythic seemed to be truer to how I experienced consciousness then. I wasn’t a big reader as a young kid, so I can’t attribute that impulse to being influenced by any specific narratives. But I remember being taken with pictures of animals, plants, trees, water, turbulent weather. The cover of the book is actually taken from my favorite childhood picture book.

Many of the pieces include a relationship between mother and son that draws upon the array of emotions churning between them throughout their lifetimes. It is tempting to read the mother and son as the same throughout the collection. Would that be reading too much into it? Or was that a guiding intention?

In one sense, the mother and the son are the same from piece to piece. They have the same bodies, same faces, similar speech patterns. In another sense, they're not the same, especially when the mother's interior reality shifts from minute to minute. That sense of flux can't help but shape the speaker's sense of himself, and the ground he walks on. Can the book have it both ways? I hope so.

This collection often undercuts nostalgia. How much focus did you put on the perspective shift between childhood and adulthood as you were working?

The speaker's sense of time is fluid; childhood and adulthood aren't exactly distinct from one another. The past infiltrates the present and the present anticipates the future. Time is all mixed up; it's shadowed, impure. The book is wary of a nostalgic point of view, because nostalgia thinks of the past as something containable, separate, inevitably preferable to the present. The idealization of the past strikes the speaker as troublesome. It prevents us from seeing the world in front of us, ahead of us.

There’s a good mix of humorous stories and stories that take a more serious position; they are interspersed throughout the book. How did you decide on the order of your collection? How do the humorous stories inform the more serious pieces and vice versa?

I’m glad to hear that you think some of the stories are funny. I’m not sure I’m the best judge as to which pieces are humorous and which aren’t. I often think my funniest lines are heard as stark and grave when I give a reading. Then people will laugh and laugh when I think I’m being deadly serious. Humor is such a subjective thing--who knows what it is?--but I always take it as a compliment when people respond physically to my work. I think of laughter as recognition, assent. As to the structure of the manuscript, I want the pieces to form an extended conversation. It’s often the case that the piece following the piece in question will contradict the argument of the original piece, and I think there’s something inherently funny about that.

* * *

RYAN HOLDEN received his MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University. His poems have been recently published in Country Dog Review, ditch, and Ampersand Review. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011 by the Hobble Creek Review.

PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU. www.paullisicky.com

On the Other Side, Blue Reviewed in SF Chronicle

2011-07-27T16:51:00.005-04:00

Review by Stephen Burt

If you want a more extroverted new poet, one closer to memoir than to photography, try Collier Nogues' debut, On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way; 66 pages; $15.95). Most of Nogues' pages react to the death of her mother; most of the rest speak to or about other people - extended family, failed romantic partners ("The Greyhound Bus Break-Up"), a friend's deceased father, "Cousin Charles," and the man who would become her husband (they're engaged by the end of the book). Nogues covers familiar landmarks of modern mourning: the hospital, the funeral, the awkward, belated scattering of ashes. But her poems, sentence by sentence, are much stranger, hence truer, than summary implies: She shows us quirks, ironies, bits that we cannot expect.

Sometimes she does it with simple observation: "Lawn chairs in the shallows, parked there, almost lap-deep;/ their aluminum legs filled with water, so the sand is rocking them." Sometimes she does it with a shocking slogan, as in "Portrait of Your Grandmother With Alzheimer's" "The past// won't kill itself, the present has to snap its neck/ and you are the present's emissary." Her love life, too, invites sour ironies: "we're dating, which means another month of asking if we're having fun." "Long Weekend," addressed to an old friend, begins with two shocks: "No one loves me like your mother, now my mother's gone./ A beer an hour ought to hold me."

Nogues' life, her quips and declarations say, has been good to her, and good for her, and yet the deaths around her once made all of it faintly bitter, and faintly absurd. Nogues (who teaches at UC Irvine) gets her effects from her syntax and tone, not from sound; her long-lined, halting poetry never quite sings. It offers, instead, sentences and memories you might share with a hard-to-please friend, reflections you may also, someday, need.

Read more here.

The Bloomsbury Review: In a Beautiful Country

2011-07-25T17:19:00.004-04:00

In a Beautiful Country, by Kevin Prufer

Kevin Prufer is one of our best poets from the younger generation who still believe in the pure power of the lyric, the rhythm, and the force of the voice. His poetry sheers the top off any fancy notions of restless form to reveal simply what is crucial in poetic experiences where language sings off the page. Poems such as “Transparent Cities,” “Little Paper Sacrifice,” and “In a Beautiful Country” speak to an audience who understands what great poetry does. This is one of the best books of 2011:Kevin Prufer’s poems dwell in a world that spins off into many dimensions where writer and reader meet in the magic of poetry.

--The Bloomsbury Review, Vol 31/Issue 1, 2011

Hayden's Ferry Review: The Nervous Filaments by David Dodd Lee

2011-07-25T15:35:00.001-04:00

Book Review: The Nervous Filaments by David Dodd Lee
Review by Debrah Lechner

Who needs Vermeer?

All that standing around in filtered light with no job.

A hundred days later

egg salad with pepper on white bread

These are the first lines of “Wildlife,” one of the poems in David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments. Who hasn’t known, or been, the individual described in these few spare lines? Lee’s view of personal relationships is not in any aspect sentimental, but it can be melancholy and tender, as in these lines from “Romantic.”

You
and the weather inside you

the graham crackers the blue jay flips and eats

after all that’s your head in the window

looking out

through rain
through snow

lonely lonely

One of the new jobs we have is dating

In the intelligence, wit, and urgent imagery that David Dodd Lee employs, there is a great deal of pure sensory impact to enjoy, but the portraiture and meditation on what human relationships mean, their transitory nature and permanent impact, is what stands out for me. Very few writers capture that moment where the ephemeral moment and the perpetual experience meet, and that packs a wallop of an emotional blow, however carefully the tone is kept objective, even removed and wry. Perhaps it’s all the more powerful for that. Again, from “Romantic:”

driving with Kim

the way the flakes dimpled
the surface of the cups of our hot chocolate

they shredded the moon again she said about the falling snow

David Dodd Lee is the author of six books of poetry, and is also a fiction writer. He is the publisher of Half Moon Bay chapbooks. Many of his poems can be found online, and your copy of The Nervous Filaments can be found on Amazon here, as well as with other vendors.

Observable Readings: September 6 featuring Debra Allbery and Stephanie Schlaifer

2011-07-25T14:16:00.004-04:00

Poets Debra Allbery and Stephanie Schlaifer Usher In 2011-2012 Observable Readings Series on Sept. 6 at the Schlafly Bottleworks

Debra Allbery grew up halfway between Lancaster, OH, where she was born, and Athens, OH, where there's the University, in a town called Enterprise, which just happens to be a very Sherwood Anderson territory-Enterprise was the basis of his novel Winesburg, Ohio. Schooled at Denison University and the College of Wooster, Allbery received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Larry Levis, and did further graduate work at the University of Virginia, connecting there with Charles Wright. In 1989 she was the Discovery/The Nation winner, and she won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first book, Walking Distance (1991). She's also the recipient of two NEA fellowships, two fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and a Hawthornden fellowship. She's been a writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy, Interlochen Arts Academy, and a teacher at Dickinson College and the University of Michigan. Now the director of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she lives near Asheville, NC. Her second book, just out from Four Way Books, is Fimbul-Winter.

Surely it was Levis who contributed to Allbery's extraordinarily rich sense of the pastoral, as a literary mode, a mode of "this space which is like | room for error" (italics in the original). In the spaces of abrupt shift, of discontinuity, in the ballad's narrative point of view, in the American song's spaces of allegorical excitement, when we're not sure if it's Arthurian England or a construction site, Debra Allbery has found her Walking Distance, a buzz in which the aspects of desire or recognition are caught out, electric. She has had the sense from the first to go into her sources, whether these are Sherwood Anderson's Enterprise, OH, or Levis' rootless demimonde of all-but abandoned public spaces. In Fimbul-Winter, it is again the rootless "weird" of that space opened in the poem between image, music, and lyric choice. This is Allbery's world, and while it finds itself on native literary grounds, it also discovers something uncanny in that world's other-the author's own experience, and suffering.

Stephanie Schlaifer, originally from Atlanta, GA, works in St. Louis as an artist and freelance editor. She holds a BFA in sculpture and BA in English literature from Washington University in St. Louis (1999) and an MFA in poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa (2003). Schlaifer's poems are informed by travel, and by social class. She is interested in the way that the cut-in landscape, in the body, and in familial position-shapes the lyric, ironically positioned narrative voice with affiliations in painting, photography, and children's verse.

As editor-designer of Delmar, she was responsible for its eleventh, and last, issue. Her own work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Verse, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Sugar House Review, and Fence, among other journals. A manuscript, Clarkson St. Polaroids, was a semi-finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prize from The University of Wisconsin Press, and a finalist for the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. Schlaifer is a combative Boggler and a compulsive baker; it is rumored that two men once arm-wrestled each other to death for the last slice of her pecan pie. She is currently working on a book of poems about historical weather events and a collection of children's books in verse.

The Rumpus reviews TORN

2011-07-20T14:17:00.003-04:00

Even More Taboo Than Love
JEANNINE HALL GAILEY

C. Dale Young uses this third book to address injustices, the divisions caused by pain, prejudice, and a fractured spirit.

I have been trying to pinpoint exactly what made me so much more alert and yes, affectionate towards C. Dale Young’s third book, Torn, and its charms, compared to his first two books. I have always thought of him as an accomplished and intelligent writer (full disclosure: AND I’ve been reading his blog for years, not just his poetry,) but the tone and language of this third book seemed more welcoming to me – more casual, relaxed, looser somehow. The sense of humor is dark, perhaps, but prominent throughout the collection that is at the same time serious in its subjects and intents. His meditations on his Catholic faith and his training in medicine are especially interesting. The title poem, “Torn,” the last in the book, a familiar enough story of violence that Young examines from the viewpoint of caretaker of both the victim and the criminal, is worth the cost of admission all by itself. When I heard the poem out loud, I felt I had been punched in the chest. In a good way. [...] Read more here!

In a Beautiful Country Reviewed in the California Journal of Poetics

2011-07-19T17:41:00.002-04:00

Reviewed by M. Zobel.

Kevin Prufer’s fifth collection of poetry, In a Beautiful Country, depicts a startling landscape that is eroded by war, violence, grief, and alienation. Prufer populates this landscape with a variety of voices–a merciless God, a grieving son, a war veteran, and speakers alternately buried alive and witnessing decay. The wide vocal and thematic scope of this collection speak to Prufer’s breadth of vision, something he addresses directly in the poem “Distant Strangers” when he urges the reader, “Take a catalog, if you’d like, / though the color reproductions / can’t quite capture / the scope of my enormous project.” The enormity of his project does not startle the reader as much as the moments when Prufer transforms familiar images into unsettling starkness. In his country of charred trees, falling angels, missiles and bombs, and perpetual snowstorms, “boys idle in pick-ups / while a spring rain dots their windshields / with a million tiny bombs.” Over the course of the book, the poems themselves become the angels that “crashed through the trees, / so the yard was a scatter / of bent, failing bodies.”

At the center of Prufer’s honest observation of contemporary American society lies the image of falling, a motion both literal and figurative ...

Read the rest of the review here!

Book Trailer for Sarah Gorham's Forthcoming BAD DAUGHTER

2011-07-19T17:13:00.001-04:00

Review of TORN in NY Times Book Review

2011-07-15T15:31:00.002-04:00

NYTBR by Jeff Gordinier:

Young’s poems are so fierce and serrated. Like William Carlos Williams, Young is both a poet and a doctor. Those two practices converge with harrowing force in the title poem, “Torn,” an emergency-room account of a young man who’s been beaten and knifed in a gay-bashing incident:

". . . I sat there
for over an hour closing the wound so that each edge
met its opposing match. I wanted him
to be beautiful again."

The poem takes a striking turn at the end, a turn that hints at the kind of hard insight Young surely has access to through his medical work. You can’t help wishing for more of that — and for more of the friction between religion and erotic longing that you find in a poem like “Nature."