Cynthia Cruz Reads at the New York Botanical Garden

Saturday, Apr 2, 3:00pm

The Bronx, NY

A SEASON IN POETRY
Cynthia Cruz, Lisa Olstein, and Cynthia Zarin

Welcoming the arrival of Spring, with poets reading classic favorites as well as their own work at the largest botanical garden in the United States.

Co-sponsored by The New York Botanical Garden.

Admission is free with general admission to the Botanical Garden.

New York Botanical Garden
Bronx River Parkway at Fordham Road

For directions see www.nybg.org

Lecture w/ Daniel Tobin: Labor in Irish-American Poetry

Press release -- St. Ambrose University.

DAVENPORT -- "In the Suburbs of Ulro: The Metaphysics of Work in Irish-American Poetry, " this year's St. Ambrose University McCaffrey Lecture of Irish-American Studies, will be presented 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 1, in Rogalski Center, located at the corner of Ripley and Lombard streets, one block west of Harrison Street.

Professor and poet Daniel Tobin,dean of the School of the Arts at Emerson College, Boston, Mass., will combine poetry reading and lecture to illuminate the place of labor in the poems of several Irish-American poets.

The lecture, which is part of the university's "Ubiquity of Work" series, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Ryan Dye (563) 333-6389, or go to www.sau.edu.

On the Other Side, Blue: Starred Review in Publisher's Weekly!

from Publisher's Weekly:

On the Other Side, Blue

Collier Nogues, Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (66p) ISBN 978-1-935536-07-9

Nogues's debut quietly but squarely takes on death, family, place, landscape, history, love, marriage, though grief ties them all together, providing not only identity but also genealogy and community throughout the book. Although Nogues begins with her own bereavement following her mother's death, she is as much an observer of mourning as a participant in it, charting the similarities and variations of grief's progression in a lover, family members, strangers, neighbors. The book then moves from death to a sort of rebirth, ending with a warily hopeful epithalamion in which "[t]he promise absents a fear/ which had been helpful/ in its way but can now be discarded." Finally Nogues's observation of loss gives way to connection with landscape and the natural world; in her best moments, Nogues counterbalances elegy with trust in plainspoken description, yielding nothing short of wisdom: "[i]t's not true/ to say there's light behind those trees. Those trees/ are all there is." In careful lines and with a particular, wry Western twang, Nogues works her way out of mourning and back into a world of living things. (Apr.)

Young and Barot @ SMU Lit Fest

C. Dale Young and Rick Barot have been selected to appear at the SMU Literary Festival in March:

http://www.dallasvoice.com/gay-poets-featured-smu-lit-fest-1065075.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+DallasVoice+(DallasVoice)&utm_content=Twitter

Lambda Literary Names TORN One of the 23 Highly Anticipated Books in 2011

"Lambda Literary Award-finalist C. Dale Young’s publishers (Four Way Books) sold all 75 advance copies of his new poetry collection during the poet’s signing at AWP. Enough said."

You can view the entire list here.

Monica Youn at Copper Colored Mountain Arts

"COPPER COLORED MOUNTAIN ARTS CELEBRATES NATIONAL POETRY MONTH WITH APRIL READINGS, LECTURES AND CONVERSATIONS"
Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 8-23, 2011

One Pause, a poetry series in its second year at Copper Colored Mountain Arts, welcomes nationally recognized poets Monica Youn, Raymond McDaniel, Mark Wunderlich, Clayton Eshleman, and Jerome Rothenberg for a series of readings and talks during National Poetry Month this April. The events will represent a diverse range of contemporary poetry. Collectively, the visiting poets have received grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Poetry Series; and the Lambda Literary Award, a National Book Award, and many others. “Yet their work is all very different,” says One Pause Director, Sarah Messer. Poetic topics range from hurricane Katrina, to Paleolithic Cave Paintings, to 18th century Lutheran “Heaven Letters,” to the comic strip “Crazy Kat.” Readings and talks will be spread throughout the month of April and will be followed by recorded public “conversations,” where the poets will discuss their poetic process, their inspirations, and why poetry matters.

All Readings and Conversations are FREE and open to the public. Location: 7101 W. Liberty Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

View the full schedule here.

Debra Allbery Interview & Review on WNYC's The Read

Debra Allbery publishes Fimbul-Winter, poems that move through landscapes and personal growth

by Rob Neufeld

A review and an interview.

"It can be in a word or, for me, probably it’s more likely that the germ of the poem—the initial seed—is in an image. You see something and you feel it vibrate. You know that the poem is in there. For me, it’s often images in the natural world. That probably comes across in the book as the place where the poem begins. It rises out of the landscape, and then the landscape becomes a fruitful and beneficial—I don’t want to say mask because it’s not a hiding—but a means of translating yourself."

Read the entire feature here.

An Exploration of Poetry and Comics w/ Professor Stephen Burt and Monica Youn

Thursday, March 3, 6:00pm

Youn

Burt

A Mice, A Brick, A Lovely Night: An Exploration of Poetry and Comics
Professor Stephen Burt and Monica Youn
Monica Youn's recent collection Ignatz, a finalist for the National Book Award, takes figures and structures from the great Modernist comic stripKrazy Kat. Youn and Burt intersperse readings from Ignatz with a discussion of Krazy Kat and other comics, the relations between words and images, and the utility of aposiopesis.

Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330
Free and open to the public.

Megan Staffel, Monica Youn, and C. Dale Young Read @ NYU

February 18, 2011, 5 p.m. Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY

Megan Staffel’s latest book is Lessons in Another Language: A Novella and Stories (2010). Monica Youn’s most recent book of poems, Ignatz, was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist. TORN, C. Dale Young’s new book of poems, is due in 2011.

Sponsored by NYU Creative Writing Program

Susan Brown Interview

Check out Marie-Elizabeth Mali's (Steady, My Gaze, Tebot Bach Press, 2011) interview with Four Way Books author Susan Brown.

"My poems are a mirror of me, for better or for worse. I adore dark comedy. I’ve had to learn balance in tone and tame my humor and irreverence, for the sake of the poem. Sometimes I find myself traveling too long in HaHa land, and the writing loses substance. I’m inclined, though, to laugh at the slightest provocation."

Poems by Joni Wallace from Boston Review and Verse Daily

Read two poems from Joni Wallace's forthcoming collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine:

http://bostonreview.net/BR36.1/wallace.php

http://www.versedaily.org/2011/valentinebrokenbirds.shtml

Lori A. May Reviews Meg Kearney's Home By Now

http://loriamay.blogspot.com/2011/01/rave-home-by-now-by-meg-kearney.html

"Long lines that linger, short lines with emotional punch, persona and voice that capture your breath and make you crave more…Home By Now is a fascinating collection that gives so much in 60+ pages, in such an accessible style that’s zeroed in on language and emotion, it’s impossible not to recommend."

- Lori A. May

Barn Owl Review Interview + More with David Dodd Lee

Visit the Barn Owl Review to check out Nick Sturm's recent interview with David Dodd Lee about his book Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems.

"These erasures were a real learning experience for me. I'm stunned I had the intelligence and good luck to allow the whole thing to take place...What happened next, really, in terms of how I wrote the poems in The Nervous Filaments, was I began “erasing” during my own composition process. Before a line could even make it onto the page I'd have cut it off at the pass (because it was predictable or too transparent or felt like the next idea one might expect in a narrative poem—that is, a narrative poem that is simply linear, and causal). I don't want poems to enact the logical sequencing of thought (made manifest in language) created by a tunnel of time. I want them to feel fractured, elliptical, impressionistic. I want to feel the disturbing logic of dreams at work."

Also take a moment to read Charmi Keranen's Gently Read Literature Review of The Nervous Filaments:

"To sit down with David Dodd Lee’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, The Nervous Filaments...Find yourself a glass of wine and prepare to be transcendently transported to a parallel sphere. Poem by poem, Lee is going to deconstruct his world, “I believe in words. One by one/they dismantle everything I have faith in” (Wildlife), and then, reader, he’s going to deconstruct your world, and hand you the pieces “in the gray-green part of your eye–/a busted out headlight” (Not A Landscape, Not A Teaspoon), every piece infused with the emotion of living in an emergent world tragically tilted, perennially askew."

Still not enough David Dodd Lee for you? Us either...

http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2010/08/david-dodd-lee.html

And if you missed him on Verse Daily, you can read the poem here!

Christopher Nelson Interviews Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review,Guernica and others. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Book, and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She is currently the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton.

"The poems in Ruin are razor sharp, anorexic in style (not subject, of course—but the immense compression). I deliberately chose the least amount of words I could to say what needed saying. In Glimmering Room, I sugar it up a bit: there is more beauty, or relief, in the poems. Some of the poems are longer as a result of this. I have now completed my third collection, and these poems are even more elaborate, more words, more beauty. I am working my way away from Morse and moving toward a richer, more layered, kind of poem."

Read the entire interview at Christopher Nelson's Poetry Blog.

"Hope Chest" by Daniel Tobin: Valparaiso's Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week: "Hope Chest" by Daniel Tobin

The VPR Poem of the Week is Daniel Tobin’s “Hope Chest,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2002 issue (Volume III, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review. This poem also has been published in Poetry from Paradise Valley, an anthology of poems from the first decade of VPR, recently released by Pecan Grove Press.

Daniel Tobin is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Belated Heavens, as well as a critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney. He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the 18th Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, and Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art. He has received the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Widely published in literary journals—including American Scholar, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Nation, New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, Sewanee Review, and Southern Review—his work also has been anthologized in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, and elsewhere. Tobin is Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Poems and an Interview with C. Dale Young

Read a discussion about three of C. Dale Young's poems from his forthcoming book, Torn, on The Fine Delight blog, as well as an interview with Moderator Nick Ripatrazone.

From the interview:

"'Torn' is a poem that for me is filled with contradictions and doubt about humanity. That human beings are capable of tenderness and the ability to heal while at the same time being capable of incomprehensible brutality is something I have always found compelling and powerful. Many of the poems in the book deal with these dualities and doubts. I also realized that in many ways I am torn in that I work both as a physician and as a poet. I am also torn as a man who is part Caucasian, part Asian and part Latino. When I first assembled the first draft of the manuscript and read through it, the title Torn seemed inevitable."

Joel Brouwer on How a Poem Happens

Four Way Books author Joel Brouwer discusses how a poem happens with Brian Brodeur. Read the interview and one of Joel's poems here:

http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/

Daniel Tobin on Poets Out Loud

Visit Poets Out Loud to hear Daniel Tobin read his poem "A Song of the Cosmos."

http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/tobin_reads_a_song_of_the_cosmos/

Reading at NYU: Megan Staffel, Monica Youn, and C. Dale Young

Three Writers from Four Way Books: Megan Staffel, Monica Youn, and C. Dale Young

February 18, 2011, 5 p.m. Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York, NY Megan Staffel’s latest book is Lessons in Another Language: A Novella and Stories (2010). Monica Youn’s most recent book of poems, Ignatz, was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist. TORN, C. Dale Young’s new book of poems, is due in 2011. Sponsored by NYU Creative Writing Program

Review of Ignatz in the Boston Review

Pick up a copy of the January/February 2011 issue of the Boston Review to read, among other wonderful things, a review of Monica Youn's Ignatz:

"Monica Youn's second collection is tied together by the world of Krazy Kat, a comic strip that spanned both World Wars as it serialized the unrequited love of Krazy Kat for Ignatz, an enraged mouse who ended most strips by chucking a brick at the forlorn Kat. The comic's endless repetition of this formula--ardor, disgust, brick--gives Youn the license and confidence to enter the endlessly repeating world of the love poem, a license she uses to mix generic expressions of desire--"She thought to brush her hand against his thigh. / She thought to trace the seam of his jeans with her thumbnail"--with those inspired by the comic strip's surreal southwestern landscapes. The latter find Youn at her best, as do her brief, elegant sketches of the motions and countermotions of the book's sweet-cruel affection: "O my dear devoir / O my dour devour." The sense of lightness and play is just a shell in Ignatz, and Youn drills through it until the characters achieve the gravity of real life and the dimensionality of real bodies. There are no glib, one-off jokes in this collection: "running from Ignatz and the night / like a drumskin and her heart like someone // locked in the trunk of a car and if there were / only time god she would spit it out." Even so, there is a charge of sheer pleasure--that of poetry, not comedy--when the narrative hits its apex, and our constant, cyclical pursuit hangs exposed, crystallized: "Her head / reared back // in an animal / posture-- // Ignatz / as always // obliged.""

--The Boston Review