Nick Sturm Reviews David Dodd Lee’s The Nervous Filaments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of TORN in NY Times Book Review

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."

Review of TORN in r.kv.r.y.

r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal, Staff Reviewer:

In TORN, C. Dale Young’s most recent book of poetry, he continues to explore the themes of human frailty, both physical and spiritual, of love and passion, and of tenderness and cruelty.

The poems in this collection beautifully express the irony of the human craving for precision and accuracy—particularly in the field of medicine and in the realm of love—and the unfortunate and inherent fallibility of both. Often Young employs repetition of a word or a phrase, guiding the reader toward understanding by modifying the context each time the word or phrase appears. This repetition also serves to deliver a sense of urgency to the cadence of the poem and the meaning of the whole.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

Upcoming Readings: Joni Wallace

August 20:

2 - 4 p.m.
Moby Dickens Bookshop

Taos, NM

October 6:

7 p.m.

with Mary Jo Bang

University of Arizona Poetry Center

Tracy K. Smith on Tina Chang's Forthcoming Of Gods & Strangers

In This Valley of Dying Stars by Tracy K. Smith

from The Best American Poetry Blog

Of Gods & Strangers is written in cinemascope. It is large-scale, epic, sifting through the embers and emblems of outlived eras, and carrying what it finds back toward the future we are in the process of cementing into place. When I try to think about what this ambitious collection (a whopping 112 pages long) is about, the first word that comes to mind is time. In Chang’s cosmology, time is the vehicle we ride, something built to serve our human habit of going...

Read more!

Tina Chang in Fort Greene Park

Fort Greene Park Summer Events:

GreeneLeaf Jazz and The Spoken Word events, held every Thursday at 6:15 p.m. from June 30 to July 21. As its name suggests, the series features jazz and spoken word, including the work of Tina Chang, Brooklyn’s poet laureate, and Jane LeCroy, poet, writer and musician.

See the calendar of events here.

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Orality and Jewishness: The Michigan Quarterly Review on Eileen Pollack

ORALITY AND JEWISHNESS

by Eric Wasserman

In the Mouth: Stories & Novellas. By Eileen Pollack. New York: Four Way Books, 2008. Pp. 258. $18.95.

The six stories and novellas that make up Eileen Pollack’s new collection put the human body on full, uncensored display in ways that are rare in serious fiction. Imagine Philip Roth’s female counterpart flexing and bending all the beauties and failings of our bodies to her will and you have a glimpse of the poetic ambition that fuels In the Mouth.

Read the entire article at the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Collier Nogues Reads June 5th at Laguna Beach Books

Poets Turn a Phrase in Person

Laguna Beach Books welcomes poets Colette LaBouff Atkinson, author of “Mean,” and Collier Nogues, author of “On the Other Side, Blue,” at the store, 1200 S. Coast Highway, June 5 at 4 p.m.

They will each read from their works, answer questions, and sign books. There is no charge for this event.

Atkinson is the acting director of UC Irvine’s Center for Writing and Translation.

Nogues was recently the Fishtrap writer-in-residence for two years in Enterprise, Ore. She’s a graduate of UC Irvine’s master’s in fine art poetry program and lives in Long Beach.

Valley News Article on Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea: Taking Stock at 68
By Warren Johnston
Valley News Staff Writer

Sydney Lea has spent most of his life thinking about growing up. And until recently, the 68-year-old poet was still grappling with what constitutes adulthood, a concept that eludes many of us. He put a career at Dartmouth on the line because he didn't want to conform to the rigors of the college's English department. He has had a lifetime of playing in the woods and fields, climbing mountains and soaking up what nature has to offer.

Lea found a new perspective after the recent birth of his first granddaughter. He reflects on the past and looks forward in his new book of poems, Young of the Year. In the title poem, which is dedicated to his granddaughter, Cora Jane Lea, he notes “… 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.”

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.vnews.com/05272011/7808967.htm

June Reading Period Now Open!

Four Way Books' Open Reading Period is now open, and the deadline will be June 30th, 2011.

Open to all poets and fiction writers. Book-length poetry collections, story collections and novellas. We do not publish novels, translations, or non fiction. Selections will be made by Four Way Books editors.

Visit our website for the full submission guidelines.