Thursday, February 24, 2011

Poetry Pairs: Carol Muske-Dukes and Tom Healy


Sunday June 12 at 3pm
Poetry Pairs is produced by Fran Castan, who will introduce the poets.

Poetry Pairs features a nationally-acclaimed poet paired with a local poet of distinction, celebrating their latest books. Meet the authors, have your books signed, and enjoy refreshments in the Boots Lamb Education Center or garden!

$5 / $3 Members of Guild Hall
Tickets online at GuildHall.org or at Box Office starting May 18; theatermania.com; or 1.866.811.4111

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. with public funds from New York State Council on The Arts, a state agency and by Daniel and Joanna S. Rose.

Pollack and Ossmann in Poets & Writers

Two Four Way Books authors in the new issue of Poets & Writers! Purchase a copy to read essays by Eileen Pollack (In the Mouth, and the forthcoming Breaking and Entering) and April Ossmann (Anxious Music).



Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Jennifer Denrow Reads for Huffington Post Video

Video Book Readings: Emerging Stars In Fiction And Poetry
Anis Shivani:

"Wow! We are excited. Not only are these amazing readings by some of today's strongest emerging talents in literary fiction and poetry--just check out the readings by Harmony Holiday, Dan DeWeese, and Garrick Davis, to take your breath away!--they represent some of the finest work being produced by the nation's best presses committed to discovering new talent: presses like Four Way Books, Fence Books, Wave Books, Noemi Press, and many others on the leading edge of innovative writing. These videos were all recorded exclusively at the request of the Huffington Post, and the writers also generously shared personal statements to introduce their work--words that can't fail to inspire emerging writers hoping to make their own breakthrough. To paraphrase Rebecca Wolff of Fence Books, don't let the awesome coolness of these readings interfere with appreciation of the fine literary quality!"


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.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

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.)

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

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."

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.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Debra Allbery Interview & Review on WNYC's The Read


"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

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Youn

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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

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

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