Tom Healy named LA Times Book Prizes Finalist

Four Way Books is so pleased to announce that author Tom Healy has been named a Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist for his debut poetry collection, What the Right Hand Knows. Congratulations to Tom!

Upcoming Readings for Joel Brouwer

Four Way Books poet Joel Brouwer (Centuries, 2003; And So, 2009) has three upcoming readings in New York City, and one in Bronxville, NY. Don't miss this chance to hear Joel's imaginative and striking work firsthand!


2/16:
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, NY
6:30 PM, Slonim House Living Room
Reading with Olena Kalytiak Davis


2/17:
Cake Shop
152 Ludlow NY, NY
7 PM
Reading with Olena Kalytiak Davis


2/18:
College of Staten Island, CUNY
1:30-2:30 p.m.
The Archive Room of the Library (1L)


2/19:
NYU Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street NY,NY
5 PM
Reading with Rachel Zucker and Rebecca Wolff.

AMAZON BESTSELLER

Tom Healy was #11 on Amazon's American Poetry bestsellers list this week for his debut collection What the Right Hand Knows, released Fall 2009. Congrats Tom! To purchase a copy of Tom's book visit www.fourwaybooks.com.

Four Way Books Readings on the Bowery

Four Way Books hosts a wonderful reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, located at 308 Bowery between Houston and Bleeker. We have an amazing winter and spring lineup! For five dollars, you can share in an afternoon filled with literature. For directions to the Bowery Poetry Club, or to check out bios of the readers, click on Four Way Books Readings on the Bowery and you will be directed to the Bowery Poetry Club homepage. The series begins at 2:00 PM. Hope to see you there.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Michael Dumanis

Monica Ferrell

Jay Baron Nicorvo

James Allen Hall

Sunday, February 28 , 2010

Fred Marchant

Dana Roeser
Elizabeth Haukaas
Joan Houlihan

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Tom Healy

Carol Muske- Dukes

Ryan Murphy

Megan Staffel

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Jamie Ross

David Dodd Lee

Susan Wheeler

Lynn Emanuel

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Sara London
Ken Chen
Meg Kearney
Monica Youn

Daniel Simko's The Arrival

Daniel Simko's posthumous collection, The Arrival, receives a wonderful review at LibraryJournal.com! Doris Lynch calls Simko's American debut "beautiful, intense poetry." Four Way Books agrees! To read this review in its entirety, please click on the title of this blog entry, and then scroll down to the poetry section of the reviews. To read Simko's work, or buy his book, return to our home page (www.fourwaybooks.com) and click on The Arrival.

Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry

Our submission period is now open for the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, and will remain open until March 31, 2010. The contest is open to any poet writing in English who has not published a collection of poetry. Alan Shapiro will judge. For details, see the submission guidelines on our home page, www.fourwaybooks.com. Good luck!

Four Way Books Featured on "The Lantern Review"

Stephen Hong Sohn, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, gives praise and attention to several Asian-American Four Way poets in his blog entry on The Lantern Review. In the entry Stephen wishes to "highlight the exciting and innovative work being produced out of independent presses," and that includes Four Way Books! The title of this entry will take you to The Lantern Review.

Farrah Field's "Rising"

Ron Slate reviews Farrah Field's Rising for The Quarterly Conversation. Slate calls Farrah's collection "superb in its design and pacing" and adds that Rising "recruits its readers to wreak vengeance on what would block our humanity by unblocking the language we use to describe what actually happens." To read this wonderful review in its entirety, click on "Farrah Field's 'Rising'" above. If you are in the New York area, Farrah will be reading with three other writers, tomorrow, Saturday, December 12 from 3-5 PM at the Bushwick Library in Brooklyn.

Joel Brouwer's "And So"

Ron Slate reviews Joel Brouwer's third collection of poetry, And So, for Blackbird, an online journal of literature and the arts. Of Brouwer's writing, Slate says "he is capable of masterfully including what Roland Barthes called the “punctum” in a photograph, the essential detail that pricks the viewer in such a way that a hidden element leaks out but cannot be fully understood." For the full review, clink on the title of this entry above.

Best Sellers List

Four Way Books is pleased to announce that three of our authors have made the Poetry Foundation's Contemporary Best Sellers List for the week of November 8, 2009. Congrats to Meg Kearney, author of Home By Now; Sandy Tseng, author of Sediment; and Tom Healy, author of What the Right Hand Knows. For a full listing, please click on the link above.

Meg Kearney, Home By Now

Meg Kearney's Home By Now is reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Clink on the link to read her full review, and while you are there, check out the reviews of our other Fall books: Tom Healy's What the Right Hand Knows, Sandy Tseng's Sediment, and Daniel Simko's The Arrival. Of Kearney's collection PW says "Fluent and easy to like, serious in its take on the American life course, this second collection of poems for adults from Kearney (she's also the author of young adult verse) looks hard at the troubles and changes of Kearney's own experience..." (Nov. 2009)

Daniel Simko, The Arrival

Daniel Simko's The Arrival is a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Of Simko's debut posthumous collection, PW writes "these poems are fragmentary but always sharp, their emotional weight clear. [...] This book will be a bittersweet discovery to many who will wish this poet had more time." (Nov. 2009)

Tom Healy at the Miami Book Fair International

Tom Healy, author of What the Right Hand Knows, will be a participant at this year's Miami Book Fair International, an eight day literary festival. If you are in the Miami area, catch Tom's event this Saturday, November 14 at 3:00 PM at Auditorium Pavilion B. For directions and more information visit www.miamibookfair.com.

Mark Halliday on Kevin Prufer's "National Anthem"

"In National Anthem Kevin Prufer offers something that we may call political poetry, though it might better be called “post-political” because he imagines a world in which it is far too late to improve life via politics. National Anthem tries to express what it’s like to live in a society that provides, for now, apparent physical safety and material well-being, but which seems to be generating irresistible forces that will bring all-encompassing disaster." Check out the link to "Contemporary Poetry Review" for the rest of this review.

Joel Brouwer on Daniel Simko's "The Arrival"

"Tonally and formally, the poems are clear kin to the Soviet Mitteleuropa house style of Popa, Sorescu, and Holub: simple sentences, stark and dramatic imagery, wry fatalism, winks of humor. In terms of content, of particular note is the poet’s (wholly understandable) obsession with deracinations both geographical and lingual. The poems of displacement — from the homeland and from the mother tongue — are . . . well, stunning. They leave me speechless. They sound like poems trying to carve themselves into my head." Clink on the link for the rest of this review.

-September 23, 2009, from Harriet, a blog from the Poetry Foundation

Sandy Tseng, Sediment

Sandy Tseng's debut collection Sediment is reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly

This vivid and clean-lined debut weaves strands of personal and family narrative into short poems with wider symbolic force; the best of them contemplate both autobiography and ecocatastrophe. Tseng's free verse creates strong moods: “Apple season, the dog eats his fill and falls asleep beside the space heater./ I thought the world was going to end years ago.” Questions of East Asian immigration and assimilation dominate some early poems before giving way to more abstract spiritual dilemmas: “if our books burn up,/ we will suffer loss and still be saved,/ as those escaping through the flames.” Tseng is equally at home depicting modern cityscapes and presenting far-flung rural locales. In both, she seeks sublimity while restricting herself to familiar words; in both she is able to see impending doom, as when the title poem presents the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in two haunting pages (“The last thing we see is a wall of white crashing... Oil rig evacuations. Cars and cars against the sea wall”). In Tseng's strongest work, everything takes on a surprising, religious dimension as the book drives to a close: “The voice of the Lord is upon the water,” she warns: “he intends to strip the forests bare.” (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly, 10/19/2009

Tom Healy, What the Right Hand Knows

Tom Healy's debut collection What the Right Hand Knows is reviewed by Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly

Laconic yet passionate and sparely personal, the poems in this first book set urbanity and unfolding tragedy in common words and slow-moving, short lines. A gallery owner since the 1990s

and a significant figure in New York City's art scene, Healy unsurprisingly sets some poems there; his real gifts emerge, though, in allegorical or remembered rural locales. In one poem “mother and son” take “a Sunday drive on Tuesday” through the land where they grew up, “their remembered selves waving,/ as farmers do.” The specter of chronic disease, likely HIV, looms over that and other verse (“Everyone is so involved/ keeping track of my pills”), while the shadow of time passing besets them all; readers who admire Mark Doty may find far more concise versions of Doty's effects. Healy's finest moments make him spare, elegiac and wry all at the same time: “What do we do when we hate our bodies?/ A good coat helps.” So often interested in bodies, their pleasures, their troubles, Healy frequently decides that neither poetry nor anything else can console us when bodies don't work: “sleep, vegetables, short walks” or even poems all seem to lead “to the logic of failure,// the panic that mind/ is not enough.” (Nov.)

--Publishers Weekly 10/19/2009

Tina Chang Receives NYFA Annual Fellowship Grant!

Congratulations are in order to Four Way Books author Tina Chang, who was awarded the 2009 NYFA Annual Fellowship Grant! Tina's Most recent collection, Half-Lit Houses, was published in 2004.
See what Timothy Liu and Li-Young Lee have to say about Half-Lit Houses:

Her mouth is fertile, seeded with incidents from a family history that lay scattered about like grains of rice upon which our poet kneels. Misfit and starlet, she wrestles with her father on earth and in Heaven. Whether seasoned with gunpowder or with sugar, Tina Chang's legacy is neither entirely Chinese nor American but an inheritance to be spoken through dialects—a composite language forged out of her many lyrical selves.

—Timothy Liu


Tina Chang's poems perform the ancient tasks of remembrance, recovery, and praise. This work seeks to account for a life in the context of the myths, cultural and familial, that both nurture and threaten that very life and the voice that might sing it into legend. This is a poetry of amazing lushness, melancholy and affirmation.

—Li-Young Lee

Tina Chang's newest collection of poems Of Gods & Strangers is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2011.

www.tinachang.com

Eileen Pollack wins Silver Medal for Best Short Fiction

Eileen Pollack's collection In the Mouth, published last Spring, was awarded the Silver Medal for Best Short Fiction by Foreword Magazine. Congratulations to Ms. Pollack!

"Pollack writes about tragedy and transition with pathos and insight. Her stories acknowledge the everyday qualities of grief while according it gravity. Honest enough not to promise the false reassurance that everything will end happily, Pollack offers resolutions that have the character of a hard-fought, fragile peace with the world: 'a pleasant exhaustion,' or the knowledge that 'I would no more want to open that safe than I would want to dig up my mother’s coffin, pry open the lid, and see if her diamond wedding-ring is still on her finger and my father’s perfect fillings still inside her teeth.'

In the Mouth shows us how the secrets that might sunder a family often become its strongest connections. Whether in the guise of the unopened safe a family is selling in a yard sale, two married strangers forlornly attracted to each other at a resort, or a mother unable to express her fears about lavishing physical attention on her baby, these electric stories explore the nerve endings of human relationships."

-- from the Press Release for In the Mouth

Daniel Tobin recieves Guggenheim Fellowship

Congratulations to Daniel Tobin who has been awarded a 2009 Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation! Daniel's collection, Second Things was released this past fall. 

"Second Things is the work of a mind intimate with such forces—such reckonings—a mind able to hear the first bloom of the clematis and think, “Regard me, I would have it say, abiding here /

among the second things bright and perishing.” Tobin’s supple mind and deft line hold in perfect poise both the bright and the perishing, the history of Ireland and Irish-Americans alongside

today’s present moment. In the Harvard Review, critic Christopher Bock writes that “Four Way Books is known for taking risks with aesthetically challenging and important work, and Tobin

seems more ambitious than many of his contemporaries.” In Second Things Tobin demonstrates that striking ambition, and this collection is a testament to the rich rewards it brings." -- from the Second Things Press Release