BookShelf Discovery: Horseless press chapbook by Erika Howsare

Dave has been shelving all of my books onto these new bookshelves we had built in my office. Issa is promptly removing and sifting through them as she can now reach the lower ones. She dismantled Anne Sexton as her first choice and then moved up to the Ts. For some reason, she then had this handmade chapbook in her hand by Erika Howsare. I love when you discover a book you have forgotten about. It's a tall (11x3) chapbook, saddle stitched on one side with a brown cover with a long rectangle on the front enclosing parts of the title Elect June Grooms and the author's name. Made by horseless press (2004) in a limited number of 500; it's number 5.

Here's poem 2 from the section Geography:

Small alphabet of hieroglyphs

Here is my button, here

is your thread

which finds its place on the page

You eye each like the body you can

live without

Sudden licks of bright commerce, like chords

in static or bits

of cornstalk through snow

As if someone hung a scarf or a parrot

from the whitebones of the woods

That "whitebones of the woods" is stunning, so stark and silent. I remember when horseless press first started putting out their online review, and now they are putting out perfect bound books like FABRIC: Preludes to the Last American Book by Richard Froude, which I haven't read yet, but I'm a big fan of Froude's work. Here's their website for all up and coming adventures: http://horselesspress.com/books-chapbooks/

How can I create a baby gate to keep the toddler off the last two bookshelves? Should I sprinkle hot sauce around the area?

Anselm Hollo

From Guests of Space (Coffeehouse Press) 2007

I don't know why his name is spelled wrong in the label, and the video is not very impressive, but the sound is good enough to hear the poem.

Poetry Books I'm Loving

Kate Eichhorn's Fieldnotes, a forensics (BookThug, 2010)

It makes me happy just to know that someone else is out there thinking about the things that I sometimes think about and thinking I should write poetry about these thoughts. I had one of those moments before reading this book when I didn't want to read it, because then it would be over. It was delicious. I think I might write a review on this, so I'm still sifting through all my thoughts.




Home/ Birth (1913 Press) by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker took me by surprise. The information was mostly familiar to me. The way they lay out and respond to each other flows nicely and makes it easy to digest all the facts and stories. But then the book just sweeps you off your feet, and you realize you're not just reading a fanstastic project taken up by two great writers but you're holding in your hands that 1/100th of life that poetry attempts to capture. It's such a brave, honest endeavor that these two women allow the reader to follow them through, and it changed me reading this text. You can't just go back to being who you were in the world before you read this.

17 Poets! Special Double Feature Sponsored by Poets and Writers, Inc

March 24 at the Gold Mine Saloon, 7:30 PM (www.17poets.com)

Special Double Feature Sponsored by Poets & Writers

Louisiana Poet Laureate Darrell Bourqueand New York Poet and Translator Bill Zavatsky

Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he served as director of the Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Humanities programs. His poetry books include Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite and The Blue Boat, and his poems from Plainsongs are featured in the Where Land Meets Sky, a catalog of the works of artist Elemore Morgan, Jr.
He continues to work as poetry workshop leader and consultant, mostly with the Louisiana Affiliates of the National Writing Project. In November of 2007 he was appointed as Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2008‐2009, by Governor Kathleen Blanco, and his personal initiative for the laureateship is to develop poetry audiences by teaching and reading in the pre‐college classroom as well as in the state's libraries.

Bill Zavatsky grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Manhattan since 1965. He has published two books of poems, most recently Where X Marks the Spot. His co-translation (with Zack Rogow) of Earthlight: Poems by André Breton, won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. His co-translation of The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud (with Ron Padgett) was republished in 2008 by Black Widow Press. His most recent anthology appearance is in Seriously Funny, an anthology of humorous poetry edited by Barbara Hamby and David Kirby. Bill’s “Elegy” for Bill Evans appeared on the sleeve of the You Must Believe in Spring album, and is included in the reissue CD. For the pianist Marc Copland, Bill has written thirteen poems that serve as liner notes for twelve CDs, the most recent being a solo recording, Alone and a soon-to-be-released quartet date with Greg Osby and Lewis Nash. Bill himself is a pianist and retains an abiding love for the great pianists of the New Orleans tradition. He has been awarded grants in poetry from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Twice he has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and in 2008 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry. He teaches English in the high school at the Trinity School in Manhattan.
March 31