Poetry News, Reviews, Readings, etc.

I've decided to begin writing here again after this extremely tumultuous last year of my life. Sometimes I forget what being a poet means, but apparently I cannot forget being a poet.

Here's some writing I did recently regarding one of my favorite poets Nathan Hauke and his newest collection In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes. “Bees errand the eaves to gather,” Nathan Hauke writes in his new collection In the Marble of Your Animal Eyes. Here a series of untitled poems coalesce to present an overarching natural theme underscored by the attention to the page brought forth by the markings and details written onto the typed pieces that keep the reader engaged in the making of the poem. 

You can read the full review over at H_NGM_N sixteen.

Here's some other news:

Trembling Pillow Press is getting ready to release its summer collection Trick Rider by Jen Tynes. Tynes publishes Horseless press, and they have been putting out a stunning amount of publications in the last few years along with their online Horseless Review. One of their newest collections by Tim Earley is on SPD's June Bestsellers. You can check it out here.

I mention Tim Early because he is one of the many visiting poets coming to read at Blood Jet Poetry Series this fall. Other great visiting writers include Dara Wier, Paige Taggart, Laura Goldstein, Megan Kaminski, & Joe Zendarski. As always New Orleans hosts a bevy of local poets who will round out the season as well including Jordan Soyka, Kristin Sanders, JS Makkos, Joseph Bienvenu, Kaycee Filson, Andrea Young, and Sandra Grace Johnson.

This is Blood Jet's second fall season at BJs in the Bywater. We feature 2-3 poets each show followed by an open mic space for our audience to share their work. I like to think of it as my living room of poetry every Wednesday night, Sept 3- Dec 17th at 8PM.

I mention Laura Goldstein and Megan Kaminski because I'll be reading in Lawrence, KS with Laura Goldstein and Simone Savannah on Aug 31 at the Taproom Poetry Series. Then  I'll be following Goldstein back to Chicago to do a reading Sept 2 with my fellow Lavender Ink poets Laura Madeline Wiseman and Sara Henning at the Wit Rabbit Series. We'll also be back in Chicago in the spring to read for the Red Rover Series.

Marthe Reed publishing with Nous-Zot press released a chapbook of mine titled i always wanted to start over this spring. I'll be reading from that along with my latest MS titled Commitment that I am hoping to find a home for soon.

Laura Madeline Wiseman and I talked about our books from Lavender Ink recently over at PANK. I should update my online bio because the one they use here says I am still married. Yikes!

That's my other big non poetry related news. I'll be officially divorced July 16th.
Here's to new beginnings. Like I said in my last chap: i always wanted to start over.

Chapbooks: Collection Tales

The photo on the left is a small collection of chaps that I've amassed over the last two months. About a dozen of them are DUSIE Kollectiv chaps mailed to me from people all over the country who were generous enough to mail their handmade chaps. There are about a dozen Belldonna series chaps in there as well. The photo below is a chap I received in the mail last week from Deborah Poe. I love how the postcard matches the chap, so they got a shot together. 

I tell you these things because all of those chaps on the left were on my desk and my husband somehow managed to spill an entire cup of coffee on my desk-- an entire freshly poured cup, my friends.

In some kind of chapbook miracle, only one chap actually was dripping. There were a handful of other items covered in coffee, including by some weird karmic fate Dave's forthcoming manuscript from Black Widow Press. 

So, the chap below is the one that got the coffee. It's called Turning 25 by Chantel Langlinais from poet Marthe Reed's small press  Nous-Zot. In an interesting turn of events, it created this abstract fade throughout the book. It almost looks like the rib cage of the book is now peeking through, and in an eerie coincidence the subject of the book is death and loss. Formally, the author pares down and extracts from poems, pulling the bones out as it were and then rearranging them so we get these sifted bits that in turn create new poems, albeit sparser echoes of their originals. From the introduction, the author states: "For each text, I turned the book to page twenty-five. The title of each poem corresponds to the 2nd and 5th word that appears on that page, and the poems are created from the words that fall down the left-hand side." Each poem has its own title and then beneath it says to "the poet" from whom the words are borrowed.

Here's a beautiful example from a Plath poem:

Years Familiar


 to Plath


twenty years bred water
waiting in the authentic
fantastic
we waver from ever

the shape intrudes
is closed
is glittering

yet the fabrication is such
that each day disguises many greens
sprouting

like icebergs
on arms that navigate
breaking us
among sacred shatters




I'm a big fan of borrowing as it were and rearranging. I think what we do as poets is see well and "see well again" how to shape and reshape words. I think words work in one poem in one particular way, but the amazing thing about them is that you can try them on and roll them out like your own little dough and then they fit you too. In this chapbook, Langlinais looks at not just poems, but the poems  that have shaped her writing. She fits them on to her grief, to her loss, to her sense of how forms change as we change in the world. It turns out that what you need you have and yet you have to take it and make it your own. I'm awed that a book about borrowing and taking then took a bit of the liquid magic that fuels my every morning and made it work as well. It made me look between stains at each word more closely; life is strange.