Linking into the Weekend

My usual gut response to hot new artists is to run screaming, but I have to say: I could listen for a long time, on repeat loop, to Amy Winehouse's Back in Black, Rehab, and You Know I'm No Good. Music for people who can't wait for summer to start blazing down. Yeah, she'll make you want to drink...you needed the excuse?

Strange week. I apologize for the many emails I have not yet sent. The literary world is atwitter with news of fellowships, M(F)A program admissions, colony stints, book deals. I'm truly thrilled for Dan Albergotti, who just won BOA's Poulin prize--a genuine case of hard work and awesome poetry paying off after a long wait. But if you're not one of the many who's receiving news this week...join me! We shall develop a secret handshake.

This is one of Dan's poems, which appeared in a journal called Cave Wall and was then republished on Verse Daily:

Surprising the Gods

Suppose Eurydice had, running through the evening field,
stepped on the adder as planned, but it was the adder
that died, Eurydice's heel coming down on its upper vertebra
and snapping it at once. Imagine her stooping down,
staring in wonder as the serpent twitches in small throes.
What would the gods do with that? How would they rewrite
the story that must be told? And would they question themselves
as they recovered from their surprise, as they made her
in some other way the impossibility she became
the moment her beauty first made Orpheus sing?

*

Update - While I'm in the business of announcing things, I can finally say that Deborah Ager (publisher of 32 Poems and its attendant blog) just had her first book, Midnight Voices, accepted for publication by Word Tech's Cherry Grove imprint. Hooray!

What Remains

The last two days have been a whirlwind: bringing Sally Mann, the famed Virginia photographer, into town for a "Ladies Luncheon" conversation about her life and work. Our event coincided with the Corcoran Gallery screening of a new documentary, "What Remains," directed by Steve Cantor. Cantor was given unlimited access to the Mann family, accumulating over 400 *hours* of footage, and the result is an illuminating film. What a force of nature this woman is--a woman who knows the value of her time, and isn't afraid to let you know it. Meeting her left me both charmed and immensely respectful.

One resonant observation she made, during an interview with the curator Philip Brookman, was how her "Deep South" landscape series is predicted within the evolution of her preceding work. To paraphrase, looking at the photographs of her children (the "controversial" Immediate Family series, which went on for about 10 years), in later shots the children began to recede from the foreground, further and further back in each finished frame. Eventually they existed less as distinct charaters and more as shadows, silhouettes, counterpoints to a larger scene. And it was then that Sally realized her focus, as a photographer, had shifted to place rather than person.

I'd be curious to find an equivalent in poetry. Did you ever have what started as a minor motif come to loom larger and larger in a poetic series, until you realized you'd committed to a whole new subject?

Little Presses to Love

As someone shopping around a manuscript, I grow picky about production values. There's a lot of admirable in spirit, no-budget presses out producing books that, to be honest, look cheap. Dull paper stock, blurry text as if it were mimeographed. I know that there is an aesthetic of ephemerality at work, but I don't want that for my book. That said, you can't buy taste: there's a lot of well-funded university presses with absolutely clunky design. Covers on which the title is squeezed into a little bit of a painting's "free" space. Times New Roman font. For "impact," garish primary colors that will look outdated in five years.

Ew. Argh. But below are exemplars and links to four small, independent presses whose wares I got to examine at AWP--feel, flip the pages, heft in the hand. I was truly impressed not only on an editorial level, but with the book as object. If you're on the fence about these presses because you've never seen their books, take this as my stamp of approval.

Black Ocean Press - The design of these books gets better and better with each volume. The Man Suit, by Zachary Schomburg, is an absolutely great little book with a macabre yet playful graphic style that reminds me of Edward Gorey. One poem features small black and white icons of telephones. Schomburg's book was the only one that I bought at AWP on the sheer strength of an author's reading...Black Ocean poets will go on to do big things. They've also got Small Press Distribution, a major plus nowadays. Doesn't accept unsolicited manuscripts, for now.


Switchback Books - At right is Switchback's first book, Talk Shows by Monica de la Torre. I was won over by the energy the editors projected in Atlanta, and the phenomenal offsite reading they organized (which included a talented, larger community of Chicago poets, such as Kristy Odelius, that I hope might soon turn up in their catalogue). You can't form a binding opinion based on one book, but they made smart choices with a nice, lightweight paper and low gloss on the cover stock (too much and the embedded text pattern would have been lost). Extra points for having the guts to make orange & green signature colors.

Red Morning Press - RMP is only just beginning to make itself known. They don't have widespread bookstore placement or distribution, and even within DC the editors are slightly outside the "literary" loop. But they are making up quickly for lost time, picking good poets and taking a conspicuously professional approach (all three founding editors have succeeded in other areas of business). Their "Our Mission" and "About Us" sections are refreshingly direct, and their refusal to charge reading fees is admirable. Bonus: they consider unsolicited manuscripts by email.


Ghost Road Press - Good God, their covers are *gorgeous*. I don't know much about these guys--they're based in Colorado, so I'm hoping I learn more when AWP is in Denver a few years from now. They did some interesting cross-media promotionals with Jeffrey Ethan Lee's Identity Papers. They are considering manuscripts through July (send a 10 pg sample). One quibble: why not have sample poems on the website? But I do like their print catalogue, downloadable in PDF format.

A special prize goes to Ahsahta, even though it has a university affiliation (Boise State). Those volumes luxuriously constructed, vellum fly pages and all...okay. What are your favorites?