Literature

Review of Christian Wiman's Every Riven Thing by Anthony Opal

Posted by Simone Muench

July 11, 2011 6:34 PM

Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman
Anthony Opal

Bob Dylan, when asked why he admired Woody Guthrie's music, said that it had the ability to teach a person how to live. I feel much the same way about Christian Wiman's newest collection, Every Riven Thing, released last November by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. These are poems that, to quote Charles Wright, are born of "pain, and the rhythms of pain," which is to say that Wiman's writing embodies both grief and suffering, as well as a clear-eyed hope and a grounded joy.

In "After the Diagnosis," the poem which ultimately begins the collection, one is introduced to Wiman as an existential being, as well as a craftsman. The poem begins:

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Interview with Dean Rader

Posted by Simone Muench

May 28, 2011 6:52 PM

Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize judged by Claudia Keelan (Truman State University Press, 2010). He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to San Francisco Chronicle and blogs at The Weekly Rader, SemiObama and 52 Gavins. Read excerpts here and here.

This interview with Dean Rader about his poetry book Works and Days was conducted during the spring of 2011 by eight poets: Danielle Burhop, Aaron Delee, Dane Hamann, Sarah Jenkins, Anthony Opal, Christine Pacyk, C. Russell Price, and Lana Rakhman.

Q: When I first picked up your collection, before reading any of the poems, I made the connection between your title and Hesiod. In what ways did Hesiod's largely agrarian poetry influence this collection?

Dean Rader: I grew up in a farm town in Western Oklahoma. In fact, up until a couple of years ago, we still had a family farm, though neither my parents nor I worked the farm. But my grandfather did, as did his brother and, of course, their parents. Most of the economy in Western Oklahoma is farm-based, so I grew up smack dab in the middle of the culture, the patterns, and the values of farming. I was always very intrigued by Hesiod's Works & Days. It's a zany text. Rambly and a bit crazy. But, I loved how Hesiod's poem articulated this deep connection between farming, duty, and the divine. It was a trinity I related to on a profound level.

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Interview with Beth Bachmann

Posted by Simone Muench

May 16, 2011 9:58 PM

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Beth Bachmann's first book, Temper, was selected by Lynn Emanuel as winner of the AWP Award Series 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and won the 2010 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her new manuscript recently won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Read an excerpt here.

This interview with Beth Bachmann about her poetry book Temper was conducted during the spring of 2011 by eight poets: Danielle Burhop, Aaron Delee, Dane Hamann, Sarah Jenkins, Anthony Opal, Christine Pacyk, C. Russell Price, and Lana Rakhman.

Q: Many of the poems in the book feel restrained, in their messages and by the form (or in their lengths); you're always edging onto something, but cut away from it quickly. So, much of the book reads in what is not being said, rather than what is stated; the confusion, the mystery surrounding its central drama. Is there a particular reason you chose this route over lengthier and expository poetry?

Beth Bachmann:I love the short lyric form: Dickinson, Rilke, The Book of Odes. I have a strong appreciation of silence. And in a poem, of staged space.

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Babbits and Agits

Posted by Mark Staff Brandl

May 14, 2011 11:14 AM

"Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers." Mignon McLaughlin --- "Jede Gesellschaft ehrt ihre lebenden Konformisten und ihre toten Unruhestifter." Mignon McLaughlin

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Poetry of the Week: Excerpts from aaaaaaaaaaalice by Jennifer Karmin

Posted by Simone Muench

March 14, 2011 5:39 PM

Jennifer Karmin's text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise. Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, community centers, and on city streets across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. At home in Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.

that's the reason they're called lessons

hands sticky
thumb nails
stained

two small
mikan

oranges
gifts from
two kid friends
they are seven

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Poetry of the Week: "Sensitivity," "Collect," and "Elegy" by Jake Adam York

Posted by Simone Muench

February 22, 2011 4:27 AM

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), winner of the Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings (2008), co-winner of the Crab Orchard Open Competition and winner of the Colorado Book Award; and Persons Unknown (2010), published by Southern Illinois University Press as an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, New South, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, The Northwest Review, Poetry Daily and others. An associate professor and director of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, York co-edits Copper Nickel. Originally from Alabama, York was educated at Auburn and Cornell. He is also the author of a work of literary criticism, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Routledge, 2005).

SENSITIVITY
May 4, 1959

for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi,
April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

Six weeks since that whisper rose
into the window of a stage
behind the Half Note's bar,
whisper Mingus let spread like a bruise,
Lester Young is dead, six weeks
since he fell from the sky,
dead off the plane from Paris,
and each night this goodbye's
gone more sensitive. Now
the flats are hid, and Handy's learned
to fold the sound of breath
inside his notes—the bleeding throat,
tongue's last epileptic flutter—
while Mingus thrills the bass

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Poetry of the Week: "Sorry, Wrong Number," "Lucy in Wien, Looking at Brueghel's Hunters in Snow" and "Classic" by Jessie Janeshek

Posted by Simone Muench

February 14, 2011 10:30 AM

Jessie Janeshek's first book of poems is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). She is co-editor of the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College, Boston. Her poetry and reviews appear in Moria, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square, Passages North, Rougarou, and Review Americana. She is a freelance editor and also works as a writing instructor at the University of Tennessee.

Sorry, Wrong Number
(Blanche)

Hello, hello?
Can you help me please?

I'm a cardiac neurotic.
My trouble's erotic.

My daughter's in the Poconos
drinking Merlot.

An admirer of Hemingway
my husband's in Idaho.

I've no one to tell.

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Poetry of the Week: "I Am Myself Three Selves at Least," "Adolescence," and more by Jennifer K. Sweeney

Posted by Simone Muench

January 6, 2011 10:35 AM

Jennifer K. Sweeney's second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music , received the 2009 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of America Poets and the Perugia Press Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory , won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award . Her poems have been translated into Turkish and published widely in literary journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily and the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives and teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney and their son, Liam.

I AM MYSELF THREE SELVES AT LEAST

I am, myself, three selves at least,
the one who sweeps the brittle
bees, who saves the broken plates

and bowls, who counts to ten,
who tends the shoals,
who steeps the morning's Assam leaves

and when day is wrung
tightens clock springs.
And yes, the one who sat through youth
quiet as a tea stain, whose hand

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Poetry of the Week: "Crawlspace Tango," "Film-Noir Panopticon," and more by Larry Sawyer

Posted by Simone Muench

January 4, 2011 12:45 PM

Larry Sawyer curates the Myopic Books Reading Series in Wicker Park, Chicago. His work is included in the anthologies The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), Shamanic Warriors Now Poets (JN Reilly, ed. Scotland), and A Writers' Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama's Inauguration (DePaul Humanities Center Press, 2009). His debut collection, Unable to Fully California, is available on Otoliths Press (2010). Larry also edits milk magazine (since 1998).

CRAWLSPACE TANGO

On a bench my newspapered nerves flutter.
Bloom of a dark, wide silence, the human
Tether keeps pulling. Like a snake bisected
Some hypotenuse out of sight, caffeinated.
The rejection of the forest floor, therefore
Is, in its elevator, a wordless lip, while
Originality convalesces in a retirement ward.
Can you see them? Festooned with teenagers
These quixotic gymnasia replete with audits
Move, slender and klutzy, as if incomplete.
But when the revolver of Indianas reloads

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Poetry for the New Year: "Reading Yeats's 'The Second Coming' on January 1, 2001," "Motherwell," and more by Dean Rader

Posted by Simone Muench

January 2, 2011 8:23 PM

Dean Rader is professor of English at the University of San Francisco where he held the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair. Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize judged by Claudia Keelan (Truman State University Press, 2010). He has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, American Indian studies, and visual and popular culture. He regularly contributes op-eds and book reviews to San Francisco Chronicle and blogs at The Weekly Rader, SemiObama and 52 Gavins.

READING YEATS'S "THE SECOND COMING" ON JANUARY 1, 2001

To begin, to start out, to turn. To expand: to center and to throb.
To fall apart. To eat in the dark grammar. To spiral and to oh; to if.

To ask of the tantrum wind. To labor, to invoke bone, to anoint. To vex:
to wish, to want and to want. To will. To waste. To plug time's stoma.

To unfasten and to abandon. To erect: to shutter. To bleed. To unbuckle
the sprung sun. To plummet. To thigh. To saddle venom's gleam and to ride.

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Disappearing Address by Simone Muench & Philip Jenks

Posted by Simone Muench

January 1, 2011 6:35 PM

Disappearing Address by Simone Muench and Philip Jenks is out now from BlazeVOX. Cover art by Kim Ambriz.

Dear Philip & Simone—

Your writing's overwrought. Too haute.
Not cuisine or couture, but chicken-legged

high-kickin' rhetoric vetted, vent,
& le vexor. French-fried car-talkers,

superspeed diesel drama. You're all dilemma
& no serenity. Prickly as Jamestown weed,

more story than history. You've been dissed
& rechristened: poet to bootlegger; writer

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Poetry of the Week: "To Dream Only of Bunnies," "Mr. Fibitz," and "Things That I Have Only One Of" by Aaron Belz

Posted by Simone Muench

October 11, 2010 5:46 PM

Aaron Belz is the author of The Bird Hoverer (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea, 2010). He is an English professor at Providence Christian College in Pasadena, California.

TO DREAM ONLY OF BUNNIES

To dream only of bunnies
is a kind of poverty.
To dream of red flashing lights,
and that only, is also sad.

To dream of flashing red
bunnies, however; to sleep,
and by a sleep to say
we dream of red and green

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Weird Al and me

Posted by Simone Muench

October 11, 2010 5:30 PM

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Simone Muench micro-interviewed by Daniel Handler

Visit The Believer here

Poetry of the Week: "Will She Return to Dancing with the Stars," "The Sandra Bullock Story that Stunned Us," and "Tempus Fidget" by Geoffrey Gatza

Posted by Simone Muench

September 24, 2010 5:33 PM

Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of eight books of poetry; Secrets of my Prison House is his most recent. Kenmore: Poem Unlimited and Not So Fast Robespierre are now available from Menendez Publishing. HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children is also available from Meritage Press. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his girlfriend and two cats.

WILL SHE RETURN TO DANCING WITH THE STARS

To make it official
I do not think of myself as a home wrecker

The cover that is making headlines
is of me wearing a bunny suit

I have this little baby with me
The house is under construction

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Poetry of the Week: "J. Beer 1969-1969," "Sonnets to Morpheus [Listen I want to tell you about Trinity.]" and "Sonnets to Morpheus ["This line is tapped, so I must be brief."] by John Beer

Posted by Simone Muench

August 12, 2010 1:59 PM

John Beer's first book, The Waste Land and Other Poems, was published by Canarium Books in April 2010. His work has appeared in Verse, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Seven Corners, and elsewhere.

J. BEER 1969-1969

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone's ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked "1820," "1950." The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from

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Poetry of the Week: "Barn Burning, An Eclogue," "Barn Burned, Then" and "They Sold The Calf. That Fall" by Michelle Taransky

Posted by Simone Muench

August 1, 2010 12:32 PM

Michelle Taransky lives in Philadelphia, where she works at Kelly Writers House, is Reviews Editor for Jacket2, and teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. With her father, architect Richard Taransky, she is the coauthor of The Plans Caution (QUEUE 2007), as well as the author of Barn Burned, Then, selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize (Omnidawn, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications including Denver Quarterly, VOLT, How2 and New American Writing.

BARN BURNING, AN ECLOGUE

For those who say it is enough
Of the farmstead, not falling

Rain come last to bed and tearing
White sheets into small armies of animals

Where this keeper's concern meets
Old thrasher in the shed

Its keyhole patterned
After a breast and the calling

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Poetry of the Week: "If You See It What Is It You See," "On Love Poems," "A Perfect Emergency" by Suzanne Buffam

Posted by Simone Muench

July 27, 2010 10:45 PM

Suzanne Buffam's first book, Past Imperfect, was published in 2005 by House of Anansi Press. The Irrationalist, her second book, was published in the U.S. by Canarium Books and in Canada by House of Anansi Press in April 2010. She's the recipient of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the CBC Literary Award for Poetry, and her poems have appeared in Boston Review, A Public Space, Poetry, and many other journals. She lives in Chicago.

IF YOU SEE IT WHAT IS IT YOU SEE

I didn't look at the fire.
I looked into it.

I saw a shelf of books
Crash down and bury me

Centuries deep in red leather.
I saw a statue in a park

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Poetry of the Week: "Epithalamium," "Abusing Another for the Sake of" and "Materniliad" by Brian Henry

Posted by Simone Muench

July 13, 2010 12:10 PM

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Brian Henry is the author of six books of poetry—Astronaut (published in the U.S. and England, where it was short-listed for the Forward Prize, and also published in Slovenia in translation), American Incident, Graft, Quarantine (winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America), The Stripping Point, and Wings Without Birds (Salt Publishing, 2010). His seventh book Lessness is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2011. His poetry has been collected in many anthologies and has been translated into Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovenian. He has co-edited Verse since 1995, and he co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews. His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun's Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Aleš Šteger's The Book of Things is forthcoming from BOA Editions.

EPITHALALIUM

What was I
but a cell in motion

the occasional collision

river gutter culvert

window through which I see you

the end-
point

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Poetry of the Week: "The Memory Skin," "Dressing the Way" and "From the Girl Becomes" by Amy King

Posted by Simone Muench

July 5, 2010 6:22 PM

Amy King's most recent book is Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox), and forthcoming, I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the poet Ron Padgett. She also teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College and co-edits the site, Poets for Living Waters. With Ana Bozicevic, King co-curates the Brooklyn-based reading series, The Stain of Poetry.

THE MEMORY SKIN

I am opposite marriage.
My dinner cake is made
guerrilla style. Getting in
their faces sly,
shotgun raw, we spoke.
You held me well until
you closed with
the intellectual integrity
of a fucked-up life. To give
in to the grace
of a sudden condition,
that is the primacy of thought.

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Poetry of the Week: "Riding in Cars with Monsters," "What Happened in the Pool" and "Under the Evergreens" by Marisa Crawford

Posted by Simone Muench

June 28, 2010 5:17 PM

Marisa Crawford is the author of The Haunted House, winner of the Gatewood Prize for Poetry, and published by Switchback Books. She grew up in New York and in Connecticut, and graduated from the University of Massachusetts, where she studied Creative Writing and Women's Studies. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco where she works as a retail copywriter and sometimes teaches high school students about poetry & feminism. Some of her poems have appeared in Action, Yes, Shampoo, and Invisible Ear.

RIDING IN CARS WITH MONSTERS

I got hit with the ugly stick, and stuff. Woke up in a pool of monster sweat. The monster finds love so easily. The monster finds real love everywhere. Under rocks and buried in sand, behind trees, tangled in seaweed, love, love, love.
The monster has
a) enormous hearts for eyes
b) a locket with my picture in it
c) a fever

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Poetry of the Week: "I was lit as if from the inside," "The Cello," and "The Musician Considers Modernity and He Sighs" by Kristina Marie Darling

Posted by Simone Muench

June 21, 2010 2:22 PM

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). Her full-length collection Night Songs was released by Gold Wake Press, 2010.

"I WAS LIT AS IF FROM THE INSIDE"

But the room stayed dark. I'd noticed the cellist's luminous cufflinks, the uncanny whiteness of his shirt. As the concert ended, I heard nothing but his music, & the cold night pulled each silver pin from her hair. That was when the curtain fell. The audience could only murmur before its folds of dusty velvet. Outside, the evening had been opened like a black umbrella.

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Poetry of the Week: "Motherfixer," "Imbibe the Cranes Electric" and "Aphid Sundry" by Lina Ramona Vitkauskus

Posted by Simone Muench

June 15, 2010 3:52 PM

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Lina ramona Vitkauskas has authored Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press), Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press), and THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press). She is the 2009 recipient of The Poetry Center of Chicago's 15th Annual Juried Reading Award, judged by Brenda Hillman, and was nominated by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award. She has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and her work has appeared in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007), The Prague Literary Review, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris), The Chicago Review, ACM, Aufgabe, Drunken Boat, and many others.

MOTHERFIXER

To dusky chalk legs,
to orgasms under trenchcoats,
to the execution of lively girls,
to the return of the green native:
let go of my hair.

To black holes
which are not portable,
to Ariadne's dismantling,
to my seahorse hair lifting
fondly the color of your lining.

I am your pasture girl,
your pleasure brigade,

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Interview with Jason Koo

Posted by Simone Muench

June 14, 2010 8:35 PM

This interview with Jason Koo about his poetry book Man on Extremely Small Island was conducted during the month of May, 2010 by seven poets: Wendy Burtt, Cory Phare, Robert Petrick, Robyn Sablosky, Claire Potter, Sean Thomas and John Rossiter.

Q: Please talk about your decisions on stanzaic structure. You use a lot of indents, staggered lines, floating lines, etc. I'd like to know what drives those decisions beyond formal appearance. If it's helpful to use a concrete example, please refer specifically to "2046 Love Songs of Wong Kar Wai," since the structure varies throughout the poem.

Jason Koo: Well, the indents in "2046" were easy because that poem is in syllabics. If you go line by line, you'll notice there is a specific number of syllables for every indented line—so whatever lines line up contain the same number of syllables. "Cell" is also in syllabics. But the poems work differently in that the lines rotate in "2046" whereas they are set in the same order in "Cell." I wrote "Cell" first—that was the first poem I'd ever attempted in syllabics. I'd been writing a lot of poems in free verse using indented lines, mainly to create this shuffling back-and-forth effect; I liked the feeling of movement and energy those lines created, and many poets I admired at the time were using those types of lines, such as Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and my friend Steve Gehrke. But after a while the indents started to feel a tad arbitrary, or lax, so I wanted a new challenge. And I thought, What the hell, why not try something in syllabics? This was incredibly difficult at first. "Cell" drove me effing crazy. It was mainly because I couldn't change the number of syllables, and the order was set for every stanza. But it kind of made sense for that poem because the subject is partly about how one can go insane trying to conform to this absurd, warped language of text messaging—the syllabics represent the insanity of that shorthand. And the obsessiveness of it.

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Poetry of the Week: "Elapsing Speedway Organism," "Paint by Numbers" and "14 Kung Fu Climaxes" by Bruce Covey

Posted by Simone Muench

June 10, 2010 8:45 PM

The only son of two chemists, Bruce Covey lived in Connecticut and New York before moving to Atlanta, Georgia, where he now teaches at Emory University and edits the web-based poetry magazine Coconut. Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books, 2006) is his third book of poetry. He is also the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and Ten Pins, Ten Frames, as well as the forthcoming Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010) and Reveal (Black Radish, 2010).

ELAPSING SPEEDWAY ORGANISM

Revolved to require to reverse, hip at the apex of triangle

All web to funnel, to spin around & under circumference
To advocate the many that drop, pennies fluttering through oil

& wet behind the ears, green. Meant stripes as favor
Curved at the top & lips. All the skins peel with it,

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Poetry of the Week: "Stare Too Hard & the Bad Feelings Creep Back," "On the Balcony" and "Back in America" by Becca Klaver

Posted by Simone Muench

June 2, 2010 6:20 PM

Becca Klaver was born and raised in Milwaukee and now lives in Brooklyn. She holds degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, and is now working on a PhD in Literatures in English at Rutgers University. A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009) and the full-length collection of poems, LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010)

STARE TOO HARD & THE BAD FEELINGS CREEP BACK

When I finally arrived at the cataloged town, prefab
          and fabulous, anticipation had already wrecked me,
warped my steel. I'm sure I'd've been
          an okay denizen if the whole goal hadn't been
a primping hope of discovery, the chance
          scouts would sling their crossfires on me
as on a pouty skinny thing at the mall. As it was
          I built things wrong, I loved things wrong—

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Interview with Mathias Svalina

Posted by Simone Muench

May 26, 2010 8:51 PM

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This interview with Mathias Svalina about his poetry book Destruction Myth was conducted during the month of May, 2010 by seven poets: Wendy Burtt, Cory Phare, Robert Petrick, Robyn Sablosky, Claire Potter, Sean Thomas and John Rossiter.

Q: I found Destruction Myth to be, for me, one of the most readable and accessible books of poetry I've read. In your book I found a lot of the characteristics I enjoy in fiction. I felt connections between the individual poems that pulled me through, almost like chapters. Also, much of the poetry reads somewhat like flash fiction. I'm very interested in the ground between poetry and fiction. So, do you set out to intentionally write poetry, or do you just write what comes to you, no matter the form?

Mathias Svalina: Thanks for the kind words! Not to be snide, but I'm actually not very interested in the boundaries between fiction, poetry & non-fiction. They seem to me ways of creating false senses of expertise & exclusion rather than better allowing a writer to express something that is particular to their experience of the world.

I wrote a lot of these creation myths, about 150, I think. Many of them were in prose, many in lineation. As I cut back to the set of them that I wanted to be the book, I found that I more often liked the prose ones more. Many of the ones that are in lines in the book could easily have been in prose as well -a few, the registrar one, the one that begins "Human life begins / at the moment / of contraception," & the one that ends "No one can feed the baby" needed to be lineated. The line breaks make some of the meaning in those poems.

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Poetry of the Week: "The virgins of Chicago (3)," "Baby, What Kind of Help Do You Really Want?" and "Thoughts of Falling, Pollen, Pare" by Kristy Odelius

Posted by Simone Muench

May 24, 2010 12:36 AM

Kristy Odelius is the author of Strange Trades (Shearsman Books, 2008) and Bee Spit (Dancing Girl Press, 2007). She is Associate Professor of English at North Park University on Chicago's northwest side, where she teaches Creative Writing and British Romantic Literature. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, GutCult, ACM, Diagram, La Petite Zine, Versal, Moria and others.

THE VIRGINS OF CHICAGO (3)

The virgins of Chicago

work nights at "Federal Screw
Products." They like welding,
sweating and wearing
gray aprons.

"I can't feel anything,"
I sigh as the elevator rises.
The meta-galaxy slips
like a ring on my finger,

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Poetry of the Week: "Early Morning on Market Street," "The Mortician in San Francisco" and "The End of Landscape" by Randall Mann

Posted by Simone Muench

May 18, 2010 6:32 PM

Randall Mann was born in Provo, Utah. He currently lives in San Francisco and is the author of Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago, 2009), Complaint in the Garden (Zoo Press, 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (7th ed. Pearson Longman, 2007).

EARLY MORNING ON MARKET STREET

The moon, once full, is snow.
The line of transplanted trees,
thin and bloodless. The pink neon
bakery sign, Sweet Inspiration,

a mockery of loneliness—
but no one cares to eat, we souls
of this hour jacked up on what-
ever. And though desire

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Poetry of the Week: "Bride of Frankenstein 2.0,"Postmodern Werewolves" and "Cyborg Fantasies" by Susan Slaviero

Posted by Simone Muench

May 8, 2010 4:57 PM

Susan Slaviero's first full length book of poetry, CYBORGIA , is forthcoming from Mayapple Press. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks: An Introduction to the Archetypes (Shadowbox Press, 2008) and Apocrypha (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). She has a BA in English / Creative & Professional Writing from Lewis University. She is the editor of blossombones: a literary journal and she blogs occasionally at mythology-and-milk.

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN 2.0

I wake in a state of clitoral arousal.
I hear the cadence of my own dissection.
Dark, festering segments replaced
with long curves of choreographed glass.
The clink-tink of a wrench in my

[digitized]

pelvis. What magic? An after/image of generativity.
I am the (dys)recognition of a two-sexed
system. My metalhood is evolution.
See, Zombie? You've always wanted a terminal

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Poetry of the Week: "Or," "This Will Darken the Cabin" and "Valentine" by Kiki Petrosino

Posted by Simone Muench

May 3, 2010 12:20 PM

Kiki Petrosino was born in Baltimore and received her BA from the University of Virginia. She spent two years in Switzerland teaching English and Italian at a private school, after which she earned graduate degrees from both the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Poems have appeared in FENCE, The Iowa Review, Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City and is the author of Fort Red Border (Sarabande, 2009).

OR

After Thomas Sayers Ellis

Or oreo, or worse.
Or spork. Or smorgasbord.
Or tender lure of colored blood
or centaur.

Or Moorish curve of orchid.
Or fork-scraped pate, or orphic word.
Or minor saint in darkened
corridor.

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Poetry of the Week: "Fetish," "Barter, Fasten" and "Self-Portrait as the Train Passes" by Allison Titus

Posted by Simone Muench

April 16, 2010 10:20 AM

Allison Titus holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont College. A chapbook, Instructions from the Narwhal, is out from Bateau Press. She lives in Richmond, VA, with her husband, the poet Joshua Poteat. Her book Sum of Every Lost Ship was recently published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010.

FETISH

Unzippered, such gape. Your hands
there. And cold.

Ransacking the meadow, the moon harvests
what light there is.

Once your hands were another's.
I was in a borrowed dress,

all peplum and sheath and unrecited.
He was tremble and corsage,

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Interview with Karyna McGlynn

Posted by Simone Muench

March 20, 2010 10:06 PM

This interview with Karyna McGlynn about her book I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl was conducted during the spring of 2010 by seven poets: Aaron Delee, Dane Hamann, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Christine Pacyk, Lana Rakhman and Virginia Smith.

Q: I enjoyed the many perspectives on the same or similar situations in this book. Where did the collection begin? Has it always been a collection? Did you recognize a theme and write to it, or did you realize you had several poems that belonged together?

Karyna McGlynn: The book started out as this grad school manuscript, Dark Rum Funnel, which was much more language-y and eventually split into two separate projects: The Mahogany Dimension and what's now I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl. The book didn't really start to gel as a collection, however, until I went to Ireland for the Moveen Residency. I had intended to use the residency to work on a different project, but instead I started writing a lot of new poems that had a similar feel to them, including 1994's title piece. It wasn't until I decided to use the poem "I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl" as the title that the theme and organization of the book started falling into place for me. I had been writing pieces that were thematically linked all along; I just didn't recognize the theme until that title was staring me in the face.

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Poetry of the Week: "Mobile Homecoming" and "For Poets (& Others)"by Brandi Homan

Posted by Simone Muench

March 14, 2010 6:19 PM

Brandi Homan is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books, a feminist press that publishes poetry by women. She earned her MFA from Columbia College, Chicago, and her MA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has appeared in Barn Owl Review, Born Magazine, DIAGRAM, MiPOesias, Natural Bridge, North American Review, and Salt Hill. Hard Reds was her first full-length collection of poetry (Shearsman, 2009). Her second collection is Bobcat Country (Shearsman, 2010).

MOBILE HOMECOMING

My professor said I was "aiming for mediocrity." I was thirty years old. My mother's into money recently, talks about some book that associates class with worldviews of material goods. In the book, low class means "quantity," middle class means "quality," and high class means "presentation." Working on my master's degree, I knew for certain I wasn't middle class, going again for quantity. I saw that others, hello Professor, viewed me as not middle class. That I was low-middle class, or low-class, even, depending on how much cash the one doing the viewing had. Or really that I was culturally bankrupt from growing up in a vacuum cleaner.

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Poetry of the Week: "Creation Myth" by Mathias Svalina

Posted by Simone Muench

March 1, 2010 4:38 PM

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Mathias Svalina was born in Chicago, where his parents were both chemists. He is the author of five chapbooks as well as five collaboratively written chapbooks. His work has been published widely in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, Diagram, Jubilat, and Typo. He has won fellowships and awards from The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Iowa Review and New Michigan Press, among others. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He currently teaches writing and literature in Denver, Colorado. Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Press, 2010) is his first book.

CREATION MYTH

There was a bunny with a broken leg
& a mink with an empty stomach,

Somehow they coexisted peacefully
& were able to create the world.

When Hollywood heard about this
they sent a team of idea people out to meet them.

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Interview with Hadara Bar-Nadav

Posted by Simone Muench

February 22, 2010 7:39 PM

This interview with Hadara Bar-Nadav about her book A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight was conducted during the month of February, 2010 by seven poets: Aaron Delee, Dane Hamann, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Christine Pacyk, Lana Rakhman and Virginia Smith.

Q: A number of your poems seem to be inspired by works of art. How does a poem like this evolve? Do you sit down thinking, "I like this piece of art, I think I'll write a poem in response to it," or does such a poem come to fruition in a more organic way--is it only later that you realize the poem was inspired by or in response to the art?

Hadara Bar-Nadav: My collaborations with art are generally pretty organic. There is a Rothko I visit at the Nelson Museum of Art in Kansas City. And as I look at it, words will float up. There are artists I turn to, much like I do certain authors, whose work seems to trigger poems. I worked on a long prose poem about Louise Nevelson's work, and when writing it I immersed myself in her art and writings. I was never sure what would come up--a line, two pages of prose ramblings--but something always did. When I was working on A Glass of Milk, I remember buying a book of Eugene Atget's photographs and one of Cartier-Bresson's that smelled like it had been in a fire; the edges of the pages were charred. The art work teaches me about seeing, about ways of seeing. And often I string together several images to form a narrative of sorts. Visual art reminds me to keep my imagery sharp, to look and look again. I painted for many years, but these days my creative energy is mostly in my poems.

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Orange Crush is now available

Posted by Simone Muench

February 7, 2010 11:18 AM

Dear Sharks, the new book from Sarabande is now available! Graced with a painting by Yves Tanguy.

You can order here

Read poems from it here and here

"A sweet fever of a voice lures us into pictures of bone bonnets, whip stripes and dead girls. These poems freeze time. Simone pulls absolute beauty and light from these dark moments. I'm in and hooked."--Tim Rutili of Califone

Poetry of the Week: "The Door" and "Voting Weather" by Ed Roberson

Posted by Simone Muench

January 18, 2010 7:13 PM

Ed Roberson is the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent book The New Wing of the Labyrinth was published by Singing Horse Press, 2009. City Eclogue was published spring 2006, Number 23 in the Atelos series. His collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. His book Atmosphere Condition was a winner of the National Poetry Series and was nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, 1970, where while an undergrad research assistant in Limnology, he traveled across Canada through Alaska, Kodiak and Afognak Islands and later Bermuda with research expeditions. He has climbed mountains in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andes, motorcycled across the U.S. and traveled in West Africa .Roberson currently lives in Chicago, where he has taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia College and Northwestern University.

THE DOOR

It's never at the door
to leave but it's always at the door
the way the wolf is,
not just on the other side, everywhere
you go the wolf is.

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Poetry of the Week: "Swearing by Effingham" and "I'm Charlie Tuna" by Jason Koo

Posted by Simone Muench

January 10, 2010 9:31 PM

Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize, published by C&R Press. He was born in New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published in The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He currently lives in New York, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.

SWEARING BY EFFINGHAM

Effingham, IL, let's just let it all out.
Sometimes you need to call a fucking ham
a fucking ham. As I drive home past
your road signs toward the tranquillizer

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Poetry of the Week: "Redbird," "Charity" and "Dream of the Last Shaker" by Damian Rogers

Posted by Simone Muench

January 4, 2010 6:29 PM

Damian Rogers was born and raised in suburban Detroit. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a graduate degree from the Bennington Writing Seminars in Bennington, Vermont. Her first book Paper Radio was published by ECW Press in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Brick Magazine, The Walrus, Salt Hill, MoonLit, and This Magazine. She lives in Toronto.

REDBIRD

It's the middle of the night.
I've set the house on fire
with those matches I love,
the ones in the kitchen
with the red bird on the box.

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Poetry of the Week: "Amputee Etcetera" and "The Abuelita Poem" by Paul Martínez Pompa

Posted by Simone Muench

December 28, 2009 4:41 PM

Paul Martínez Pompa has lived in the Chicagoland area for most of his life. He studied at the University of Chicago and at Indiana University, where he received his MFA in creative writing. His chapbook, Pepper Spray, was published by Momotombo Press in 2006, and his first book My Kill Adore Him was selected by Martín Espada for the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). He currently teaches English at Triton College. His writing has appeared in After Hours, Borderlands, Locuspoint, and Rhino.

AMPUTEE ETCETERA

Nothing cuter
than a war amputee.
His limb not as fleshy ruin
but as fresh bouquet
of soft tissue, blasted with love
through desert air.

Nothing prettier
than a deserted semi-trailer
loaded with dead Mexicans.
How their mouths fall
open like little brown orchids
thirsty for a breath
of hot air.

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Poetry of the Week: "The fox had no face the loggermen said" and "A Red Tricycle in the Belly of the Pool" by Karyna McGlynn

Posted by Simone Muench

November 23, 2009 4:21 AM

Karyna McGlynn is the author of three chapbooks: Scorpionica (New Michigan Press, 2007), Alabama Steve (Destructible Heart Press, 2008) and Small Shrines (Cinematheque Press, forthcoming). Her first full-length collection, I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, received the 2008 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (Sarabande, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Fence, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, CutBank, and Ninth Letter. She lives in Austin, Texas, with multimedia artist Adam Theriault.

The fox had no face the loggermen said

they rolled a barrelful of something muffled
down the back of a mountain

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Poetry of the Week: "And Snow Is What Snow Has Always Been" and "Infinity and the Implications of the Word" by Adam Clay

Posted by Simone Muench

November 16, 2009 7:01 PM

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006), and A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, which is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. His chapbook In a World of Ideas, I Feel No Particular Loyalty is available from Cinematheque Press. He co-edits Typo Magazine and lives in Michigan.

And Snow Is What Snow Has Always Been

Of course a quilt is a house—

And of course you can become so enamored
with an image that you become it:

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Ballary Marvels

Posted by Lynne Warren

October 22, 2009 5:39 AM

INDEX Press is pleased to announce the publication of BALLARY MARVELS, featuring pen-and-ink drawings by Ellen Lanyon and eleven "nonsense" poems by Lynne Warren. Twenty-four pages plus cover, perfect bound, trim size 10 x 8 ½.

The book is available at MCA Store, 220 E. Chicago Avenue, and Printworks, 311 W Superior Street.

It can also be purchased online at the MCA website.

Poetry of the Week: "What We're Up Against" and "When One Has Lived Too Long Among Other People" by John Gallaher

Posted by Simone Muench

October 5, 2009 5:22 PM

John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, from Four Way Books, and Map of the Folded World, from The University of Akron Press. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press.

What We're Up Against

On the way home from the funeral
we stopped for lunch.

Lunch was like the singing. Lunch

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New Media Poetics

Posted by Simone Muench

October 5, 2009 4:33 AM

Catherine Yass
Still from Descent 2002
Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery © the artist
16mm film on projected DVD

New Media Poetics: a collaboration of poetry and sound arts in two parts. In collaboration with the Experimental Sound Studio and the SAIC Department of Exhibitions.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 6:30pm
Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor

Part one: Reading
Featuring Bill Allegrezza, Ray Bianchi, Justin Cabrillos, Steve Halle, Philip Jenks, Simone Muench, and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

This project is an artistic response to the Learning Modern exhibition, with particular attention to modernist trends in poetry and the manner in which design sensibilities translate across media and are even evident in our understandings of the sonic landscape. Building on the works on display, contemporary poets design texts, which are then read in the Sullivan Galleries. Subsequently, SAIC sound students engage these poems as material for further response, reframing the auditory elements of each poem's structure into a new sound score. The resulting projects will be presented in the lobby of the Sullivan Gallery as a temporary sound installation November 6 - 25.

Tony Isabella: Review of 'The State of Jones'

Posted by guestblogger

September 8, 2009 11:58 AM

Tony Isabella, a renowned comic professional, does book and comic reviews on the website World Famous Comics. Here is a great, short and sweet one of a startling book.

After listening to one of the authors on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," I requested The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer [Doubleday; $27.50] from my library. The book is a fascinating and frequently horrifying account of the outnumbered, under-supplied Mississippi unionists defying the wealthy slave-owners who launched the American civil war to preserve their lavish lifestyles and their "right" to enslave other human beings. It's also the story of the heroic, remarkable Newton Knight and his two families, one white, one black.

This is a page turner, though the chronicles of brutality (on both sides of the conflict) and atrocities (more on the Confederate side) often forced me away from the book. At least when I was in school - and that was before and not long after the Civil Rights Act became law - our history books glossed over the darkest parts of this story. I never knew the Confederate leaders plundered the families of the poor soldiers pressed into fighting for a cause not their own or that those Southerners who sided with the Union were subjected to even worse treatment. I never knew that the racism of Andrew Johnson and the weariness of Ulysses S. Grant allowed these same Confederate monsters to reclaim their power shortly after the war and continue subjugating the poor. Sadly, the reality of the common man blindly following leaders who constantly act against his best interests is all too familiar to me. I see its like whenever the ignorant scream their Faux News talking points at "tea parties" and town hall meetings.

If I were a history teacher, The State of Jones would be required reading for my students. It's an exceptional work of non-fiction and, as such, it earns the full five Tonys.

Read more of his reviews here.

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Interview with D.A. Powell

Posted by Simone Muench

August 1, 2009 10:00 AM

D. A. Powell's books include Tea, Lunch and Cocktails; the latter a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His most recent collection is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). By Myself: An Autobiography was penned in collaboration with David Trinidad and published by Turtle Point Press. The following interview with D.A. Powell was conducted by Aaron Delee.

Delee: I've heard many people, academics and ordinary readers, saying that the market has been flooded over the past decade with memoirs and autobiographies; in light of your new chapbook, By Myself: An Autobiography, what is your take on this?

Powell: Oh, yes, it's true. I think that was part of our initial impulse: knowing that the plethora of memoirs was out there, we went in fully aware that the chapbook was in part an effort to parody the genre. But it was only after we started that we truly began to understand what the form of the genre was. Everybody had the same story: strong grandmother, poverty, sense of otherness, being passed over for the role of Cinderella in the Christmas pageant, a desire for fame, a struggle to be noticed, surprise upon being successful, a nomination for the Golden Globe, an addiction.

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Poetry of the Week: from Untitled Wave by Carolyn Guinzio

Posted by Simone Muench

July 21, 2009 5:29 PM

Carolyn Guinzio is the author of Quarry (Parlor Press, 2008), and West Pullman (Bordighera, 2005), as well as the chapbook Untitled Wave (Cannibal, 2009). Originally from Chicago, she lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

from Untitled Wave

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Poetry of the Week: "New Dress" and "Miss Weariness" by Laura Kasischke

Posted by Simone Muench

July 6, 2009 6:54 PM

Laura Kasischke is the author of seven books of poetry, including Lilies Without (Ausable Press, 2007), Gardening in the Dark (Ausable, 2004), Dance and Disappear (Juniper Prize, 2002), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay diCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

New Dress

Dress of dreams and portents, worn

in memory, despite
the posted warnings

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Poetry of the Week: "Delection Even" and "Concerning Lasts Made (In Illinois)" by Jennifer Scappettone

Posted by Simone Muench

June 30, 2009 5:54 PM

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009), and of several chapbooks: Ode oggettuale, a bilingual poemetto translated into Italian with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, 2008); Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (dusi/e kollectiv, 2008). She is at work on a manuscript called Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, for Atelos. She was guest editor of Aufgabe 7, devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Delection Even

I dredge allegedly

to repair and upgrade the Port of Umm Qasr

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Poetry of the Week: "Waiting" and "La Bouderie" by Allison Benis White

Posted by Simone Muench

June 22, 2009 5:39 PM

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Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. She is currently at work on a second manuscript, Small Porcelain Head, which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from The San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

Waiting

I think of broken snow, but this is permanent. Two separate women on a bench—crossed at the wrists,

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Poem of the Week: from "Storm, lustral: unevensong" by Andrew Zawacki

Posted by Simone Muench

June 15, 2009 6:44 PM

Andrew Zawacki is the author of three books of poetry—Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009), Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2001). A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers' Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and cotranslated Aleš Debeljak's new and selected poems, due next fall from Persea. His translation from the French of Sébastien Smirou, My Lorenzo, is forthcoming from Burning Deck. He teaches at the University of Georgia and is Coeditor of Verse and of The Verse Book of Interviews.

from "Storm, lustral: unevensong"

A tractor rasping its talon

along the dune

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Poetry of the Week: "The Stationer's Transport" and "The Geometry Transport" by Jessica Bozek

Posted by Simone Muench

June 8, 2009 5:33 PM

Jessica Bozek received an MFA from the University of Georgia and an MA from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London. She is the author of cor·re·spond·ence (dusi/e-chap kollektiv), a collaboration with Eli Queen. She has lived in Russia, England, Spain, and Costa Rica but currently walks the dog in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Bodyfeel Lexicon was published by Switchback Books, 2009.

The Stationer's Transport

through panes and across sheets, perception yields

here, in the margins, my body-ghosts happen

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Poem of the Week: "Wí'-gi-e" by Elise Paschen

Posted by Simone Muench

June 1, 2009 10:01 AM

Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary (Red Hen Press, 2009), as well as Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in The New Republic, TriQuarterly and The Hudson Review, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. The editor of Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Wí'-gi-e

Anna Kyle Brown. Osage.
1896-1921. Fairfax, Oklahoma.

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

Because they dragged her down to the creek.

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Interview with Robyn Schiff

Posted by Simone Muench

May 26, 2009 12:41 PM

This interview with Robyn Schiff about her book Revolver was conducted during the week of May 18th, 2009 by eight poets: Christine Pacyk, Aaron Delee, Nicole Gallicchio, Andrew Galligan, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Lana Rakhman and Rose Woodson.

Q: When reading Revolver, I noticed that nearly every poem had something to do with an invention, including the envelope machine, the Singer Sewing machine, McCormick's Reaper, and even the revolver itself. Which poem was written first? Did you originally intend on writing a series? If so, how did this series evolve? How do you come choose the images of the antiques that you describe in your poetry?

Robyn Schiff: The first poem I worked on was "Colt Rapid Fire Revolver." I wrote it as the United States was gearing up toward the invasion of Iraq, and it set the tone and helped determine the content for the other poems in the collection. I was interested in invention and destruction, but also displays of power because this was the immediate post-9/11period, and there was all this chest-beating patriotism going on and solidarity expressed on bumper stickers.

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Little Visceral Carnival by Philip Jenks & Simone Muench

Posted by Simone Muench

May 22, 2009 2:12 AM

Art by Kim Ambriz

Little Visceral Carnival by Philip Jenks & Simone Muench

| saddle stitched chapbook | 5" x 5" | 23 poems + 2 linocut collaged lithographs | $8

To purchase, visit Cinematheque Press

Dear Godzilla—

The parade didn't become you. You are so over the top
but this is why I love you, my atomic lover, my glottal stop,

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Interview with Kristy Bowen

Posted by Simone Muench

May 16, 2009 5:38 PM

This interview with Kristy Bowen about her book in the bird museum was conducted during the week of May 11th, 2009 by eight poets: Christine Pacyk, Aaron Delee, Nicole Gallicchio, Andrew Galligan, Sarah Jenkins, Joshua Lobb, Lana Rakhman and Rose Woodson.

Q: In your collection of poems in the bird museum, you experiment considerably with form. During the initial draft of a poem, does the form present itself to you as a means to experiment, or is form secondary to either the language choices you make or the thematic significance you're going for? Did you have a specific goal in mind while putting the book together or was the layout the result of a natural tendency for you to experiment with language and forms?

Kristy Bowen: In most cases, those poems that play with formal constructs (glossaries, footnotes, mathematical equations) always seem easier to write, largely because one is basically limited somewhat by the circumstances of the form and those limitations are oddly comforting. The entire first section of the book, most of which was originally a chapbook called errata, was written as an exploration of "feminine" vs. "masculine" texts, or modes of writing, so I had a list of things that I wanted to try out--poem as etiquette manual, poem as textbook, poem as concordance.

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Poetry of the Week: "The Further Out You Go" and "An Issue" by Jennifer Kronovet

Posted by Simone Muench

May 1, 2009 6:56 PM

Jennifer Kronovet is co-founder of CIRCUMFERENCE, the journal of poetry in translation. She received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University and MA in Applied Linguistics from Columbia University Teachers College. Her publications include Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Ploughshares. She has lived in Beijing, Chicago, and St. Louis, and currently in New York City, where she was born and raised. Awayward received the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009).

The Further Out You Go

the harder you are dragged
to your tongue.

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Alogon Gallery Presents a Project by Vincent Dermody

Posted by Simone Muench

May 1, 2009 5:13 PM

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Alogon presents Information Booth: Duet for Caller and Oracle

Host: Vincent Dermody
Readers: Richard Fox, Philip Jenks & Simone Muench

Friday, May 22, 2009
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Alogon Gallery
1049 N Paulina #3R
Chicago, IL

Mojo Nixon on Jack Kerouac, Sharkforum Podcast No. 4

Posted by Mark Staff Brandl

March 31, 2009 9:53 PM

On the Road, the novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, was written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. One of the greatest books ever.

3 minutes. Click on arrow to stream and listen!

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Poem of the Week: "The Queen of Staves Imagines Leaving Her Day Job" by Susan Slaviero

Posted by Simone Muench

March 2, 2009 11:02 AM

Susan Slaviero is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: An Introduction to the Archetypes (Shadowbox Press, 2008) and Apocrypha (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flyway, Caffeine Destiny, Blood Orange Review, Mythic Delirium, RHINO and elsewhere. She designs and co-edits the online literary journal blossombones.

The Queen of Staves Imagines Leaving Her Day Job

I wasn't hired to be an envelope
girl, a gum-chewing doxie

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Poem of the Week: [ riddance ] by Susana Gardner

Posted by Simone Muench

February 1, 2009 8:38 PM

Susana Gardner was born and raised in Rhode Island, and now lives in Switzerland with her young daughter. Her first chapbook, To Stand to Sea, was published by The Tangent Press in 2006 and is presently being translated into Italian and forthcoming from Canterena Press, Genoa. Her book [ lapsed insel weary ] is also available from The Tangent Press, 2008. Gardner edits and curates Dusie Press.

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Kimberly J. Soenen: Dive and Dismantle

Posted by guestblogger

January 19, 2009 7:04 PM

At my part-time job, fur clad cosmetically-enhanced people often approach me and make unique, and always urgent, requests.

"Can you tell me where I might find a sterling silver flask? I'm looking for a Canadian Goose Down coat for my daughter. Where might I find that automatic espresso machine that makes the coffee without you having to do anything? Does the spa downstairs do brows and waxing? How tall is the Christmas tree? Where can I get a good shoe shine? I'm looking for Wii. I'm looking for Nintendo. I'm looking for one of those foot massagers? I need the 2.5 ounce Rain Rose hand crème. Do you know if that French store still carries that hand crème in that size? I need to get lingerie for my girlfriend and she loves leather, do you know if The Secret on Michigan Avenue carries leather? My niece is getting married at Holy Name in three hours and she needs a white umbrella."

The requests come quickly and often. Always extremely urgent and very important.

But one request made on the evening before Christmas Eve was different.
...

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Poem of the Week: "Obedients" by Steve Halle

Posted by Simone Muench

January 5, 2009 6:13 PM

Steve Halle is a poet, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. His poetry and critical work has been published in various journals including Jacket, Cordite, PFS Post, moria, Milk Magazine, OCHO. He edits the online journal Seven Corners and blog at Fluid / Exchange. His first book Map of the Hydrogen World was released by Cracked Slab Books in 2008.

Obedients

At Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Elementary, Chicago,
a fire claimed the lives of 92 school children and three nuns
on December 1, 1958. Firemen found 24 children
at their desks in one room, their school books open before them.
--Newspaper Clippings, (www.olafire.com)

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Poem of the Week: "Niagara Falls: Scrapbook Three" by Kathleen Rooney

Posted by Simone Muench

November 24, 2008 5:21 PM

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Kathleen Rooney was born in West Virginia and raised in the Midwest. She is the author of Reading with Oprah: the Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas, 2005) and a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her collaborative chapbook Something Really Wonderful, co-written with Elisa Gabbert, is available from dancing girl press, and their full-length collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness is available from Otoliths Books. She works as a Senate Aide and lives in Chicago with her husband, the writer Martin Seay. Oneiromance (an epithalamion) is her first single-author collection of poetry, (Switchback Press, 2008).

Niagara Falls: Scrapbook Three

Here it is, honey, the Honeymoon Capital--
Art Deco ziggurats & heart-shaped beds,

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Poem of the Week: "Just the Thing" by Chris Glomski

Posted by Simone Muench

October 20, 2008 5:14 PM

Chris Glomski is the author of Transparencies Lifted from Noon (MEB / Spuyten Duyvil, 2005) and two chapbooks, IL LA, from Noemi Press (2002) and Eidolon from Answer Tag Press (2008). He has published translations of Italian poets Francesco Giuntini, Maura del Serra, and Eugenio Montale. He lives in Chicago's East Ukranian Village.

Just the Thing

would be
a book
on which the rain

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Poem of the Week: "Blues—Silences—Stops Between" by Garin Cycholl

Posted by Simone Muench

September 27, 2008 6:38 PM

Garin Cycholl works as co-editor of Near South, a journal of experimental poetry, fiction, and drama. He is author of the prose collection Nightbirds (moria books, 2006), Blue Mound to 161, a book-length poem on geological and historical displacements in Southern Illinois (Pavement Saw Press 2005) and Rafetown Georgics ( Cracked Slab Books, Chicago, 2008)

Blues—Silences—Stops Between

for Sterling Plumpp

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Poem of the Week: "The Shoebox Letters" by Melissa Culbertson

Posted by Simone Muench

September 8, 2008 9:42 PM

Melissa Culbertson is a graduate of Lewis University, where she studied literature and creative writing. Her poetry has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Flyway, Windows, Pebble Lake Review, Barn Owl Review, Wicked Alice, [GROWLING SOFTLY] from Juliet Cook's Blood Pudding Press, and Melusine, or Woman in the 21st Century. Melissa also co-edits the online literary journal blossombones with her good friend and fellow writer, Susan Slaviero. The Fire-Wife is her first chapbook (dancing girl press, 2008).

The Shoebox Letters

I.

Dear bramble. Dear braid. Dear beer-drowned bee.

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Poem of the Week: "Poem in Which I Am My Own Porn Star" by Brandi Homan

Posted by Simone Muench

August 4, 2008 5:28 PM

Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds (Shearsman Books, 2008), and Two Kinds of Arson, a chapbook from dancing girl press. She is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.

Poem in Which I Am My Own Porn Star

Most days I just want to live
in a Crate & Barrel catalog.
I can't stop watching Law & Order.

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Poem of the Week: "Loosening the House" by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Posted by Simone Muench

June 19, 2008 5:09 PM

Hadara Bar-Nadav's book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (MARGIE IntuiT House, 2007) was chosen by Kim Addonizio as the winner of the 2005 MARGIE Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Verse, and other journals. Born in New York, she currently is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She lives in Kansas City, MO with her husband, the furniture designer Scott George Beattie.

Loosening the House

The typewriter is feminine in French.
I grow larger every day.

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Poem of the Week: selections from Figures for a Darkroom Voice by Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Posted by Simone Muench

May 23, 2008 12:51 PM

Figures for a Darkroom Voice was written by Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson with artwork by Noah Saterstrom , and published by Tarpaulin Sky in 2007. To read selections from Figures for a Darkroom Voice and bios, please hit continue.

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Poem of the Week: "Sleeping on the Edge of the Prairie" by Peggy Munson

Posted by Simone Muench

May 12, 2008 5:39 PM

Peggy Munson's book Pathogenesis is out from Switchback Books, 2008. Munson is the author of the novel, Origami Striptease, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. She also edited the anthology, Stricken: Voices from the Hidden Epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She has also been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, and Cottages at Hedgebrook. A native of Normal, IL, she now lives in Massachusetts.

Sleeping on the Edge of the Prairie

I am sure the panic grass has a language of gestures.
I am sure the wild horses of forced surrenders

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Poem of the Week: "This is a Story You Won't Tell the Kids We'll Never Have" by Melissa Severin

Posted by Simone Muench

April 14, 2008 1:23 PM

Melissa Severin lives in Chicago and works in search engine marketing. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New England College, and her poems have appeared in MoonLit, The Alembic, Seven Corners, 42opus, and The Cultural Society. She is also the managing editor of Switchback Books. Brute Fact, her chapbook, was released from dancing girl press, 2008.

This is a Story You Won't Tell the Kids We'll Never Have

Hood of your mouth
scraped with saguaro carcasses

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DvA Gallery presents

Posted by Simone Muench

April 2, 2008 11:49 PM

1st Friday Poetry with
Brandi Homan
Daniel Borzutzky
Nina Corwin
Simone Muench

8:00 - 9:30 PM
Friday, April 4th, 2008
Free admission

DvA Gallery
2568 N. Lincoln

Interview with Tony Trigilio on his book The Lama's English Lessons

Posted by Simone Muench

April 1, 2008 4:40 PM

The following interview with Tony Trigilio about his book The Lama's English Lessons was conducted during March 2008 by Andrew Galligan.

Andrew Galligan: According to your bio, you've spent most of your life in two major American cities - Boston and Chicago. Much dissimilarity is apparent - how are they alike?

Tony Trigilio: Both cities are quite different, yes. At the same time, both are cities of neighborhoods. That is, in both cities your daily life can be characterized by the neighborhood in which you live, and each neighborhood has its own rich history. Both cities are hugely segregated; yet at the same time, you can find neighborhoods that are diverse like no other city except probably New York.

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Poem of the Week: "communion" by Margo Berdeshevsky

Posted by Simone Muench

March 31, 2008 8:28 PM

Margo Berdeshevsky was born in New York City in 1945; she was an actress; she has lived in Hawaii; she currently lives in Paris. But a Passage in Wilderness is her first poetry collection (Sheep Meadow Press, 2007). Her works have appeared in Agni, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New Letters, Poetry International, Runes, Siècle 21, Europe. Her Tsunami Notebook of poems and photographs followed a journey to Sumatra in Spring 2005, to work in a survivors' clinic in Aceh. A book of short fictions, Beautiful Soon Enough, and Vagrant, a poetic novel, wait at the gate. The cover art for But a Passage in Wilderness is one of her montages.

communion

Let us come into communion
The sea is sick of fish--randomly, it wants a god.

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Poem of the Week: "Story" by Yerra Sugarman

Posted by Simone Muench

March 24, 2008 11:05 AM

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Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto, and lives in New York. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first collection, Forms of Gone, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was also published by Sheep Meadow in 2008. Her poems and articles have appeared in ACM, The Nation, How2, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, and 100 Poets Against the War. She holds degrees in visual arts from Columbia and Concordia Universities and in writing from City College. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University and is Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.

Story

If it had only been a story

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Interview with Sean Singer on his book Discography

Posted by Simone Muench

March 4, 2008 7:42 PM

This interview with Sean Singer about his book Discography was conducted during the week of February 11th, 2008 by seven poets: Rachel Chamberlain, Vince Francone, Andrew Galligan, Joshua Lobb, Virginia Smith, Rose Woodson, and Nate Zoba.

Nate Zoba: When writing about a particular musician or music, do you listen to that musician or that type of music before writing, while writing, in rewriting, or all? How does the music affect the form of the poem, the rhyme scheme, and the meter? If the affect is significant, do you ever find that there is a point where it is best to work a poem without its subject's music playing? Does the music of the subject ever become too influential on the form of the poem?

Sean Singer: I listen to jazz obsessively, and was doing so when I wrote the poems in Discography, which was between 1995-2000. Also, I have nearly 1900 jazz CDs in my collection.

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Poem of the Week: "Zombie: 24 Hours In The Life Of" by Daniela Olszewska

Posted by Simone Muench

March 3, 2008 7:46 PM

Daniela Olszewska holds a BA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. Her poetry-related activities include serving on the Editorial Board of Columbia Poetry Review and acting as Editorial Assistant/Intern Coordinator for Switchback Books. Her poems have been/ will be published in Keep Going, Shampoo, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, and La Petite Zine. Her chapbook The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe was published by dancing girl press, 2008.

Zombie: 24 Hours In The Life Of

Green glow, eel glow. I wake up.
Obliterate all traces of breadcrumbs.

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Poem of the Week: from Closed Histories by Sara Veglahn

Posted by Simone Muench

February 24, 2008 9:21 PM

Sara Veglahn was born and raised in the American Midwest. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Sleepingfish, Octopus, Fence, 26, Fairy Tale Review, the anthology Poets on Painters (Ulrich Museum of Art, 2007) and elsewhere. She is the author of three chapbooks: Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008); Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003); and Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002), and is co-author of the chapbook That We Come to a Consensus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), a collaboration with poet Noah Eli Gordon. She is the Associate Editor for the Denver Quarterly and teaches literature at Naropa University and creative writing at the University of Denver, where she is completing her PhD.

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Poem of the Week: "It Is Possible He Thought" by Nickole Brown

Posted by Simone Muench

February 18, 2008 9:13 PM

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Nickole Brown is the author of Sister (Red Hen Press, 2007). She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College, studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She co-edited the anthology, Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight. She also has served as the National Publicity Consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and as the Program Coordinator for the Union Institute & University writing residency in Slovenia. Nickole works for the nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, and currently lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

It Is Possible He Thought

It is possible he thought
he loved me. It is possible
he wanted me

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Poem of the Week: "Ancient Sorrow Sleep Already" by Matthew Zapruder

Posted by Simone Muench

February 11, 2008 9:50 AM

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Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of poetry: American Linden (Tupelo Press, 2002) and The Pajamaist (Copper Canyon, 2006), selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. He is also the co-translator of Secret Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2008). He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New School and works as an Editor for Wave Books. In Fall 2007 he was a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas. He lives in New York City.

Ancient Sorrow Sleep Already

It takes a great act of will to poke your head
out of the nocturnes to say those clouds
might seem to be hanging but fact is Emily

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Poem of the Week: from Filament Sense by William Allegrezza

Posted by Simone Muench

February 4, 2008 9:36 AM

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William Allegrezza currently resides in Michigan. His poems, articles and reviews have been published in the U.S., Holland, the Czech Republic and Australia, as well as in several online journals. His chapbooks, e-books and books include Lingo, The Vicious Bunny Translations, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Ladders in July, Ishmael Among the Bushes, and In The Weaver's Valley. He is the editor of Moria Poetry, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books, which released the The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. His latest books are Fragile Replacements (Meritage Press, 2007), and the chapbook Filament Sense (Ypolita Press, 2008)

6.

as waters over an edge

boulders placed and waiting for destruction

"is this it?"

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The End Below Where You Were Reading

Posted by Kim Christoff

February 2, 2008 12:23 AM

I.
The end below where you were reading
continues where brush strokes stroke
a horse of yellow halos... halos not attached
to anything ... should we not be bothered by things
of this century. Sometimes description makes me
not believe. That is best to go on.
Getting to endings. And I do love a punch.
But, they leave me nowhere particular.

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Poem of the Week: "beta (Β, β)" by Michaela Gabriel

Posted by Simone Muench

January 21, 2008 12:05 PM

Michaela A. Gabriel lives in Vienna, Austria, where she assists adults in acquiring computer and English skills. She has been published in English, German, Italian, and Polish, both online and in print, most recently in Eclectica, Loch Raven Review, Underground Window, The Hiss Quarterly, MindFire, and Niederngasse's Erotica Supplement. Her first chapbook, apples for adam, is available from FootHills Publishing, and her collection, the secret meanings of greek letters, was published by dancing girl press in 2007.

beta (Β, β)

plastered to the
road on winter nights,
it evokes bleached adders

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Poem of the Week: "Mood Ring" by Jaswinder Bolina

Posted by Simone Muench

January 7, 2008 1:24 PM

Jaswinder Bolina was born in Chicago in 1978. He received his B.A. from Loyola University Chicago and his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. He currently studies and teaches in Athens, Ohio, where he is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. His book Carrier Wave was the winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2007).

Mood Ring

Inside me lived a small donkey. I didn't
believe in magic, but the donkey
was a sucker for the stuff. Psychics,

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Poem of the Week: from The Work of Days by Sarah Lang

Posted by Simone Muench

December 31, 2007 10:28 AM

Sarah Lang was born in Canada.

Her book The Work of Days was published by Coach House Books in 2007.

from The Work of Days

This is the harbour where I rig your happiness. One thing
into another: you cover my mouth; I play dead. The sheet breathes

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Poem of the Week: "II." by Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney

Posted by Simone Muench

December 11, 2007 1:44 PM

Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College . She currently lives in Boston and is an editor of Absent. Recent work can be found in Pleiades, Meridian, Cannibal, and LIT. Her chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press. That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness , a book of poems written with Kathleen Rooney, is forthcoming from Otoliths Books.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of Reading With Oprah: the Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005) and Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Arkansas Press, 2009). Recent essays and poems can be found in Gettysburg Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Quarterly West.

Their collaborative chapbook Something Really Wonderful was published by dancing girl press in 2007.

II.

She kept a chamois-soft list of Things That Set My Heart Aflutter
& she sent it in a letter, the envelope encrusted with ruby glitter.

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