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Frankie Drayus, "To have, to hold"
Both poets are from the Open Issue.
Congratulations, and good luck!
]]>About this workshop:
“Touch has the upper hand, the pavilion, an internal sense or the body itself, closes its veil as the body does its skin,” writes Michel Serres. Be ready to engage a full embodiment of poetic response, moving across multiple dimensions of written expression, summoning language from the vastness of your inner and outer worlds, experience imagination reaching beyond the cerebral and into the sensory. This workshop will be designed for those who are not afraid to take poems off the page either developing a new format for previously written work, collaborating with others (in or out) of the workshop, and honoring the sacredness of the body-temple as a tool for exploration into transcendental realms of visual, audio and of course written expressions of poetic form.
Registration is a suggested $100. There are only 12 spots available. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity.
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Congratulations to associate poetry editor Judy Kronenfeld, whose latest poetry collection, Shimmer, is just out from WordTech Editions. See below for info.
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In Shimmer, Judy Kronenfeld’s careful attention to the details of the particular and domestic also throws off sparks from the larger cultural, political and historical currents charging those events. Sample Poems by Judy Kronenfeld
“Judy Kronenfeld is a Southern Californian/Ex-New Yorker who’s crossed geographies and decades with her eyes and her heart open. In these fine poems she gives us the fruits of her journeying, some as close to home as the checkout line where we stand ‘ambivalent as mid-afternoon’ and some so globally empathetic that she can write about the mothers of ‘martyred’ babies on one side and soldiers on the other—war victims both: ‘The romance / of a meaningful death must be so brief.’ Kronenfeld’s nearly photographic eye knows that ‘night falls fast, / so fast, piling up in steep / soft drifts, canceling / cornice, column, piling up / in streets of ash and embers’ and yet her poems show us how careful attention continues to enrich us—‘You still see nothing / that is not there, / but now you sense everything / that is.’” —Deborah Bogen
“Judy Kronenfeld’s Shimmer radiates a fierce clarity of vision: the glow of the title is fed by intensities of memory and desire, love and rage. I’m deeply moved by these powerfully voiced poems that oscillate between evocations of an earlier world—the ‘crumbling Bronx,’ the ‘white noise’ of the city—and the new realm of age, loss, and reconciliation to which we all must come.”—Sandra M. Gilbert
The Scientific Method, a poetry chapbook by Mary Alexandra Agner, is now available from Parallel Press: http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/poetry/titles/author.shtml?Agner. It includes poems about the Navier-Stokes equations, Barbara McClintock, moss, and other intriguing scientific topics.
]]>One of our contributors, Letitia Trent of the Open Issue, has a brand-new collection just out from Sundress Press. We hope you will take a look. Official press release below.
Congrats, Letitia!
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One Perfect Bird
A Collection of Poems by Letitia Trent
Knoxville, TN— Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of Letitia Trent's One Perfect Bird (Sundress Publications $14.99) on January 1, 2012. This is Letitia’s first full-length collection of poetry. Trent is also the author of two chapbooks, Splice and The Medical Diaries, and a third, You aren’t in this movie, to be out in 2012.
"Reading these poems I was reminded of the voice and vision of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. Similarly, the emotional and psychological rawness of human thought, as crafted by Letitia Trent in surprising, elusive, and innovative lines, startles us into a recognition so profound, we're not entirely sure what we're reading or if we're reading. It's a pleasing and unsettling experience--and I daresay, what literature should and can be."
- Kathy Fagan, author of Lip
In Letitia Trent's debut collection, the poems unfold like wildflowers in the spring, each one more surprising and dazzling than the last. But they are not simply a fleeting beauty, but rather a voracious and heated sort that stays with you long after you've closed the book. These poems, rooted deeply in the places they explore, are impeccably constructed and bitingly honest. This is a collection from a new voice that must be heard.
"The poems in One Perfect Bird ride like a dirty living letter in a good, clean envelope. They are the silty Tang in our cups, the color of the hunters' vests like ribbons through the birches as they searched our forest for any rusty bursts of blood. They are primarily poltergeists; mesh net masks and subtly singing beards, bee bodies slipping from their chins like honey. If it's true that I lifted all these lines of praise from the lines in Letitia Trent's poems—and it is true—then who could blame me? For the lyricism required to describe them, I can't better their maker. No one could."
- Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil's Territory
Letitia Trent was the recipient of the 2010 Alumni Flash Writing Award from Ohio State University’s The Journal. She has also been awarded fellowships to The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony. One Perfect Bird is currently available for pre-order through Sundress Publications at sundresspublications.com.