1. No category

A l ice J a m es B o o k s
Spring 2015
INSIDE
1 From the Editors’s Desk
2 New Titles
4 Author Interview
Cecily Parks
6 News and Events
9 Donors
10The Alice Fund
11 Featured Backlist Title
12 Alice Asks
Michael Broek
spring
n e w s l e t t e r
A lice J ames B ooks
2015
Volume 20, Number 1
AJB STAFF
Carey Salerno
Executive Editor
Alyssa Neptune
Managing Editor
Nicole Wakefield
Senior Editorial Assistant
Debra Norton
Bookkeeper
Board Of Directors
Anne Marie Macari
President
Carey Salerno
Executive Editor
Craig Morgan Teicher
Vice President
Peter Waldor
Treasurer
Jan Heller Levi
Secretary
Editoral Board
Tamiko Beyer
Michael Broek
Monica A. Hand
Sally Wen Mao
Angelo Nikolopoulos
Cecily Parks
Suzanne Parker
Matthew Pennock
Erica Wright
INTERNS
Kimberly Renee Arthurs
Tim Bushika
Nate Fritts
Sarah Winchenbach
Front cover from Yearling (4/2015)
Image credit: “Go Tell The Others,”
Regan Rosburg, original artwork.
Image of Alice James
pf MS Am 1094, Box 3 (44d)
By permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University
books that matter
Dear Friends:
Welcome to AJB’s spring newsletter. Before you dive in and indulge, I have an essential
message to share: this e-issue marks the final, formal newsletter endeavor for AJB for the
time being. Let me illuminate.
Over the years, we’ve immensely enjoyed transforming the newsletter communiqué from
its original inception—a corner-stapled stack of black and white papers—to the colorful,
online version you currently see before you. Yet, as we all look more and more to social
media in order to obtain up-to-the-minute information about the press, we recognize that
the way in which our friends want AJB news is changing. Timelines are changing. News is
changing. Where and how we read is changing.
Accordingly, it’s time for the next newsletter
incarnation. What we plan to offer now is news
via our website’s blog platform, Alicing Around,
with new stories appearing at the bottom of
AJB’s homepage as they arrive. There, you’ll
find many of the same stories and interviews
you’ve come to love, just in a fresh format.
We’re looking forward to continually bringing
you stories and surprises more than just twice
a year, and will share new Alicing Around posts
on our social media outlets like Facebook and
Instagram, so you’ll know immediately when
they become available. Also, in the new format,
there’s possibility for dialogue between you
and your fellow AJB friends, so we’re looking
forward to the opportunity for continued
conversation.
AJB will continue to produce the seasonal catalogs in spring and fall, absolutely, so please
keep your eyes peeled for those bi-annual emails from us.
We hope bringing you news as it happens will be thrilling for you—hey, you’ll get your AJB
fix more times a year this way, too!
In this “last” newsletter, you’ll find much of what you’ve come to expect from us: interviews
with our forthcoming authors, news on our fundraising efforts, and a couple of pages
just for fun. We appreciate your loyal readership of the AJB newsletter, and we’re looking
forward to our next phase for all things AJB.
Enjoy!
Carey Salerno, Executive Editor
new titles
2
Michael Broek is the author of two chapbooks – The Logic of Yoo (Beloit Poetry Journal) and The Amputation
Artist (Emerge Literary Journal). His poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry
Journal, Blackbird, Connotation Press, Drunken Boat, Exit Strata, Fourteen Hills, The Great River Review, Literary
Imagination, The Literary Review, and elsewhere in print and online. He has held a scholarship to the Bread
Loaf Writers Conference and a Poetry Fellowship from the NJ State Arts Council. He holds a PhD from the
University of Essex (England) and edits the online journal Tran(s)tudies.
The Nothing
So as an artist of negative space he poured himself
into nothing & took breaks—sometimes weeks long—
recovering from the ardor of nothingness executed
with a jeweler’s patience, though it was the rock-dust
grains powdering the cutting-room floor out of which
one day he would make a window, that clear pane
© Joanna Elderedge Morrissey
making (inside light) / (outside light) the birds
exterior, the children & multiplication tables interior.
Is this what it was? Division. Word. Splitting firmament.
REFUGE/ES
May 2015
Michael Broek
Praise for Refuge/es:
“Juxtaposing our wars, our disturbed cities, our flawed policies with the
erotic and domestic, Michael Broek creates, in Refuge/es, a stunning love
song for our troubled nation and world. Consisting primarily of three
sequences, this audaciously original first book is actually one complex
collage with recurrent points of reference, assembled with uncommon skill
and passionate care.”
—Martha Collins
“Michael Broek’s book Refuge/es takes on the whole world: history, justice,
the fragmentations of modernity, terrorism, erotic love and estrangement.
But his resources are substantial—these poems possess intelligence,
erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition,
this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the
capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.”
—Tony Hoagland
3
new titles
Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, The Kenyon
Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf
Coast Poetry Prize.
A Girl Thief ’s Illustrated Primer
To guarantee safety, go back inside and count
to noon. To make honey by honest trees,
press for time. Either way, all numbers are hellhound
as well as holy, but what did you expect?
A little divine torture has always been
the way in, and waiting for daylight
robbery won’t leave you deadly. Or, take my
word away and light up the teeth in the tumbler
all at once, like the locked door is a yawning
god and you the very last Alleluia—
at once, as if your heart shredded its school skirt
and shotgunned over the yard for home.
They kept you on the wrong side all along.
Hold a tension wrench closer. Treat your gates
like they were lovers and listen for the Yes
And there it is, but look at what you found inside.
Ari Kellond
Be need with a black glove riding the wrist.
Be first-felony Eve in the red telephone booth
outside the garden, a battle coal
dialing herself back into the war.
YEARLING
Lo Kwa Mei-en
April 2015
Praise for Yearling:
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling is brilliant—blindingly smart and lit at midnight—
hard and beautiful, so sharp ‘you could baptize a battlefield in it.’ Through
its excavation of memory, trauma, girlhood, the body itself, it electrifies form
and narrative in poems that are rich, journeyed, dark, resilient. So brave, too,
in their song of recovery: wings and war and eggs and maps and scars and
somehow, in the morning, vision. I am in awe of this book, will no doubt
reread and reread it.”
—Anne Marie Rooney
“You can’t step into Yearling and then come back out the same. You just
can’t. Lo Kwa Mei-en’s words burn elementally—fire, water, fire, water—
beatering you, halving you, splitting you, with symmetrical defiance and
embrace, ever and again. A luminescent and branding volume of poems
that lights everything on fire with one hand and tends coals with the other.”
—Brenda Brueggemann
author interview
4
Cecily Parks is the author of the chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) and the collection Field
Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), which was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the
Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review,
Orion, Tin House,Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Forest for the Trees
I believe it’s all this pollen that dizzies me.
I chance and re-chance upon
the stalks of wild asparagus, the crimson
rhubarb, the fern splayed into
the cow road’s muck.
Is it my eye or sundown pin-tucking the ravine?
Carrie Patterson
I believe my panting
leaves wet blossoms
on the branches of this one tree.
Willing my mouth to press against elm
and ironwood, I have inklings of missing
but not of what I should miss.
Solitude is like this, a distance I walk toward
but never into.
Strings of spit testify to the bark I’ve kissed.
O’Nights
Cecily Parks
An Interview with Cecily Parks
In a recent dialogue with Cecily Parks, AJB asked
the author about the inspiration for her second
collection. Here, she speaks of transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau’s influence on her poetry,
how writing about nature distances you from it,
and her passion for the wilderness, which shines in
O’Nights.
ALICE JAMES BOOKS: How did the idea of O’Nights
form?
CECILY PARKS: I wrote O’Nights poem by poem.
The poems responded to the Northeastern landscapes
in which I found myself over the course of more than
five years. Those landscapes were geographical but
also literary. The book takes its title from a passage
in Thoreau’s Journal in which a neighboring farmer
comments on Thoreau’s tendency to be out roaming
the woods at night. The farmer says that Emerson
looks younger than Thoreau but adds that Thoreau is
out “o’nights” more than Emerson. The word o’nights arrested
me. I’d never seen the word before, but I loosely translated
it into of the nights and let the word encourage me to
think about nocturnal poetics. It just so happened that
I discovered Thoreau’s Journal (which often reads like a
poem) when I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, not
far from Walden Pond. So, as is often the case, I immersed
myself in a landscape and in the literature that responds to
that landscape. I started reading the Transcendentalists,
Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alice James,
all of whom have explicit or implicit cameos in this book.
AJB: You found influence for O’Nights in Thoreau’s work,
presenting readers with a fascinating mixture of romanticism
and the contemporary. How did you negotiate writing in the
pastoral, while still trying to make it new?
PARKS: I believe that contemporary poets write from
the position of knowing that any engagement the natural
world must include what we know of environmental crisis.
This knowledge encouraged literary critic Terry Giffords
5
author interview
(continued)
to introduce the term post-pastoral,
which, broadly defined, describes
a text that reflects on the ethical
and environmental implications of
human interactions with nature.
Borrowing from Giffords, I used
“Postpastoral” to title a poem that
features a female speaker who, like
Thoreau in Walden, borrows an axe
to chop down trees and build a
house. Despite failing to even chop
down a tree, the speaker concludes
the poem with an unsettling
declaration: “I would own the forest.” In this poem and
throughout the book, I tasked myself with writing
about the natural world in ways that acknowledged my
own complicity in our current environmental culture, and
tried to incorporate ugliness, toxicity, and destruction into
my poems’ ecological consciousness.
AJB: Besides Thoreau, did you have any other major influences
for this collection?
PARKS: Though my poems are inspired by the natural
world, I write best when I’m thinking about how other writers
have approached writing about the natural world. Seamus
Heaney, Susan Howe, Kathleen Jamie, Cole Swensen,
William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf,
and Dorothy Wordsworth were among the authors I turned
to during the writing of this collection.
identity” and to not discuss wilderness through a traditionally
feminine perspective. To do this, you avoid using gender
pronouns and associations within your poems. What was
your reason for composing your collection with a female
speaker who encounters the natural world in ways that are
conventionally considered masculine?
PARKS: I was interested in creating a fluidly-gendered
speaker in order to draw attention to the ways in which
we expect gendered bodies to encounter the natural world.
Who picks flowers? Who carries an axe? Who builds a fire
in the woods? Who is afraid that their clothing might get
wet in the rain? The nights of the collection’s title provided
subversive places to explore these questions.
“I
think all writing about the natural
world implicitly or explicitly mourns
the way that writing about something
can only distance us from it.
”
AJB: One of your biggest influences in poetry is the work of
Seamus Heaney. Like Heaney, you employ language in ways
that are quite unique: common states of mind can suddenly
seem uncommon. For example, in your poem “Sinus Infection,”
the speaker describes a headache as “a pack of black wolves
howls.” What can you tell us about your imaginative process
in this poem?
PARKS: Among the many places where I wrote, the Hudson
River Park in New York City and Fresh Pond in Cambridge,
Massachusetts were the most valuable. Although I didn’t do
the literal pen-to-paper writing in those places, they were
where my poems came into being, often when I walked or
ran beside the water and tall grasses. The MacDowell Colony,
The Saltonstall Colony, and Yaddo gave me other productive
spaces for writing.
PARKS: I’ve long wanted to write a poem that acknowledges
the different sides of the debate about hunting wolves. As
the poem suggests, I wrote it while I had a sinus infection.
I hated that sinus infection, and I wondered, a bit perversely,
what it would be like if I imagined that the sinus infection
was a pack of wolves. I was writing in a library, and each
time I looked up from the poem, I couldn’t help but look
at the man, a stranger, working across from me. I have
no idea what he was working on, but I imagined a kind
of continuity to our thinking, that simply by our being
in proximity to one another I could create “a meadow
now / greenly unfolding / in the man’s mind,” where I
could imagine the wolves bounding over the grass after I
eliminated them from my skull.
AJB: Does writing help you feel connected to nature, or does
delving into the complexities of human relationship with nature
almost set you up to be alienated from it?
AJB: Many, if not all, of your settings in O’Nights occur in
nature. When did your love for the outdoors begin, and how
did you feed your passion for the wilderness?
PARKS: I’ve written about this elsewhere: I think all writing
about the natural world implicitly or explicitly mourns the
way that writing about something can only distance us from
it. If I’m writing about a pond, for instance, how can I be
truly attentive to the complex ecosystem that a pond can be?
I write poems that attempt to bridge the distance between the
pond with its reeds, fishes, and bright-green duckweed to the
desk in my house where I write on a MacBook Air.
PARKS: I grew up in the suburbs of New York City. We
lived in a house that had what seemed to me at the time
to be a giant backyard. I remember spending a lot of time
in the woods near our house, looking for vines to swing
on. On vacations, my family would go to the Catskills,
where I learned to fly fish. The Catskills region was lush
with forests and fields of high grass. There were crumbling
stone walls and the ruins of early farmsteads in the trees.
I loved the haunted quality of that landscape. Each valley
and clearing seemed to hold a secret.
AJB: A sense of place is heavily entrenched in the essence of your
collection. In which place did you complete most of your writing?
AJB: Many of the poems in O’Nights try to “break down
t
news and events
Kazim Ali
has a new fiction book from Spork Press, Wind Instrument. He has a book
forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in November 2015,
Resident Alien: On Border Crossing and the Undocumented Divine.
Catherine Anderson
had her third full-length collection of poetry published in 2014 by
Mayapple Press, Woman with a Gambling Mania, which was selected as
one of the best 100 books of the year by the Kansas City Star. She is the
feature poet of the I 70 Review’s website. She will be reading in Kansas
City, Wichita, and Overland Park, KS in the forthcoming months. She
has new poems forthcoming in The Laurel Review.
Tamiko Beyer
has recent or forthcoming poems appear in the Feminist Wire, Tupelo
Quarterly, The Fourth River, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, and
Contemporary Verse 2.
Cathy Linh Che
had a recent poem and interview in Waxwing, an interview with
Divedapper, and was highlighted in the ‘In Their Own Words” feature on
the Poetry Society of America’s website. She read with James Allen Hall
on March 18 for the Poetry Society of America at McNally Jackson Books
in NYC, on March 29 during the Eagle & Wren Reading Series at Book
Court in Brooklyn, NY, on April 1 during Arts @ UNH at the University
of New Haven in CT, on April 6 at the University of Colorado in Boulder,
CO, and on April 8 with Tiffanie Hoang, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Bao Phi,
and Paul Tran during the Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry, 40 Years after
the War panel at AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, MN. She is reading on April
27 during FOLKSLAM at Columbia University in NYC, on May 2 at
12:15 P.M. with Tamiko Beyer, Chen Chen, Ching-In Chen, Sally Wen
Mao, and Annie Won, during the Poetics of Construction event at the
Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA, on May 3 at 11:30 A.M.
with Laren McClung and Bruce Weigl, during the Poems of Love and
War event at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA, on May 4 at
4:00 P.M. with Eugenia Leigh, R.A. Villanueva, and Ocean Vuong at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and on June 19 during FREE
WATER at KGB Bar in NYC.
Deborah DeNicola
has a poem forthcoming in Packinghouse Review, “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at Hitchcock’s Blackbirds.” Her poem “The Night as Meditation”
received an Honorable Mention in New Millennium’s contest and will
appear in The New Millennium 2016 Anthology.
Amy Dryansky
has poems forthcoming in the Women’s Review of Books. She will be on
the From Zero to One: First Books and What We’d Wish We’d Known panel
from May 1-3 at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA. She is
reading on June 28 during the Voices in Poetry event in Roxbury, CT, and
in January 2016 at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon in NYC.
Joanna Fuhrman
has a section of her collaboration with Toni Simon forthcoming in the
Brooklyn Rail. She read on March 7 with Adeena Karasick and Yuko
Otomo at The Shed in Brooklyn, NY, on April 1 with Laura Sims, James
Wagner, and Daniel Borzutzky during the April Fools Readings at Mello
6
Pages in Brooklyn, NY. She is reading on April 16 with Michael Lally
and Thomas Devaney at Rutgers New Brunswick Barnes and Noble in
New Brunswick, NY, on April 18 with Toni Simon and Cheryl Kaplan
during the Acidic Ghost Spectral Reading Series in NYC, and on April 24
with Frannie Lindsay at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, MA.
She is reading on May 13 with Thomas Devany at the Print Center in
Philadelphia, PA, on June 14 at 6:00 P.M. during the New York Quarterly
Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC, and on June 21 with
Thomas Devaney during the In Your Ear Reading Series at the DC Arts
Center in Washington, D.C..
Allison Funk
had her fifth book of poems published by Parlor Press, Wonder Rooms. She
read on April 9 at Bone Shaker Books in Minneapolis, MN, during an
offsite reading at AWP. She was on “The Thinking Eye” panel on April 10
at the AWP 2015 Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Erica Funkhouser
is reading from April 24-26 at the Newburyport Literary Festival in
Newburyport, MA. She continues to teach both Introductory and
Advanced Poetry Writing Workshops at MIT.
Rita Gabis
has a memoir from Bloomsbury US/UK forthcoming September 2015,
A Guest At The Shoorters’ Banquet: My Grandfather and the SS, My Jewish
Family, A Search for the Truth. In October, she will be one of the Ruth Gay
endowed speakers at YIVO in NYC. She has two poems forthcoming in
the summer issue of Tin House.
Richie Hofmann
has a book of poetry from Alice James Books forthcoming in November,
Second Empire. He had recent poems appear in Best New Poets 2014,
The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, and on The Academy of
American Poets Poem-a-Day. He has poems forthcoming in Ploughshares,
Salmagundi, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, and Birmingham Poetry Review. His
poem “Midwinter,“ originally published in The Adroit Journal was recently
selected for Best of Net 2014. He is reading on April 15 at Agnes Scott
College in Atlanta, GA.
Alessandra Lynch
had her poems “Guarded” and “Magnolia,” which was nominated for a
Pushcart Prize, published in the Summer 2014 issue of 32 Poems. Her poem
“Epidemic” was published in the Spring 2015 issue of Antioch Review.
In February, VERSE put her poem “Admission” on their website. Diane
Lockward of “Blogalicious” posted an interview with Alessandra about her
poem “Magnolia” on their website, which also featuers a recording of her
reading the poem.
Ruth Lepson
has a book of poems forthcoming from Pressed Wafer, which will feature
musical settings of the poems on their website, Ask Anyone. She read on
February 28 at Galatea Fine Art in Boston, MA.
Lesle Lewis
is reading on May 1 during the Lighthouse Reading Series in Cleveland,
OH. She has poems fothcoming in Spoke Too Soon and Bodega.
Anne Marie Macari
has a new book of poetry from Persea Books, Red Deer.
7
news and events
(continued)
Alice Mattison
participated in a tribute to Jane Kenyon with Joyce Peseroff on April 11
during the AWP 2015 Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
​Suzanne Matson’s
Ploughshares Solo and Kindle Single is now available as an audiobook, Pie.
Learn more about Suzanne at http://suzannematson.com, purchase the
Kindle Single at http://bit.ly/KINDLESINGLE, and the audiobook at
http://bit.ly/AUDIO_BOOK.
Shara McCallum
has a new book of poetry from Alice James Books forthcoming in January
2017, Madwoman. She had recent poems appear in The Antioch Review,
Great River Review, The Southern Review (US), and Manifold Blackbox
(UK). Her poems hace also appeared in a number of recent anthologies,
including Scribner’s Best American Poetry 2014 and Tupelo Press’ Another
English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World. Her short essay on
John Keats appeared on the Poetry Society of America’s “Old School”
web feature (http://bit.ly/SHARAMCCALLUM). An interview she
conducted with Eavan Boland appeared in a special feature on Boland in
a recent issue of PN Review (UK). She read from March 4-6 at the StAnza
Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, from March 26-28 at the Poetry
Conference in Vicenza & Venice, Italy, and is reading on May 26 at the
CB1 Poetry Series in Cambridge, England.
Laura McCullough
edited an anthology from University of Georgia Press, A Sense of Regard:
Essays on Poetry and Race. Her poem “There Were Dandelions” was selected
by Sherman Alexi for Best American Poetry 2015. She was the fall 2014,
spring 2015 Florida Writers Circuit Tour Poet. She joined the faculty of
the Sierra Nevada Low Residency MFA in January 2015.
Philip Metres
has a book of translations with Dimitri Psurtev from Cleveland State
University Poetry Center, I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny
Tarkovsky.
THE 2016
ALICE JAMES AWARD
Open to emerging as well as established poets
residing in the United States for an unpublished,
book-length manuscript of poems.
~
Submission deadline is November 1, 2015
~
Winner recieves $2,000, publication, and
distribution through Consortium.
~
For guidelines visit our website
www.alicejamesbooks.org
Helena Minton
has recent or forthcoming poems in Sou’wester, Red River Review, and
in the anthology from University of Washington Press, Raising Lilly
Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace.
Mihaela Moscaliuc
has a new book of poetry from the University of Pittsburgh Press,
Immigrant Model. In April, she is reading at San Diego University, the
University of Southern California, and the Los Angeles Book Festival.
She moderated a panel on the poetry of Gerald Stern, read for the
anniversary of Great River Review, and had two book signings at the AWP
2015 Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Carole Oles
has a new book of poetry from the University of New Mexico Press,
A Selected History of Her Heart. She had a tribute to Maxine Kumin in
the November 2014 issue of The Magazine and an essay in the January/
February 2015 issue of the American Poetry Review, “Maxine Kumin’s
Poetic Legacy.” She read on March 30 at California State University in
Chico, CA. She was a panelist on “The Poetic Art of Maxine Kumin” and
had a book-signing at the AWP 2015 Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
Suzanne Parker
had two recent lyric essays in The Inquisitive Eater (http://bit.ly/
LYRICESSAYS). She has poems forthcoming in Passages North. She read
on April 1 at The Writer’s Forum spring season at SUNY in Brockport,
NY. She hosted an off-site reading on April 10 with Alice James Books,
Organic Weapons Press, Nightboat Books, and MEAD: A Magazine of
Literature and Libations at Gluek’s Resteraunt in Minneapolis, MN. She
is reading on April 21 at 7:00 P.M. during the Armenian Poetry Project’s
“A Reading Commemorating the Centenary of the Armenian Genocide”
at the Holy Cross Armenian Church in NYC, NY.
Willa Schneberg
was the international judge for the Reuben Rose Poetry Competition,
sponsored by “Voices in Israel: A Group of Israeli Poets Who Write in
English.” In January, she was hosted, in Israel, by the organization and
offered readings, workshops, and spoke at their Awards Ceremony. In
March, she read from her recent collection, Rending the Garment, at
Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland, CA. On April 25 she is the Featured
Author in the Nye Beach Writers Series in Newport, OR. ​
Lisa Sewell
has a new book of poetry from The Word Works, which won the 2014
Tenth Gate Prize, Impossible Object. She has recent or forthcoming
poems in The Laurel Review, MEAD, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner,
Salamander, and Crab Orchard Review. She read on April 14 at Villanova
University. She is reading on April 23 at 8:00 P.M. with Beau Monde
and Suzanne Wise during the L’Etage Reading Series, on April 18 at 7:00
P.M. with Nzadi Keita at the Chestnut Hill Gallery, on April 29 at 7:00
P.M. during the Cervena Barva Press Reading Series in Somerville, MA,
on May 22 at 8:00 P.M. at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA, and on May
19 at Cal Poly.
news and events
8
(continued)
Chad Sweeney’s
fifth book of poetry was published in February by Marick Press, White Martini
of the Apocalypse. His online literary journal, Ghost Town, recently released Issue
7 and he invites Alices to send in poems for Issue 8 at www.ghosttownlitmag.
com.
Coming Fall 2015
Brian Turner’s
memoir was released via Audible and from Thorndike Press in a large print
edition, My Life as a Foreign Country. He has an essay forthcoming in MORE
Magazine. In March he read at NYU, SUNY in Brockport, NY, Ginnell College
in IA, the University of Hawai’i, Eastern Carolina University, and Modesto
Community College in CA. In April he read in Pasadena, CA, the AWP 2015
Conference in Minneapolis, MN, and La Crosse, WI. He is reading in Los
Angeles, CA, on April 21 at Monmouth University in NJ, on April 25 at the
Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock, AR, from April 27-28 at Elliot Bay
Bookstore and Highline Community College in Seattle, WA, from April 2930 at Grossmont College in El Cajon, CA, in May at “Poetry on the Road”
in Bremen, Germany. He is teaching an Arvon course in June in Lumb Bank,
UK.
DroughtAdapted
Vine
Dona Shatford Peters
Donald Revell
Available
September 2015
Cornelia Veenendaal
has a new book of poetry from BlazeVOX, An Argument of Roots.
Ellen Doré Watson
is reading on May 7 at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, MA.
She is participating from April 25-26 in the Colrain Manuscript Conferences
and from June 5-8 in Truchas, NM. She received an Artist Residency at The
Hermitage in Manasota Key, FL. She was on the “Translating Brazil” panel at
AWP 2015 in Minneapolis, MN.
Attention Alices
Don’t forget to share your events online
on AJB’s Community Events Calendar!
[email protected]
Available
November 2015
Thief in the
Interior
Phillip B. Williams
Available
January 2016
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
If you’re unable to access the calendar or would
like more information, please e-mail:
Richie Hofmann
Joe Hofmann
Suzanne Wise
has a new chapbook from Red Glass Books, Talking Cure. She has recent or
fothcoming poems in The Awl, Quaint, and Five Quarterly.
Second
Empire
9
donors
AJB thanks the following individuals for their generous contributions
to the press from 2014 to present*
Institutions
The National Endowment for the Arts
The Summer Wind Foundation, Inc.
Sponsors: $2500 or More
Anonymous
David & Margarete Harvey
Anne Marie Macari
The Soderlind Family Giving Trust
Patrons: $1000-$2499
Madeleine Deininger & Joel Peterson
Jane Mead
Peter Waldor & Jody Miller
Benefactors: $500-$999
Jan Heller Levi & Christoph Keller
Robert Dorsett
Nina Nyhart
Donors: $250-$499
Kazim Ali
Harriet Feinberg
Stacy Gnall
Shara McCallum
Joyce Peseroff
James Tilley
Contributors: $150-$249
Catherine Barnett
Elizabeth J. Coleman
Dante Di Stefano
Jeannine Dobbs
Allison Funk
Dobby Gibson
Gail Gnall
Benjamin Goldberg
Rob Greene
Elizabeth Hagerty
Donald Hall
Linda Hofmann
David Kirby
Evan Kleekamp
Mary Ann McFadden
Edmund Miller
Matthew Nienow
Janine Oshiro
James & Judy Pennock
Donald Revell & Claudia Keelan
Lucy & Lawrence Ricciardi
Leslie Taylor
Ellen Doré Watson
Toni Yagoda
Supporters: $75-$149
Kate Adams
George Biecher
Ronald Cohen
Bob & Hester Brooks
Carl Dennis
George Drew
Denise Duhamel
Lynn Emanuel
Forrest Gander
Marita Garin
Monica A. Hand
Marie Harris
Ava Leavell Haymon
Hugh Hennedy
Joel Hernandez
Nancy Jean Hill
Marianna Hofer
Christine Hofmann
Anne & Joseph Killough
Jeffrey Thomas Leong
Ruth Lepson
Daniel & Lesle Lewis
James Longenbach
The Mattison Household
Tim Mayo
Mihaela Moscaliuc
April Ossmann
Christine Robbins
Carey & Daniel Salerno
Laurie Sewall
Elizabeth Stabler
Gerald Stern
Terese Svoboda
Mary Szybist
John Robert Thelin
Laurence Thomas
Jennifer Eriksen & Jeffrey Thomson
Barbara Tomash
Connie Voisine
Claire Wahmanholm
Eleanor Wilner
Readers: $1-$74
Elizabeth Ahl
Elizabeth Aoki
Renee Ashley
Robin Becker
Carole Borges
Henry & Joan Braun
Michael Broek & Laura McCullough
Zakia Henderson Brown
Pat O’Donnell & Michael Burke
Emily Carson
Kristen Case
Helen Marie Casey
Cathy Linh Che
Rick Christman
Amy & Jim Church
Nicole Cooley
James & Edwina Cronin
Ariene Distler
Juditha Dowd
Grazyna Drabik
Sherri Felt Dratfield
Amy Dryansky
Eric Edwards
Mary Feeney
Doris Ferleger
Alice B. Fogel
Peter & Leslye Fries
Erica Funkhouser
Rebecca Gambito
Michael Glaser
Joshua Goldfond
Jim & Erica Haba
Rhoda Hacker
John & Kathy Harden
Jared Harel
Maria Healy
Mary Herman
Darla Himeles
Richie Hofmann
Faith Holsaert
Kathleen Jesme
Jill McCabe Johnson
Marilyn & Raymond Johnston
Beth Kanell
Caledonia Kearns
Lynne Knight
Lo Kwa Mei-en
Nancy & David Lagomarsino
Joan Larkin
Anna Leahy
Andrew K. Lewis
Leslie Joan Linder
Margaret R. Lockwood
Jean Lunn
Alessandra Lynch
Jamaal May
Richard McCann
Laren McClung
Lynne McEniry
Josephine McKee
Sandra Meek
Fleming Meeks
MaryAnn L. Miller
Nora Mitchell
Kelsey Moore
Jeanne Morel
Karla K. Morton
Kathleen Motika
Jesse Nathan
Frank Paino
Michael Palma
Allan Peterson
Lynne Potts
Cindy Price
Michael Puican
Ruth Ann Quick
David Radavich
Bill Rasmovicz
Cynthia Ravinski
Jendi Reiter
David Roderick
Idra Rosenberg
Kelly Rowe
Nan Rush
Beverly Salerno
David Salerno
Willa Schneberg
Phillip Schultz
Jeffrey Schwartz
Lee Sharkey
Lynn Shoemaker
Jody Stewart
Christina Stoddard
Retold Story
Miranda Strichartz
Allen Strous
Terry Ann Thaxton
Cedric Tillman
Parker Towle
Edwina Trentham
Jean Valentine
G.C. Waldrep
William Wenthe
Mary S. Willis
Ken & Lois Wisman
Margot Wizansky
YesYes Books
*If you do not see your name listed but have donated to AJB or have found an inaccuracy, please accept our apologies and notify us right away by calling or emailing.
AJB makes every effort to keep this list current and accurate up to the time of publication.
Yes! I love poetry
... and I want to give to Alice James Books.
◊ Publish one AJB book ($5000) ◊ Launch one AJB book ($500)
◊ Print one AJB book ($2500)
◊ Advertise one AJB book ($250)
◊ Design one AJB book ($1000) ◊ Promote one AJB book ($100)
I wish to make my donation by:
Donating online at: www.alicejamesbooks.org/get-involved/
Enclosing a check payable to: Alice James Books
114 Prescott Street
Farmington, ME 04938
Enclosing
cash
◊ My Company has a matching program:
Debit or credit card:
Company name: _____________________________
VISA/MC CARD#: ___________________________________
Email: _____________________________________
NAME ON CARD: ___________________________________
Contact Phone: ______________________________
EXPIRATION DATE: ______________________________
My gift will:
the alice fund
10
stay alive.
“ Just
That’s all I ask.
About The Alice Fund
The Alice Fund’s mission is to ensure the long-term financial stability and realization
of the strategic goals of Alice James Books. The press is wholly committed to investing
the vast majority of any “profits” or “gains” from a given fiscal year directly into The
Alice Fund. Though many donors choose to give to both, funds raised for The Alice
Fund and our Annual Fundraising Appeal remain separate from each other.
Fund Management Policy
Each year up to 5% of the fund may be distributed to our cash reserve/contingency
portion of The Alice Fund to Alice James Books as income for ordinary operations
or for special projects.
Fund Investment Policy
Our investment policy is decidedly conservative. AJB currently distributes funds
evenly between cash (for contingency/quasi-endowment use), CDs, and moderate
growth mutual funds.
About Our Strategic Goals
All nonprofits plan for growth and aspire toward greatness. Here’s what the
Alice James Cooperative Board is committed to:
• Hiring full-time marketing, publicity, and development
personnel
• Publishing up to 8 titles per year, including books from the AJB
Translation Series
• Continuing to publish emerging and established poets
• Accelerating the growth of The Alice Fund
THE ALICE FUND
...preserving the legacy of
AJB’s deepest thanks for the
gifts made to The Alice Fund
by the following founding
contributors
:
Alice
• Anonymous
• David & Margarete Harvey
• Rita Waldor
Henry
• Financial Benefits Research Group
William
• Brown & Brown Metro Insurance
• Anne Marie Macari
• Valley National Bank
• Peter Waldor
Robertson
• Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
• Anonymous
• Anonymous
• Privett Special Risk Services
• United States Fire Insurance Company
Wilky
• Bernstein Global Wealth Management
• Lee Briccetti
• Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno and David Bonanno
• Chubb Group
• Carmela Ciurarru
• Beverly Davis
• Christina Davis
• Anonymous
• Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company
• Franklin Savings Bank, Farmington Branch
• Peter Gelwarg
• Joan Joffe Hall
• Jan Heller Levi
• Philip Kahn
• Ann Killough
• Nancy Lagomarsino
• Ruth Lepson
• Lesle Lewis
• Diane Macari
• Anonymous
• Idra Novey
• April Ossmann
• Jean-Paul Pecqueur
• Bill Rasmovicz
• Lawrence Rosenberg
• Carey Salerno
• Thomson-Shore, Inc
• Jeneva & Roger Stone
• Lisa Sherman & Martin Stone
• Marla Vogel
Your gift to The Alice Fund
”
—Jane Kenyon on AJB, 1994
A lice J ames B ooks
What’s your legacy level?
Alice
$10,000 or more
Henry
up to $10,000
William
up to $5,000
Robertson
up to $1,000
Wilky
up to $500
Make a Lasting Impression Call us to discuss this
opportunity to give the gift of preservation.
may come in many forms. You may give a one-time gift, set up annual contributions, make a gift on a
loved one’s or friend’s behalf, or write a plan for Alice James Books right into your estate. Gifts may even be made in stocks or bonds, or you may
also wish to consider individual or corporate sponsorship and matching opportunities. However you choose to give, poetry salutes and appreciates
your conscientious efforts to preserve this great art, and Alice James becomes your life-long friend.
11
featured backlist title
PENNYWEIGHT WINDOWS
Donald Revell
Zion
Suddenly copper roses glow on the deadwood.
I am these because I see them and also see
Abolition, the white smock on a girl
Eating an apple, looking down into
The valley, a small train steaming there.
I go to the uplands to join death.
And death welcomes me, shows me a trailhead,
Foot-tracks overfilled with standing water.
Man has never owned another man here.
Aglow in the shade hang apples free for the taking.
I’m saying that death is a little girl. The apple
There in her hand is God Almighty where the skin
Breaks to her teeth and spills my freedom all over
Sunlight turning deadwood coppery rose.
Praise for Pennyweight Windows:
“PW said last year that Revell was due for a career retrospective, and this ample and almost
shockingly varied cull of poems from eight books rewards that call richly.”
—Publishers Weekly
“To read this selection from Donald Revell’s 20-plus years of making poems is to witness
the evolution of both an individual poet and the poetics of an entire era.”
—Boston Review
Dona Shatford Peters
“It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell’s are
so fresh, it’s as if he’s the first person ever to do it.”
—Time
Born in The Bronx, New York in 1954, Donald Revell was educated at Harpur College (B.A. 1975) and the University of Buffalo (Ph.D.
1980). He is the author of twelve previous collections of poetry, most recently of Tantivy (2012) and The Bitter Withy (2009), both
from Alice James Books. Revell has published six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan),
Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (Omnidawn), Laforgue’s Last Verses (Omnidawn) and Verlaine’s Songs without Words (Omnidawn). His
critical writings have been collected as The Art of Attention (Graywolf) and Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn). Winner of the
PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’
Lenore Marshall Prize and is a former Fellow of the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. Additionally, he has twice been
awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Former editor-in-chief of Denver Quarterly, he now serves as poetry
editor of Colorado Review. Revell is Director of Graduate Studies & Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives
with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan and their children, Benjamin and Lucie, in the Spring Mountains of Nevada.
alice asks
12
alice asks...
Michael Broek
AJB: What color best represents you and why?
© Joanna Elderedge Morrissey
BROEK: Not sure. I’m colorblind. I could tell you, but it would be like
telling you North is South; the one place this make me sense is at the
Pole, where every direction is the opposite of where you are, but leaving
that coordinate behind, my perception would no longer make any sense.
Colorblindness is like my personal Surrealist Manifesto. An escape from
the “real.” Or so I’m told.
AJB: What song best describes your work ethic?
BROEK: That’s reductive as hell, but then so are most of these questions.
Actually, I did listen to music as I wrote many of the poems in Refuge/
es. The funky little Brooklyn band (now not so little) The National was a
favorite, but more especially was Max Richter’s re-vision of Vivaldi’s The
Four Seasons. Richter is a contemporary composer who thought he would
rewrite this canonical work, and I admire the hubris and the courage. It’s
also a haunting and beautiful re-vision, captured wonderfully online in a
video that I played on Youtube a hundred times – a performance at the
Le Poisson Rouge with an ensemble of maybe thirty; a very sweaty, very
passionate conductor; a rather resplendently dressed principal violinist;
and lovely close-ups of strong-hearted musicians playing with intensity
and sonorous love. It would be nice to think that some of that music
seeped into the poems.
AJB: What is the last book you read?
BROEK: The answer to this question always makes someone sound like
an ass – name dropping and intellectualism, neither of which are below
me. So here goes. When the NBA’s are announced, I’ll order the nominee’s
books, if I don’t have them already, and then I’ll spend the rest of the winter
arguing with myself about the selections. I’m also working on translations
of a contemporary French poet, Marie-Claire Bancquart, so I’m reading
her work, along with various reference books, since I’m not fluent, but I’m
not going to let that stop me. Finally, I’m reading Cooking With Pomiane,
a reprint in the Modern Library Food Series of a classic French cooking
treatise. To call it a book of recipes is not really accurate. It’s more a work
of existentialist philosophy, with mushrooms. For example, the recipe for
Cervelle au Beurre Noir begins, “Suppose you buy an ox brain,” and ends,
“With them drink a good Sauternes which, as you know, is a little sweet.”
Found poetry.
AJB: If you had six months with no obligations or financial constraints,
what would you do with the time?
BROEK: As fantasies go, this takes the cake, but I can’t help but read this
as, “If you had six months to live with no obligations ... .” Somehow, this
seems much more realistic. I mean, impending doom may clarify one’s
desires, which reminds me – my mother-in-law died a year ago this April,
and last winter, as I was getting to spend a few hours alone with her while
she was in hospice, I read Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” to
her, and it was crucial, both for her and for me. She had grown up alone,
save for her father, and that poem’s evocation of grace and loneliness was
evocative for her, and strangely, for me, which I suppose prompted me to
read it to her in the first place. She was a lover of poetry. She loved me,
and as I write this, I miss her very much. Six months before her severe and
abrupt decline, she had been snorkeling in the South Pacific. While not
my idea of a good time, I love the verve. Me? I’ll let you know when the
time comes.
AJB: Do you make your bed every morning?
BROEK: Is this a metaphor? I make someone’s bed every morning. I have
had five children – the last two still young and at home – so every morning
is an act of making a bed. This is not a complaint, just an acknowledgment
of the many concrete yet tenuous ways in which we are connected to one
another. Who does not make some kind of bed in the morning, if bed
making is any obligation, an effort to stem chaos and the always looming
tide of diapers and dog poo that threatens to overwhelm our (living) spaces.
I do wonder if, living by myself, I would bother. ... Probably not. This is
why, at least for me, the Other is so crucial. Without it (otherwise), I’d
sooner die (or die sooner). Making the bed is a shout out against eventual,
inevitable dissolution. Which is also to say that I rarely, literally, do it.
AJB: What number do you see most often?
BROEK: Sixty-four. Do you remember learning your multiplication
tables? Third grade, I recall “eight times eight is sixty-four.” It’s what
I memorized first, and I realize now the phrase is metrical, all those
trochees, the final stressed syllable, plus all those vowel sounds, and
the consonance. There are four of these hexameter-plus-one equations:
Five times five is twenty-five / Six times six is thirty-six
Eight times eight is sixty-four / Nine times nine is eighty-one
For my favorite, the second of those – 36 – is a close runner-up. All those
x’s and i’s. If math were just always so metrical, I would have had a much
easier time in high school.
AJB: What food would you prepare for a dinner party?
BROEK: I’ve been dabbling in French cookery, both because I have been
translating French poetry, and because oeufs, jambon, and fruits de mer just
arouse my aural senses. I tried a pot au feu, which took two days it seemed,
but in the end was just a brown pot roast. However, and as ludicrous as it
may sound, I found the key to a great French onion soup – cooking the
onions over low heat for about three hours; they begin to sweat, cook in
their own liquid, nearly jelly: it’s hard not to draw some metaphoric power
from that. Given time and concentration, cooking is another, and tastier,
way to write.
AJB: What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?
BROEK: Whatever flavor you’re having.
Alice James Books
Jua n A n ton i o G on z á l e z I gl e s ia s
idoia elola
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry
collections: Fence Line (BkMk Press, 2004),
won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish
Sketchbook is a bilingual
English/Spanish collection
published by Ediciones
en Huida in Seville Spain;
and The Real Cause for
Your Absence was published
by C&R Press in 2013. His poems and
translations have appeared in The Southern
Review, The Indiana Review, The Common and
The American Poetry Review, among others.
He is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue
Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations
Editor for From the Fishouse, and he teaches
Creative Writing and Comparative Literature
at Texas Tech University.
“ The voice of Juan Antonio González Iglesias,
translated with great beauty by Curtis Bauer,
seems miraculous in its clarity. Crucial and
inevitable, the poems speak directly from
our time, and simultaneously through the
layers of time. I lifted my face from reading as
from fresh essential water. This is poetry that
resuscitates.” —Marie Howe
“Contemplative and utterly sensual, Bauer’s
translation of Eros Is More stands at the brink
of oblivion with such tenderness, gratitude,
and reverence for the brief bodies of things
(birds, lovers, letters) that we cannot
help but be emboldened by these poems.
Provocatively and playfully they enliven my
thinking and seeing: “October, like a truce.
Like an absence of everything/ that exceeds
limits. May it be for us/ liberation.” This is a
beautifully masterful collection, at once lucid
and mysterious. In this book we are in the
hands of two generous and beautiful poets.”
—Aracelis Girmay
Eros Is More
t r an sl at e d by C urt i s Baue r
Eros Is More
Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Salamanca,
1964) is Professor of Latin Philology at
the University of Salamanca, Spain. He
has translated Ovid,
anonymous Romans,
Horace, Catullus, James
Laughlin, Stendhal, and
Sebastiano Grasso. In
addition to Eros es más,
his other collections of poetry include La
hermosura del héroe (Premio Vicente Núńez,
1993),Esto es mi cuerpo (Visor, 1997), Un
ángulo me basta (IV Premio Internacional
de Poesía Generación del 27, Visor,
2002), Olímpicas (El Gaviero Ediciones,
2005), and most recently, Del lado del amor:
Poesía reunida 1994-2009 (Visor, 2010). Eros es
más was selected by El Cultural, El Mundo as
the best collection of poetry in Spain in 2007.
González Iglesias | Bauer
anne provoost
poetry / $15.95
“Eros is more or less everything in the magical
world of Juan Antonio González Iglesias.
What good luck to have his poems in the
elegant translations of Curtis Bauer, for here
is a poet who understands the centrality of
love, or, more precisely, beauty, to our works
and days—a theme that he explores with
rigor, wit, and wisdom.”
—Christopher Merrill
Alice James Books
fa r m i n gto n , m a i n e
www.alicejamesbooks.org
AJB Subscribers Get 6 Books for $70!
When you choose to be an Alice James Books subscriber, AJB will automatically mail you each new book
we publish (six books a year), so you’re guaranteed not to miss a title! The cost is $70/year (two seasons of
books, including shipping)—that’s about 50% off the cover price! Take advantage of this great offer now!
Call us at (207) 778-7071, email [email protected], or visit our website to enroll.
www
. a l i c e j a m e s b o o k s . o rg
an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington