Annie Finch’s new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems, will be in stores in time for Poetry Month. Annie is a master of form. You may enjoy the sounds of the poems when read aloud. Read with friends! Stay tuned for events announcements.
You can read a sample here.
Thanks to our authors and readers for making AWP special, year after year. Special thanks to Samuel (Chip) Delany, Kit Reed, Kazim Ali, Rae Aramntrout, Annie Finch, and Jena Osman for participating in readings, and to Dennis Barone for organizing a panel on Connecticut poetry. Thanks to everyone else for stopping by our booth to say hello and visit. It is always wonderful to see so many friends in one location. See you all in Seattle!
Jena Osman, Rae Armantrout, Annie Finch, Kazim Ali.
Check out Tor’s blog here for a chance to win a copy of Kit Reed’s The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories.
Wesleyan UP’s book Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith is finding its way into more libraries across Connecticut. 850 copies of the book will be donated to libraries statewide, thanks to co-author Chandler Saint and congresswoman Rosa DeLauro. The distribution project was announced by five members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, at a press conference held at the state Capitol earlier this week.
Read more about the book here. View a video of an announcement of the project to distribute the book here. Read an article from The Day newspaper here.
Friends spotted Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems on sale at Unnameable Books, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. We hope you can join us at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Manhattan, for a celebratory reading on April 17th, 7PM.
Annie Finch’s Spells: New and Selected Poems is due out in April. Read her article, “A New Witch in Town,” at the Huffington Post. If you are a fan of Annie Finch, please “like” her article and help us move it to the Huffington Post’s front page.
We are honored to have published the poetry of Harvey Shapiro, who recently passed at the age of 88. Read the full obituary, from the New York Times, here.
BROOKLYN NIGHTS
We are like inhabitants
of a southern river town
gathering summer evenings by the water.
A flock of bridges greet us
and the stone hunks of Manhattan.
The power of redemptive love, like
New Jersey red, has gone into the clouds.
Everyone must feel it.
COMBAT
In the war in which I fought
not all my actions were heroic.
I remember particularly the time
I bargained with God—the plane
seemed to be going down,
smoke filled the cabin—
if he would only get me out alive,
I would … What was my promise,
my heartfelt vow? Tears in my eyes,
probably, and trembling. I might
have been speaking to a woman.
CHANCE MEETING
Just family trouble, said Lear,
and what’s new with you?
DESK
After my death, my desk,
which is now so cluttered
will be bare wood, simple and shining,
as I wanted it to be in my life,
as I wanted my life to be.
Please enjoy our interactive Influence Map, highlighting our press’s international scope. Click here to learn more about the map.
Congratulations to David Ferry for his National Book Award in the Poetry category. Ferry published his first volume of poetry, On the Way to the Island, with Wesleyan UP in 1960.
Happy Halloween…
Looking for a nail-biting story to celebrate Halloween? Forget Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, try Michael E. Bell’s Food for the Dead! In chilling detail, Bell reconstructs a distant world, where on March 17, 1892, three corpses were exhumed from a Rhode Island cemetery. One of them, Mercy Brown, who had succumbed to consumption, appeared to have turned over in her grave. Mercy’s family cut out her heart, burnt it, and fed the ashes to her ailing brother. From documents written as early as 1790 to a recent conversation with a descendant of Mercy Brown, Bell investigates twenty cases in which the vampiric dead were exhumed to save the ailing living.
