Two Forthcoming Readings

Please join us to celebrate the publication of two new titles from our catalog!

Vivian Faith Prescott’s Fat for Our Stories

April 4, 9:00 p.m. (Central) / 6:00 p.m. (Alaska)
Register here
Get the chapbook here

”Vivian Faith Prescott's poems powerfully interweave stories of family, place, and life with wild salmon. Rich with memory, Fat for Our Stories is an intimate and authentic portrait of the deep, meaningful relationship between wild salmon and people in Alaska—and of the ways the rhythms of that relationship are changing.”

—Mary Catherine Martin, SalmonState Communications Director

Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry at The Poets Corner

with Rick Barot, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Lee Ann Roripaugh, and Charif Shanahan
April 14, 3:00 p.m. (Central) / 4:00 p.m. (Eastern)
Register here
Get the anthology here

“I come to this anthology having languished, having felt benumbed, having come to question, at my very core, poetry’s value, its potency, as we contend with our current brand of American tyranny, our Hour of Lead. As I read Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, I experience an incremental awakening, or re-awakening. Every poem, every phrase in every poem, clicks a small switch in me that had been shut down, repairs a blown fuse, brings a wound into the light, provokes it into being, or staunches it. The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance. From the first lines of the opening poem, Frank Bidart’s ‘Queer’—Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything—an entreaty against self-deception, we find ourselves in veracity’s realm, where language reigns free. … The lines of these poems accordion, inhale, exhale, serpentine, straighten, curl. A carnival of approaches to diction, positionality, structure, song. This anthology is not representative of a sector of American poetry. It is American poetry. The party contains multitudes and hints at multitudes to come. When I reach the last lines of the final poem, torrin a. greathouse’s ‘On Using the Wo|men’s Bathroom,’ I am no longer numb.”
—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Announcing the Recipient of the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize!

On behalf of Green Linden Press, I am excited to congratulate JoAnne McFarland for winning the fourth annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Green Linden Press will publish American Graphic in December. Named for an essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the Prize awards $1000 and publication for a manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be and demonstrates anew the rich potentials of lyric language.

With candor and insight, American Graphic confronts personal and cultural pasts. Juxtaposing historical documents—recipes from the first cookbook published by a Black woman in the States, reward posters for people fleeing enslavement—with intimate moments from the present, the book's magic is to bend time so we see that the past’s rivers flow through us into the future. Spare yet lyrical in its language, American Graphic is a concentrate of feeling and vision.

JoAnne McFarland is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. She is the Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which exhibits works that focus on the intersection of language and visual representation. Her poetry collections include A Domestic Lookbook and Pullman, both recently published by Grid Books, Identifying the Body and the digital album Tracks of My Tears, both published by the Word Works, and Acid Rain, published by Willow Books. JoAnne has artwork in the permanent collections of the Cooper/Hewitt Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Department of State, among many others. She has had fellowships at the BARD Graduate Center Library, KALA Art Institute, the National Arts Club, Cave Canem, Van Alen Institute, and the Painting Center. JoAnne's artwork is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art. www.joannemcfarland.com

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A fond thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript. It has been a pleasure to spend time with so much remarkable work. I would like to honorably mention numerous poets whose manuscripts we also found exciting and evocative:

・Samuel Ace & Maureen Seaton for My Ears or a Field of Ears
・Emily Carr for the autopsy lyrics: a murder mystery in verse
・Emily Carr for The Stork Rides Shotgun: & other statistically significant poems
・Cody-Rose Clevidence for This Household of Earthly Nature
・J.L. Conrad for it will have been so beautiful
・Aja Duncan for The Intimacy Trials 
・Ethan Fortuna for surface phasms 
・H.L. Hix for American Outrage
・Don Hogle for Meet Me at Waterloo Station
・Emily Hyland for Breasts/Mom
・Jen Karetnick for Sensor Hypothesis
・Ben Miller for Make
・Jane Morton for Drosophila: a Fairy Tale
・Heather Nagami for The Heart As
・Coco Owen for Scar let  Woe man
・Dayna Patterson for Our Lady of Thread
・Jennifer Perrine for Beautiful Outlaw
・Rebecca Seiferle for If Language Is that Forest
・Megan Shevenock for What Is Simple
・Aaron Smith & Mareen Seaton for Beautiful People
・Sharon White for Landbrim

The Wishing Jewel Prize contest is open June 21 through November 30.

All the best,
Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher

Announcing the Recipient of the 2024 Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize!

It has been a pleasure spending time with the manuscripts submitted for the Stephen Mitchell Translation Prize. A heartfelt thank you to all who entrusted us with their work and for their dedication to the art of translation.

We are excited to announce that Rebecca Seiferle is the recipient for The Dream of Apples: Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Rebecca has been awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2024. Congratulations to Rebecca! We look forward to working with her to bring these wonderful poems into the world! Her translation work embodies Stephen Mitchell’s maxim that in translating “there’s a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There’s a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things.”

Of Federico García Lorca, she writes, “There are few Spanish poets who have so captured the English speaker’s imagination, and yet we continue to read Lorca as we have read him, which is to say through the filters of our own assumptions. Similarly, previous translations have gone in pursuit of surrealism or ‘music’ or romanticism at the expense of the sharp clarity and elemental intelligence of the original. … Breathtaking in its versatility, Lorca’s poetry conveys the sense that there are many Lorcas, but elusive, a play of presence and absence. For Lorca, fluidity and evasion are essential to the truth of poetry. His deep anguish, his performative masques, his sense of difference and his identification with those also marginalized, his sense of the interpenetration of absence and presence, all begin to interconnect if viewed from a queered center. These translations seek only the original, its deep intelligence, where a phrase can convey what Lorca called duende, an elusive ‘something else’ that evades all definition, ‘a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ ... the spirit of the earth.”

There were many wonderful manuscripts submitted, which made for pleasurable reading and difficult decisions. I would like to honorably mention several translators, poets, and writers whose work captivated our attention:

— Kevin Carollo’s translation of The Law of the Trough by Patrice Nganang
— Bradley Harmon’s translation of ANIMA by Birgitta Trotzig
— Adriana X. Jacob’s translation of Yakantalisa and Other Poems by Hezy Leskly
— Margaree Little’s translation of The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam
— Carlo Massimo’s translation of Mario Scalesi: The Damned Poet of Tunis
— Robin Myers’ translation of The Beast of Being by Susana Villalba

Annually Green Linden Press awards $1000 and publication for a book-length manuscript in any genre translated from any language into English that honors Mitchell’s linguistic acumen. All finalists are considered for publication. The contest is open June 21 through November 30.

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Federico García Lorca is the preeminent Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th century. From the beginning, his work was remarkably versatile, as he published in a variety of genres. His first poetry collection, Libro de poemas (1921), was preceded by Impresiones y Paisajes (1919) a work of prose, recounting his travels as a college student throughout Spain, and his first play El Maleficio de la mariposa, was produced the following year. In his lifetime, Lorca published five poetry collections, but a number of celebrated works, including Diván del Tamarit and Poeta en Nueva York were to be published posthumously and in other countries, as the works were viewed as too controversial in Francoist Spain. Published in 1928, his Gypsy Ballads made him famous in Spain and lead to international acclaim. In 1936, Lorca was killed by Fascist forces, and, following his death, his books were publicly burned in Granada and further publication banned. In the decades following, his works have been translated into many languages where they have continued to influence subsequent generations of artists in many fields. At the Prince Asturias Awards in 2011, Leonard Cohen spoke of his “deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico García Lorca” and how “he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.”

Rebecca Seiferle has published four poetry collections. Wild Tongue won the Grub Street National Poetry Prize, and Bitters won the Western States Book Award. She is a noted translator from the Spanish, having published translations of César Vallejo’s Trilce and The Black Heralds. Her translations of various poets are included in The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry. Her essay “Black Cactus Open in Reeds,” on Federico García Lorca appeared in Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant, and was Tucson Poet Laureate for two terms from 2012–16.

Launch Readings: Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry

Join us in celebrating the publication of the second anthology in the Essential Voices series!

“The exhilarative truth-telling and wit, the poems that walk the page with a humble gait, and those that ego-strut, the foundational
voices and the newly arrived, remind me of what poetry has been in similarly oppressive times, its capacity for liberative endurance.” —Diane Seuss

Virtual Readings:

  • January 23, 7:30 p.m. (Central): Derrick Austin, Robin Becker, Rachel Mennies, Ruben Quesada, Mark Wunderlich —register here—

  • January 25, 8:30 p.m. (Central): Richard Blanco, James Allen Hall, Jennifer Perrine, Catherine Pond, Magdalena Zurawski —register here—

  • February 20, 8:30 p.m. (Central): Brian Blanchfield, Dorothy Chan, Eduardo C. Corral, Randall Mann, Brian Teare —register here—

  • February 22, 7:30 p.m. (Central): Meg Day, Jan-Henry Gray, Richie Hofmann, Rebecca Seiferle, Shelley Wong —register here—

  • April 14, 3:00 p.m. (Central), with The Poets Corner: Rick Barot, Ellen Bass, Richard Blanco, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Charif Shanahan —forthcoming—

  • May 9, 6:30 p.m. (Central), with Meet Me There Reading Series: Samuel Ace, Christopher Nelson, and others —forthcoming—


Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City Convention Center, Room 2503AB:

  • February 9, 1:45 p.m. (Central): Lisa Dordal, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Donika Kelly, Paul Tran

Green Linden Press, 2024

Get your copy of the anthology in our store!


100 Poets for the Present and Future.

The Essential Voices series intends to correct misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the broader culture. At its heart is the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. This anthology features 100 poets who illuminate the queer experience in the U.S., including Kaveh Akbar, Rick Barot, Frank Bidart, Richard Blanco, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, CAConrad, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Nikky Finney, Nikki Giovanni, Marilyn Hacker, Robin Coste Lewis, Timothy Liu, Eileen Myles, Carl Phillips, Justin Phillip Reed, Kay Ryan, Sam Sax, Richard Siken, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, and many others. Diverse in styles, subjects, and demographics, the book is a mirror to the lived experience of nearly one century of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender poets.

Chapbook Open-reading Period Selection

We have enjoyed reading the 400+ chapbook manuscripts submitted during our open-reading period. We are excited to announce that we have selected for publication Fat for Our Stories by Vivian Faith Prescott, forthcoming spring 2024!

Born and raised on the small island of Wrangell, Alaska, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan, Vivian Faith Prescott lives and writes at her family’s fishcamp. She’s a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of the first LGBTQIA group on the island. She’s the author of several poetry collections and works of non-fiction and fiction. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she co-hosts the award-winning Planet Alaska Facebook page and the Planet Alaska column appearing in the Juneau Empire.


We would like to honorably mention the following poets, whose manuscripts stood out:

— Jonathan Conley for Deadheading

— Richard Jordan for The Squannacook at Dawn

— James Scruton for Now Serving Customer Zero

— Don Thompson for Indelible

— André Le Mont Wilson for Landfill

Our next open-reading period for poetry chapbooks will be from December 21 to March 19.

Ryler Dustin's Something Bright

Congratulations to Ryler Dustin on Something Bright being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in the chapbook category! Many poems in the chapbook are part of a longer manuscript, Trailer Park Psalms, which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

The Wishing Jewel Prize Winner Announced!

I am excited to congratulate Kristi Maxwell on winning the third annual Wishing Jewel Prize! Later this year Green Linden Press will publish Goners. The poems are lipograms, an ancient form that demands certain letters be excluded when writing the poem; in Maxwell’s case, the letters comprising the names of endangered animals. As she describes, “The piece ‘Cheetah,’ for instance, uses 21 of 26 letters, all but a, c, e, h, and t, so no articles, no cats, no being, no are or were or was, no choice, etc. (no etc.).” In the context of the corrosive effects of imperialism and industrialization, Goners questions the common practice of elegizing and employs an alternative mode. The animals in the titles are absent from the poems—they’re gone. Instead, in a haunting gesture, the poems “foreground the role human-centering has played and continues to play in the sixth extinction underway.”

Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books of poems, including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020); Realm Sixty-four (Ahsahta Press, 2008), editor’s choice for the Sawtooth Poetry Prize and finalist for the National Poetry Series; and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, 2009), editor’s choice for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville and a 2022–23 American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellow. Kristi holds a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arizona.

I would like to honorably mention several poets whose work we also found brilliant and evocative:

· Samuel Ace and Maureen Seaton's Portals
· Bruce Bond’s The Crawling Eye
· Bruce Bond’s Lunette
· Carol Ann Davis’s of small musics
· Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s Praise Song for Adverse Noise Conditions
· Sam Kemp’s Lut Lut Lut
· Sam Kemp’s Maps to Arkham
· Jason Ly’s Body Problem
· Matt McBride’s Arrangements in a System to Pointing
· Dayna Patterson’s Our Lady of Thread
· Aaron Smith and Maureen Seaton’s Beautiful People
· Spring Ulmer’s dear a

The Wishing Jewel Prize is named for a lyrical essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater. The Prize awards $1000 and publication; it honors an innovative manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be. The contest will open again in September.

Christopher Nelson, editor and publisher

Stephen Mitchell Prize for Poetry in Translation — Winner Announced!

It has been a pleasure spending time with the manuscripts submitted for the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for Poetry in Translation. A heartfelt thank you to all who entrusted us with their work and for their dedication to the arts of poetry and translation.

We are excited to announce that Philip Metres is the winner of the inaugural Stephen Mitchell Prize for his translation of Ochre and Rust: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky. Philip was awarded $1000, and the book will be published in the fall of 2023.

We are also delighted to be publishing Cole Swensen's translation of Pierre Alferi's And the Street, an Editor's Selection in the Green Linden Poetry in Translation Series.

Congratulations to Philip and Cole! We look forward to working with them and the poets to bring these wonderful books into the world! Their translation work embodies Stephen Mitchell's maxim that in translating "there's a deeper faithfulness than simple accuracy. There's a place where, as in marriage, faithfulness and freedom are the same things." Read more about the translators and poets below.

There were many wonderful manuscripts submitted, which made for pleasurable reading and difficult decisions. I would like to honorably mention several translators and poets whose work captivated our attention:

· Rachael Daum's translation of A Regata of Paper Boats by Marko Tomaš

· Jennifer R. Kellogg's translation of Book of Exercises II by George Seferis

· Margaree Little's translation of The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam

· Siavash Saadlou's translation of ...And the Poet is a War Correspondent: Selected Poetry of Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou

· Roger Sedarat's translation of Caught in His Presence: Selected Poems of Hafez

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Sergey Gandlevsky is one of the most celebrated contemporary Russian poets. Born in 1952, Gandlevsky opted out of the Soviet system, working odd jobs and sharing poetry with a small coterie of friends in the 1970s and 1980s. His work did not appear in Russian literary journals until the late 1980s, during glasnost and perestroika. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Gandlevsky’s poetry and prose have received nearly every major Russian literary prize: the Little Booker Prize (1996), the Anti-Booker Prize (1996), the Moscow Score prize (2009), and the Poet Prize (2010). A Russian critics’ poll in the 2000s named him the country’s most important living poet. His writing—poetry, fiction, and essays—has been translated into numerous languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Georgian, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Lithuanian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese. In English, Gandlevsky’s poetry also appears in A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003). Gandlevsky’s two novels also appear in English translation by Suzanne Fusso: Trepanation of the Skull (Northern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Illegible (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019). Since 1993, Gandlevsky has worked at the journal Foreign Literature. A lifelong Muscovite, Gandlevsky has relocated to the Republic of Georgia since the war in Ukraine began.


photo: Heidi Rolf

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Shrapnel Maps (2020), The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance (2018), Sand Opera (2015), and four volumes of poetry in translation; the most recent, I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (2015), won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Award, the Read Russia Prize, and was longlisted for the National Translation Award. His work has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Watson Foundation. He has been awarded the Adrienne Rich Award, three Arab American Book Awards, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and the Hunt Prize. Metres has been called “one of the essential poets of our time,” whose work is “beautiful, powerful, and magnetically original." He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University, and lives in Cleveland, Ohio.


Pierre Alferi is a French poet, novelist, essayist, and one of the pioneers of the cinépoème, a fusion of short film and poetry. He has published some fifteen collections of poetry and four novels and has collaborated with various visual artists and musicians on a variety of hybrid projects and performances. A translator himself, he has translated works by John Donne, Giorgio Agamben, Meyer Schapiro, and others. He has been awarded residencies at the Fondation Royaumont and the French Academy in Rome. He currently teaches at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.


Cole Swensen is an American poet and translator. The author of twenty volumes of poetry and one volume of critical essays, she is also the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid. Her poetry has been selected for the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. She has translated over twenty volumes of French poetry and fiction and regularly translates articles and catalogue essays in the field of visual arts. She won the PEN USA Award in Translation for her translation of Jean Frémon’s novel Island of the Dead. She teaches in the Literary Arts Department at Brown University.

Flesh-plastique, a forthcoming collection of poems by Dennis Hinrichsen

Flesh-plastique, Dennis Hinrichsen’s tenth full-length collection, explores an array of debris fields, where we experience the repercussions of a life fueled by dirty, secular Eucharists. Moving at hyper speed through worlds—a compromising job in the nuclear industry, the purloined grave of the Apache chief Geronimo (not far from Atomic Annie, a cannon that could shoot a nuclear projectile)—Hinrichsen articulates each scene with a swift directness and capacious emotional range. In collages and atmospheric lyrics with stunning formal collisions, we hear anger and humor directed at the mess we have made of things, from the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and toxic forever-chemicals to the decay of the American family. But we also hear joy for the sheer pleasure of music and old technologies; we hear compassion for friends stricken with dementia; and ultimately, we hear notes of hopefulness for a world which swirls wildly and dangerously around us.

Pre-order here! March 21, 2023, publication date.

Praise for Flesh-plastique

In a nuclear age without a nucleus to cling to, the poems of Dennis Hinrichsen’s Flesh-plastique flit and careen across time and space, both dexterously and dangerously—grieving, grooving, lusting, waiting—and showing us how to live—fully live!—between an unsettled past and an uneasy future: “I too am cut with Eros and toxicity—fearing death—by isotope and viral load—but still pursuing nakedness.” A searing, audacious, deliberative book.

—Lauren Russell

In Flesh-plastique, Dennis Hinrichsen is once again, and even more vigorously, a formal genius, every page engineered into a canvas of airborne lines, charted space, and radical gifts of punctuation that feel like symbols and stamps—sometimes even scars. His words throughout gleam intensely personal and political, often at the same time: wounded lands of heart and world. Sometimes they are not easy words or comfortable or cozy words, but they are honest and longing—absolutely human in their undisguised vulnerability.

—Maureen Seaton

 

Flesh-plastique is Dennis Hinrichsen’s tenth full-length collection of poetry. His most recent work includes schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press, and This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the 2020 Grid Poetry Prize. His other awards include the 2015 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary for Electrocution, A Partial History, the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press for Skin Music, the 2010 Tampa Poetry Prize for Rip-tooth, the 2008 FIELD Poetry Prize for Kurosawa’s Dog and the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize for Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights as well as the 2016 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a 2014 Best of the Net Award. Work of his also can be found in two anthologies from Michigan State University Press, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, and RESPECT: An Anthology of Poems on Detroit Music. He lives in Lansing, Michigan, where from May 2017–April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.

Winner of a Midwest Book Award!

We are honored to receive a Midwest Book Award for Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, best poetry anthology of the year! It really is a unique and powerful collection. Featuring 130 poets and translators from ten countries, the book takes the position that Iranian and Iranian diaspora poetry should share the same space; the conflation reminds that cultural identity transcends nationality. With an in-depth, illuminating introduction by Kaveh Bassiri, the book is appealing to scholars, poets, historians, students, and general readers. Order your copy here.

Something Bright—a chapbook by Ryler Dustin forthcoming fall 2022

Selected from 400 manuscripts in our chapbook open-reading period, Ryler Dustin's Something Bright will be published this fall! It is available for pre-order here; two poems from the collection, "Trailer Park Psalm" and "Love Poem," are featured in our new issue. 

"The exquisitely haunting poems in Something Bright are steeped in memory and longing and reverence for the world, imperfect as it may be. ... Dustin finds something precious even in 'the rampant damages of love' and celebrates how 'the forbidden holds inside of it the holy.'" —Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New and Selected Poems

"[Dustin's poems] are offered with a gentle quiet that gives way to the quiet in me ... similar to how a walk in the forest allows us to join the conversation of silence that passes between the trees."—Anis Mojgani, Poet Laureate of Oregon

"With real clarity, these poems meditate on the persistence of memory, the difficulties of love, and the curiosities of ecology, always offering us voyages toward knowledge, awe, and an invigorated sense of self." —Kevin Prufer, author of The Art of Fiction: Poems


Ryler Dustin is the author of the poetry collection Heavy Lead Birdsong from Write Bloody Publishing. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam, and his poems appear in American Life in Poetry, The Best of Button Poetry, Gulf Coast, Verse Daily, The Best of Iron Horse, and elsewhere.

A Reading at the AWP Conference: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora

If you will be attending the AWP conference in Philadelphia, please join us for a reading from Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora: Friday, March 25, at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern Time). Four wonderful poets and translators will share work from the anthology: Athena Farrokhzad, Armen Davoudian, Kaveh Bassiri, and Sholeh Wolpé. More details about the event are here. Hope to see you there! And do stop by our table (1247) and say hello.

Robin Tomens wins the second Wishing Jewel Prize!

We are delighted to announce that Robin Tomens has won the second Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for an innovative manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be! Resurrecting seemingly obsolete technology, Tomens uses a typewriter to create evocative visual poems that both invite and resist being read. Invigorating and a little disorienting, one comes away from these poems with the mind aswim in possibilities. You Would Say That will be published this summer. Pre-order your copy here; it’s not a book to be missed.

”Using typewriters, print, acrylic, carbon paper, and pen, Robin Tomens in You Would Say That playfully captures that ‘chattering’ in his head ‘that won’t stop’ as he unmoors letter from word, word from sense, each poem typed and retyped, layering the page. Sometimes a piece crystallizes out of that atomic layering into a moment of familiar clarity. A word or phrase. A complete sentence. And then, as often as not, a piece simply, beautifully—I think happily—stalls in a ruckus built for the eye. Page by page, Tomens not only maps the angularity and dynamics embedded in visual poems but simultaneously reveals the angularity, the false starts, the do-overs, the frustrations, in the process of that utterance. Tomens’ You Would Say That is a tactile, pleasurable read—ink on the hand, ink in the eye—that cuts to the heart of the alchemy between letter and word, and ultimately, thinking.” —Dennis Hinrichsen, author of schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize

"Robin Tomens’ You Would Say That explores the dead language of manual typewriters, a poetry which chatters from craft to architecture. The familiar logic of the typewriter, the anchor of our desk, slips away and letters slide off the grid into a choreographed questioning, pirouettes of punctuation. Hold tight, read differently, and open your mind to an atomistic collision, bonds forming and breaking in a bountiful microscopic ballet."
—Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate

About the Author

Robin Tomens has been making art since producing zines in the Punk era. His multimedia collages and visual poetry have been featured in the exhibition Visual Poetry on the Page: With, Within, and Without the Word and with The Tunnel collective in London. Timglaset (Sweden) and Redfoxpress (Ireland) have published his booklets; his work has also appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and Explorations In Media Technology. His art has been used for album covers, and he makes his own artist’s books, most recently a collection of typewriter art called Yes I No. He has also written a book on Jazz, Points of Departure: Essays on Modern Jazz (Stride, 2001) and contributed to Cut Up! (Oneiris Books, 2014). He lives in London.

A fond thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript for us to consider. It has been an honor to be entrusted with so much fine work. Sincere congratulations to the finalists, whose work we found truly remarkable:

  • Aimee Wright Clow’s Dear, A Ballerina

  • James D’Agostino’s The Goldfinch Caution Tapes

  • Carol Ann Davis’s From Their Salts

  • Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton’s Tilt

  • Molly Fuller’s Honey Suckle Wolf

  • Rae Gouirand’s The Velvet Book

  • Don Hogle’s Meet Me at Waterloo Station

  • Donald Platt’s Tender Voyeur

  • Dan Rosenberg’s Esau

Announcing the publication of James Hoch's Radio Static

Brilliant in its treatment of childhood, brotherhood, and war, James Hoch’s Radio Static is the selection from the 2020–21 chapbook open-reading period. It can be pre-ordered here for a December 21 publication. And join us on February 1 for James’ reading from the chapbook. Register here.

Praise for Radio Static


James Hoch is a visionary, able to find meaning in everything around him—dreams intersect with fields of poppies, a brother embodies a misguided war. His language is both precise and reckless—each word like a thread he’s been gathering his entire life, which he somehow weaves into broad fabrics of sound, into delicate tapestries that somehow stand before us, breathing. These poems are alive.

—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

“Sometimes standing beside him, / I hear the wind whistling / through my brother,” James Hoch writes, in this spare, beautiful sequence about America’s newest generation of forgotten soldiers. These are heartbreaking poems that bear witness to both the devastation of war and the quiet ravages of coming home.

—Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine

“I love the only way I can,” writes James Hoch, and that love is woven throughout this excellent treatise on compassion and masculinity. Hoch knows a great deal about the complexities and solace of brotherhood, and in these poems we experience an endangered tenderness—the recognition that another can be both yourself and not yourself at the same time. This willingness to grapple with differences and come away with a connection merits your attention. Pick up the walkie-talkie and you will hear “each calling the other: / You there? You there?”

—Elizabeth Scanlon, editor, The American Poetry Review

BOOK LAUNCH READING: Richard Jones' The Minor Key

Join us Tuesday, November 9, at 8:00 p.m. CST to hear Richard read from his new magical book, which sings of the daily joys and transcendent sorrows.

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Praise:

There are so many pleasures to be found in The Minor Key, and as much celebration here as lament. Sure, Jones like Keats gluts his sorrows—in the tender manner he dresses his mother who suffers from dementia or invites the Buddha in for tea and discussion of the first noble truth, and his acknowledgement of the gift of becoming invisible in old age. By turns retrospective, imaginative, and formal, Jones unfolds these new poems with his characteristic, cheerful directness and urgency. We often don’t know where he’s leading us nor toward what revelation, but we hold on to these poems as we do to our lives and to each other, “happy, / if happy is the word for the way this feels.”

—David Axelrod

Invoking the melancholic nature of the minor key, this fine book is acutely aware that melancholy’s great practitioners, like John Keats and Robert Burton, also celebrate life. Richard Jones’ poems remind us that it is our duty to remain “shining as best we know how, brightly together.” Not afraid to ask the difficult questions—What should I have done with my life? How does one get on with living?—Jones is equally committed to seeing “the sunlit summer sumacs sparkling,” to finding answers to life’s large questions. Here are poems that console without sentimentality and see clearly without falling into easy, unheroic despair.

—Michael Blumenthal

Richard Jones gives us melancholy music in The Minor Key, but a music so suffused with tenderness that all suffering trembles into love and light. These poems arise from “blue notebooks,” travel the world, and return to rooms lit by candles or to a backyard full of roses, visited by fox and deer, where two people sip perfect martinis as evening falls. 

—Kathleen Kirk

BOOK LAUNCH READING: Dennis Hinrichsen's schema geometrica

Join us Tuesday, October 12, at 8:00 p.m. (CST) to hear Dennis Hinrichsen read from his new collection, schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize.

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Praise:
Some of us are content to rearrange the furniture. Dennis Hinrichsen has dismantled the walls, attached a wheelbase to the flooring, and reconfigured the power lines. And wait, I think he has levitated the shrubbery too. But fear not. Page by page and image by image, he leads us through the time- and memory-altering adventure that is schema geometrica. The poems are wild and rigorous at once, joyful and irreverent, abundant with intellect, and sometimes, yes, driven by rage at the wreckage we have made around us. This is not a comfortable couch of a lyric vision. This is lyric determined to imagine a future, and I admire it deeply.

—Linda Gregerson

schema geometrica is a “box of light” whittled from a life marred by darkness. Biblical ekphrasis & Daft Punk, Godzilla & gonorrhea, an extinct paddlefish & an Instagram model’s bodily brand of philanthropy—there are no subjects Dennis Hinrichsen can’t juxtapose & wield like a gilded mirror to orient the self in this confounding era. Lyrically dexterous, formally inventive, & humming with vulnerable surprise, schema geometrica is the work of a master poet.

—Marcus Wicker


BOOK LAUNCH READINGS!: Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora

Please join us for two evenings of poetry to celebrate the publication of our groundbreaking anthology, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which features 130 poets and translators from ten countries.

October 19 at 8:00 p.m. (CST) — register here —
Mansour Alimoradi, Kaveh Bassiri, Mandana Chaffa, Amin Fatemi, Mahdi Ganjavi, Fayre Makeig, Daniel Rafinejad, Parisa Saranj, Chad Sweeney, Ali Zarrin

October 20 at 8:00 p.m. (CST) — register here —
Roja Chamankar, Armen Davoudian, Tyler Fisher, Gary Gach, Persis Karim, Haidar Khezri, George Reiner, Siavash Saadlou, Niloufar Talebi