Archive for August, 2011

Blogger Jessica Varin over at Rattle, much like BOA Poet Barbara Jane Reyes, traces her heritage from several cultures. On what kind of person she would be or how it would feel if she were able to fully share all of those cultures, Varin writes “I don’t know the answers to these questions. I could spend a lifetime speculating: instead, I have chosen to create a new culture for people like me. There is no instruction manual, so I look to the creative work of those who stand at the intersect of two cultures.” Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata is her chosen guidebook for this venture, and indeed she has chosen a work in which the cultures both intersect and dismember each other.

Varin writes of Reyes’ “Polyglot Incantation,” a particularly multi-cultural poem which trades off lines of Tagalog, English and Spanish. The diwata of the title is mentioned here as well; Reyes’ guide and muse is never far from the poems, and the hint of the supernatural or mythical intertwines beautifully with the very real physical aspects of the poems. “Throughout the collection,” Varin writes, “Reyes uses sharpened knives as a metaphor for cultural dismemberment. Often, the cleaving is physical,” as in “Aswang,” a poem which takes as its subject a mythological female vampire particular to the Philippine area which presents as a beautiful woman whose torso separates from her legs at the hips and flies about at night drinking the blood of infants and the unborn. Paired against this are poems such as “Call It Talisman (If You Must),” which talks about the way Filipina women bore the consequences of war and the hideous violence they and their families are powerless against.

Diwata is both story-telling and myth-telling, and the two are intrinsically interlaced in the multicultural presentation that is today’s “new culture.” As perhaps poet laureate of this new realm, Barbara Jane Reyes brings it all together in a breathless and detailed presentation that cannot be denied. “This poetry collection provides a platform for the mythologies of a glorious and not-so-glorious past. In Diwata, creation happens time and time again.”

Diwata is available for purchase here.

You can read the full review here.

It’s been a long while since we’ve done any blog entries on some of BOA’s classics, so today we’re going to bring you back to Anthony Tognazzini’s collection of short stories, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These, BOA’s first collection of short fiction, published in 2007, and still an undeniably keen new voice in the form.

Smart and innovative, Hammer is a refreshingly quirky read and is at one time abstract and yet completely relevant. Tognazzini deals with life, relationships, the mundane and the cosmic, often all at once. His stories remind one of absurdist, surrealist paintings, bits of everyday life into which have intruded the strange, oddly-natural tendrils of something completely alien, and yet still carry themselves in such a way as to suggest that it is our world which is disjointed, and not his. In one story, the narrator finds himself flattened by an escalator because he was pondering the grand questions of life. In another, the reader is placed in the center of an art museum and eavesdrops on the visitors walking by. Tognazzini demonstrates more than just a spark on ingenuity, but creates a work that overflows with creativity and fun amidst a sea of more heavy, serious pieces. Yet there are still very difficult, personal aspects to his work that, combined with the oft-ridiculous events and frequent dalliances with hysteria and psychosis, point out to us the reader the inherent transience and silliness in some of our heaviest issues. In each brief piece, Tognazzini reaches an intriguing, but unexpected, depth as he captures the mind and heart of the reader.

Rochester, N.Y.––Douglas Watson is winner of the inaugural BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize for his collection The Era of Not Quite. After receiving 126 manuscripts, the collection was selected from among four finalists by BOA Publisher Peter Conners. Douglas Watson will receive a $500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in Spring 2013.

Of the collection, Peter Conners says, “The first sentence of the first story in Douglas Watson’s The Era of Not Quite bit into me and wouldn’t let go: ‘The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B.’ From that point on, the manuscript only got richer, more surprising, and – most welcomingly – funnier. Watson writes with the kind of humor that makes you chuckle, then sigh. His great skill is to poke holes into the absurdity of the nagging doubts we carry through our daily lives. We laugh with him because we live in this ‘era of not quite’ and Douglas Watson does too. A debut collection like this makes for wonderful company – even hope – as we all go through it together.”

The three other finalists selected were God and Other Megafauna by Kellie Wells, Stories of the Unexplained by Pedro Ponce, and The Violence of Love by Enid Harlow.

Douglas Watson holds an MFA in fiction from Ohio State and an MA in history from Brown. In 2011 he was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. His stories have appeared in Sou’wester, The Journal, Fifty-Two Stories and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a copyeditor for TIME magazine.

Upon learning that he had won the BOA Short Fiction Prize, Douglas Watson said, “I’m thrilled that The Era of Not Quite will be appearing in BOA Editions’ American Reader series alongside so many terrific books. I couldn’t be happier or more startled. Life is full of surprises, some of them quite good!”

BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the 2nd annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize between April 1, and May 31, 2012. An entry form and fee are required. The guidelines for the 2012 BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize will be announced on www.boaeditions.org later this year.

BOA Editions, Ltd. is celebrating 35 years as one of the premier independent publishers of contemporary poetry and literary fiction. Founded in 1976 by A. Poulin, Jr. to provide a venue for both new and established poets to be published, BOA has released more than 220 titles, including two dozen books of poetry in translation. Many BOA titles and authors have been recognized with literary awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Renowned BOA poet Michael Waters has graciously agreed to be a part of our upcoming Writing Exercises workshop, being held September 17th at the Midtown Athletic Center on East Highland Drive. For anyone not familiar with our workshops, they’re a great opportunity to work with a nationally-recognized writer and hone their own craft while at the same time learning from one of the best.  The workshop is open to everyone- beginners, amateurs, published poets, professors, and even those just looking to gain a deeper understanding of what they’re reading. What promises to be a fun, lively, group affair, this is not the English class you fell asleep in during high school.

Taking his cue from poet Theodore Rothke, Waters’ workshop will will focus on the music, integrity and power of the poetic line with an emphasis on the function of rhyme in both traditional and free verse. There will also be plenty of time to discuss any aspects of poetry writing and reading raised by students’ poems. Active participation and collaboration are encouraged and desired. Did I mention lunch is included?

Michael Waters’ new book Gospel Night lands in mid-September here at BOA, and perhaps you’ll even get to hear the poet himself read a bit of it before it officially hits shelves. His previous book, Darling Vulgarity, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has published ten collections of poetry in all, and his work has appeared in more journals . A Professor of English at Monmouth University, he also teaches in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. He currently lives with his wife Mihaela in New Jersey and is coming up to Rochester on special request, so make sure not to miss him!

Should you find yourself unable to attend the workshop, but would still like to see/meet/stand in awe of Mr. Waters, never fear: you will have the opportunity to do so at the Dine & Rhyme on September 18th, along with BOA Poets Aracelis Girmay and Keetje Kuipers.

You can reserve your place in the workshop by calling the Midtown Athletic Center at (585) 461.2300 before September 10th. The workshop will run from 10am to noon, and reservations are $50, lunch included. Spots are going quickly, so make sure to get your name on the list before the chance passes you by.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is the culmination of a year-long exchange of poems between the poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep.  Over the past few weeks, the poets discussed the process of this collaborative endeavor. The conversations have tread a wide range of territory, and now, in the final of those exchanges between Your Father on the Train of Ghosts authors  the pair revisit their haunting experience at The International Circus Hall of Fame, providing personal stories that helped fuel their writing that allows them to go where no one goes.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The Show Where No One Goes

John Gallaher: I’ve always been drawn to the Terra Incognita that improvisational jazz can get to, and that Neil Young also speaks of as a wall. There’s this wall, he says, where well-trained musicians can play right up to, but when they get to it, they stop. He likes going through that wall. It’s different than rules, or forms, it’s a version of playing away from what you’ve learned. Apples and monkey wrenches, say. It’s also why I like Spicer’s metaphor of the Martian radio. These are all metaphors for going, for listening to what is from someplace else, and hopefully bringing something back.

This idea we had during the writing of the book, this “show where no one goes” that is both “the show no one goes to” as well as “the show where everyone stays”—these are two versions of community, aren’t they? “Let’s go somewhere that isn’t completely played out” and “Let’s go somewhere where we can all remain, accounted for”? At least that’s how it felt for me, as we were exchanging emails. One of the things you’re fond of saying, how you don’t play the music, the music plays you, comes back to me in this regard.

And then, quite literally, we visited The Circus Hall of Fame Museum in Peru, Indiana, which seemed a place where no one went, a place full of ghosts, mildew, and cobwebs, where these pictures sprinkled through these exchanges came from. You found it on a roadside attractions website of some sort? It’s an amazing place.

G.C. Waldrep: The International Circus Hall of Fame. I’ve known about it for years (vaguely) (but the curious can find it at either www.circushof.com or www.roadsideamerica.com). Somehow I always thought of it as a modern museum, depressingly antiseptic—lots of plexiglass and state-funded enrichment programs for elementary school students. I had no idea it was what it is, a fabulous trove of obsessively-collected circus memorabilia in a cavernous dilapidated barn in the middle of a field in Indiana.

It felt like the perfect coda to the book (and by “perfect,” I mean both appropriate and standing outside the book itself). I liked it best when the lone volunteer guide couldn’t see us, didn’t know we were even in the building (barn). We walked around the exhibits a few dozen paces behind him, listening to him offering his spiel to the one other human being on the property.

After that other person left, we were human again. (I think I preferred being a ghost.) I can’t decide which photo caption was my favorite: “The Canvas Spool (1927)” or “Tusko Before He Broke His Tusks.” And there is something poignant about the carefully archived badges from the Circus Model Builders National Gathering….

There are tribes out there that we can barely imagine. We may turn out to have been one of them.

JG: A field by a river that floods. It seemed we were visiting something that was no longer there, or, as you say, perhaps it was we who were no longer there. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turned out there was no one there that day. “George Washington enjoyed the circus” was my favorite thing the guide said. There was enough in that to ride out the rest of the week. “Clown Six-Shooter” was the sign beneath a perfectly realistic looking pistol. “Father Will Take the Children to the Circus” was the caption beneath a young woman with a fetching look over her left shoulder on the cover of a Chicago Sunday Tribune from July 15th, 1923.

Fathers have always been a complicated subject for me. I’ve had two. The first one named me Martin Lynn Enquist, Junior, and when I was adopted by the Gallahers, I became John Jerome Gallaher, Junior. It’s interesting how this book, a collaboration, gave us the freedom to explore subjects such as these in some ways more directly than in the past. I always thought, or I was always led to believe, that collaboration was a party game. Maybe it is, but, as you said when we were driving, it’s a game that can kill you. Or save you, I suppose. Or both.

GC: One of the earliest poems we actually worked on—that made it into the final book—was called “The Circus of Probable Sighs.” At one point one of us probably knew what prompted that poem. There’s a Doppler effect where poems are concerned: we move away from them in time, become other people, remember and forget. This is true whether we’re the writer or the reader. But the poems don’t change.

JG: My inclination at such times is often to give a sort of shrug, and say the father still takes the children to the circus, though they all speak Esperanto and wear silver jumpsuits. It goes back to what you were saying before about who is the actor and who is the acted upon. Often when I go back to things I’ve read, it seems that it’s not just me who has changed. Sometimes it seems everything has changed. It’s my version of hopefulness, I suppose: if everything changes, then what’s to say it doesn’t change back? It’s at least a mathematical possibility, I’ve read, if highly improbable. But we, at least in possibility, can return to the show where no one goes. In fact, we can be that show.

GC: Sometimes, in our present culture, I wonder whether poetry isn’t itself “the show where no one goes.” This is part of the irony and intimacy of the art: we can go where “no one” goes. And the show goes on, whether we’re there or not: Stevens and Clare and Stein and Ashbery and Hill, all of them, all of it.

We are that show anyway, maybe. Maybe the poems watch us. Maybe we keep them entertained, after all.

.

.

G.C. Waldrep’s previous collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), winner of the Colorado Prize; Disclamor (BOA, 2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Boston Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and The Nation, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature and received a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His anthology of creative, critical, and personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, co-edited with Ilya Kaminsky, is forthcoming from Marick Press. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis poetry prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

Regular visitors to this blog know that BOA is celebrating our 35th anniversary this year. So it’s only right that this year’s Dine & Rhyme be an extra-special event!

This three-poet reading featuring Keetje Kuipers, Aracelis Girmay, and Michael Waters will be Rochester’s most diverse and engaging poetry event of 2011. Issues of gender, sexuality, and race merge in the voices of three radically different poets all published by BOA Editions. Together, their poetic styles and life-experiences will grip and inspire everyone in attendance. The Dine & Rhyme will also allow attendees ample time to have their books signed and chat with these three amazing BOA authors.

Aracelis Girmay won BOA’s 2011 Isabella Gardner Award for her new book Kingdom Animalia. Born and raised in Southern California, with roots in Puerto Rico, Eritria, and African America; her previous poetry collection Teeth, was awarded a GCLA New Writers Award. Girmay has taught youth writing workshops in schools and community centers for the past ten years. She is assistant professor of poetry writing at Hampshire College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Drew University in New Jersey. Girmay is also a Cave Canem Fellow and sits on the board of the Acentos Foundation.

Keetje Kuipers earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College, her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the 2011-2012 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. In 2007 Keetje was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She used the residency to complete work on her book Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in 2010 by BOA Editions.

Michael Waters has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA Editions: Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity (2006); Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001); Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (1997); and Not Just Any Death (1979). His book, Darling Vulgarity, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is co-editor of Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The recipient of four pushcart prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, he is Professor of English at Monmouth University in New Jersey and teaches Poetry and Poetry in Translation in the Drew University MFA Program.

The Details

Sunday, September 18, 2011

3PM Poetry Reading & Book Signing (Gallery Auditorium, Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Ave., Rochester, NY)

6PM Reception, Dinner & Silent Auction (Good Luck Restaurant, 50 Anderson Ave., Rochester, NY)

Tickets: Reading and book signing $20 in advance, $25 at the door.

Reading, dinner & silent auction $125 per person.

Your response is requested by September 9th, 2011.

RSVP to Melissa Hall via telephone 585-546-3410 etx. 11 or email hall@boaeditions.org

*Melissa Hall can also provide info on corporate and academic sponsorship packages (including ads in our program booklet). Please remember that tickets and sponsorships are tax-deductible.

 

So a few weeks ago we gave you a little bit of a teaser with previews of three of BOA’s new books coming out this fall. But if somehow, somehow, that wasn’t enough to get you psyched up for the upcoming literary season, here are the three more which should break through that thick, calloused shell of yours and open to your eyes the wonderful things which are to come. Please keep in mind that although they haven’t hit stores yet, all of our fall titles can be purchased NOW directly from the secure BOA Editions bookstore.

In Joseph Salvatore’s To Assume a Pleasing Shape, a collection of short fiction which debuts in November,  “Answers were not given. Answers will not be given. You understand as much as any of us understands- and more than most of us could even give a hoot.” ( from “Everlovin’”, which is less about lovin’ and more about the remnants of the phrase one usually fits the word into). “Sexy and smart, sad an uproarious, Salvatore’s stories work a glorious alchemy, brewing a warlock’s potion of influences ranging from David Foster Wallace, to W.G. Sebald, to John Barth. ‘Reduction’ is one of those magical tales that leaves you baffled as to how you have managed to live- to survive!- this long without it.” (J.C. Hallman, from the back cover)  These are pieces of an intimate, somehow closer-to-ourselves reading of life in all its myriad textures and temperatures, brief astonishing little windows in which he grabs so quickly our attention and innate trust of the truth of the world he paints that we can’t help but nod yes, yes, this is how it would be. And life with all its questions and non-answers and fumbles and contested, gray-area, uncertain victories is there, undeniably there.

Carsten René Nielsen, whose prose poems have been translated from the Danish by translator David Keplinger, has already garnered an unexpectedly large audience in the States for a translated author. His new collection, House Inspections, which will be available from BOA in mid-November, treads the line between realistic, almost nostalgic views of everyday life and the magically incongruous. Writes Keplinger in his introduction, “While the poems focus on the interior, referencing his city, his neighborhood, his small apartment, he is attracting readers from farther and farther away. … The question comes up repeatedly in the title poem of this collection, calling us on a mission to inspect, interrogate these moments, these houses of insight, as policemen would, so that ;even at night, while the running lights of an airplace inch across the sky, the questions can be heard as a hardly audible mumbling in the darkness between houses: ‘What… is… here?’”

Janice Harrington’s second collection of poetry with us (her first, Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and BOA’s 5th annual A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Award) focuses on the lives and moments, most of them quiet and lingeringly introspective, of the nursing home. Though Harrington does not include an introduction or any note to detail her own truths and her history as a nursing home worker during her college years, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home has an astonishing truth to it that cannot be denied or ignored, whether or not one knows the history behind the poems collected in it. It is better perhaps not to ask how Harrington has become privy to the day-to-day workings and livings and feelings of the care of the elderly- represented on both sides, from both the eyes of workers and residents- and to simply know that the images painted here are all at the same time tender, unflinching, compassionate, and uneasily prophetic. Writes Martha Collins, “Janice N. Harrington’s astonishingly moving second book is an eye-opening celebration of both sides of a relationship that has rarely if ever been so deeply examined in our literature.”

To Assume a Pleasing Shape is available NOW for order here, House Inspections here, and The Hands of Strangers here.

Adam McOmber admits he’s been an ardent fan of the macabre and horror genre since high school. His own writing reflects the exquisitely unhiemlich, “the fantastic moments when the strange breaks through our daily grind.” In a recent interview with the New School’s LIT writer Mike Gillis, McOmber talks about his passion for the mythology and the fiction like his This New and Poisonous Air and the upcoming Empyrean.

“I think that these type of stories- stories of the fantastic- reach back to mythology. Because that’s what myths are,” he said in a phone interview. “I think humans in general are drawn to these stories because they create this rupture in daily, general experience, and humans in general want that. So I think there’s a staying power in that type of fiction.” McOmber himself tends to stay away from the genre convention and tropes popular in most horror genre pieces, saying, “You don’t want to write something that is purple in a gothic way, because that’s really grating. … When I write I look for a certain kind of density. I avoid those kind of stereotypically gothic things. If I ever write and image that feels like that I’ll try to flip it or figure out another way to present it.”

Asked about the recurring images of simulacra in his work, such as the automatons in the opening story, “The Automatic Garden,”  or the wax figures of Madame Tussad’s museum in “There Are No Bodies Such as These,” McOmber admits laughingly that “Yes, my work is kind of like these little machines. … It’s like the Automatic Garden itself. It’s something I can lose myself in.”

So can we, Adam, so can we.

This New and Poisonous Air is available for purchase here.

You can read the whole review over at Newcity Lit, here.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third “voice” emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.  In Part 5 of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep’s engaging discussion about the ircollaborative process, the pair continue their exploration of community in poetry, challenging the notion of the individual artist and reminding us of the voice that haunts every poem.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Part 5: Literature & Community

G.C. Waldrep: Following up on the “you” and the speaking voice—one thing I had long been wondering, before we started working together, was why poetry had to be such a lonely enterprise, the act of composition something that takes us away from those we love. It certainly wasn’t for the Dadaists & Surrealists, and it still isn’t in other genres: musical performance, architecture, the larger visual arts with their fabrication requirements, etc. Somehow in poetry, though, it seemed to me that we’d all slipped back to the Romantic notion of the tortured soul toiling away in his or her garret, into the night. Sometimes it is like that, of course (pax Virginia Woolf). But weren’t there other possibilities? What might a poetry of community look like?

IN THE FILE OF DISCONTINUED THINGS

It looks like no one’s showing up
again. But let’s do the show anyway. The one called
Lincoln. Or Ban the Bomb.

There’s a reason for it
as there are reasons for most things. Smoke.
Chocolate. The way old paint
looks like a sunburn. The floor
of overlapping shadows
from the television
and approaching fires.

Let’s say the show is over, or everything
is over. The next show or the war show,
where the teenage male is obsessing
over girls, which we take to mean teenage males
obsess over girls. It’s late,

I’m watching television
while reading the Constitution. Which is easy. (We
the floor shine.) (In order to
order faster delivery.)

It’s winter. And snow. Whole wedding gowns
of snow. Towns under wraps
and we know this already. Hey,

let’s be the town anyway. We are free
for a limited time.

We can go to the show where no one goes.

I like the way this poem moves back and forth between the “I,” the “you,” and the “we,” and between that intimate triad and everyone else—the larger social organism in which we are implicated. And it does so tenderly, or with a tenderness I couldn’t otherwise have placed.

JG: We’re having this exchange just as I’m re-reading the Dean Gorman piece from Gulf Coast I mentioned earlier. A friend turned my attention back to it, because in it Gorman talks a bit about this ongoing romance of the Romantic: “The romantic concept of the Individual . . . will probably never go away,” he writes. It’s part of what he sees as a general skepticism a lot of people have about collaborative work. But, as you say, this isn’t the case in the other arts. Poetry seems to be more like painting in this regard. Collaboration, as I see it, and as we’ve discussed, is really just a more overt version of what we’re all doing anyway. Gorman gestures toward that, as well, when he writes that collaboration brings us to the question that have always been there: “Can something be truly singular, or is it always built from what preceded it, what already exists?”

In our case, that is specifically how we wrote the book: each of our poems was written directly from what preceded it, even if that no longer directly tracks, now that we’ve had to take many of the poems out for publication. Even so, all the parts are out there in space somewhere, in sequence. But more generally, all artists work in something akin to that way, one thing begets another. In the things one reads or views, we’re all tuning into a version of Spicer’s radio, finding out what the Martians are broadcasting today.

GC: Or the ghosts. Sometimes I think every poem is haunted. And yes, YFOTTOG is haunted—at least for us, the authors—by the poems that didn’t make it into the book, their ghost presences. There’s a great silence in between poems in any collection. The difference in this case is that we know what some of that silence is concealing.

Some of what that silence is concealing, mind you. Nobody knows what the rest of the silence is concealing. Or we think about it, for a long time, as in Keats or Donne or Oppen or Stein. (Stein used a lot of words to conceal the silence itself, inside a constant flow of language.)

The thing is, as you say, every writer, every artist is already working from other art—collaborating with ghosts. For a poet, Keats and Donne and Oppen and Stein (or Dickinson or Whitman or the Gawaine poet, substitute as you will) are all still communicating presences. Their poems are their traces.

G.C. Waldrep’s previous collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), winner of the Colorado Prize; Disclamor (BOA, 2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Boston Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and The Nation, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature and received a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His anthology of creative, critical, and personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, co-edited with Ilya Kaminsky, is forthcoming from Marick Press.  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis poetry prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

Now through November 30th  BOA Editions is accepting submissions for the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.  This prize is awarded awarded to honor a poet’s first book, while also honoring the late founder of BOA Editions, Ltd.  The winning manuscript will receive a $1,500 honorarium and a book publication by BOA Editions in The A. Poulin, Jr. New Poetry of America Series in March 2013.

This year’s contest judge is Cornelius Eady.  Eady is author of eight books, producer of several musical theater works, and founder of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization to serve African American poets.  He has received a number of awards including a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.  Eady currently holds the Miller Chair in Poetry at University of Missouri.  For a full bio, follow the link here.

For more information on the contest, guidelines, and eligibility, follow the link here.