The press will hold a reading at The Court, Columbia College, Chicago on Friday, March 2 at 3 p.m.  APP Authors Mary Makofske, Jason Schneiderman, Richard Jackson, Marc J. Sheehan, Helen Pruitt Wallace, and Lorna Knowles Blake will read. 

Visit Booth #503 for these APP author signings, and pick up a sweet treat, too:

Richard Jackson – Thursday, March 1, 3 p.m.
Helen Pruitt Wallace – Thursday, March 1, 4 p.m.
Marc J. Sheehan – Friday, March 2, 12:30 p.m.
Stephen Haven – Friday, March 2, 1:30 p.m.

Blue Orange

by Robert Grunst 

Winner of the Robert McGovern Publication Prize

Publication Date: May 15, 2012 

978-0-912592-12-1 | $15.95

“Blue Orange is an extraordinarily vibrant book, peopled with vivid characters—Smethers, Dottie, Ramón—come alive, singing gospel, bowling, planting, harvesting, driving to Korea in an old Ford. The vignettes make one nostalgic for a carefree, exultant small town mid-America, even if this world seems oddly archetypal, hyper-real and historicized in a tintype.  Even if, like Gaspar and Miguel Corte Real’s, Donald’s whereabouts will never be settled; even if roofs and swing set sets are treacherous.  Even if the dogs….  Beyond family and tribe the book attempts a daring global reach in various colorful travel poems: exuberant flora and fauna assert themselves—marmosets, shrikes, horses telling tales and leaping out of their otherworldly Latin America taxonomies, making ‘elsewhere’ here.  Ultimately, this book is a joyous reading adventure, making even the most blue-cast among us sing ‘hallelujah!’ and devour tasty oranges.   I love this book!”

- Marilyn Chin

 “In Robert Grunst’s poems the city’s forgotten signs rise from memory into mid-day light. Blue Orange conveys the luster of words, revealing both an older and brightened sense of the world. These poems are at once both shrewd and true.”  

 - Stephen Kuusisto

 “The blue orange is something forgotten in a fruit drawer, spoiling, before its discovery releases a second beauty. The image serves the poet well in poems that recover ghosts of family members and his own childhood, lives of hard labor and damage, lives he honors. The ripe orange is something else entirely, appearing as it does in poems about the now—full of loved ones and travel to remote, strange places—where the speaker hopes to find ‘something marvelous / some inconceivable / inscape // Instead you chance upon a world / of grief.’ The journey of the book, then, brings us from dimness into light, to the bite of the fruit, to the best gift: the sweet acid of the present in the mouth.”

- Richard Robbins

Robert Grunst’s first collection of poems is The Smallest Bird in North America (New Issues, 2000).  His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seneca Review, Tar River Poetry, and many other magazines.  His essays focusing on the history and culture of the Great Lakes commercial fishery have appeared in a number of publications including Inland Seas, Lake Superior Magazine, and Michigan History Magazine. Grunst was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Holland, Michigan on the western shore of Lake Michigan.  He taught 9^th grade English for the Midland, Michigan Public Schools and subsequently spent three years working as a gillnet fisherman and engineer on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. He teaches a variety of courses including creative writing as Professor in the English Department at St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Gabriel’s first book of poems, The Standing Wave, was published by HarperCollins (New York) in 2003.  It was selected for the 2002 National Poetry Series and also received the 2004 Literary Book Award for Poetry from PEN USA-West. Spera’s poems have appeared in journals such as Chicago Review, Crazyhorse, Doubletake, Epoch, Folio, Greensboro Review, Laurel Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ontario Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review. His work was also featured in The Best American Poetry 2000. He grew up in New Jersey and lives in Los Angeles.

The 2012 Richard Snyder Publication Prize deadline is April 30, 2012.  Guidelines for this year’s contest are available on this blog.  The 2012 contest will be judged by Elizabeth Spires.  This year’s entrants may choose to submit their manuscripts electronically through Submittable.

Side Note: The Ashland Poetry Press website will be undergoing a redesign.  In the meantime, those interested in the goings-on of the press should sign up for our electronic newsletter and continue following this blog.  Thank you for understanding!

The 2012 guidelines for the Snyder Prize will also be posted soon, including the ability to submit your manuscript electronically.

Thank you for your patience as we make our final selection!

For more information, visit http://www.brewsterladieslibrary.org/.

Richard Jackson is the author of ten books of poems including Resonance (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010) (winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in poetry), Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems (2004) and Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems (Ashland Poetry Press, 2003). He has also published two books of translations, Last Voyage: The Poems of Giovanni Pascoli from Italian (2010) and Alexandar Persolja’s Journey of the Sun from Slovene (2008). He is also the author of two crucial books, Acts of Mind: Conversations with American Poets (Choice Award) and Dismantling Time in Contemporary Poetry (Agee Award Winner), and has edited two anthologies of Slovene poetry, as well as the journal Poetry Miscellany.

Lorna Knowles Blake is the author of Permanent Address (Ashland Poetry Press, 2008). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Bell­ingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Hudson Review and other journals, as well as in several anthologies.

Mary Makofske is the author of Traction (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011), The Disappearance of Gargoyles (Thorntree Press, 1988) and Eating Nasturtiums (1998), winner of a Flume Press chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Mississippi Review, Poetry East, ZONE 3, American Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, Calyx, Louisville Review, and other journals and anthologies.

Helen Pruitt Wallace is the author of Shimming the Glass House (Ashland Poetry Press, 2008), which won a Bronze Award in Poetry in the Florida Book Awards. Wallace has published poems in The Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Cumberland Review, Nimrod International, Tampa Review, and other journals and anthologies, and served as co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers published by Anhinga Press.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010) (finalist for the 2011 Eric Hoffer Award), and Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The Best American Poetry, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House among other places.

Marc J. Sheehan is the author of Vengeful Hymns (Ashland Poetry Press, 2009), which was the runner-up for the Society of Midland Authors book of the year in poetry, and Greatest Hits (New Issues Press, 1998). His poems have appeared in anthologies from Fine Madness, Passages North, and Milkweed Editions, among others.

The Art of the Sonnet: A Reading and Discussion

Book Court (163 Court St., Brooklyn)

www.bookcourt.org

Wednesday, November 2, 7 PM

Lorna Knowles Blake
Jeff Dolven
Saskia Hamilton
David Mikics
Jason Schneiderman

Lorna Knowles Blake was born in Havana and lived in South America before moving to the U.S. She is the author of Permanent Address, which Charles Martin called “a wise and joyful collection by a poet of impressive accomplishment.” She has taught at the 92^nd Street Y and is on the editorial board at Barrow Street.

Jeff Dolven, who teaches at Princeton, is the author of Scenes of Instruction, and an active poet who has published poems in the TLS, Paris Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. He is also an Editor at Large at Cabinet magazine.

Saskia Hamilton teaches at Barnard, where she directs the Women Poets at Barnard Program. Her books of poetry include Divide These and As for Dream. Alice Quinn has praised her “spare, miraculously explosive lyrics.” She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. 

David Mikics is the author (with Stephen Burt) of The Art of the Sonnet, as well as A New Handbook of Literary Terms and other books. “I know of no other recent book that so steadily illuminates the riches it invokes,” Harold Bloom said of The Art of the Sonnet, and Publishers Weekly wrote, “Learned as well as passionate, this book is a delight.”  Mikics’s Annotated Emerson, a richly illustrated reader’s edition, will be out from Harvard/Belknap in December. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Houston, where he teaches.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of two books of poems, Sublimation Point and Striking Surface, called by Linda Gregerson “witty, tender, trenchant, acerbic, and always, immutably, wise.” He directs the Writing Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The Ashland Poetry Press announces Traction by Mary Makofske

Winner of the 2010 Richard Snyder Publication Prize 

Publication Date: November 15, 2011

978-0-912592-11-4 | $15.95 | 104 pages

Traction will be available soon from Amazon.com, Small Press Distribution, the Ashland Bookstore, and other independent booksellers.

“Traction is a collection of poetry that repays attention. The poems are intelligent and well-crafted. Makofske ranges widely from moving meditations on prehistory to an homage to Walt Whitman, love poems, family poems, poems about nature, mortality, and growing up in the fifties. These poems are not just for the eye but sound in the ear.”– Marge Piercy

“Mary Makofske’s poems create a dialogue with the work of Whitman, Eliot, and James Wright. Her subjects are personal growth but also continuity, how much we ask of nature which asks nothing of us, the way flesh holds the spirit, the fragility of love and desire and the toughness of bone and ritual. She shows us the life cycle of a farm house, a gardener worrying that his creation will be destroyed because an ancient skull has been unearthed, bird tracks in the snow writing the history of their own hunger, mounds of paper at the recycling center crying out that we are constantly engaged in re-creation. The poems bring us out of ourselves and toward an understanding of our own relationship to history.” – Deborah Fleming

“There is a quiet self-possession and maturity of vision in this volume that characterizes all of its poems; yet at the same time they range widely, addressing subjects as various as Neolithic customs, Whitman’s career as a Civil War nurse, the physiology of cetaceans, and a Muslim’s stealthy visit to an adult bookstore. The author is also capable of writing sly accounts of family history and a Cold War childhood that seem archetypal rather than generic, that show evidence of a strong social conscience that never devolves to cant. Traction is an altogether impressive book of great tonal and formal range.” – David Wojahn

“The traction referred to in the title poem here is not of the ‘where the rubber meets the road’ variety; rather it is the meticulously forced arrangement of damaged limbs into the relationships best maintained to restore comfort and health to the afflicted. The poems in TRACTION are as lithe and limber, as powerful, as long distance swimmers– or, better yet, divers, with not a trace of fat, all flat muscle, lean grace, bent to spring.” – William Pitt Root

About the Author: Mary Makofske grew up in Washington, DC, and received a B.A. from Douglass College and M.A. from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of TRACTION (Ashland Poetry Press, 2011), The Disappearance of Gargoyles (Thorntree Press, 1988) and Eating Nasturtiums (1998), winner of a Flume Press chapbook competition. Until her retirement in 2006, she taught expository writing, literature, and creative writing at SUNY Orange. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Mississippi Review, Poetry East, ZONE 3, American Poetry Review, Natural Bridge, Calyx, Louisville Review, and other journals and anthologies. She and her husband live in a solar house in New York State.

2011 National Book Award Finalists Announced on Oregon Public Radio

The twenty Finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s morning radio program, Think Out Loud, in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Oregon on Wednesday, October 12. The announcement was also streamed live on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s website, www.opb.org/nationalbookawards. Past NBA Winners, Finalists, and Judges announced this year’s Finalists by category:

• Virginia Euwer Wolff, National Book Award Winner in 2001, will announce the Young People’s Literature Finalists.

• Vern Rutsala, National Book Award Finalist in 2005, will announce the Poetry Finalists.

• Sallie Tisdale, National Book Award Judge in 2010, will announce the Nonfiction Finalists.

• Charles Johnson, National Book Award Winner in 1990 and Judge in 1999 and 2009, will announce the Fiction Finalists.

Think Out Loud host David Miller interviewed each of the four guests, as well as National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, about their own National Book Award experiences.

Blue Orange by Robert Grunst
Robert McGovern Prize Selection
Anticipated Publication Date: May 15, 2012

American Urn: New and Selected Poems by Mark Irwin
Anticipated Publication Date: January 15, 2013

The Rattling Window by Catherine Staples
Robert McGovern Prize Selection
Anticipated Publication Date: April 15, 2013

Note: The 2011 Snyder Prize winner has not been announced.  The winner of the Snyder Prize will be announced soon.

Please also note that our website, http://www.ashland.edu/aupoetry, is currently experiencing technical difficulties, and we are unable to update the site. All pertinent news and announcements will be posted here until further notice. Any questions can be directed to app@ashland.edu.