Sherry Chandler » Publishers
from The Guardian:
Baghdad Burning, by a 26-year-old author who has won an international readership under the pen name Riverbend, is longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award. In the list, announced today, she is up against 18 other books including Alan Bennett’s latest bestseller, histories of the cold war and the great wall of China, and a biography of the 19th-century cookbook author Mrs Beeton. The Guardian carried an extract from Riverbend’s title last summer.
The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend’s identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.
It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.
Riverbend began the blog with the words: “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”
If you’ve read here long, you know I’ve linked to Baghdad Burning several times over the last year. Although I wish the circumstances that produced this blog had never happened, I am pleased to see that the writing is getting attention.
This post was written by sherry
Steven DaGama’s Passages (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2005) is as cynical as Brooks Carver’s Pilgrim Heart is romantic. Passages is filled with terrorists and exiles, soldiers and travelers, music and lovers.
I feel too dull-witted to comment on the prosody – it is somewhat imagistic, very masculine, but clear and sure-footed. There may or may not be a woman’s poetry (see discussion of the question here), but I would characterize this definitely as man’s poetry, filled with mysterious women and exotic locations. Come to think of it, I’ll take back what I said. This collection is also romantic, though it’s the romance of noir.
I can appreciate Passages for its commentary on the modern condition. It is a poetry of witness. Here is a section from one of my favorite poems in the collection:
Sandstorm
Everything we see is something else.
— Fernando PessoaIn the nightmare, deployment
is familiar, not so the terrain.
A shifting sandscape, male, never female,
women never — Women cook, Men assumecrucial tasks: they devastate.
Through sandstorm and heat shimmer
humps rise, sink, rise, sink. Everlasting
columns of boy-men, man-boyssandblasted. …
DaGama is also a visual artist. He drew the cover illustration.
I’m not sure how this collection came to be in my mailbox on Christmas eve. I suspect because I subscribe to Wavelength. Nor am I sure how you would acquire a copy or how much it would cost. I’ll ask David Rogers and get back to you.
This post was written by sherry
The Writer’s Almanac choice for today is a poem called “Anatomy” from Jennifer Gresham’s Diary of a Cell.
This is Tom Hunley’s second publication at Steel Toe Books. It was selected by Charles Harper Webb as the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry.
You can read and/or listen to the poem here. The Writer’s Almanac airs on WUKY at 7:00 pm, just before Fresh Air.
You can see the results of Steel Toe’s 2005 Open Reading Period here.
This post was written by sherry
A reminder to all of you out there with booklength collections:
Rather than running a contest this year, Steel Toe Books is holding an open reading period during the months of June and July.
Send a full-length poetry manuscript (48-72 pages).
There will be no celebrity judge and no prize money, but we do plan to offer one author aroyalties contract.
There’s no reading fee, but we ask everyone who submits to purchase a copy of Diary of a Cell, by Jennifer Gresham, selected by Charles Harper Webb as the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry ($12).
Send manuscripts and checks to
Steel Toe Books
c/o Tom C. Hunley
Department of English
Western Kentucky University
20-C Cherry Hall
1 Big Red Way
Bowling Green, KY 42101-3576.
This post was written by sherry
Good news by e-mail from Michael Czernacki of FootHills Publishing:
Monday, Memorial Day, our Amish neighbors are having a “Frolic” at our place – 20 to 40 Amish men will be here to raise our house out of the 2,000 foot elevated air of Wheeler Hill! … For years we have lived in housing that could very much qualify as “Appalachian, far-below-poverty-level, rural poor, how-can-this-be-in-20th/21st century America.” What was that influential book written by Michael Harrington??? (somebody help me here) that brought to the forefront the condition of America’s rural poverty? We could be a modern update of that book. But in a few days a house will rise a little further back from where this leaky-roofed mobile home sits. I can not adequately put into words the importance, the immensity of this upcoming frolic, this “house” that is being built for us. 21 years on Wheeler Hill – finally a house that is what we want it to be. Not that first trailer and 16 acres. Not the house on the corner that was not at all what we dreamed of. Not the trailer we’ve lived in for most of the last 10 years on this spectacular 50 acre hilltop land that we have almost paid off. Those other pieces of land on Wheeler Hill that we somehow worked out deals to purchase were not what what we really wanted, but what we could work out in our limited financial situation. This land, these 50 acres atop Wheeler Hill, are what we envision spending our aging years on.
If Michael can live poor for art’s sake and achieve this house (FootHills will be 20 years old next year), then perhaps we can at least achieve a roof and a raccoon-free attic (if Ursula has not by then become a cherished member of the family).
This post was written by sherry
I picked this up from Allison Joseph’s CRWROPPS mailing list (don’t ask me what crwropps stands for – I think I knew once upon a time, but no more, but it’s a good market resource):
Rather than running a contest this year, Steel Toe Books is holding an open reading period during the months of June and July. Send a full-length poetry manuscript (48-72 pages). There will be no celebrity judge and no prize money, but we do plan to offer one author a royalties contract. There’s no reading fee, but we ask everyone who submits to purchase one of our existing titles directly from us. James Doyle’s book Einstein Considers a Sand Dune, selected by David Kirby as the winner of the 2003 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry, costs $10. Diary of a Cell, by Jennifer Gresham, selected by Charles Harper Webb as the 2004 winner, sells for $12.
You can read reviews of James Doyle’s book at here. The web site also has links to a Verse Daily feature on the book and Garrison Keillor reading one poem from it on NPR.
Send manuscript and check to
Steel Toe Books
English Department
20-C Cherry Hall
Western Kentucky University
1 Big Red Way
Bowling Green, KY 42101-3576
I have Einstein Considers a Sand Dune and can assure you that it is good value for the money.
This post was written by sherry
Owner of Wind Publications, publisher of the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar, Charlie Hughes is also an excellent poet. (See this post for more on Charlie as publisher.) The poem below is from his collection, Shifting for Myself (Wind, 2002). Charlie says:
this poem refers to US 68 between Lexington and Harrodsburg. I’ve driven it countless times at night. If you’ve ever traveled it you’ll see the connection
I have driven it, slowly and in the daytime. It’s an impressive route along the Kentucky River, which has cut deep into the limestone bedrock, but I think pretty soon the highway/commuter safety police will take it away and give us something bland, ugly and “safe.”
Driving Force
I could have taken the interstate
after the funeral
but don’t. Tonight I want
the river road. I need
the knowledge of water
that has washed for ages over stone
to form this dark gorge.
Tonight give me the hum of an engine
breathing easy in the cool dark,
a road that snakes and clings
to the limestone cliff. I love
the not knowing
what’s around each bend, how the old
Chevy lunges into each curve.
Swift God, give me acceleration
and the surge of shifting gears.
Let the wind’s cool fingers
rip open the night.
O let this hunk of metal and flesh
lean into that wild darkness
the moan of tires holding on for life.
This post was written by sherry
If you question him, Wind Publications’ Charlie Hughes will tell you that he started the Kentucky Literary Newsletter and Calendar as an excuse to flog his own publication list. No matter why he started it, the newsletter has been growing and is containing more and more news. I think Charlie was a fan of the early MobyLives and is offering the same kind of mix. So join the mailing list. But don’t just wait for the bimonthly mailings. Slope on over to the web site once in a while and check things out. Here are some items I picked up over there just today:
Keep Louisville Weird.
Gospel truth: Infrared to reveal 9,000-year secrets
WKU professor, Joe Glaser announces the publication of his translation, The Canterbury Tales in Modern Verse (Hackett Publishing, 2005).
Kaleidowhirl, an online magazine edited by Kentuckian Cynthia Reynolds, seeks submissions
Robert Penn Warren Centennial Prize
He also has several links relevant to the Foetry controversy that are worth following up.
And while you’re at it, check out the Wind Publication list. It is impressive. (I’m eagerly awaiting the reissue of Richard Taylor’s Girty. Charlie’s doing us a service by bringing that book back into print.)
This post was written by sherry
Tom Hunley teaches writing at Western and publishes Steel Toe Books . If I understand it right, Steel Toe publishes one poetry collection a year. This year’s book by Jennifer Gresham has been delayed (Tom will let me know when it’s available, I hope), but last year’s excellent Einstein Considers a Sand Dune by Stephen Doyle is worth your attention.
Tom’s own collection, Still, There’s a Glimmer , is available from WordTech Editions of Cincinnati.
Although I first met Tom last year at the Kentucky Writers Conference, I first encountered one of his poems at Gumball Poetry for spring 2000, here. This issue was called Heavy Metal , an odd place to find this graceful dancing poem. Here’s what I said in my comments then: “The language flows nicely off the tongue and it is original language. …Each issue of Gumball Poetry has one poem that delights me. This one is it for Spring 2000. It is exactly the kind of poem I’d like to find in a Gumball capsule.” Here is that poem:
First you have to make the oranges.
To do that you must become
an orange tree, which means moving
to Florida or Southern California.
If you go to San Diego, the beach
will beckon you, with its bikinis
and its waves, and you will feel the temptation
to take up surfing, which would get in the way
of becoming an orange tree. Stay focused
on your goals. Visualize all things orange:
carrots bursting from the ground,
a field of poppies blossoming all
at once, like some unplanned party,
a haunted house peopled by jack-o-lanterns.
Eat only the orange M&Ms
in each packet. Make friends only
with redheads. Concentrate entirely
on orange juice, which is not the same
as buying orange juice made from concentrate.
Stop looking for the easy way.
This post was written by sherry
In my very first entry on this blog, I noted that, rather typically perhaps, I was starting with blogging just as blogging is going out and podcasting is coming in. “What,” some one asked, “is podcasting?”
Over at Rocket Kids, Rachel Dacus has a post that addresses podcasting and its significance for poets. Follow her links for an explanation and an opportunity.
Meanwhile, Have Coffee Will Write provides a link to a rather deflating Scott Stantus cartoon. The weak link in podcasting may be the podcasters?
And over at I See Invisible People, Terry Kanago addresses the way blogs themselves are revolutionizing and redefining what is literature. So perhaps I am not, to quote my friend Robert Brimm, “clinging to the trailing edge of technology.” Though I don’t expect AdSense to come calling to show up on this site any time soon.
This post was written by sherry
