early summatime pre-monswoon

yay mike sikkema! go get this fine book that yr girl had the fine honor to blurb!

Mike Sikkema
Trembling Pillow Press, June 2015

Walker Percy was fond of declaring serious writers as ex-suicides—“he starts with himself as nothing and makes something of the nothing with things at hand.” The emptying of this egoistic self allows writer and reader to gather into the unknown tethered to an enigma. In Mike Sikkema’s May Apple Deep, readers encounter a world we know and have forgotten: a snowed-in town of the cut short and war-torn, where taxidermy, twang, porch talk, and a “fixing of the light” are shared territory. Here, the house you most know becomes a rifle, reckless under the surface, wild dogs on the other side of the street: all a lie or it’s a lie: this town where you can run into your own ass. Spaces enact gut punches in the fragmentary spaces of your living. Post-your dreaming, after your remembering, “we,” when “we” forget, Sikkema’s collection brings us back from this nothing into a world known, fast, trembling.


-Shelly Taylor

knockin' it baby

big congrats to my nola girl! yay carolyn hembree!

2015 Trio Award Winner Selected 

Trio House Press is pleased to announce that Neil Shepard has selected Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague as the winner of the 2015 Trio Award. The annual award is for a first or second book of poetry by an emerging poet writing in English and currently living in the United States. The book is forthcoming in the spring of 2016.

Carolyn Hembree’s debut poetry collection, Skinny,was published by Kore Press in 2012. Her chapbook, Fever Dreams in Tongues without Skulls, came out from Nous-zōt Press (2015). She is the recipient of the 2015 Marsh Hawk Press Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award, selected by Stephanie Strickland.  Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Journal,Poetry Daily, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Verse Daily, and other publications. Carolyn comes from Tennessee. She is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou.

magic magic

rip ornette

best advice and pen pal / mentor

Hey Taylor, you lament that Lions, Remonstrance tanked but A. you are an exceptionally wonderful writer, B. all poetry books tank, and C. our era has made a mockery of the word and practice of poetry. I can no longer look at it, the poetry culture, must avert my eyes from the big top circus it is. All one need do is listen to the readers' angry cackle at the AWP, is experience the AWP itself with its thousands of Yeats's, Eliot's, Ginsburg's, and Rich's spilling through doorways with their superior IQs. They're poetry careerists, sold The Lie by their respective MFA departments, those singular profitable oases floating in the hopelessly impoverished liberal arts programs of the collective American academy. Of the hundreds of poets I've read over the past few years you are one of perhaps ten I think worthy of the name poet. That is because I believe poetry called you, or more accurately, bit into your back like a panther commanding you to write it off if it takes a lifetime. It may or may not but I think you write for survival, not fame. That means tank or not you will write until you kill it, your panther. I killed my panther. I am light and free. My god book blew it away and now I am free to love. God may not get published but I hardly care anymore. If I continue to write it will be soft and for me alone. 

Anyway, hang in there old girl. Try not to fight life; it will sweep you in its current anyway. 

G

need season 2 pronto - sense8

the real thing + homage / commentary

cool books for hot days

Hick Poetics, by Abraham Smith

“It’s a project built to consider class, authenticity, place — and it’s a book built to reclaim hick, a once proud word now turned pejorative,” English instructor Abraham Smith said of his new book, Hick Poetics. The countryside is the setting of many classic, celebrated poems, and this anthology of contemporary rural American poetry further explores how place and people are in conversation. The poetry of those who live off the beaten path has not been particularly publicized in modern anthologies; all the more reason to bring them to light according to Smith and his co-editor, Shelly Taylor. Smith offered this simple, final question: “Do we write the land or does the land write us?”

rtr book talk

the only road worth your time