Alice James Books Fall 2013 Newsletter

A l i c e J a m es B o o k s Fall 2013

INSIDE From

Director’s Desk

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New Titles

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Author Interview Suzanne parker

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News

Events

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AJB’s New Home

Donors

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The Alice Fund

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AJB Cryptogram

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Alice Asks Jan Heller Levi

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the

and

fall n e w s l e t t e r

A lice J ames B ooks

2013

poetry since 1973 Dear Friends,

Volume 18, Number 2

AJB STAFF Carey Salerno

Executive Director Alyssa Neptune

Managing Editor Nicole Wakefield Editorial Assistant Debra Norton

Bookkeeper

COOPERATIVE BOARD MEMBERS Tamiko Beyer, President & Clerk Suzanne Parker, Vice President Sally Wen Mao, Treasurer Angelo Nikolopoulos, Secretary Catherine Barnett Monica A. Hand Stephen Motika Matthew Pennock Anne Marie Macari, Alice Emeritus Ellen Doré Watson, Alice Emeritus

INTERNS Mary Drover Alyssa Mahoney Karla Solis Sarah Stefanik

Front cover from Hum (11/2013) Image credit: “A Vexing Quiet,” Brian Despain

We’ve embarked on and embraced a glorious transition over the summer; moving to a new home after being residents of the Look House at the University of Maine at Farmington for nearly twenty years.

Moving is one of those activities that sparks all kinds of emotions even in the most adaptable of people. Would we like our new space? How would we tackle all of the challenges that this drastic change presents? Would we be settled by fall? Would everything continue to work just as well? It’s not often that a great opportunity presents itself without requisite logistical hurdles, and I am so proud of our team for facing and tackling every one of them with grace and good humor.

Inside this issue, you will see some photos of our new digs on the banks of Rollo Pond.

Picture, if you will, this tranquil setting amidst the old pines and weathered stone bridges stretching across the narrow ends of this peaceful, charming body of water. Just up the hill, past the outdoor amphitheater, is the sturdy, ecru Creative Writing house; how lovely to now have a sightline. We’re hoping the images on pages 9 and 10 of our surroundings will help aid you in envisioning our new environment.

Also in this issue, we’re introducing some mega-amazing books, Viral by Suzanne Parker, Hum by Jamaal May, and Orphan by Jan Heller Levi. These books are all incredibly variant in nearly every aspect, yet they all share a commonality which is the singing and making of very astonishing music. I strongly urge you to bear witness.

Last but not least, we’re nearing the end of our fortieth anniversary year. We’re kicking off our annual appeal season soon, and drawing a close to a year of immense joy, accomplishment, and anticipation for the press. Thank you for celebrating with us thus far, for all the amazing generosity and support you’ve shown the press this year, and all the years leading up to this momentous one. It’s been my pleasure to serve the press as it reaches this very important milestone. My sincerest hope is that the press will continue to flourish as it has, to grow and prosper, and that AJB will be a strong presence in the literary community for many, many years to come. Your friendship plays an enormous role in these hopes and dreams, so thank you for all you do. We not only celebrate forty years of poetry but forty years of ardent and loyal friendship with you.

Yours in poetry,

Image of Alice James pf MS Am 1094, Box 3 (44d) By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

Carey Salerno, Executive Director

new titles

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Jan Heller Levi is the author of two books of poetry, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder (winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) and Skyspeak. She is the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader and consulting editor on the 2005 re-issue of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. She is also co-editor, with Sara Miles, of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Levi lives in New York City with her husband, the Swiss-born novelist and playwright, Christoph Keller, with whom she is completing a biography of Rukeyser. She teaches at Hunter College in New York City.

What Love Is

Orphan

Photo © Jan Folsom

To forsake all others.

To float the beloved on your back from flood to land, to wrench bread from the beggar’s hand, snatch the oxygen mask from a child’s face.

To ransack hospitals and nursing homes for drugs to ease the beloved’s pain, to stumble down 101 floors, beloved slung on your back, not stopping for the other ones in wheelchairs waiting at the landing doors.

Jan Heller Levi

January 2014 Previous praise for Jan Heller Levi: “. . . a poet whose humanity encompasses both our urge for completeness and our necessary dwelling in the work-in-progress of the world.”

—Mark Sullivan “Jan Heller Levi’s work countervails the implications of this curmudgeonly koan with passional, self-critical intelligence. Ardent yet free of gush, the spontaneity and conversational ease of her poems assure that the quality of wonder, like that of mercy, is not strained.”

—Alice Fulton “. . . it’s Levi’s humanity that ultimately won’t let you loose, words as direct as bullets, as kisses.”

—Bob Holman

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new titles Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, MI, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. Jamaal has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press.

from Thinking Like a Split Melon A melon falls from a bag,

a platoon of ants pours in

and out of its gash, and I wonder if it takes being broken

open and emptied

to be filled with something new.

Didn’t a poet say cracks are how light gets in everything?

I’m probably mixing that up.

and trouble that mire

with whatever stick I happen to find.

Tarfia Faizullah

But this is how I think. Give me a box,

and I’ll fill it with dirt

or fill it with water

or fill it with both

HUM November 2013

Jamaal May

Praise for Hum: “In his percussive debut collection Hum, Jamaal May offers a salve for our phobias and restores the sublime to the urban landscape. Whether you need a friend to confide in, a healer to go to, or a tour guide to take you there, look no further. That low hum you hear are these poems, emanating both wisdom and swagger.”

—A. Van Jordan “The elegant and laconic intelligence in these poems, their skepticism and bent humor and deliberately anti-Romantic stance toward experience are completely refreshing. After so much contemporary writing that seems all flash, no mind and no heart, these poems show how close observation of the world and a gift for plain-spoken, but eloquent speech, can give to poetry both dignity and largeness of purpose, and do it in an idiom that is pitch perfect to emotional nuance and fine intellectual distinctions.

Hard-headed and tough-minded, Hum is the epitome of what Frost meant by ‘a fresh look and a fresh listen.’”

—Tom Sleigh

author interview

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Suzanne Parker’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Rattapallax, and numerous other journals. She has also published non-fiction in the travel anthology Something to Declare, edited by Gillian Kendall (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009 ). She is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets, was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars, and has received fellowships and scholarships from Sarah Lawrence College Summer Writers Seminar and Prairie Schooner. Suzanne directs the Creative Writing program at Brookdale Community College and is an editor for MEAD: A Magazine of Literature and Libations.

Only Kissing

The webcam showed only two men kissing.

Katherine Van Acker Photography

In the eyes now a wilderness— when the birds open their beaks not in song, but a huff escapes from the rigor of killing, feeding, climbing to find, again, the swaying of grass, the nudging a being makes as it moves, no matter how quietly, through the world, setting its neighbors in motion— How do you sleep when the siren is your own exhaled cry: “Oh Christ.”

Viral

An Interview with Suzanne Parker

Suzanne Parker

In a recent discussion with Suzanne Parker, AJB asked the author about the inspiration behind her debut collection, Viral. In the following interview, Parker discusses her connection to Tyler Clementi, how she constructed the variety of voices emulated in her poems, and how she ended up finding her own.

ALICE JAMES BOOKS: Through the tragic story of Tyler Clementi’s suicide, Viral investigates the complex issues of sexuality, shame, grief, and privacy in today’s society.

What specifically drew you to write about his story?

SUZANNE PARKER: In September 2010, Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge two days after his roommate streamed, via webcam, his encounter with another man. His death and the suicides of other young queers and teens who were bullied— 13, 14, 15 years old— haunted me. However, Tyler’s death, in particular, stayed with me.

I live in Manhattan and every day drive over the GW Bridge to get to work, and every day, I would imagine his lonely

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author interview

(continued)

September 2013

walk to the middle of that bridge. I would think about how had he just made it downtown to the city, to the Village or Chelsea, he could have found a community, support, safety. For so many young queers, myself included, NYC is Oz, a gay Mecca, but the journey there can be trecherous, and so many young queers and teens who are targeted for some perceived “difference” cannot find their S U Z A N N E PA R K E R way to safety. Viral arose from that hearbreak, that they could not find their way to safety on the other side of the bridge.

VIRAL

AJB: The book begins with the poem, “If the Body Could Live without Desire.” Although the book is divided into three sections, this poem appears before the first section, prefacing the book. It reads: “I would be as song / flowing past / hands as in air. / I’d kiss you softly on the ear’s rim / and disappear.” Who do you envision as the “I” in this poem? Can you expand on the relationship between this poem and the rest of the collection?

PARKER: The “I” in this poem I imagine as the voice of not only Tyler Clementi but of the many queer teens who are in turmoil, who are living or who lived in fear or shame. The “I” is the voice of those who are bullied and those who live through their days dampening down their difference, as if turning a light down low.

Many of the poems in the book I consider elegies. This is the first one. It offers their song.

ensued from the death of Tyler and other young queers. One of the things that struck me early on was the tenor of the messages posted on chat boards and in response to online stories. There was so much vitriol and anger in some of the posts. Pure homophobia and hatred. However, there were also messages attacking or reasoning with or dismissing those who wrote from a position of hatred. If anything, the discussion posts and their reflecting of our national attitudes drew me to the story.

AJB: Given the subject matter of the book, was there anything in particular you struggled with while writing these poems?

PARKER: The largest challenge I had was in giving myself permission to explore the subject from all sides. Tyler’s death became part of a national conversation. He became a symbol for many things. The book is a contribution to that dialogue.

However, at the same time, this is one family’s personal tragedy.

There is Tyler’s mother and father and brothers, aunts, uncles, and more who lost someone very dear to them. I struggled greatly with whether I could write a poem in Tyler’s voice. I felt that might be crossing a line. However, a wonderful reader of an early draft of the book raised the issue that by not writing in his voice, Tyler was being silenced yet again. This idea resonated with and disturbed me and, in the end, gave me the permission I needed to write the poems that are in his voice.

I also struggled with whether there should be poems with a personal “I”, the authorial “I.” Again, as with writing in Tyler’s voice, I was concerned about appropriating this tragedy. The first draft of the book did not have any poems in a personal “I” and, again, thanks to some great readers, they let me know that by withholding that “I” and distancing myself from the subject I was creating the exact effect that I feared. Thus, I added poems to the book that allowed for my personal response. I think the lesson here for me is to have early readers of my work.

AJB: With the immense amount of sensationalized news coverage that Tyler’s story received, were there any sources you found particularly helpful? Could you, perhaps, further elaborate on the importance of researching and accessing information via media coverage, while also discussing why you were compelled to reflect upon the nature of it?

AJB: You create voices for a number of people involved in this real event—students, parents, even Clementi himself. How did you go about constructing these voices? What elements of the craft were most critical?

PARKER: My research was limited to news coverage and reading on the internet, much of which eventually proved to be inaccurate in the minor details. Later, there was a fine New Yorker article and much coverage of Dharun Ravi’s trial; however, by that point, the book had been written. I did revise to make certain changes to correct for accuracy. However, the book is not non-fiction but is my response to the event and to the national conversation that

PARKER: I actually wrote much of this book in a sketchbook using charcoals. I was drawing random images and pictures (I am a terrible artist), and the poems arose out of what I was drawing. I think the fact that I was sketching, badly, distracted me enough to allow me to get out of the way and let the voices of those involved in the tragedy arise. A wonderful poet, Chad Sweeney, had spoken to me once of allowing the poem to not

t

author interview

make sense, to not impose upon it, to simply channel the voice of it and to not interfere. I wrote that advice down on a cocktail napkin and kept referring to it throughout the writing of the book. It is wonderful advice. As a writer who has written many poems about me, my childhood, my thoughts and feelings, it was absolutely wonderful, liberating, to metaphorically kick myself out of the car and continue on driver-less.

“I

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(continued)

would think about how had he just made it downtown to the city. . . he could have found a community, support, safety.

”

AJB: The poems in Viral seem to loosely flow in chronological order, leading up to what seems to be the present day in the final section.

How do you feel this progression influences the tone of the speakers(s) throughout each section?

PARKER: The book is constructed in three sections. The first begins by looking backward at childhood and then reverses to focus on the story of Tyler and to reflect upon the circumstances of his death. The first section ends with quite a narrow focus centered upon Tyler. The second section opens up to imagine the impact of his death on those around him. The voices here are those associated with the tragedy. Finally, the third section broadens the view farther, and the voices here are more public, the concerns including questions of culpability and love and desire.

Here is where I introduce the authorial “I.” I hope that the book’s movement comes full circle, beginning with larger concerns, moving through the tragedy, and then returning, opening up to the larger concerns again. There is something important and universal in the pain and tragedy of the deaths of bullied teens. I think it is important that the book include that at the end.

AJB: While many of the poems in this collection are intensely personal, Viral also touches upon political themes—most overtly in the poem “The Courts Are Shuffling Their Laws,” in which you explore the relationship between intention and outcome. At what point did you become interested in the political implications of this story?

PARKER: As many say, art cannot be but political. I think I was always invested in the political implications of the story though writing about it came later in the writing of the book’s poems.

AJB: Two poems in the collection use visual art—Petya Coyne’s “Untitled #720” and the Greek statue “Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patrocles.” What struck you about these pieces in particular?

How do they inform the narrative?

PARKER: These poems both appear in section three where the poems have opened up from the tragedy to larger concerns.

Both of these works of art, to me, are about grief and creation.

“Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patrocles” shows one man supporting the falling body of another. It is a sculpture with a great deal of movement and energy in it—the anguish lining Menelaus’s face, the collapsing body of Patrocles draped over Menelaus’ arm. What struck me was how this moment before death was captured by the artist, that something can be salvaged from loss. Similarly, Petya Coyne’s sculpture, which is made of razor thin strips of an Air Stream trailer that has been shredded, struck me as the work of an artist turning pain into beauty.

This incredible sculpture looks like a cloak, a ghost, a cave. It is deadly sharp and gorgeous. Again, this is an artist turning anguish into art. It is what I aspired to do in the book.

AJB: The book closes on a poem entitled, “An Essential Language,” in which a speaker recounts a kiss on a street corner and the drastically different response it received: “The city splits, / surging around us, / not even / for a moment stopping.” Who do you imagine as the “I” in this poem? What do you hope readers will take from this final image?

PARKER: The “I” here is me, in the city, finally able to kiss my girlfriend in public, and no one around us could care less.

I find this a very hopeful image of survival and of acceptance.

The book, though a response to tragedy, is also a hopeful one in that the world is changing, will change, and there is hope for the future. I wanted it to end on that note—on the empowerment of a public kiss.

THE 2014 BEATRICE HAWLEY AWARD Open to emerging as well as established poets residing in the United States for an unpublished, book-length manuscript of poems.

~

Submission deadline is December 1, 2013

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Winner recieves $2,000, publication, and distribution through Consortium.

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For guidelines visit our website www.alicejamesbooks.org

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news and events

Kathleen Aguero published a book from Tiger Bark Press in October 2013, After That.

Kazim Ali has a new volume of poems published from Wesleyan University Press, Sky Ward. He also translated L’Amour by Margeurite Duras and The Oasis of Now: Selected Poems by Sohrab Sepehri. He has poems forthcoming in Tin House, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, and American Poetry Review.

Dan Beachy-Quick has two new books: from the University of Iowa Press, A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and from Coffee House, a novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. Robin Becker has a new book of poems forthoming spring 2014 from the University of Pittsburgh Press’ Pitt Poetry Series, Tiger Heron. Seven of her new poems appeared in the fall 2013 issue of the American Poetry Review. A poem titled “The Barcelona Inside Me” was featured on the Academy’s Poem-ADay Project in fall 2013.

Tamiko Beyer has recently had poems appear in Poetry Daily, Quarterly West, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has a reading on December 16 at Outpost 186 in Cambridge, MA, and will be at AWP in Seattle.

Cynthia Cruz has poems forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Drunken Boat. She is teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing students at Sarah Lawrence College. She had a reading on November 7 at the University of California--Berkeley during the Lunch Poems Reading Series.

Xue Di has published a collection of poems in Chinese and English from Green Integer, Across Borders.

B.H. Fairchild has a book from W.W. Norton forthcoming July 2014, The Blue Buick: Selected and New Poems.

Joanna Fuhrman has a twenty page poem that will appear in the winter issue of Puerto del Sol. She also has new poems that appear in the summer issue of Hanging Loose and the winter issue of Court Green. A new section of her visual/text collaboration with Toni Simon is forthcoming in Talisman. She will be on a panel at AWP in Seattle called “Drawing Out the Poet: Visual Art in the Writing Workshop.”

Erica Funkhouser had new poems published in the fall issue of AGNI. Rita Gabis has a memoir from Bloomsbury US forthcoming spring 2015. Poems in her new collection, “Feng Shui in the Spirit House of the New Family,” recently appeared in Salamander.

Frank Giampietro is reading at 7:30 P.M. on December 6 at the Dragonfly Bar Bellini Italian Restaurant in Madison, WI, during the Monsters of Poetry reading series.

Marie Harris has a picture book from Nancy Paulsen/Penguin forthcoming, The Girl

Who Heard Colors. She will have a book signing with illustrator Vanessa Brantley-Newton on November 16 at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, NC. Alice Jones’ newest book from Apogee Press, Plunge, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry.

Janet Kaplan has a chapbook of prose poems and prose sonnets forthcoming from PressBoardPress in summer 2014, entitled “Chronicles.”

Ruth Lepson collaborated in mid-August with a group of dancers, painters, musicians, and other poets in Rockport, MA. Lesle Lewis has a book from Cleveland State University Poetry Center forthcoming March 2014, A Book’s a Boot.

Laura McCullough had a book published by Black Lawrence Press, Rigger Death & Hoist Another, and another book published by Syracuse University Press, The Room & The World: Essays on Stephen Dunn. She gave a reading on Labor Day weekend at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, a reading on August 31 with Tom Lux, and read on October 10 at Warren Community College in New Jersey with Suzanne Parker, where she and Parker co-lead a master class beforehand.

Starting January 2014, she will be teaching poetry at the Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway at the Seaview Hotel at The Richard Stockton College of NJ. She will be at AWP in Seattle reading in “Poets on the Sea” with David St. John, John Hoppenthaler, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, and Matthew Nienow. On March 1, 2014 she will be running a double launch with Elliot Bay Books for the anthology The Room & The World: Essays on Stephan Dunn and for Stephen’s new book, Lines of Defense.

Shara McCallum had publications during summer 2013 in The Massachusetts Review and The Southern Review. She had readings on October 31 and November 1, and was a featured poet at the 29th Annual Poetry Festival at Desales University.

On November 19 she read as part of the 40th AJB Anniversary Reading at the Kelly Writer’s House in Philadelphia. She will be reading on November 20 at Lehigh University, December 12 as a 2013 Witter Bynner Fellow in the “Writers Live” series at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and from February 26-March 1 she’ll be attending AWP in Seattle and will appear on a panel.

Adrian Matejka’s has new book of poetry from Penguin, The Big Smoke. He accepted a position teaching in the MFA program at Indiana University Bloomington.

Jane Mead has a book of poetry from Alice James Books forthcoming spring 2014., Money Money Money | Water Water Water. She has upcoming readings in St. Louis, Berkeley and Cambridge, MA. Mihaela Moscaliuc has a book of translations from Romanian forthcoming from Carnegie Melon University Press, The Hiss of the Viper, by Carmelia Leonte. Her translations from the work of Liliana Ursu came out in September in Modern Poetry in Translation (U.K), and her poems are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and 5 AM. An essay on “Code-switching, multilanguaging, and language alterity” is coming out in the University of Georgia Press’ The Task of Un-Masking:

Poetry and Race. She read on November 19 as part of the 40th AJB Anniversary Reading at the Kelly Writer’s House in Philadelphia.

Chad Sweeney taught workshops from September 26-29 at Litfuse in Spokane, WA, with other poets, including Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar,. He will be teaching a workshop and giving a reading on February 11, 2014 at Columbia College in Chicago. He proposed two AWP panels that were accepted for AWP in Seattle, “Poetry of Wonder/Awe/Astonishment,” with poets Mark Irwin, Sherwin Bitsui, Angie Estes, and Sandra Alcosser, and “Protean Poetics: Place in a Placeless Society,” with poets Paul Hoover, Susan Schultz, Brynn Saito, and Mark Irwin.

He is serving a tenure track position teaching in the MFA program at California State University - San Bernardino.

Ellen Doré Waton haa a reading with Joan Houlihan and Rusty Morrison in July 2014 at Moes’ Books in Berkeley, CA, sponsored by Poetry Flash. She had an Orion-Tupelo reading n September with Jeffrey Harrion at Bascom Lodge, Mount Greylock.

She had bilingual readings in November with Brazilian poet Adélia Prado at Smith College, Poets House, New York, co-sponsored by PSA America and the University of Texas, Austin.

Attention Alices Don’t see your news listed, but have some you want to share?

Be sure you’re included in the Spring 2014 Newsletter by contacting the AJB office today! write to us

(207) 778-7071 We want to hear from you!

Money Money Money Water Water Water Jane Mead Available April 2014

Split

Cathy Linh Che

Available April 2014

Mad Honey Symposium Sally Wen Mao

Available May 2014

Mariamma Kambon

or call

Coming Spring 2014

Greg Gale, 2012

Idra Novey has a writer/artist collaboration with Erica Baum forthingcoming spring 2014, through The Cahier Series through the American University in Paris, Clarice: The Vistor.

Bill Rasmovicz has new publications from 42 Miles Press, Gross Ardor, and from Brooklyn Arts Press forthcoming January 2014, Idiopaths.

Donald Revell has a translation of the poems of Paul Verlaine published by Omnidawn, Songs Without Words.

Willa Schneberg has a poem published in 21st Century Text. She will be presenting at AWP in Seattle on the panel, “Fractious Art: The Palestine/Israel Poetry Anthology.”

ajb@alicejamesbooks.org

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(continued)

Katie Bloom

news and events

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AJB has moved!

Welcome to our new home!

Photos by Nicole Wakefield

Have you heard our wonderful news?

Alice James Books recently moved to a cozy new home on the banks of Rollo Pond! Although moving all of our inventory took an impressive amount of work, we’ve finally settled in and are back to working on all things poetry!

All of us at AJB would like to extend our sincerest thanks to everyone who helped make our move as quick and comfortable as possible. Many thanks to the University of Maine Farmington, UMF President Kathryn A. Foster, UMF Facilities, employees, and their wonderful summer workstudy students, Facilities Manager Ben Pratt, the UMF Computer Center, and everyone else who helped us create this new space as our own!

AJB has moved! (continued)

The view when you walk through our front door

Alyssa’s cozy corner office

Our spacious intern loft

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Welcome to AJB!

Where Debby works her magic

Carey’s office overlooking the pond

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donors AJB thanks the following individuals for their generous contributions to the press from 2012 to present*

Institutions

The National Endowment for the Arts The Frank M. Barnard Foundation

Sponsors: $2500 or More Anonymous Anonymous David Harvey Anne Marie Macari Carey Salerno

Patrons: $1000-$2499 Celia Gilbert Peter Waldor

Benefactors: $500-$999 Stephen Motika

Donors: $250-$499

Catherine Barnett Tamiko Beyer Patrica Gibbsons The Mattison Household Jane Mead Nina Nyhart James Tilley

Contributors: $150-$249

Amy Dryansky Harriet Feinberg Linnea Johnson Lesle Lewis James & Judy Pennock Donald Revell & Claudia Keelan Lisa Sewell Connie Veenendaal

Supporters: $75-$149 Mary Anderson George Blecher Bob Brooks Dobby Gibson Donald Hall Daniel Johnson Theo Kalikow James Longenbach Shara McCallum Mihaela Moscaliuc April Ossmann Michelle Parker Michael Poage Doug Powell Dorothy Robinson Beverly Salerno Third Wednesday Tom Thompson

Readers: $1-$74 Tom Absher Kathleen Aguero Elizabeth Ahl Meena Alexander Robin Becker Star Black Susan Bondine Carole Borges Lee Briccetti David Cohen Ronald Cohen Robert Cording Nancy Crampton Jeannine Dobbs Denis Duhamel Lynn Emanuel Mary Feeney Joseph Fritsch Erica Funkhouser Lucia Gajda Michael Glaser Rhoda Hacker Monica Hand Marie Harris Hugh Hennedy Carol Hepper Mary Hermen Cathy Hong Michele Jaquays Alice Kaasik Joan Larkin Ruth Lepson Jean Lunn Adrian Matejka

Elizabeth Metzger Tamalyn Miller Helena Minton Nora Mitchell Kathleen Motika Roberta Oliver Kathleen O’Toole Mona Paschke Suzanne Parker Jane Preston Ruth Ann Quick Alice Freemand Quinn Idra Rosenberg Willa Schneberg Jeffery Schwartz Myra Shapiro Neil Shepard Lynn Shoemaker Lisa Sisler Thomas Sleigh Sue Standing Jody Standing Elizabeth Knies Storm Allen Strous John Thelin Jeffery Thomson Mona Toscano Parker Towle Edwina Trentham William Wenthe Eleanor Wilner Ken and Lois Wisman Rodney Wittwer Margot Wizansky

*If you do not see your name listed but have donated to AJB or have found an inaccuracy, please accept our apologies and notify us right away by calling or emailing.

AJB makes every effort to keep this list current and accurate up to the time of publication.

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the alice fund

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stay alive. “ Just That’s all I ask.

About The Alice Fund The Alice Fund’s mission is to ensure the long-term financial stability and realization of the strategic goals of Alice James Books. The press is wholly committed to investing the vast majority of any “profits” or “gains” from a given fiscal year directly into The Alice Fund. Though many donors choose to give to both, funds raised for The Alice Fund and our Annual Fundraising Appeal remain separate from each other.

Fund Management Policy

Each year up to 5% of the fund may be distributed to our cash reserve/contingency portion of The Alice Fund to Alice James Books as income for ordinary operations or for special projects.

Fund Investment Policy

Our investment policy is decidedly conservative. AJB currently distributes funds evenly between cash (for contingency/quasi-endowment use), CDs, and moderate growth mutual funds.

About Our Strategic Goals

All nonprofits plan for growth and aspire toward greatness. Here’s what the Alice James Cooperative Board is committed to: • Hiring full-time marketing, publicity, and development personnel • Publishing up to 8 titles per year, including the AJB anthology and books from our two new series: The Kundiman Poetry Prize and the AJB Translation Series • Continuing to publish emerging and established poets • Accelerating the growth of The Alice Fund

THE ALICE FUND

...preserving the legacy of

AJB’s deepest thanks for the gifts made to The Alice Fund by the following founding contributors

:

Alice

• Anonymous • David and Margarete Harvey • Rita Waldor

Henry

• Financial Benefits Research Group

William

• Brown & Brown Metro Insurance • Anne Marie Macari • Valley National Bank • Peter Waldor

Robertson

• Consortium Book Sales and Distribution • Katherine and Joseph Macari • Anonymous • Privett Special Risk Services • United States Fire Insurance Company

Wilky

• Bernstein Global Wealth Management • Lee Briccetti • Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno and David Bonanno • Chubb Group • Carmela Ciurarru • Beverly Davis • Christina Davis • Anonymous • Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company • Franklin Savings Bank, Farmington Branch • Peter Gelwarg • Joan Joffe Hall • Jan Heller • Philip Kahn • Ann Killough • Nancy Lagomarsino • Ruth Lepson • Lesle Lewis • Diane Macari • Anonymous • Idra Novey • April Ossmann • Jean-Paul Pecqueur • Bill Rasmovicz • Lawrence Rosenberg • Carey Salerno • Thomson-Shore, Inc • Jeneva & Roger Stone • Lisa Sherman & Martin Stone • Marla Vogel

Your gift to The Alice Fund

”

—Jane Kenyon on AJB, 1994

A lice J ames B ooks

What’s your legacy level?

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Cryptogram Alice James Books has left you a hidden message!

Can you decode it to see what AJB would like to say?

Hint: N= R

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A = F, B = T, D = S, E =H, F = I, G = L, H = M, I = B, J = A, K = C

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alice asks

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alice asks...

Jan Heller Levi

AJB: What would your superhero power be, and your superhero name?

LEVI: PoetryWoman, and I’d make everyone love Poetry.

AJB: You can only eat one meal for the rest of your life, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. What’s your meal?

Do I get to choose the IHOP pancake platter? It comes with two eggs, two bacon strips or pork sausage links, and hash browns. I know this must be a completely unhealthy choice, but your question didn’t include the issue of ramifications.

Anyway, breakfast is my favorite meal, so I think I’d be happiest repeating that all day -- it always gives me the sense of new beginnings.

AJB: What did you dream about last night?

LEVI: Robinson Jeffers brushing his teeth. I swear. I don’t usually have such literary dreams, if you can call Robinson Jeffers brushing his teeth literary.

Actually, I’m embarrassed to say, I often dream about shopping. Or dreaming that suddenly the place I’ve been living in has another room in it that I never acknowledged or never used.

AJB: What is your most exotic phobia/fear?

LEVI:

When I was a kid I had an intense fear that John Wilkes Booth was hiding under my bed and that any minute he was going to jump out and assassinate me.

AJB: What’s something that amazes you?

LEVI:

Right now, August Wilson’s plays, that the Voyager has left our solar system, how hard it is to write a biography, that Edward Snowden isn’t a national hero, how much we can’t say to one another, that I’m still alive.

Photo © Jan Folsom

LEVI:

AJB: If you had to use a pen name, what would your pen name be and why?

LEVI: I’m not telling, because I might want to use them.

AJB: If you could change one thing about the human body, what would you change?

LEVI:

I have been working on a biography of Muriel Rukeyser for a long time. Now, with my co-writer, Christoph Keller, it’s almost finished. Anyway, I have a copy of a note she sent to herself on Sarah Lawrence College memo paper sometime in the 1950s. And it has something to do with your question. She wrote her name in the to line and in the from line she wrote Sigmund. And below she copied three quotes from Freud. The last was “The genitals themselves have not undergone the development of the rest of the human form in the direction of beauty…” It’s strange to agree with Freud – I’m not sure Rukeyser did – but he’s got something of a point there; I think I’d like to come up with a more gorgeous design…

AJB: What’s a conspiracy theory you can get behind?

LEVI: Almost any.

AJB: What’s the most enjoyable word to say?

LEVI: “Another.”

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