Alice James Books Spring 2013 Newsletter

Alice James Books Spring 2013

INSIDE From the Director’s Desk

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New Titles

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Author Interview Tamiko Beyer

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News and Events

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AJB at AWP 2013

Donors

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2013 Celia Gilbert Fellow

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The Alice Fund

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AJB Poem Match-Up

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Alice Asks Angelo Nikolopoulos

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spring 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 1

AJB STAFF Carey Salerno

Executive Director Meg Willing

Managing Editor Alyssa Neptune Editorial Assistant Debra Norton

Bookkeeper

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

INTERNS Darrian Church Breanna DeLuca Gus Field Taylor McCafferty

Front cover from Mezzanines (04/2013) Image credit: “Low Tide”, 2008 © Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz Image of Alice James pf MS Am 1094, Box 3 (44d) By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

At the end of a long winter, I find nothing more inspiring than the clusters of crocuses that eke out from hardened snow to bloom in the widening hours of watery spring sun. How beautiful to see them blossoming in berms beside the icy limestone of churches, our shovel-weathered porches, and before building alleyways and bus stops, beckoning hopefulness as we toss our trash into the can or mechanically step into the lumbering elephant that pauses on the same hour of every day at the tips of our salted feet. The crocuses bid us to find and appreciate beauty as we persist in the most mundane of tasks and muddle through the lingering winter days.

What I also find inspiring, in these first weeks of 2013, is the fact that a poetry press, which began as a hypothesis in a poetry workshop in Beacon Hill—really, to hear Patsy Cumming describe its coming together as a series of “what ifs” is sobering—is now turning forty.

What an incredible milestone we’ve reached together. Consider with me all of the masterful poets we’ve published since 1973. It is remarkable. Even more inspiring is the way the press has grown since its inception. I wonder if our seven founders ever imagined that a press run by its poets would flourish as we have throughout the years.

In celebration of this monumental birthday, the words of each fine AJB poet can now be found collectively within our celebratory anthology of poems, Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books, which Anne Marie Macari (Gloryland, 2005) and I assembled over the past three years.

This collection not only showcases the incredible talents of AJB authors, but also portrays the growth of the press, the social and historical constructs that informed each poem, and the evolution of our poets’ concerns throughout these forty years. It may amaze you, as it did me, that subjects relevant thirty or forty years ago remain at the forefront of poets’ minds today.

Many of the challenges that writers faced in the 70’s, particularly women and minority writers, persist. If Alice James was indeed founded to “give women writers a chance,” then this collection demonstrates the cultivation, expansion, and prolonged achievement of this ambition.

Collectively, the poets and their poems in Lit from Inside remind us of the practical challenges the press has faced and overcome—as Suzanne Matson recalled in Boston during the AWP conference in March: “…There was always that shocked moment when new authors we had chosen saw what a shoestring operation we were running.” This anniversary year reminds us of the press’s strength and perseverance in the literary community, its necessity, and its endurance: drawn from you, our kind readers and supporters, our authors, and our cooperative members.

Thank you for your loyal readership. Thank you for seeing the press this far and for what you will do for and over the next forty years to ensure the press’s legacy continues. Alice James Books is one of the oldest independent poetry presses in the country. What are the odds that a press, which publishes exclusively poetry, would still be thriving these days? We are all so “busy,” inundated, our connectivity facilitated by technology leaves us with less space for private thought and independent magic, making it practically impossible to preserve a space for solitude, for the poetic spirit to rise within us. Yet, we are lucky to still have the opportunity to offer such a haven to our community. I’m happy we remain committed to our continued work together, to ensuring the press will endure, providing enjoyment, enlightenment, contemplation, revelation, and transportation to all who seek it where it is best found: Alice James Books.

Happy Birthday to us!

Yours in poetry,

Carey Salerno, Executive Director

new titles

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Angelo Nikolopoulos received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Creative Writing and Literature from New York University. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, Best New Poets 2011, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, The New York Quarterly, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the 2011 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Contest and the founder of The White Swallow Reading Series in Manhattan. He currently teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and lives in New York City.

from Daffodil Maybe it’s me, always loving what I can’t have, the bulb refusing itself, perennial challenge.

I’d rather have mulch than three blithe sepals from you.

I’ve never learned how to handle kindness from strangers.

It’s uncomfortable, uncalled-for.

Photo © Star Black

I’m into piss and vinegar, brazen disregard, the minimum wage indifference of bark, prickly pear.

Flirtation’s tension: I dare, don’t dare.

Obscenely yours April 2013

Angelo Nikolopoulos

Praise for Obscenely Yours: “Nikolopoulos’ debut is careful, sexy. . . . The body, its ecstasy and its shame, is this poet’s obsession, and he observes it with a straightforward awe.”

—Publishers Weekly “These supple poems are at once frank and mysterious, and they explore desire in a way that feels modern and intelligent. An audacious debut, Obscenely Yours is devilishly candid and definitely scandalous.”

—Edmund White “Dynamic and dead-on, these poems speak to the urge, the threat, the violent appetite of desire. They also do the hard work of unraveling the question of love—the thing we ‘take on faith […] lightly,’ that asks everything and promises only we ‘are not dead.’ Obscenely Yours leads us through the Cineplex of ecstatic language and out into the wilderness of human longing, where we let go the selves we know and become ‘something else entirely.’”

—Tracy K. Smith

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new titles

Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.

93,000,000 Miles from the Sun and 20 years apart, both my grandfathers suffered heart attacks. One I would never meet. There are things I’ve wanted to know, questions spiraling through my capillaries.

Each minute that passes without CPR, your chances drop. Light passes from the center of the solar system to your garden and if your heart isn’t beating in that time, you’ve got less than a twenty percent chance of feeling the sun against your face again. Sometimes, when a wave of energy is interrupted, it reverses its direction. Reflection? Light reaches the end of its voyage, hits a wall, turns back with nothing.

Michelle Matiyow

Mezzanines April 2013

Matthew Olzmann

Praise for Mezzanines: “Olzmann’s masterful debut heralds the arrival of a delightful and daring poetry that scorches and coils its way through galaxies, strip malls, and the intricacies of the human body. With a wickedly delightful wisdom at its core, Mezzanines practices the most graceful kind of alchemy—its greatest strength is how it turns tiny heartbreaks into a bright and satisfying beauty.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil “With Mezzanines Matthew Olzmann has given us a vibrant new poetry, as soulful as it is funny. Sci-fi and snake charms, love poems, ship wrecks, and a dash of artful self-parody—the materials of his narratives come from all over the cosmos to find, in this wonderful poet’s hands, a shape crackling with power that’s connective, convincing, and true.”

—David Baker

author interview

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Tamiko Beyer spent the first ten years of her life in Tokyo, Japan, and has since lived in cities on the water on the West and East coast. She is the author of the chapbook bough breaks (Meritage Press). She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Fellowship. Beyer has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and VONA/Voices. She is the Senior Writer at Corporate Accountability International in Boston.

We Come Elemental

Each molecule polished each o each pair of h a banquet of lust – wet sludge:: stream suds::

oil slick rain::

::eat the bread of our body’s slough ::eat our bread the crumbed down drain ::eat of our bread our rainbowed fuel

until clear pools flow back to the rivers – those quick veins of industry –

wash over ancient mollusk shells Kian Goh

and we learn again green’s good was light veined through leaves.

WE come elemental

Tamiko Beyer

An Interview with Tamiko Beyer

In a recent dialogue with Tamiko Beyer, AJB asked the author about the inspiration behind her debut collection, We Come Elemental. Here, Beyer discusses the intricate relationships between the human and the environmental, guiding us through a world of water and plastics, compassion and activism, the disappearing and the disappeared.

Alice James Books: Your debut collection, We Come Elemental, presents nature—through water—as a fully present character, leading us to consider the intricate relationships between bodies both human and elemental. What sparked your interest for this ecological collection?

TAMIKO BEYER: I felt sick outrage when I learned of the enormous gyres of plastic floating in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In reading more, I learned that plastic never disappears. Every piece that has ever been created is still here. It doesn’t disintegrate; it just gets smaller and smaller, until the tiniest fish are ingesting bits of plastic, all of over the world. This was mindboggling to me.

And it’s just one of many ways humanity’s existence is fundamentally altering the rest of the world. It seemed important to me to think and write about what disappears, and how. And what appears, and how. And what stays, but shifts.

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author interview May 2013

(continued)

In writing these poems, I began experimenting with what I am calling a queer::eco::poetics — and exploration of ecopoetics from a queer lens. Historically, queers have often positioned as somehow “outside” nature. A queer::eco::poetics holds on simultaneously to the outsider status of queerness while working to disrupt the distinctions between outside and in, natural and unnatural, normal and freakish.

I think it’s very interesting to think about nature from the outside. What does that even mean? What is outside of nature?

Take cities: if they are constructed by humans, are they not part of nature? And if cities are nature, is plastic nature? If so, where do I ground my outrage about the Pacific gyre? We Come Elemental explores, if not answers, these questions.

AJB: The book is separated into three sections: “Body Geographies,” “Dear Disappearing,” and “Tenacious As Salt.” Could you discuss how each section works independently and within the collection as a whole?

as well as rage. I’m interested in how we can move toward that place with and through intimate relationships. And this feels fundamentally queer.

AJB: Out of all of the elements—earth, air, wind, fire, water— what compelled you to focus on water as the primary natural force coursing through We Come Elemental?

BEYER: I have always had a deep love for water, for the ocean, for the rain. There is such sensual pleasure in water for me—from the way it feels against my skin to the essential satisfaction of drinking water.

I’m also interested in its queerness: its fluidity, its transparency, how it takes on the form of its container.

And in thinking about the city as nature, I’m also fascinated by water systems. I wanted to explore the mechanics and metaphor of water infrastructure: how does water actually flow from our taps? What does water “treatment” look like?

How does water infrastructure reflect or create the life of our cities? How is it a manifestation of our needs, habits, and desires?

“M

y hope is that voices of water, of the disappearing, and of the humans blend and blur into each other...

”

BEYER: From almost the start, I knew “Dear Disappearing” would be the heart of the collection. It’s a poetic sequence meditating on nature and human presence as a creative and destructive force. And it’s a love poem to the indelible force of life.

AJB: The poems in this collection confront environmental, social, and political issues in an array of voices—including the voices of various bodies of water. What inspired you to write in the voice of these “nonliving” elements? How do these “nonliving” voices relate to the more familiar, human voices in the collection?

The poems in “Body Geographies” explore various manifestations of human relationship to water. Here, I was interested in finding out how far I could take the collective “we.” I wanted to blur boundaries between self and world and society. What kind of voice could speak for a “we” that is, at its core, as elemental as water? But, I also didn’t want a collective voice that obscured very real issues of inequalities of power and systemic injustices. I wanted to spend time in that uncomfortable space of tension.

BEYER: In exploring a queer::eco::poetics, I reflected on how writing about nature as queer requires interrogating all previous assumptions of “nature,” —the construction of what is natural, and all of what natural implies (inevitable, innate, normal, nonhuman, pristine, etc.). I like to say it’s the poetics of the porous, fitting for a collection awash in water.

“Tenacious as Salt,” takes up many similar concerns. But the focus here (if it were a film) zooms in intimately on a “we” who are queer lovers. Perhaps it is within our most intimate relationships, following the logic of the heart as much as the head, we discover ways of thinking and acting that are truly revolutionary. I think realizing social justice and restoring environmental balance must come from a place of deep love,

This requires a rethinking of boundaries. I want to explore a new kind of sense making that helps us see anew all that surrounds us: the environment in the largest sense of the word.

And I’m interested in exploring how poetry can participate in asserting the agency of “nonliving” beings in the world.

My hope is that the voices of water, of the disappearing, and of the humans in the poems blend and blur into each other, simultaneously pointing to, and refusing, the boundaries the dominant culture seeks to uphold.

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author interview

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(continued)

AJB: Your use of negative space, line breaks, and punctuation create not only an interesting visual space on the page, but also a unique reading rhythm. In particular, the double colon (::) is a recurring element that peaked our interest. How do you envision this punctuation functioning? What effect would you like it to achieve?

BEYER: I experiment with the double colon as a way of playing with disruption within the line. I am interested in experimenting with how it can be read from left to right, right to left. I like how it insists on tangible boundaries while simultaneously disrupting demarcations, asks for multiple readings, and questions the equation of direct correlation but posits interconnection. I also see it as a built environment, and queer.

For me, the double colon breathes new life into co-opted, saturated forms, wrestling both queerness and greenwashing away from corporate and mainstream speech acts. It holds queerness in all its discomforts and embraces the entirety of ecology (ecology of language, of human creation, of thought, emotion, and of the “natural” world).

AJB: The cover image of your book is a photograph of Antony Gormley’s sculpture, “Another Place.” He is also quoted at the start of the section “Dear Disappearing.” How did you first encounter his work? How does your poetry relate to his visual art?

BEYER: “Dear Disappearing” was inspired, in part, by the sculptor Antony Gormley’s project, “Another Place.” I was intrigued by the images of human figures subsumed by the tide in various degrees along a beach. Gormley placed a hundred solid cast iron statues (cast from his own body) along the coast of the Kugelbake in Germany. The statues—now permanently installed at Crosby Beach in the UK—all face the horizon, positioned in varying distances from the lowest tidemark. So, at any given time, the statues are variously immersed, or not immersed, in water. They disappear and appear again and again in the cycle of the tides.

within the skull’s circumference? / Like tidal retreat, the wet shore scrubbed down, / a drowning mind is reflective ground.” What— or who—is this “disappearing”? How did these poems come to be?

BEYER: Almost every April, Asian-American poets from Kundiman organize a postcard poetry exchange to celebrate National Poetry month. It is at once an ephemeral exercise (because a poem you write disappears every day into the post box) and very physical (because you open your mail box daily to poems penned in different hands accompanied by a variety of images). It is a conversation dispersed through time, space, and poetics.

One April, thinking about the many ways things can and are disappearing, I decided to address all my poems that month to “dear disappearing.”

As the sequence developed, the disappearing—the collective voice of all that is being driven to extinction—began writing back. As boundaries blurred, I began to see the disappearing as also the “we” of the other poems. The disappearing was/ were asserting its/their agency. Full of sorrow and full of life.

The way nature is always insistent and returns in some form, even in the face of utter destruction.

About that time, I heard a story on NPR by Gwen Thompkins.

Her neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park in New Orleans, was submerged underwater during Hurricane Katrina. For years afterward, her neighborhood was desolate, empty of people and animals. Then, one day, she almost stepped on a frog, and realized “the night was alive with sounds.”

“Given the chance,” she said, “what disappears will one day come home again.” In the poem, the disappearing are demanding that chance. My hope is we all listen, and act to create space for resilience.

THE 2013 KINERETH GENSLER AWARD

Gormley’s says of this project: “The idea was to test time and tide, stillness and movement, and somehow engage with the daily life of the beach. This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships.”

Open to poets residing in New England, New York state, or New Jersey for an unpublished manuscript of poems.

This exploration of stillness, transformation, and the body, nature, ocean, and industry/urbanity moved me deeply, and informed the development of “Dear Disappearing.”

For guidelines visit our website www.alicejamesbooks.org

AJB: At times, your poems are conversations. In the “Dear Disappearing” section, there are a number of poems that begin with the salutation, “Dear disappearing” and move forward into a question-answer dialogue: “What use, the head and all the resounds

Winners become editorial board members, recieve $2,000, publication, and distribution through Consortium.

~ ~

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news and events

Doug Anderson has new poems in the Raleigh Review and Badlands. He read with “Group 18” at AWP. He is currently teaching at Smith and Emerson Colleges.

Catherine Barnett published The Game of Boxes in August 2012. She will be reading with Oni Buchanan at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge on April 29 at 8:00 p.m. and with Dobby Gibson and Mary Szybist at the Brooklyn Public Library on May 8 at 7:00 p.m. Barnett will be teaching with NYU Writers in Paris in late June and July.

forthcoming in Orion, Upstreet, and the anthology, Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke: Erotic Poems (Tupelo Press). She is reading at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem, MA in May and in the Massachusetts Cultural Council Commonwealth Reading Series in Northampton in April. She was awarded a Poetry Fellowship from the MCC for 2012-13.

Robin Becker attended the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston. She participated on a panel celebrating the work of poet Gail Mazur and one on the history of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. In April 2013, Becker read her poems at Colorado State University.

Joanna Fuhrman’s essay on teaching a high school writing exercise based on corpse drawings will be in the spring issue of Teachers and Writers. Joanna’s latest poems appeared online in Maggy, Hot Metal Bridge, and Hyperallergic. Some of her other recent poems will appear in Hanging Loose and Puerto del Sol.

Cindy Cruz published a book entitled The Glimmering Room in October 2012 (Four Way Books). The New York Times published a review in January 2013 on The Glimmering Room. Cruz had poems published in the Kenyon Review as well as in Plume in the winter of 2012. She has forthcoming poems in Point of Contact, Spoon River Review, and The American Poetry Review. She did a reading at Syracuse University on April 11, 2013 as well as at the Folding Chair Reading Series, the Earshot Reading Series, and the Mixer Reading Series. She was part of workshops at the Poetry Salon, the Poetry Workshop, and a Fiction Literature Class in March.

She will be holding a workshop at Y-Uptown on July 9, 16, 23, and 30.

Christina Davis’ latest book, An Ethic, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, is forthcoming. She will appear in the Bibliopoetics Conference with Anna Moschovakis at the University of Maine in April.

Ted Deppe is hosting a writers’ week in Howth, Ireland from October 1118, 2013. He will be doing a reading with Annie Deppe at Manchester Community College on April 25 at 7:00 p.m. in Manchester, CT. He has new work published in Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, New England Review, Sojourners, and Green Mountains Review.

Deborah DiNicola’s sequence of eight poems called “The Month of Slumber” were published in the new anthology, Reckless Writing: Emerging Poets of the 21st Century (Chatterhouse Press). Deborah gave a reading in the Hannah Kahn Poetry Series at Broward College in February.

Amy Dryansky’s second collection of poems, Grass Whistle, was published from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in March 2013. She has individual poems

B.H. Fairchild’s book, The Blue Buick: Selected and New Poems, will be appearing from WW Norton in April 2014.

Forrest Gander’s latest and forthcoming publications include Redstart: An Ecological Poetics with John Kinsella (University of Iowa, 2012), Watchword, poems by Pura Lopez Colome (Wesleyan, 2012), and Eiko & Koma (New Directions, 2013). Forrest attended the Oxford Book Festival in March.

Rebecca Gale Howell’s debut collection, Render / An Apocalypse, which was selected by Nick Flynn for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Prize, has been released. This spring Render / An Apocalypse is featured in On the Seawall’s “Twenty Poets New & Recent Titles,” in a review written by Ruth Lilly fellow Chloe Honum. On April 24 she will be reading at Cleveland State University Student Center with Nick Flynn.

Ruth Lepson recently had a poem published in Ping Pong along with a forthcoming book from Pressed Wafer, with a CD of musical settings. In March she gave an AWP off-site reading in Boston for Ping Pong.

Lesle Lewis’ chapbook, It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium, was published by Factory Hollow Press. She read as part of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA in December of 2012 and at Jones Jubilat Reading Series in Amherst, MA in February 2013.

Sarah Manguso’s new memoir, The Guardians, was published in paperback in March.

Suzanne Matson’s short story, “Boys’ Choir,” was published in Carolina Quarterly 62.3 (winter 2012) 60-5.

news and events

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(continued)

Laura McCullough facilitated for the “Camouflage and Capitalism” talk and discussion at the 2013 AWP Conference. Her publication, Rigger Death & Hoist Another (Black Lawrence Press) debuted in March. Laura is the editor of two upcoming books.

Idra Novey read at the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series with David Fried in March as well as at the Fort Gondo Poetry Series in St. Louis in April. She will teach an open workshop at Poets House in June.

Viral

Suzanne Parker Available September 2013

Katherine Van Acker

HUM

Jamaal May Available November 2013 Mariano Avila

Willa Schneberg has a poem in the spring 2013 anthology Alive at the Center: Poetry of the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press), which she will read from on April 19 in Portland, OR. Her interdisciplinary exhibit, “The Books of Esther” recently closed at the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland. A limited-edition letterpress chapbook of poems about her mother, Esther, was produced in conjunction with the exhibit. She will read from the chapbook at the NW Poets’ Concord in Newport, OR on May 5. She conducted a workshop entitled “Writing the Jewish Mother,” and gave a reading at the Museum with workshop participants. She has forthcoming poems in Drash and The Portland Review.

Lisa Sewell has forthcoming poems in the Harvard Review, Drunken Boat, and Ploughshares.

Adrienne Su is reading at “New South Family Supper,” a dinner to benefit the oral history initiative of the Southern Foodways Alliance, hosted by Anne Quatrano of Bacchanalia Restaurant in Atlanta on April 15.

Coming Fall 2013

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

Be sure you’re included in the Fall 2013 Newsletter by contacting the AJB office today.

Orphan

Jan Heller Levi

write to us

ajb@alicejamesbooks.org or call

We want to hear from you!

Jan Folsom

(207) 778-7071

Available January 2014

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AJB at AWP 2013 More than 11,000 writers and readers gathered in the Hynes Convention Center in snowy Boston, MA for the 2013 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and Bookfair this year. AJB rang in our 40th anniversary year with an array of panels, readings, and book signings.

Books, books, and more books!

AJB booth ready for the bookfair.

Of the highlights—and there were many!— founding Alices led a panel discussing the genesis of the press; Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine read from their collection Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva to a room overflowing with poetry-lovers; AJB held a featured panel, “Camouflage and Capitalism: The Intellectual Appropriation of American Poetry”; Brian Turner, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Shara McCallum, and Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno read from their collections in celebration of the press’ anniversary; AJB fans braved the snow-ridden, blustery streets for our offsite reading at Trident Booksellers and Café featuring Mathew Pennock, Stephen Motika, and Jane Springer.

Stephanie Sandler listens intently as Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine take the podium to share their readings of Marina Tsvetaeva.

On Saturday, at the close of the conference, we invited guests to a reception launching AJB’s anthology, Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. This event drew supporters and Alices from every era, gathering together to reminisce, reflect, and rejoice.

Jane Springer delights the audience with poems from Murder Ballad at the off-site reading.

An excited crowd awaits readers at Trident Booksellers and Café.

Thank you to all that helped make AWP 2013 a joyous occasion. A special thank you to Trident Booksellers and Café for providing a beautiful reading location.

Lit from Inside captures the imagination of a new generation of readers at the AJB reception.

Stephen Motika and Matthew Pennock prepare for their book signings.

Jean Valentine and Meg Willing share a moment.

donors

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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 David Harvey Patrons: $1000-$2499 Celia Gilbert Anne Marie Macari Carey Salerno Peter Waldor Benefactors: $500-$999 Patricia Gibbons Donors: $250-$499 Catherine Barnett Mattison Household Jane Mead Stephen Motika Nina Nyhart James Tilley Contributors: $150-$249 Amy Dryansky Harriet Feinberg Linnea Johnson

Donald Revell and Claudia Keelan Lesle Lewis James and Judy Pennock Lisa Sewell Sue Standing Connie Veenendaal Supporters: $75-$149 Mary Anderson George Blecher Bob Brooks Dobby Gibson Donald Hall Daniel Johnson 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 Elizabeth Ahl

Robin Becker Susan Bodine Carole Borges Lee Briccetti Nancy Bryan David Cohen Ronald Cohen Robert Cording Amy Dryansky Denise Duhamel Lynn Emanuel Mary Feeney Joseph Fritsch Erica Funkhouser Lucia Gajda Michael Glaser Rhonda Hacker Monica Hand Marie Harris Hugh Hennedy Mary Herman Michele Anne Jaquays Joan Larkin Ruth Lepson Jean Lunn Adrian Matejka Taylor Mccafferty Helena Minton

Nora Mitchell Kathleen Motika Kathleen O’Toole Mona Paschke Ruth Ann Quick Summer Rodman Idra Rosenberg Willa Schneberg Jeffrey Schwartz Neil Shepard Lynn Shoemaker Lisa Sisler Jody Stewart Allen Strous John Thelin Jeffrey Thomson Mona Toscano Parker Towle Edwina Trentham William Wenthe Eleanor Wilner Ken and Lois Wisman Rodney P 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.

Wow! Together

we raised over

$25,229 for this year’s annual appeal! ~

Our

sincerest thanks for your generous support.

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2013 celia gilbert fellow

Alice James Books congratulates Taylor McCafferty on being the recipient of the 2013 Celia Gilbert Fellowship which was founded in honor of Alice, Miriam Goodman, who contributed greatly to the press during her time with us. This fellowship enables an exceptional UMF student to travel with the press to the AWP Conference as our press assistant.

MCCAFFERTY: As a whole, it exceeded all of my expectations.

I was nervously expecting a business atmosphere to the conference, but I was pleased to find everyone had a much more laid back, approachable attitude.

AJB: What was it like being a press assistant? Did you have a particular favorite part of setting up for AWP?

Alice James Books: Taylor, what are a few things people should know about you?

TAYLOR MCCAFFERTY: I am a second-year English major here at the University of Maine at Farmington. I’m also an Assistant Editor for The Sandy River Review, an intern, a work study student, and a voice in Clefnotes, the a cappella group on campus.

AJB: What has been your most memorable experience at Alice James Books?

MCCAFFERTY: While attending AWP was definitely the most memorable, small triumphs are definitely worth mentioning. I found it exciting at the start of my internship getting thrown into working with InDesign and seeing my pages in the completed fall 2012 newsletter. Knowing that so many people were going to see what I’d worked on was exhilarating.

AJB: What was the most thrilling moment at the 2013 AWP Conference? The most nerve-wracking?

MCCAFFERTY: There was a pile of thrilling moments, but the one that’s definitely on the top of my list was being at AJB’s reception for Lit from Inside in a room full of Alices.

I loved being a witness to Alice reunions and getting to meet many of them! The most nerve-wracking moment was when the AJB booth was swarmed with Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky fans wanting their books signed after their reading of Dark Elderberry Branch. We sold out of all our copies in just a few minutes!

AJB: How did AWP compare to what you had imagined it would be?

MCCAFFERTY: I adored being a press assistant. Even though the days were exhausting, they were so rewarding, especially when people would come up to the booth just to express their adoration for AJB. My favorite part of setting up for the booth was getting to see all the book covers! Though I work with many of them as an intern, it’s a rare, good thing to see all the covers displayed as they were.

AJB: How would you describe meeting some of the AJB authors for the first time?

MCCAFFERTY: Since it’s a special year for AJB, I was especially privileged to meet many Alices, even some from the press’ early years! I started out keeping track of the authors that I met, but soon after I lost count. It was such an honor to be in their presence, but at the same time I learned what I basically already knew—they are people too! They have kids, they are humble about their work, and they have a great sense of humor.

AJB: What insight do you have for future fellowship recipients?

MCCAFFERTY: My advice is to learn all you can about the press, read as many of their books as you can, soak it all up, and try to make everything fun!

AJB: After attending the AWP Conference this year, being an intern at AJB, and now being the Assistant Editor of The Sandy River Review, where do you see yourself going from here?

MCCAFFERTY: It’s easy to say where I’d like to see myself going from here, but hard to say how things will actually turn out. Working in publishing is a career I’m excited about pursuing, and I’m very lucky and proud of the fact that my initial publishing experience has been at such a beautiful press like AJB. I’m hoping to gain more experiences that put me at the center of things in the way that AJB has. That said, my options are a little limited in rural Maine, so I definitely foresee myself pushing out of my comfort zone and seeking an internship in a city. However, if that doesn’t work out, I will definitely be content as long as I can remain surrounded by books in one way or another.

the alice fund

12

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?

Alice $10,000 or more Henry up to $10,000

William up to $5,000

Robertson up to $1,000 Wilky up to $500

Make a Lasting Impression

Call us to discuss this opportunity to give the gift of preservation.

may come in many forms. You may give a one-time gift, set up annual contributions, make a gift on a loved one’s or friend’s behalf, or write a plan for Alice James Books right into your estate. Gifts may even be made in stocks or bonds, or you may also wish to consider individual or corporate sponsorship and matching opportunities. However you choose to give, poetry salutes and appreciates your conscientious efforts to preserve this great art, and Alice James becomes your life-long friend.

ajb poem match-up

13

Try to figure out which of the six AJB books listed below match with the six quotes! Once you think you have figured it out, the answers are upside down in the bottom left corner.

1

“. . .who carries fragments of the war inscribed in scar tissue, a deep intractable pain, the dull grief of it the body must learn to absorb.”

2

A B

“Adam’s fall invented the future.

He tied the bats’ wings onto dragonflies.

Nature, even as it dies, abhors imagination.

What men call Extinction, I call Home.”

3

“A day a year ago last summer God filled me with himself, like gold, inside deeper inside than marrow.”

4

“He loved her. One night late I saw them in the kitchen dancing something like a rhumba to the radio, dish towels wrapped around their heads like swamis.”

C D

5

“I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them”

6

E F

“I remember how the gods turned people into things, not killing their consciousness.

And now, to keep these glorious sorrows alive, you have turned into my memory of you.”

1) B

2) E

3) F

4) C

5) D

6) A

alice asks

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alice asks...

Angelo Nikolopoulos AJB: If you could go dancing with any three people, dead or alive, who would they be?

NIKOLOPOULOS: I’d be happy to be the third person dancing with Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler, a kind of lucky Pierre on the dance floor, in any tawdry discotheque. I’m hesitant to add a third, though, because I’m easily distracted and not so keen on sharing, but were you to twist my elbow, I suppose Elizabeth Bishop could squeeze in a shimmy.

NIKOLOPOULOS: I’d most likely go to Greece and take the first ferry to Hydra and drink a lot of dry, white wine and read poems by Gerald Stern.

Alice James Books: What book do you consider to be life changing?

How did it change yours?

ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS: When I was sixteen, I found a tattered copy of Satan Says by Sharon Olds in the back of a yellow cab in San Francisco. It was 1997 and the book’s beauty and brazenness shook me out of my Teen Spirit daze.

Poems like “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure” and “Satan Says” thrilled me to no end, and I thought: You can write about this stuff—directly? Though, in hindsight, what interested me, perhaps unconsciously, was how Sharon Olds was writing to and in tangent with Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman. I had read both—at least the innocuous snippets one gets in high school—but it was this idea of lineage, of stepping into the same river of poets who came before you, that changed the way I approached writing. Many years later, I applied to only one creative writing program—New York University— because Sharon taught there, and I was both elated and terrified to learn I had been accepted. It’s so strange to think of it now, how differently things might have been had I hailed a different cab.

AJB: If someone made a movie about your life, who would you want to play you?

NIKOLOPOULOS: I wouldn’t be too upset if Zachary Quinto played me. Failing that, James Franco would do, of course.

Photo © Star Black

AJB: If I gave you a plane ticket to anywhere right now, where would go? What would you do?

AJB: List five things on your bucket list.

NIKOLOPOULOS: - Visit Cambodia

- Adopt a cat

- Ride (submerge?) in a submarine

- Be banned from entering a country

- Build a bridge AJB: What was the best decision you have ever made?

NIKOLOPOULOS: By far, the best decision I ever made was leaving everything—my friends, a spacious apartment and garden in San Francisco—to move to New York City.

It’s filthy and noisy and I love it. Partly because the long, desperate winters force me inward, and partly because what the city lacks in obvious beauty—hills, magnolia-lined streets—it compensates with the dazzling people who live here.

AJB: Grab the nearest book to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17.

NIKOLOPOULOS: “Johnny, your dream moves summers inside my mind.”

From Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), though I snuck the 18th line in, too.

Alice James Books Become an Alice James Books Subscriber Today!

When you choose to be an Alice James Books subscriber, AJB will automatically mail you each new book we publish (6 books a year), so you’re guaranteed not to miss a title. The cost is $65/year (two seasons of books, including shipping)—that’s about 50% off the cover price! Take advantage of this great offer now.

Call us at 207-778-7071, email ajb@alicejamesbooks.org, or visit our website to enroll. www

. a l i c e j a m e s b o o k s . o rg

an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington