alice james books FALL 2009
INSIDE A Message from Carey
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New Books
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Author Interview
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Mihaela Moscaliuc
News and Events
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AJB Donors
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Staff Spotlight
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Website Highlight
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Our Interns
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Alice Asks
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Donald Revell
Volume 10, Number 2
fall n e w s l e t t e r
A lice J ames B ooks
2009 Volume 14, Number 2
AJB STAFF Carey Salerno Executive Director
Julia Bouwsma Associate Managing Editor
Deanna Kaiser Editorial Assistant
founded in 1973
Greetings from Farmington! This letter comes to you just at the time of pumpkins and peak foliage here in the western mountains of Maine where our town of Farmington rests in a neat little valley. I walked down the hill this morning to Alice James, the sky a corridor of hasty clouds, the air crisp and perfect, the hills aglow with our last batches of gold, evidence of thoroughly enjoyed autumn splendor, and thought of B.H. Fairchild’s poem, Beauty, the last few lines of which I now wish to share with you: [… ] we see the city blazing like miles of uncut wheat, the farthest buildings taken in their turn, and the great dome, the way the metal roof of the machine shop, I tell her, would break into flame late on an autumn day, with such beauty. In this poem, “beauty” (in all its conjugations) is Fairchild’s incantation—and through him, we make it ours, especially during these autumn days that are just so “beautiful” we can do nothing but pay them humble homage.
COOPERATIVE BOARD MEMBERS Peter Waldor, President Idra Novey, Vice President Mihaela Moscaliuc, Treasurer Daniel Johnson, Clerk Catherine Barnett Joanna Fuhrman Ann Killough Anne Marie Macari Jean-Paul Pecqueur Bill Rasmovicz Ellen Doré Watson
INTERNS Ariel Cohen Dory Diaz Laura Jennings Kelsey Lowe Samantha Shepard
Fall marks the commencement of many important ventures for Alice James Books. After a short summer hiatus, our collaborative board gathers to make decisions that will impact the present and future of our press. Fall is the time of our Kinereth Gensler Awards, a highly anticipated and significant occasion for AJB, where new board members and authors are gained into the fold. Fall also marks the beginning of our Annual Appeal. As you’re undoubtedly aware, this year we sent our letter along with a brand new look, which I hope, along with our message, found you inspired to continue or commence your support for Alice James Books, recognizing that we are a vibrant and vital presence within a larger literary conversation. Thus far, I must say, your response has been incredible! Within the first couple of weeks, we received approximately $13,000 in contributions from you. This amount is just $10,000 away from our set fundraising goal, and we thank you immensely for your support and confidence in the press. For those of you who are still making an allowance for your gift, there’s still plenty of time to send it. Our appeal season runs from fall to early spring, and no matter what your level of contribution can be to the press this year, please know it is deeply appreciated and needed! And how about this fall newsletter? Notice anything different? Why of course the new catalog is inside and upon us. My, what a labor of love it’s been, but we’ve finally married these two seasonal items together, and what a couple they make! The catalog, of course, still contains an order form which we encourage all of you to use to stock up on AJB titles, or perhaps purchase some poet-friendly holiday gifts. From our interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Father Dirt (January 2010), to our pages featuring our cast of new interns & one hefty intern project, to the “Alice Asks” section featuring Donald Revell, there is a plethora of exclusive AJB content inside this Fall 2009 newsletter. So have at it everyone—Farmington may be all about autumn, and we’re sure to celebrate it, but AJB is and always will be all about you, our supporters, readers, authors, fans, and friends! Best wishes,
new books
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Poet, translator, and critic Donald Revell, has authored ten previous collections of poetry. Winner of a 2008 NEA Translation Award, the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award, and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Revell has also received fellowships from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is Poetry Editor of the Colorado Review.
Francois Camoin
Ground-dwelling birds reply to thunder. It is sunrise somewhere over there, while here Stars shine still, and the secret doors inside the pines Remain wide open. Which way to go? When I walk into the sun, my children Hurry beside me. I hear footsteps and machines. When I go west into the stars, I see Nothing I could show you: ghosts Who are not ghosts at all, hearts On their sleeves, eyes like melted diamonds. I truly believe that someone loved me once. A bird alighted on a bee alighting On a green stem, and I heard thunder. God’s favorites Are the little stars He drops into the sun. “Kentucky”
The Bitter Withy September 2009
Donald Revell
A “Best Books of 2009” pick by Publishers Weekly Praise for The Bitter Withy “...intensely personal, even visionary accounts and meditations are rendered with lucidity and ease...truly exceptional” ― Publishers Weekly, starred review Previous Praise for Donald Revell “It takes guts to write more poems about peace, war, God and children, but Revell’s are so fresh, it’s as if he’s the first person ever to do it.” —TIME Magazine “No poet so innovative now is more accessible, and no poet half so accessible in recent years has made the language so new.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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new books
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of three previous poetry collections, and her poems have appeared in anthologies published by HarperCollins, Hanging Loose, NYU, Carnegie Mellon, and Soft Skull Press. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and in public schools and libraries through Poets House and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the playwright Robert Kerr. We wander, decorating fingernails with designer bacteria, adorning earlobes with the borrowed limbs of embalmed neurosurgeons. No one is sad. No one knows the word sad. The 21st century sleeps hidden in its permeable shell.
Sandra Fuhrman
Every mystery novel ends with an opaque coffee stain. Every love story— a missing tongue. “The 22nd Century”
PageaNT
Joanna Fuhrman
November 2009
Praise for Pageant “...moments of hilarity, illumination, solemnity and insight… Fuhrman’s delightfully weird and most penetrating moments are a joy.” —Publishers Weekly Praise for Joanna Fuhrman “Forget New York poetry. Forget Language poetry. Forget desires for a totalizing poetics. Fuhrman is a leader in the particular, in ‘infra-surrealism.’ She taboos nothing; no form impedes her complete wit. This full poetry is not only ‘feminine, marvelous, and tough,’ but subtle, searching, and wounded—sexual, social, and smart. Fuhrman celebrates new truth-telling, an art of the spectacular pageant.” —David Shapiro
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Born and raised in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work in American literature. Her poems, reviews, translations, and articles have appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International, Arts & Letters, Pleiades, and Soundings. She teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry in Translation, and lives in Ocean, New Jersey.
January 2010 When Mitică, street-child-blessed-with-lightning-fists, as he dubs himself, allows the seven layers off, his eyes turn into desert sands. Taut-winged scarecrow, he begs forgiveness for letting his body undergo such mock baptism, then steps into the bathtub. When I daub his shoulders with olive soap, he prays for my “bleached soul” in quiet tones, asking that in the name of Father Dirt I be granted absolution until my tongue learns the texture of rubble and the taste of clay. “Everything Touched by Darkness Knows Itself ”
Father Dirt
Mihaela Moscaliuc
an interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc Alice James Books: What drew you to the world of poetry? MOSCALIUC: A number of first experiences, I would say. When I was fourteen, my English teacher took us to hear one of the Romanian dissident poets, Mircea Dinescu, read in front of a small, quiet gathering. It felt special—risky, subversive, an act of necessity larger than the poetry itself. When I read a lot of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, and Pound in college in Romania, along with some token Plath, Moore, and St. Millay, but I remember being mostly apprehensive about it all. As we say in Romanian, I didn’t know with what kind of spoon I was supposed to eat poetry. During my last year in college I was browsing through my university’s American Reading Room (a mini-library consisting of donations form various Fulbrighters) and I came across The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets edited by Dave Smith. I took it out on what became a “permanent loan.” I read it cover to cover more than once and copied down lines and stanzas in my journal. Then I came to the States in 1996 to do graduate work at Salisbury University in Maryland
and later that year I realized that the person I had started dating (Michael Waters, now my husband of 10 years) was one of the Morrow poets whose work I knew and admired. I had noticed the name coincidence, but never put the two together. He had mentioned, in passing, that he wrote poetry, but then so did every man wooing a woman, I figured. I found Michael’s passion for poetry infectious and I started reading poetry voraciously, indiscriminately. It wasn’t until I found myself trying to decide what poems I would want to steal and why, that I knew I was interested in writing. I guess being in love with a poet had much to do with inviting poetry into my life. In the Spring of 1997, Gerald Stern came to read at Salisbury University and something shifted irrevocably in my relationship to poetry. Poetry could be fun while being serious, it was or could be the stuff we, life, love were made of. During Stern’s reading I experienced poetry as a living thing, vital and irreplaceable.
interview
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(continued)
AJB: What was your life
in Romania like? How have your experiences there developed your aesthetic as a writer?
Valentin Moscaliuc
MOSCALIUC: It was much more difficult, less exciting, but also less complicated, though I keep changing my mind about this assessment’s degree of accuracy. During my first decade in the United States, I experienced both awe and disenchantment (the common immigrant story), so memories and impressions of my Romanian life readjusted themselves depending on where I stood, at the moment, in relation to my America. As I grow older and the Romania I knew retreats into the realms of the imaginary, nostalgia kicks in hard and often, inviting mystification. So I have to remind myself that yes, I did have plenty of time to immerse myself in reading, or spend hours brooding on my soul, but no, I didn’t enjoy doing it numb feet and nostrils closing in protest in the minus-ten-degree apartment, or while sitting on an empty gas tank at 5 a.m. in the morning, hoping that the supply truck would arrive before I had to leave for school and that I would slip in the bribing banknote without blushing. One of the survival strategies we developed in response to the regime’s politics of deprivation and terror involved attended to daily details as if they were the only thing worth pursuing, the only thing that mattered. People were being “disappeared” for as much as a joke perceived as subversive, paranoia reigned supreme, and resignation seemed to have had set in. Thinking about the future—or even reflecting on the present—took the kind of courage that bordered (and often slipped into) insanity. I’m still trying to understand my “other” life, and that’s where most poems originate, in the need to remember, but also to make sense of things I couldn’t or didn’t have the guts to at the time. Perhaps many, if not most of my poems are fairly straightforward narratives because I grew up in a country and at a time when to be truthful you had to be elliptical, fragmentary, evasive. I grew up decoding language, reading between lines, feeding on the potential of silences and empty spaces. So narratives, though old hat in poetry, are still fairly new to my psyche. I need them, at least for now.
AJB: Can you tell us about the experience of writing poetry in a lan-
guage that is not your first tongue? How has that informed or influenced your relationship with language, your poetry? MOSCALIUC: I wrote my first poems while working on my doctoral dissertation, and I needed to escape the theoretical frameworks and constructs that were raiding my mind, to keep myself sane and
connected to real language. I was quite intrigued by the stories of immigrants arriving to the States in their teens, with no English, and trying to make themselves into writers (the topic of my dissertation), so I attempted my first poems directly in English. Filtering my Romanian life through the English language has added a layer of difficulty but also a sense of relief to the project. Life makes sense differently in English.
AJB: In telling a story that is highly personal and also larger than one-
self, I’m always interested in how to begin. Can you tell us about why you chose to start with “How to Ask for My Hand at My Grandmother’s Grave”?
MOSCALIUC: You’re absolutely right. “How to Ask…” is very personal while also speaking to other concerns and obsessions in the book. I wrote the poem while teaching composition, so it started as a piece of directional process analysis on a marriage proposal. I realized that even something as straightforward as that became endless complicated when the context involved cultural/ethnic discontinuities and discrepancies, when personal narratives were inextricable from their larger cultural histories. The common language of love suffers moments of intranslatability. Those are important moments, for they require that you make something out of them. They make you refresh the language, coin new words, negotiate meanings. “How to Ask” is a love poem that sets the tone of the book: I’m yours but so are my ghosts.
I
“
grew up decoding language, reading between lines, feeding on the potential of silences and empty spaces.”
AJB: Can you tell us about the significance of the title “Father Dirt”? MOSCALIUC: It derives from one of the poems in the second section, “Everything Touched by Darkness Knows Itself,” and refers to a homeless boy’s belief in a God whose purity and humility are manifest in his rawness, his oneness with the earth, the dirt. Mitica’s God was a lot more believable to me than the biblical one. I realized that if I were to believe in God it had to be a God who loved dirt, who loved rolling in the mud. In Sumerian epics and songs (see Gilgamesh and Inanna) gods create life, and sometimes pure spirit, out of the dirt under their fingernails. Romanian culture too is very earth-bound both in ritual and in thinking, as some of my poems (beginning with the opening one) mean to suggest. The title “Father Dirt” also speaks, if indirectly, to communist restrictions on religion, which was tolerated as long as it was not called by its name. And since, during Ceausescu’s regime understatements had subversive potential, “father dirt” would have been an apt nickname for God.
interview
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(continued)
AJB: Many of your poems focus on the universal struggle to eek out an individual identity in a restrictive social structure. How has this conflict informed your aesthetic identity?
MOSCALIUC:“…you were no longer permitted to know,/Or to decide for yourself,/whether there was an angel inside you, or whether there wasn’t.” Life under Ceausescu’s regime exemplified Orwell’s idea of “doublethink.” In a society of total oppression, you learn to develop strategies to deal with two contradictory things at the same time without transcending or repressing the contradiction. On one hand, you were forced to follow the official line and profess belief in things that were quite alien from your convictions—and you had to pretend you were happy when you were starved and deprived of all liberties, and you had to pretend you understood how that was good for the “progress” of our extended communist family. So you had to work hard at taking care of your soul and nurturing your spirit and not letting the corruption from which you’d unwillingly become part of engulf you. It took me years to start figuring out how deep an imprint compromise (in the form of hypocrisy, deceit, silence) had left on me.
AJB: The second section of Father Dirt is about Roma children. Could you tell us a little more about your relationship to these children and the significance of these poems?
MOSCALIUC: Romania has a long history of persecution of and discrimination against Roma (commonly known as Gypsies), an ethnic minority whose ancestors are said to have fled Northern India approximately a thousand years ago, dispersing though (and eventually settling in) various parts of the world, particularly in the British Isles and Eastern Europe. By the time they were emancipated in 1863, after more than two centuries of slavery, Romanian Roma had already settled in the nation’s imagination as the quintessential outsiders and as a social caste. With the demise of communism, at the end of 1989, Romanians’ right to freedom of expression was restored, and many decided to practice this new right by giving voice to latent prejudices or by misdirecting their frustrations on the Roma. They became the scapegoats for everything that was going wrong in our fairly chaotic search for democracy. Many of the orphans and street children I worked with during my involvement with the Body Shop Charity Foundation, a British organization that had started a number of programs in northern Romania in the early 1990s, were Roma or of Roma descent. This form of identification which was something they resented and saw, for good reasons, as the source of much of their plight. And they were right. Many of these children and teenagers had been deemed “mentally challenged” early on, segregated, left lagging behind at every opportunity. Relegated to the lowest rung of society, Roma teenagers, especially those who had gone through the orphanage system, had very low changes of getting jobs and often ended up on the streets, fighting for survival. And we blame them for being thieves. The thieves I got to know were more honest (to themselves, for sure, but also to others) than most political dignitaries Romania has had for the last seven decades. Some of the most important things I’ve learned about living I’ve learned from these children.
I am particularly interested in giving voice to their stories because they have little chance and little motivation to do so. The Romanian-born French essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran remarked that “Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.” Yes, you’re damned if you speak in the name of the subaltern, but I think you are responsible to do so, so here I am…
Y
“
ou had to work hard at taking care of your soul and nurturing your spirit and not letting the corruption from which you’d unwillingly become part of engulf you
”
AJB: The imagery of the poem “Chernobyl” is so haunting...could
you please tell us a little more about this poem and your experience with the history behind it? Was it derived from firsthand observation? Is there a symbolic or metaphorical element to this poem? MOSCALIUC: The Chernobyl Disaster (April 26, 1986) was one of the worst nuclear power plant disasters in history, and though only two people died in the explosion, the released radioactive fallout, which is said to have been four hundred times higher than the one released by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, affected hundreds of thousand in the years to come. It took days for Romanian powers to make an official announcement, and even then all relevant details were withheld. My home town (in the Northern Eastern part of the Romania) was only a few hundred miles from the (Soviet) Ukranian town of Pripyat, where the explosion took place, and although I had gotten some sense of the gravity of the situation from foreign broadcasts and rumors, I didn’t pay much attention. In the next few years, women started having miscarriage after miscarriage, children were born with fatal malformations, people started developing thyroidal cancer, and still nobody seemed quite willing to acknowledge the connection. There was a sense of fatalism and resignation that I found profoundly troubling, especially as it seemed to permeate our lives in so many other ways, and seal our fate as a nation.
The Kundiman Poetry Prize
Open to ALL asian-american poets for an unpublished manuscript of poems. Winners receive $2000, publication by alice james books and distribution through consortium.
send entries to: Kundiman • P.O. Box 2565 • Staunton, va 24402-2565 Postmark deadline: January 15, 2010. For more information visit www.kundiman.org
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news and events Kathi Aguero lead workshops at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell in October. She also taught a three— day poetry workshop at the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference this past August. Kazim Ali’s novel, The Disappearance of Seth, was released June, 2009, by Etruscan Press. His other book, Bright Felon: autobiography and cities, is due October 2009 by Wesleyan University Press. He also has new poems forthcoming in Colorado Review and American Poetry Review. Readings for the 2009-2010 academic year include readings in Oberlin, OH; Cleveland; Gambier, OH; Buffalo; New York City; Albany; Portland, OR; Houston; Detroit and Chicago. Kazim’s recent upcoming events include a symposium on Muslim American poetry at Northwestern University, a talk with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon at the New School University, the Writing and Faith Conference at Calvin College, a reading with Joanna Klink, Michael Dumanis, Sarah Gridley, and Mary Quade as part of the “Poetry in the Gardens” program at the Cleveland Botanical Gardenand a reading at Williamsville East High School, East Amherst, NY.
17, 3 p.m. at the DC Arts Center, NW. Dobby Gibson’s second collection of poetry, Skirmish, was published in January, 2009 by Graywolf Press. His book tour began in early 2009 and included many stops. Celia Gilbert’s new book, Something to Exchange, has been published by BlazeVOX[books]. A Polish-English bilingual collection of her new and older poems was published this summer by the Polish publishing house Świat Literacki (World Literature).
Kevin Goodan’s book Winter Tenor was recently published by Alice James Books. An anthology containing his poetry, Between Water & Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century, is forthcoming. Kevin read for Open Books in Seattle in October at Woodbury Library, and will be reading at Harvard on November 7, and at Wesleyan University, tentatively scheduled for November 9. Henrietta Goodman’s Carol A. Borges’ poem “Navigation” is forthcoming in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Spring 2010, review of Pamela Uschuk’s poetry book Crazy Love was published in The Hous- “Canada” was published in Guernica, Spring 2009, and “Willful Blindness” was ton Literary Review. also published in FIELD, Spring 2009. Henrietta is currently relocating to LubCynthia Cruz’s bock, TX to enter the PhD Creative Writing program at Texas Tech University. second and third books have been picked up by Four Ways Books to be combined into one larger book for publication. She also has publications forthcomMarie Harris ing in PEN America, Boston Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and The New participated in the event An Evening with Amy Beach with The North Country Yorker. She recently published in The American Poetry Review, July/August 2009 Players in October at the Sugar Hill Meeting House, Franconia NH. The event and FIELD, Spring 2009. Cynthia recently read for the Academy of American was a presentation of a selection of chamber music and art songs by New HampPoets reading, for Tuesday; an Art Project in September, and participated in the shire-born composer Amy Cheney Beach. Marie performed the verse narrative PEN America reading in October. She is currently teaching poetry workshops she wrote to accompany the music. at Sarah Lawrence College. Daniel Johnson Patricia Cumming, is starting to plan readings and events for the release of his book in April 2010. after a long silence, published “Two Poems for a Mirrored Room” this summer His poem “For Ebele” recently appeared in The Iowa Review and a few other in CALYX Journal, and “The Way” in The Kerf.Ted Deppe poems appeared on Hinchasdepoesia.com. “Father Song” will appear in Barrow recently published Orpheus on the Red Line through Tupelo Press, July 2009. Street. He read at Dingle Bookshop in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland, in August and Alice Jones taught a writing workshop and gave a reading for the Blue Stacks Arts Festival, was awarded the First Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Award for “Spell,” a Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, Ireland in October. Ted will also be teaching poem in her new manuscript titled Vault. Poems from the manuscript have apa writing workshop at the Insight of Rathlin festival in Ballyshannon, County peared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Verse, Colorado Review, Volt, Denver Antrim, Northern Ireland on November 7. Poet Annie Deppe and Ted also Quarterly, New American Writing and Parthenon West. hosted the Dingle Writers Week, a seven-day conference from August 15-22 Janet Kaplan in Dingle, Ireland. From January 7-14 2010, Ted will direct the Stonecoast in had several prose poems (including a prose sonnet) published this spring in the Ireland residency in Howth, County Dublin, for the Stonecoast MFA Program anthology An Introduction to the Prose Poem, edited by Brian Clements and Jamey of the University of Southern Maine. From July 7-14 he will also direct a Stone- Dunham. (Firewheel Editions, 2009). These poems will also appear in her book, coast residency in Dingle, Ireland. Ted and his wife also hope to host another Dreamlife of a Philanthropist, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame independent writers week in Ireland next summer. Interested parties should Press. Among other readings in and around NYC, Janet read as part of the Word e-mail him at teddeppe2@hotmail.com. for Word Reading Series in Bryant Park, New York. She is the Poet– in– ResiB.H. Fairchild dence at Fordham University in New York City until Spring 2010. recently published Usher: Poems with W.W. Norton, 2009 and Trilogy, with David Kirby’s illustrations by Barry Moser with Pennyroyal Press, 2009. He was awarded the new publication Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll is being published by Pushcart Prize in 2009 for “Frieda Pushnik,” originally published in Image, Continuum Books. He read at Hamilton College and Southern Illinois Univer2008. He will be the featured reader at AWP in 2010 for the William Carlos sity in October. Williams Anniversary and a panel member for Image’s 20th Anniversary. He Lesle Lewis read at River Styx in St. Louis in September and will be reading again at the has poems forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review and Bateau. She just led a Guadalajara International Book Festival, November 30-December 2. workshop called “The Thin Line: between poetry and prose” at Great River Arts in Vermont. Erica Funkhouser Margaret Lloyd participated in a workshop on poetry and ecology at the Massachusetts Poetry had two poems published, “Magdalen” and “Rembrandt’s Women”, in Poetry Festival in Lowell in October. East. On November 20th at 7pm, she will be reading at the Downtown Writers Joanna Furhman Center of the YMCA in Syracuse. Margaret will also be giving a poetry reading at has a Poetry Project reading for her book Pageant scheduled for February 24th. Fairfield University’s low– residency MFA program in Creative Writing in MysHer article “Teaching Jayne Cortez” (and her interview with her) will be in the tic, CT between Christmas and New Year’s. next issue of Teachers & Writers magazine. She will be reading at the following Adrian Matejka’s venues: Earshot Reading Series (with Steven Karl) November 20, 7:30 at Rose new book, Mixology, was published by Penguin Books in May, 2009. Poems reLive Music in Brooklyn NY; Book Party for Pageant on December 5, at Erika’s cently appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Reverie, Salt Hill, St. LouisSalon, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Labyrinth Books with Yerra Sugarman Decem- Post Dispatch, and the anthology From the Fishouse. Adrian read in New York at ber 8, 6 p.m., Princeton NJ; Celebrating the Renegade Press (with Peter Wal- the Bowery Poetry Club in October and will read at the University of Colorado at dor, Jean-Paul Pecqueur, and Mihaela Moscaliuc), January 26th, 6-8pm at the Boulder on Jan. 28, 2010. He will also be doing a reading (“From the Fishouse: A ACA Galleries, NYC; Emory University’s “What’s New in Poetry” Series (with Reading of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, Joanna Fuhrman, Stacey Lynn Brown, Jenny Sadre-Orafai), January 29; POG Reading March 20, Tucson, Arizona; and In Your Ear (with Chris Nealon) May (cont.)
news and events
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and Just Plain Sound Great” ) and participating in a panel (“One never know, do one?: Identity vs. Aesthetics in Contemporary Poetry of Color”) at AWP in April. Alice Mattison’s essay on the current state of short story publication, including a review of four recent books of short stories, was just published in Yale Review. Alice is one of four organizers of the Ordinary Evening Reading Series in New Haven, CT, which puts on monthly readings of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction at the Anchor Bar in downtown New Haven. Alice James poets who’d be willing to travel to New Haven and would like to be considered for a reading should look at their blogspot and send a few poems: http://www.ordinaryevening.blogspot. com. Mihaela Moscaliuc has published poems, translations, and reviews in Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Great River Review, Zone 3, and Connotation Press. She read for “Other Words: A Conference of Literary Magazines, Independent Publishers, and Writers” at Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL in November and will be participating in the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Pasadena, CA, November 12-14. Idra Novey won the 2009 NEA fellowship in translation for her translation of In the Time of Jaguars (a collection by Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros) from Portuguese to English. She is publishing poetry in the fall issue of The American Poetry Review, the fall issue of The Pequod, and fall issue of A Public Space. She also participated in the Poetry Society of America’s “A Season in Poetry” series at the Bronx Botanical Garden with Marie Ponsot and Monica Ferrell. Lia Purpura was awarded a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Two Experiments and a Coda,” which originally appeared in Agni Magazine. Some of her poems will be published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, Diagram, and essays in Orion, The Seattle Review and Georgia Review. She will also be participating in two AWP panels: “Letters to a Young Poet” and “Writing the Mind’s Wild Geography.” Donald Revell recently published The Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud (a new translation by Donald Revell) with Omnidawn Publishers, June 2009, and The Bitter Withy, new poems by Donald Revell with Alice James Books in September 2009. The book is on Publishers Weekly’s “Best Books of 2009”. He read at the Concord Academy Chapel, Concord MA, University of Rhode Island, Vegas Valley Book Festivaland Moe’s Books, Berkeley, CA on November 10. Chad Sweeney read in Santa Rosa, CA, in October at the Sonoma County Museum; Berkeley, CA, and read on November 1 at Pegasus Books; Talahassee, FL, November 3, at the Warehouse of Florida State University; Tampa, FL, November 4, 6 at the University of South Florida Graphic Studio; St. Petersburg, FL, November 5 at the Eckerd College Writing Center; and St. Augustine, FL, November 6 and 7 at Flagler College for the fifth annual OTHER WORDS: A Conference of Literary Magazines, Independent Publishers, and Writers. Ellen Doré Watson will be publishing her poem “Dream So Sweet” in the forthcoming anthology The Disco Prairie Social Aid and Pleasure Club with Factory Hollow, 2010. She has her poems “Parade of Possibles,” “Late Love,” and “He Brings Wood” appearing in the Fall 2009 edition of Prairie Schooner. Ellen read at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in October at three different events: reading with James Tate and James Haug at the Amherst Cinema, “Wild, Wild West – 3 poets from Western MA” and “Ugly Truths” with Patrick Donnelly, Frannie Lindsay, and Nancy K. Pearson. Also in October, Ellen participated in the Colrain Manuscript Workshop held in Colrain, MA. She will be reading her new Adelia Prado translations for the American Literary Translators Association on November 12 in Pasedena. She will also read at Ruskin Art Club in Los Angeles with Joy Manesiotis on Sunday, November 15, at 2:00 pm. CA. She begins teaching in the Drew University MFA Program in January 2010.
Coming next season Phantom Noise Brain Turner Available April 2010
How to Catch a Falling Knife Daniel Johnson Available April 2010
Shahid Reads His Own Palm Reginald Dwayne Betts Available May 2010
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David & Margarete Harvey Joseph & Katherine Macari Foundation Judy Swahnberg
Catherine Anderson Sally Ball Bob Brooks Ronald Cohen Beverly Davis Carl Dennis Jeannine Dobbs Laura Edwards Peter and Leslye Fries Erica Funkhouser Patricia Gibbons Dobby Gibson Joan and David Grubin Donald Hall Joan Joffe Hall Hugh Hennedy Alice Jones Mary and William Joslin Donald Revell and Claudia Keelan David Kirby Lesle Lewis Tim Mayo Jane Mead Mihaela Moscaliuc Jean-Paul Pecqueur Joyce Peseroff Lawrence Rosenberg Mary Szybist Rita Waldor
Patrons Anne Marie Macari Peter Waldor Donors Catherine Barnett Celia Gilbert Benefactor Matthea Harvey Contributors Robert Ellis Harriet Feinberg Marilyn Greenberg Theo Kalikow Sydney Lea Alice Mattison Nina Nyhart
Hugh Coyle and Maynard Yost Readers Tom Absher Elizabeth Ahl Lewis Ashman Suzanne Berger Clifford Bernier Geroge Blecher Henry Braun Lisa Breger Ann Browning David Campbell Mary Beth Caseiro Vanessa Catanzaro Aimee Beal and Jim Church Jim Daniels Deborah DeNicola Bonnie Dickinson Connie Donovan Amy Dryansky Denise Duhamel Lynn Emanuel Mary Feeney Sarah Gambito Forrest Gander Cameron Gearen Rebecca Kaiser Gibson Mimi Gilpin Michael Glaser
Anna Goldman Judy Goodpasture Sarah Gorham Alison S. Granucci John Gribble Jim Haba Rhonda Hacker Vanessa Haley Beata Hayton Sarah Heller Mary Herman Angela Hicks Nancy Jean Hill Maurice Hirsch Michele Anne Jaquays Daniel Johnson Monty Jones Lisa Kershner Diane Kruchkow John Krumberger Frederic Lawrence Ruth Lepson Margaret Lloyd Jean Lunn Alessandra Lynch Joanie Mackowski Jynne Dilling Martin Anne Masters Julianna McCarthy Margaretta Jill McKay Helena Minton Kamilah Aisha Moon
Idra Novey Judith Pacht Angela Palmisono Juliet Patterson Shelli-Jo Pelletier Newton Press Donna Prinzmetal Lia Purpura Ruth Anne Quick Susan Raby-Dunne David Radavich Cynthia Ravinski John Rippey Kimberley Ann Rogers Beverly Salerno Neil Shepard Betsy Sholl Jody Stewart Allen Strous Alice Taylor J.R. Thelin Mona Toscano Edwina Trentham Rebecca Gambito and Soloman Verdes Connie Voisine Ellen Doré Watson Dara Wier Mary-Sherman Willis Eleanor Wilner Ken and Lois Wisman Marilyn Zuckerman
we THaNk THe FollowiNg iNDiViDUals aND iNsTiTUTioNs For THeir sUPPorT oF THe alice FUND Lee Briccetti Bill Rasmovicz Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno and Lawrence Rosenberg David Bonanno Carey Salerno Chubb Group Thomson-Shore Carmela Ciurarru Jeneva & Roger Stone and Financial Benefits Research Group Beverly Davis Lisa Sherman & Martin Stone Christina Davis Marla Vogel Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company Franklin Savings Bank Farmington Branch Brown & Brown Insurance Peter Gelwarg Anne Marie Macari Joan Joffe Hall Valley National Bank Jan Heller Peter Waldor Alice Fund Donor Levels: Philip Kahn Alice: $10,000 or more Ann Killough Consortium Book Sales and Henry: up to $10,000 Nancy Lagomarsino Distribution William: up to $5,000 Ruth Lepson Katherine and Joseph Macari Robertson: up to $1,000 Lesle Lewis Privett Special Risk Services Wilky: up to $500 United States Fire Insurance Company Diane Macari Jane Mead Anonymous For more information Idra Novey Bernstein Global Wealth please visit April Ossmann Management www.alicejamesbooks.org Jean-Paul Pecqueur Anonymous David and Margarete Harvey Rita Waldor
staff spotlight Deanna Kaiser joined Alice James Books as Editorial Assistant in July of 2009. The AJB interns sat down with Deanna to ask her some humorous, enlightening, and practical questions. AJB: What drew you to Alice James Books? I’ve always loved books and have wanted to work in publishing. I really like that an idea or inspiration can evolve into something beautifully bound and readable. I serendipitously saw the advertisement for an editorial assistant at AJB and applied. AJB: What’s your favorite music to listen to at work? I love a lot of different types of music. In no particular order, here’s a list: Beck, Tom Petty, The Black Eyed Peas, Rolling Stones, RHCP, Steve Miller Band, Wilco, Pearl Jam, Wyclef, Bob Marley, The Rustic Overtones, The Black Crowes, The Smithereens, Neil Young, Buena Vista Social Club, The Talking Heads, The Grateful Dead, The Basement Jaxx, The Strokes, The Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac, CSNY, The Traveling Wilburys, Wilco, 311, Radiohead, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals and Daft Punk.
10 tended St. Michael’s College in Colchester, VT, where I earned my B.A. in journalism and mass communications with a minor in philosophy. AJB: What’s your favorite book and why? Naming a favorite is too hard. Instead I’ll tell you the last book I read: The Secret Diaries of Marie Antoinette. AJB: What do you do in a sunny fall day in Maine when you don’t have to work? I’m not sure, I haven’t really had many of those! I imagine that I’d take a drive, go on a walk with my dog Marley, or read a book. AJB: The Beatles or the Rolling Stones? If I was ten, I would definitely say The Beatles. When I was younger I had a fascination with anything Beatles related. I used to get teased because at school I’d go around singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Twist and Shout.” Although I’m a big fan of the Beatles’ early albums, I think now I’d go with The Rolling Stones. AJB: What’s the one thing you can’t go through a day without?
AJB: What inspires you to get up in the morning?
My glasses or contacts.
This is going to sound really cliché, but I’m inspired to get up in the morning because of work. I’ve always relished routine, and having a job with purpose definitely helps.
AJB: If you were a dance, which one would you be?
AJB: Where did you grow up/go to school? I grew up in the woods of Temple, Maine. My parents built a house on a big piece of land, and we didn’t get electricity until was about seven, so, needless to say we got really good at using our imaginations. My childhood was spent building forts, exploring and playing with my two older siblings, Dane, and Natalie. I went from one wonderful state to the next, and at-
I’d be a classical ballet. I started dancing with the Farmington Dance Workshop when I was about four. Dancing, like writing, is something that’s always with you. Although I still dance, I no longer dance on pointe, and I can’t say I miss squeezing my feet into those shoes! AJB: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve ever received? The best advice I’ve ever received was from my advisor in college, Dr. Jon Hyde. Hyde (as the students call him) gives the greatest advice and guidance, but he also helped me grasp more serious concepts about how the world works. He helped me understand that everyone has a story worth telling, and he taught me to never lose sight of that story. The best piece of advice he gave me was to never preface any piece of work you’re showing (or reading) with anything other than your name and the title. I think the worst advice I ever received was from this career advisor who told me I had to wear a power suit to get a job. I’m not a power suit kind of person.
Deanna and Marley outside of the AJB office
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website highlight with Kelsey Lowe
This summer AJB approached me about redesigning their website, I was excited but had no idea what I was really getting into. The following months would be packed with research, application modification, cataloging, and more. As most of you know, our present website is perfectly capable of functioning, regrettably, that’s all it does. This project was aimed at bringing Alice James into the twenty-first century. On the new website you can search for books, browse the online catalog and watch videos about our new publications. We even have a blog on the way. During the design phase I worked closely with another AJB intern, Becca Park, to come up with several prototype images. The new AJB website features Alice front and center. Cleaner, more modern lines are incorporated, and its new color scheme to really make it all about the books. We worked intensively in PhotoShop, DreamWeaver, FireFox, Java, MySQL, PHP, and XHTML to make the new site interesting and navigitable for Alices. Everything on the AJB site has been coded and designed to function on its own for the most user-friendly experience. Most of the new features were built from scratch. No one else has an application quite like ours. Why? Because it was made uniquely Alicefriendly. For newer, more convenient functionality, you can now navigate a comprehensive drop-down menu from any page within the site. No more guessing which category a page might be under. You can actually see where it is! No more scrolling through long pages to find a book or wishing you remembered the whole title. The catalog is searchable, organized by author, title, and publication date. It also offers plenty of conveniently placed ‘view bookbag’ buttons. The new ‘bookbag’ is another important feature. We’ve teamed up with PayPal to give you an easier online buying experience. Simply click the ‘add to bag’ button featured next to any book or AJB item, and it becomes automatically stored in your PayPal cart. When you’re ready to pay, click the ‘view bookbag’ button, and you’re taken directly to PayPal to safely, easily complete your purchase. You can also make donations to AJB via PayPal. Donations can be made in any amount, or you can choose to sign up for regular donations to be credited from your account through PayPal for recurring, painless donations. You can also sign up to buy books by season, as well as purchase the original standing order. There are new shipping options, including expedited ones, for that book you just have to have now. We’ve streamlined most of the older content on AJB. No more searching through letters or messages in quirky places to find out how to submit a manuscript or send us an e-mail. You can do it all with a simple click. I can’t wait to have the new Alice site up and running and I’m sure you’re pretty excited now too. This has been an incredible experience for me; my work isn’t on the refrigerator this time, I’m showcasing my design skills on the world wide web! - Kelsey Lowe, AJB web designer and intern
A sneak peak at the new website’s donation page
A portion of the website’s new board members page
our interns
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Dory Diaz
Ariel Cohen
washed up on the Cape Cod shore and spent her early life reading by the light of the moon. She meandered up to Maine with the idea to study creative writing and has traded her fins for a pair of legs to continue with her love of playing field hockey. When she isn’t reading, writing, or running, you can find her working in the UMF Theatre.
Dory Diaz
Samantha Shepard
grew up in the small town of LaGrange, Maine where she ran wild with her three sisters. She is daughter to a social worker and a fisheries scientist, from whom she traces her ancestry to the stone cutters of Deer Isle, Maine. Currently a senior Creative Writing major at UMF, she studies fiction and creative nonfiction writing. Recently she spent the summer tagging and tracking American Shad with her father on the Kennebec River. Her favorite trees are beech trees.
Dory Diaz
Laura Jennings
has probably danced in your presence before. She is embarking on her last year at UMF then will go on to film school so she can bring her stories to life. She lived in France for four months and would love to go back if only for baguettes and pastries. She finds herself to be a lot funnier than she is poetic but keeps trying anyway.
Kelsey Lowe
owns several computers. Their names are Margaret, Winifred, Agnus, and Hector. She talks to them in code. Sometimes, they talk back. A very wise person once said “code is poetry.” She agrees. < $_ SELECT* klowe ; FROM brain SELECT* brain.sentiments LINE= ID=$14 “heart” ; FROM brain SELECT* brain.ideas LINE=ID=7 “poetry” ; .._$>
Dory Diaz
Dory Diaz
is a writer, photographer, and single-mom of two mostly lovely children. She worked as a project manager for AOL for nearly seven years, gave birth to her two – okay, they’re lovely about 85% of the time, and really not bad the other 15 – children, and decided to finally get her degree in Criminal Justice. After her first semester at NVCC in Sterling, VA, she realized what she really wanted was to write (something she had always done, but with her BFA she could tell people she was actually trained), so she moved her two – okay, fine, 80% of the time they’re lovely, 15% mostly okay, and 5% truly awful but loveable anyway – children and herself to Maine, where she is now pursuing her BFA in Creative Writing at UMF.
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Seen & Heard
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno reads from Slamming Open the Door at The University of Maine at Farmington. The October 8 reading was coordinated by SAVES, Sexual Assault Victims Emergency Services and sponsored, in part, by Alice James Books.
Bill Rasmovicz takes a standing break at a Beatrice Hawley Award screening.
Idra Novey smiles for a manuscript screening snapshot.
Ellen DorĂŠ Watson amidst a pile of manuscripts, poised to make a decision.
alice asks...
14
Donald Revell Alice James Books: What’s your favorite mythical creature?
DR: Dawn.
Donald Revell: Nothing is more real than mythology, and I have an
AJB: If AJB took a look
“Harvey” is also dear to my heart. AJB: If you could have a conversation with any deceased poet, who would you choose? DR: I would wish to drink applejack and go sledding with Hart Crane. Our conversation would be sung. AJB: What’s your favorite cuisine? DR: Old-line, old-fashioned Italian…baked ziti and bitter broccoli as prepared on the west side of Manhattan circa 1962…. AJB: If you were stuck on a deserted island for one year what five items would you take? DR: A Bible, the Library of America edition of Hart Crane’s poems & prose, a notebook, a box of pencils and my concertina.
inside your refrigerator, what would we find? DR: Just now? Strawberries, heavy cream, eggs, bacon and chardonnay. AJB: What did you want to be when you were a child? DR: A Bishop. AJB: What was the last film you saw? Would you recommend it to your friends? DR: A recent German film called “Cherry Blossoms”…it’s magnificent and pure. But my favorite film of all time remains “Jules et Jim.” It’s a damned fine novel too.
AJB: What magazine or journal can you consistently read cover-to-cover?
AJB: When was the last time you laughed out loud, and why?
DR: Gourmet
DR: Jasper, our giant schnauzer, likes to play the piano in the evenings, and
AJB: If you could choose to be any fictional character, who would you be? DR: The Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Chapter VII of that novel is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. AJB: If asked to prepare a tantalizing dish for your favorite poet, what would you make? DR: My seven-lettuce soup…it contains enormous quantities of sweet cream butter and is quite the greenest thing you’ve ever seen, or tasted. AJB: Have you ever run out of gas while driving? Where were you / what happened?
I laugh out loud every time that he does. Of course, we place his favorite toys on top of the piano, so as to inspire him… AJB: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve found in your yard / garden? DR: An abandoned limousine AJB: Name the best and / or worst poem titles you’ve ever come up with (published or unpublished). DR: A title I still think of as my best and which an almost universal consensus believes to be my worst is “Even Everybody”…it comes from the exclamation of an illiterate indentured servant in 17th-century New England…when a particularly harsh winter had been survived, this
DR: Back in college days…my best friend and I were driving from Bing-
wonderful man rejoiced to note that “The cattle and even everybody seem
hamton, New York to Buffalo…my friend fell asleep at the wheel and I
changed!”
steered from the passenger seat for a long, long while, terrified. Happily, we ran out of gas in a place called Horseheads. AJB: What’s your favorite time of day?
Francois Camoin
overwhelming fondness for the Easter Bunny…though Jimmy Stewart’s pal
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