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Street Press Book Contest |
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Street Press |
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Black Leapt In to any poem for the thrill of finding a poet of
eerie energy breaking new ground. These pages are full of unexpected images,
passionate energy, and entirely new ways of making the homely, heartbreaking
world as beautiful and odd as it deserves to be. The lines and their grief-stricken
cadences invent a new music for the American experience. “Improbable:
our toes and shoes, the tongues and laces …” of “Fourth
Grade Science.” “That billowy thing in flames back there?/That’s
not my circus tent. Never seen it.” I have been reading Chris Forhan's
poetry with pleasure for many years, but this new book kept me up late with
its tricks and terrors as no recent collection has, thank God, for a long,
long time. —Laura Kasischke These poems have in them something of Theodore Roethke’s excitement at being alive in the physical world—how much there is to see!—as well as Roethke’s certainty of the darkness threaded all through that world. Yet they remain wholly Chris Forhan’s poems—brooding and exuberant, tender and amazed. “The heart gets sad, you slap it,” he writes. Fiercely observant, richly inventive, and sometimes very funny, Black Leapt In is a terrific book. —Lawrence Raab Available June 1st, buy Black Leapt In online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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camouflage, of appearance versus reality, of that darkness out of which we hope to draw forth a self we can recognize as our own—these are among the concerns of these beautifully eerie poems that over and over purport to navigate one space even as they carry us to spaces the poems themselves seem startled to have arrived at. —Carl Phillips Buy Boy with Flowers online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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range, craft, and a dreadful curiosity about how human beings work, Richard
Hoffman gives us Gold Star Road. Gold Star—an apt title for this collection,
my hands-down favorite for the Barrow Street Prize 2006. Hoffman’s
poems tap into moments when civilization dissolves, not superficially, but
at its emotional roots. Simply reading this book becomes an engaged, passionate
experience. Time and again through the poet’s weary irony comes the
bite of life. In short lyrics like “Refugee,” “Psalm,”
and “Humility,” and in longer lyrics like “Founder’s
Gallery” and the title poem, “Gold Star Road,” he makes
the world seem, in the words of Wislawa Szymborska, whom he quotes: “just
a room away.” —Molly Peacock Buy Gold Star Road online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| “The
man who shoots/at another man has forgotten/what the student who sits all
day/is trying to remember.” Will someone please place this book
on the steps of the White House? The poems of Stan Sanvel Rubin move with
unobtrusive delicacy and deep grace through the mysteries of time and being.
He’s a wise guide, rich with luminous beckonings, unflinching in the
face of complexity. One feels more peaceful, reading these fine, compelling
poems. —Naomi Shihab Nye Buy Hidden Sequel online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| Sally
Ball grew up in New Jersey and now lives in Arizona. Annus Mirabilis
is her first book. "In the provocative, finely wrought and, at every turn, original poems of Annus Mirabilis, Sally Ball examines the human impulse to know-to master a thing by knowing it-and to make of mastery and knowledge a clean equation. A bracingly keen observer of human nature, Ball uncovers the limitations of that thinking, the many ways in which it can only bring us face to face with near unbearable truths-about ourselves, about those we love, about the world as we'd all this time thought we knew it. How to reckon with that part of us that we suspect is merciless?" -Carl Phillips Buy Annus Mirabilis online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| Christine
Scanlon was born in New York City in 1971and, except for a brief time in
Montréal, has lived there ever since. She received her MFA from The
New School, and is currently doing graduate work in literature at The City
University of New York. A Hat on the Bed is her first book. A Manipulation of Seams aims to probe meaning in order to get at deeper meaning. Like the physicist in her title poem, Christine Scanlon believes that "If the relationship holds/it radiates./If it endures a new second/it matters." Everything the poet's keen mind lights on becomes "a gentle apocalypse": theology, (auto)biography, science, Danny Kaye, grilled cheese sandwiches. This pensive and winning book manipulates only in the sense that very fine skills are deployed with infinite care. From somewhere, Gertrude Stein is blessing this poet's inception. Read her book; it will reward you. -Kathleen Ossip Buy A Hat on the Bed online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| "With
Selah Joshua Corey joins a generation of exciting first-book poets (Jennifer
Clarvoe, Joanie Mackowski, Cate Marvin come to mind) who apply the fundamental
poetic gift of the ear, in new ways. Sheer richness of language, and in
the best poems cadences layered like those of Wallace Stevens, guide the
reader through Corey's extravagant, playful, fantastical and profuse otherworld."
-Robert Pinsky "Joshua Corey's book maps new territory in the indefatigable search for an adequate form of elegy. These poems meditate in a timeless manner on the terrible NOT at the center of death, but they do so to new music, one that embodies sly humor, formal invention, and rhetorical bravado. They are original, sophisticated and unabashed." -Mary Jo Bang "Deep engager, Joshua Corey seeks to redeem what is 'singed' and 'wared' in us with 'the pupa's word. Dazzled weresong' ('man' song, a 'we're' or 'we are' song), one made strange from the straits of the problem. Through a ravishing compact formal beauty comes 'white sound crashing . . . on the shoals of . . . sleep.' He has gone so far into disillusion and aporia that he seems about to emerge out the other side, as through one of those suddenly wavering, watery space- and time-walls in a science-fiction film. What if it really is as he says: 'my mouth is full of his breath. / His tongue is in my mouth, and his name / is every body I see'? Selah: lift up! He keeps you hooked; he keeps you tantalized."-Cal Bedient Boston Review Timeout NY review February 12, 2004 Buy Selah online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| Joshua
Corey update: Joshua Corey’s second book, FOURIER SERIES, has just won the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award for Best Book-Length Work of Constrained English Literature, as judged by Christian Bök for Spineless Books. Please visit Spineless Books for more information. |
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| Evelyn
Reilly lives in New York City and writes poetry, as well as text for museum
exhibits on historical and cultural subjects. She received a degree in zoology
from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts degree
from the Writing Program at Columbia University. Her literary work has appeared
in ACM, American Writing, Barrow Street, Parnassus, The New Yorker, 6ix,
Salamander, and 3rd Bed, among other journals. Her poetry was selected by
Heather McHugh for the anthology Sad Little Breathings & Other Acts
of Ventriloquism and has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Hiatus explores the fascinating, frustrating, often tragic, and sometimes comic “gap” between words and world, human being and human being, and the human species and its cosmic setting. At times writing “between the lines” of older traditions, at others opening new spaces for writing to inhabit, Reilly has created a book that is both playful and scholarly. Leslie Scalapino describes Hiatus as “a social comedy by lines delineating contrasting roles interior and exterior.” Elaine Equi applauds its “intentionally wayward and witty poems.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls it “a way of working through life’s multiplicities in inventive, particular and discerning language.” Hiatus was a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Buy Hiatus online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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| Lois
Hirshkowitz, who lives in New York City, is a founding editor and trustee
of Barrow Street, has taught at the Writer’s Voice in New
York City, and has worked as a New Jersey Poet-in-the-School and as a Dodge
poet. In 1973 she founded an independent day school, Lakewood Prep, which
she still ‘attends.’ She has published three books of poetry:
Nurture & Torture (San Diego Poets Press, 1992), Marking
Her Questions (Mellen Poetry Press, 1993), and Pan’s Daughters
(Chi Chi Press, 1998). “There’s poetry in the very idea of p, the infinite number which shows us constancy of mathematical relationship. If you know the radius, p guarantees the circumference of a circle, and Lois Hirshkowitz guarantees us a remarkable radius of pleasure in these quirky, dream-like poems about the circumference of a life, and how to calculate it. Sounds abstract? It is, but this is a full-bodied abstraction with a sensuous apprehension of the world. Hirshkowitz’s poems are mature work in peak flower, radiant on the landscape of contemporary American letters.” -Molly Peacock Buy 3.14159+ online via our secure payment service, Paypal: |
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