Two More For 2009

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is pleased to announce the publication of two new collections of poetry: Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina and Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus.

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Destruction Myth
poems by Mathias Svalina
7 x 8.5 x .202", 83 pp.
$15.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-880834-87-9

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off and replaced with a soft serve ice cream machine, I am pretty sure it is poetry. Svalina's book does no less, and also so much more. Read but also believe this book of fantastic lies. It's like how you see a cat sitting there and you think 'that is just a cat' and then you realize that cat is God. Mathias Svalina has reinvented Yahweh as an Animorph. When this book is taught in college classrooms, students will curl up on the air conditioning vents and ask for salt."
- Anne Boyer

"In the beginning, we were children and we had beautiful imaginations, but we had no home for them. Then up sprouted Mathias Svalina's Destruction Myth and we did. It too was beautiful, bloody, silly, haunted. At first we thought it was godly, and then we discovered it was human. We feared it; we loved it; we slept with it under our pillows."
- Eleni Sikelianos

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Sum of Every Lost Ship
poems by Allison Titus
5.5 x 8.5 x .202", 78 pp.
$15.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-880834-88-6

"Sum of Every Lost Ship navigates what is haunting, strange, and unknowable-grief and disappearances, fragments and histories. Reading, we are deftly balanced on the shores of mystery, a mystery fathomed by a keen instinct for metaphor. Allison Titus is a writer exquisitely attuned to compassion, isolation, and the sometimes overlooked details of this sturdy and tenuous world-goats' hearts, schooners, cabinets, arctic realities. This is a startling and moving collection."
- Talvikki Ansel

"The pilgrim heart," as one of Allison Titus's exquisite phrasings has it, requires an unmooring, a letting go, into a world marked by passing journeys, passing architectures, almost-lost motels for intimates to get lost in-a hardscrabble world rich with leavings. An internality emerges, sets out, to congress with the obstinate, the creaturely. This poetry's experiment takes us to the fact that the everyday is also experimental, in that, familiar as it is, it can never, if it is seen intensely enough to be durably writ, be wholly predicted. So fine a lyric sensibility as the reader will find in these poems is all the more compelling for acknowledging the human limits of the lyric, for making hard choices, even refusals, and for never romanticizing omission-i.e., obliteration-but testing it at every step with earthly perceptions. Allison Titus's Sum of Every Lost Ship presents readers with a striking new poetry, and a beautiful and truly original voice."
- William Olsen

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Ordering Information

Destruction Myth and Sum of Every Lost Ship can be ordered through SPD, Small Press Distribution, at 800-869-7553, or spdbooks.org, and is also available through many corporate and independent bookstores, as well as Amazon.com, and BarnesAndNoble.com. Orders can also be placed directly at the phone numbers below.

Please submit requests for media review copies and printed catalogs to Rita Grabowski at poetrycenter@csuohio.edu or call 216-687-3986.

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For more information on individual books or for submission guidelines for our upcoming First Book (Judge: Rae Armantrout) and Open Book (Jury: Kazim Ali, Mary Biddinger, Michael Dumanis, and Sarah Gridley) contests (Postmark Deadline: February 15th), please visit our website: www.csuohio.edu/poetrycenter
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I just got Mathias' book in the mail today & can't wait to read it! Titus has poems up on Real Poetik

Monday Round-Up

Fellow FITer & friend, Dottie, has poems up on Real Poetik.

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Futurepoem has open submissions this month. Read about it here.

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Yesterday Lila and I walked the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and then ate pizza outdoors. Today is in the 70s which means I should get off the computer & enjoy the weather.
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Real Poetik Update

Sampson Starkweather has poems up on Real Poetik & there has been a changing of editors so get your submissions ready.
Dear readers,

Happy summer. I'd like to share some news with you: I'm delighted to announce that two new editors, the wonderful poets Lily Brown & Claire Becker, yes: Claire Becker & Lily Brown, will now conduct your weekly encounters with RealPoetik. It's been an honor sending poems your way for three years (some of them yours!), & reading your comments and submissions. I send hugs and take a bow. I hope you'll keep in touch: write to me at anabobo@gmail.com, visit me at www.nightcommute.org, and look for my book due out from Tarpaulin Sky Press in the fall. I'll be reading on with you, so let's see what Lily & Claire have in store for us:

[exit Ana Bozicevic]
[enter Lily Brown & Claire Becker]:

We're excited to be taking over editorial duties at RealPoetik and look forward to building on the work Ana and previous editors have done. The poems published as emails in RealPoetik are able to go virtually anywhere--read on your phone on the train, aloud to your dog, on a braille display; or printed out and scribbled on; deleted; or replied to. Through email and the RealPoetik blog, we will bring you poems straight from the physical world, where real-live poetry communities won’t be superseded anytime soon. We're dedicated to publishing poems that are engaging, challenging, and aesthetically diverse. We look forward to this new endeavor and would love to hear from you at any time!

Lily & Claire

About the Editors:

Lily Brown holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. Her first book, Rust or Go Missing, is forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She lives in Chicago and in Athens, where she is a Ph.D. student at The University of Georgia.

Claire Becker lives in Oakland and teaches high school at the California School for the Blind. She is the author of the chapbooks Untoward, from Lame House Press, and Get You, from Duration Press. She holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California and an Education Specialist Instruction Credential from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

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RealPoetik
realpoetik.blogspot.com
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If you can make it tomorrow be sure to catch Kaveh's reading. His poems are beautiful and he's a great reader!
Bryant Park Reading Room

Tuesday, July 14
7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Kaveh Bassiri
Patrick S. Donnelly
Richard Tayson

11 W. 42nd St.
(behind the New York Public Library
between 40th and 42nd Streets & Fifth and Sixth)

Loneliness, such a sad affair

GlitterPony Issue #6 is up. Julia Cohen, Elizabeth Lenson, Shane Jones, Mathias Svalina, Ari Feld, Donald Dunbar, Lisa Ciccarello, and Seth Parker.
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sawbuck 2.4 is here to warm you up with the fiery poetry of all these good people:

{Ewa Chrusciel} {Melissa Culbertson} {Mark Cunningham}

{Glenn R. Frantz} {James Grinwis} {Eli Halpern}

{Sean Patrick Hill} {Melissa Severin}

{Paige Taggart} {John Woodward}

hope to see you there.

& as always, we are reading for future issues, so send us your poems!

~samuel wharton, editor
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[Realpoetik] Thanh Tam Tuyen, translated by Linh Dinh

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failbetter
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Shampoo Issue 34
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Trickhouse vol. 3 – Winter 2008

visual artist: Eric Baden
writers: Brenda Iijima, Rebecca Brown, Michelle Naka Pierce
guest curator: Miriam Kathrein
sound: Andrew Klobucar
video: Abigail Child
correspondent: Erik Anderson
interview: Mathias Svalina with Shelton Walsmith
experiment: Denise Uyegara with Natalie Nguyen
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missed Eric Baus' reading on Friday? Head over here to check it out.

A Poem

I took this from Real Poetik http://realpoetik.blogspot.com/

Damaged Soul Document

by Steve Roberts

Big hand on the keyboard, diagonal
striped glove, difficult to remember past
christmases, the blur of memory, several
coffee cup stains, row of imperfect circles.

Moron wanted to be the life of parties
unknown. The woods, several years ago.
Annual rememberance of empty box.
I don't want to use the word 'you' anymore.

New and selected strands of hair, mix
myself a poison, call it a potion, endless
nights on the couch, party with wine,
restless clothesline begins to flap.

My glow is not alive. Someone
has spread blankets over ourselves,
morning is sneaking up. Car won't start.
Parties are the in-between, these moments.

September starts with a Yelp

Well after spending all day and night at JFK I now find myself at my friend's house in Chicago sipping a cup of English Breakfast tea and looking forward to a completely empty day of relaxing and daydreaming- maybe even a little writing too!

September will soon be upon us and the are two amazing readings happening. The first one (T&W) I will moderate and it will also be Zach Miller's last east-coast reading for a while. The second one is the release party for LIT and CA Conrad (who I read with back in June) will be reading amongst other wonderfuls. All detailed info below:

Teachers & Writers Collaborative 2020 Visions
Thursday, September 6th 7pm- Free

Come out and celebrates the first Fall reading featuring Deborah Landau, Matthew Zapruder and Zach Miller!

It's free and there will be refreshments served after the reading so go aheand and mark your calanders now!

Deborah Landau's poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely and she has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her book, Orchidelirium, a National Poetry Series finalist, won the Anhinga Prize and was shortlisted for the Foreword Book of the Year Award. She co-curates the KGB Poetry Reading Series and directs the creative writing program at NYU


Matthew Zapruder is the author of two collections of
poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist, selected by
Tony Hoagland as the winner of the 2007 William Carlos
Williams Award. He is also the co-translator of Secret
Weapon, the final collection by the late Romanian poet
Eugen Jebeleanu (Coffee House Press, 2007). He teaches
in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the New
School and works as an Editor for Wave Books. He lives
in New York City.

Zach Miller is a graduate of the New School MFA program for Creative Writing and has published in Red China, Agriculture Reader, and has poems forthcoming in Sea Legs.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 8th Ave, Suite 2020
A,C,E, 34th/Penn Station
www.twc.org

LIT 13 LAUNCH PARTY AND CELEBRATION!

Friday, September 7th, 6-10 PM
Wollman Hall @ The New School
66 West 12th Street, NYC, 10011

Featuring readings by...

CAROLINE CONWAY
ADAM GOLASKI
CACONRAD
TERESE SVOBODA

And a special talk/reading with ROBERT POLITO
on LIT 13 feature DETOUR: A Symposium on Edgar Ulmer's 1945 PRC Film Noir

There will be dancing!
There will be eating and drinking!
There will be oohs and aahs for LIT's spanking new design!
There will be cheers for LIT's new editors, Peter Bogart Johnson and Nicole Steinberg, and tears of sadness shed for our departing prose editor, Danielle Winterton!

It's going to be an emotional evening.

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Reader bios:

Caroline Conway edits the online journal RealPoetik. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, ology, luzmag, and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. The first line of "Song for the Inanimate" is taken from Samuel Beckett's novel Malloy.

But at any rate. Adam Golaski was in our Brit Lit class. We both considered him to be one of the most pretentious people we'd run across at Emerson College so we used to share Golaski stories. In Brit Lit he was one of those fucking stereotypical tossers who wore the fucking corduroy or tweed jacket with the professor elbows and would read aloud whenever the professor wanted someone to read a selection of whatever poetry we were studying with the book held up in one hand and about 3 feet away from him as though The Norton Anthology of English Literature were Yorick's fucking skull itself. He says, "Google my name for some more pretentious bullshit."

CAConrad's childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia the first chance he got where he lives and writes today with the PhillySound poets (http://PhillySound.blogspot.com). Soft Skull Press published his book Deviant Propulsion in 2006. His book The Frank Poems is forthcoming in 2008 from CHAX Press. A small selection of The Frank Poems was translated into German in 2007 by Berlin poet Holger, and is now available as a bilingual edition chapbook from YPOLITA Press (http://theFRANKpoems.blogspot.com). He is the author of several other chapbooks, including (end-begin w/chants), a collaboration with Frank Sherlock.

Terese Svoboda has published nine books of prose and poetry, including Tin God (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). Her tenth, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, and will be published in February 2008. Next spring she will teach fiction as the McGhee Professor at Davidson College and she will teach poetry at the Pan African Literary Forum in Ghana in July.

Robert Polito is completing a nonfiction book, Detours: Seven Noir Lives.


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LIT 13: available NEXT MONTH! Featuring poetry and prose by...

Kristin Abraham * Jennifer Frost Banks * Bridgette Bates * Aaron Belz * Jessica Bozek * Stephanie Brown * Mairéad Byrne * CAConrad * Caroline Conway * Wende Crow * James Cummins * Erinne Dobson * Noah Falck * Edwin Frank * Mary Gaitskill * Drew Gardner * Adam Golaski * Paul Hoover * Caitlin Horrocks * MC Hyland * Brian Kloppenberg * Joshua Land * Debra Liese * Dora Malech * Destanie McAllister * Jennifer Merrifield * Eugenio Montejo * Frank Montesonti * Carley Moore * Kirk Nesset * Matthew Pennock * David Pollock * Jessica Reed * Andrew Sage * Maureen Seaton * Kristine Snodgrass * Jason Stumpf * Terese Svoboda * Jackson Taylor * Urban Waite * Rob Walsh * Amanda Rachelle Warren * Derek White

Art by...

Brett Baker * Jeffre Dene

Plus a SPECIAL FEATURE on DETOUR, Edgar Ulmer's 1945 PRC Film Noir
Curated by ROBERT POLITO and featuring critical writing, reactions, and interviews by...

A.J. Albany * John Ashbery * Arianné Ulmer Cipes * Kent Jones * Guy Maddin * Greil Marcus * Geoffrey O'Brien * Robert Polito

My poem on Real Poetik

http://realpoetik.blogspot.com/2007/04/steven-karl.html