Lisa DeSiro’s chapbook, Simple as a Sonnet, is now available from Kelsay Books.
A collection of poems about the ups and downs of modern love, this book was appropriately published just prior to Valentine’s Day. Copies can be purchased direct from the publisher (https://kelsaybooks.com/products/simple-as-a-sonnet) or on Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/books/simple-as-a-sonnet/9781952326943).
We are saddened by the news of the death of NEPC Golden Rose poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
“Ferlinghetti began his career at a revolutionary time in arts and music. In 1994, he still believed art could make a difference. “I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself,” he said. “And nothing less is really acceptable. So I mean if art is going to have any excuse for — beyond being a leisure-class plaything — it has to transform life itself.”
Through more than half a century of writing and publishing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti did.” (from NPR)
From “Autobiography“
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike’s Place every day
watching the pocket pool players
making the minestrone scene
wolfing the macaronis
and I have read somewhere
the Meaning of Existence
yet have forgotten
just exactly where.
But I am the man
And I’ll be there.
And I may cause the lips
of those who are asleep
to speak.
And I may make my notebooks
into sheaves of grass.
And I may write my own
eponymous epitaph
instructing the horsemen
to pass.
Helen Marie Casey’s new poetry chapbook, “You Kept Your Secrets”, is available from Finishing Line Press. Susan Edwards Richmond has written of the book: “In this deeply affecting collection, Helen Marie Casey chronicles the aftermath—and persistence—of loss in the absence of a beloved child. “What do we become when we cease to be/who we were?” the poet asks, a question that resonates for subject, author, and reader alike. These poems both celebrate a brief life, “you/young boy, hawk-like, spreading/your sweatered wings wide” and map the ever-widening circles of pain and joy.”
David Wyman’s poetry collection Violet Ideologies has been published by Kelsay Books. This is Wyman’s second book; his first, Proletariat Sunrise, came out on 2017, also from Kelsay Books. The poems express a dissident sensibility often exploring themes of our commodified identities in a culture subsumed by capitalism.
His poems have appeared in BlazeVOX, Dissident Voice, Zombie Logic Review, Clockwise Cat, Picaroon Poetry, The Voices Project, Squawk Back, Tuck Magazine, S/WORD and Genre: Urban Arts among other publications. He’s a fan of Noam Chomsky, jazz guitar and the visionary poetry of William Blake.
Violet Ideologies is available on the Kelsay Books website, on Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and Powells.com
Violet Ideologies, David Wyman’s second collection, lays out a brilliant spectrum of incongruous ideas. It’s ominous yet funny, apocalyptic but oddly serene, a splice of the beautiful and the monstrous. The result is “a binary like foxglove” where the language of Wall Street is grafted to the poetics of the natural world. It is a book for our times, when translating corporate-speak has become almost impossible and the day’s “official transcript gets redacted.” Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Wyman asks and the answer is evident. Still, he won’t stop reminding us there is more to see than spread sheets and trendy electronica: horses gathered along a stone wall, a pub where poems taste like hard cider, songs sung to infants. Commodified language insists on a mandatory unity, even as lyricism escapes its confines again and again. Can the binary be broken? The book isn’t saying.
Lori Lamothe author of Kirlian Effect
In Violet Ideologies, “worn hearts/turn meaning into value.” Wyman knows that as sure as authority is constructed, “Landscape is temporary too.” Things are held in orbit by the caustic sting of pure feeling. It’s never a slow tectonics, but a rapidly shifting reality. Writing to “awakening/to an even greater understanding/of the inner dimensional self” is an uncomfortable benediction.
Jess Mynes author of One Anthem
COSMIC POETRY – Open call for submissions for any poet in the universe. Submit your poem about the cosmos/universe to be considered for publication in a second anthology edition of Cosmic … Read more
Please spread the word! The NEPC is accepting submissions for the Victor Howes Prize in Poetry. This is for undergraduate English majors studying in New England and comes with a $1000 prize and a reading (virtual this year) at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.
As the translator of book three of the Copenhagen Trilogy, Dependency, Michael Favala Goldman was on the January 26 panel launch for this gripping memoir by Danish author Tove Ditlevsen. Fresh Air gave the Trilogy a rave review on NPR on Feb 3.
Below are the links to those two events and a recent podcast.
Michael Favala GoldmanPoet and Translator
PODCAST
FRESH AIR BOOK REVIEW, FEB 3, 2021
BOOK LAUNCH VIDEO
Mark Pawlak’s pandemic journal essay appears in this new issue of Arrowsmith magazine.
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/pawlak-column
