Thursday, March 27, 2008

Two extraordinary chapbooks from Marick Press

Storm, Katie Ford

SNOW

I held the chambered gun
and clicked its emptiness against the crows

let them fly inside me even as they fell
back into the saplings of thin woods

for when there is no storm
there is this stormed body

to keep alive in its solitary room
outside of which the snow is falling

One of us at a time.




Buy the book

Listen to the University of Iowa podcast, Katie Ford: “Ghost Forms: Using Traditional Form in Free Verse

Katie Ford is the author of Deposition (2002) and Colosseum (Graywolf Press, 2008).Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Partisan Review, Seneca Review, Poets & Writers, American Literary Review and Pleiades.
















The Catfish, Franz Wright

THE STUDENT


I saw the blind student crying
on the steps to my Beacon
Street classroom that darkly
bright day in late October –
the next thing I knew
I was sitting beside her
and asking if she might like to
talk about it.
“No,”
she replied. “Thanks.”
This was said with great kindness and tact
as if in answer to a child
who offered her his sucker.
“Save your pity for yourself,”
wrote Heine in his obituary
on his friend Gérard de Nerval.
“Do you have the faintest clue
what may well one day happen to you?”



Buy the book

Read a review at The Miracle Blog, Chanticleer.

Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collections, GodÕs Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. WrightÕs other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by Renz Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.

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