Marick Press

Kjell Espmark visiting Grosse Pointe, Michigan

2011-05-27T21:31:00.001-04:00

All the way from Sweden, distinguished poet and professor of the History of Literature, Kjell Espmark, will be speaking in Grosse Pointe. Professor Espmark will discuss his experiences as a member of the Nobel Prize Selection Committee, and he will introduce his first book translated into English, Lend Me Your Voice, a poetry collection.

The library has joined forces with Marick Press to present this special program, and it promises to be a unique and wonderful evening.

The program will be held at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial on Thursday, April 7, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. Admission is $10.00. Please reserve a spot on the online

The Fifth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival

2010-09-27T22:12:00.001-04:00

The Fifth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: "TRANSLATING 2010"

AT THE RECONSTRUCTION ROOM

CONTACT: Dan Godston

info@borderbend.org

312.380.9223

DATE: Wednesday, October 6, 2010 (8 p.m.)

LOCATION: The Reconstruction Room at the Black Rock Bar

3614 N. Damen Ave.

Chicago, IL 60618

ADMISSION: Free and open to the public, donations accepted.

The Reconstruction Room presents Translating 2010, which is part of the Fifth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival and Chicago Artists Month. Translating 2010 explores the theme of "translations" in its wide range of permutations and possibilities: translating matter into energy, poetry into prose, time into memories, the present into the past and the future into the present, sound into words and the page into the air, promises into reality / ideals into facts, pencils into sketches into sculptures, DOS into HTML, 1999 into 2012 into The Long Now, frames into motion, and clouds into rain and water into ice.

Participants to include:

· A Guest Giving Way like Ice Melting: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Laozi -- Sou Vai Keng (Macao) and Steven Schroeder (Chicago)

· Erin Teegarden (Chicago), Della Watson (San Francisco), and Eric Cressley (Pittsburgh)

· Brett Foster reads a selection of his English translations of Cecco Angiolieri's poetry

· RaKel Delgado (Barcelona), Saul Aguirre (Chicago), and Luis Humberto Valadez (Chicago)

· Catie Olson (Chicago), Meg Duguid (Chicago), and the purveyors of Lovitt Restaurant (Colville, WA)

· Eric Elshtain (Chicago) and Gregory Fraser (Carrollton, Georgia)

· Francesco Levato (Chicago) reads English translations of poems by Tiziano Fratus and Fabiano Alborghetti, and he and and Mariela Griffor (Gross Pointe Farms, MI) give a bilingual reading of her poetry

· Happy 150th Birthday, Jules LaForgue, Piccolo Mountains Repertoire -- David Harrison Horton (Beijing), Sheila Murphy (Phoenix), Harry Ross (London), and Dan Godston (Chicago)

Chicago Calling is organized by the Borderbend Arts Collective, a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to promote the arts, to create opportunities for artists to explore new directions in and between art forms, and to engage the community. Annual Borderbend projects include Chicago Calling and the Mingus Awareness Project. Other organizations partner with Borderbend to enrich and extend the reach of its project, such as the Experimental Piano Series, which is co-produced by the Chicago Composers Forum and Borderbend, in partnership with the PianoForte Foundation.

Fifth Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival

During the Fifth Annual Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival, Chicago-based artists collaborate with artists in other locations -- both here in the U.S. and abroad. These collaborations involve a range of art forms -- including music, dance, film, literature, and intermedia -- and they are prepared or improvised. Some Chicago Calling events involve live feeds between Chicago and other locations. 2010 Chicago Calling events include "Bicycles and the Arts" at Happy Dog Gallery, "Translations 2010" at the Reconstruction Room, "Seda Röder / Burton Greene - Harrison Bankhead Duo Concert" at Curtiss Hall, "Temperatures and Shapes / Arctic Live" at Elastic Sound & Vision Gallery, "I Remember Fred" at the Velvet Lounge, "Chicago Calling, Waiting for the Bus" at Café Ballou, "Two Way Tarot Mirrors" at Myopic Books, "My Favorite Banned Books Abecedarian Read-Out" at the Logan Square Library, "Aural Architecture" at WNUR, and other events.

Chicago Artists Month

Throughout October, you are invited to meet hundreds of Chicago visual artists at exhibitions, workshops, open studios, tours, neighborhood art walks and more in venues across the city. Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in collaboration with more than 200 program partners, Chicago Artists Month aims to showcase the extraordinary talent and vibrancy of Chicago's art community.

This year's theme, "The City as Studio," explores the impact of the urban environment on Chicago artists and their work, and the contributions that artists make to the vitality of our city. The place where art is imagined and made, whether in a physical or virtual space, affects the idea, the process and the final product. And the art, once created, leaves a mark on the place it occupies. Chicago Artists Month 2010 looks at how the city influences art and artists, and how artists transform the city by contributing to civic dialogue and quality of life.

Other Waves On The Seashore: Two New Translations of Swedish Poetry

2010-08-28T15:13:00.000-04:00

Petter Lindgren (born 1965) is a Swedish poet of a younger generation than Sonnevi's, but more fundamentally of a different disposition. Whereas Sonnevi works within an open, fragmentary structure above which hovers an unmistakable lyric purity, distended but with which the poet is in continuous contact, Lindgren starts with the short imagistic lyric and, retaining its lineaments, imbues it with detritus--“silver-coloured dragonflies” (15), ‘drubbing glasses” (35). Lindgren writes as a journalist for Aftonbladet, one of the most popular of the Stockholm daily newspapers, and his poetry has the quality—not at all to be scanted—of an easy give-and-take with the world that came come from many sources, but which can often particularly run in tandem with an ability to write good expository prose. But Lindgren is not a referential poet; if one had to place him in any genealogy, it would be a Surrealist one, as his poems continually assert the wacky underside of the ordinary seen even in realistic and elegiac details, such as in ‘Southward: A Railway Crossing: (part of the sequence “A Slower Kind of Ink,”
“

The clouds that then passed over the landscape
Are now peeling off in the city’s art museum
Around the old gateposts poppies grow (38)

The interchange between art and reality is seamless, but the import is at once to make reality less slid and more valuable than it might be without Lindgren's, again, basically though idiosyncratically Surrealist prism. With Lindgren, one can relax a bit and return to understanding the meaning of a specific poem, not the very kind of meaning to which the poem aspires as is at stake in Sonnevi. Translation issues also arise,; whereas Lesser is an American who knows Swedish well, Lars Ahlstrom is a Swede best known for translating difficult Anglophone authors such as Gerald Murnane into Swedish. Rare is the translator who has excelled at working both into and out of a language. Ahlstrom’s challenge is particularly great in that Lindgren's effect (unlike Sonnevis) depends every much on the individual word, and even more because so much of Lindgren’s technique depends on upending our expected ideas of lyric diction. Despite these differences, there are commonalities between Sonnevi and Lindgren, though one has no idea whether these are due to coincidence, milieu, or influence whether avowed or unavowed. “Persephone” (11) is mentioned as the proper name of an 81 year old, a symbolic inversion of a name that even in descent is associated with youth and elasticity. The very title Farawaystan also echoes Sonnevi's concern with the redefinition of the global in the wake of the Soviet collapse, as the prevalence of “–stan” as a suffix became much more ubiquitous after the independence of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. One could argue that Sweden, as one of the few truly neutral nations in the Cold War, has its equilibrium upset by the end of this period more than the main combatants, whose identity depended less on their opponent roles than Sweden’s did on its neutral one. This is what some of the rhetoric otherness in Sonnevi pertains to,; in Lindgren, it is more of a purely mental state, at times one of memory and desire at others a half-burlesque nightmare where dark if preposterous manipulators direct the fates of objects and people. At ties these take on more specific contours, as in poems 11 and 12 of the sequence “Portrait of The Dead Owner of a Small Boat” where environmental extremity is sued as a metaphor of a limit-situation, of somebody attempting, if not succeeding, to evade external control. The poetry here is not just in one mode; prose poem and lyric, self-reflexive conjuring—the name “Lindgren” is at one point explicitly evoked00mingle with the palpable if acrid detail: “here and there a taste of zinc, like old mailboxes: (39).
In one of the most personal, elegiac passages in Mozart’s Third Brain, Sonnevi declares that “(t)he future is the surging/of other waves on the seashore”. We know that the future will come and how it will arrive, but we do not know what it will be: its shape, its force, its affect, Lindgren's collections ends with a prose poem on waves, with the conceit that all waves are sent by members of a bureaucracy, of increasingly Lesser ran was the waves proceed. Sonnevi’s vision of flux and Lindgren's comic paranoia are drastically opposite in purport, but both are responses to unpredictability, searches for patterns that are not redemptive, consolatory or perhaps even positive. Sonnevi is a poet of more magnitude than Lindgren, but this willingness to ask the ontologically tough questions, to not settle for platitudes, to abide provocatively in the infinite space between Heralcitean change and Parmenidean unity, is a notable trait in these two outstanding translations from the Swedish.

Petter Lindgren and Lars Ahlstrom

2010-08-28T15:10:00.001-04:00

Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain. Tr, Rika Lesser, New Haven: Yale University Press , 200 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-300-14580-9.

Petter Lindgren, Farawaystan. Tr, Lars Ahlstrom. Grosse Pointe Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2010. #14.95. 48 pp. 978-1934831-14-2

Other Waves On The Seashore: Two New Translations of Swedish Poetry

By Nicholas Birns

At the beginning of Mozart’s Third Brain , Göran Sonnevi (born 1939) distinguishes himself from both extreme Heracliteanisn—everything changes-and extreme Parmenideanism—everything is part of the One. In truth, not even Heraclitus or Parmenides in their waking lives, could have held to their arrived extremes, and so stepping back from either verge is not only tenable but unavoidable. But what distinguishes Sonnevi is that he does not seek a sensible center , a comfortable immersion in the mid-range of experience: he insists on seeking out all possible points of connection even though both constant change and an underlying identity must be constant refrains.
Sonnevi is an unusual poet in that he is at once gnomic, introspective, and political. The beginning of section XXXIX of Mozart’s Third Brain can serve as a suitable example:

Snow fell upon the darkness. Upon the two
Who walked up Allhallows Hill in Lund
In December, 1958 he didn’t believe it was true

Nor was it, except for
A moment, outside of time. The world
closed its huge eye, whose inside was binding stars
Then sleep came and pain. The world is strange
The world is strange, an alien place So-
Cieties are warped, shot apart. Nothing
can be predicted. The future is the surging
Of other waves on the seashore. Winter (50)

Memory and detail are mingling with a kind of lyric breach. The moment out of time is suspended, promising a graspable transcendence but not one in any orderly continuity with the immanent. The monosyllabic authority of “And then sleep came and pain. The world is strange” is offset and earned by the dizzying incorporation of data and experience in the rest of the passage. And not only the layering of present and past but the introduction of explicitly social speculation amid this moment of inward memory sets the tone for Sonnevi’s poetic method, in which public and private come to know each other intimately. The very hyphenation of “SO-/cieties” in Lesser’s translation hints at the splayed nature of how the social manifests itself in Sonnevi’s poem. The social is not only ingrained within the poetic weave, but it is made clear there is no redemptive vision of society; indeed, the poem is very much about the blowings-apart of a social frame in which Sonnevi himself implicitly once trusted.
Sonnevi is like Ashbery in being at once diaristic, receptive and capacious, but with Ashbery whatever the diaristic referents exist are sealed off from our comprehension, while the pace of Ashbery’s recounting is quick, often jaunty; Sonnevi is at once more accessible and slower, though certainly not lugubrious. Nor is Ashbery remotely as political as Sonnevi is, although again in Ashbery the politics may be very covert. Yet t he comparison of Ashbery comes to mind not just because Sonnevi similarly combines an intimate difficult with an ambitious intellectual platform, but because this book’s translation into English by Rika Lesser, a distinguished American poet, makes it far more part of ‘American poetry’ than would occur is the translator was not somebody so present in and conscious of the American poetry scene. Not to say, though, that the translation assimilates the poem; quite the contrary, as not only Sonnevi's sensibility but his primary references acre intensely Swedish, and one of the poem’s major motifs is a complex, utterly non-reductive resistance to globalization.
It is often sad that Sonnevi's poetry is difficult; that he is learned n multiple disciplines, from many branches of science to music and politics, and that he shares both his knowledge and his investigations into that knowledge generously with the reader. This is all true, yet to go into reading Mozart’s Third Brain with this sort of caveat will mislead the reader, because what we are immediately confronted by—what stands to disconcert us most as readers of poetry—is an intense series of meditations on the crises and tragedies in the news in the mid-1990s, Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, episodes of “immeasurable” (78) pain for whom, argues Sonnevi, those who live should feel not just a vague collective guilt but a personal responsibility. Sonnevi has always been a political poet form the 1960s onward, but the aftermath of the Soviet collapse made the political aspect of his work more all-pervasive and yielded a mode of diaristic notation somewhere between passionate polemic and meditative grumbling.
But is this just editorializing on the issues of the day that might have been fructifying for the poet’s creative process but should be purged from the final product? The New Critics of the 1950s would have certainly thought so, but even today’s critics, sued to all sorts of expository and political material, has to wonder whether not just the subjects talked about but the way in which they are talked about are journalistic, untrammeled, I would say the answer is ultimately no, that they are cognitive poetic, art of what Coleridge termed the :finite-infinite” aspect of the historical. But undeniably the question above is one the reader asks themselves before they can fully ‘enter the poem.
This is made even more complex by Lesser’s indication that Mozart’s Third Brain is in a sense the anteportal to Oceanen, Sonnevi’s 2005 work which contains responses to 9/11 and its aftermath in much the same mode as the responses to Bosnia et al in the earlier book. (Lesser, though, does translate passage dealing immediately with 9/11 in the introduction). This becomes intriguing because, as Lesser says she will not translate Oceanen, it most likely will not be translated in the foreseeable future, as who else but Lesser could translate Sonnevi? For the English-speaking reader, Oceanen is the unmanifested completion, the catastrophic sequel on which we oar eon the other side in the way that, as we shall see in a bit we are on the other side of much of the cognitive and affective experience Sonnevi summons in the earlier poem. In a sense the ready adaptability of the discursive-speculative punditry of Mozart’s Third Brain to Oceanen provides a far more clairvoyant and continuous view of the relation of the 1990s and 2000s than historical events or how the conventional wisdom imagined them, ever could. Yet one desperately does not want to overemphasize the political side of Sonnevi’s work, as they are felt to be—perhaps by both author and reader—embarrassing, as if they are there not out of rage, grudge, or bias but because art simply demanded them.
Given this awareness, why are the political referents there, what do they mean? A guess is this is provided by the fact that, although Bosnia is labeled the “low-grade” (52) genocide by Sonnevi in relation to Rwanda, he concentrates on it more, and surely this interesting the European crisis has to do with Sonnevi own identity as a figure on the Swedish left and the implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which albeit highly distantly (remembering that Yugoslavia was only briefly part of the Soviet bloc) precipitated the Bosnian crisis, Sonnevi was fifty in 1989, and it can be argued that Bosnia for him represents not just a crisis of the left—its very possibility dependent on a unipolar world where the United States predominated and the Soviet union had fissured--but a midlife crisis, particularly when the poem is studded with the deaths of slightly older contemporaries, and the purest lyric moments in the book are those occasioned by elegies to these figures. With each death, an optimistic view of history as a quest towards social justice recedes further into the past—‘’”Who speaks now for the lowest? And in which language?” (132). Death is an interruption of the natural order, and parallels the new world realities with their annunciation of strange new dispatches as witness section XLV< the smallest unit of Mozart’s Third brain, here given in its entirety

Now Kore no longer wants
To return to the earth
In the cycle of vegetation, you say (57)

What this means is not that Kore (Persephone) refuses to go down to the underworld as her mandated cyclical sojourn, but that the entire order of surface and depth, light and dark, presence and absence is ruptured by a more radical catastrophe, as Kore no longer has the strength even to alternate between daylight and doom. The cycle was dolorous, but also exuberant in its shuffling of light and dark; now the contrast no longer matters. One assumes that, in Lesser’s translation, the phrase “imagined community: (used with respect to Hades, 64) is intended to bear resonance of Benedict Anderson’s phrase, whether or not it did in the original Swedish, (“imaginary community” is used on 96, so one does not know whether the ‘imagined’ is accidental or a reference to Anderson later varied by another usage. Anderson's book was also generated by the implosion of Communism into contending nationalisms, and this linkage to the unsustainability of Kore's cyclical journey point to what is, from the poems; point of view, some sort of unexpected annulling disaster, Other invocations of Greek myth and tragedy also point to some fundamental alteration of what had been assumed at the beginning of section XCVI, the famous First Stasimon of Antigone is not so much inverted by Sonnevi—the original Greek word Sophocles sues is “deinon’ which can mean terrible as much as it can noble to mighty—but has its valence switched to one side:

Much is monstrous But nothing is
More monstrous than man. Laws being broken through, their sounds,
Their rhythms toward eternity, their fractal interference forms,
In the format of expanding fans, tree… (116)

Importantly as the syntax trails on the tone become s less pessimistic, as proliferation at least airs out monstrosity. But this passage, with its revels of Antigone, tallies with a far more original statement, in fact a question: ‘When did Antigone become genocidal; Creon always was.” If, as in Hegel’s formulation, Antigone stood for individualism, Creon for the order of the state, it is assumed the latter will be self-interested and destructive, but now even the former is. Again a contrast has been disrupted, and instead of a conflict of light and dark there are only two alternate monstrosities. In the past, we relied on art, on eloquence, on personal distinction, to distinguish those worth supporting from those worth fearing. In Sonnevi’s world, that sturdy ground of Romantic individualism is imperilled.
Part, though certainly not all, of this surprising Antigone-horror is self-incrimination. In a recounted discussion with a friend Lesser indentifies as the world-renowned poet Tomas Tranströmer, Sonnevi recounts the failures of the Communist regime in Vietnam, then admits the modern left in the West was partially to blame” “we, too, are the barbarians” (122-3). In a poem about the brain, so many complexities come in here, beyond the political. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 and is now aphasic, unable to speak, though retaining ibis mental faculties; Tranströmer nods when Sonnevi discusses composers or politics, but makes no audible reply, assents, but does not engage. One has no idea whether the following is a Swedish reality or an American hallucination of such a reality, but from an external viewpoint some other factors intrude. Tranströmer, while he was healthy, was the most famous Swedish poet, the successor to Gunnar Ekelof, who was translated by Auden, Tranströmer was in turn translated by Robert Bly and by the young Lesser herself. Lesser, though, later concentrated on translating Sonnevi, perhaps because Tranströmer, after his stroke, was no longer reproducing as copiously or in the same vein. Sonnevi not only speaks where Tranströmer is silent, he is still speaking to an audience whereas Tranströmer is at least in same ways not. Tranströmer’s presence in the poem as a kind of silent, valiant brain, complicates the implied authorial posture of Sonnevi. It also makes Tranströmer a arrogate for the reader—as he listens to and responds to Sonnevi's political and artistic musings—and this is intriguing as the reader too, within the confines of the book, is aphasic. It also gives the reader setting to live up to, we have to rise not just to the level of listening to Sonnevi but that of emulating Tranströmer as auditor—which might account for how challenging, beyond the mere density of its referential material, the poem, in its enunciation, is.
These intricacies in Sonnevi’s authorial posture mean that is too easy to make the poem’s 1990s political commentary into a plaint against 1990s=style globalization. Sonnevi somewhat shame-facedly takes an overtly “public stand” (97) in the battle over “the European brain”’ Sonnevi opposed Sweden’s entering into the European union (which Sweden eventually did). While even ‘liberals' were advocating this as a means of greater interconnection and hybridist, Sonnevi not only takes a public stand in itself but does so within his poem, forcing the reader to confront the issue, whatever their feelings or whatever the relevance of the subject to them. And not only does Sonnevi aver that he is not anti-Europe as such, but, he is clearly not anti ”universal empire” (142), or even “empire”, a word which he uses several times, seeming to reference the Soviet Union, although the post-1989 United States was often said to be an empire, Yet empire in Sonnevi is not just global hegemony, but also the cognitive connections between people, the continuum of sensoriness and consciousness, that through which “diffuse power” (51) can radiate. Are there good or bad collectivities in Sonnevi? And how does the individual, if such a concept survives the corruption of Antigone and the wearying of Kore, deal with these connections?
To address this, the poem’s deep engagement with music, and with the figure of Mozart, must be addressed. This is not a poem about the new cognitive science or bout the connections between mathematics and music, or why Mozart’s brain was so special and creative and how we can emulate it. As Lesser states in her introduction, the very idea “third brain' evokes the familiar left brain/right brain dichotomy of cognitive science, the rational and creative sides of an artistic psyche, but seeks neither to privilege one side nor, again, to posit a wanly synthetic thirdness. The idea of the third has been present on Sonnevi’s poetry for a while; in the previous volume of Sonnevi poems translated by Lesser, A Child Is Not A knife, Sonnevi , in “Dyrön 1981” muses, “A Third Term must epistle it cannot exist in language”. Its very existence is contradictory, Similarly, the \ third brain is not the unification of opposites but “excluded” (128), symptomatized by ‘constant alternation” The third Brain is not so much a faculty that cannot be put into words—that would be the Second brain, ‘resounding’ (128; both resounding in the conventional sense and re-sounding) with ‘music’—but a faculty we cannot imagine. Sonnevi loves Mozart as much as anyone—his reaction to the string quintet in G minor is so strong that, despite all the warnings we have received about ‘imitative form’, I gained a lot by reading the poem in conjunction with various recordings of this piece-. But his Mozart is not the consoling Mozart, the Mozart whose magic exempts him from the usual artistic stresses and shortcomings, the “collective Mozart” (54) that is “an absurdity, a falsification” but a combinatorial Mozart, one whose range of notes and permutations of sounds reveal ‘The greater memory…the interior,/where all substances exist, actual or virtual./in grater or Lesser degrees of perfection.” (48). This plenum, though, is not an organic or expressive unity. Infinite combination does not assume a closed totality or even an asymptotic convergence on comprehensiveness. The “brain’s plurality” (7) has its contacts “ever increasing, constantly growing” and this “irrevocably alters” the “simple structures of language”. Sonnevi quotes Parmenides to the effect that unity cannot include both everything and the explicit articulation of the One, minus this explicit articulation, there is always one less ingredient there than there should be for the purposes of ‘totality’. Plurality entails a constant shift that can be assumed to be the sum of all the world’s parts yet never, determinately, adds up to anything. Furthermore, that '(n)othing is unaltered in a brain" (31) means that cognition can take into account lfie-experience, whether the political headlines or the personal losses of departed friends that Sonnevi chronicles in the poem.
So “Mozart’s Third Brain” as a concept is ultimately not predicable in the poem; it is not what the poem evokes, nor even what it desires, but what is on the other side of its desires. Nor is Mozart, much as Sonnevi appreciates his work, a totemic hero, a “collective” figure that, whatever the best intentions of those who lionize him, can at best be “marginally evil” (54). Sonnevi shows he is less interested in Mozart’s melodic aspects than his challenging techniques by dwelling on Bartók's ascent towards an “immense plateau”(6) residing in the underworld of paradoxes”, and leading on to citing avant-garde twentieth-century composers such as Andrzej Panufnik and Girolamo Scelsi, though his mention of Billie Holiday, as well as more melodic modern composers such as Silvestre Revueltas, also shows he is not simply an Adorno-style cultural mandarin. Furthermore, the complex, meditative Mozart that Sonnevi summons is mirrored by a dark Mozart; a harlequin Mozart, a rogue Mozart, a Mozart who “Stalin, too, loved” (132), a Mozart that the literary reader does not want to digest and cannot digest. So Sonnevi does his best to foil the readers expectations of being about to say a highbrow version of “oh, how cute” with respect to the idea of Mozart’s third brain; he prevents us from substituting a make-our-child-even-brighter cognitive-science paradigm that parades the appearance of complexity in order to evade its darker reality. Sonnevi is ruthless with himself in the poem, ruthless with the demands of his own production; he is similarly ruthless with the reader, he will not let us escape into an easier version of what we more lazily might like the poem to be.
Sonnevi challenges us because he thinks we are capably of being challenges. He prizes the democratic individual, able to love, to mourn, to make autonomous decisions, to have their feelings not just constitute a nexus of appetitive wishes but be the bowstring to the cognitive instrument of their life’s perception. The word of the mid-1990s did not present only distressing data but also the inspirational changeover to a multiracial South Africa and the election of elson Mandela. Sonnevi does not just draw uplifting lesions, though, but stresses how these events underscored what is truly valuable about an autonomous, responsible individual:

Democracy’s secret in free, general elections with secret ballots
There, too, is music’s concealment, its inaccessibility, eye to eye (68)

So often it is said—by both democracy’s opponents and supporters—that the public orientation of democracy precludes the secret, that concealment, and, most likely inwardness can only exist where there is suppression or something short of full discursive ventilation. By focusing on the secrecy of the ballot box and aligning it with music’s sinuous avoidance of exposure to the discerning gaze, Sonnevi calls attention to a reserve that is not fetishistic, an obliquity that art of a complicated self-aware individuality not a by-prod duct of a retreat into ideology or fantasy. Even the patterning of the lines indicate this kind of secrecy; the space between ‘secret’ and ‘in’ is blank, open, but also unfilled; it is both apparent and mysterious: a secret but a bank, democratic one rather than a substantive, authoritarian version. For all the poem’s somberness, its sense of being at an impossible end of time, there is some hope, “Not in vain do you give me your rose” (98), the narrator addresses an absent female, somewhat as in Eugenio Montale’s Clizia poems; and, similarly, there is some ruptured, secreted, yet available hope visible to the reader of Sonnevi's agile, darkly virtuosic, infinitely concerned meditation.

Petter Lindgren (born 1965) is a Swedish poet of a younger generation than Sonnevi's, but more fundamentally of a different disposition. Whereas Sonnevi works within an open, fragmentary structure above which hovers an unmistakable lyric purity, distended but with which the poet is in continuous contact, Lindgren starts with the short imagistic lyric and, retaining its lineaments, imbues it with detritus--“silver-coloured dragonflies” (15), ‘drubbing glasses” (35). Lindgren writes as a journalist for Aftonbladet, one of the most popular of the Stockholm daily newspapers, and his poetry has the quality—not at all to be scanted—of an easy give-and-take with the world that came come from many sources, but which can often particularly run in tandem with an ability to write good expository prose. But Lindgren is not a referential poet; if one had to place him in any genealogy, it would be a Surrealist one, as his poems continually assert the wacky underside of the ordinary seen even in realistic and elegiac details, such as in ‘Southward: A Railway Crossing: (part of the sequence “A Slower Kind of Ink,”
“

The clouds that then passed over the landscape
Are now peeling off in the city’s art museum
Around the old gateposts poppies grow (38)

The interchange between art and reality is seamless, but the import is at once to make reality less slid and more valuable than it might be without Lindgren's, again, basically though idiosyncratically Surrealist prism. With Lindgren, one can relax a bit and return to understanding the meaning of a specific poem, not the very kind of meaning to which the poem aspires as is at stake in Sonnevi. Translation issues also arise,; whereas Lesser is an American who knows Swedish well, Lars Ahlstrom is a Swede best known for translating difficult Anglophone authors such as Gerald Murnane into Swedish. Rare is the translator who has excelled at working both into and out of a language. Ahlstrom’s challenge is particularly great in that Lindgren's effect (unlike Sonnevis) depends every much on the individual word, and even more because so much of Lindgren’s technique depends on upending our expected ideas of lyric diction. Despite these differences, there are commonalities between Sonnevi and Lindgren, though one has no idea whether these are due to coincidence, milieu, or influence whether avowed or unavowed. “Persephone” (11) is mentioned as the proper name of an 81 year old, a symbolic inversion of a name that even in descent is associated with youth and elasticity. The very title Farawaystan also echoes Sonnevi's concern with the redefinition of the global in the wake of the Soviet collapse, as the prevalence of “–stan” as a suffix became much more ubiquitous after the independence of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc. One could argue that Sweden, as one of the few truly neutral nations in the Cold War, has its equilibrium upset by the end of this period more than the main combatants, whose identity depended less on their opponent roles than Sweden’s did on its neutral one. This is what some of the rhetoric otherness in Sonnevi pertains to,; in Lindgren, it is more of a purely mental state, at times one of memory and desire at others a half-burlesque nightmare where dark if preposterous manipulators direct the fates of objects and people. At ties these take on more specific contours, as in poems 11 and 12 of the sequence “Portrait of The Dead Owner of a Small Boat” where environmental extremity is sued as a metaphor of a limit-situation, of somebody attempting, if not succeeding, to evade external control. The poetry here is not just in one mode; prose poem and lyric, self-reflexive conjuring—the name “Lindgren” is at one point explicitly evoked00mingle with the palpable if acrid detail: “here and there a taste of zinc, like old mailboxes: (39).
In one of the most personal, elegiac passages in Mozart’s Third Brain, Sonnevi declares that “(t)he future is the surging/of other waves on the seashore”. We know that the future will come and how it will arrive, but we do not know what it will be: its shape, its force, its affect, Lindgren's collections ends with a prose poem on waves, with the conceit that all waves are sent by members of a bureaucracy, of increasingly Lesser ran was the waves proceed. Sonnevi’s vision of flux and Lindgren's comic paranoia are drastically opposite in purport, but both are responses to unpredictability, searches for patterns that are not redemptive, consolatory or perhaps even positive. Sonnevi is a poet of more magnitude than Lindgren, but this willingness to ask the ontologically tough questions, to not settle for platitudes, to abide provocatively in the infinite space between Heralcitean change and Parmenidean unity, is a notable trait in these two outstanding translations from the Swedish.

Marick Press Spring -Summer 2010 titles

2010-06-14T20:41:00.002-04:00

From Threshold to Threshold by Paul Celan translated by David Young
7Prose by Franz Wright
The Paris Stories by Laird Hunt
Bunker Anatomy by Cristopher Claro translated by Brian Evenson

Spring-Summer 2010 Titles

2010-06-14T20:33:00.003-04:00

From Threshold to Threshold by Paul Celan translated by David Young
The Paris Stories by Laird Hunt
Bunker Anatomy by Brian Evenson
From Milltown to Malltown by Jim Daniels, Charlee Brodsky and Jane MaCafferty
7Prose by Franz Wright

check out new titles at http://www.marickpress.com/

2010-06-14T20:22:00.002-04:00

check out new titles at http://www.marickpress.com/

new review to share

2009-12-24T11:49:00.003-05:00

Erin McKnight at Prick of the Spindle calls WATER THE MOON a “stunning debut collection.” Read the full review of Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s WATER THE MOON here.

Poets Follies Reading October 2009

2009-10-27T22:02:00.004-04:00

October 20, 2009 Reading Photos

2009-10-27T21:57:00.003-04:00

The Country of Loneliness by Dawn Paul was released by Marick Press on October 20, 2009!

http://twitter.com/MarickPress

2009-10-13T20:54:00.001-04:00

Hey there! MarickPress is using Twitter.

2009-07-31T15:00:00.001-04:00

Hey there! MarickPress is using Twitter.
Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Join today to start receiving MarickPress's tweets.

http://twitter.com/MarickPress

The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard

2009-07-21T12:13:00.001-04:00

The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard
Published by Litterature d’Aphelie, an imprint of Rocky Shore Books

I first fell in love with Russell Thorburn’s poems because of their wild sense of invention, poems that liked to play with history and time, that liked to take such public figures as Ty Cobb and Apollinaire and place them into strangely contemporary situations. There was something of the ‘never before’ in these earlier poems that Thorburn seemed to be pulling out from thin air, a sleight of hand poetics that seemed to be hiding up his magician’s sleeve. Of late, in his last two books, Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged and here in his latest, The Whole Tree as Told to the Backyard, Thorburn has turned away from persona and invention in favor of the deeply personal, the skinlessly domestic—the tensions of the marital bedroom, the desires that still burn for other lovers, other lives—and although it’s difficult to say if Thorburn is inventing a personal past or drawing from it, the end result is that the feelings behind these new poems are authentically and emotionally true and that the hard truths that the poet is making point to a life that is turbulent and trembling with familial unrest. To read these poems is to encounter the heart of a man that is shaped by the ache of longing and driven by the insistence to go on living and loving even though it might be easier to surrender to the silence and indifference of inarticulation. These are poems of the first order, made out of the Beckettian mustness—I can’t go on, I must go on—that resides on the flipside of can’t. And I’m happy that he has, that Russell Thorburn did.
--Peter Markus

The Drunken Piano

2009-07-20T21:50:00.002-04:00

Thorburn writes across as broad an imaginative spectrum as any poet working today. The subjects of The Drunken Piano are exquisitely varied—real and fantastic literary biography, childhood rapture, rock and roll, adolescence, old movies, spies, soldiers, love, baseball played by sons and legends, the Russian cold of Upper Michigan. And through all this, the mental life we inhabit has a consistent complexity, depth and (above all) authenticity that makes this book the best of company.
--Jonathan Johnson, associate professor at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University; poet, Mastodon 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves

Russell Thorburn Publishes Two New Books in Fall 2009!

2009-07-20T21:34:00.006-04:00

Russell Thorburn is having two new books out Fall 2009! He is more prolific than ever. Check out his book with Marick Press "Father Tell Me I Have Not Aged"

Thorburn writes across as broad an imaginative spectrum as any poet working today. The subjects of The Drunken Piano are exquisitely varied—real and fantastic literary biography, childhood rapture, rock and roll, adolescence, old movies, spies, soldiers, love, baseball played by sons and legends, the Russian cold of Upper Michigan. And through all this, the mental life we inhabit has a consistent complexity, depth and (above all) authenticity that makes this book the best of company.
--Jonathan Johnson, associate professor at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, the graduate writing program at Eastern Washington University; poet, Mastodon 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves

Notes pulled from a Bergmanesque cello, house whiskey, the grainy surface of film noir detective movies—sepia nights and sleepless mornings, you will want Russell Thorburn’s Drunken Piano at your bedside…travel with them in your back pocket, but you won’t rest easy: these poems are too miraculous for that.
--Bronwyn Mills, Professor of Caribbean Literature at Northern Michigan University, author of forthcoming novel, Beastly

In The Drunken Piano Russell Thorburn creates an intense and complicatedly emotional persona by using the fictional consciousness of others. It’s edgy stuff, out there where death, sex, war, and nature intermingle into blisters of erotic awareness. Thorburn creates a set of dynamics that transcends the merely notational narrative of the historical, assimilating his truths into a powerful poetic style. Heavily enjambed, his diction and syntax are brutally harsh in the service of beauty and truth. These are some of the most urgent lyric intertwinings I’ve read in a while—narrative poems of such velocity they blur into music, and, I am tempted to say, pure song. And yet it is a terrible music as well, completely authentic. Read this book for the way it shatters the boundaries of “story” by creating an original and necessary human noise that is the thing we remember when we put the book down. Which is why we return. Russell Thorburn has turned into the kind of poet I want to read and reread over and over again. One of the few.

--David Dodd Lee, author of four books of poems, Downsides of Fish Culture, Wilderness, Arrow Pointing North, and The Nervous Filaments

New England College MFA Program in Poetry

2009-06-12T15:24:00.004-04:00

New England College MFA Program in Poetry

MFA IN POETRY EVENTS & OPEN HOUSES
Saturday, June 27, 2009
OPEN HOUSENew England College Campus8:30 AM-9:00 PMFree Open House for prospective students interested in an MFA. A day of writing workshops, lectures and a performance with Regie O'Hare Gibson. Pre-registration required. July 6-11, 2009
Download application and full schedule here:Post MFA Symposium with Peter Campion, Rachel Hadas, Ilya Kaminsky, Major Jackson and Ed Ochester.
July 8, 2009 (free and open to the public)
PANEL WITH DONALD HALL and Post-MFA faculty
on Donald Hall's historic essay "Poetry and Ambition"
2:00 PM in the Great Room,
Simon Center,
98 Bridge Street
Henniker, NH
ReadingsAll readings held in the Simon Center, 98 Bridge Street at 7:30 PMFree and open to the publicCall 603-219-9172 to confirm readingWednesday, June 24Ilya Kaminsky and Carol FrostThursday, June 25Featuring NH Poets Pat Fargnoli and Maura MacNeilFriday, June 26Kazim AliSaturday, June 27Performance with Regie O'Hare GibsonSunday, June 28NEC alumnus Chris Goodrich and Paula McLainTuesday, June 30NEC student readingWednesday, July 1,Brian Henry and Eleni SikelianosPost MFA Symposium ReadingsMonday, July 6Major JacksonTuesday, July 7Rachel HadasWednesday, July 8Peter CampionThursday, July 9Chard deNiord & Peter EverwineFriday, July 10Ed Ochester and Ilya Kaminsky

Marick Press Gets a Mention in Poets & Writers Magazine

2008-10-14T08:14:00.001-04:00

Check it out: Small Press Points

Video: Jim Schley reads at the Marick Press Book Launch

2008-06-25T21:27:00.002-04:00

Photos from the Marick Press Mini-literary festival's Friday night readings

2008-05-20T21:51:00.004-04:00

Marick Press Authors, from left to right: Peter Conners, David Matlin, Derick Burleson, Sean Thomas (poolhall junkie) Dougherty, Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Jim Schley

Peter Conners reads from his new book, Emily Ate the Wind, against a backdrop of “urban art”

The words from Sean Thomas Dougherty’s new book, The Blue City, seem to flow through his fingers into his chest and out his mouth.

Marick Press authors chat under blushing green trees outside the Grosse Pointe Artists Center

Derick Burleson reads from Never Night, his new book shiny in the foreground.

With his new book As When, In Season in hand, Jim Schley tells us where he’s coming from.

Marick Press Mini-Literary Festival and Book Launch a Tremendous Success

2008-05-19T10:06:00.000-04:00

It began Friday, May 2, a soggy spring evening saw writers from Alaska to Vermont gathered at the Grosse Pointe Arts Center to read for a captivated crowd. Friends old and new loitered on Kercheval Street. Wine was consumed. A palpable energy coursed through and outside the building and one and all were touched with the wonder of the event.

The next morning, fortified by a table full of snacks and a couple gallons of coffee, the authors dug in to a series of workshops. Topics covered: flash fiction, the craft of emotion, the metaphor as alchemy, reading poems from around the world, poetry writing: the poet as camera, the grammar of metaphor and making poems with the inner child. There was an amazing amount of knowledge being tossed about the room and the young poets in attendance drank it all in.

The clouds broke and the sun shone on the Tompkins Community Center at Windmill Pointe Park Sunday. Tables were lined with food, books and Marick Press authors. Ribbons were cut, poems read, music played and books signed. What started as a perfect day unfolded a perfect day.

Thanks to the Marick Press authors and staff. And a special thanks to all of you that came out for readings, participated in the workshops and helped to launch our five new titles. Your support is invaluable.

Check this blog frequently. We’ll be bringing out many photos and videos captured throughout the weekend.

And please, post your comments here. Let us know how you felt about the mini-festival.

Review of Peter Conners, Emily Ate the Wind in the Brooklyn Rail

2008-05-19T07:54:00.001-04:00

...each short prose piece seems to speak in its own language, each gives a view of its subject as seen from blindingly close range, and since many of the stories read at first as departures from the main narrative, the expanding implications revealed on a subsequent pass form a wide wholeness that books twice its length rarely achieve.

Read all of John Colasacco's review of Emily Ate the Wind in the Brooklyn Rail

Robert Lipton: A Complex Bravery

2008-05-13T21:22:00.003-04:00

HOMER AT THE HOT DOG STAND

Chafing, raw, reddened skin
from fiction the man tells me
all chicken fried and coated with sun.
I’m surrounded by him
like the atmosphere of a dying planet.
He was here before mathematics
before the first winter collecting
so many layers of blue
or before a brother had large teeth
enough to kill his twin.
I had little on offer
simply considered splitting the Pringles
and Slurpees, too shell-shocked to talk
or to feed my child the last little dollup
of Gerber’s yams.
The man was all sepulchral
as he described a war drenched in red sunsets
a “blood red that is not blood”
or of the mountain of three goddesses
sans goddesses.
He shakes his head as my child screams
Do you charge for that baby?
he winks, the baby starting to hum
not like an opera singer
but like a washing machine
something to calm the parents.
Even after all this
there is a singing about paradise.

Buy the book

“This is the book of childhood, love and war. Lipton’s poems are a gang that takes no prisoners: his voice is direct, his tone is clear, his diction is ironic — but his irony is earned and felt-through. The manuscript is a book of elegies that refuse to go mourning without at least a little bit of protest. Whatever his loss is, Lipton’s voice’s always quirky and alive, always ready to report the world straight to us, without patronizing, for “this battle is parent by parent / and I have homework to do.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Dancing in Odessa and Musica Humana

Robert Lipton is the author of Bearing Witness in the Promised Land. In: Live from Palestine (South End Press). His stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals, both on and offline, including Echo 681, Interbang, Jacaranda Review, Squaw Valley Review, King Log, Shades of Contradiction, The Texas Observer and Parthenon West. He has received grants from Berkeley Community Arts and Alameda Community Arts Programs, was for seven years poetry workshop leader at Berkeley Art Center.

Festival of New European film and writing at Oakland University May 9-10, 2008

2008-04-28T12:44:00.002-04:00

Oakland University and Absinthe: New European Writing will host a festival of new European film and writing at Oakland University in Rochester on May 9-10th, 2008. All festival events are free and open to the public.

The festival will commence on Friday evening, May 9, with a presentation of short films from Europe by the Ann Arbor Film Festival, readings by the poets Eamonn Wall and Valzhyna Mort, and a silent auction to benefit the festival. Desserts and drinks will be provided, and door prizes will be raffled off throughout the evening. In addition, the first 100 guests will receive a free copy of the current issue of Absinthe: New European Writing.

Eamonn Wall was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. His poetry has been published widely in Ireland and in the U.S. His books include Dyckman-200th Street, (Salmon, 1993), Iron Mountain Road (Salmon, 1997), and The Crosses (Salmon, 2001).

Valzyhna Mort was born Valzhyna Martynava in 1981 in Minsk, Belarus. She will read from her recently published collection Factory of Tears.

On Saturday, May 10, from 10:00 am until 10:00 pm, the festival will screen three award-winning European feature films, along with readings by the Detroit-area translators Keith Taylor, Marilynn Rashid, and Doris Runey, and Polish poet Piotr Sommers with Chicago-based translator Bill Martin. The films will be preceded by a selection of short films by Oakland University students.

10:00 AM--A screening of the German film Yella-a metaphysical thriller crafted by acclaimed writer-director Christian Petzold. The title role is played by Nina Hoss, who was awarded the 2007 Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear for her performance.

12:30-1:00--Lunch will be provided for festival attendees

1:00 PM--A reading by the Detroit-area writers and translators Doris Runey, Keith Taylor, and Marilynn Rashid.

2:00 PM--A screening of the Romanian film The Way I Spent the End of the World-this film appeared at several film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, and the Cannes Film Festival.

4:30 PM--A reading by Polish poet Piotr Sommer and translator Bill Martin

Piotr Sommer is a poet and translator of contemporary English-language poetry, including the work of Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and many others. He has published several dozen books of poetry, literary criticism.

7:00 PM--A screening of the Russian film The Island-this film was shown at several film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival, the Venice International Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the London Film Festival, and was awarded five major Nika Awards (Russian Oscars).

Presentation of The Island is generously underwritten by the Council of Orthodox Christian Churches of Metropolitan Detroit (COCC)-Promoting Orthodox Christianity since 1957.

The Oakland University/Absinthe Festival of New European Film and Writing is supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and Oakland County Arts & Culture.

Additional information, including the full festival schedule is available at www.absinthenew.com/pages/OUConference.html or by contacting Dwayne D. Hayes, editor of Absinthe: New European Writing at dhayes@absinthenew.com.

Poet's Follies

2008-04-23T21:06:00.005-04:00

Browsing the images of "Urban Edge"
at the Grosse Pointe Art Center

Abdul Punnayurkulam talks about his
short story "Dedication"

Marick Press publisher, Mariela Griffor,
reads from her latest book House

May 3rd Marick Press Author Workshops 50% off for students

2008-04-23T20:45:00.002-04:00

Date: Saturday, May 3, 2008
Time: 8:00-8:45 registration with coffee & bagels.
Location: Grosse Pointe Artists Association
15001 Kercheval Avenue, Grosse Pointe Park, MI 48230
Admission: Individual workshops are $100.00 each.
$150.00 includes all workshops, buffet lunch and refreshments.

Workshops

o 9am-11am Peter Conners: Flash Fiction: How & Why to Shrink your Story

o 11am-Noon Katie Ford : The Craft of Emotion

o Noon-1pm G.C. Waldrep: The Metaphor as Alchemy

o 1pm-2 pm Ilya Kaminsky: Reading Poems from Around the World

o 2pm-3pm Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Poetry Writing: The Poet as Camera

o 3pm-4pm Sean Thomas Dougherty: The Grammar of Metaphor

o 4pm-5pm Derick Burleson: Trailing Clouds of Glory: Making Poems with the Inner Child

To pre-register contact Mariela Griffor at mgriffor@marickpress.com, or Ryan Kelly at rkelly@marickpress.com. Or call (313) 407-9236. Registration for any workshop is available throughout the Festival.

Jim Schley: As When, In Season

2008-04-21T20:57:00.004-04:00

LAND ALONE

Some cartographer’s error
and we squandered days,
a river on the map now swamp:
glacial fissures drained to marsh,
so a channel angled south goes east then north,
to halt canoes at a beavers’ dam, trunks big as cabin logs.
Millions of droplets per cubic inch, and brief efflorescence
in stalks, leaves and lacy ferns already by August
curling for an onslaught of snow. Head-high grass
spread by prows keeps no trail of keel, paddle blade or feet
as flies toil and bite, as boots spew rot from muddy sockets.
Redwings creak on cattails like farcical guides.
Bullfrogs thrum directions only a blackbird could decipher.
Who are you to the herons, to the beavers felling trees?
Who cares for you? say the barred owls,
as soft to disappear as puffs of mist.
How far to your vanishing point?

Our lives became things,
callused joints and scarlet knees,
with hair tied back to tumble behind. Six of us,
strangers since, a rank and cantankerous crew.
On day three we crossed a flowage in porridge-thick fog,
tracking island to island by compass
with twelve-foot visibility encircling each boat.
Near noon a bush plane, then growling saws.
The village on Red Lake. But remember

how the land made its own way, with no one there

Buy the book

“I like these poems immensely. What Schley has done is to reinvent the ode, especially in the nine poems for the muses. Prosodically he’s discovered an odic tone, grave but graceful, imaginatively objective. It’s extremely effective, and it tokens a very large degree of literary depth and experience.” —Hayden Carruth

Jim Schley grew up in Wisconsin and moved to New England in 1975 to attend Dartmouth College, where he majored in Literature & Creative Writing and Native American Studies. In 1986 he earned an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has been co-editor of the literary quarterly New England Review, production editor for University Press of New England, and editor-in-chief of Chelsea Green Publishing Company and has edited more than a hundred books on a wide variety of subjects, including poetry and fiction, literary essays, history, art, Native American culture, organic farming and gardening, solar and wind energy, and natural architecture and building techniques. He has also been very active as a teacher with Community College of Vermont and the Vermont Humanities Council. A frequent performer with experimental theatre ensembles, including Signal & Noise and FLOCK Dance Troupe, he has toured internationally with Bread & Puppet Theater and the Swiss movement-theater company Les Montreurs d’Images. Jim’s poems have been featured in Best American Spiritual Writing, on Garrison Keillor’s radio program The Writer’s Almanac, and in Keillor’s companion book Good Poems, as well as in a poetry chapbook, One Another (Chapiteau, 1999; chapiteau.org), which Christopher Merrill called “the most beautiful book of poems I've ever seen.” He’s an associate of the journalists' collective Homelands Research Group (homelands.org) and is now executive director of The Frost Place (frostplace.org), a museum and poetry education center based at Robert Frost's historic homestead in Franconia, N.H. Jim Schley lives with his wife Rebecca Bailey and their daughter Lillian in a home they built themselves as part of an off-the-grid, multi-family cooperative in central Vermont.

Robert Fanning: The Seed Thieves

2008-04-17T22:58:00.004-04:00

Green Stephania

A full wood, wet bark
shower, the fresh drenched
trees, the leaves lush heavy,
so consequently, Stephania.

Stephania, curled finger ferns
unfurl and burst. Loose spores
string through mist and nestle.
Moss tufts rub.
Rain-slapped leaves, Stephania,
spring and drip on our deep
sogged glade, our soaked sunk roots.

Me and Stephania.
In a hiding place our slick lips sore
from pressing together.
Stephania, seaweed breath,
burrs in your tangling curls,
soiled nails and knees, giggling.
Eden, Stephania. The smell of dirt.
I never want to leave the world.

Through the streaming wash
of rain, through the windows
and pale curtains, our mothers ache.
Their bedrooms flicker with blue TV.
Scent of biscuits, chimney smoke, tea.
Our fathers cup their hands
against the cold glass panes
and look out.

It’s dusk, Stephania.
No one knows where we are.

Buy the book

“Passionate and accomplished — this poet’s ear is beautifully tuned — The Seed Thieves is an urgent, nervous, tender, and brilliant first book. Read it for joy!”
—Tomas Lux, author of The Street of Clocks and The Cradle Place

In addition to The Seed Thieves, Robert Fanning is the author of Old Bright Wheel, winner of the Ledge Press Poetry Chapbook Award. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, his writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award. His work has also been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, America, The Ledge, and Artword Quarterly. He is the Program Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which brings professional writers into the classrooms of the Detroit Public Schools. He is a resident of Ferndale.

Russell Thorburn: Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged

2008-04-10T20:49:00.004-04:00

Ambassador Bridge

We wanted to set the world right
on the Ambassador Bridge, returning
over a mile of steel to the American side.
We wanted the presence of the earth, the river
below lazy in its blueness like a sleepwalker
raising his hands to this mystery.
We looked down and knew goodness
with my lover’s baby in her arms,
and our friend innocent enough
to be a teenager. We were stopped
coming back to Detroit from Windsor,
our trunk searched, revealing dirty
laundry, a bag of detergent the officer
thought was drugs. We laughed
until he wanted to know our age.
Show me your ID photo, anything
to tell us why you are so young.
And for a moment we held our breath
prisoners of paranoia, naïve and lost.
And she was our runaway friend,
or so the Canadian thought.
Oh, to be that young again, as if one
of us were a runaway teenager,
and we, perhaps, kidnappers –
and with the baby in her arms, my lover,
her eyes heaven and looking
to be one and good with the world
from our excursion to Windsor
and the art museum. Our communion
with paintings and the sea gulls later,
with their tilted wings, forming a narrative.
And the Canadian officer
checking ID photos, his jaw sticking out
like a Maple Leaf flag, not letting us go.
Oh hosanna of his hands – and the river
in its blue painting, sun speckled,
a nameless feeling of having been
already painted by a crazy man,
soulful in the way of Van Gogh,
trying to make the world turn good.

Buy the book

A memoir in poetry drawing upon childhood, love and loss, with a french turn to film, especially Truffaut, in explaining the human spirit.
Russell Thorburn’s Father, Tell Me I Have Not Aged is as sure-footed and persuasive a poetry collection as I have come across in a long time. To say it both devastates and delights with its insights is simply to acknowledge the book’s depth and accuracy of emotion, its abiding humanity, and its vigorous pursuit of linguistic exuberance. I was not only moved by what I encountered in these poems, I was compelled. This is poetry of the first order. – Jack Driscoll

Read the Metro Times review

Russell Thorburn is the author of Approximate Desire (New Issues Poetry, 1999). His poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals both on and off line, including Briar Cliff Review, Full Circle Journal, LitRag, Parting Gifts, Passages North, Poet Lore, Praire Schooner, Puerto del Sol, The Quarterly, Quarterly West, Sou'wester, Third Coast, Willow Springs and Witness. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has been awarded creative artist grants from the State of Michigan. Since 2000 he has been teaching poetry in Upper Peninsula schools through Michigan Council of Arts and Cultural Affairs. He has taught college classes at Marquette Branch Prison and Northern Michigan University. He is editor of numerous poetry books. He lives in Marquette, Michigan, with his wife, Emily, and three sons, Gabriel, Christopher and Michael.

April is National Poetry Month

2008-04-09T08:06:00.000-04:00

30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month.

National Poetry Month was established by the Academy of American Poets as a month-long, national celebration of poetry. The concept was to increase the attention paid-by individuals and the media—to the art of poetry, to living poets, to our poetic heritage, and to poetry books and magazines. In the end, we hoped to achieve an increase in the visibility, presence, and accessibility of poetry in our culture. National Poetry Month has been successful beyond all anticipation and has grown over the years into the largest literary celebration in the world.

Coming soon: fiction editor Peter Markus' new novel, Bob, or Man on Boat

2008-04-07T22:52:00.007-04:00

"Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing, give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.”
—Brian Evenson

"With spare but magical language, Peter Markus weaves a tale with the currents of a river, a family saga that spins through both the depths and the shallows. In Bob, or Man on Boat, recollections rise from the muddy river bed to be illuminated by starshine on the surface, only to be lost once more in the river mists that mingle with the wind-scattered ashes of a dead man, and finally, to sink again to the bottom. Like the voice of the narrator, Markus uses words that “skip across the surface like a stone”, but take the reader to the depths of longing and loss, myth and memory."
—Pamela Ryder

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Peter Markus is the Marick Press fiction editor and author of three short books of short-short fiction, Good, Brother (AWOL Press/reissued by Calamari Press), The Moon is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press), and The Singing Fish (Calamari Press). His work has been published in a number of anthologies, including New Sudden Fiction (Norton), Fiction Gallery (Bloomsbury), Sudden Stories (Mammoth Books), and PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books). His stories have appeared widely in such journals as Black Warrior Review, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, 3rd Bed, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, Willow Springs, Seattle Review, Post Road, New York Tyrant, Sleeping Fish, Verse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unsaid, Dislocate, among many others. He lives in Trenton, Michigan, with his wife and two kids and is the Senior Writer with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project of Detroit.

Ancestral Radio, Book Review by Heather A. McMacken

2008-04-07T21:59:00.002-04:00

Listen. There are poets…and then there are poets.

Ancestral Radio was written by a poet.

His name is Edward Haworth Hoeppner, longtime English Professor at Oakland University, whose first book of poems, Rain Through High Windows, published by New Issues Press in 2000, was a gorgeous and intuitive collection.

Aptly titled, Ancestral Radio is about family. The word radio suggests a frequency, a channel to impart the observations of one particularly awake man.

Ancestral Radio’s broken into four parts. The first contains the autumn season. These are poems of frustration and melancholy chaos; about problems like alcoholism and vacations gone sour. The setting is either far away in actuality (Italy) or in the mind. The speaker is lost, agitated. In “East Dakota,” the complaint:

There are too many stars
on the prairie tonight.
They are too much here
and there is nowhere else
to turn.

The second section is not a season, but a location: the past. It faces backward—staring intensely at deaths and endings. At this point, memory is either vacant or a traitor. “Private Property” summarizes the lifecycle in this bone-chilling way:

You go off like a flash-bulb,
and people rub their eyes.

Poems in part three deal with winter: this dry, white ship, slow cage (70).
There’s frostbite, snowdrifts, sickness, and talk of how Michigan winters suck:

…brain’s not propped up
well enough to handle being shoved inside a box
and left for long (86).

The most enjoyable section is the last—it’s spring! Here Hoeppner fulfills our need for a happy resolution, for transforming grief to joy. The setting for most are near Minnesota, his birthplace. The last word of the book is home, signifying serenity.

Notice Hoeppner’s descriptional mastery in “Early Spring:”

…for this season made from small
bells, in which you step once more
across the planks, to a bobbing edge,
spread your hands as if to float
straight from out your clothing.

As a whole, Ancestral Radio’s mostly sober, with glints of hilarity. The speaker appears consistent, autobiographical, and incredibly honest. All the indecision, flimsy, and misperceptions of this person are center stage.

The book reflects the contradictions, inaccuracies of the mind. Quite often the speaker will say how something is, and then immediately say that it isn’t. There’s also a riot of double (even triple!) negatives. What impresses most, though, is the poet’s clear appreciation of the intricacies of systems: systems of thought, systems of nature, the systems governing human relationships and time.

This universe, all flecked
by things that move so quickly they are partly gone
when they arrive (65).

Edward Haworth Hoeppner cannot be called a simple poet. He is not an Alice Walker or a Billy Collins. Ancestral Radio asks patience. It calls for meditation, for time to fight the bafflement. This book reminds me so much of Hoeppner’s biggest influence, John Ashbery. It requires readers to do as they do with Ashbery’s poems: to let go. To process with something more than brain.

Heart.

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Heather A. McMacken has worked with Marick Press on various editorial assignments. She received her B.A. in English from Oakland University. She writes about art and culture for Detroit’s Metro Times, Real Detroit Weekly and Gazette van Detroi. Her poems have appeared in Oakland County Beat, The Fairfield Review, thedetroiter.com, 3rd Muse Poetry Journal, nthposition.com, Slow Trains, Autism Advocate, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Liberal Arts Network for Development (LAND) poetry prize.

Contact Heather at hmcmacken@gmail.com.

Two extraordinary chapbooks from Marick Press

2008-03-27T20:43:00.005-04:00

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.

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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?”

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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.

Ilya Kaminsky in the San Diego Weekly Reader

2008-03-19T21:12:00.004-04:00

Marick Press poetry editor gets some well-deserved press.
Read the story

Marick Press writer workshops May 3, 2008

2008-03-19T19:46:00.001-04:00

Date: Saturday, May 3, 2008
Time: 8:00-8:45 registration with coffee & bagels.
Location: Grosse Pointe Artists Association
15001 Kercheval Avenue, Grosse Pointe Park, MI 48230
Admission: Individual workshops are $100.00 each.
$150.00 includes all workshops, buffet lunch and refreshments.

Workshops

o 9am-11am Peter Conners: Flash Fiction: How & Why to Shrink your Story

o 11am-Noon Katie Ford : The Craft of Emotion

o Noon-1pm G.C. Waldrep: The Metaphor as Alchemy

o 1pm-2 pm Ilya Kaminsky: Reading Poems from Around the World

o 2pm-3pm Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Poetry Writing: The Poet as Camera

o 3pm-4pm Sean Thomas Dougherty: The Grammar of Metaphor

o 4pm-5pm Derick Burleson: Trailing Clouds of Glory: Making Poems with the Inner Child

To pre-register contact Mariela Griffor at mgriffor@marickpress.com, or Ryan Kelly at rkelly@marickpress.com, by April 25, 2008. Or call (313) 407-9236. Registration for any workshop is available throughout the Festival.

Emily Ate the Wind, Peter Conners

2008-03-17T21:36:00.003-04:00

Emily in the Hallway

There are no night-lights here, but the shades are up on all the windows and the anemic moon bleeds into the hallway. Little feet. The lime green carpet is scratchy and stiff and a few forlorn pictures hang on the wall. Emily pauses to look up at one – a man with unbelievably sad eyes and a ring of sharp wood encircling his forehead. Yawns. Blue light flickers through the stairway railing slats illuminating the green carpet where the pale moonlight gives way. Emily presses her face between two slats. Fits all the way up to her ears. Puffy emerald eyes sweep across the den. No one. On the television a man with three distinct sections of strawberry blonde hair allows a grin to spread with immaculate, slow control across his face until it seems to protrude past his cheeks. Applause. Drum Roll. Laughter. The strawberry blonde man steps back, steps forward, fans his arms out to either side and then swings two karate chops down in front of him. Emily lays her head down on the carpet, drowsily watching the man. Her knees creep closer to her chest. Her thumb finds her mouth. Her little toes curl, release. Her little toes curl, release.

Copyright © 2005-2008 Marick Press All Rights Reserved

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"Sparks of brilliant images light up the compressed worlds Peter Conners creates with words. Music is made with whispers and curses, belches and laughter, pronouncements and asides and sly retorts. Startling lists transform into unsettling truths. The performances in Emily Ate the Wind are dazzling."

—Joanna Scott

Peter Conners is editor of PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books, 2006), founding co-editor of the literary journal, Double Room, and a contributing editor to Del Sol Review. His third collection of poetry and prose, Of Whiskey and Winter, is forthcoming from White Pine Press. His poetry and prose appear in such journals as Mississippi Review, Fiction International, American Book Review, Salt Hill, and, in several anthologies. He lives in Rochester, NY where he works as Editor/Marketing Director for the literary publisher BOA Editions.

Never Night, Derick Burleson

2008-03-10T20:58:00.005-04:00

Harvest

He stands beside his father on the Gleaner
gripping the metal rail tight in both hands
staring down into the sun blur of sickle,
clouds of dust and straw and chaff blown behind,
and all the way to the horizon, to the curve
of round earth across the plain, nothing but wheat
and a cloud of dust for each combine cutting.
When wheat fills the machine, his father starts
the auger and a stream of gold pours into
the truck, where he is not allowed to play
since nearly every year a boy falls asleep
in the sun on that pile of gold smelling
of bread in the heat of late June and is
buried alive by his father under
the grain we in those parts of Oklahoma
all lived to raise from red soil. Thirteen hours
the sun spun across the unbroken blue sky,
thirteen hours we and the Gleaner gleaned
until moon rose and dew fell too heavy
down and wet the ripe wheat, and the silence
in that absence of machine was an abyss
only crickets could understand. I see the boy
there on that machine, the sure hands of his father
on the wheel, on the levers that sped or
slowed, raised or lowered to keep the wheat feeding
evenly in. How the boy stares down into
that spin of bright hot steel, of well-oiled blade
against steel cutter bar, the auger whirling,
a steel cylinder pulling fate and will together
where steel fingers grab grain and chaff and straw,
above it all into the metal monster’s
ravenous maw. I watch the boy hold tight
and I hope he will not fall.

Copyright © 2005-2008 Marick Press All Rights Reserved

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"Derick Burleson has given us a far northern book of invitations ("You'd like it here where/it's never night"), which shines with a radiant spirit. It is a work of soul-making." – Edward Hirsch

Derick Burleson's first book, Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Letter from the publisher

2008-03-10T08:48:00.005-04:00

Dear Friends of Marick Press,

Hi, this is Marick Press again, with information about our new releases and workshops. This year we launch our new titles at ‘Mini-Literary Festival 2008’, with a reading on Friday May 2, workshops on Saturday May 3 and the 2008 Launch on Sunday May 4. The 2008 Launch will be held at 2pm at the Tompkins Center in beautiful Windmill Pointe Park in Grosse Pointe Park, on Lake St. Claire. Read the press release for more detailed information about these three days.

This year, we look forward to an exciting event. Some of the most promising poets of our generation will be traveling to be with us here, to hold workshops for the first Marick Press Mini-Literary Festival. The Festival workshops will take be held on Saturday, May 3 at the Grosse Pointe Artists Association, located at 15001 Kercheval, Grosse Pointe Park, 48230, from 9 AM to 5PM.

Our masterful authors will be sharing their skills and insights on a diverse variety of subjects dear to writing, both in poetry and fiction. Susan Kelly-Dewitt, the author of six chapbooks, will hold a workshop on "Poetry Writing: The Poet as Camera." Peter Conners is a poet and fiction writer. He is an editor and marketing director for BOA Editions, Ltd. He will instruct "Flash Fiction: How (and Why) To Shrink Your Story." Ilya Kaminsky teaching at San Diego University is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won numerous awards. Ilya will lead "Reading Poems from Around the World." G.C. Waldrep holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently a visiting professor at Kenyon College. His poetry workshop "The Metaphor as Alchemy" will be enlightening. Katie Ford is the poetry editor of the New Orleans Review whose work has been widely published in journals such as the American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. Ford’s class will be "The Craft of Emotion." Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books, and is known for his captivating performances. He will teach "The Grammar of Metaphor." Lastly, Derick Burleson from Alaska. In 1999, he received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. This year Burleson will bring us "Trailing Clouds of Glory: Making Poems with the Inner Child."

The community will benefit by participating in this landmark event. The description of the workshops and the registration form for the program are available for download here. If you have any questions, please contact our Marick office at (313) 407-9236, or email us at minifestival2008@marickpress.com or at mgriffor@marickpress.com. Staff and writers are available for interviews and questions.

With gratitude,

Mariela Griffor, Publisher
Marick Press
P.O. Box 36253
Grosse Pointe Farms, MI 48236
marickpress.com
chileanconsulatedetroit.org
marielagriffor.com
Phone (313) 407-9236
E-mail: mgriffor@marickpress.com

The Blue City, Sean Thomas Dougherty

2008-03-07T20:48:00.008-05:00

passage from IN THE CITY OF THE BARE BULB

This is the city three regimes deep. More than the psychopath, the criminal, the pimp. More than the schemer and the simply poot. More than the misanthrope and the destitute. Who collects their green printed check at the first of the month at the small postal drop door? It is the pensioner, those who rock in their small rooms with the bare bulb swinging above.

The city of the bare bulb belongs to the police who shine its sun into the eyes of the mistakenly-picked-up to keep them awake and blind. There is no shade for the lamp of the police sergeants, hips lips are grit, his fists are lumps of coal, coal-hearted former children.

Can you tell what city we are in?

How do I know these things? I who took bags of bread, fish Tomas gave me, spinach, tomatoes grown on roofs, took them to my great aunt Zelda who sang beneath the bare bulb in her one room at the end of the three flights of stairs in the shadow of the Great Machinery Plant whose twelve smokestacks filled the skyline with blackened earth.

Copyright © 2005-2008 Marick Press All Rights Reserved

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"Be prepared for wonder: The Blue City is a place where you will see paper boats made by God illuminated in the merciful light that rises from the eyes of the dead. Be prepared to grieve for the children who sing a song you sang in childhood. Sean Thomas Dougherty's mesmerizing tale is a song of praise, a hand-written psalm, a visionary prayer made from the last handful of earth." -- Melanie Rae Thon.

Sean Thomas Dougherty is the author of nine books including Nightshift Belonging to Lorca, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Except by Falling winner of the 2000 Pinyon Press Poetry Prize from Mesa State College. His awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry. Known for his electrifying performances, he has toured extensively across North America and Europe. He received an MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and lives in Erie, PA where he teaches writing workshops.

The Fortunate Islands, Susan Kelly-DeWitt

2008-03-04T21:06:00.007-05:00

POMEGRANATES

My mother, gray bird
beside a white bowl
of pomegranates

They flare
against her face
creating an odd
balance

She is retelling the family
myths. In this one, her mouth
is cut and bleeding, her teeth
pop out like seeds.

It is winter.
My father is King
of the Underworld.

"My whole mouth,"
she explains, drawing open
her lower lip, exposing the hidden
scars, "was pulp."

I memorize exactly, word
for word:

He was quick
and strong, his punch
like a boxer's.

We'd been married
only six months, still newlyweds...

as I pluck a pomegranate
from the bowl, hack it

open, place

a single blood
red seed on my tongue

Copyright © 2005-2008 Marick Press All Rights Reserved

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Read what The Montserrat Review has to say about The Fortunate Islands.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of six chapbooks: A Camellia for Judy (Frith Press, 1998), Feather's Hand (Swan Scythe Press, 2000), To a Small Moth (Poet's Corner Press, 2001), Susan Kelly-DeWitt's Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2003), The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2005 ), and Cassiopeia Under the Banyan Tree (forthcoming, September 2007), as well as a letterpress collection, The Book of Insects (Spruce Street Press, 2003). Her work has been included in national and regional anthologies such as Claiming the Spirit Within (Beacon Press), I’ve Always Meant To Tell You, Letters to our Mothers (Pocket Books), Things I Never Said, An Anthology of Letters to Fathers (Story Line Press), O Taste and See (Bottom Dog Press) and Highway 99 (Heyday Books), and Words and Quilts (Quilt Digest Press, 1996); her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, North American Review, Rosebud, Cutbank, Nimrod, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Iris, Comstock Review, Oxymoron, Yankee, Runes, Poet Lore, Smartish Pace, Poetry Southeast, Cimarron Review, Spoon River Quarterly, Hawaii Review and Passages North, among many others. Her short story “The Audience” is forthcoming as an illustrated chapbook (Spring 2007) from Uptown Books. She has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and has won a number of awards, including The Chicago Literary Award from Another Chicago Magazine, the Bazanella Award for Short Fiction and a number of Pushcart nominations. Her essays, interviews, reviews and creative non-fiction have appeared in Poetry Now, Small Press Review, Perihelion and Gardening at a Deeper Level (Garden House Press, 2004). She is currently a part-time instructor for Sacramento City College and the University of California, Davis Extension. The Fortunate Islands is her first full-length collection of poetry.

Review: The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars

2008-03-03T22:14:00.009-05:00

Read the insightful review of The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars by Joshua Kornreich in The Meridian.

"Much of the pleasure in reading The Boy Who Killed Caterpillers does indeed come from the use of the language itself; once adjusted to the rhythm and flow of Kornreich’s isolated sentences, the reader may find it difficult to imagine the Boy’s story told any other way. Yet beneath his public image as a linguistic trailblazer, Kornreich proves himself to be a fine storyteller: outrageous and bizarre, certainly, but also subtle, perceptive, and sensitive enough to win the reader’s heart." —Tina Blevins

Marick Press Mini-Literary Festival 2008

2008-03-02T09:43:00.003-05:00

Greetings

2008-03-01T23:34:00.000-05:00

It’s the new and electric Marick Press weblog. Here you can read excerpts from our talented authors. Pierce the pulse of contemporary literature then watch it flow lighted before you. Revel in the words of the living. Find out what’s happening, what’s next, and what has come before.

Marick Press Authors Workshops

2008-02-07T23:56:00.004-05:00

Saturday, May 3, 2008

Download the registration form.

• 9am-11am Peter Conners (confirmed)
• 11am-Noon Katie Ford (confirmed)
• Noon-1pm G.C. Waldrep (confirmed)
• 1pm-2 pm Ilya Kaminsky (confirmed)
• 2pm-3pm Susan Kelly DeWitt (confirmed)
• 3pm-4pm Sean Thomas Dougherty (confirmed)
• 4pm-5pm Derick Burleson (confirmed)

Register before April 25, 2008
Contact Mariela Griffor
mgriffor@marickpress.com
(313)407-9236

Calendar of Events

2008-01-01T21:57:00.003-05:00