Steve Fellner on Rigoberto Gonzalez

One of Gonzalez's recurring trademarks is his obsession with similes. Due to spiritual reasons, I've always been suspicious of them. Why not accept the fact that everything in this universe is on some level uniquely its own? To imply that something is "like" something else is to ungenerously take away from the thing's specialness. But in Black Blossoms, Gonzalez's book, which consists largely of persona poems, the figurative language is used less to compare but to show a different side, a nuance, or a shocking oddity of and within the same thing.

dear whiting foundation,

thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you
thank you

NYC: Whiting Writers' Award Ceremony/Reception/Reading

oh my

Ten emerging writers including a novelist in New York City and a poet in Casa Grande, Ariz., are among this year's winners of the Whiting Writers' Awards.

chicago bits

if i wasn't moving to nyc later this fall, i would consider moving to chicago.
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thanks to carlos cumpián for inviting me, and thanks to kimberly dixon being such a wonderful host.
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i got a tour of the poetry foundation buidling. it's beautiful. and i got a sneak peek at the TOC of the december issue, which includes two of my poems.
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david love your cap
sara oh your smile
erika you are a tiger
kyle nice beard
jacob we got your back
luis thanks for the pics
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i
got
a
secret
!

Rigoberto González on Dagoberto Gilb

Gilb explores fresh territory with "Before the End, After the Beginning": for the middle-aged, middle-class Chicano (neither young or old, rich or poor, Mexican or American), upward mobility is more of a zigzag. The dust never settles, and the man exists in a state of perpetual discomfort because -- like burly Texan Ramiro, who rents a low-ceilinged room in the story "Hacia Teotitlán -- "he didn't fit" completely into a single box.

chicago pix

Slow Lightning (Click on pic to enlarge it!)

I now have a page over at the Yale University website!

I love the cover. But hey, I'm biased.

This is really happening. I'm going to have a book out in the world. Somebody pinch me.

Crazy.

bits

back home. up next: chicago. then...
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today i have to respond to some student poems, comment on proofs, and kiss a fool. ha.
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there seems to be way more creative writing jobs opening up this year, no?
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the world was on fire and nobody could save but you.
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thank you, my little poems. your devotion keeps surprising me. i often say that i'm your father. but sometimes i feel like a child, and you, my little poems, are my father-figure, always taking care of me, making sure i eat, making sure i'm happy in the world. how can i ever repay you?
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From high above, I might be said to ripple.

2012 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award

Each year, Yale University Press seeks one book-length poetry manuscript to be published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The competition is open to any American citizen under forty years of age who has not published a book of poetry (contestants must be under the age of forty at the time they submit the manuscript to the competition). The winner receives royalties when the book is published.

Submissions for the 2012 Competition must be postmarked no earlier than October 1, 2011 and no later than November 15, 2011.

Full guidelines here.

2011 National Book Award Finalists in Poetry

Poetry: Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly); Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton & Company); Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press).

!!!!

i love this poet. i love this poem.

HENS

It's good for the ego, when I call and they come

running, squawking, and clucking, because it's feed time,

and once again I can't resist picking up little Lazarus,

an orange-and-white pullet I adore. "Yes, yes, everything will be

okay," I say to her glaring mongrel face. Come September,

she'll begin to lay the blue-green eggs I love poached.

God dooms the snake to taste nothing but the dust

and the hen to 4,000 or so ovulations. Poor Lazarus,

last spring an intruder murdered her sisters and left her

garroted in the coop. There's a way the wounded

light up a dark rectangular space. Suffering becomes

the universal theme. Too soft, and you'll be squeezed;

too hard, and you'll be broken. Even a hen knows this,

posing on a manure pile, her body a stab of gold.

Henri Cole

poet on poet fun!

The PSA invited some poets to talk about their favorite recent first books. I know most of the poets/books selected, but there are some names/titles that are new to me, like Dilruba Ahmed and Joshua Edwards. I love discovering a new voice. Thanks, Poetry Society of America!!

Kazam Ali on Orlando White
Thomas Sayers Ellis on Shane Book
Arda Collins on Jonathan Thirkield
Carmen Giménez Smith on J. Michael Martinez

Full list here.

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I have a new crush. Farid Matuk! Check out his pic. I'm so buying his book now.

coldfront review: henri cole

Beauty is always tempered by brutality in Cole’s work. And a dynamic tension runs throughout, like a dangerous undertow. The comprehensiveness of his view is reflected in his unselfconscious melding of East and West, of Japanese and Chinese culture and classical Greek and Roman mythology. Childhood and adulthood alternate...

blue mountain pics