‘Wednesday’ by 2013 Poetry Finalist Tina Schumann

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Wednesday

by Tina Schumann

Today I sat at my desk. Moved
a few books around. Thought of my demise.
Wrote a letter to a friend’s mother
thanking her for the Longfellow;
she’d heard I was a poet and naturally assumed.
I ate when my body said eat.
I drank water – cold and slick
it slipped down my throat.
I waited for the mailman
to walk up the steps. I heard his start
and stop, the lift and lowering
of the lid, the sharp turn of his boots
on dry leaves. I waited and he came.
I listened and he left. He and I
and the crows and the UPS man
and the kid down the street with the basketball
are all figures moved by instinct and need,
obligation, desire, and boredom. But I digress.
I picked the glass up, set the glass down,
stood up, walked the floor, looked out the window,
cursed the grass, and thought, thought, thought.
– never fully dormant, never fully engaged.
And all the while this is what the sign around my neck said:
If it rattles like a person than it is a person.


Tina Schumann’s work was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Tupelo Press listed her full manuscript as a “remarkable work,” in their 2012 open submission period. Her chapbook “As If” (Split Oak Press) was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for 2010 and in 2011 her work received a Pushcart nomination. She holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies including The American Poetry Journal, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, Harpur PalatePALABRA, PARABOLA, PoemeleonRaven Chronicles, San Pedro River ReviewThe Midwest Quarterly, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.

Augury Books’ Fiction Publication Will Be ‘The Family Cannon’ by Halina Duraj

Look for ‘The Family Cannon’ new from seller Augury Books

 

 

 

Photo by: Amanda Noyes

Hello friends and fellow lovers of the arts. We were amazed and overwhelmed by the quality of your work; an ardent and sincere thank you goes out to all of you who trusted us with your manuscripts.

Halina Duraj

We are pleased to announce that we have selected Halina Duraj’s The Family Cannon as our inaugural short story collection.

Halina Duraj’s stories have appeared in The SunThe Harvard ReviewFictionWitness, and other journals and have been recommended for PEN/O’Henry and Pushcart prizes. In 2012, she was a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award finalist and a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah, where she served as a fiction co-editor for Quarterly West. Halina teaches literature and fiction writing at the University of San Diego.

We would also like to recognize the short story collections of our six finalists:

Adam Weinstein — From the New Technical Manual of Use

Hall CaryDelaware and Other Places of Mind

Dan MoreauA Tour of North American Ruins

Ellen CampbellContents Under Pressure

Sara Lippmann — Doll Palace

Eleanor Swanson Exiles and Expatriates

Thank you to our finalists and everyone who submitted during our reading period. Please help us welcome Halina aboard at Augury Books.  Leave a comment, follow this blog, or simply “Like”!

—Augury Books