An Apology

We here at Augury want to apologize for a glitch in our Submittable notifications. When we initially announced you’re the most beautiful thing that happened by Arisa White as our poetry selection for 2016, along with a list of finalists who will be featured in the coming weeks on our blog, we believed each author who had submitted work and was not selected received a Submittable email notifying them of our decision and thanking them for entrusting us with their work. However, it has recently come to our attention that some authors who submitted their work did not receive our email and that their manuscripts continued to be listed as In-Progress on Submittable. When we remedied that situation by closing this summer’s poetry submissions category, other authors received a second decline notice. Neither of these situations are acceptable: lack of notification or multiple notifications.

We want to make it clear that our selection process prizes each author first and foremost. We pride ourselves on being a press who works closely with authors in all facets, as we are authors ourselves and understand the work and (often times) frustration which comes with putting your writing out into the world and seeing it declined. We posted our poetry selection and finalists believing that everyone had been notified beforehand. We are sincerely apologetic both to those who learned of their rejection via our post as well as to those who had received our original notification and so experienced the follow up notification as an unnecessary second rejection. Glitches happen, but the publication process is so emotionally fraught anyway that we are sorry tech issues on our end may have added frustration or gloom to any author’s day.

 

Please stay tuned to our blog for updates about our prose selection and finalists in November.

"someone is collecting the lost" by Poetry Finalist Aimee Herman

 

Aimee Herman is the author of two full length books of poetry, “meant to wake up feeling” and “to go without blinking” and currently teaches writing in the Bronx. Read more words at aimeeherman.wordpress.com.

Word Up Reading with Joe Pan

On Saturday, November 7th from 6:00 pm-8:00 pm, Word Up Community Bookshop in Washington Heights will host a reading of seven city poets. Among the featured poets is Joe Pan, whose poetry collection Hiccups we published this past October.

Word Up describes itself as a “multilingual, general-interest community bookstore and arts space … committed to preserving and building a neighborhood in which all residents help each other to live better informed and more expressive lives, using books as an instrument of reciprocal education and exchange, empowering not only themselves, but their community.” Word Up is run by volunteers and hosts literary readings, film screenings, concerts, community meetings, workshops, and reading groups with the goal of bolstering the creative community in upper Manhattan.

See the reading’s Facebook event to learn more about Pan, the bookstore, and the six other featured poets.

Hiccups is available through Small Press Distribution online.

More of Joe Pan:

Joe Pan’s website

"Black Anecdote" by Poetry Finalist Andrew Seguin

Photo courtesy of Sofia Verzbolovskis

Andrew Seguin is a poet and photographer. He is the author of the chapbook Black Anecdote (Poetry Society of America, 2010), and has a new chapbook forthcoming from Tammy. His photographic work explores the intersection of imagery and language. Andrew has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, Poets House and the United States Fulbright Program. You can find him on the web at www.andrewseguin.com

Frances Justine Post Reviewed in Denver Quarterly

Augury’s own Frances Justine Post is featured in issue 50.1 of Denver Quarterly. We published Post’s Beast in 2014 and Fox Frazier-Foley gives her musings on the text in this month’s review.

Frazier-Foley latches onto an overriding theme of Beast: the idea of the juxtaposing bestiality and civility in us all and how these parts interact to form a whole.

“…these poems provide an illuminating oscillation between brutality and vulnerability. What does it mean to be a beast, or to be human? Where, and why, might overlaps occur between/among these identities? Post explores the frightful possibilities through rich, lyrical language, melding the mythic tradition of human-animal hybrid consciousness with fraught, postmodern edges of ‘glowing emergency.’”

To see the connections between Post’s work and Ovid’s, and to read meditations on writers from Roland Barthes to Percival Everett to Joan Didion, subscribe to the Denver Quarterly here.

Beast is available for purchase through Small Press Distribution online.

More of Post:

Frances Justine Post’s website

Frances Justine Post on Twitter (@FrancesJPost)

An Excerpt from ‘you’re the most beautiful thing that happened’ by Arisa White

 

There are little words
that can fit in little places
if you say them small enough.

To fit a song into a pore
you have to be prepared
for the day it will sweat.

If words could stick on people,
if spoken, they would become
a different creature.

Blinded and you’re turned
five times around. Nothing
in you knows what it knew.

It’s the best part of the game:
Prick the girls you like best
while pinning on the donkey’s tail.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is the author of the chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. With funding from the City of Oakland, Post Pardon was adapted into an opera. Her full-length collections Hurrah’s Nest and A Penny Saved were published in 2012. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, won the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival Award and was nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Award, the 82nd California Book Awards, and the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. One of the founding editors of HER KIND, an online literary community powered by VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, Arisa has received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Headlands Center for the Arts, Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Rose O’Neill Literary House, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a 2013-14 recipient of an Investing in Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, which funded the dear Gerald project, a regional representative for Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and a faculty member in the BFA Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her wife, Samantha.

More on Arisa White.

PICS: Joe Pan and Carey McHugh’s Launch Party in Review

Last Wednesday, Augury Books hosted a launch party for Joe Pan’s Hiccups and Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone. The turnout at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop was great, and we are thankful to all who came. As you can see, there was barely any room left to stand!

Debora Kuan and an amazing crowd! Photo: Ian Lloyd

Our first reader of the evening was Debbie Kuan. She shared with us a selection of her poems, telling the story of the pigeons in her building, and her perpetually blue toe. She then introduced Joe Pan, telling us she had been a fan of his since the moment they met, and how she had found out he took his last name from his wife.

Joe Pan reading from Hiccups. Photo: Ian Lloyd

Joe Pan then read to us from his new book Hiccups. He took us with him on his journey around the country and around the world, demonstrating the lighthearted wit of his poems.

Karen Russell reading her essay on beepers and introducing Carey McHugh. Photo: Ian Lloyd

Following Pan was Karen Russell. She read to us from her essay Beeper World, originally published in Harper’s, a funny and poignant look at growing up in Miami in the nineties. She then introduced her dear friend Carey McHugh, saying “Each time Carey McHugh writes a poem, a Dodge in the desert bursts into flame.”

Carey McHugh reading from American Gramophone. Photo: Ian Lloyd

Rounding out the night was Carey McHugh, reading selections from her new book American Gramophone. We shared in her excitement as she saw her book, and we got to hear the story of the hog (not a pig!) gracing the cover, as well as her experience in Greenpoint seeing her own death.

We are very grateful to our readers Debora Kuan, Joe Pan, Karen Russell, and Carey McHugh, and to Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop for hosting the event. And, most importantly, to everyone who made it out to support Joe, Carey, and Augury Books! Our extended thanks, and we look forward to seeing you all at the next one!

Photo: Ian Lloyd

From left to right: Carey Wladis, Kimberly Steele, Mike Miller, cover designer of American Gramophone and Randall Horton’s Hook (forthcoming!), and Kate Angus. Photo: Ian Lloyd

Joe Pan, Debora Kuan, Kate Angus, Carey McHugh, Karen Russell, Kimberly Steele, Nicolas Amara, and Ian Lloyd. Photo: Carey Wladis

Our Poetry Selection for 2016

In the Giant’s Lair (1892) by Gerhard Munthe, Wikimedia Commons

Following a plentiful reading period full of outstanding work, Augury Books is very happy to announce Arisa White‘s you’re the most beautiful thing that happened as our poetry selection for 2016. We received so many great submissions, and paring down one manuscript from our finalist pool was a difficult feat. We are glad to highlight the work of our poetry finalists here:

Architect, Garden by Andrew Seguin

brightness this by Franciszka Voeltz

I Wanted Everything by Elizabeth Whittlesey

Majnun by Mark Faunlagui

Pinocchio: The Whale Years by Patrick Moran

Schematics for Manhood & Flight by Joe Jimenez

Snow Farmer by Benjamin Gantcher

there are some things that are easier to mention by Aimee Herman

When I Was an Octopus by Gregg Murray

On behalf of the editors, we thank you all for your extended patience. Stay tuned for more on Arisa, an excerpt from her manuscript, excerpts from several of our finalists, and a prose selection in November!

Applications Open for Bitch Media’s Writing Fellowships

Bitch Media, a non-profit feminist media organization, has announced the funding of four new writing fellowships. The fellowships aim to help emerging writers in the feminist, activist, and pop-culture fields develop their voices. Over the course of three months, each fellow will produce six online articles, one long-form print article, and will receive useful guidance from those already established in feminist media. Additionally, each fellow will receive a stipend of $1,500.

The application deadline is November 1st. For more details on how to apply, check out this article on Bitch Media’s website.

Save LitMore’s Poetry Library!

LitMore, located in Baltimore, aims to provide a space for writers, readers and audiences to come together for workshops, readings and support. The space provides daily and monthly writing studios and houses a free access community poetry library. But as of January 1, 2016, LitMore will become a nomadic literary organization, continuing programming, but in various locations. A number of local educational and cultural institutions have been examining the practicality of taking in the organization’s book collection, but until then the library will remain in limbo and it may be necessary to move the library’s collection to a storage facility until a partner has been found. Let’s give these books a home! Find out more on how to help here!