Author: augurybooks

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"Playing Tennis Against a Wall" by 2013 Poetry Finalist Andrew James Weatherhead

Photo by Amanda Noyes

Photo by Amanda Noyes

Playing Tennis Against a Wall

by Andrew James Weatherhead

The only way to win
is to rent a bulldozer
file a construction permit
learn how to operate
a bulldozer.
Don’t be a sore loser.
Trace the thought
back to the beginning.
The bus is late, again
but it’s here. It’s just you
and the driver.
His ringtone is that
Ennio Morricone song.
You know the one.
He has to use his hands.
He says, “Who is this?”
Then, “Oh, good morning.”

 

Andrew James Weatherhead holds a degree in Neuroscience from NYU, an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and is an Eagle Scout. His website is www.andrewweatherhead.org.

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Poem by 2013 Augury Finalist Travis Macdonald

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

How To Keep Clean When The World Around You Is Going To Shit

by Travis Macdonald

Spoiler alert: there’s no secret meaning asleep beneath
every single love story. The human mouth contains
about 20 billion bacterium breeding
endlessly. Generations live and die in the grip
of your indigenous indigestion. Meanwhile we are still

killing the buffalo but with birth control
darts and BBQ sauce instead of bullets. Same dark hunger, different
villains in the seed vault stealing meals. It doesn’t take

Monsanto stock or an advanced degree to see we’re sinking in
iceberg sweat and high-speed propaganda bandwidths. You can get a PhD in pretty
much anything. Adieu

to you, dear country club bar mitzvah season. We miss
your microbe exchange rate slow dance doubling. With every chaperone slap

the effects of your affection hardened
into hidden tissues and hand-me-down zippers. Overstimulated
economic indicators of the apocalypse beware: This is the moment
where we begin to build our intimacy into a big brand name.

 

Travis Macdonald is a copywriter by day, editor by night and a poet in between. He is the author of two full-length collections (The O Mission Repo [vol. 1] and N7ostradamus) as well as several chapbooks. With his wife, JenMarie Macdonald, he publishes Fact-Simile Editions, a micropress dedicated to the creation of handmade contemporary poetic artifacts from recycled or reclaimed materials.

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‘Childproofing’ by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer, 2013 Augury Poetry Finalist

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Childproofing

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer

i.

My mother is reading a book

entitled The Fearful Child,

and in-between pages 57 & 58,

there is a tiny yellow sticky labeled STEPHANIE.

 

I am the section of the chapter subtitled

“Overactive Imagination, Underactive Reasoning.”

 

Apparently,

I am abnormal.

I have been

found out.

 

It is disappointing

to find that

I have not been mentioned in the forward.

 

Just the same,

my mother has penned me in.

 

The book was neatly blanketed

by A Special Issue

of Martha Stewart Living

lying underneath the nightstand

near the Better Homes and Gardens

Family Medical Guide.

 

One morning I found a kitchen knife

wedged between

the mattress and the box spring.

 

It is easier to be anthologized

than really in the dark.

 

I can make a doily from a tourniquet

from the queen Charisma sheets.

 

Somewhere there is an artist

commissioned to illustrate an erection,

trench mouth and Nasturtium;

harelips, epileptic,

Convallaria majalis,

pinworms and

 

an itchy anus,

common,

accidental death;

 

I like to read

what my mother is reading:

fragrant, wide flowers.

 

ii.

Occasionally, we have company

over. They ask, “Why

do you have babies

in the basement?

 

It is odd—

they scratch so at the door.”

 

My mother kept us there

when we were little.

I turned out okay.

 

I let the cats out.

 

Our two Maine Coons

live in a room

beneath the kitchen.  The basement, Stephanie.

A finished basement.

 

Correction: we keep our cats in the basement.

 

It is frightening

to go either up or down stairs.

They are beginning to sound

human—like us.

 

iii.

Something in the paint

becomes a hospital;

the leaded cream

embalms

a private bone

black molding

certifies against

the mirrors

and their nook,

hanging here

before the desk,

before the desk, the Askins’ window—

no one ever writes without a chair,

I ruined it I think, watering

the Bonsai, that someone

loved me for.

 

iv.

If you want to watch TV

you can watch

 

the news: people say

Southeast Atlanta

police say: a woman

 

in her home;

a man:

survived: her

husband is:

 

everyone

on the news is:

off JimmyCarterBoulevard;

sent to Grady

 

He was:

in the closet

for three days:

 

she hadn’t vacuumed;

he raped her:

I’d’ve heard:

 

:what the neighbors said

 

in a quiet:

 

brought in,

died.

 

Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer is originally from Atlanta, GA, and works as an artist and freelance editor in St. Louis, MO, where she co-curates the Observable Readings series. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her poems have appeared AGNI (forthcoming), Verse, Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Cimarron Review, Fence, and Verse Daily, among others. Stephanie is a compulsive baker and also very handy with a pitchfork. “Childproofing” previously appeared in Delmar.

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‘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 Palate, PALABRA, PARABOLA, Poemeleon, Raven Chronicles, San Pedro River Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.

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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 Sun, The Harvard Review, Fiction, Witness, 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 Cary — Delaware and Other Places of Mind

Dan Moreau — A Tour of North American Ruins

Ellen Campbell — Contents 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

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Announcing Frances Justine Post’s ‘Beast’ As Augury’s Next Poetry Publication

Photo by: Cecelia Post
From collection: Natural Won’t Change Disaster

This announcement concerns our upcoming poetry publication. Keep checking in or follow this blog (bottom right corner) for our fiction announcement, coming soon.

First things first: We want to emphatically thank everyone who submitted their work to Augury Books during our reading period. As always, it was a great pleasure and even greater honor to have the opportunity to read so many exceptional manuscripts. We are so grateful to all of you for trusting us with your work.

We are thrilled to announce that we will be publishing Beast, the debut collection by Frances Justine Post, in the genre of poetry (fiction genre announcement TBA, see above).

Frances Justine Post

Frances Justine Post received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where she is a Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast. She is a recipient of the 2013 Inprint Verlaine Poetry Prize from the University of Houston, the 2008 “Discovery” / The Boston Review Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and others.

We would also like to salute this year’s poetry finalists, some of whose work you can see featured here in the upcoming season:

Tina Schumann — Praising the Paradox

Stephanie Schlaifer — Clarkston Street Polaroids

Pia Aliperti — Solitude Must Share My Solitude

Travis Macdonald — 3

Andrew Weatherhead — Cats and Dogs

Many thanks to Frances Justine Post and our finalists for giving us the opportunity to recognize their wonderful work. Stay tuned for our fiction announcement.

—Augury Books

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Jeff Alessandrelli, Editors’ Prize Finalist, Shares ‘The Ample Harvest of the Luminous Never’

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

“The ample harvest of the luminous never.”—Tristan Tzara

What have the starfish

—glowing bright—

stolen from so many millions of stars?

If the information age cannot tell us,

if the digital age cannot,

nor the pulsating electronic nodes constantly circling

in and around our heads,

how can we lull ourselves

peacefully to sleep at night,

content in our ignorance?

Mystery is tangible, is constantly converting

the preying jaws of death

into a rocking chair, a La-Z Boy,

something colored-smooth and reclined.

Life resides here,

there. Death.

Luminous harvest of some ample never,

glowing bright, bright.

Even if you never learned how to swim,

even if you are 20,000 leagues under the sea

swarming in starfish,

it is impossible to drown,

to awake and—in wonder—

believe and be whole again.

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Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Portland, OR. This Last Time Will Be The First, his first full-length collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in early 2014. The name of his dog is Beckett Long Snout.

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Remembering in Third Person: Poem by 2012 Finalist Stephanie Anderson

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Remembering in Third Person
Look at what we have
             established:
                               It is possible to have
                               a conversation with
                               a stranger.
The cats under the bed
The tiny tick of carbonation
We don’t imagine the
               scene:
                                 We inhabit it.
Closing lids against the sun
That shade of red
What makes
               a journal:
                                 a list.
The multicolored boards
The needy dog
The blue-and-white
               check:
 
We’ve lost the car:
                                 what has been
                                 taken.
The peeling paint
The glitter glue
               in her hair
What makes it better.
                                 The girl launching
                                 the waves
The water falling on
               the water
If you love error
               so love zero.
The dirty sill
The violet door
The pink cake
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Stephanie Anderson is the author of In the Key of Those Who Can No Longer Organize Their Environments (Horse Less Press, August 2013) and four chapbooks, including the forthcoming Sentence, Signal, Stain (Greying Ghost Press).  She lives in Chicago and edits the micropress Projective Industries.
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Come See Augury at the 3rd Annual NYC Poetry Festival, July 27-28

 

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Tomorrow is already Wednesday, so it’s time to prepare your answer for the popular post-hump-day question of: “Hey, what are you doing this weekend?”

We’ve got you covered. “Going to the Third Annual New York City Poetry Festival, hosted by the Poetry Society of New York, on Governor’s Island,” you can say. Why? Because, hopefully, you are just as excited as we are for the two-day celebration of New York’s dynamic poetry scene.

Yes, Augury will be there! Our own B. C. Edwards (To Mend Small Children), David Joel Friedman (Soldier Quick with Rain) and Paige Lipari (Family of Many Enzos) will be reading Sunday (July 28) at 1:30 p.m. on the White Horse stage.

Find out all you need to know at the Poetry Society of New York’s website, including the lineup of over 50 poetry organizations and 200 poets, the times and locations of each reading, and transportation info to and from Governors Island.

Also, check out Coldfront’s fabulous NYC Poetry Festival Preview, featuring interviews from many of the presses, journals, and organizations that will present at the festival — including one from Augury!