Author: augurybooks

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To Mend Small Children by B.C. Edwards

“If you like to be spooked by poems, if you like poems to send you back into your quotidian existence with a more acute sense of its weirdness and charm, read “How to Mend Small Children” carefully. Edwards’ poems offer solutions to bizzaro problems and alchemic transmogrifications for exotic items, but their miraculous nature really lies in the way they transform the person who reads them. Prepare to visit a dimension that is weird, dark, funny and eerily similar to the one in which we live.” ~Ben Mirov

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FAMILY OF MANY ENZOS by Paige Lipari


Family of Many Enzos

“In Family of Many Enzos, Paige Lipari conjures a night kitchen that pulses with memory and fantastical incident. Volcanoes provide the heat, while “the red moon only comes out on the nights we stuff artichokes.” The cooking, too, is hardly homey: “enemies/ will be picking/ bones from their loaf,” and be sure to look for the “young American cousin in/ the sweet dumpling squash.” Smartly posed dilemmas of self-knowledge are entwined with strands of a generational saga, obliquely told yet vivid. Lipari pries at the connections that link all things sensual—food and pleasure (“Make me a feast out of the/ the brains you’ve lost in bed”)—to render felt intimacies, as well as the starkness of isolation: “Where are the candles kept?/ I am alone on this ceiling,/ and wasn’t even born timely to.” In Lipari’s night kitchen, the flame burns low but steady.” ~Albert Mobilio

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Book Release Party with Edwards & Lipari!

Finally, something to do Monday, February 20th if you live in the New York Tri-State area! Augury will be around to heartily celebrate the release of its three new titles. B.C. Edwards and Paige Lipari will also be there to read from their startlingly beautiful new chapbooks.

Also, music by Alicia Jo Rabins of Girls in Trouble! Cupcakes! Drink specials! Poetry! Books!

RSVP on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/272806632784695/

And we would be remiss if we didn’t thank everyone who supported Augury during our fundraising process. We made our goal! Thank you to donators, well-wishers, word-spreaders, hand-holders, and everyone else.

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SIXTEEN DAYS IN A LINCOLN ROADSTER by Finalist Kathleen Rooney

& here they are: the left-most coast.

The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, on the Porciúncula River.

Easier, he admits, just to say L.A.

Plainly not alluvial, no longer a floodplain, the climate seems wild, spooky in its mildness.

Annexations & consolidations, grandiloquence & excess.

Ann lived here after they graduated—Nebraska has given you all she has to offer, said the commencement speaker.

Oil, orange juice, the sperm of movie stars.

Craning his neck at a variety of angles, Robinson sees no angels.

Less couple-in-a-car, more leaf-blown-about-on-the-earth-by-the-winds, they decide to crash at the Portal Motor Hotel—

a Motel, got it, but a portal to what?

They will go out at night: clarinets & trumpets—a maze of jazz.

Bred to earn his daily bread, Robinson once dropped out of vocational psych.

The motto of the city: augment augment augment.

Bored by pioneers, Robinson tries to be pioneering.

Prospector without prospects, or potentially too many?

Cement cement cement buries all trace of the old enterprise of gold.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her most recent books include the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010) and the poetry chapbook, After Robinson Has Gone (Greying Ghost Press,2011).With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008). Her second full-length collection, Robinson Alone Provides the Image, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in November 2012.

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A Poem by Finalist Lily Ladewig

More Like a Compass

this hat gives me a direction.
There are occasions for hats
and a hat for every occasion.
But this is just the opposite.
I wake up naked and put this hat on
my head before deciding
what the day will wear.

 

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Lily Ladewig’s poems have appeared in Conduit, Denver Quarterly, H_NGM_N, Salt Hill, and SUPERMACHINE. She is the author of the chapbooks You Are My Favorite Person of the Year (Mondo Bummer Press, 2010) and, with Anne Cecelia Holmes, I Am A Natural Wonder (Blue Hour Press, 2011). Her first full-length book, The Silhouettes, was a finalist for Augury Books inaugural Editors’ Prize and will be published by SpringGun Press in 2012.

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Big News: Chapbooks by B.C. Edwards & Paige Lipari

We have fantastic news! Following hot on the heels of our announcement that Patrick Moran won the Editors Prize for the Book of Lost Things, we are pleased to announce that Augury Books will be publishing two chapbooks this Winter/Spring. Take a moment to meet our attractive new authors B.C. Edwards and Paige Lipari.

B.C. Edwards lives in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the 2011 Hudson Prize put out by Black Lawrence Press which will be publishing his collection of short fiction, “The Aversive Clause” in 2012 and his collection of poetry “From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes” in 2013. He is a regular contributor to BOMBlog and his work can be found in Red Line Blues, The Sink Review, Mathematics Magazine, Hobart and others. His short story “Illfit” is being adapted into a piece by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. He is also a Literary Death Match Champion and has the medal to prove it.

Paige Lipari is a poet, music maker, cartoonist, and cook. She lives and works in Brooklyn, and was previously an editor at A Public Space.

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Poem by Finalist Mark McKain

Chameleon

 

puffs its red throat-fan—
a warning stolen from the burning cane-fields.

 

My love and I pose
beside a wall of wrought iron and hibiscus.

 

I hold a ball of string. A wild dog sniffs the gutter.
Kite made of palm ribs hangs on thorns of a lime tree.

 

A hurricane of scents—sweaty skin,
spitted pig, bleeding fish—bathes the island.

 

We suck on oranges. Juice runs down chin
and stings the corners of mouth, sea-rain

 

and seared flesh streaming through hair.
A maroon centipede undulates.

 

Sugarcane ash falls on skin.

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Mark McKain’s poetry has appeared in many literary journals including The New Republic, Agni, Subtropics, The Journal, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Ranging the Moon and teaches screenwriting at Full Sail University in Orlando, Florida.

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A Poem by Finalist Carrie Meadows

We might welcome these storms

 

were they not so like glass
broken, lingering in slivers
lodged in laundry, in the dishes, bits
tacked like proclamations
to the soles of shoes. Wads of insulation
dry in grass, and the elderly
brace their necks to look up, just
to not look down on this day-after
when shingles glide in
on blue skies, when children
drag their bicycles and rollerblades
into the streets and take deep
breaths between screams: Come
out and play. The light won’t last
beyond the sun’s setting. This day
won’t last beyond the sirens
and warning beeps of trucks
moving in reverse, only reverse
as they zigzag routes of fallen trees
to some destination out of the reaches
of their lifts, their ladders, some place
familiar and stinging like a splinter
felt but never seen.

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Carrie Meadows’ poetry has appeared in North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, and other publications. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her husband and two children.

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A Poem by Finalist Rachel Moritz

Pilot

Someone who tunnels down and away was other

My mother said, you’re going where I can’t be with you

As a glass idol fills its own presence with lack

The stairs down into each self—how one door

opened where the man was let in

Public as flame, the self with no interior

One hadn’t hearing for doubt in that place seen as clear

With him on the street, my spine was agent a world

extended into, sweeping a path

Sometimes coming back in dreams, that other kind of transparency

How our safety felt unreasonable, like I was doing something wrong

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Rachel Moritz is the author of two chapbooks, The Winchester Monologues (2005) and Night-Sea (2008), both from New Michigan Press. Her poetry has been published in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Free Verse, HOW2, typo, 26, and other journals. She co-edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and also publishes a poetry chaplet and broadside series, WinteRed Press. Moritz lives and works in Minneapolis.