PICS: Frances Justine Post + Others Read at Poets House Showcase

Wednesday, July 23rd, Frances Justine Post (Beast, Augury Books, 2013) read at Poets House with fellow poets Emily Abendroth, Brett Fletcher Lauer, and Wendy S. Walters, as part of the 22nd Annual Poets House Showcase series coordinated by Stephen Motika. The reading series accompanies an annual exhibit at Poets House of every poetry and poetry-related text published in the United States each year. See some photos from the night below.

Left to right: Wendy S. Walters’ ‘Troy, Michigan’ (Futurepoem Books, 2014); Frances Justine Post’s ‘Beast’ (Augury Books, 2013); Brett Fletcher Lauer’s ‘A Hotel in Belgium’ (Four Way Books, 2014); Not pictured: Emily Abendroth’s ‘] Exclosures [‘ (Ahsahta Press, 2014). Photo: Nicolas Amara

Stephen Motika. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Emily Abendroth. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Brett Fletcher Lauer. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Frances Justine Post. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Wendy S. Walters. Photo: Nicolas Amara

Poets House, located in Battery Park City, is a poetry library, writing space, and venue, free and open to the public, that houses 60,000 volumes of poetry. Poetry workshops and readings are regularly held, and the building features an open floor with space for writers to browse books or create their own work. A full recording of Wednesday night’s reading is available to stream on the Poets House website—head over and listen!

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This Weekend: 2014 New York Poetry Festival on Governors Island

New York City Poetry Festival

The fourth annual New York City Poetry Festival on Governors Island is almost here!

Augury Books will be reading on the White Horse Stage at 4pm on Saturday, July 26, with Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014) and B. C. Edwards (TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN, 2012). Admission to the festival is FREE, so there’s absolutely no reason to miss out!

The NYCPF is put on by the Poetry Society of New York and features a worldclass lineup including Mark Doty, Matthea Harvey, and Joyelle McSweeney, along with over 250 poets on three stages. The festivities will take place on both Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 6pm. Come for the readings, performances, Vendor’s Village (where you can discover new poetry as well as your old favorites), artists, craftsmen, and food trucks!

Check out the press release for more info, or visit the festival’s website for more information.

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

Frances Justine Post to Read at Poets House on Wed, July 23

Frances Justine Post

On Wednesday evening, Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014) will be reading at Poets House in NYC as part of the Showcase Reading Series. Joining Post are poets Brett Fletcher LauerEmily Abendroth, and Wendy S. Walters.

The event will take place in association with the Annual Poets House Showcase, a remarkable initiative to collect and exhibit to the public, free of charge, every book of poetry published each year, making the Poets House stock among the most comprehensive open-stacks collections in the country.

So go for the reading, stay for the books—or vice-versa—on Wednesday, July 23, 7pm, at Ten River Terrace (at Murray Street) / New York, NY  10282.

Learn more about the Poets House showcase and other readings this week in the New Yorker.

Post will also be reading with Augury at the New York Poetry Festival on Saturday. Stay tuned for more information on the festival and readers later this week.

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Meghan O'Rourke to Lecture at the Mayapple Center

Meghan O’Rourke, photo by Sarah Shatz

The Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities will kick off their Creative Writing guest lecture series on Monday night, July 21, with a lecture by editor, essayist and poet Meghan O’Rourke. The Center, located in Stamford, Connecticut, provides programs, retreats and residencies that cover writing, literature, music, and art therapy, in a “distinctly 21st century climate.”

Augury Books editor Kate Angus, who is also Mayapple Center’s Creative Writing Advisor, will be introducing O’Rourke on Monday night. For more information on the Center and to register, visit Mayapple’s site.

Meghan O’Rourke began her career as one of the youngest editors in the history of The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in Slate, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Redbook, Vogue, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry. O’Rourke is also the author of the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. She was awarded the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Front Page Award for her cultural criticism. One of three judges chosen to select Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007, she has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a finalist for the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts and Letters. A graduate of Yale University, she has taught at Princeton, The New School, and New York University. She lives in Brooklyn, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.

 

Augury Books at the 4th Annual New York City Poetry Festival

The New York City Poetry Festival, put on by the Poetry Society of New York and organized by Stephanie Berger and Nicholas Adamski, will celebrate its 4th year on July 26th and 27th, with two full days of readings on three stages at Governors Island. This year’s line up includes Mark DotyMatthea Harvey, and Joyelle McSweeney, as well as readings organized by The Academy of American Poets, Coldfront Magazine, and The Poetry Project, among many others.

Join the festival both Saturday and Sunday between 11 AM to 6 PM, with a Vendor’s Village of booksellers, artists and craft makers, and food truck catering. Augury Books will be reading on Saturday at 4 PM on the White Horse stage, with Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014), David Joel Friedman and B. C. Edwards (TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN, 2012). Admission is free — don’t miss out!

Check out the press release for more info, or visit the Festival’s website for a full line up of each day, directions, and any additional info.

Augury Books’ reading period is open — Submit your manuscript!

10th Annual Printers’ Ball

This year marks the 10th annual Printers Ball, a day of performances, live printmaking demos, and exhibitions surrounding poetry and literary culture. Founded in 2004 by Poetry magazine’s Art Director Fred Sasaki, Printers’ Ball takes place each year in Chicago and has seen a number of venues spanning across the city. This year, the Ball will be hosted by Spudnik Press Cooperative at the Hubbard Street Lofts, with a central theme of CHATTER, focused on “the energy and chatter of concurrent creative practices.”

Augury Books is honored to be a selected publication at this year’s Ball.

For more information, visit the event website.

 

PICS & VIDEO: "Bonus Round" at Fowler Project Space

Last week, Luke Degnan and  BOMB Magazine put on the reading, Bonus Round, a final event in the Game Show exhibition at Fowler Project Space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The reading included poetry and fiction by presenters Frances Justine Post (BEAST, Augury, 2014), Jack Christian, Michael Coffey, Vincent Katz, and Micaela Morrissette. The exhibition itself displayed work spanning several mediums by Ted Carey, Susan Fang, Kurt Freyer, Elizabeth Hoy, Shanjana Mahmud, Emilie Selden, and Cecelia Post. Enjoy the video and photos documenting the night’s events.

 

Frances Justine Post reads “Heart Hunted” (Video: Cecelia Post):

 

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Sarah Gerard of BOMB Magazine and Luke Degnan introduce. Photo: Frances Justine Post

 

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Michael Coffey reads from his forthcoming story collection, The Business of Naming Things (Bellevue Literary Press, 2015). Photo: Frances Justine Post

 

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Vincent Katz prepares to read in front of a video piece at Fowler. Photo: Frances Justine Post

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Jack Christian reads new work. Photo: Frances Justine Post

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"The State Of The Union, 1998" by Alison Espach

We are very excited to present work from our readers at next week’s Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S on Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels. If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us! Afterwards we can all go dance at the VIDA party.

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This is an excerpt from Alison Espach’s “The State Of The Union, 1998”

THE STATE OF THE UNION, 1998

It is 1998, and everybody we know has moved to Florida.  Everybody we know is obsessed with their porch. The president is always on TV. He won’t leave us alone.

Our leadership in the world is unrivaled, Bill Clinton says.  Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our union is strong.

The President has bags under his eyes.

I am taking notes. Mrs. Klausterman is going to quiz us on the State of the Union first thing in social studies.  She said, “Write down anything you feel is important,” though I know from experience that everything I think is important usually turns out not to be important, so I decide to be safe and write down everything.

The President seems very tired.

But this is not a time to rest.

My brothers are playing Bloody Knuckles on the couch.  The point of the game is always to see who can stomach being the bloodiest, the longest.  Usually, nobody can.  It is the only game my brothers and I play where at some point, we all agree it’s better to lose.

My mother sips a gin and tonic, sitting Japanese-style on the floor. She looks like we do when we are watching Wheel of Fortune after dinner, noses close to the screen. She sits like this, so close to him, as though they are on a date.

It is a time to build a new America!

And find cures for diabetes.

(and AIDS!!!)

It’s no secret: my mother wants to fuck the President. These were my father’s exact words, last night, when my parents thought we had gone to sleep.

“It certainly is our business,” my mother said. “The president’s character is our business.”

“You only say that because he’s the only president you’ve ever wanted to fuck,” my father said.

I seized with panic in the stairwell. I had no idea there were people in this world who wanted to fuck the president. Fucking the President, I think, sounds like a kind of crime.  Something you should get arrested for.

Alison Espach is the author of the novel The Adults. The Adults was a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of 2011, New York Times Editors’ Choice, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and Chicago Tribune #1 Reader Recommendation.   Alison’s other writing has appeared in Salon, the Daily Beast, Lincoln Center Theater Review, Fiction Writer’s Review, Del Sol Review, Sentence, and others.

A poem by Camille Rankine

We’re happy to continue presenting work from our readers at the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S on Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels. If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us!

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Octopus, Paper Darts, and  Tin House. She was selected for a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2013, and was named an Honorary Cave Canem Fellow in 2012. She is Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College, Editorial Director of The Manhattanville Review, and lives in New York City.

A poem by Alicia Jo Rabins

We are very excited to present work from our readers at the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S on Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels. If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us!

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

 Chute

Each time a baby is born
the universe squeezes itself
through a chute,
the same chute
into which
suicides squeeze themselves.
Its mouth
is lined with small iron teeth.
When you bathe your father
who has become like a child,
you feel the teeth
on your fingers.
When your father asks
who you are,
it means his legs have been
sucked in.
For you the tunnel’s
mouth is closed;
for him it is open
and oiled.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet and musician currently based in Portland, OR. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, 6×6, Boston Review, Court Green, Ploughshares and The Collagist. She tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, a song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, and has performed fiddle music across Central America and Kuwait. Residencies and scholarships include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.