Poetry

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Patrick Moran is the Winner of the 2011 Editors' Prize in Poetry

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted. We were completely overwhelmed by fantastic manuscripts.

Congratulations to Patrick Moran for winning the prize for The Book of Lost Things!

Patrick Moran’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a variety of publications including Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Iowa Review and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is the author of two other collections of poetry, Tell a Pitiful Story and Doppelgangster.  Currently, he’s an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He lives in Fort Atkinson, WI, with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

 

Finalists are listed below. Check back during the next few week for poems from Moran and our finalists.

–Borrowed Wave by Rachel Moritz
–Vitreous Hide by Michael Edgerton
–Doubter Come Home from a Drowning of Vision by Carrie Meadows
–The Silhouettes by Lily Ladewig
–After Hurricane by Mark McKain
–ROBINSON ALONE PROVIDES THE IMAGE by Kathleen Rooney
–Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope by Frank Montesonti
–Rancho Nostalgia by James Cihlar
–Mirror Inside A Coffin by Maureen Alsop
–Paradise for the Rest of Us by Gary Hawkins
–No Tee Vee by Andrew Terhune

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A new poem by John Deming

 

Half-Size Dishwasher Routine Voice

 

“Like all routines, however mindless, this

is one I backed into. But it’s–

don’t fear: don’t wake up half-drunk,

hating yourself: you’re tremendous,

one of the best–and it’s

you there, only you attempting

hard memory at what muscle memory.

Remember things, not emotions.

There are reasons to stay one place a long time.”

 

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John Deming’s new chapbook 8 Poems was just published by Eye For an Iris Press, and his four-song Tugboat EP, which features members of P-Funk, was released this summer by BozFonk Music. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, FENCE, Verse Daily, Tarpaulin Sky, POOL and elsewhere.  He is Editor-in-Chief of Coldfront Magazine, lives in New York City, and teaches at Baruch College and LIM College.

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A Poem by Jim Behrle

I Go Forth Blurbless
America needs more
mosques & less fear
“The post office freaks
her out” / I kissed
a boy and it tasted
like the New York Jets
I eat phonies & crap
out copies of Catcher
in the Rye
Put yourself in debt
forever to write like
the poets you like
Turns out I didn’t need
a therapist, I needed
an exorcist
I want to fail worse
I still don’t have
health insurance
You can get along just
fine on boredom &
despair
“Hold me closer, tiny
gangster” / I’ll never
win a Pulitzer unless I
get cancer Stealing your best lines
—
“The poem / does not lie to us. We lie under / its law”–John Wieners, “A poem for vipers”

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Jim Behrle’s latest chapbook, IT SERVES ME RIGHT TO SUFFER, is due out soon

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Three Days Left to Submit!

Once again we are pleased to announce that we are accepting manuscripts for our inaugural Editors’ Prize in Poetry. 

-The winner will receive a $1,000 honorarium and publication with Augury Books as well as 10 complimentary copies of the book. Additional copies can be purchased at a discounted price.

-This contest is open to anyone, except personal friends, colleagues or former students of the editors.

-Multiple submissions are accepted as long as each manuscript is submitted individually with separate reading fees.

-All entries will be considered for publication.

–Submit up 40-75 pages of poetry and an acknowledgments page. Please do not include a bio.

-Entry Fee: $20

-Deadline: May 15, 2011

We are accepting submissions online through Submishmash at http://augurybooks.submishmash.com/Submit.

All money received will go directly towards the title and the maintenance of our catalog.

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Poems (2) from Paul Legault

Catss

In my house, I remember
like a woman goes into her reason.

NINE LIVES: I pass in and out.
THE BOOKS: They pass in and out of me.
WANT: I went in.
FRIENDS IN A SEASON: This season

enacts a change in itself.
We get along

with and for each other.
THE SEQUELS: One cannot live alone.

THE IMPOSSIBLE: But one wants to.
ONE: I can’t live

without being
without and don’t.

 

Party

In it, the bird and his anti-bird
remained calm, it being the air.

CLOSE-UP: I’m dull,
but so is fog.
ARCH: You have to enter your own.
THE STARS: That we are eyes is a thing
as is that we eat corpses in the sea.
TRANQUIL PIGEON: I’m winking at you

to indicate collusion
and that the elliptical fire will augment its intensity

to become what all light will become.
ONE DAY: There it is.

GUILLAUME: Guillaume,
let’s get to know each other one day.
COGNITION: Parts can make a whole person
or thousands of them.

Stick out your tongue,
and hand me that little dog,

so I can describe to you
what they made of those cities with rivers in which they who are sensitive to the cold or not live.

THE SOUND OF THEIR FOOTSTEPS: Draw near
and do it this way.
ALGAE GIANT: An island is a tower.
1,000 WHITE TRIBES: To invent a language, one must tell someone one has done so.
GUILLAUME AGAIN: People put me together

by myself
like a tower

huddled up from the human effort.
TIME: The gods are trespassing in it.

WIDE AVENUE: The past is rising up.
NOTHING: I won’t exist again

because everything does that
to itself.
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Paul Legault’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and others. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010) and The Other Poems, which is forthcoming this fall from Fence Books. He co-edits the translation press Telephone Books and works at the Academy of American Poets.

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Miracles by Brenda Shaughnessy

Photograph by Andy Mastrocinque

Brenda Shaughnessy will be reading at the upcoming Poems about Nothing event at the Rubin Museum this Wednesday. This poem is from her forthcoming third book,  Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press 2012), and was originally published in The Nation (Fall 2010).

Miracles


I spent the whole day

crying and writing, until

they became the same,

 

as when the planet covers the sun

with all its might and still

I can see it; or when one dead

 

body gives its heart

to a name on a list.  A match.

A light. Sailing a signal

 

flare behind me for another to find.

A scratch on the page

is a supernatural act, one twisting

 

fire out of water, blood out of stone.

We can read us. We are not alone.

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Brenda Shaughnessy received her B.A. in literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar(Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.  She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

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Chute by Alicia Jo Rabins

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.

 

 

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a Brooklyn-based poet, performer and composer who received her MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, 6 x 6, Boston Review, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU Press) and Horse Poems (Knopf). As a musician she tours internationally; her original art-pop song cycle about Biblical women, Girls in Trouble, was released in October 2009 and she is the violinist in Golem, NYC’s punk-klezmer band.  She also holds a Masters in Jewish Women’s Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary and tutors bar and bat mitzvah students online.
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4 Poems by Sharmila Cohen

Augury likes to think of Telephone as our sister journal. Therefore, it is our honor to present 4 very small poems by one of the co-editors today!

 

4 Poems

The iron gates kept us out of the city
for weeks. When we finally broke through,
giant moths burst from the chimneys of every home.
When the sky cleared, our eyes burned
and all sight of the present was lost.
*
We are following the horn-tips
through the wilderness. Someone will be cursed
on behalf of goats. The walking stick broke
and scrambled down the mountain. This appeared
to be a prophecy. A fainting spell.
A mandatory sleep.
*
We galloped through the tunnels and tunnels led
to more tunnels. Sometimes fires would light
on the path ahead. During that era,
we were made of water. Those of us who evaporated
returned fully-formed in the cold evening.
*
The expedition failed
when someone tripped over a crate
of dead birds. We covered the body in feathers,
but blood could not be stopped. A dark trail
of wings rivered around the campsite.
*


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Sharmila Cohen lives in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of The New School’s M.F.A. program and co-editor of Telephone, a translation-based poetry journal. Her work can also be found in Harper’s Magazine, The Cortland Review, Shampoo, and Juked, among other places.
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