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.

 

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.

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.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

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.

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
________________________________________________________________________
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.

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!

Two new poems by Christopher Hughes

 

We are very happy to present poetry by Christopher Hughes. For your viewing pleasure, this video clip of “The Sense of a City is War” was filmed at the Spiderweb Salon in Denton, Tx.

 

For your reading pleasure:

 

Waves Are The Practice Of The Water.

 

I went to the grocery store for cat food, litter, toilet paper, detergent and alcohol.  I took my cat to the vet and the vet shrieked when she saw my cat.  People only shriek like that in movies.  Movies are more like reality than our perception of reality.  Wet cat food from now on, she said.  I said, Why?  Because it’s real, she said.  So I stood in the aisle, staring at rows of pastel-colored tin cans, wondering which flavor my cat prefered. It was turning summer and the mosquitos were sucking.  I was eating squash and swallowing vicodan and taking selfies of my wounded face for the district attorney, because he wanted proof of my pain.  I wanted to help myself, but the best I could do was repeat the phrase, This is water. I said it over and over until it didn’t mean anything.  Then I wandered around the square and was hassled by evil teenagers with thin mustaches and mild acne.  In the movies, they overdub cat sounds and it never matches the mouth.  I let the sweat come into my eyes as an excuse not to look.  They asked me to share whatever was in the brown paper bag and the orange prescription bottle.  It made me think of when I was their age, and I’d sit on curbs in convenient store parking lots, sizing up adults as they pulled in, offering five bucks to buy me a pack of Marlboro Reds for two dollars and thirty-seven cents.  Or I’d page my dealer from a payphone and he’d pull around the corner and I would enter his lime green Monte Carlo and we’d drive around the block indiscreetly, probably on purpose.  But now it’s different.  Now, we are the high bidders of ingredients and blueprints on eBay, and we bomb city blocks while everyone celebrates humanity, make first-person shooters out of the last moments of our lives, have no idea how to make reality a thing independent of a smartphone or flourescent screen without twisting wires into fluid.  Maybe death means less when you’ve got a Facebook profile that completes you.  Maybe one day we won’t have a use for movies.  It’ll all just be a series of scenes, disconnected, till the day we decide to thicken our plot.

 

————————————————————————————————————————–

 

Christopher Hughes is the author of Selected Tweets, a spoken word project and ongoing collection of prose poems based around the idea of giving context to his otherwise vague Twitter feed. He is the singer, guitarist and songwriter for Texas indie rock band, The Calmative, and he produces other artists as well, out of his studio, Miscellaneous Sound. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School, has been published in Pax Americana and Omnia Vanitas Review, and lives in Denton, Texas.

We will wander through the strange and beautiful landscape of your manuscripts

 

Our submissions period is now officially closed for the summer and we are looking forward to spending the next few months reading your manuscripts; thanks to everyone who entrusted us with their work! We expect to notify authors by mid-to-late fall, both by privately reaching out to those whose work we’ve selected for publication and making an official announcement on our webpage. Thanks again for submitting your work to us.

Augury Books’ Reading Period OPEN — Poetry Manuscripts and Short Story Collections

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Welcome, and thank you for your interest in submitting to Augury Books. Our reading period will last between May 1, 2013 & June 30, 2013, and we have something special for you! For the first time, we are opening submissions in two categories: poetry manuscripts and short story collections.

Please read our guidelines for each category carefully, as manuscripts that do not adhere may not be considered. To submit your manuscript, click on the link at the bottom of the page. Use the same link for both categories; you will be prompted to choose your category on the next page.

Do not forget to upload your file on the submission form before completing the process! To return to this information anytime before June 30, bookmark our Submissions Page.

—Augury Books

 

GUIDELINES FOR FULL-LENGTH POETRY MANUSCRIPTS

We are seeking your best full-length poetry manuscripts for our 2013 poetry selection.

—Submissions are open to anyone.

—Manuscripts should be 45-80 pages.

—Page requirement does not include front and back matter (title page, table of contents, acknowledgements, notes, etc.).

—Please include a brief (under 300 words) bio in your Submittable cover note.

—Acceptable formats PDF, DOC and DOCX.

—Reading fee is $10.00 through Submittable (universal link below).

—Multiple submissions (meaning full poetry manuscripts) are accepted, but must be submitted separately with separate reading fees.

 

GUIDELINES FOR FULL-LENGTH SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS

We are seeking your best short story collections for our 2013 fiction selection.

—Submissions are open to anyone.

—Manuscripts should be 80-180 pages in length.

—Collections should include a minimum of three short stories.

—Page requirement does not include front and back matter (title page, table of contents, acknowledgements, notes, etc.).

—Please include a brief (under 300 words) bio in your Submittable cover note.

—Acceptable formats PDF, DOC and DOCX.

—Reading fee is $10.00 through Submittable (universal link below).

—Multiple submissions (meaning more than one entire collection of short stories) are accepted, but must be submitted separately with separate reading fees.

 

Click Here to Submit Your Manuscript to Augury Books

 

All funds Augury Books receives through Submittable will go toward the title’s production fees and the maintenance of our catalogue. We are unable to accept manuscripts from international authors or offer royalties for accepted titles at this time. Complimentary copies will be available to authors of accepted titles.

 

Sat, Apr. 27: David Joel Friedman Reads at Yippie! Museum for Phoenix Reading Series

Clear your calendars for the afternoon of Saturday, April 27, 2013, between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. for the Phoenix Reading Series at the 9 Bleecker Street Yippie! Museum and Cafe.

The winner of Augury’s 2012 Editors Prize, David Joel Friedman, will be reading as part of the Phoenix Reading Series, and we will be there, selling copies of his hot, new Soldier Quick with Rain (also currently available on our ORDERS page), sipping espresso and getting seriously into it.

Help Support the New York City Poetry Festival

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

 

Augury Books is very happy to announce that we’ve been invited to this summer’s New York City Poetry Festival, hosted by the Poetry Society of New York and scheduled for July 27 & 28 on Governors Island.

However, the event’s Kickstarter campaign is in dire need of financial support or the event MIGHT NOT HAPPEN! Help keep the literary summer spirit alive—dig deep into your poetry coffers (everyone has those, right?) to see if there’s anything lurking down there.

Help support the New York City Poetry Festival here.