Patrick Moran is the author of four collections of poetry, Tell A Pitiful Story (2012), Doppelgangster (2013), The Book Of Lost Things (2013), Rumors Of Organized Crime (2014 Winner of the Tennessee Chapbook Prize). He also has published translations of the French poet, Eugene Guillivec, and essays on poetics and poetry. His most recent essay, The Ampersand: Casual Vortex or Engraver’s Shortcut, appear in the 2013 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. He currently a professor of poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Hook

This Friday, November 20th, from 6:30-8:00 PM, join Augury Books and author Randall Horton for a celebration and launch of Hook: A Memoir. The event will take place at African Voices Magazine on the Upper West Side and will feature food, wine, music, and several special guests. Hook: A Memoir will be available for purchase and signing and, as always, can be found online at Small Press Distribution. We’re very much looking forward to this event and hope to see you there!

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. His previous work includes the poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy (Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press, 2013). Horton serves on the Board of Directors for Pen America’s Pen Prison Writing Program and teaches at the University of New Haven. He is a Cave Canem Fellow, and a member of both the Affrilachian Poets and the experimental performance group: Heroes are Gang Leaders. Horton is also a senior editor at Willow Books, an independent literary press he helped found in 2006. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he now resides in Harlem, New York.

November has brought several pieces of news for Joe Pan’s Hiccups: favorable reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Luna Luna Magazine, as well as a #2 spot on Small Press Distribution’s best seller list last month (pictured below).

Meanwhile, the Publishers Weekly review focuses on Pan’s imagery in the form of “striking cinematography and use of perspective” and ends with the claim that Hiccups “presents new rewards with each reading.”

In Joanna C. Valente’s lengthier review, she points to Pan’s use of both directness and irony as a means of expressing colloquial tragedies native to his own city, New York, and beyond.

Everything in this collection is about nuance, contrasting the different selves and times, where human interaction is juxtaposed by nature both physical and intangible. Basically, Pan gracefully and poignantly connects and interweaves all the mysteries of our lives in such a way where it’s not just keenly observant, but fiercely unforgiving of the world around us.

Hiccups is available for purchase through Small Press Distribution online.

More of Joe Pan:

Joe Pan’s author page.

“when i say american” has previously appeared in Flaneur Foundry #2 (2010).

From the crossroads of writing and social practice, Franciszka Voeltz curates a collective poem to the entire planet, maintains an interactive daily writing practice, and facilitates community writing events and workshops. Voeltz’s chapbook POETXTS is available from Imaginary Friend Press, and her work has appeared in journals including Dark Mountain, Analecta Literary Journal, and Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women. Voeltz is the recipient of various poetry fellowships including those granted by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and Art Farm. She earned an MFA in Writing from the University of California, San Diego.

Mark Faunlagui was born in the Philippines, grew up in New Jersey + New York, and earned a Bachelors in Architecture at Cornell University. He has studied and worked with poets Geoffrey Nutter and Nicolas Destino, and is currently developing two manuscripts, On Some Hispanoluso Miniaturists and Majnun. The poem ‘Whether or Not This Is the Best Halva This Side of Ramallah’ [included in Majnun] was published in Greying Ghost Press’s The Corduroy Mtn #4 chapbook anthology. This January, he will be participating in the Ashbery Home School Miami 2016. He is currently an architect in New York, and lives in Jersey City.

Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone was recently reviewed in two publications: Stay Thirsty Magazine and Red Paint Hill Journal.

Abrianna Jetté’s contribution to Stay Thirsty, “As the Seasons Change, Read These Poets,” mentions Carey McHugh as an author whose prose we would do well to hold close as the volatility of seasons and nature asserts itself in most areas of our lives.

We take from our environment as much as we need, and we attempt to emulate its beauty in our own idiosyncratic ways. I imagine Carey McHugh looks out onto the world and understands the dramatic impact of the slamming of a door or the honk of an irritatingly loud horn. I imagine that when McHugh gazes outward, she ignores that door and horn and listens, rather, to the soft pull of the daisy’s petal as it reaches towards the sun. I imagine she hears the earth.

Stephanie Bryant Anderson touches not on seasons but on secrets in her review, eponymously titled after McHugh’s collection. The arcana lurking within McHugh’s prose, as she calls it, urges the reader to dig twofold for secrets internal and external, from past selves and lives to stories overheard and unsung.

McHugh’s images conjure from the gut to express the workings of the unconscious by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of content; I find myself inferring my personal arcana to the peculiar landscape of fox possessions, winter, crows, sickness of violins, collar bone, clavicle and spine, well’s open eye; what a beautiful shakeup of syntax. What I find to be the most valuable thing about the collection for me is the way readers are invited to discover their own arcana within the lexicon. I feel claustrophic in these poems, but in the way that my reflection feels claustrophobic in the mirror.

American Gramophone is available for purchase through Small Press Distribution online.

More of Carey McHugh:

Carey McHugh’s author page

Plate 72 from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904) from Public Domain Review

This week, Alex Green of Stereo Embers Magazine reviewed Joe Pan’s Hiccups. The review diagnoses, among many aspects of Pan’s work, his irrepressible knack for observing the world around him.

Because Pan, who writes with one of the keenest observational eyes in modern poetry, has such an affection for the world–the people, the places, the seasons, the animals, the music, the art and the way it works and doesn’t work–this line is more than just a quiet admission a writer makes to himself. This is a line that’s uttered with marvel and joy—and why wouldn’t it be? To realize the world can never be used up by language because life’s theatre is such a rich and expansive place it can never be fully recorded, is to realize that the job of a poet can never be completed.

Green touches on the paradox, and ultimately, the limitation of language to do justice to the natural world. Where Pan sets himself apart as a poet is in his recognition of this incongruity. And yet because—and not in spite of—this Sisyphusian panic, as Green calls it, Pan’s words are meant not to carve a thing in stone, but to let it constantly regenerate, spiral, and take shape over time.

Hiccups is available for purchase through Small Press Distribution online.

More of Joe Pan:

Joe Pan’s author page

Joe Pan’s website

We here at Augury want to apologize for a glitch in our Submittable notifications. When we initially announced you’re the most beautiful thing that happened by Arisa White as our poetry selection for 2016, along with a list of finalists who will be featured in the coming weeks on our blog, we believed each author who had submitted work and was not selected received a Submittable email notifying them of our decision and thanking them for entrusting us with their work. However, it has recently come to our attention that some authors who submitted their work did not receive our email and that their manuscripts continued to be listed as In-Progress on Submittable. When we remedied that situation by closing this summer’s poetry submissions category, other authors received a second decline notice. Neither of these situations are acceptable: lack of notification or multiple notifications.

We want to make it clear that our selection process prizes each author first and foremost. We pride ourselves on being a press who works closely with authors in all facets, as we are authors ourselves and understand the work and (often times) frustration which comes with putting your writing out into the world and seeing it declined. We posted our poetry selection and finalists believing that everyone had been notified beforehand. We are sincerely apologetic both to those who learned of their rejection via our post as well as to those who had received our original notification and so experienced the follow up notification as an unnecessary second rejection. Glitches happen, but the publication process is so emotionally fraught anyway that we are sorry tech issues on our end may have added frustration or gloom to any author’s day.

Please stay tuned to our blog for updates about our prose selection and finalists in November.