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Augury Books’ Fiction Publication Will Be ‘The Family Cannon’ by Halina Duraj

Look for ‘The Family Cannon’ new from seller Augury Books

 

 

 

Photo by: Amanda Noyes

Hello friends and fellow lovers of the arts. We were amazed and overwhelmed by the quality of your work; an ardent and sincere thank you goes out to all of you who trusted us with your manuscripts.

Halina Duraj

We are pleased to announce that we have selected Halina Duraj’s The Family Cannon as our inaugural short story collection.

Halina Duraj’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review, Fiction, Witness, and other journals and have been recommended for PEN/O’Henry and Pushcart prizes. In 2012, she was a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award finalist and a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah, where she served as a fiction co-editor for Quarterly West. Halina teaches literature and fiction writing at the University of San Diego.

We would also like to recognize the short story collections of our six finalists:

Adam Weinstein — From the New Technical Manual of Use

Hall Cary — Delaware and Other Places of Mind

Dan Moreau — A Tour of North American Ruins

Ellen Campbell — Contents Under Pressure

Sara Lippmann — Doll Palace

Eleanor Swanson — Exiles and Expatriates

Thank you to our finalists and everyone who submitted during our reading period. Please help us welcome Halina aboard at Augury Books.  Leave a comment, follow this blog, or simply “Like”!

—Augury Books

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Announcing Frances Justine Post’s ‘Beast’ As Augury’s Next Poetry Publication

Photo by: Cecelia Post
From collection: Natural Won’t Change Disaster

This announcement concerns our upcoming poetry publication. Keep checking in or follow this blog (bottom right corner) for our fiction announcement, coming soon.

First things first: We want to emphatically thank everyone who submitted their work to Augury Books during our reading period. As always, it was a great pleasure and even greater honor to have the opportunity to read so many exceptional manuscripts. We are so grateful to all of you for trusting us with your work.

We are thrilled to announce that we will be publishing Beast, the debut collection by Frances Justine Post, in the genre of poetry (fiction genre announcement TBA, see above).

Frances Justine Post

Frances Justine Post received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, where she is a Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast. She is a recipient of the 2013 Inprint Verlaine Poetry Prize from the University of Houston, the 2008 “Discovery” / The Boston Review Poetry Prize, and the 2006 Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, and others.

We would also like to salute this year’s poetry finalists, some of whose work you can see featured here in the upcoming season:

Tina Schumann — Praising the Paradox

Stephanie Schlaifer — Clarkston Street Polaroids

Pia Aliperti — Solitude Must Share My Solitude

Travis Macdonald — 3

Andrew Weatherhead — Cats and Dogs

Many thanks to Frances Justine Post and our finalists for giving us the opportunity to recognize their wonderful work. Stay tuned for our fiction announcement.

—Augury Books

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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.

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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.
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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.

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More From 2012 Editors’ Prize Finalist Nicholas Hite

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Poetry

His name really is Paul

Paul,

you were

a courtesy,

like hotel pillowmints

from God’s right hand:

like Jesus Christ

were a beautiful Hispanic maid.

&Paul,

you will recall

there was a period of time

in which I was

afraid of staircases and elevators;

for six months I lived my life horizontally;

I wish that time had been now

and that it had been you instead of me.

Paul,

the last time

you came home,

I hugged you

and for a moment,

I could feel the size of you.

I contained the entirety of your smallness.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Augury Introduces: Nicholas Hite is a 28-year-old attorney living in New Orleans with his vegan boyfriend, their blue-eyed dog, and a pet crawfish.

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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.

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VIDA Interview: Augury Founder Kate Angus on Aesthetic Diversity

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Just in time for the end of our reading period (5 days left, folks!), our own Kate Angus talks to VIDA’s Melinda Wilson about the issue of diversity and bias in the literary arts while also addressing the principles that have shaped Augury since its inception. Here’s a little teaser from the interview:

What we want more than anything is to publish more titles—the more books we can send out into the world, the greater statistical likelihood that they will reflect the multiplicity of personal experience and aesthetic range that we are interested in. —Kate Angus

Read the whole interview in VIDA’s Editor’s Corner here: http://www.vidaweb.org/editors-corner-10-kate-angus-for-augury-books

In the meantime, it is NOT TOO LATE send us your poetry manuscripts or short fiction collections on Augury’s Submissions Page. Get in under the wire before our reading period closes at 11:59 p.m., June 30, 2013.

Enjoy!

—Augury Books

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Another by Augury Finalist Nicholas Hite: "Not an oubliette but similar"

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

 

Not an oubliette but similar

 

The times the men of the family used to

go deep sea fishing in the Gulf

& the other times they went

camping on small islands in Minnesota:

the times that I grew fiercely aware of my penis

& what it was supposed to mean

between my legs there flaccid like a wet sock

but I knew from talk around campfires with cousins

that it was to one day fatten, to become a sizeable portion of me.

I learned to carry it like a promise to myself;

later, like a promise I wanted to break,

like a hard carnivorous curse demanding

the meat of other people. To break.

Trading my virginity for his on Tuesday,

2002, as if we were going to remember each other

forever. When he didn’t bleed I felt cheated

& I stopped eating meat because

to want blood, it’s too much.

Let me love someone without perforating them.

Let me be that hole that they fall into.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Augury Introduces: Nicholas Hite is a 28-year-old attorney living in New Orleans with his vegan boyfriend, their blue-eyed dog, and a pet crawfish.

DON’T FORGET: Augury’s reading period is still open for another 10 days! Find out how to submit here.