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Announcement! Announcement!

Photographer: Josette Chen
Model: Stephanie Robalino
Stylist: Joshua MacLeod of Vesper Magazine
Producer: Dog & Pony

Augury Books is delighted to announce that David Joel Friedman is the winner of this year’s Editors’ Prize for his beautiful manuscript Soldier Quick with Rain. David is also the author of The Welcome, which was selected by Stephen Dunn for the 2004 National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press. Recent poems by David can be seen in Barrow Street and on Poetry Daily.

We are also very happy to be publishing Maureen Alsop’s Mantic. Maureen is the author of Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag); her work has previously appeared in AGNI, Blackbird, Action Yes, Drunken Boat and The Kenyon Review. 

We are also thrilled to be partnering with Vesper Magazine for images.

Finalists for the 2012 Editors’ Prize are as follows:

Jeff Alessandrelli, You Can’t Discover the Lost Treasure if the Ship Didn’t Sink

Stephanie Anderson, From an Assumed Position

Bruce Covey, Change Machine

Nicholas Hite, Whichever Chain I Choose

Mark McKain, From Burnt Ground

Rachel Moritz, Borrowed Wave

Sarah Paley, Interior Soliloquys

Andrew Terhune, No Tee Vee

Lee Upton, Bottle the Bottles

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted their work to us; we are grateful and humble to have had the chance to read so many excellent poems.
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Deadline of the Editor’s Prize Extended!

We are happy to announce that we are extending the Editor’s Prize deadline until August 15th.

-The winner will receive a $750 honorarium and publication with Augury Books as well as 20 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

We will accept 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.

Unfortunately we will not be able to provide royalties to the winner beyond the honorarium.

We are unable to accept manuscripts from international authors at this time. Open to U.S. residents only.

 

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New Poem by Geoffrey Nutter!

To prepare you further for the New York City Poetry Festival, we are excited to present a new poem by another one of our readers, Geoffrey Nutter. To hear more by Geoffrey, who will be reading with B. C. Edwards and Paige Lipari, don’t forget to join us on Governors Island Saturday, July 21st at 2 pm at Chumley’s stage.

These Great Sentinels

 

These great sentinels

have been here so much longer than you,

bare as January, January bees,

bare as rain or boats of commerce snarled

on the highly trafficked waterway,

as the bowsprit of the Dutch fishing pink

(one of many curious boats)

or the Malay rigging of the Bombay yacht

(another one of many curious boats)

and the lights along the turrets of the cliffs

along the harbor basin shined.

 

And Mrs. Hannah Glass set her cliffside house

in order. It was a house of glass.

And out above the water burst

the Roman candles of July,

the apple-green meister-singers,

the long fire of an open secret, aquatic trees,

and the cerulean brothers of Jupiter, of love.

 

And these great sentinels have torn

a page of strange remembrancy

from your endless calendar

to let the cool wind charm you

(the cool wind of July–for a fragrance

of jasmine drifted over from the palace, from the forest).

For each season has its delights,

as each key unlocks a door–but the key

does not tell you which door it opens,

nor in which building you will find it.

 

Geoffrey Nutter has written three books: A Summer Evening, Water’s Leaves & Other Poems, and Christopher Sunset. The Rose of January will appear in 2013 through Wave Books. He lives with his family in Upper Manhattan.

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New poem by B. C. Edwards!

In anticipation of the upcoming New York City Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island, we are posting a new poem by one of our featured readers. Please join us on Saturday, July 21st at 2 pm at Chumley’s stage. Can’t wait that long? You can also hear Carter read on Friday the 13th at the H.I.P. Reading Series at Bar on A (170 Avenue A) at 7 pm.

Like Everything Was Already There

Joshua,
I am making a list of the things we need to buy
A bathroom scale
A weekend vacation house for the bathroom scale to live in
and keep occupied during the weeks that we are in the city.
A blender to keep the bathroom scale company. One of those nice ones
That can grind rocks into sand. That if we leave it too long
Will grind sand to dust. Dust to whatever comes after dust.
Pots of various sizes
and colors if possible
A vacuum for the dust and what comes next.
A couch
Two couches, actually, unless your sister has a spare
Mine does not. she has no extra couches
She is flush all out
but my sister is lousy with beds
We do not need any extra beds
we have between us five beds possibly more
we could each spend almost a week
every night in a different bed
and not sleep with each other once
A dry bar.
A shower curtain.
Stools for the dry bar.
A shower curtain liner,
but to be honest I don’t know what those are for
They just seem to get in the way, dangle on the wrong side of the tub at all the worst moments
I only added it to the list so that you wouldn’t think that I was one of those brutes that grew up only having a shower curtain and not the liner, which I was, in fact.
A dishwasher, because we should be honest about this, neither of us is going to wash the dishes. Probably not ever.
A maid. Mostly to deal with the dust, what comes after and also take the dishes out of their washer.
We’ll need a bedroom as well.
or really just the walls to define the bedroom.
because we kind of already know where the bedroom is
but haven’t told anyone
and without the walls there, no one will know that it’s the bedroom
but, as I said before, we’ve got plenty of beds for it.

B.C. Edwards lives in Brooklyn. He is the recipient of the 2011 Hudson Prize put out by Black Lawrence Press which will be publishing his collection of short fiction, “The Aversive Clause” in 2012 and his collection of poetry “From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes” in 2013. He is a regular contributor to BOMBlog and his work can be found in Red Line Blues, The Sink Review, Mathematics Magazine, Hobart and others. His short story “Illfit” is being adapted into a piece by the Royal Ballet of Flanders. He is also a Literary Death Match Champion and has the medal to prove it

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We are now open for submissions again!

 

We are so happy to announce that we are open for submissions again for the 2012 Editors’ Prize manuscript contest. Our reading dates are May 1st–July 31st 2012.

The winner will receive a $750 honorarium and publication with Augury Books as well as 20 complimentary copies of the book. This contest is open to anyone, except personal friends, colleagues or former students of the editors.

For further guidelines, please click on the Submissions tab at the top of our webpage. As you can see, we are excited to put our reading hats on; we hope you’ll put on your submitting hats too!

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To Mend Small Children by B.C. Edwards

“If you like to be spooked by poems, if you like poems to send you back into your quotidian existence with a more acute sense of its weirdness and charm, read “How to Mend Small Children” carefully. Edwards’ poems offer solutions to bizzaro problems and alchemic transmogrifications for exotic items, but their miraculous nature really lies in the way they transform the person who reads them. Prepare to visit a dimension that is weird, dark, funny and eerily similar to the one in which we live.” ~Ben Mirov

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FAMILY OF MANY ENZOS by Paige Lipari


Family of Many Enzos

“In Family of Many Enzos, Paige Lipari conjures a night kitchen that pulses with memory and fantastical incident. Volcanoes provide the heat, while “the red moon only comes out on the nights we stuff artichokes.” The cooking, too, is hardly homey: “enemies/ will be picking/ bones from their loaf,” and be sure to look for the “young American cousin in/ the sweet dumpling squash.” Smartly posed dilemmas of self-knowledge are entwined with strands of a generational saga, obliquely told yet vivid. Lipari pries at the connections that link all things sensual—food and pleasure (“Make me a feast out of the/ the brains you’ve lost in bed”)—to render felt intimacies, as well as the starkness of isolation: “Where are the candles kept?/ I am alone on this ceiling,/ and wasn’t even born timely to.” In Lipari’s night kitchen, the flame burns low but steady.” ~Albert Mobilio

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Book Release Party with Edwards & Lipari!

Finally, something to do Monday, February 20th if you live in the New York Tri-State area! Augury will be around to heartily celebrate the release of its three new titles. B.C. Edwards and Paige Lipari will also be there to read from their startlingly beautiful new chapbooks.

Also, music by Alicia Jo Rabins of Girls in Trouble! Cupcakes! Drink specials! Poetry! Books!

RSVP on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/272806632784695/

And we would be remiss if we didn’t thank everyone who supported Augury during our fundraising process. We made our goal! Thank you to donators, well-wishers, word-spreaders, hand-holders, and everyone else.

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SIXTEEN DAYS IN A LINCOLN ROADSTER by Finalist Kathleen Rooney

& here they are: the left-most coast.

The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels, on the Porciúncula River.

Easier, he admits, just to say L.A.

Plainly not alluvial, no longer a floodplain, the climate seems wild, spooky in its mildness.

Annexations & consolidations, grandiloquence & excess.

Ann lived here after they graduated—Nebraska has given you all she has to offer, said the commencement speaker.

Oil, orange juice, the sperm of movie stars.

Craning his neck at a variety of angles, Robinson sees no angels.

Less couple-in-a-car, more leaf-blown-about-on-the-earth-by-the-winds, they decide to crash at the Portal Motor Hotel—

a Motel, got it, but a portal to what?

They will go out at night: clarinets & trumpets—a maze of jazz.

Bred to earn his daily bread, Robinson once dropped out of vocational psych.

The motto of the city: augment augment augment.

Bored by pioneers, Robinson tries to be pioneering.

Prospector without prospects, or potentially too many?

Cement cement cement buries all trace of the old enterprise of gold.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her most recent books include the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010) and the poetry chapbook, After Robinson Has Gone (Greying Ghost Press,2011).With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008). Her second full-length collection, Robinson Alone Provides the Image, is forthcoming from Gold Wake Press in November 2012.

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A Poem by Finalist Lily Ladewig

More Like a Compass

this hat gives me a direction.
There are occasions for hats
and a hat for every occasion.
But this is just the opposite.
I wake up naked and put this hat on
my head before deciding
what the day will wear.

 

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Lily Ladewig’s poems have appeared in Conduit, Denver Quarterly, H_NGM_N, Salt Hill, and SUPERMACHINE. She is the author of the chapbooks You Are My Favorite Person of the Year (Mondo Bummer Press, 2010) and, with Anne Cecelia Holmes, I Am A Natural Wonder (Blue Hour Press, 2011). Her first full-length book, The Silhouettes, was a finalist for Augury Books inaugural Editors’ Prize and will be published by SpringGun Press in 2012.