On Monday, Fox News shared an interview with Randall Horton about his new memoir, Hook.  The interview details Horton’s downward spiral towards drugs and to prison, both of which ultimately led him to pen Hook and become a professor at the University of New Haven, among many achievements since.

Randall Horton’s Author Page.

Her, Bodily

Montgomery Wards. The name on our lawn mower connected by a thread to the nametag shining on her breast. Glass sheen walkway and a country of beds, shoe on shoe on shoe, and the box full of gold. Mom stands behind it. I see her skirt through the glass she tells me not to touch. Lets me hold the red ruby ring.

I wanted the Hush Puppies. Tassels. Little moustaches shimmying over the puckered toes.

Homeward, we slide over the truck bench, DadMeMom. The scent of sunrust, the sweat and perfume soaking through blouse tied at the throat. How she would pull the sash loose, exposing her moles—constellation over the rise of breast flesh.

There was the moment of crossing the green bridge before the rise of land and road. The truck spasmed—halted—at the base of the ascent. What did I know about distance until we opened the doors into darkness, held hand into hand and began stepping?

I was too big, but she held me. Held my body in long stretches. Arrived to the pay phone fused like an animal with two heads, a bouquet of sweating limbs. Where did Dad go? He came for us, I know. He went the other way in the dark.

Bessy, he named her. The truck that never carried us again.

Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the Managing Editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose has recently been published in: Passages North, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, Smartish Pace, The Collapsar, Pilgrimage, The Squaw Valley Review, The Superstition Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She curates community literary programming and is a member of the Quoin Collective, a local letterpress group. Check out her website for more: www.sarahpape.com.

Poets House, known for its extensive (60,000-volume) poetry library, events, and workshops in and around New York City, has announced a deadline of December 11th for their annual Emerging Poets Fellowship.

Through the 12-week fellowship, lead by Adam Fitzgerald, selected poets will have the opportunity to engage in discourse, guidance, and workshops with both peers and distinguished faculty and guests. Events and conversations with poets and scholars will also take place during the fellowship period. Tuition is free and a stipend will be provided to cover travel expenses. At the end of the fellowship, a group reading will be held, showcasing the prose completed over the three months.

Interested applicants are highly encouraged to submit work before Friday, December 11th.

To learn more about Poets House and the application process, visit their website.

Help

Sometimes, I sat at my small table by the window and imagined a man older than me, but still young, sitting with me, his long fingers holding my best teacup. The alley below empty, the windows in the building across the alley empty, the plant on the table blooming its purple flowers in the morning light and then the afternoon light and then the evening light. He steadily returned my gaze. I had not felt that kind of love since childhood, certainly not since I lived in that apartment, but during that time, the man really did help me. I told him about the sounds of grief in the alley, the malleability of time, shifting shadows and light, isolation, dreams, the sewage system, broken things, colors, closets, phone calls, stains making shapes on carpet, my red pants, ants and squirrels, the materialization of cornbread, the gaps between people, the company of furniture. I would say, the lover becomes memory and memory becomes an artifact, a sacred tomb.

I offered him more tea.

It’s nice to have someone to listen to, he said, gazing steadily back at me, something in his expression more ample than realism. He told me the good news, our hearts cradled in sacrificial light, shepherds braying with sheep, bread and fish, buoyancy of water, two palms open to us, vast skies, pearly gates, corpses rising, birds in flight, the feeling of acceptance for all beings, this feeling sometimes so insistent he felt he would explode. The lover lives in us, he said.  In the seas, in the fur of horses and dogs and bears, in the fins of fish, in grass and seeds,lamp light and sunlight and lungs and sidewalks. 

Sometimes we didn’t even talk. Sometimes I think those times were the best.

And now, so many years later, as I sit at my computer in my office, I think how soothing that would be, to have Jesus in my imagination again. What is the harm, really? To be accompanied by his enormous good will and kindness, even for a little while. And even if it isn’t real.

Nona Caspers is the author of Heavier Than Air, which received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has received a NEA Fellowship and an Iowa ReviewFiction Award, among others.  Stories from Alley Stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cimarron Review, Epoch, and other literary reviews.  She is also the author of cross genre Little Book of Days and recently co-edited with Joell Hallowell a nonfiction book Lawfully Wedded Wives:  Rethinking Marriage in the 21^st Century.  She teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.  www.nonacaspers.com

This week, Literary Hub posted an excerpt from Randall Horton’s Hook on their website. The selection, a prime example of Horton’s dynamic voice, is titled “1990: theater of the absurd.”

Horton writes,

One guy stayed by the van and held his elbow chest-high to me as if to prevent the contemplation of retaliation. Drake did not move. Not a breathing human in sight. Odds dictated I freeze and watch those chasing arms grab Stump about the waist, stopping and then twirling his torso. He could’ve been in a modern ballet, ripped shirt and all. But more importantly, the package tore, and white powder trailed Stump everywhere he was flung. Call it Theatre of the Absurd. Call it early American vaudeville. To call it a rag doll disintegrating into yarn does not do the metaphor justice. It took one minute for the five men to take the package off Stump’s body, leaving him swinging, clutching, and grabbing at the wind. Stump resurrected himself from the ground, dazed and breathless. No police. We hopped back in the van, negotiating the curve at almost fifty, not in pursuit, but in gettin ghost. We were victim and perpetrator at the same time.

To read more of the excerpt, visit Lit Hub.

As always, you may purchase Hook and other Augury titles through Small Press Distribution.

More of Randall Horton:

Randall Horton’s author page.

Drawing of Doctor Caliban

“Doctor Caliban, Peeping Tom” 

The train was crowded with actors

I couldn’t tell the extras from the characters

or who would have a part in the evening show

that plays in every dazzled window

under the umbrella of rain-slick trees

or so it seems

The saturated colors of those TVs

wouldn’t exist if not for me

minder of the Tunnel

my wormhole

a channel

that broadcasts the bric-a-brac of minutes

as if the world were sending postcards to one not in it

Doctor Caliban the sun & the moon are setting the table

Doctor Caliban the sureness of loss has left me unable

to care about anything I have not lost

Doctor C you gotta taste this sauce

Doctor Caliban is it more ghoulish

to be like me a taxidermist

and whistle on my hands to wit to woo

or be an ironist like you?

Ben Gantcher’s collection of poems, Snow Farmer, was a finalist in several book contests. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Slate, Tin House, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail. His first chapbook, Strings of Math and Custom, was published by Beard of Bees Press. If a Lettuce, his first full-length collection, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was a resident at Ucross and Omi, and a fellow at LABA. He teaches math, Language Structures and an interdisciplinary writing and visual art studio course at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, NY, where he lives with his wife and three children. 

Say Something Nice About Me

After six indecisive years together, I told Gregory, “If we don’t have a kid, I’m leaving.” He worried about overpopulating the earth, but I knew he also feared being alone. So we had this ravenous infant, a fitful sleeper, and I was sure the marriage wouldn’t last anyway.

Naomi was almost ten months old when I invited my college roommate and her fiancé down from Ontario. I was lonely in Helena but didn’t say so; instead I said I wanted to meet Freddie before the wedding. I wanted them to see how beautiful my girl was. My life felt small and unremarkable in most ways, but having a baby still seemed like an accomplishment worth bragging about.

Kim’s silkscreens of densely populated cityscapes were hanging in corporate offices all around the US, but she rarely talked about her own accomplishments. Even so, Gregory had never thought she was as fun or talented as I did. He was not thrilled about the visit, but at least he was willing to watch Naomi crawl through the unkempt grass in the backyard while I put clean sheets on the guestroom bed.

Sara Schaff’s fiction has appeared in FiveChapters, Southern Indiana Review, Carve Magazine, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she has taught in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling. Sara is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Oberlin College. Find links to her work at saraschaff.com.

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.