Augury

by

Poet Katie Fowley’s ‘Lullaby’

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

LULLABY

by Katie Fowley

Let’s all become nurses
And sleep in low places
A spa of red flowers
A block of old trees.

Away from your window
Across from your building
A building like yours
Lets off its new steam.

It’s better this weather
It’s better than silk.

The sky is a gray thing
The sky wants to hold you
The sky is away now.
It cannot white out.

Let’s all become nursemaids
And sleep in low places
Let’s all become jelly
In a spa of red hearts.

The heart is an urchin
The heart isn’t well now
The heart has a fever.
It wants to black out.

Let’s all become nurses
And sleep by the fire
The winter umbrellas
A host of red hair.

It’s a good thing this building.
This mantle of gleaming.
I’ll build you a building
If you live there with me.

Like snakes in the building
Like birds in the building
The men in the building
Are circling free.

The dusk is a low thing.
The dusk wants to hold you.
You cannot be held now.
You cannot walk out.

Come out of your building
Fluorescent in gloaming.
The windows are darkening.
The smell of green tea.

This green is depressing.
This green light is fetching
The light from the ether
The light from your knee.

Katie Fowley is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry and criticism have been published in No, Dear; 6×6; and Rain Taxi: Review of Books. She is a co-editor of Lightful Press, which publishes poetry, translation, and art. Her chapbook is forthcoming from DIEZ in spring, 2014.

Editor’s Note: Many thanks to Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6×6, in which “Lullaby” first appeared.

by

Over 35% Off: End of Year Book Specials

This time of year, everyone is in the giving spirit. More importantly, everyone has various giftees they need to cross off of an ever-expanding list.

For a short time at a 35% discount, you can give the gift of poetry while supporting Augury Books and the literary arts. Expand your own collection or help beef up the bookshelves of your aspiring-writer niece or your poetry-loving boyfriend. Trying to think of an original gift for colleagues in your office that will entertain and impress? Voila.

For only $40, including shipping* — more than 35% off the regular price — get all four books:

Simply send $40 to augurybooks@gmail.com via PayPal, include your full name and shipping address on the PayPal order to avoid delays, and your books will be shipped within 24 hours.**

Love the idea, but already have our catalogue? Bravo! You can still help spread literary cheer. Share this with friends and (continue to) support the arts.

As always, to keep receiving posts such as this, follow our blog by clicking in the bottom right corner of this page.

*International shipping not included in special. Please contact us for international shipping rates. Sorry, no Amazon orders for this special!
**For receipt before 12/25/13, place order before end of business day 12/19/13.

by

Matthew Zingg’s ‘Mediations on Perspective’

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

M E D I A T I O N S   O N   P E R S P E C T I V E
by Matthew Zingg

Because the sky was wax paper the planes were
flies stuck in their holding patterns.

From a few thousand feet downtown must seem
          like something a man
could carve into a walnut shell.

It was just one of those days.

On the rooftop again a couple of dumb Lowells
in our hungover pajamas wagging two dollar
                 egg salad sandwiches
above our heads like late minute commandments.

You said: the city was wearing its clearest uniform.

I said: the brow of the park looked
scabrous and fresh

in its Sunday best, the air a shade
of yellow easiest to forget.

It was a game we played—to see how far the other
could take all this acreage.

A balloon lifts up a couple blocks away

and it means an explosion, a portent
or it means a slow eye. In other words

there is nowhere else to go up here, stretched
          thin as we are
across this autumn afternoon.

Matthew Zingg‘s work can be found in The Paris-American, The Awl, Blackbird, Cider Press Review, HTML Giant, The Madison Review, Birdfeast, The Rumpus, Everyday Genius, and Muzzle, among others. He lives in Baltimore where he hosts the Federal Dust Reading Series.

by

Poet Sarah Carson Shares ‘The Hello Goodbye’ with Augury Books

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

The Hello Goodbye
by Sarah Carson

Friend, they’re on their way to tell you that the poem you’ve been carrying is no longer your love poem. She’s said, “If another boy comes along, I’m going to kiss him,” and they’ve stamped it all official. There’s no time for an ode to the time you touched her hair in a store window, an elegy for the morning she found your necklace splayed softly in the dirt. She’s working on a little something about boxes and boxes and empty tractor trailers, about the widest river on your favorite continent and the shortest song you’ve ever heard. There are lines about several evenings where the phone is ringing and ringing and ringing in America. That poem, like most poems you loved, is useless. I’ve only come to tell you that I know how you are feeling, and it doesn’t matter. You need to take a long swig of something now. You need to get the hell out of here.

Sarah Carson was born and raised in Flint, Michigan, and now lives in Chicago with her dog, Amos. She is the author of three chapbooks, “Before Onstar” (Etched Press, 2010), “Twenty-Two” (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and “When You Leave” (H_NGM_N, 2012). Sometimes she blogs at sarahamycarson.wordpress.com.

by

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

by

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

by

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.

by

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.
by

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