Augury

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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.

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A Poem by Finalist Rachel Moritz

Pilot

Someone who tunnels down and away was other

My mother said, you’re going where I can’t be with you

As a glass idol fills its own presence with lack

The stairs down into each self—how one door

opened where the man was let in

Public as flame, the self with no interior

One hadn’t hearing for doubt in that place seen as clear

With him on the street, my spine was agent a world

extended into, sweeping a path

Sometimes coming back in dreams, that other kind of transparency

How our safety felt unreasonable, like I was doing something wrong

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Rachel Moritz is the author of two chapbooks, The Winchester Monologues (2005) and Night-Sea (2008), both from New Michigan Press. Her poetry has been published in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Free Verse, HOW2, typo, 26, and other journals. She co-edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review, and also publishes a poetry chaplet and broadside series, WinteRed Press. Moritz lives and works in Minneapolis.

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From the Archive with Ray DeJesús

From the Archives of the Dancer-cum-Singer-cum-Actress Recreation Project in Progress

as is an undone bow-tie dipped in a well of M.L. Ciccone’s
antiseptic pomade for brunettes
gone blonde genteel.

From the Archives of the Great Potamkin
Blowout

The stretched pleather gloves reach to the Peconic of yr
lap like Cadillac
hubcaps

*

Kindly that she endures
an uproarious Cantiflas
laugh

 

From the Archives of the Case of the State of Florida vs. State of Florida

an argyle
v-neck
of
geese

 

why does the hunter follow with
delta airline
units

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Ray DeJesús was born, raised, and still resides inBrooklyn,NY. A first generation Nuyorican, Ray is a graduate of The New School (MFA, Poetry, May 2010), and he currently teaches writing atSt.FrancisCollege.  He has had the privilege of reading at the following: 169 Bar, Rose Live Music for the Earshot Reading Series, The New School Faculty/Student reading (May 2010), Cornelia Street Café, and Flying Object inHadley,Massachusettswith the fine folk at Maggy Poetry Magazine. His poetry has been published in The Best American Poetry’s Blog, Maggy Poetry Magazine (Issue 2), and Literary Chaos. Poems in G(o)BBet magazine (UK), Gondola Journal, Peaches and Bats Journal, and an essay on Hüsker Dü in Jackie Clark’s Song of the Week are forthcoming. Ray was also guest blogger for Best American Poetry, June 22-28. He can usually be found shielding his ears from the awful, shrill sound of church bells on a daily basis in his neighborhood of Bay Ridge,Brooklyn. Ray is currently working on a collaboration: A chapbook long project with poet Christine Kanownik. In addition, he, along with Jeff T. Johnson and Claire Donato, produce Vampiros Documentos Presents, a video online journal. His current mantra: Sometimes things is just things.

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Three Days Left to Submit!

Once again we are pleased to announce that we are accepting manuscripts for our inaugural Editors’ Prize in Poetry. 

-The winner will receive a $1,000 honorarium and publication with Augury Books as well as 10 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

-Deadline: May 15, 2011

We are accepting 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.

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Everything Changes Now by Melinda Wilson

There is a knotted ghost
sucking at your wrist; it is a tick,
a numb, fuzzy mass,
an underground straw,
a snake in the gas tank.
You live in an evaporated swamp,
blown up like a bull frog.
Everywhere and everywhere
little pieces of your skin.
Everything changes now.
You woke up repeating and heard
everything changes now.
Like below frost level,
a toad in a mud hole,
your heart rate deliberate and slow.
Detached, it’s clear:
everything changes now.
Frogs buried and sleeping.
No peeking,
no stirring, or peeking.
Bulging eyes or empty
sockets of fish
formerly packed
in the ice of the markets.
Silver dollar scales shed in the wind,
in the black of everything.
Every little thing
you’ve been thinking,
everything changes now.

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Melinda’s poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster, Diner, The Agriculture Reader, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Her chapbook Amplexus was published by Dancing Girl Press in winter 2010. She is Managing Editor for Coldfront Magazine www.coldfrontmag.com and VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts www.vidaweb.org. She lives and teaches in New York City.

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654 & 923 by B.C. Edwards

654. To Clean Dark Furs

Of all the animals, chipmunks are the least trustworthy.
Squirrels are the most. You can tell
by the stripes.  Skunks too but skunks
have all their own problems.
Do not burn them. They will not burn well
they will burn like the rest of us. Not well at all.
Cracked lipped and melting overcooked sugar
bubbling like bran added to milk heated over a soft flame
licking the bottom like it’s in love or something.
Like it knows what that is, even. That’s how they burn.
People are the same. Those of us that have ribbons
down our backs are not to be trusted. But you have to
get us naked first to be able to tell. You have to
fuck us to be able to tell you have to
want to fuck us before you can tell
if we’re squirrels or not.
I know,
I know.
No one said it was fair.

 

923. How to make Hydraulic Cement

Our hands are stiff with paste
tired from kneading and
kneading. Rolling the balls
we have boiled the paste in oil and will
form it into something useful. We say we
will form it into something useful, but
our hands will stick together
if we hold for too long.
Parts of your fingers are wet,
parts have already dried over caked
white and solid like we are building a new skin for your
like if we cover every inch of you
you will be safe. If we coat you in paste and harden it over
nothing will get in.
Even me, I ask.
Even you, you say.

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B.C. Edwards lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He is the author of the forthcoming novella ‘knucklebone’ and is the editor of Pax Americana. He received his MFA from The New School. He is a regular contributor to BOMBlog and the Brooklyn Review. His most recent work can be found in Red Line Blues, LyreLyre, The Sink Review, Food-i-corp as well as Hobart which nominated him for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. He is also a Literary Death Match champion and has the medal to prove it.