Our Poetry Selection for 2016

In the Giant’s Lair (1892) by Gerhard Munthe, Wikimedia Commons

Following a plentiful reading period full of outstanding work, Augury Books is very happy to announce Arisa White‘s you’re the most beautiful thing that happened as our poetry selection for 2016. We received so many great submissions, and paring down one manuscript from our finalist pool was a difficult feat. We are glad to highlight the work of our poetry finalists here:

Architect, Garden by Andrew Seguin

brightness this by Franciszka Voeltz

I Wanted Everything by Elizabeth Whittlesey

Majnun by Mark Faunlagui

Pinocchio: The Whale Years by Patrick Moran

Schematics for Manhood & Flight by Joe Jimenez

Snow Farmer by Benjamin Gantcher

there are some things that are easier to mention by Aimee Herman

When I Was an Octopus by Gregg Murray

On behalf of the editors, we thank you all for your extended patience. Stay tuned for more on Arisa, an excerpt from her manuscript, excerpts from several of our finalists, and a prose selection in November!

PICS: Augury at AWP 2014

This year’s AWP offsite reading, Augury Books and Friends in Seattle, was a resounding success. We had a wonderful night of wine, snacks, readings, and socializing at the stunning Noble Gas Neon Company venue. Thank you so much to everyone who came out to attend the reading.

Special thanks to Lia Hall and Cedar Mannan for providing the space, as well as our 12 incredible Augury and guest readers, Maureen Alsop (Mantic), Halina Duraj (The Family Cannon), Alison Espach, Lia Hall, Lauren Hunter, Cynthia Lowen, Karyna McGlynn, Patrick Moran (The Book of Lost Things), Frances Justine Post (Beast), Alicia Jo Rabins, Camille Rankine, and Diana Spechler.

Welcoming the Crowd

Phoebe Rusch Helps Augury Editor Kate Angus Set Up

Augury and Friends Settle In

Patrick Moran and Camille Rankine Read for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Alison Espach Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Camille Rankine Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Cynthia Lowen Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Diana Spechler Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Halina Duraj Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Frances Justine Post Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Karyna McGlynn Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Lauren Hunter Waits to Read at Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Lia Hall Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Maureen Alsop Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Patrick Moran Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Alicia Jo Rabins Reads for Augury Books and Friends Offsite, AWP 2014

Our readers for the Augury Books & Friends Offsite AWP Reading

We’re so excited for the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. We have a great list of readers (see below), each of whom will read briefly and then we will make new friends and maybe even fall in love during the post-reading mingling. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S this Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels.  If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us!

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

Our readers (in alphabetical order) will be:

Maureen Alsop, author of MANTIC (Augury Books, 2012), has new poems appearing at Watershed Review, Citron Review and ditch.

Halina Duraj‘s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Harvard Review, FictionWitness, and other journals. She has an MA in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah. In 2012, she was a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island, WA. She teaches at the University of San Diego, where she also directs the Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing. She is the author of THE FAMILY CANNON (Augury Books, 2014), now available.

Alison Espach is the author of The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year, and a “Barnes and Nobel Discover Great Writers” pick. Her other writing can be found in McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Salon, The Daily Beast, Glamour, Writer’s Digest and other journals. Her short story “Someone’s Uncle” is available as an e-book through Scribner.

Lia Hall writes in neon. She co-founded Noble Neon illuminating words and shapes with noble gases. She teaches yoga and lives in the Old Rainier Brewery in Seattle. She received her MFA in Poetry at the New School in 2009.

Lauren Hunter is from North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and works with the team at Telephone Books as their Managing Editor. Lauren is the co-founder/curator of the Electric Pumas, a reading series/revolution in New York City. Her chapbook, My Own Fires, was released by Brothel Books in 2011.

Cynthia Lowen is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, and poet, and author of The Cloud That Contained the Lightning, winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series selected by Nikky Finney. Cynthia is the recipient of the 2013 Women Authoring Change Fellowship from William Morris Entertainment, the DuPont-Columbia University Awards for Excellence in Journalism, and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as residencies to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hedgebrook, and Yaddo, among others. Cynthia is also the producer and writer of BULLY, a feature documentary film following five kids and families through “a year in the life” of America’s bullying crisis, which was released in theaters worldwide by The Weinstein Company. She lives in New York City.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books, as well as two chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Seattle Review, West Branch, Subtropics, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is the Managing Editor of Gulf Coast and coordinator for the Houston Indie Book Fest and Gulf Coast Reading Series.

Patrick Moran is a 1995 graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of four books of poetry, Tell A Pitiful Story, (MWPH, 2011), Doppelgangster (Main Street Rag Press, 2012), THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS, (Augury Books 2012), Rumors of Organized Crime, Poems & Plays’ 2013 Tennessee Chapbook Prize winner. He is also the author of “The Ampersand: Casual Vortex or Engraver’s Shortcut,” which appeared in the 2013 September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. His poems and translations have appeared in many journals including the New Republic, The Antioch Review, The Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review and The Boston Review. He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.  His lives in Fort Atkinson, WI with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

Frances Justine Post is the recipient of the “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, the Inprint Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize, and the Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & CommentaryBoston Review, Denver QuarterlyThe Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts ReviewPleiadesWestern Humanities Review, and others. Originally from Sullivan’s Island, SC, she received her MFA from Columbia University and is currently earning her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where she is poetry editor for Gulf Coast Magazine. She is the author of BEAST (Augury Books, 2014), now available.

Alicia Jo Rabins is a poet and musician currently based in Portland, OR. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, 6×6, Boston Review, Court Green, Ploughshares and The Collagist.  She tours internationally with her band, Girls in Trouble, a song cycle about the complicated lives of Biblical women, and has performed fiddle music across Central America and Kuwait. Residencies and scholarships include Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets

Camille Rankine is the author of Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship. The recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Octopus, Paper Darts, and  Tin House. She was selected for a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2013, and was named an Honorary Cave Canem Fellow in 2012. She is Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College, Editorial Director of The Manhattanville Review, and lives in New York City.

Diana Spechler is the author of the novels Who by Fire (Harper Perennial, 2008) and Skinny (Harper Perennial, 2011). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, O The Oprah Magazine, CNN Living, Paris Review, GQ, Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, and Southern Review, among other publications; as well as in a number of anthologies, including, most recently, Sex Matters: The Sexuality and Society Reader (W.W. Norton, 2013) and True Tales of Lust and Love (Counterpoint/Soft Skull, 2014). She is the recipient of an MFA degree from the University of Montana, a Steinbeck Fellowship from San Jose State University, a LABA Fellowship from the 14th Street Y, residencies from the Anderson Center and Portsmouth Abbey School, and a fellowship from the Sozopol Fiction Seminars. She is also a six-time Moth StorySLAM winner whose stories have been featured on The Moth podcast and The Moth Radio Hour.

A poem by Patrick Moran

We’re happy to continue presenting work from our readers at the upcoming Augury Books & Friends offsite AWP reading/shindig in Seattle. The reading will be at Noble Neon, 3130 Airport Way S on Friday, February 28th from 7:30 until we all feel like going back to our hotels. If you’ll be in Seattle, please join us! Today’s poem is by Patrick Moran and is the title poem for The Book of Lost Things, winner of the first Augury Editors’ Prize.

Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

The Book of Lost Things

In the book of lost things you appear on page twenty-

seven.

The text next to your picture doesn’t dwell on details

as much as it tries to capture a mood.

You also appear on page forty-one as a charm bracelet

and page ninety-nine as a tooled cowboy belt.

Read in quick succession the entries begin to form a

composite of a more expansive definition of loss.

The authors, as you would imagine, are a society of

scrupulously devoted ne’er-do-wells.

Inevitably, a significant portion of the Book of the Lost

is perceived as the Book of the Found.

This inherent duality creates cross-references problems

of nightmarish proportions.

Just think of it, on page three you and everyone you

know is missing a brain cell.

And on pages nine and ten your virginity smiles impishly

for the cameras.

from The Book of Lost Things, Augury Books Editors’ Prize Winner 2012, available for order here

Patrick Moran is a 1995 graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is the author of four books of poetry, Tell A Pitiful Story, MWPH, (2011), Doppelgangster, Main Street Rag Press, (2012), The Book of Lost Things, Augury Books, (2012), Rumors of Organized Crime, Poems & Plays’ 2013 Tennessee Chapbook Prize winner. He is also the author of “The Ampersand: Casual Vortex or Engraver’s Shortcut,” which appeared in the 2013 September issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. His poems and translations have appeared in many journals including the New Republic, The Antioch Review, The Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review and The Boston Review. He is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.  His lives in Fort Atkinson, WI, with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

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 PayPalinclude 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.

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.

Patrick Moran is the Winner of the 2011 Editors' Prize in Poetry

Thank you so much to everyone who submitted. We were completely overwhelmed by fantastic manuscripts.

Congratulations to Patrick Moran for winning the prize for The Book of Lost Things!

Patrick Moran’s poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a variety of publications including Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Iowa Review and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is the author of two other collections of poetry, Tell a Pitiful Story and Doppelgangster.  Currently, he’s an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He lives in Fort Atkinson, WI, with his wife, the painter Bethann Moran, and their three children.

 

Finalists are listed below. Check back during the next few week for poems from Moran and our finalists.

Borrowed Wave by Rachel Moritz
Vitreous Hide by Michael Edgerton
Doubter Come Home from a Drowning of Vision by Carrie Meadows
The Silhouettes by Lily Ladewig
After Hurricane by Mark McKain
ROBINSON ALONE PROVIDES THE IMAGE by Kathleen Rooney
Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope by Frank Montesonti
Rancho Nostalgia by James Cihlar
Mirror Inside A Coffin by Maureen Alsop
Paradise for the Rest of Us by Gary Hawkins
No Tee Vee by Andrew Terhune