Poetry

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‘Wednesday’ by 2013 Poetry Finalist Tina Schumann

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Wednesday

by Tina Schumann

Today I sat at my desk. Moved
a few books around. Thought of my demise.
Wrote a letter to a friend’s mother
thanking her for the Longfellow;
she’d heard I was a poet and naturally assumed.
I ate when my body said eat.
I drank water – cold and slick
it slipped down my throat.
I waited for the mailman
to walk up the steps. I heard his start
and stop, the lift and lowering
of the lid, the sharp turn of his boots
on dry leaves. I waited and he came.
I listened and he left. He and I
and the crows and the UPS man
and the kid down the street with the basketball
are all figures moved by instinct and need,
obligation, desire, and boredom. But I digress.
I picked the glass up, set the glass down,
stood up, walked the floor, looked out the window,
cursed the grass, and thought, thought, thought.
– never fully dormant, never fully engaged.
And all the while this is what the sign around my neck said:
If it rattles like a person than it is a person.

Tina Schumann’s work was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Tupelo Press listed her full manuscript as a “remarkable work,” in their 2012 open submission period. Her chapbook “As If” (Split Oak Press) was awarded the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize for 2010 and in 2011 her work received a Pushcart nomination. She holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University and her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies including The American Poetry Journal, Ascent, Cimarron Review, Crab Creek Review, Harpur Palate, PALABRA, PARABOLA, Poemeleon, Raven Chronicles, San Pedro River Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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
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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.
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Come See Augury at the 3rd Annual NYC Poetry Festival, July 27-28

 

Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography

Tomorrow is already Wednesday, so it’s time to prepare your answer for the popular post-hump-day question of: “Hey, what are you doing this weekend?”

We’ve got you covered. “Going to the Third Annual New York City Poetry Festival, hosted by the Poetry Society of New York, on Governor’s Island,” you can say. Why? Because, hopefully, you are just as excited as we are for the two-day celebration of New York’s dynamic poetry scene.

Yes, Augury will be there! Our own B. C. Edwards (To Mend Small Children), David Joel Friedman (Soldier Quick with Rain) and Paige Lipari (Family of Many Enzos) will be reading Sunday (July 28) at 1:30 p.m. on the White Horse stage.

Find out all you need to know at the Poetry Society of New York’s website, including the lineup of over 50 poetry organizations and 200 poets, the times and locations of each reading, and transportation info to and from Governors Island.

Also, check out Coldfront’s fabulous NYC Poetry Festival Preview, featuring interviews from many of the presses, journals, and organizations that will present at the festival — including one from Augury!

Two new poems by Christopher Hughes

 

We are very happy to present poetry by Christopher Hughes. For your viewing pleasure, this video clip of “The Sense of a City is War” was filmed at the Spiderweb Salon in Denton, Tx.

 

For your reading pleasure:

 

Waves Are The Practice Of The Water.

 

I went to the grocery store for cat food, litter, toilet paper, detergent and alcohol.  I took my cat to the vet and the vet shrieked when she saw my cat.  People only shriek like that in movies.  Movies are more like reality than our perception of reality.  Wet cat food from now on, she said.  I said, Why?  Because it’s real, she said.  So I stood in the aisle, staring at rows of pastel-colored tin cans, wondering which flavor my cat prefered. It was turning summer and the mosquitos were sucking.  I was eating squash and swallowing vicodan and taking selfies of my wounded face for the district attorney, because he wanted proof of my pain.  I wanted to help myself, but the best I could do was repeat the phrase, This is water. I said it over and over until it didn’t mean anything.  Then I wandered around the square and was hassled by evil teenagers with thin mustaches and mild acne.  In the movies, they overdub cat sounds and it never matches the mouth.  I let the sweat come into my eyes as an excuse not to look.  They asked me to share whatever was in the brown paper bag and the orange prescription bottle.  It made me think of when I was their age, and I’d sit on curbs in convenient store parking lots, sizing up adults as they pulled in, offering five bucks to buy me a pack of Marlboro Reds for two dollars and thirty-seven cents.  Or I’d page my dealer from a payphone and he’d pull around the corner and I would enter his lime green Monte Carlo and we’d drive around the block indiscreetly, probably on purpose.  But now it’s different.  Now, we are the high bidders of ingredients and blueprints on eBay, and we bomb city blocks while everyone celebrates humanity, make first-person shooters out of the last moments of our lives, have no idea how to make reality a thing independent of a smartphone or flourescent screen without twisting wires into fluid.  Maybe death means less when you’ve got a Facebook profile that completes you.  Maybe one day we won’t have a use for movies.  It’ll all just be a series of scenes, disconnected, till the day we decide to thicken our plot.

 

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Christopher Hughes is the author of Selected Tweets, a spoken word project and ongoing collection of prose poems based around the idea of giving context to his otherwise vague Twitter feed. He is the singer, guitarist and songwriter for Texas indie rock band, The Calmative, and he produces other artists as well, out of his studio, Miscellaneous Sound. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School, has been published in Pax Americana and Omnia Vanitas Review, and lives in Denton, Texas.

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Halfway Point For Augury Books’ 2013 Reading Period

Photo by: Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

We’re halfway there, friends, in our reading period for poetry books and short story collections. Many thanks to those of you who have already sent us your manuscripts. If you’re still cracking, no worries — you have another full month (until June 30, 2013) to get those poetry books and short story collections together to submit to Augury.

A few words about what we’re looking for: We gravitate toward pieces that are expertly written and keep us intrigued. We are not particular when it comes to content, as we have fallen in love with work from many different traditions and on many different topics, as well as work that defies tradition and “topics.”

We do, however, want to fall in love with it, so it should justify that kind of devotion. If you have fallen in love with it, we consider that a great place to start.

Now you know. Tell your friends, loved ones and acquaintances. We’ll be seeing you all within the next month!

For exact guidelines and to submit your manuscript, click here.

—Augury Books

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Save the Date: Feb 25th Launch Party for Books by David Joel Friedman and Maureen Alsop

We know how much you love poems, new books, and looking forward to stuff, so we wanted you to be the first to know about our upcoming launch party on Monday, February 25, 2013. We will be celebrating (and selling!) the brand-new, hot-off-the-presses Soldier Quick with Rain by David Joel Friedman, the winner of this year’s Editor Prize, and Mantic by Maureen Alsop.

We promise poetry readings, drink specials, friendly faces, handshakes, hugs and … did we mention NEW BOOKS? … all in the cozy back room of Botanica Bar on Houston Street in Manhattan at 6:30 p.m. You can RSVP to our Facebook invitation.

While you’re at it, Like us on Facebook to continue receiving updates, and, if you’re feeling really ambitious, you can follow this WordPress blog by clicking in the right corner below and stay informed that way.

We would also like to extend another mammoth and monolithic thank you to anyone and everyone who supported these books and other upcoming Augury endeavors during our Indiegogo campaign, be it with donations, word-of-mouth, moral support or good vibes. You are dazzling and darling individuals.

To pre-order Soldier Quick with Rain and Mantic, click here. RSVP to our book launch party on Facebook here.

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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.