Photo by Nicolas Amara
Almost5Q is the finalist blog of Five Quarterly, an online literary journal that publishes five pieces of fiction and poetry each month, with each issue edited by a new editorial board composed of five guest editors. The finalist blog showcases those pieces which reached the final editorial reading. Our assistant editor, Nicolas Amara, was recently featured there. Check out his poem, “River,” over at Almost5Q!
Thomas Cook lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where he’s completing a dissertation on the novels of David Foster Wallace and editing the latest issue of Tammy.
The preppy hombre
ferried the sunlight on his shoulder
but didn’t speak to it
trotting through the wrestling
signatures of such and such
I have been his age
legible in the rorschach
insensible to the provenance
of flourish or giant
absence of giant Nightingale
with a tweed lid in a cedar
closet The dollar
vans are singing of home
on the Fulton Mall
The world has been resurrected
through its furnishings
I will have added
dogwoods leaning over the fence
with some foolishness and the sycamores
in the sky in their rapture
Ben Gantcher’s recently completed manuscript of poems, Snow Farmer, was a finalist in the 2014 Omnidawn Open book contest. His first chapbook, Strings of Math and Custom, was published in 2013 by Beard of Bees Press. If a Lettuce, his first manuscript of poems, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Slate, Guernica and The Brooklyn Rail. He is a 2014-15 fellow at LABA. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a resident at Ucross and Omi, a correspondent with the Hyde Park Review of Books and a poetry editor of the online journal failbetter. 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.
A detail from “Pollen Up Close” (1837), by Carl Julius Fritzsche, courtesy of Public Domain Review
Maureen Alsop (Mantic, Augury Books, 2013) has recently had several new pieces published online for the month of November. Spanning across text, sound, and video, as well as authorships and continents, they are a testament to the creative volume of Alsop’s work. See (and listen) below to receive a rounded view of her poetics.
Read a poem in Constraint, issue 48 of Australian poetry review Cordite.
A six-poem collaboration with the late Hillary Gravendyk has recently been published at The Volta in Arizona.
Listen to “Ensign March,” a poem from Mantic, translated into sound via telephone for Chicago-based Weird Deer.
View two video poems, “Vetiver” and “Thou,” at The Continental Review, an online journal devoted to video poetry and poetics.
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Detail of Le Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000, by Albert Robida. Courtesy of Public Domain Review
This coming Saturday, October 25th, Augury editor Kimberly Steele will be featured on the next P&W LIVE panel, held at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
Poets & Writers LIVE, developed by Poets & Writers magazine, aims to connect the independent literary community through a series of group panels featuring upcoming and established editors, publishers, and authors.
Other publishing companies represented will include Graywolf Press, Algonquin Books, New Directions, Black Balloon Publishing, Rose Metal Press, and Gival Press, as well as a featured reading by Charles D’Ambrosio.
Steele will be sharing her experiences as an editor of Augury Books at the Indie Editor Roundtable at 1:30. For more information about the day’s events, as well as P&W LIVE and how to register, head over to their site.
DC
Green shoots on one side
of a January branch—
half choose hope
Congress—the mighty chambers—
a heart? a stomach?—two dogs
wrestling over street meat
The South
Crawfish, a hundred perhaps, boiling
in a pot—a lava of spooning hoards—
we’ll suck the juices from their heads
& sex ourselves to sleep.
Thousands led to a stadium’s
mouth—the stadium
is fed better
Pecos River, Texas
My hand upon a man’s hand
blown red with paint dust
ten thousand years ago
Joe Pan’s first collection, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named “Best First Book of the Year” by Coldfront. He is the founding editor & publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press & serves as the poetry editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic. His work has appeared in such places as Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Glimmer Train, H_ngm_n, Phoebe, & has been excerpted in The New York Times. He grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and now lives in Brooklyn.
Carey McHugh’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Tin House, among others. Her chapbook Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c. was selected by Rae Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She lives and works in Manhattan.
This poem, “[You will come first as a sound],” has previously appeared in Gulf Coast, under the title “Open Brackets Closed Brackets.”
Photo by Dave Bledsoe, FreeVerse Photography
Augury Books is delighted to announce our selections from this summer’s open reading period. We are honored and humbled to have received so many wonderful manuscripts. It was difficult to come to a final decision. All of the work we received this year has helped to renew our faith in the high quality of independent literature.
Our next three titles will be:
Letters to Lxxxx by Randall Horton
American Gramophone by Carey McHugh
Hiccups, or Autobiomythography II by Joe Pan
We are also happy to highlight the works of our finalists:
A Love Supreme by Jeremy Townley
Children Left Breathing by Jeanne Althouse
Missionaries by David Ebenbach
True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape by Micah Perks
You Don’t Seem Happy Enough by Stephanie Austin
Hotel Grand Abyss by Robert Glick
Certain Registers by Thomas Cook
Snow Farmer by Benjamin Gantcher
A Miss by Marina Blitshteyn
Thank you again to everyone who submitted their work. We are truly grateful for your work and patience. Check back in the upcoming weeks and months to read selections from our three upcoming titles and our finalists!
For updates, follow this blog, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.
Later, Knives & Trees by Maureen Alsop
Maureen Alsop (Mantic, Augury Books, 2013) has recently published a new full-length poetry collection entitled Later, Knives & Trees with Negative Capability Press. Praised by many, including E.C. Belli and the late Hillary Gravendyk, Later, Knives & Trees deals largely with subjects of grief and coping with death. We are glad to include a poem from that collection, “Sanctimony,” below.
SANCTIMONY
You are a fine one after all— you among the beginnings are my beginning. Among delicate patterns of birds, sparks shepherding
Sun slim contrails like a small intimacy, the pewter sky’s glassy
impression toward night, a ritual with time. Perhaps dear,
I might judge the shadow of myself, the slight will of my shadow that keeps things just.
The dead live beneath the reach of snow—
without intimation I record collusions temporal heat. I keep record of your records.
Negative Capability Press was founded in Mobile, Alabama and has been publishing award-winning books since 1981. They are a Member of APSS: Association of Publishers for Special Sales (formerly SPAN). More information on the press, as well as Later, Knives & Trees, can be found at their website.
Frances Justine Post’s Beast (Augury Books, 2014) has received a micro-review in the latest edition of The Boston Review. Kay Cosgrove, poetry editor at Gulf Coast, commented on Beast‘s aesthetic approach and thematic development:
Frances Justine Post’s Beast (Augury Books, 2014) has received a micro-review in the latest edition of The Boston Review. Kay Cosgrove, poetry editor at Gulf Coast, commented on Beast‘s aesthetic approach and thematic development:
Though the collection’s narrative arc is familiar… the phrasing Post uses to convey it is dazzling, dangerous, visceral, and new… The poems dismantle the binaries of you and me, then and now, self and other, and singular and plural as they investigate, almost obsessively, how experience uproots and shapes us.”
The September/October issue is now available on newsstands. Additionally, each article from the current issue will soon be available to read online. Check back at The Boston Review’s site for updates.
UPDATE: The review is now online here.
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