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news & events
news & events
SINGAPORE REACHES POETRY WORLD CUP FINALS
July 13, 2014
It’s astonishing. Singapore has knocked out four countries to make it to the Finals of the Poetry World Cup. It’s probably the closest thing to this small country ever bagging the real thing. Singapore has certainly been on the roll. Asked for his choice pick in this World Cup for Bards, Singapore’s poet-ambassador Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé was quoted as saying: “We’re all winners in this game. All of us who participated and joined in the fun.
It’s a game of appreciation. Of appreciating one another’s wordsmithery, and each of our poems. These poems are no less than gifts to the reader.” In this tournament where the readers’ votes are all that matter, Desmond’s prose poem, titled “gǎn qíng yòng shì :: impulsive and impetuous”, has seen him through all the rounds. Poetry World Cup 2014 is organised by The Missing Slate. Viewers get to read both poems, and then click to register their choice. Voting for the final match will only open around 3.30pm (Singapore Time) on Sun, 13 July, and close 24 hours later. The Finals see Singapore in a face-off with Pakistan. For on-going match details and to cast your vote, please visit the Poetry World Cup 2014 site HERE.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES
NEW ZEALAND’S POET LAUREATE
July 11, 2014
Lord, have mercy on us! We’ve just published two broadsides by New Zealand’s very best. Ian Wedde is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, six novels, two collections of essays, as well as several art catalogues. His most recent books are The Life-Guard (Auckland University Press, 2013), a novel The Catastrophe (Victoria University Press, 2011), and an artist monograph Bill Culbert: Making Light Work (Auckland University Press/RGAP, 2009). Born in New Zealand in 1946, Wedde has lived and worked there as well as in Bangladesh, Jordan, England and
France. He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate 2011-13, was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in 2010, given a Distinguished Alumni Award at the University of Auckland in 2007, and an Arts Foundation Laureate Award in 2006. He has won national book awards for both fiction and poetry. He was Head of Art and Humanities at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa from 1994 to 2004, and from 2011-13 taught in the English and Art History Departments of Auckland University. In 2013-14 he will be based in Berlin on the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer’s Residency. To purchase his glorious broadsides, please wander over HERE.
SINGAPORE MARCHES INTO POETRY WORLD CUP SEMI-FINALS
July 10, 2014
Things are looking rosy for the Little Red Dot. At Poetry World Cup 2014, Singapore’s choice poet Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has blazed a winning streak, leaving behind China, Cyprus, and Trinidad & Tobago. Organiser Jacob Silkstone reported that Singapore “recorded the biggest win of round one and received the most votes in round two”, followed by “top form… recording a
comfortable win over Trinidad & Tobago to set up a semi-final with Tunisia.” Desmond’s prose poem is titled “gǎn qíng yòng shì :: impulsive and impetuous”, handpicked by the organisers. All four semi-finalists have been interviewed before what is expected to be heart-stopping matches. Poetry World Cup 2014 is organised by The Missing Slate, an arts and literary journal which has published writers from more than 60 countries. The event has seen 32 authors from 32 countries battling for the gold. The initial two rounds finalised the poet contenders for the quarters, semis, and finals. To hear what the semi-finalists have to say about their chances, please mosey down to the Poetry World Cup 2014 portal HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR NOAH ELI GORDON’S YEAR OF THE ROOSTER
June 23, 2014
We recently published a lovely broadside by Noah Eli Gordon. We’re so impressed with his 2013 poetry collection that we decided we’d give it a big toot. It’s titled The Year of the Rooster. Here’s what Tom Raworth has to say about it: “In the ocean of images a sonnet tide ebbs and returns while within that fearful symmetry identity picks a way between mirrors and windows grateful that thought has mergeable labels, that adjectives are nouns, and that no things abut ideas: The Year of the Rooster shall be your map and guide.” Cathy Wagner also gives it a big thumbs up: “Tracking the motions of these witty, reflective poems is like wandering through a chambered nautilus with a Virgil in a crisis of self-doubt about his mission. The nautilus resembles a mirrored city, then a garden, or it’s sliced and pinned to the wall as art, or hung up like a human in a suit or skirt whose self-fashioned day is morphing.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES WINNER OF BASS IRELAND AWARD FOR LITERATURE
June 10, 2014
Absolutely breathtaking, the work of this awesome Irish poet. Born in 1950 in Belfast, Medbh McGuckian has authored more than 15 poetry collections. These include On Ballycastle Beach (1988), Marconi's Cottage (1992), Captain Lavender (1995), Shelmalier (1998), The Book of the Angel (2004), The Currach Requires no Harbours (2007), and My Love Has Fared Inland (2010), among others. She is also the author of Horsepower Pass By! A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1999). McGuckian attended Queen’s University in Belfast, where she befriended poets Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and Seamus Heaney, and earned her BA and MA in
English. Her other notable publications include editing The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985), and co-translating, with Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s collection The Water Horse (1999). McGuckian has earned significant critical acclaim over the course of her career. Her poem “The Flitting”, published under a male pseudonym, won the 1979 National Poetry Competition. In 1980, McGuckian published two chapbooks of poetry and also won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. On Ballycastle Beach won the Cheltenham Award, and The Currach Requires No Harbours was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. McGuckian won the Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.” Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. McGuckian was the first woman to hold the Writer-in-Residence position at Queen's University. She currently lives in Belfast with her husband and children, and is a professor of English at Queen's University. We have not one but two spectacular broadsides by McGuckian. Please go HERE.
WE PUBLISH RECIPIENT OF VILLAGE VOICE WRITERS ON THE VERGE AWARD
May 24, 2014
Another amazing author to add to our ranks! We’re happy to welcome Paisley Rekdal, the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid genre, photo-text memoir Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA
from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series (2102 and 2013) and various state arts council awards. Her recent book of poems, Animal Eye, was a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and was the winner of the 2013 UNT Rilke Prize. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and on National Public Radio among many others. Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah. For a peek at her lovely broadside, please mosey on over HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE:
BROADSIDE BY WINNER
OF SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PREMIER’S AWARD
May 9, 2014
We’re completely humbled to be able to put out a broadside by one of Australia’s most accomplished writers. John Tranter’s two latest books Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (2006) and Starlight: 150 Poems (2010), have together won six major Australian awards. He received a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and is an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney School of Letters, Arts and Media and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has given more than a hundred readings and talks in various cities around the world, has published more than twenty collections of verse, and has edited six anthologies. He founded the free Internet magazine Jacket in 1997 and granted it to the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, he is the founder of the Australian Poetry Library at
http://poetrylibrary.edu.au which publishes over 40,000 Australian poems online, and he has a journal at johntranter.net and a vast homepage at johntranter.com. To purchase his stunning broadside, look no farther than HERE.
WE PUBLISH RECIPIENT OF RUTH LILLY POETRY FELLOWSHIP
April 21, 2014
We’ve got a lovely contemporary poet here. Catherine Wagner is the author of several poetry collections, including Nervous Device, My New Job, Macular Hole, Miss America; and a dozen chapbooks, such as Imitating and Articulate How. Born in Burma, Wagner lived in Asia and the Middle East until 1977, when her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated from University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Iowa, and University of Utah. Her work has appeared in anthologies including The Norton Anthology of
Postmodern American Poetry, Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, Poets on Teaching, Starting Today: Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, Gurlesque, State of the Union: 50 Political Poems, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, and The Best American Erotic Poems, 1800 to the Present, among others. An anthology she co-edited with Rebecca Wolff, Not for Mothers Only, was published by Fence in 2007. She has performed widely in America, England and Ireland. Her honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the Teaching-Writing Fellowship from University of Iowa, and Steffensen Cannon Fellowship from University of Utah. She is associate professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. For her lovely broadside, please wander over HERE.
WE UNVEIL A TEEN TITANS VINTAGE ANNUAL
April 12, 2014
Happy Valentine’s Day! Even back in 1989, when this annual was released, the comic world was obsessed with the origins of its masked vigilantes. Here’s one more vintage collectible from our age-old book box. This is Volume 3 and the final annual of the series. You can see Robin as Nightwing down the frontispiece, very topical given Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s turn as John-Blake-aka-Robin in Dark Knight Rises. Within the annual are great flashback sequences, a recapitulation of events from Brave and the Bold, as well as Teen Titans. An interesting revelation: The Gargoyle was actually the Titans' first arch enemy Mister Twister – this comes as a sweet surprise because the two characters were originally treated as separate. Look out for more vintage comics and rare books as we slowly introduce them to you!
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES WINNER OF BARNARD POETRY PRIZE
March 15, 2014
We absolutely love her book Traffic with Macbeth. Larissa Szporluk’s other lovely collections include Dark Sky Question, which won the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind; and Embryos and Idiots. Her work has been included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 1999, Best of Beacon 1999, The new young American poets, Best American Poetry 2001, and Twentieth-century American poetry. Her honors include two The Best American Poetry awards, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Guggenheim, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio Arts Council. She was a visiting professor at Cornell University in 2005, and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University. So, it is with pure awesomeness that we issue a broadside by her. Please mosey over HERE.
WE PUBLISH GRANT CALDWELL
March 2, 2014
We’re publishing some awesome work by Australian authors. Totally pleased to be offering a lovely poem by Grant Caldwell. Born in Melbourne in 1947, Grant Caldwell has lived in London, Morocco, Ibiza and Sydney. After living in Europe in the early 70s, Caldwell devoted his time to writing. He has been teaching Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne since 1995. His creative work, poetry, stories and extended narratives, have been published widely in Australia since the 70s, as well as in Canada, Columbia, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and USA. He has had eight books published – six collections of poetry, a novel and a collection of short stories. His work has been translated into Bengali, Japanese, Spanish and Arabic. Caldwell has received two Australia Council Established Writer Fellowships, and two Arts Victoria Grants. His books have been nominated for the Age Book of the Year Award, and a Human Rights Award. He was the Managing Editor of the Australian Poetry Centre’s national poetry journal Blue Dog from 2007 to 2010; he was an inaugural board member of the Australian Poetry Centre, and the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Bid 2007, and the
Steering Committee for the Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. Caldwell has represented Australia at international poetry festivals in Columbia, New Zealand and Japan. To purchase his broadside, wander over HERE.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
February 17, 2014
If you don’t own all his books, you should. Philip Schultz is the author of several collections of poetry, including his most recent The God of Loneliness: Selected and New Poems (2010), Failure (2007) winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, Living in the Past (2004), and The Holy Worm of Praise (2002), all published by Harcourt. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine (Viking 1984), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; Like Wings (Viking 1978, winner of an American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Award as well as a National Book Award nomination) and the poetry chapbook, My Guardian Angel Stein (1986). His work has been published in The New
Yorker, Partisan Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Slate, among other magazines, and he is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in Poetry to Israel and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He has also received, among others, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1981), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1985), as well as the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. Schultz founded The Writers Studio in 1987 after spending four years as the founder and director of New York University’s graduate creative writing program. The Writers Studio utilizes a method that emphasizes technique and emotional connection, making writers aware of the distinction between the actual writer and a narrative persona. Today it features an online program, workshops in New York City, San Francisco and Tucson, as well as a celebrated reading series in New York City. We’re lark-happy that we get to publish a whopping three broadsides by this amazing writer. To see these gems, please go HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR RAE ARMANTROUT’S JUST SAYING
January 20, 2013
Rae Armantrout, who has a beautiful broadside published with us, launched her new book earlier this year, and it’s certainly gained an awesome critical audience. It’s titled Just Saying, and it’s a gorgeous tome by the Pulitzer recipient. Here’s the review from Publishers Weekly: “No poet gets caustic, or self-critical, or sarcastic, as well as Armantrout, whose quick stanzas – half Twitter, half Emily Dickinson – say a lot about how language, money, love, and memory can fail us, and in very little space. This collection, in particular, might give readers still on the outside of Armantrout’s brilliance a set of new ways in.” And here’s what John Deming from Cold Front has to say: “She assembles images, thoughts and sensations – things seen, heard, overhead – and finds inconspicuous patterns in them, never losing the abiding sense that saying anything might mean pretending to know too much. Yet many poems lead to overpowering revelations that will be lost on those only committing to a cursory read....
Rae Armantrout’s full bibliography is important and possibly essential. But it seems to matter that we don’t ignore the incredibly high level at which she is currently writing. If there are few variations in style, one might remember that her poems are new like every day is new: as long as the world is changing, there is fodder.” To purchase this spectacular book, please go to Amazon HERE. To purchase Armantrout’s broadside, please wander over HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR BARNETT'S GAME OF BOXES
January 11, 2014
We really love this new poetry collection from Catherine Barnett. Published by Graywolf Press, The Game of Boxes, received the 2012 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. April Bernard has this to say about the book, “With subtle and cumulative force, The Game of Boxes builds a complex poetic structure in which fundamental questions about motherhood, trust, eroticism, and spiritual meaning are posed and then set into motion in relation to one another. The mind is delighted, the spirit enthralled, by this wonderful book.” Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Barnett has put out a previous collection by Alice James Books in 2004. It’s titled Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced. Barnett’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award. She works as an independent editor and as Writer-in-Residence at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan where she meets with mothers in the shelter system. She teaches at the New School
and New York University. To purchase her book, please wander over HERE.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES WINNER OF SAN FRANCISCO STATE POETRY CENTER AWARD
December 27, 2014
We first encountered Noah Eli Gordon’s stunning work through his book Inbox. We were simply blown away. Gordon is the author of eight books, including The Year of the Rooster (Ahsahta Press, 2013), The Source (Futurepoem, 2011), and Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and subsequently chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award. He is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions, an editor with The Volta, and an Assistant Professor in the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado–Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press.
His essays, reviews, creative nonfiction, criticism, and poetry appear widely, including journals such as Bookforum, Seneca Review, Boston Review, Fence, Hambone, and in the anthologies Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Poets on Teaching, and Burning Interiors: David Shapiro's Poetry and Poetics. An advocate of small press culture, he penned a column for five years on chapbooks for Rain Taxi: review of books, ran Braincase Press, and was a founding editor of the little magazine Baffling Combustions. To purchase his glorious broadside, please mosey over HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR RAFAEL CAMPO’S NEW BOOK
December 19, 2013
Rafael Campo, who has a beautiful broadside published with us, has a new poetry collection out. It’s titled Alternative Medicine, and it’s Campo’s sixth book of poems. Here’s what Lloyd Schwartz has to say about the book: “Alternative Medicine (a wonderful euphemism for poetry) is an extraordinarily powerful and moving book – its central poems about doctoring, about the sadness and helplessness of being a doctor. Only someone who has actually lived these poems could have written them. Rafael Campo is that rare poet. This book makes art out of the pain and blood of experience.” Sandra M. Gilbert is no less effusive about Campo’s poetic prowess. She writes: “Rafael Campo is an extraordinarily skillful poet: his technique manifests itself in the range of forms he so brilliantly masters. But he is also a poet of gravity and poignant observation. Unlike so many people writing today, he has subjects, passions, and themes that are profoundly important.” To purchase this book, please go to Amazon HERE. To purchase his broadside, please wander over HERE.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES AUSTRALIAN AUTHOR KEVIN BROPHY
December 13, 2013
We’re fortunate to welcome this superb Australian poet and novelist to our press. Kevin Brophy has thirteen books to his name. His latest book of essays is Patterns of Creativity (Rodopi Press 2009), while his latest collection of poetry is Radar (Walleah Press 2012). Creativity was shortlisted for the NSW Premiers Nonfiction Literary Award in 1999. His collection of short fiction, What Men and Women Do, was runner-up for the Christina Stead Award, and in
2005 he was awarded the Martha Richardson medal for poetry. Co-winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay in 2009, Brophy is also the recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts grants in 1974, 1986 and 2005, as well as Arts Victoria project grants in 1996 and 2003. He is a regular reviewer for Reading Time, the journal of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, and has contributed Book Notes for the Council of Adult Education Reading Groups. Brophy is a life member of Writing Victoria, patron of the Melbourne Poets Union, a member of the publishing executive of Five Islands Press, and co-editor of the online journal of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs, TEXT. He is a founding member of Lines to Time, an association devoted to providing poetry at the funerals of those who would otherwise die without recognition or ceremony. He was a member of the Executive of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs 2001-2008. He has been a board member of Going Down Swinging, four times a judge for the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards, and through Hit & Miss, the publisher of chapbooks by Melbourne poets. We’re thrilled to be publishing two broadsides by this splendid writer. To purchase, please go HERE.
WE UNVEIL A 30-YEAR-OLD
ALPHA FLIGHT COMIC
December 6, 2013
You might not have heard of this superhero ensemble, given how the film adaptations have dwarfed so many Marvel creations of the past. Alpha Flight is one of very few Canadian superhero groups, pitched as Canada’s answer to The Avengers. Their first appearance can be traced to 1979, in Uncanny X-Men #120. In fact, the team was slated only to prop the backstory of Wolverine – Creator John Byrne then went on, in 1983, to launch the group its own series, which enjoyed a good readership to 1994. Four short-lived revivals have been attempted since. Some interesting trivia: In the popular X-Men: Legends video game, you can see Alpha Flight’s insignia. This is shown when the player – as Magma – visits Wolverine’s room. Also, if you look closely enough, you’ll spot Alpha Flight’s name on Stryker’s computer in X2: X-Men, when Mystique hacks into it. We’re slowly digging out our comic collectibles. If you like what you’re reading, look out for them in our Rare Books Store, to come soon!
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES BROADSIDE
BY CHARLES BERNSTEIN
November 29, 2013
To say we’re over the moon would be an understatement. We know him to be the patriarch – or at least one of the founding fathers – of language poetry. We fell off our seats when Charles Bernstein provided us with a fabulous poem titled “I Don’t Remember”. What makes it totally awesome is that it’s completely handwritten. Bernstein is the author or editor of over 50 books, ranging from full-length collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, and collaborations, most recently Recalculating (2013) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011), both from the University of Chicago Press and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010) from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Press, 2011). Recent full-length works of poetry include Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), With Strings (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Republics of Reality: 1975-1995 (Sun & Moon Press, 2000). He has published two books of essays and one essay/poem collection: My Way: Speeches and Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1999); A Poetics (Harvard University Press, 1992); Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, 1986, 1994; reprinted by Northwestern University Press, 2001). Shadowtime (Green Integer, 2005) is the libretto he wrote for Brian Ferneyhough's opera and Blind Witness (Factory School, 2008) collects the libretti he wrote for Ben Yarmolinsky. Bernstein is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PennSound; and editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center. He is coeditor, with Hank Lazer, of Modern and Contemporary Poetics, a book series from the University of Alabama Press. He has been host and co-producer of LINEbreak and Close
Listening, two radio poetry series. In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Prizes include: The 1999 Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; and, at Penn, the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching in 2005. Fellowships include: New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1995 and 1990, University of Auckland Foundation Fellowship (1986), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1985), the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (1980), and the William Lyon McKenzie King Fellowship (1973). Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania. To purchase his totally awesome broadside, please go HERE.
GET THE LATEST ISSUE OF BLACK HERALD
November 20, 2013
The latest issue of this lovely publication is out, edited by the fabulous Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs! Here’s what Will Stone reviewed of the journal in Agenda: “January 2011 witnessed the birth of a significant new literary magazine in Europe, The Black Herald. This immediately refreshing bilingual magazine is issued from Paris, which seemed fitting, since its pages held the work of poets, essayists and translators from across the European theatre of operations and beyond. The Black Herald Press editors put forward their commitment to multilingual inclusivity and a necessary avoidance of the ‘island bound verbiage’ or mainstream poetry workshop mentality that festoons so many literary magazines in the UK.” In Bookslut, Greer Mansfield described Black Herald as “a concourse for strong and original English-language poetry, publishing interesting new poets like Will Stone, Mark Wilson, and Siddhartha Bose. It has also published more established
writers (Clayton Eshleman being an example), and it maintains a constant dialogue with the dead. Or perhaps, more accurately, the “dead,” because in its pages the likes of Hart Crane, W.S. Graham, Cesar Vallejo, Georges Rodenbach, Osip Mandelstam, August Stramm, and James Joyce are blazingly alive in the company of the newer writers.” This issue’s contributors include: Steve Ely, Pierre Cendors, Edward Gauvin, Paul B. Roth, Jean-Pierre Longre, Rosemary Lloyd, Boris Dralyuk, Paul Stubbs, Georgina Tacou, John Lee, Cristián Vila Riquelme, Philippe Muller, Michael Lee Rattigan, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Vasily Kamensky, David Shook, Oliver Goldsmith, Michel Gerbal, Gary J. Shipley, Anthony Seidman, Fernando Pessoa, Cécile Lombard, Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Heller Levinson, Jorge Ortega, and Blandine Longre. To purchase the issue, please go HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR MATT RASMUSSEN’S BOOK
November 15, 2013
We received this lovely poetry collection in the mail. It was shipped to us from The Academy of American Poets. It’s a beautiful collection of poems that bagged the Walt Whitman Award, described like so from Ben Mirov: “Certain poets have the ability to create poems of Euclidean clarity. Rasmussen is one such poet. His images make me feel as though I’ve lived for years in the span of a moment. His lapidary poems seem more real than the chair I am sitting on or the room that holds me aloft in space as I type this.” Jane Hirshfield has this to say: “The liberations of tongue, word, and conception held in these poems restore the possibility-sense that’s as essential to us as oxygen, when a person stands in the chambers of unacceptable loss.” We read it in one full sweep, and it made us cry. If you want to get a copy, look for it HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR VERENA TAY’S BALIK KAMPUNG
November 5, 2013
We’ll be happily traipsing down for the launch of this gorgeous anthology at The Singapore Writers Festival. Published by Math Paper Press and edited by Verena Tay, Balik Kampung 2B: Contemplations comprises nine new stories written by authors contemplating the neighborhoods they’ve lived in for some time. How does one's environment affect one's outlook in life? Is your home your identity? How do people react to a specific place over time? The various short stories within this collection ponder these questions and more. By the time you reach the last page, you’re guaranteed to view parts of Singapore with a fresh perspective. Featured writers include: Marc Nair, Ann Ang, Cyril Wong, Verena Tay, Wei Fen Lee, Tania De Rozario, Zizi Azah, Gemma Pereira, and Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. We hope to see you there, where Ng Yi-Sheng’s lovely book Diary of a Stone Monkey will also be launched. It’s at the Binary Pavilion in Singapore Management University’s Campus Green. The date is Tue, Nov 5, between 7-8pm. Admission is free. For more details, please see HERE.
DESMOND KON’S NEW BOOK LAUNCHES AT SINGAPORE WRITERS FESTIVAL
November 4, 2013
We’re happy to announce that The Arbitrary Sign: The Most Misunderstood Alphabet Book In The World will be launched by Red Wheelbarrow Books at this year’s Singapore Writers Festival, all thanks to the fabulous Savinder Kaur and Chris Mooney-Singh. Are the signifier and the signified as tight friends as Saussure thinks, as inseparable as two sides of a piece of paper? For Jacques Lacan, the sign “represents something for someone”; on the contrary, the signifier is “that which represents a subject for another signifier”.
Is S really the subject or the signifier? Or in the schemas of Sade, the raw subject of pleasure? Where is the S1 here? And if it’s around, is it still the master signifier? If S2 is the signifying chain – that is, all language and knowledge, as we know them to be strung together – where are the other characters in the perplexing world of Lacan, and by association, Derrida and Deleuze? This book elevates the quintessential alphabet book into the connoisseur’s poetic aperitif. Here’s a review by Bryan Borland, editor of the journal Assaracus: “Don’t be fooled. There is nothing arbitrary here, nothing that begs to be misunderstood. Instead, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé offers psalms of philosophy, quiet prayers to Socrates and Plato, to Thomas and Whitman. These poems are confessional in the most unique of ways, beyond the public, underneath the personal. They tap into a universal vein, the voice that comes when we allow ourselves to observe ourselves. The result is transcendent.” We hope to see you at the launch, where Marc Nair’s lovely collection Postal Code will also be launched. It’s at the Festival Pavilion in Singapore Management University’s Campus Green. The date is Mon, Nov 4, between 7-9pm. Admission is free. For more details, please see HERE.
LAUNCH OF CERIPH 6 AT SINGAPORE WRITERS FESTIVAL
November 2, 2013
Known for promoting a refreshing selection of emerging writers from Singapore, Ceriph will unveil its latest issue with a poetry and prose reading at this year’s Singapore Writers Festival. Beautifully produced by the fabulous Wei Fen Lee, Amanda Lee and Winnie Goh, this issue highlights the poetic form and its potential for “local uses” – with Singlish or without, rooted in familiar spaces or flung far into space. These exciting new works continue to critically question and celebrate the idiosyncrasies, grievances and cadences of the local tongue, without being restricted by it. After the reading, join the editors and contributors for an informal discussion of Ceriph and other literary magazines, and the quizzical shape of Singaporean literature. Look out for great new work by: Andrew Cheah, Berny Tan, Brandon Chew, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, Daryl Yam, David Wong Ng Xi Jie, Desmond Kon, Jerrold Yam, Joshua Ip, JY Yang, Nicholas Chng, Sam Ng, Samuel Caleb Wee, Tan Sihan, Teo Huey Yun, Teoh Ren Jie, Tjoa Shze Hui, and Yi Hui Hoh. It’s at the Big Steps at Singapore Management University. The date is Sat, Nov 2, between 7-8pm. Admission is free. For more details, please see HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE: TWO
BROADSIDES BY WINNER OF GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
October 30, 2013
We first encountered Sylvia Legris’ amazing book Nerve Squall, a totally mind-blowing collection of poems. So, it’s with such pleasure that we present you two broadsides from the superbly talented writer. Born in 1960, Sylvia Legris is a Canadian poet, originally from Winnipeg and now in Saskatoon. Legris’ most recent publication is Pneumatic Antiphonal (2013), published by New Directions Publishing as part of their newly revived Poetry Pamphlet Series. She was the 2012 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement by a mid-career artist in writing and publishing. Her collection Nerve Squall (Coach House Books) won both the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2006 Pat Lowther Award. Her other books are Iridium Seeds and Circuitry of Veins, both published by Winnipeg’s Turnstone Press. Legris’ writing has appeared widely in both US and Canadian journals, among them Conjunctions, New American Writing, The Capilano Review,
and the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Boulder Pavement. Her work has recently appeared in the anthology The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press, 2012), and is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry 2013 (Tightrope Books). The Judges’ Citation of Legris’ Nerve Squall goes like this: “Sylvia Legris’ high-octane poems are powered by ‘atmospheric overload’. Her eye is that of the twenty-first century – zooming from satellite to microscope – but her focus and coherence are increasingly rare in this age. In her hands, language refracts in ways which break open etymology to bring us more sense rather than less. Legris’ poems build like chords from sub- to super-sonic and, even at their most rapid and heightened point, sustain the force of poetic enquiry. There is always, as she says, ‘something on your hook, you feel it’.” For her broadsides, look no farther. HERE they are.
SQUIRCLE REPRINTS 25-YEAR-OLD CENTERFOLD AS BROADSIDE
October 18, 2013
This image appeared as the centerfold spread of a junior college literary magazine called My Word. It was first considered for the cover, and eventually was given its own prominent space in the middle of the saddle-stitched publication. It remains one of the earliest illustrations of publisher Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé to have made it to print, the first only two years earlier. The magazine was black-and-white, and only enjoyed a small print run. It was never reprinted. Few copies of it remain to this day. Desmond continued illustrating sporadically, and completed commissioned pieces for national daily The Straits Times, as well as several magazines. More than 20 years later, we’re happy to re-issue the centerfold as a broadside. To have a look at it, please wander over HERE.
MALALA YOUSAFZAI ANTHOLOGY LAUNCHES TODAY
October 9, 2013
Today is the one-year anniversary of 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai’s shooting, simply for speaking out regarding a girl’s right to education. Since the attempt on her life, Malala has emerged as an empowered voice for women worldwide. On her 16th birthday this past July 12 — declared Malala Day by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — Malala addressed the United Nations to call for the support of all governments to help girls and women flourish. One of Malala’s statements has become a rallying cry, bringing hope to all: “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” To mark this anniversary, FutureCycle Press launches Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai. Edited by Joseph Hutchison and Andrea L. Watson, this anthology features contributors from across the world. All proceeds from sales of the paperback and Kindle editions will be donated to the Malala Fund, thanks to the fabulous initiative by FutureCycle founders Diane Kistner and Robert S. King. To help raise awareness of her cause, a PDF version will also be available on the press website for
free download and sharing. The authors featured within this anthology include: Rukhsana Ahmad, Diana Anhalt, Carol Alena Aronoff, Ed Baker, Ellen Bass, Sherry Stuart-Berman, John Brandi, April Bulmer, Kathleen Cain, Kathleen Cerveny, Joan Colby, Kathleen Dale, Conrad DiDiodato, Laura Eklund, Susan J. Erickson, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ilmana Fasih, CB Follett, Madelyn Garner, Katherine L. Gordon, Pat Hanahoe-Dosch, Jane Hilberry, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Paul Hostovsky, Joseph Hutchison, Ana Istarú, Anita Jepson-Gilbert, Penn Kemp, Rita Brady Kiefer, Diane Kistner, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Paula J. Lambert, Wayne Lee, Lyn Lifshin, Bobbi Lurie, Ken Meisel, Karla Linn Merrifield, Basia Miller, Kishwar Naheed, Ruth Obee, Colleen Powderly, Peg Quinn, Chris Ransick, Barbara Rockman, Joan Roberta Ryan, Marjorie Saiser, Aftab Yusuf Shaikh, Michael G. Smith, Mark Smith-Soto, Meryl Stratford, Judith Terzi, Andrea L. Watson, Sarah White, John Sibley Williams, Kathryn Winograd, Sholeh Wolpé, Diana Woodcock, Abigail Wyatt, and Vassilis Zambaras. For more information on this worthy project, please read on HERE.
SQUIRCLE PUBLISHES TWO-TIME WINNER OF LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD
October 4, 2013
Here’s a doctor who’s also a distinguished poet. Rafael Campo is the author of The Other Man Was Me, which won the 1993 National Poetry Series Award; What the Body Told, which won a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, a collection of essays now available in paperback under the title The Desire to Heal, which also won a Lambda Literary Award, for memoir. His poetry and prose have appeared in many major anthologies, and in numerous prominent periodicals. Campo currently teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where his medical practice serves mostly Latinos, GLBT people, and people with HIV infection. He is also on the faculty of the Lesley University Creative Writing MFA program. His work has been featured on the National Endowment for the Arts website and on National Public Radio. With the support of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, he wrote Diva, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Lambda Literary Awards for poetry. He is a recipient of the Annual Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Pushcart Prize, and he has served as Visiting Writer at Amherst College, George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana and Fanny Hurst Visiting Poet at Brandeis University. Campo is also the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Amherst College. His collection of poetry, Landscape with Human Figure, was published in April 2002, and won the
Gold Medal from ForeWord in poetry. In August of 2003, W.W. Norton published The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry, essays on poetry and healing. In May 2007, Duke University Press published his fifth book of poems, The Enemy, which won the Sheila Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest poetry organizations. We’re delighted to present a whopping three broadsides from this wonderful writer. To have a look at these poems, please go HERE.
GET THE LATEST ISSUE OF MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW
October 1, 2013
The latest issue of this esteemed publication is out! The Massachusetts Review is edited by a highly talented group of writers and teachers, centered in the Five Colleges area of Western Massachusetts, with offices at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The fabulous editors include: Jules Chametzky, Jim Hicks, Ellen Doré Watson, Michael Thurston, John Emil Vincent, Deborah Gorlin, Ata Moharreri, Corinne Demas, and Edwin Gentzler. This awesome issue’s contributors are: Gary Amdahl, Radcliffe Bailey, Tara Bray, Martha Collins, Geffrey Davis, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Mary Evans, Brendan Fernandes, John Hope Franklin, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Peter Kahn, Juilie Mehretu, Ann Messner, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé, Karen An-Hwei Lee, Kathryne V. Lindberg, Andrew Nurkin, Dale Peterson, Jefferson Pinder, Tim Rollins, Adam Tavel, Jean Fagan Yellin, and Elizabeth Young. To purchase the issue, please go HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR ORLANDO MENES’ NEW BOOK
September 29, 2013
Orlando Menes, who has a beautiful broadside published with us, has a new poetry collection out. It’s titled Fetish, and it bagged the prestigious Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. It’s nothing short of stunning. Here’s what John Phillip Santos has to say about the book: “Orlando Ricardo Menes’s Fetish is a rare work of the American Creole Sublime, conjuring visions of his Cuban homeland as a sacred geography of vanquished mestizo dreams, his Florida boyhood a world of transmuting tropical wonder. At once mythic, syncretic, and autobiographical, transported on strains of epiphanic geomancy, Menes’s work subtly presents a new vision of América that Martí, Stevens and Walcott would all embrace. You want to whisper in a fever, ‘Adelante!’” To purchase this book, please go to Amazon HERE. To purchase his broadside, please wander over HERE.
OUR GORGEOUS BROADSIDE FROM POET LAUREATE OF CALIFORNIA
September 23, 2013
We first encountered Carol Muske-Dukes’ wonderful poetry through her book of poems, Sparrow, which was a National Book Award finalist. Then, we asked her about her writing process in Smartish Pace’s fabulous Poets Q&A Series. We asked her to share her thoughts regarding “the elegy as poem or letter, of lament and mourning” and the sort of sensibilities one comes away with from the writing of poetry and fiction. And Muske-Dukes gave us the most lovely detailed response. Now, we’re over the moon that we get to publish as a broadside her poem “After Skate”, which has been featured on the website of the Academy of American Poets. Muske-Dukes needs little introduction. A former Poet Laureate of California, Carol Muske-Dukes is co-editor of two anthologies and the author of eight books of poetry, four novels, and two essay collections. Her latest book of poetry is Twin Cities. Her other recently released books are two anthologies: Crossing State
Lines: An American Renga, and The Magical Poetry Blimp Pilot’s Guide. Her four novels are Channeling Mark Twain, Life After Death, Saving St. Germ, and Dear Digby. Her collection of essays titled Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in Hollywood was published in 2002. Her collection of reviews and critical essays, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self, was published in 1997. With many of her collections named New York Times Most Notable Books, Muske-Dukes is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. She is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She has received various awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, and several Pushcart Prizes. To have a look at her broadside, simply wander over HERE.
EKPHRASTIA GONE WILD ONLINE PUBLICATION READING TODAY
September 15, 2013
This is coming Live from Poetry Super Highway! Join emcee Rick Lupert, today, Sunday, September 15th at 2:00 pm (pacific) as he hosts 59 poets from all over the world reading poems from the recently released collection Ekphrastia Gone Wild - Poems Inspired by Art. Published by Ain't Got No Press, Ekphrastia Gone Wild is an anthology of ekphrastic poetry – poetry inspired by other works of art – including work by Nobel Prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska along with a roster of 87 poets from all over the world. This lovely tome is edited by Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert. The complete list of contributors: A. J. Huffman, Ackroyd Jackson, Adam Kress, Alan Britt, Alan Price, Alan Wickes, Ann Drysdale, April Salzano, Benjamin Taylor Lally, Brendan Constantine, Brooke Dorn, Bruce Taylor, Carolyn A. Martin, Catherine Graham, Consuelo Marshall, Cynthia Gallaher, Dan Fitzgerald, Daniel Y. Harris, David Chorlton, Deborah P. Kolodji, Desmond Kon
Zhicheng-Mingdé, Donald Mulcahy, Doris Lueth Stengel, Douglas Richardson, Dusan Colovic, Elizabeth Iannaci, Ellaraine Lockie, Eric Evans, Eric Lawson, Eric Tuazon, F. J. Bergmann, Farida Samerkhanova, Fern G. Z. Carr, Fiona Curran, Florence Weinberger, Gabrielle Mittelbach, Gene Grabiner, Gerald Locklin, Graham Fulton, Helen Bar-Lev, Iris Dan, James Bell, Jan Chronister, Jerry Quickley, Jim Bennett, John Stewart Huffstot, Johnmichael Simon, Kath Abela Wilson, Kathleen M. Krueger, Kenneth Pobo, Kevin Cornwall, Laurel Ann Bogen, Leland James, Letitia Minnick, M.A. Griffiths, M.J. Iuppa, Maggie Westland, Mantz Yorke, Marie Lecrivain, Martin W. Bennett, Mary Buchinger, Mary Harwell Sayler, Maryann Corbett, Michael Virga, Mick Moss, Mira Martin-Parker, Neal Whitman, Neil Ellman, Noel Sloboda, Paula McKay, Peggy Dobreer, Peggy Trojan, Perie Longo, Peter Branson, Phil Howard, Robert Wynne, Ron. Lavalette, Rosalee Thompson, Salvatore Difalco, Simon Jackson, Simon Peter Eggertsen, Sonja Smolec, Stanley H. Barkan, Steve Ely, Suzanne Lummis, Timothy Charles Anderson, and Tracy Davidson. Tune in to the Virtual Publication Party HERE. To purchase the anthology, go HERE.
TWO SQUIRCLE BROADSIDES
FROM WINNER OF AGNES LYNCH STARRETT POETRY PRIZE
September 5, 2013
Publisher’s Weekly has said this about David Rivard’s work: “In his fast-paced, irregular, and superbly assembled free verse, in effusions and snapshots, hot pursuits of teen memories and spiky commitments to adult life, Rivard makes joy and satisfaction aesthetically interesting.... Rivard sounds always urbane, unmistakably American.” It is thus with such honor and supreme delight that Squircle presents you not one, but two stunning broadsides from Rivard’s genius. The poems are titled “Iron Rising Out Of Iron” and “To Myself, On A Workday Morning In May”. David Rivard is the author of five books of poetry: Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1996 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque, winner of
the 1987 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poems and essays appear regularly in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Poetry London, Pushcart Prize, Best American Poetry, and other magazines and anthologies. Among his awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. In 2009, he was awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. Rivard is currently the director of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of New Hampshire. To purchase these sleek broadsides, simply go HERE.
NEWSFLASH: MAD HARE GOES SWIMMING
August 30, 2013
And off the deep end. It’s official. This Raving Rabbid is losing it. “I’m wearing Calvin Klein,” he says, shifting his weight to let the boxers swish a little. “You like?” He’s reading John Banville on a beachfront resort in Langkawi. He chose Langkawi over Nongsa Beach in Batam because someone said the waters were crystal clear. In Batam, he stayed in his hotel room, and watched blockbuster movies. Watching the news in Bahasa Indonesia was a lovely and
strange experience. When he went to Nagoya Hill Mall, he sat down to a full meal of nasi goreng and ayam penyet. That’s fried rice and fried chicken. He ordered bakso gunung too. That’s meatballs. “But rabbits are herbivores. Aren’t you?” The Squircle asked, as if actually expecting a rational answer. “And the Mad Hatter is the March Hare,” said Rabbid, nonplussed. It’s been a month, and Squircle is looking over Rabbid’s shoulder, to share in his reading of Banville’s The Sea, a stellar find. It reminds Rabbid of the week at McLean. It made him feel like Susanna Kaysen or David Foster Wallace. Or Plath, if one could be so beautiful. Both Squircle and Rabbid like the ending paragraphs: “As I stood there, suddenly, no, not suddenly, but in a sort of driving heave, the whole sea surged, it was not a wave, but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself, and I was lifted briefly and carried a little way towards the shore and then was set down on my feet as before, as if nothing had happened. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference. A nurse came out then to fetch me, and I turned and followed her inside, and it was as if I were walking into the sea.” Without another thought, Rabbid stands up from his deckchair, and sprints towards the small waves. It is low tide, and there seems a greater distance between him and the ocean. To purchase a Stress Squircle, please go HERE. To purchase Banville’s numerous books, simply go HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE:
NEW BROADSIDE FROM WINNER OF CECIL HEMLEY MEMORIAL AWARD
August 23, 2013
It’s official. We’ve managed to get a glorious sonnet from the stunning Andrew Zawacki, whose book Anabranch is just wonderful. Andrew Zawacki is the author of the poetry books Videotape (Counterpath), Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House), Anabranch (Wesleyan), and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia). He has published numerous chapbooks, including Arrow’s shadow (Equipage), Georgia (Scary Topiary/Katalanché), Glassscape (Projective Industries), Lumièrethèque (Blue Hour), Roche limit (tir aux pigeons),
Bartleby’s Waste-book (Particle Series), and Masquerade (Vagabond), which received the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Translated into French by Sika Fakambi, Georgia was published by Éditions de l’Attente, who recently released Carnet Bartleby. Zawacki’s Par Raison de brisants, translated into French by Antoine Cazé and published by Éditions Grèges, was a finalist for Le Prix Nelly Sachs, while Anabranche is due from Grèges next year. Coeditor of Verse and The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse), Zawacki coedited Gustaf Sobin’s Collected Poems (Talisman). A former fellow of the Slovenian Writers’ Association, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine) and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s new and selected poems, Without Anesthesia (Persea). He is the translator, from French, of Sébastien Smirou’s My Lorenzo (Burning Deck), which received a French Voices Translation Grant. Zawacki has held fellowships from the Résidence internationale aux Récollets (France), Salzburg Seminar (Austria), Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), Fulbright Foundation (Australia), Rhodes Trust (England), Bread Loaf, and elsewhere. Look no farther for this gem of a broadside, with a special dedication to Ella. Just come on over HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE: NEW BROADSIDE BY FOUNDING LANGUAGE POET
August 16, 2013
Poets have been made from reading her work. So, it is an understatement to say we’re more than happy to bring you a new poem by Lyn Hejinian. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1941, Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000). She has published over a dozen books of poetry and numerous books of essays as well as two volumes of
translations from the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. She is the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998 (Wesleyan, 2013), an anthology of works on key issues in poetics published in tandem with the Poetics Journal Archive, an ebook edition of the complete (1500-page) Poetics Journal. Her most recent new books are The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Books, 2012) and The Wide Road, written in collaboration with Carla Harryman (Belladonna, 2010). To underscore Hejinian’s importance as a poet, here is an excerpt from The Poetry Foundation: “A founding figure of the Language writing movement of the 1970s, and an influential force in the world of experimental and avant-garde poetics, Lyn Hejinian’s poetry is characterized by an unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday. Like most Language writing, her work enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated…. Hejinian’s work insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent the confessional or the real. Her work, repeatedly concerned with biography or autobiography, explores the relationship between alternative writing practices and the subjectivity that these genres often obscure. The alternative form that Hejinian uses most frequently is what has come to be called the ‘new sentence,’ a form of prose poem composed mainly of sentences that have no clear transitions. The gap created by a text that moves from subject to subject invites the reader to participate, to bring his or her own reading to the text.” Hejinian is currently co-editor of Atelos, which publishes cross-genre collaborations between poets and other artists. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the California Arts Council, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Fund, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the University of California, Berkeley English Department, and has lectured in Russia and around Europe. To get her broadside, take a deep breath and dive HERE.
WE UNVEIL ANOTHER COOL WOLVERINE COMIC
August 11, 2013
We found in our dusty boxes of collectibles yet another Wolverine gem. A real blast from the past, this is Volume 2 of a four-part series titled Havok & Wolverine: Meltdown. Released in December 1988, it’s a quaint premise that is adrenaline-pumping to the very end. Wolverine and Havok are on vacation, and Soviet agents recruit them, manipulating them for a giant nuclear meltdown. Featured villains include Quark, Meltdown and Yuri. The story is grand and superb, with beautiful artwork – from penciling, inking to coloring – by John Muth and Kent Williams. Look out for more vintage comics and rare books as we slowly introduce them to you!
OUR NEW BROADSIDE BY WINNER OF BOTH T. S. ELIOT PRIZE AND FORWARD POETRY PRIZE
August 7, 2013
Born in Dunfermline in 1955, John Burnside is the famous Scottish writer who needs little introduction. The author of 14 books of poetry, he is one of only two poets to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book: Black Cat Bone (2011). Of this book, The Guardian called it “a tour de force of liminal expression”. After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Astonishingly prolific, Burnside has authored eight novels, including The Dumb House (1997), The Devil’s
Footprints (2007), Glister (2009), and A Summer of Drowning (2011). His memoir, A Lie About My Father, received the Saltire Book of the Year Prize, the Sundial/SAC Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award and a CORINE International Literature Prize. A second memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, appeared in 2010. He has also published the short story collections Burning Elvis (2000) and Something Like Happy (2013). His stories and feature essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Guardian and The London Review of Books, among others. He also writes an occasional nature column for The New Statesman. Burnside’s main interests are in American literature, poetry, ecocriticism and the language of environmental activism. In 2011, he received the Petrarca-Preis, a major German international literary prize. We’re clearly bowled over by Burnside, and his generosity. We’re honored to be publishing his new poem within our broadside series. Please look HERE.
SQUIRCLE COMMEMORATES THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE KOREAN WAR
July 27, 2013
This year marks a steady 60 years after 1953, the year the Korean War, also known as The Forgotten War, left the world a divided Korean peninsula. The death toll was grave – two million Koreans died – and many families remain separated by the Demilitarized Zone, which runs along the 38th parallel north. Thanks to an invitation by Agro Genesis director and arts patron Dr Sung Do Song, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has written a commemorative poem – he is the first Singaporean to do so – specially for Action For One Korea, the organization founded by Jean Chung in Los Angeles. The poem is titled “The 38th Parallel in Two Villanelles”, comprising two villanelles — a composite of 38 lines — one as an open invitation to the writing out of the absent other. The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines, with structural requirements of five tercets and a closing quatrain, replete with two refrains. The form’s origin lies in the Italian harvest field, and its formal requirements make it suitable
to be rendered in rounds. Today, AOK’s communities in America, Korea, Japan, and Singapore are organizing a joint ceremony to mark the significance of the War. It was lovely having a dialogue with Song over the finer points of translating an English poem into Korean, and the added insight into the Korean symbols referenced in the poem, such as Shilla artistry, the Sonjuk Bridge, Pyoseon Beach, and hanok architecture. The translator, Cho Soo-Hyoung, himself a distinguished poet in Seoul, consulted other poets for input before writing up several drafts, the final version wonderfully retaining the structural integrity of the villanelle. The Korean translation will appear in print in Cho Soo-Hyoung’s new book, forthcoming at the end of the year. See Song's presentation of the poem on Youtube in English HERE and in Korean HERE. To find out more about the Korean War, look HERE for BBC’s coverage of the London parade and thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey. For how American President Barack Obama honored the event in Washington DC, and paid tribute to Korean War veterans, check out USA Today HERE. Madison Park of CNN also does a lovely story titled “Why the Korean War Still Matters” HERE.
WE UNVEIL OUR RARE 1991 COPY OF X-MEN VOL 1 ISSUE 276
July 26, 2013
Apart from the birth of the royal baby, this week is abuzz with how the latest Wolverine installment will fare in the box office. It’s clear now, and for quite some time, that no one other than Hugh Jackman can play Wolverine. We might accept the different faces of Superman over the years, with Henry Cavill now suitably donning the red cape. Even Spiderman’s transition from Tobey McGuire to Andrew Garfield the critical audience took to pretty well. As for Batman, we’ve had Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, before Christian Bale sealed the character for keeps. But Wolverine? Jackman seems to own it all on his own. We caught the movie the day it opened here, and simply loved it. The action was all there, but this sixth outing within the X-Men film series took a look at a physical and emotional vulnerability not yet seen for the character on the big screen. We especially like Yukio, his self-appointed bodyguard, who is a ronin herself, a
samurai without a master. Fashion model Rila Fukushima is an excellent choice as the trained assassin in Shingen’s clan. Awesome kick-ass fight scenes right through. On the left, you see a vintage issue of X-Men Vol 1 #276, published in May 1991. In this issue, we see Wolverine, Professor X, Storm, Psylocke, Gambit, and Banshee on Chandilar. Amidst all the action, Wolverine, in a fit of rage, kills Xavier. There you have it, what a rush! We say go catch the new movie, and stay tuned to us when we unveil our rare books collection in our bookstore over the next few months.
SQUIRCLE PRESENTS TWO
BROADSIDES FROM WINNER OF
OTTAWA BOOK AWARD
July 25, 2013
It’s a lovely day. We’re proud to present two new broadsides, by the charming John Barton from Canada. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1957 and raised in Calgary, Barton studied poetry with Eli Mandel, Gary Geddes, Robin Skelton, Joseph Brodsky, and Daniel Halpern. Barton has published ten collections of poetry and six chapbooks since 1981, including Hidden Structure (1984), West of Darkness (1987), Great Men (1990), Designs from the Interior (1994), Hypothesis (2001),Hymn (2009), and most recently Balletomane: The Program Notes of Lincoln Kirstein and For the Boy with the Eyes of the Virgin: Selected Poems, which were both published in 2012. Of For the Boy, here is an excerpt from Barton’s interview in Plenitude Magazine: “The book is a survey of thirty-five years’ work and my commitment to the craft of poetry, even of my faith in the vocation I’ve chosen for myself. In a way, the book’s akin to a class or family reunion, where
distant relations who’ve not seen each other for decades are gathered together in a party room. I am the poems’ social secretary, who’s made all the arrangements, and now that the party’s started, I have the great pleasure of observing how they interact with one another. Hopefully, it’s a reunion and not a wake.” Coeditor of Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, Barton has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award, and a National Magazine Award. His poems have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and newspapers, and online across Canada and in the United States, Australia, China, India, and the U.K. Previously the co-editor of Arc Poetry Magazine in Ottawa, he now lives in Victoria, B.C., where he edits The Malahat Review. To have a look at Barton’s broadsides, please wander HERE.
WE’RE GIVING AN ARTIST TALK
AT LIT UP INDIE ARTS FESTIVAL
July 20, 2013
We’re elated to be invited by Word Forward, leaders in the Singapore performance poetry scene, to be a part of Lit Up, their annual indie arts festival. Thanks to the fabulous festival director Savinder Kaur and artistic director Marc Nair, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé will be joining the panel of writers for the artist talk titled “Literary Umbrellas”. Moderated by the wonderful Chris Mooney-Singh, the panel comprises authors who work in different genres, including Zafar Anjum, Richard Lord and Ken Mizusawa. Why do writers select distinct literary forms? Is it easy to switch between them? Does the subject, or venue of publication determine the medium of expression? To find out, just mosey down
to 9 Pahang Street, which Orita Sinclair School of Design calls home. It’s tomorrow. That’s Sunday, July 21. Between noon and 1pm. Entry is free, but seating capacity is limited to 30. For more on the event, and Lit Up’s awesome line-up this year, please look HERE. For more on Orita, please check them out HERE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW BROADSIDE FROM PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
RAE ARMANTROUT
July 19, 2013
This must be poetry heaven. We just published Rae Armantrout’s poem “Chirality” as a broadside, and can’t stop gushing about it. Frequently associated with the Language poets, Rae Armantrout has authored ten books of poems, including her recent Just Saying (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), and Money Shot (2011). In 2010, Versed won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Next Life was selected by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 2007. The recipient of numerous other accolades, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, Armantrout has also written a prose memoir, True, published by Atelos in 1998. As the Academy of American Poets notes: “In the preface to her selected
poems, Veil, Ron Silliman describes her work as ‘the literature of the anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical... possibilities.’ ” Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947, and grew up in San Diego. She now teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. To get her chic broadside from Squircle, please go HERE.
WE’RE TURNING UP AT THE TWENTY-FOUR FLAVOURS
LAUNCH OF ITS NEWEST ANTHOLOGY
July 12, 2013
This lovely book launch is co-presented by the beautiful minds at The Arts House and Math Paper Press. Twenty-Four Flavours is a food-themed anthology of flash fiction by 24 writers in Singapore. Each story is written to keep within the limit of 240 words, no more. This anthology is published by the fabulous Math Paper Press – the brainchild of the
equally fabulous Kenny Leck. Following the first issue Sushi, the second installment takes on the much more challenging and local title Century Egg. Thanks to the wonderful series editor Jocelyn Lau, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has a sweet little fable in there. Look out for the other projects to be launched as well at the event. These include Sam Leong: The Man Behind Modern Chinese Cuisine, and “Not For Sale” – Singapore Remaining Heritage Street Food Vendors. This is our big shout-out. It’s on a Saturday. July 13. It starts at 8pm. We’ll be in The Blue Room at the resplendent Arts House. Be there, or be squircle. For more details, please check the listing on I-S magazine HERE or on The Arts House website THIS out. To purchase the anthology, please look HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE: BROADSIDE BY LILA WALLACE-READER’S DIGEST FOUNDATION AWARDEE
July 10, 2013
We’re lark-happy to be issuing a broadside from the fabulous James Galvin. Born 1951 in Chicago, James Galvin has authored six collections of poetry, most recently As Is (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), X: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), and Resurrection Update, Collected Poems, 1975-1997 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Poet’s Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed prose book The Meadow (Holt, 1992) and a novel, Fencing the Sky (Holt, 1999). In 2005, Galvin along with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, and Terry Tempest Williams was hailed in Mark Tredinnick’s The Land’s Wild Music (Trinity University Press, 2005) in which Tredinnick analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Galvin’s writing. Of his work, The Nation wrote: “James Galvin has a voice and a world, perhaps the two most difficult things to achieve in poetry.” Galvin is the recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Award, Lannan Literary Award,
Guggenheim Fellowship, Ingram Merrill Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He has a home, some land, and some horses outside of Tie Siding, Wyoming, and he is a member of the permanent faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. To get a hold of this broadside, you can find it HERE.
A BIG SHOUT-OUT FOR
ALFIAN SA’AT’S LATEST PLAY
July 9, 2013
Alfian Sa’at is one of Singapore’s most vocal and popular artists, so fans would be thronging to this 17-Day celebration of the poet-playwright’s work. In The Spotlight will showcase three works – two revivals that have not been staged in Singapore for over a decade, as well as his new play, Cook A Pot Of Curry, that explores the topical issue of immigration in Singapore. The play is directed by Glen Goei, a leading film and theatre director known for his films Forever Fever and The Blue Mansion, and well remembered for his Olivier-Award-nominated performance in the title role of M. Butterfly opposite Anthony Hopkins in London’s West End. The resident playwright of theatre group W!LD RICE, Alfian has written over 30 plays in English and Malay, and authored three poetry books and two short-story collections. After being nominated seven times for Best Script at the Life! Theatre Awards, he bagged the award for Landmarks and Nadirah. He’s also received the Golden Point Award for Poetry and the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. For his poetry book, A History of Amnesia, he was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize. Interviewed by Ng Poh Hian at The Urbanwire for his thoughts on the prolific writer, Desmond Kon talks about sharing Alfian’s work years ago at a reading in Massachusetts, and names him one of Singapore’s post-Independence writers who will be ensconced in the republic’s history and collective consciousness. Please mosey down HERE for the Urbanwire story, the lovely entertainment zine founded by Robin Yee. For more on In The Spotlight, check out Time Out HERE and national daily Today HERE. And for more on W!LD RICE, check out their web presence HERE.
OUR BROADSIDES FROM WINNER OF PAT LOWTHER AWARD
July 7, 2013
We’re thrilled to present not one, but two broadside offerings by Canadian writer Rhea Tregebov. Born in Saskatoon and raised in Winnipeg, Tregebov is the author of seven volumes of poetry: Remembering History, No One We Know, The Proving Grounds, Mapping the Chaos, The Strength of Materials, and (alive), a volume of selected and new poems by Wolsak & Wynn. Her seventh collection of poetry, All Souls’, was released by Signal Editions/Véhicule Press in 2012. Tregebov is the recipient of the Pat Lowther Award, Malahat Review Long Poem prize, Honorable Mention for the National Magazine Awards, and the Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry from Prairie Schooner. In addition to her poetry and fiction, Tregebov has published five children’s picture books, including The Big Storm and Sasha and the Wiggly Tooth. She also has edited numerous anthologies,
including a collection of translations from Yiddish, Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (Sumach Press, 2007; The Feminist Press CUNY, 2008). Of her latest poetry collection, George Fetherling of Quill and Quire Review has this to say: “Tregebov has always been a poet’s poet, but never more so than here. Honesty of feeling and honesty of expression are the author’s twin talents. There are no wasted words in All Souls’, nor any wrong ones. Even in the longer poems, her concision is remarkable. Although serious, she is never solemn. In fact, this collection, more so than any of her previous ones, shows a playfulness in her use of line breaks. Such is the dexterity of her voice that Tregebov can seamlessly slip in her translation of a poem by Federico García Lorca. Likewise, she has the skill to include the sort of travel poems for which Canadian poets seem to have a special fondness.” To have a look at Tregebov’s new broadsides from Squircle, please enter HERE.
OUR ICE-COOL BROADSIDE
FROM WINNER OF GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD FOR POETRY
July 5, 2013
We are awe-struck. We are ecstatic that we get to publish a broadside by Jan Zwicky, renowned Canadian philosopher, poet, essayist, and musician. An author of eleven books, Zwicky’s poems have been translated into Czech, French, German, Serbian, Spanish and Italian. Among her many accolades, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1999, while Robinson’s Crossing won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2004. Calling herself “the original brown wrapper girl” (see HERE), she stated her preference for plain text on plain paper. “I don’t have any carpets or curtains; the walls are painted white. ‘Austere’ would be kind.” In her own philosophical work, Zwicky maintains that “the form of a linguistic gesture determines a speaker’s ontological commitments more
thoroughly than any explicit content”. This can be seen in her use of double texts, and both linear and non-linear structures – her books are wonderfully dialectical and polyphonic. Zwicky construes both logical analysis and lyric understanding as complementary, including both in a broader conception of rationality. That her work is enactive makes for its virtue – the reader remains immersed in the experience that she discusses. As James Young says: “There’s a reasonable chance that people will be reading her work a century from now. This is something that one says about only a very small number of philosophers.” To get a hold of this minimalist beauty, purchase the broadside HERE.
OUR COMMEMORATIVE TOME GETS LOVELY COVERAGE IN NPTRIBUNE
July 4, 2013
We’re pleased that AWESOME, the book we designed as a commemorative tome for Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s 50th Anniversary Celebrations, got a nice write-up with lovely pictures of its internal pages. Thanks to reporters Douglas Yong and Gloria Lin, the book was given a thumbs up, like so: “Without doubt, the vivid colours, photographs, and use of space in the 233-page work is visually stimulating, and without the intimidating, standoffish feel usually associated with milestone projects. Instead, the creators have transformed
information into exciting excerpts, all while presenting little-known nuggets which show NP to be more than just a learning institution.” Needless to say, we’re charmed, tickled to bits, and buying ourselves some pizza to celebrate.
FROM SQUIRCLE: TWIN BROADSIDES BY WINNER OF COLORADO BOOK AWARD
July 2, 2013
This is the collector’s dream come true. Dan Beachy-Quick sent us six of his newest poems. Of this stunning sequence, he explains: “The series is considering the drone in all its manifestation, each one three times. Poems 1 and 4 take the idea of drone as the musical undercurrent of some form of prayer – that heightened attention through sound. Poems 2 and 5 think about bees, queens, workers, and drones. Poems 3
and 6 are erasures of newspaper articles from the last two drone attacks in Pakistan.” Wonderfully prolific, Beachy-Quick is the author of five books of poetry, five chapbooks (two collaborative), a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales. The recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, he is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space, Dear Navigator, and West Branch. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. Susan Howe has this to say: “If it is true, as Thoreau suggests, that the poem of creation is ongoing, this ambitious and prolific poet shows us that learning to listen for that music of daily life involves a lifetime.” We offer you dual broadsides that pull into dialogue Poems 1 and 2 from Beachy-Quick’s breathtaking sequence. Hesitate not. Get them HERE.
OUR NEW BROADSIDE BY PRAIRIE SCHOONER BOOK PRIZE WINNER
July 1, 2013
Orlando Ricardo Menes is a Latino poet, writer, translator, and editor. Born in Lima, Peru, to Cuban parents, Menes spent part of his childhood in Spain. His third poetry collection, Fetish, won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of Furia (Milkweed, 2005) and Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001). Here’s an excerpt from his West Branch interview: “The Romantics, plus those poets writing in the Romantic tradition, had an indelible influence on my development as a poet. Among the most formative for me were Keats, Wordsworth at times, Blake always, of course, Yeats as well, and the contemporary American poet Galway Kinnell. I was drawn to their intensity of emotion, their musicality, their ecstatic revelations. I find kinship with these poets, not just in terms of my poetic sensibility but also in how one crafts language to realize flashes or glimpses of the rhapsodic, though not in some ethereal or rarified context but in ordinary human experience, in memory, in
ritual…. I cannot, and will not, abandon my roots in the Spanish language, my Latin Catholicism, my memories of Lima and Cuba, though the latter tend to conflate with those of my parents—borrowed memories, if you will. I am more a poet writing in English with a Latin American sensibility.” Menes also edited Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). That same year he received a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. To own a piece of his ornate poetry, look HERE for the broadside of “Cenobites”.
WE ARE SHOWCASED IN THE EDIBLE LIT EXHIBIT
June 28, 2013
As part of Food-O-Philia 2013, The Arts House sent out an open call to the public to re-create favorite food scenes from literary texts through photographs. Edible Lit: The Exhibition showcases 15 of the most creative original entries that evoked a powerful connection between food, photography and literature. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s photograph of blue bowls is an ekphrasis of Natasha Trethewey’s poem “After Your Death”, published in her book of poems, Native Guard, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Thanks to journalist Lisabel Ting of The Straits Times, we got lovely coverage in Singapore’s national daily. William Phuan, director of The Arts House, is quoted as saying: “This is a chance to meld two popular art forms, literature and photography, and get folks thinking about turning words into pictures. Hopefully, after seeing the delicious photos, more people will be inspired to pick up the books and read them.” This exhibition is held at the Print Gallery. It commences on 19 June and ends its run on 31 July. Managed by The Old Parliament House Ltd, The Arts House develops and promotes Singapore artists and works by, from and about Singapore, with an apropos focus on the literary arts. For more information on the exhibition, please visit their website HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE: AMY GERSTLER’S
WOMANISHNESS ON A PLATE
June 27, 2013
One more broadside from the glorious Amy Gerstler. And this one’s for the women. The poem is “Womanishness”, and it’s filled with panache. Eileen Myles has described Gerstler’s poetry as “extremely rich. But not cluttered and not loud”. Myles goes on to say that “the supernatural, the sexy mundane, the out-of-sight are simply her materials, employed as they might be in a piece of religious art”. Then, in American Poetry Review, David Shapiro writes: “In
Gerstler, we see how effective a quiet ruminative and contemplative poem can be... On the other hand, Gerstler has a series of complex, humorous prose poems which can be as immediate and imagistic as a germ.” Simply put, Gerstler is pure mettle. To purchase “Womanishness” on a broadside, anguish no more. It’s HERE.
TWO MORE BROADSIDES BY US:
FROM FORREST GANDER &
ILYA KAMINSKY
June 27, 2013
Unbelievable, we’re over the moon. We so fell in love with the suite of poems offered by Forrest Gander and Ilya Kaminsky that we moved mountains – of paper-pushing – to publish one more broadside from each of these distinguished poets. From Gander, we have a lovely poetic thesis on love. An earlier version of the ballad after Juan de Yepes appeared in the print journal Manoa years ago. The other piece – as intimate an expression and feeling – is Kaminsky’s “My Mother’s Tango”. If you’d like to listen to Kaminsky perform this poem in his famous “passionate, almost ecstatic reading style”, go HERE. To purchase either of these broadsides, HERE they are.
BIG WELCOME FOR LISA JARNOT
AS AN HONORARY ADVISOR
June 26, 2013
We’re happy to add to our panel of honorary advisors the fabulous Lisa Jarnot. Lisa Jarnot is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck Press, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001 and Salt Publishers, 2003), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003) and Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan was published by the University of California Press in 2012 and a Selected Poems was published by City Lights in May of 2013. She has edited two small magazines (No Trees, 1987-1990, and Troubled Surfer, 1991-1992) as well as The Poetry Project Newsletter and An Anthology of New (American) Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 1997). She currently lives in Jackson Heights, New York with her husband and daughter.
FROM SQUIRCLE: VILLAURRUTIA PRIZE AWARDEE’S BROADSIDE
June 26, 2013
Born in the Mojave Desert, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant periods in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo, and Eureka Springs, before moving to Rhode Island. Of his many works, book praise has been glowing: “sinewy and strenuous language” from Boston Review; “adventurous and intimate” from American Poetry; “restlessly experimental, precise and hallucinatory” from The Washington Post; and “astonishing… a poet impossible to categorize” from Shearsman. Gander’s
book Core Samples from the World was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author of numerous other books of poetry, Gander also writes novels, essays, and translates. His most recent translations are Watchword (which won the Villaurrutia Prize) by Pura López Colomé; Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (winner of Best Translated Book Award); and Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho (Finalist, PEN Translation Prize). His books in translation are available in France, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Bulgaria, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Gander is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Whiting Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. To purchase this broadside, simply wander over HERE.
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDEE'S BROADSIDE FROM US
June 25, 2013
The Los Angeles Times has described Amy Gerstler as “one of the best poets in the nation”. In the New York Times, David Kirby called Gerstler a “maestra of invention... skilled in every kind of comedy, from slapstick to whimsy.” Gerstler is the author of over a dozen poetry collections, and two works of fiction. She won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Bitter Angel (1990). She also edited the 2010 edition of the anthology Best American Poetry. Her more recent works include Medicine (2000), Ghost Girl (2004), and Dearest Creature (2009), all published by Penguin. Dearest Creature was named a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times. It is with great pleasure that we publish “To Do List”, a poem of deep wit. To purchase this broadside, go HERE.
A SNEAK PREVIEW OF
MICHAEL RYAN’S BROADSIDE
June 24, 2013
The stars are out tonight. We’re thrilled to be publishing two of Michael Ryan’s newest works, to be unveiled in the next couple of weeks. Michael Ryan’s writing career spans a good forty years. From the start, his poetic prowess was evident, and already recognized. Threats Instead Of Trees bagged the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In Winter was a National Poetry Series selection and New York Times notable book in 1981. God Hunger won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1990. Five years later, Ryan published an autobiography, Secret Life, followed by his 2000 collection of essays about poetry and writing, titled A Difficult Grace. His memoir, Baby B, was excerpted in The New Yorker and was published in 2004 by Graywolf Press. That year, Houghton Mifflin put out his New and Selected Poems. The book won the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Among many other distinctions for Ryan’s work are a Whiting Writers Award, NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and awards from The
American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Poetry Society of America. This Morning is his most recent book of poems. It’s completely lovely. You can get the Houghton Mifflin book HERE.
OUR NEW BROADSIDE
FEATURING ILYA KAMINSKY
June 23, 2013
Just when you think it couldn’t get more spectacular, here’s a new broadside for you. From the beautiful mind of Ilya Kaminsky. Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and came to the United States in 1993. His family was granted asylum by the US government. His book of poems, Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press), has bagged the Whiting Writer’s Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly
Fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. The Philadelphia Inquirer gave its thumbs up: “Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is a terrifyingly good poet, another poet from the former USSR who, having adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame.... It seemed to take about five minutes to read this book, and when I began again, I reached the end before I was ready. That’s how compulsive, how propulsive it is to read. It wraps you in a world created by a new and wonderful poet.” We’re thrilled to be publishing the opening poem, “Author’s Prayer”, as a beautiful broadside. To purchase, please look HERE.
NEWSFLASH:
THE ICEBUNNY COMETH
June 22, 2013
Yesterday, on Alaska’s Unimak Island, a homeless drunk found a Raving Rabbid impaled by a stalactite in his homemade igloo. Apart from a gash and some bruises, Rabbid was fine, and regained consciousness. “Did someone say vodka?” He said, quite loudly, as if shouting in his sleep. In his dream, he said he met a block of dry ice large as Chenega Glacier. Rabbid was hovering over it, as if he had
managed an astral projection. It was The Giant Squircle and it was pontificating – something about existentialism – and at some point in time, it invoked Kafka and Camus. It looked happy when it mentioned their names, as if Hickey was more than just a hardware salesman and never killed Evelyn. “Did you say Alaska has more than three million lakes? Does this mean I have to change my ways? Does this mean I have to start reusing and recycling, like bags for life?” By then, the dream sequence was over, and the nosy drunk had arrived to shake him awake. We’re embarrassed to say that our stress squircles like a good conversation. So give a stress squircle a home. To do so, knock on this DOOR.
OUR NEW BROADSIDE
FEATURING DEAN YOUNG
June 21, 2013
Here we have the genius of Dean Young. Young has published ten books. What a turnout! Awarded the Colorado Prize for Poetry, Young is the recipient of the Stegner Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poetry collection, Elegy on Toy Piano, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Here’s an excerpt from The Poetry Foundation: “Strongly influenced by the New York School poets, and Surrealists such as Andre Breton, Young’s poetry is full of wild leaps of illogic, extravagant imagery, and mercurial shifts in tone. Using surrealist techniques like collage, Young’s poems often blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, creating a poetry that is enormously, almost disruptively, inclusive…. Upon presenting him with the Academy Award in Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted, ‘Dean Young’s poems are as
entertaining as a three-ring circus and as imaginative as a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch.’ ” To get a hold of Young’s “Studies Show” broadside, walk in right HERE.
AND IF YOU DON’T LOVE TAO LIN . . . .
June 20, 2013
It’s time to get a chic quotient. We first came to know Tao Lin through his poetry collection from Action Books. Then we were completely charmed by his novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee (Melville House), which was a lark. Miranda July has this to say: “Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass – from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.” Tao Lin has a new novel out, from Vintage Books. It’s called Taipei, and you can get it HERE. Please do.
IF YOU DON’T LOVE ETGAR KERET . . . .
June 17, 2013
It’s time to love Etgar Keret. We’ve just added his Missing Kissinger (Vintage Books) to our book recommendations. Clive James calls the Israeli author “one of the most important writers alive”. Yann Martel says “Etgar Keret is a writer to be taken seriously”. The book won the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize. Come to think of it, you should check out his other books like Kneller’s Happy Campers (Chatto & Windus) and Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Salman Rushdie writes of Keret: “He is a brilliant writer, entirely different from any other I know. He is the voice of the next generation.” Nice. Check him out HERE.
ANOTHER BROADSIDE FROM US
FEATURING JOHN WILKINSON
June 16, 2013
This is a treasure. The poem is “Lyric”, three breathtaking quatrains from the fabulous John Wilkinson. Of his own important work surrounding lyric poetry, Wilkinson has this to say: “Central to all my critical writing is a preoccupation with the peculiar properties of lyric poetry. What is the social ground of lyric? Does lyric prosody carry a capacity for thought distinguishable from semantics? What principles govern lyric coherence, especially for extended works in sequences or books? What political valency can and should lyric poetry aspire to? My approaches to these questions are governed by a training in close reading, an interest in object relations theory, and a moderate amount of errant curiosity.” Look out for His Selected Poems, edited by Alex
Pestell, which is forthcoming from Salt and draws on eight principal earlier collections. There’s also his newest poetry collection, Reckitt’s Blue, by Seagull Books. Of this new work, Patrick McGuinness writes: “John Wilkinson's taut, precise poems, in which lyric grace and ethical urgency move together but never comfortably mix, amount to one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary poetry.” To purchase the Wilkinson broadside, please enter HERE.
CHECK OUT OUR TWO BROADSIDES
BY STEVEN CRAMER
June 15, 2013
In Ploughshares, this is what was written about Steven Cramer’s World Book: “Cramer’s poems fight sentiment with our only available weapons: knowledge and integrity. His work recognizes and confronts the stupidity of adolescence, the ambiguity of political action, the facelessness of death, and the selfishness of grief. And ultimately, the poems, rather than succumbing to sentimentality, achieve intimacy.” Steven Cramer has authored a whopping five poetry collections: The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992),
Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), and Clangings (2012). Of his newest collection, David Rivard described Clangings as “magnificent… formally acute but unfussy, and entertaining as all hell”. Cramer is the recipient of the Massachusetts Center Honor Book in Poetry, Sheila Motton Prize, Stanley Young Fellowship in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. We are privileged to be able to publish not one, but two of Cramer’s poems: “After The Chinese” and “Lackawanna”. These poems first appeared in AGNI Online and The Paris Review. To purchase these beautiful broadsides, wander over HERE.
FROM SQUIRCLE: BROADSIDE
FEATURING DAN CHIASSON
June 14, 2013
A humongous heap of thanks to Dan Chiasson, an astonishingly talented writer. We’ve just published his poem “Vital Signs”, on a full-color broadside. The treatment is lavish, the paper a beautiful heavystock. Dan Chiasson is a distinguished poet and critic, having authored three poetry collections, as well as One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. We first noticed Chiasson’s work in Natural History, a book which Robert Pinsky described as “free swinging, gorgeous in phrase, bold in imagination”. John Ashbery wrote: “Like Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball’ or that of Pliny, Dan Chiasson’s gaze is curious, friendly, and unassumingly all-encompassing. His distinctions are smooth and profound and capable of sudden crescendos of meaning that are heartbreaking in their intensity.” Chiasson has received the Whiting Writers’ Award, aPushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim
Foundation. Look out for his fifth and newest book, Bicentennial: Poems and Plays, to be published by Knopf. To get a hold of this single-poem broadside, walk in right HERE.
OUR STRESS SQUIRCLES HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY
June 12, 2013
“This is body paint, if that’s what you’re about to ask me.” The Raving Rabbid says this matter-of-factly. He tries not to blush. What is a Raving Rabbid? The Stress Squircle asks, positing an impossible question. “I’m not a toy or a figurine, if that’s what you’re gunning for.” Oh, you’re capable of irony, that’s neat, replies The Squircle. The Rabbid isn’t smiling. “I’m ever only a tenth of what I’m really worth.” The Rabbid starts looking a tad sad – it’s hard to tell – and he looks away at his small shadow. Even your Dasein? The Squircle presses further, intent on understanding the nature of Being. Like circularity, and how the particular must be something more than the sum of its properties. Art makes nothing happen, The Squircle says, citing Auden. “What happened to my top?” The other Rabbid says, looking at The Squircle. Nothing, says The Squircle. The next thing we hear is a loud slap, as if on the face except it sounds more like a thud on a rubber placemat on a table. “Nothing isn’t nothing,” the other Rabbid says, pulling on her red thong and releasing it, like a rubber band, to mirror
the sound of the slap. “I’m going to sit on your other face. Let’s see how you like being an Ottoman.” Even in the afternoon sun, we know we've learnt a bit of metaphysics today. Squircle Line Press wishes it had invented Rayman Raving Rabbids, but that is not to be. As they say in Yiddish, only in dreams are carrots as big as bears. To purchase a stress squircle, hop over HERE.
HATS OFF TO OUR COUNCIL
OF HONORARY ADVISORS
June 10, 2013
We’re wonderfully privileged to have such distinguished writers seated in the wings. Please welcome our stunning panel of honorary advisors, each of them unbelievably gifted writers, with big hearts to boot. Just to dribble out their names. We have Jenny Boully, author of five books. Arielle Greenberg, author of five collections and recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and a Saltonstall Individual Artist Grant. Lily Hoang, author of four books and winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award. Dan Beachy-Quick, author of five books and winner of the Colorado Book Award. Ilya Kaminsky, who’s bagged the Whiting Writer’s Award, Dorset Prize, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Levinson Prize, Yinchuan International Poetry Prize, and American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, to name a few accolades. Whew, what a rush, what a high! Our deep gratitude to their generosity, and for joining our team. For more on our distinguished panel, please look no further than HERE.
POETRY WORKSHOP FOR PROMISING LITERARY TALENT
June 4, 2013
Thanks to the Creative Arts Programme (CAP), we’ve been invited to conduct a poetry workshop at a residential seminar for young writers. The CAP seeks to nurture young writers aged 15 to 17 in Singapore, and is jointly organized by the Ministry of Education, and the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. This lovely long-running project is already into its 24th year. Some 180 students all over Singapore are handpicked to attend this event after a creative writing portfolio evaluation. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé is giving a seminar, titled “Alterity: Asian Authors Going Global”, where he’ll introduce writers the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Aimee
Nezhukumatathil, Bai Hua, Boey Kim Cheng, Cathy Park Hong, Kim Hyesoon, Lily Hoang, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Michael Ondaatje, and Shanxing Wang. This will be followed by a workshop where students get to share and discuss their own writing. For more on CAP, please meet the amazingly committed team HERE.
NEW NOVEL BY VALERIE SAYERS
June 2, 2013
You’ve got to get Valerie Sayers’ new book, The Powers. Her last novel, Brain Fever, came out in 1996, so this beautiful story has been long awaited by her fans. It’s 1941. There’s Joe DiMaggio on his record-breaking streak. There’s WWII, and the attack on Pearl Harbor. There’s some terrifying Catholic anti-Semitism. There’s the hope of pacifism rising above those dark years. Sayers has written six novels, two of which were named “Notable Books of the Year” by the New York Times Book Review. She’s the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. To get one of her novels, including The Powers,
please visit Amazon HERE. For an insightful interview with the author, just wander over HERE.
GIFT OF ARIRANG FROM
SEOUL ARTS CENTER
May 29, 2013
It’s pure joy when artists from across the world share their culture and rich traditions. Our deep gratitude to entrepreneur and arts patron Dr Sung Do Song. Ten years ago, he helped us reach famous Korean poet Ko Un, who's bagged the Bjørnson Prize Order for Literature and
Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, to contribute his poems to our anthology. Recently, Song donated one of our titles to the library at Seoul Arts Center, Korea’s very first arts and culture complex. And in return, they gave us this absolutely breathtaking boxed set. The book, titled Arirang, is written by Yoon Jung-kang and edited by Kim Kyung-rim. It introduces us to the traditional Korean folk song, a form that has evolved regional variations through the years. So tied to the country’s history and collective consciousness, the Arirang resonates with every Korean. The music is beautifully intense and rhythmic. A huge thank you to Seoul Arts Center for its generosity. And best of birthday wishes as it celebrates its 25th anniversary this year! For more on the Center, please visit their website HERE.
POETRY MARATHON FOR TUPELO PRESS
May 24, 2013
Since Desmond Kon would never attempt a real marathon, he volunteered
as a participant in the next best thing: a poetry marathon, called The Tupelo
30/30 Project. Nine poets every month write a poem everyday to help raise
funds for Tupelo Press, one of the coolest independent publishers in the US.
We’re into Day 24 of the month of May, with seven more days to go. So, if
you’d like, please donate any amount to this cause, in the name of any of
the nine volunteer participants. Proceeds help Tupelo continue to publish
more awesome books of poetry and fiction. On the marathon site, individual
poems may be read as a day-by-day thread. Please visit the project HERE.
OUR TITLE MAKES IT INTO A TIME CAPSULE
May 21, 2013
Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s 50th anniversary celebra-tions is reported in The Straits Times, Singapore’s national daily. We provided design consultancy services on the commemorative book, AWESOME, a full-color tome of a good 238 pages. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
worked on this with long-time colleague and friend Robin Yee, who helmed the project as its chief editor. In the newspaper article, our book is mentioned as being one of 50 items sealed in a time capsule for all posterity. To top it off, during the gala dinner, our book is presented formally to the country’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who wonderfully took time out of his busy schedule to grace the night’s event. Needless to say, we’re thrilled with how the book turned out, and its stellar reception thereafter. For the story, please go HERE.
NEW BOOKS BY JOHN WILKINSON
& STEVEN CRAMER
May 17, 2013
Who doesn’t love a lyric poet? We’ve just added to our Reading Room recommendations the delicious new titles – Reckitt’s Blue and Clangings – from these two heavyweight poets. Every book from Wilkinson has been superb, and our faves include Proud Flesh and Lake Shore Drive. Cramer’s Goodbye to the Orchard is simply stunning. Cramer has been awarded the Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and the Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. To purchase their newest outings, just drop in HERE and HERE.
2013 POETRY SUPER HIGHWAY CONTEST
May 14, 2013
We're sponsoring some chapbooks and postcard-bookmark gift sets for this fabulously inclusive contest, organized by the equally fabulous Rick Lupert, who’s a bottomless well of energy and good ideas. The Poetry Super Highway Poetry Contest will be into its 16th year this summer, when the contest again opens for submissions. Every entrant will receive some sort of prize. Just for participating and joining in the fun. How wonderful is that! Check out the website HERE.
SMALL BEGINNINGS
May 11, 2013
This small press has been too long in coming. We've been toying around with starting our own outfit for years, and finally put some muscle into it. We're a boutique press, which means we really care about bringing solid,
beautiful work to the page. Aesthetics mean an awesome lot to us here. We're launching with a full suite of anthologies, all on the lookout for some amazing writing. We're also hosting two international poetry competitions, to celebrate the centenaries of Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz's birth as well as the 1914 first print of Gertrude Stein's monumental work Tender Buttons. Scout around our humble abode, and see if something piques your interest. We'd love to hear from you!
