Unplugged

July careens and summer swells. I'm off to Fishtrap Outpost tomorrow, where I'll be happily disconnected from phone and interwebs for 9 days. Looking forward to coming back with poems, pictures, and something worth telling you about. Be well, friends!

***********

I have a poem up this week over at Linebreak: "Months after the Mt. Cashmere Wildfire, with Meteors"

Big thanks to the editors for featuring the poems, and to my Sewanee friend Lisa Fay Coutley for such an excellent reading (she's up on Verse Daily! she has a new chapbook you should buy!)

**********

Eight years ago, I began traveling the United States to photograph senior dogs. Like the diverse human pageant that Robert Frank captured in his book, The Americans, back in the 1950’s, I found dogs inhabiting all manner of American life -- and with many years inscribed in their beings.

My interest in the world of the senior dog began as my own two dogs began to approach the end of their days. This was at a time when I had lived enough years to start imagining my own mortality. I entered a world of grace where bodies that had once expressed their vibrancy were now on a more fragile path.

-This is amazing.

***********

Heather Christle is a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University whose second volume of poetry, "The Trees the Trees," is out now (her third book will be published by Wesleyan University Press). If you like her poems, you can call her during appointed (but generous) hours between now and next Thursday, and she'll read one just for you. It's as easy as dialing 413-570-3077.

-via Salon

***********

Box of Replenishments

Bought books this week! 3 from the local indie (The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer, and The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter), 1 from a press website (In the Carnival of Breathing by Lisa Fay Coutley), and 1 from Amazon Marketplace (Robert Penn Warren's Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce). Looking forward to devouring them when I'm unplugged in Oregon next week.

************

Killer first line of the moment:

Like a twentieth-century dream of Europe--all

from Laura Kasischke's "Time"
(Space, in Chains, Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

*************

New York Quarterly Books is the perfect example of the way a small poetry press should be run: editor Raymond Hammond solicits books from poets already published in the New York Quarterly (one of the most eclectic, well-rounded, and exciting journals I've seen--and I read them all!--with a mix of reviews, essays, and interviews along with very generous offerings of poetry); while the journal has been around for four decades, the book publishing program is new, getting started only in 2009 but already having picked up a lot of steam. Among their new poetry books, I've really liked Amanda Bradley's Hints and Allegations, Shelley Stenhouse's Impunity, Tony Medina's My Old Man Was Always On the Lam, Steve Henn's Unacknowledged Legislations, and Luke Johnson's understated After the Ark.

Anis Shivani features NYQ Books and After the Ark over at Huffington Post in his 4th of July post: "20 of the Best Books from Independent Presses You Should Know About."

Whoa. How bout that. Though, the last line of the poem quoted should read "exploring the sky, open and distant."

*************

Even with the band's tireless work ethic (or perhaps because of it), happenstance trails the Head and the Heart everywhere: The day Billboard met the band at a dimly lit New York diner marked the one-year anniversary of its self-released debut album. For the release show, the members returned to their birthplace: Conor Byrne Pub, where more than 200 friends and fans congregated in support. The show sold out easily, and during the next few months, the band members found themselves ordering box after box of replenishments for local record stores Sonic Boom and Easy Street. Fans were not only sharing the music-they were buying it multiple times over, as gifts for friends and family.

I remember that show. How bout a picture of it?

*************

Violin-y