Opening Day
William Corbett

William Corbett is a poet who lives in Boston’s South End and is Director of Student Writing Activities in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He writes frequently on art, directs the small press Pressed Wafer and is on the advisory board of Manhattan’s CUE Art Foundation. Among his books are the memoirs Furthering My Education and Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir. He edited Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler and The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara. He is currently at work on a book about the painter Albert York.

The Evolution of a Sigh
R. Zamora Linmark

R. Zamora Linmark is the author of Prime Time Apparitions and Rolling The R’s, which he adapted for the stage. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the Philippines. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation. He lives in Honolulu and Manila.

“Linmark’s new collection of poetry is a celebration of what can be done to and with the English language in the service of tumult, teasing, post-Postmodern Filipino showmanship, Shinjuku shenanigans, trans-Pacific pyrotechnics, turning-Japanese (and you know what I’m talking about—), and, yes, Beauty. Especially Beauty.”—Kimiko Hahn

“R. Zamora Linmark is a brazen practitioner of (in his own words) 'spontaneous disobedience',” a kind of 'solo circus feat' that’s as gutsy as it exciting. His biting, over-caffeinated wordplay produces intelligent takes on race, popular culture, and sexual politics. And hard-as-nails love poems—perfect in their cynicism and wit. These poems made me laugh, made me envious, and repeatedly (since Linmark works without a safety net) took away my breath.”
—David Trinidad

“In The Evolution of a Sigh, R. Zamora Linmark borrows from the world of portraiture, old Hollywood, sci fi, art films, newspaper headlines, signs with irresistible typos, the classics, Noh theater, text messages, chat rooms, and Tagalog slang and grammar to construct amazingly inventive and emotive poems. Linmark invigorates and twists cliches into stunning verse and reworks the abecarian, pantoum, and haiku with panache. R. Zamora Linmark writes dazzling and intense poetry. His is an intimate voice that simultaneously embraces our world.”—Denise Duhamel

ISBN: 9 78-1-931236-95-9 (pbk), $16

ISBN: 978-1-931236-96-6 (cloth), $26

Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard
Michael Cirelli

Michael Cirelli is from Providence, Rhode Island. He is the Executive Director of Urban Word NYC, an award-winning literary arts organization for teens. He is also the author of Hip-Hop Poetry & the Classics (Milk Mug, 2004), and received his MFA in poetry from the New School. His poems have appeared in the New York Quarterly, Texas Review, Hanging Loose, Word Is Bond, Spindle, among others. He has also been featured in World Literature Today, Spoken Word Revolution Redux, HBO's Def Poetry Jam, and King Magazine: The Illest Men's Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

“Michael Cirelli has invented his own electric school of lyric, stamping an unflinching signature on soul-infused stanzas that are alternately tender, tough, revelatory and always, alwaays unapologetic. What's most amazing is that he possesses a voice that doesn't seem to have occurred before—its definitive drum works its way into your head and stays there, making you crave more of the infectious music he drops, exactly the way he drops it. Damn.” - Patricia Smith

“[His work] reveals the great artistry of poets and rappers and shows how hip-hop is the evolution of classic poetry.”
- Kanye West

“In theory, true poetry can co-exist with spoken-word artistry to produce something vital and eye-catching and new. Michael Cirelli is putting that theory into exciting practice.” - David Lehman


“Michael Cirelli’s poems surge, splurge, and splash across the page—‘loud as a gazillion pigeons…Louder than skyscraper fingernails/on the sky.’ Few before him have been so successful at marrying the tension of the well-crafted poem with the bravado and high energy of hip-hop. It’s a funky formalism that will keep the words in your head dancing all night.
”- Elaine Equi

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-931236-91-1 (pbk.) $16.00
ISBN-13: 978-1-931236-92-8 (cloth) $26.00

The Virgin Formica
Sharon Mesmer

Sharon Mesmer’s other poetry collections include Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997). Her prose collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, France, in French translation, 2005) and In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005 and 2000). Lonely Tylenol, an art book in collaboration with the painter David Humphrey, was published in 2003 by Flying Horse Editions/University of Central Florida. She is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry.

Praise for The Virgin Formica:

“Whether taking surreal leaps and bounds over the trash and beauty of cityscapes or drawing gnomic lines from woodland views, Sharon Mesmer’s poems are timed to rise with those moments when ‘things are always beginning or becoming’ or to settle in ‘a way to hear Hope talking or maybe listening.’ At turns intimate or boisterously satiric, The Virgin Formica can gently detonate or erupt, carrying readers along on ripples or shockwaves.”—Paul Violi

Praise for Sharon Mesmer’s previous work:

“. . . the multifaceted approach of an eclectic creator . . . Mesmer’s imagination shows no limits . . . wit, insight, and often awe-inspiring flights of imagination ... intelligent and inventive writer.”—Janet St. John, Booklist

“. . . a lively, readable volume, always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern.”—Allen Ginsberg

ISBN: 978-1-931236-84-3 (pbk), $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-931236-85-0 (cloth), $26.00

The Trapeze Diaries
Marie Carter

Marie Carter graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in English Literature. She also worked for a variety of literary organizations in Scotland including Chapman magazine. In 2000, she moved to New York City where she is currently an Associate Editor at Hanging Loose Press. She is the editor of Word Jig: New Fiction from Scotland (Hanging Loose, 2003) and co-editor of Voices of the City (Hanging Loose, 2004). In 2004, she ran the Planehopping: Scottish Writers in New York readings series at the New York Public Library. Her work has been published in Hanging Loose, The Brooklyn Rail, Bloom, Spectacle (circus magazine), turntablebluelight.com, among others, and in The Best Creative Nonfiction (W. W. Norton, 2007). She recently completed a residency at the MacDowell Colony. She studies fixed trapeze and yoga.

Advance praise for The Trapeze Diaries

“Marie Carter’s The Trapeze Diaries is a tour de force performance—this is a writer transforming the things of daily life, the fears and struggles and unexpected glories, into weightless prose. Carter gets at the question we’re all trying to get at in one way or another: how, in this heavy world, against our own mortality and terror, can we break loose and fly? How can we get around the troubles in our own hearts and make our way toward joy? Carter finds the answer, both metaphorically and physically.”—Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Year of Yes

“Not only the lyrical tale of one woman’s love affair with the trapeze, but a powerful story on becoming brave and letting go.”—Carolyn Turgeon, author of Rain Village

“A quiet meditation on loss and recovery…the narrator’s poignant voice has great clarity as she explores a new life far away from home while recovering from the death of her father. This is a brave and heartwarming book.”—Donald Breckenridge, author of 6/2/95 and fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail

 

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ISBN paperback: 978-1-931236-93-5, $16.

ISBN cloth: 978-1-931236-94-2, $26.

Winter Journey
Tony Towle

A native New Yorker and a longtime resident of downtown Manhattan, Tony Towle is “one of the New York School’s best-kept secrets,” as John Ashbery has written, calling his New and Selected Poems “a feast.” Towle has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Poets Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, among other honors and prizes. This is his twelfth collection of poems.

 

Comments on The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1963-2000

“Towle has ... been a singular voice among American poets since the early 1960s when Frank O’Hara first championed his work.” — Publishers Weekly

“The deep, surprising lyricism of the early poems and the incisive witty discourse of the darker late ones are both part of a poetry at the same time direct and highly artistic. Tony Towle’s is one of the clear, authentic voices of American poetry.”
— Kenneth Koch

“A fresh reading of early works alongside recent accomplishments will provide followers of the New York School with an enlarged appreciation for one of its most assured and engaging masters.” — George Green, The Poetry Project Newsletter

“Smart and sly, sure to disarm and delight. The History of the Invitation belongs in every library of poetry, possibly on its very own shelf.” — Billy Collins

“The poetry is constantly delightful.” It “reminded me not just of ... other New York poets, but also Byron, and even occasionally Pope at his most waspish.” — The North (UK)

“Meditative, erudite, stunning with ease and quirky sanity, Tony Towle’s massive Selected is a phenomenal measure of a poet’s nearly four decades’ mind in poetry ... a grand achievement.” — Anne Waldman

 

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ISBN paperback: 978-1-931236-82-9, $16.

ISBN cloth: 978-1-931236-83-6, $26.

The Splintered Face Tsunami Poems
Indran Amirthanayagam

Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, essayist and translator in English, Spanish and French. His first book The Elephants of Reckoning won the 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize. The poem “Juarez” won the Juegos Florales of Guaymas, Sonora in 2006. Other books include El Infierno de los Pajaros, El Hombre que Recoge Nidos, and Ceylon R.I.P. Amirthanayagam has been a NYFA fellow in poetry as well as a grantee of the U.S./Mexico Fund for Culture for his translations. He was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He is a member of the United States Foreign Serivce. This is his second book to be published in the United States.

 

“These poems both about those who died in, and those who survived, the Tsunami of 2004 memorialize with anger and beauty one of the most devastating tragedies of our time. In its largeness of heart, bold artistry, and admirable desire to bear witness, Amirthanayagam’s consoling, life-affirming and triumphant volume reminds me of Neruda’s great Residence on Earth.”—Jaime Manrique

“Indran Amirthanayagam’s densely woven Tsunami Poems display a perfect marriage of form and content. His rhythms, rhymes, and intricate consonantal endings as well as his precise images and mot justes ironically intensify the terror of the stories these poems tell—stories of real men, women, and children whose lives have been changed forever by a terrible natural disaster. This beautifully written and graphic sequence makes for fascinating reading.”—Marjorie Perloff

“Indran Amirthanayagam’s poems about tragedy and loss are woven with such fine irony. Each offers the poet’s consolation, challenging horror with the beautiful line.”—Richard Rodriguez

“In his powerful and vivid reenactment of the devastating 2004 tsunami and its aftermath, Indran Amirthanayagam rematerializes a composite but ‘splintered face,’ and conjures a myriad of voices, memorializing this incomprehensible tragedy. With plain-spoken eloquence and consummate skill, he presents a chorus of individual testimonials from survivors—including monologues by a Sri Lankan fisherman who lost his entire family, visiting tourists, a body builder, and a bereft but ever faithful priest—all who witnessed and survived ‘the shape of a giant wave’ rising to devour tens of thousands of lives.
A deeply moving and wise book, The Splintered Face recognizes the great and small paradoxes inherent in the world, and among them: ‘the sea [as] father/ and mother,/ karma and dharma// and all other/ available terms,/ including fate.’ The poet understands how, while we still mourn for the lost and dead, we also engender ‘the ceremonies of innocence,’ and muster both hope and strength to carry on. Ultimately, Amirthanayagam’s poems celebrate the human spirit’s resilience, even when faced with unutterable loss.”—Maurya Simon

 

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