the Prairie Schooner blog

Thanks for Contributors

Beth Bachmann, winner of 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry.
Walter Bargen, Days Like This Are Necessary: New and Selected Poems, BkMk P /UMKC, 2009. And the William Rockwell Nelson Award for poetry.Theban Traffic: Poems, WorldTech Communications, 2008.
Chana Bloch, Blood Honey, Autumn House Press, 2009. Winner of the Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress.
Jericho Brown, Whiting Award. Please, New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008.
Margaret Chaula, What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, Katsura P, 2009.
Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover, translators, Selected Poems of Freidrich Holderlin, won the PEN USA Translation Award.
Matthew Gavin Frank, Sagittarius Agitprop, Black Lawrence P,2009.
Ray Gonzalez, Cool Auditor, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009.
Marilyn Hacker, translator, He and I, by Emmanuel Moses, Oberlin College P, 2009.
Bill Lavender, transfixion, Garret County and Trembling Pillow P, 2010.
Patti M. Marxsen, First Prize winner, All Nations Press Non-Fiction Chapbook Contest. Beyond the Village: Essays Out of Switzerland, All Nations Press, 2010.
Constance Merritt, Two Rooms, LSU P, 2009.
Lori Ostlund, 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Book of Seventy, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Donald Platt, Dirt Angels, New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2009.
William Reichard, Sin Eater, Mid-List Press, 2010.
Jack Ridl, Losing Season, University P of New England, 2009.
Colette Sartor, short story “Lamb” published by Prairie Schooner, named to “100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008” in Best American Short Stories 2009.
Maurya Simon, The Raindrop’s Gospel: The Trials of St.Jerome and St. Paula: A Novel in Verse, Elixir P, 2010.
Charles Harper Webb, Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.
Jeff Worley, Best to Keep Moving, Larkspur P, 2009.

The Continued Work of our Previous Contributors

Cynthia Atkins, Psyche’s Weathers, WordTech Communications, 2007

Mary Jo Bang, The Bride of E, Graywolf P, 2009

Bruce Bennett, Subway Figure, Orchises P, 2009

Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, Norton, 2009

Paul Eggers, The Departure Lounge, Ohio State UP, 2009

Patricia Fargnoli, Then, Something, Tupelo P, 2009

Sherrie Flick, Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Meredith Hall, Without a Map, Beacon P, 2008

Kevin Hart, Young Rain, U of Notre Dame P, 2009

Julie Kane, Jazz Funeral, Story Line P, 2009

Marilyn Krysl, Swear the Burning Vow: Selected and New Poems, Ghost Road Publishing, 2009

Steve Langan, Meet Me at the Happy Bar, BlazeVOX, 2009

Kathryn Ma, All That Work and Still No Boys, U of Iowa P, 2009

Hilary Masters, In Rooms of Memory: Essays, U of Nebraska P, 2009

Jennifer Militello, Flinch of Song, Tupelo P, 2009

Debra Nystrom, Bad River Road, Sarabande Books, 2009

Lisa Olstein, Lost Alphabet, Copper Canyon P, 2009

Mark Perlberg, Waiting for the Alchemist, LSU P, 2009

Marc J. Sheehan, Vengeful Hymns, Ashland Poetry P, 2009

Abbott Small, Into the Turquoise, 2009

Michael Spence, Crush Depth, Truman State UP, 2009

Dabney Stuart, Tables, Pinyon Publishing, 2009

Kristen Tracy, Camille McPhee Fell Under the Bus..., Delacorte P, 2009

The Expanding Universe

In an economy of sometimes riveting contractions (just exactly how much smaller is the banking industry these days?), at least one small publisher is holding back the push. C&R Press had come to our attention because they've published a few of our contributors, but I encourage you over the weekend to peruse their titles and pick up a few. And I hope it will be at a local bookseller, but I suppose they won't hold it against you if you use another outlet.

You can see one of our mutual poets do a reading here.

And you can tell us about your favorite small, passionate publisher in the comments. Please do, actually. We'd love to hear about them. It makes our days a bit more lively.

Celebrating Taxidermy and the Ordinary

You might wonder who those people are at the top of the masthead. What do they write about? What do they do? At the top of our fiction and poetry staff we have two amazing people who not only have a keen eye for great work in their genres (and we rely on them for these skills), they also generate great work. I know this because I've heard them read at our local grad student reading series, the No Name, and because they have new work coming out in book form. Yep, books.

Dave Madden's exploration of taxidermy just got accepted by St Martin's Press, and Carrie Shipers' book, Ordinary Mourning, won the 2009 ABZ Press First Book Prize.

It's been an honor to work with these two over the past several years. When these books hit the shelves, rush out and buy several. You'll want to give them as gifts.

Writers in an Adventure with Zombies!

It's mid-afternoon. The new and returning graduate students keep stopping by. The budget is twisting its way deeper into my brain, and I keep thinking that I can't think of anything to add to anything right now. And then I stopped at the keyword "brain."

Did you know that there was such a thing as zombie haiku in the world? You do now. And some of it was written by Billy Collins.

You could add more zombie haiku in the comments. But there's a paucity of pirate haiku in the world. And in the comments. I'm just mentioning this.

Another Loss

We learned this week that Rynn Williams, the winner of the second Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, has died. The circumstances of her death are still not clear. She leaves behind a family, though I don't know much about them, even as I've been thinking a lot about who they might be and what they might be going through.

I have had her book, Adonis Garage, here on the desk in front of me for most of this week. It's full of life, desire, of New York, of looking back that's neither nostalgia nor regret but not quite celebration either of a time of glam and costume that rarely gets revisted, at least in verse.

And I want to post a piece that Rynn published in Prairie Schooner and read when she visited us a couple of years ago:

Chicken

was crucial to the Scarsdale Diet--and despite Miss Trevor,
staunch vegetarian, appalled--I sucked down whole birds.
Intricate ribs, dense gray thighbones, the way
dark tendons fell away--who cares if the diet was useless?
I was fourteen, I'd just lost my innocence.
Giddy from grease, protein and hormones,
the heat of the city playground in August
and the thrill of Miss Trevor's frank disdain,

I was tossing gristle on a pile, licking my fingertips,
nothing but chicken and boys to devour:
Robert and Frankie, Skip and McVey--
seeing the world through a haze of roast meat--
all those boys, all that warm flesh, sinew and fat,
juice on my lips, those piles of shiny bones.

Ekphrasis

It's one of those words you get to use to freak out first year poetry students. Their eyes get big, and they begin to sense that poetry might be slightly more technically challenging than the Beats would have them believe. There's a nice summary--both historical and technical--here (though there's a better image of the art at the top of the page over here or at Wikipedia).

But why bring this up? For one thing, our guest editor for the Fall issue, Grace Bauer, has taken advantage of the practice (Field Guide to the Ineffable and Beholding Eye, to name two books). For another, one of our local profs has managed to reverse the field, if you will. An artist in Portland, OR--Lorna Nakell--has taken some of Ted Kooser's poems as inspiration for a series of paintings now up at the Beppu Wiarda Gallery. You can see some of the paintings taking shape here, here, and here (and relive the opening reception). And if you're there, you might stop by for a little reading and gazing.

Friday the Third

Our recent guest-blogger and Schooner contributor Jehanne Dubrow has scored a coup: a poem on Poetry Daily for the Fourth. "Sea-Change" is in the Summer issue, so subscribers already know the piece. But if you don't subscribe--though it's shockingly easy to do--then you'll get a chance to read a fabulous piece of work. The poem (in a subtle formal approach) reveals part of the anxiety of being a military wife, especially in wartime.

And if you'd like a bit of context for the Poetry Daily piece, you can read this piece from our own website.

Summer Days Make Me Feel Fine

Especially now that the Summer 2009 issue is up on the web.

We've got Lori Ostlund's "Idyllic Little Bali" for you. Some poems by Alicia Ostriker, Jehanne Dubrow, Richard Jackson, Chanda Feldman, Moira Linehan, Cathy Carlisi, and Chris Forhan. And we've even got a review up.

That should keep you busy.

We're talking about sending out a ten question questionnaire to some of our contributors and editors. What would you like to have us ask? Post your questions on the comments, or email them to me: jengelhardt2 at unl dot edu.

Would You Welcome, Please

Jehanne Dubrow! She'll be our guest blogger for the next week. I have a ton of stuff to say about Jehanne--I inherited her position as Prairie Schooner Book Prize coordinator, we were senior poetry readers at Prairie Schooner together, we had a couple of workshops together--but the bio on her own blog, Notes from the Gefilte Review, do a better job:

I was born in Italy and grew up in Poland, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. I earned my PhD in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and my MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland. My work has appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, and others. I am the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press 2009) and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press 2007). A second poetry collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Prize and will be published in 2009. A third collection, Stateside, will be released by Northwestern University Press in 2010.

Though I will note that any mention of her adorable dog and remarkable husband are missing. You might ask her about these things as well as being a formal poet in a fractured poetry landscape as the week goes along.