spring 2016 fall 2015

Transcription

SPRING
2016
LLAF
5102
Welcome to Four Way Books
Director Martha Rhodes
Associate Directors Sally Ball & Ryan Murphy
Financial Director Jeffery Morehouse
Publicist & Assistant Editor Clarissa Long
Web Development Maudelle Driskell
Founding Editors Jane Brox, Helen Fremont, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Martha Rhodes
Officers
David Lee, President
Owen Lewis, Vice President
Jeffery Morehouse, Treasurer
Marjorie Tesser, Secretary
Board Members
Carla Carlson
Michelle Gillett
Freda S. Johnson
Howard Levy
Martha Rhodes
Boris Thomas
Ellen Bryant Voigt
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Spring 2016
Fall 2015
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Spring 2016 POETRY
from Walking Stick
Author Photo: Jackie Gloye
You charm me across rope bridges
and lead me to what was never lost,
where the future becomes past.
Tonight under this full moon,
a dense tuft of fox hair
caught in a rose briar shines.
Here where I walk through my own night,
the night I offer to you as my own.
Walking Stick, where am I?
Grinding at the ground—
To go over a river where there is no river
and dream a dream I can’t remember to dream.
To come on a cloudless night.
To reason with the wind on a path.
Smoke follows beauty, he said.
Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas, and is
the author of 1-800-HOT-RIBS, reprinted in Carnegie
Mellon Classic Contemporary Series; Rock Farm;
Notarikon; The Plath Cabinet and editor of Word of Mouth:
Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Her
poems have been selected for several editions of the Best
American Poetry series and have appeared in The New
Yorker, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The L.A.
Times, Ploughshares, Black Renassiance Noire, and other
journals and magazines. She lives on a farm and wildlife
refuge in Bloomington, Indiana. She has taught in the
New York City public schools and directed the MFA
Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, where
she currently teaches.
Spring 2016 POETRY
Past Praise for Catherine Bowman
“By consulting The Plath Cabinet, we
can perceive. . . a sort of idolatry of the
feminine that was later refigured into
an iconoclastic attack in the greatest of
Plath’s poems. Bowman draws attention
to the idolatry, moving us inside the
divided mind that would turn against
itself through a violent rejection of
feminine ideals and then through
self-violence. Bowman approaches a
predecessor as obsessed with the desire
to speak as with the desire to shut up or
be shut up.”
—Susan Gubar in Eye Rhymes: Sylvia
Plath’s Artof the Visual
“This poetical homage politicizes Sylvia
Plath, showing her to be less a victim
than a citizen of her time, whom history
can misrepresent but not silence. . . .
Bowman’s work shifts the posthumous
perception of Sylvia’s incantatory
aspirations as not neurotic, but
heartbreaking.”
—Virginia Konchan in The Rumpus
Publication Date: Mar. 2016 • 978-1-935536-66-6 •
Poetry • $15.95 • Paper, 136 pages • 6 x 9
Also available from Four Way Books:
The Plath Cabinet
Notarikon
Spring 2016 POETRY
Cynthia Cruz
How tHe end Begins
“Cynthia Cruz continues to write the
soul in its fullness and emptiness with
markings that bring what is possible in
seen and unseen worlds into a single
line. This is poetry from the mind
of a poet who can sit in Dickinson’s
finite but overwhelming complex to
see her own self contemporarily where
everything and nothing live inside one
another. ‘There is no city / but the city
within. . .’ Cruz writes, and she is the
grand cartographer of that place in
poetry where the beauty of imaginative
truth sings itself real in tiny moments.
How the End Begins is the experience of
what makes us human.”
—Afaa Michael Weaver
The Glimmering Room
Wunderkammer
“Loneliness and death are never the
same, but in How the End Begins,
Cynthia Cruz parses their similarities
and differences so exquisitely and
obsessively that trace patterns begin
to appear on the surface of experience.
These are poems of grief and
recognition, of both elegy and opulence:
they glitter, sometimes fiercely with
an icy moonlight, sometimes with
the disposable bling of contemporary
American culture, sometimes with
either the glimmer of faith or else
its devastating absence. ‘With you
missing,’ Cruz declares in one poem,
‘All the pretty animals are game for the
killing.’ The same can be said for this
ravishing, deeply abandoned collection.”
—G.C. Waldrep
Spring 2016 POETRY
Author Photo: Steven Page
SELF PORTRAIT: POLAROID
Our very own Pharmacopoeia blonde
In blue powder eye shadow, or
Luminous nurse of the locked ward,
This sweet, licked delirium. Of teeth,
Dirt, and seed. Alone, in my dream
Room, listening careful
For the second coming.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of three previous
collections of poetry: Ruin, The Glimmering Room,
and Wunderkammer. Her essays, interviews, and art
writings have been published in The Los Angeles Review
of Books, The American Poetry Review, Guernica, and
Hyperallergic. Cruz is also currently at work on two
poetry anthologies: one, a collection of Latina poets
and the other, a collection of poetry by female poets
on the issue of consumption and nourishment. She is
also at work on a collection of essays exploring issues of
language and silence. Cruz has received fellowships from
Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder
Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA
from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA
in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual
Arts. Cruz is currently pursuing a PhD in Germanic
Languages & Literature. She teaches at
Sarah Lawrence College.
Spring 2016 POETRY
from “Milton’s Satan”
The nest was empty. Burned. The ceiling
Author Photo: M. Robin Barone
of her room still showed its poster for Some Like It Hot,
shriveling after long years
when Monroe looked down on a herd of plush deer
and other mild creatures
now ragged with age. I imagined imagination
might cool my soul: I wrestled to mind
a gentle meadow dotted with flowers,
the checkered shade of a hardwood stand in fall,
a small brook’s ice-jeweled pools,
and last, an unmarred quilt of snow
on our cellar bulkhead . . .
Sydney Lea is author of eleven other volumes
of poetry. A former Pulitzer finalist, a recipient
of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright
and Guggenheim Foundations, he was founder
and longtime editor of New England Review.
He has also published a novel, a collection of
literary criticism, and four volumes of personal
essays, most recently What’s the Story? Short
Takes on a Life Grown Long. His work across the
genres appears in some fifty anthologies. Active
in literacy and conservation efforts, he lives in
northern Vermont with his wife Robin Barone.
Spring 2016 POETRY
“The truth is, no one writes—or has
written—like Sydney Lea, except
maybe E. A. Robinson. In a long poem,
‘Locals,’ Lea says, ‘My life has been
distilled to details, / But on balance has
been exquisite.’ And that’s just it: the
people, the creatures, the land, but also
the language are so exquisitely seen and
sounded that every poem is a tribute and
a celebration. In this collection full of
memories, each is immediate and alive.
I am forever a fan of Lea’s poems and of
the skill and heart and guts it takes to
write poems like these in this age.”
—Fleda Brown
“In Sydney Lea’s new book, No
Doubt the Nameless, the mystery of
the commonplace surrounds the
reader, even in its familiar Frostian
landscape. . . . Again and again these
startling, beautifully-made poems
upend assumptions about life, death
and everything in-between. ‘I’ll turn
the whole bittersweet saga over,’ Lea
says. And he does, with a sure and
steady hand, in profound, masterful
unforgettable style.” —Carol Muske-Dukes
No Doubt the Nameless
sydney lea
I Was Thinking of Beauty
Young of the Year
Spring 2016 POETRY
“‘It was like stepping into a telescope /
unseen,’ writes Mark Levine in his new
collection, ‘into the dark distorted center.’
A work of dark optics, Travels of Marco
refracts our post-traumatic millennial
condition through a savage burlesque
of literary forms, re-purposed historical
idioms—ranging from pitch-perfect
Edwardian intonations to wry Catskills
schtick and beyond—and a nightmarish
dérangement of sensation itself. Few poets
‘speak into the currency’ of our time with
such rage, wonder, and sorrow. Travels of
Marco is an incendiary book that warrants
its own warning label: ‘Secure your
suspenders, / Restrain your tender / Parts,
prepare for wild / Surrender.’”
—Srikanth Reddy
travels of marco
MARK LEVINE
“Travels of Marco is a captivating lyric
invention of nimble leaps and twists of
wit. It is also an eloquent and affecting
meditation on fatherhood, striking in its
articulations of love’s lonely and austere
offices: ‘for I had no more business in this
life.’ There is a tender, graceful quality to
these poems as much as there is a stirring,
passionate ability to throw down rhyme
like it’s snake eyes. This is sheer nononsense joy.”
—D.A. Powell
Spring 2016 POETRY
Employment
I had a calling.
I took the call.
It was all I could do to follow the voice streaming into me
Like traffic on the runway where I lay
Down to gather.
I had a calling. I heard the geese bleat
In the firmament as they migrated
Into the jet’s jets.
And could I have foreseen that falling
I could have fallen too
Rather than being sutured to the bottomless
Freeze-out lake.
For it is fine to lie within one’s borrowed blankets
Looking up at the
Dropped ceiling coming down.
For at the moment I am counting holes
In the sound-absorbing tiles
Keeping a running record of the interlocutor’s
Chides.
I feel at one with extinction
By my own hand
(Inner hand)
Though once there were many of my kind
Flocking inland, or perhaps
It felt that way.
Mark Levine has published three books of poems, Debt
(1993), Enola Gay (2000) and The Wilds (2006), and a book
of nonfiction, F5 (2007). He has also written journalism
for many magazines, including The New Yorker, The
New York Times Magazine, and Outside. He has received
fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting
Foundation. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Spring 2016 POETRY
from Cover Scent
He lies naked with another boy in a clearing
of palmettos and sand pines.
They touch each other
with rabbit skin gloves.
Today: the odium of salt and pheromones.
To erase himself he rubs the ashes
Author Photo: Sharain Naylor
on his arms and chest. Outside an
Eastern Cottontail hides three kits…
Winner of a 2015 AWP Intro Journals award and the
2014 Intro Prize in Poetry from Four Way Books,
and recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund
Grant, Rajiv Mohabir has received fellowships from
the American Institute of Indian Studies language
program, Kundiman, and the Voices of Our Nation
Arts Foundation. His poetry and translations are
internationally published and can be found in
Aufgabe, Best American Poetry 2015, Crab Orchard
Review, Drunken Boat, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and
Quarterly West. He received his MFA in Poetry and
Translation from Queens College, CUNY, where
he was editor-in-chief of Ozone Park Journal. A PhD
candidate at the University of Hawai‘i, he currently
lives and teaches poetry and composition
in Honolulu.
Spring 2016 POETRY
Rajiv Mohabir
The
Taxidermist’s
Cut
WINNER OF THE
FOUR WAY BOOKS
INTRO PRIZE IN POETRY
“Rajiv Mohabir’s debut collection
is electric with fierce love —animal,
erotic, obliterating—the hard and soft
always bruising and buffing each other.
The ways we hurt each other are similar
to the ways we hurt ourselves: precisely,
with a steadiness learned in the murk
and danger of childhood. The cornfields
of adolescence and the observation of
animals teach us how to not only love
each other and tear each other apart
but also how to meticulously put what
we love, what we destroy, back together
again. . . . This new voice is primal,
essential. It sings (as if it’s merely
breathing) the song of how we came
to be sitting here in ourselves, in our
bodies as they are, among the ruins
inside and out.”
—Brenda Shaughnessy, judge
Spring 2016 POETRY
“In Emoticoncert, Maya Pindyck writes of
the conflicting emotional soundtracks
that play continuously in all our minds.
These honest, sonically dazzling poems
pursue the music of human emotion,
of the expressions we are taught to hold
back and which appear in every family
photograph.”
—Idra Novey
Emoticoncert
Maya Pindyck
“In Henri Michaux’s Land of the
Magicians, the deepest wizardry is
the sorcerer’s power to ‘remove the
horizon.’ Suddenly we’re confronted
with sheer experience, no prompts.
Maya Pindyck’s Emoticoncert has that
breathtaking immediacy: the volatile gist
of narrative, without the cues. . . these
are dazzling poems, pared to the bone,
but like the horizon-less landscape,
vast in their intimacy. Pindyck isn’t a
miniaturist: she’s a gem cutter with huge
themes. The concision, the cumulative
force—these poems are musical in their
fierceness: not akin to music, but music
themselves.” —D. Nurkse
Spring 2016 POETRY
A Truth about Temperature
Author Photo: Amy Finkel
Out the kettle, a whistle
like a neigh escapes the red throat
of a drunk horse, animal or man,
alone, collapsed on the road,
crying out with his last stone:
his voice: a burning silver singing
louder & louder & louder
until his maker rushes
to close the flame.
Maya Pindyck is a poet and a visual artist. She has
received grants and fellowships in support of her
projects from the Historic House Trust of New York
City’s Contemporary Art Partnerships program, the
Abortion Conversation Project, Squaw Valley Writers,
and the Vermont Studio Center. Her first collection
of poetry, Friend Among Stones, won the Many Voices
Project Award from New Rivers Press, and her
chapbook, Locket, Master, received a Poetry Society of
America Chapbook Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn
and teaches throughout New York City.
Spring 2016 POETRY
from Origin
A little sand, a little soda, a little lime once used
to embalm the dead, and out of black hole and kiln
the molten bubble gathers like honey on a dipper
Author Photo: © 2008 Star Black
for the blower to stretch breath into glass, the pipe
a silent horn shaping the form with its emptiness
to be marvered and mandrelled, jacked and lathed.
In your father’s factory the vessels anneal, neat rows
of flagons, jars, mould blown, ribbed and decorated,
every glinted edge and pattern the fire will destroy
so the life foreseen becomes a retrospect foreknown:
the char-black rolling country of the Pays Noir
from which your people came…
Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems,
Where the World is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second
Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts
Book Award in Poetry), The Net, and From Nothing. He is
also the author of the critical studies Passage to the Center:
Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
and Awake in America, as well as the editor of The Book
of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the
Present, Light in Hand: The Selected Early Poems and Lola
Ridge, and Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice
and the Art. His awards include the “The Discovery/The
Nation Award,” the Robert Penn Warren Award, the
Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason
Prize, and fellowships in poetry from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation. This book would not have been written
without the generous support of a fellowship in poetry
from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Four
Way Books which provided a month-long residency at the
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Spring 2016 POETRY
From Nothing
Daniel Tobin
“In From Nothing Daniel Tobin explores
the intersection of war and science,
mysticism and rationality, the vastly
large and intensely small in and through
the character and voices of the major
figures in the scientific community of
the twentieth century, most notably the
Jesuit priest and mathematician, George
Lemaître. Tobin brings his learning and
astounding imaginative powers to bear
on such central questions as the origin
and end of the universe, how something
came from nothing, human depredation
and beauty, and the intractable mystery
of time. This is a memorable, tragic and
moving book that should be read by
everyone who wonders how we got here
and what our being here can mean.”
—Alan Shapiro
The Net
Belated Heavens
Second Things
The Narrows
“In his lyrical and narrative suite of
poems From Nothing, Daniel Tobin
weaves the history of the cosmos into
the biography of the Belgian Jesuit
priest Georges Lemaître, a physicist
who realized that Einstein’s General
Relativity Theory entailed ‘the Big Bang’
and foresaw the discovery of the Cosmic
Microwave Background. The poet
draws the weft of scientific vocabulary,
poetically, through the warp of everyday
speech, with occasional over-embroidery
of hymn and prayer. . . .”
—Emily Grosholz
Spring 2016 POETRY
Past Praise for C. Dale Young
“Sometimes the ability to convey
information compactly and quickly
has moral grace. [Young’s] writing
can put garrulous narration or
evasive speechifying to shame.”
—Robert Pinsky,
The Washington Post
“Young’s poems are so fierce and
serrated.”
—Jeff Gordinier,
New York Times Book Review
THE HALO
C. Dale Young
Torn
The Second Person
“Young is a doctor as well as a poet,
and [his poetry] demonstrates a
skilled physician’s combination of
empathy and formal precision.”
—David Orr, NPR
“[T]he [poems] are preoccupied
with human frailty, strength,
and lust; with a complex and
contradictory relationship with
God; and with violence in forms
small and large.”
—Dilruba Ahmed, Kenyon Review
Spring 2016 POETRY
from The Vista
Not tenderness in the eye but a brute need
to see accurately: over the ridge on a trail
deep in Tennessee, the great poet looked out
and examined the vista that confederate soldiers saw
as they rode over its edge rather than surrender.
Author Photo: William Anthony
I saw only the cliff’s edge and then
estimated the distance down to the bottom
of that dirty ravine. This is what someone with wings
does when he knows he cannot fly: he measures
distance. . .
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and
teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for
Writers. He is the author of The Day Underneath the
Day (Northwestern, 2001); The Second Person (Four
Way Books, 2007) a finalist for the Lambda Literary
Award in Poetry; and Torn (Four Way Books 2011),
named one of the best poetry collections of 2011 by
National Public Radio. He is a previous recipient of
the Grolier Prize, the Stanley W. Lindberg Award
for Literary Editing, as well as fellowships from
the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony,
the National Endowment for the Arts, the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the
Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in San Francisco
with his spouse Jacob Bertrand.
Fall 2015 POETRY
from “Berlin”
Wire mesh, poplar, that strange dance.
Body by which to bend must move so
delicately like a dull minuet. And you
were magnetic field, voltage against
the eye of sun and bones that grated
Author Photo: Wolfram Koessel
one against the other. O motor
of my limbs, coiling through
the monotone days. How young then,
guarding me against every ruinous thing.
Born in Toronto, J. Mae Barizo is a prize-winning
poet, critic and performer. Recent work appears in
AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, and Los Angeles
Review of Books. She is the recipient of fellowships
and awards from Bennington College, the New
School, the Jerome Foundation and Poets House.
The Cumulus Effect is her first book. She lives in New
York City.
Fall 2015 POETRY
“The Cumulus Effect haunts, surprises,
and fascinates the reader; as if looking
at shape-shifting clouds, always in
transition, we watch how the poet’s
mind travels, as the past travels
through it. There is absence here, and
violence; memories like wounds in these
reflections of a bravely summoning soul
gradually moving to release the past…”
—Jean Valentine
“These exquisite poems display
throughout a mastery of poetic form and
a thoroughly professional command of
surface and tone. It is clear we are in the
hands of a highly cultivated, intelligent
writer. . . . The variety of poetic
stanzas and shapes, all convincingly
orchestrated, showed that J. Mae Barizo
knows exactly what she is doing. Hats
off to her.”
—Phillip Lopate
Publication Date: Oct. 2015 • 978-1-935536-64-2 •
Fall 2015 POETRY
“Reginald Dwayne Betts paid a heavy
price for the wisdom coursing through
his fierce, unstoppable book of
poems, Bastards of the Reagan Era. The
redemption he has found in wrestling,
fearlessly, with the destructive
decisions—and decade—of his
generation’s trials is mesmerizing and
beautiful in the language and rhythms
of his pen. Betts’s journey back—from
prison all the way to Yale Law School—
is as inspiring as it is rare, and should
give us pause in condemning any man
to social death. From rebirth comes
justice—and power.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse
Fletcher University Professor, Harvard
University
“Dwayne Betts describes my field,
criminal law, as ‘the business of human
tragedy.’ He’s right. In Bastards of the
Reagan Era, Betts does a remarkable job
of describing the precise shape of that
tragedy. It comes at the right moment,
too, as many Americans are straining
to see something beyond ‘guilty’ and
‘prisoner’ when they look at criminal
law. Betts is a great poet, and a witness
to truths that have for too long been
shrouded in media fables and easy
politics.”
—Mark Osler, Professor of Law,
University of St. Thomas
Fall 2015 POETRY
Stress this: the lit end
of anything will
burn you. & that is just
just a slick way of
saying: running will
never save you. This
man’s first son caved, fell
to the pressure, to
the barrel’s indent
against his temple.
A body given
back to asphalt.
Stress this: we never
gave a fuck, not ‘bout
Malik or how the
bullet didn’t split
the air, but split those
edged-up, precise hairs
of his caesar, to save
the man the burden
of years fearing death.
Author Photo: © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
For the City that Nearly Broke Me
Reginald Dwayne Betts’s first collection of poems,
Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice
Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom:
A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in
Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image
Award for non-fiction. Betts’s work has also led to
a Soros Justice Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship,
a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes.
Currently a Yale Law student, Betts was appointed
by President Barack Obama to the Coordinating
Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention in 2012. He is a graduate
of the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College,
the University of Maryland, and Prince George’s
Community College.
Fall 2015 POETRY
from “The Longevity of Bone”
8.
Where it says I, it means me.
Where it says she, it means Margaret or Lucy or my poor mother.
Author Photo: Steven Haas
Where it says she, it means said. It means dead.
Not that she was such a good guide, but I miss my mother.
Laurel Blossom is also the author of Degrees of Latitude
(Four Way Books), another book-length narrative prose
poem telling the geography of a woman’s life from Pole to
Pole. Earlier books of lyric poetry include, among others,
Wednesday: New and Selected Poems and The Papers Said,
selected as a Notable Book of Poetry by Shelf Unbound.
Blossom is the editor of Splash! Great Writing About Swimming
and Many Lights in Many Widows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction
and Poetry from The Writers Community. She is the first Poet
Laureate of Edgefield, SC, where she lives. She can be found
online at www.laurelblossom.com.
The market had its worst week, points dropped, ever.
Fall 2015 POETRY
“Dreams are ways in which we can see
what we sometimes don’t want to see,
where in some brief truce we might
work out our human conditions.
Blossom’s book-length poem Longevity
achieves such translation: bordering
the longed-for and the ill-gotten, a
speaker sorts out her survivorship: a
sister, a mother, a dear one. This poem
skirts 9/11, family, and the degradation
of the body in time and illness, as
‘Memory catches on the sprockets
of grief.’”
—Sophie Cabot Black
“. . . Longevity’s narrative arc possesses
the range, density, and richness of
a novel, but Blossom’s long poem is
buoyed by an elegant lyricism that
is wrenching in its musicality. The
poem’s style and structure seem so
inevitable, it would be easy to overlook
the audacity of the book’s project,
which is nothing less than to salvage
our dead. In this wise, generous,
heart-breaking book, ‘Everything
is elegy.’”
—Gary Young
Degrees of Latitude
Fall 2015 POETRY
“Immanence is nothing more or less
than the actual condition of things
as they address the open mind and
appeal to the open heart. In All Pilgrim,
Stephanie Ford conducts a truly
remarkable concert of immanence,
noting musics I’d never thought to hear.
These poems belong unmistakably to
our moment. Tender to every nuance,
yet undeceived, these poems are
amazing.”
—Donald Revell
“‘To do a sly kindness and do it /
without sleeping.’ The poems of
All Pilgrim empty me out alongside
American freeways scattered with the
refuse that bedecks Stephanie Ford’s
sorrowful, resolute observations. A
harm has been done. The unexpected
intelligence of these poems, their
fractious yet layered nuances that
repeatedly push the possibilities of
sense against the sensual, announce a
terrific and very new poetry. I honor
this work and urge you, Reader, to
take part.”
—Cate Marvin
Fall 2015 POETRY
The Other Airman
Author Photo: © 2013 Lisa Ohlweiler
The moon doesn’t snuff itself out.
Does hover, tethered, over fallout shelters.
Tasseled rows of feed corn feel it
as do boys who, in dreams,
take tea with the enemy,
make love to the bombardier,
radio an aria in dashes and dots
over the sea’s flaying mirror.
Did you find, Uncle, in servitude
the mind is composed
as a brain slice under plate glass?
The payload opens its petticoats,
eats a city, goes rococo
while a peony drops its incendiary head
and a child dunks her dolls in the pool,
clacks their plastic bodies together,
calls you saved, and who will tell her.
Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Stephanie Ford
studied at Grinnell College and the University
of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in many
journals, including Boston Review, Tin House, Harvard
Review, The Iowa Review, and Fence. The recipient of
a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, she lives
and works in Los Angeles.
Fall 2015 POETRY
Makeover
I’m only this, and this is not enough.
Because each body is an accident.
Because my body is the opposite
of mystery, and yet I cannot solve
myself. I will not know until I’m shown.
Because I want to step into a life
Author Photo: Ella Schwarz
as a wealthy woman steps into a store.
Because the fountain’s full of coins already,
and the escalator doesn’t pause its glide
upward into grace. I will be more
than what I seem. My heels on the marble floor
will sound like every door in hell thrown wide.
Patrick Ryan Frank was born and raised in rural
Michigan. He studied poetry and playwriting
at Northwestern University, Boston University,
and the James A. Michener Center for Writers
at the University of Texas. He is the recipient
of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural
Council, the Vermont Studio Center, the
Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the
Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Fine Arts
Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland,
where he wrote poems about melting glaciers,
Norse gods, and the end of the world.
Fall 2015 POETRY
“Patrick Ryan Frank offers a view of the
heart through the lens of television,
film and even the stage that—when we
see our lives projected through his pen,
when we find that we’re as naked as the
audience we imagine before us—leaves us,
somehow, both vulnerable to the voyeur
and emboldened by Frank’s direction of
our lives. There’s not only empathy but
also wisdom between the pages of The
Opposite of People, and there’s also the ‘inner
music that words make,’ as put by Truman
Capote, who shows up here for a dance
with Marilyn Monroe. I promise you that if
you spend time with these poems and just
watch carefully for “long enough. . . you’ll
learn a thing or two / about yourself. Not
the obvious. . . .”
—A. Van Jordan
How the Losers Love What’s Lost
“‘About violence they were never wrong, / the
old cartoons. . .’ Steeped in Auden, Patrick
Ryan Frank has written an Age of Anxiety
for our age. His wry, cool, sinister, keenly
intelligent poems probe the pathos of
our world of semblances. In soap operas,
horror movies, and commercials, he reads
our baffled desires and stunted myths, the
destiny in which ‘No one / lives beyond
the planet of himself,’ no matter how
much we pay or play. Frank is a maestro of
disillusion.”
—Rosanna Warren
Fall 2015 POETRY
“In poems of familial and romantic
connection, in moments of mourning
and of hilarity, Okrent’s riskiness proves
her a true love poet. . . . If she plumbs
the depths of loss, she also celebrates
the fruits of labor rightly won, offering
her reader a delicious mingling of
thought and feeling. American poetry is
richer for this book.”
—Peter Campion
“There is a rough honesty to these
poems, even though their language can
often be delicate: ‘the robin’s canticle…’
the horseshoe crab ‘with undersides /
ruffled like pages.’ Okrent’s voice is
intelligent and perceptive, particularly
when dealing with death or the darker
side of sex. This is a deeply felt book.”
—Linda Pastan
“Whether writing as a mother,
daughter, or wife, Rebecca Okrent is an
intelligent, sensible poet. She is as open
to affliction as love, and I admire that in
these pellucid, beautiful poems.”
—Henri Cole
Fall 2015 POETRY
Danse Macabre
Daylight is ferocious,
tears at intention
as a lioness her kill,
so by nightfall resolve
Author Photo: Giorgia Fanelli / Civitella Ranieri
is a carcass, again
you wreath remains
in smoke and ashes, bleach
the bones in bourbon
smut your face in entrails
and pronounce the layers of dark
you fall through
beautiful.
Rebecca Okrent was born in Ohio and raised on
the campus of a boys’ boarding school in New
England. After graduation from Bennington
College, she worked in publishing in New
York, and later as a landscape designer, graphic
artist, food columnist, and editor of an online
magazine. Her work has appeared in The New
York Times Magazine, Travel and Leisure, The
New Republic, and the Boston Globe, among other
publications. She and her husband, writer/editor
Daniel Okrent, divide their time between New
York and Cape Cod.
Fall 2015 POETRY
Love’s Body
Love gives all its reasons
as if they were terms for peace.
Love is this but not that
that but not this.
Love as it always was.
Author Photo: © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
But there is no peace in the mountain
cleft where the fruit bats scatter
from the light.
There is no peace in the hollow when
the heat snuffs night’s blue candle.
The outline of brown leaves
on the beach is the wind’s body.
Jonathan Wells’s poems have appeared in
The New Yorker, AGNI, Ploughshares and The
Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day
program and other reviews. He is the author of
Train Dance (Four Way Books 2011) and edited
an anthology of poems about rock music Third
Rail: The Poetry of Rock ‘n Roll (MTV Books
2007). Wells is co-editor of the Tebot Bach New
World Translation series with Christopher
Merrill and was formerly Director of Rolling
Stone Press.
A crow is squawking at the sun
as if the screech itself is dawn.
Let me hear every perfect note.
How I loved that jasper morning.
Fall 2015 POETRY
“In Jonathan Wells’s new book, love
has as many arms as Shiva. Limitless,
transcending, unchanging and protean,
the poems capture the energy of Eros
for both its terror and tenderness.
Luckily for us, Wells has the formal
discipline and restraint to control such
a whirlwind. This is a terrific book,
serious, bemused, generous, revealing
the most complicated facets of our
human connections.”
—Erin Belieu
Train Dance
“In this eloquent book of poems,
Jonathan Wells meditates on the
vast interconnectedness of personal
relationships, discovering human
unities beneath the surfaces of our
complex and varied experiences of
love, mortality, and poetry. Meditative,
intimate, and precise, Wells finds
insight is such surprising places, ‘a
yardman’s / mitt open-fisted on a
post like an owl’s glower,’ the way the
ankles of wading deer ‘split the river
into twelve new streams.’ The Man
with Many Pens is a musically rich and
moving collection, one I will return to
with pleasure.”
—Kevin Prufer
Selected Reviews
Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts
“Poet and memoirist Betts (Shahid Reads His Own Palm) presents elegy after elegy in a devastatingly beautiful
collection that calls out to young black men lost to the pitfalls of urban America. ‘In the streets that grieve our
silence, children die, / they fall to bullets & asthma, they fall / into each other’s arms as mothers watch on,’ he writes.
Betts keeps his forms as tight as his turns of phrase. In ‘Elegy with a City in It,’ he flips the same handful of words
and their homonyms over and over to meticulously depict the violence—systematic and individual—experienced
by black people in Washington, D.C., during the 1980s. These poems are aimed at readers willing to be moved and to
be schooled, who appreciate poetry’s ability to cull beauty and hope from despair and desolation: ‘They have known
cells like rivers and brown and / Black men returning to prison as if it’s / The heaven God ejected them from.’ If the
raw material of these poems seems depressingly familiar in 2015, their molding is not. Yet Betts cares for more than
aesthetics—he cares to return names and spaces to the dead and incarcerated: ‘For Shawn, & Malik, Quan, & Moe—/
their names all echo.’”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review, October 2015
“Fierce, lyrical and unsparing, the poems in Reginald Dwayne Betts’s new book, Bastards of the Reagan Era, bear
witness to the author’s difficult journey from prison to law school, and the experiences of the men he got to know in
prison. It is a haunting and harrowing book that addresses, through the power of poetry, the same subjects at the
heart of two important best sellers, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Michelle Alexander’s The New
Jim Crow—the trials of coming of age during an era in which unarmed black men and boys are dying at the hands of
police officers, and millions are incarcerated by a justice system that turns people into statistics and warps their lives
and hopes. . . .”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, October 12, 2015
Lighting the Shadow by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
“Her ambitious ‘New World,’ a longer poem that reckons with the legacy of American industry and dreams of
material ascension, identifies and gives shape to specters at work in the present, culminating in a tribute to ‘Broken
wheelbarrows of men/ forming flags, waving the spokes, the unspoken/ labor. The violence of course.’ Yet, as
expansive and outward-looking as Griffiths’s poems are in their subject matter, they are metabolized through the
personal and unified by a continuous speaker, one whose ‘voice is a gold streetlamp corroded by ghost moths.’”
—Publishers Weekly, April 2015
Repetition by Rebecca Reilly
“. . . Reilly produces a deeply affecting beauty, an aesthetic wrench that works the intellect as much as the heart. In
discussing language learning and her elected displacement to foreign cities, she notes that ‘landscape is not colored
in object by object, but driven by verb, in motion, through the city which invents itself, unfolding before you as
you arrive—and so you built a new interior landscape—a whole city without memory.’ And in contemplating the
marking of time via the sky, she states, ‘It is birds who apportion the sky, dividing and distributing it among us.’
Reilly maintains a control over language that is characteristic of the best poets and an insistence on insight that is
familiar from great nonfiction, resulting in a text sworn to its own striking beauty.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review, April 2015
Four Way Books News, Announcements, and Awards
Digest by Gregory Pardlo is the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a nominee
for the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the recipient of an honorable mention
for the Foreword Reviews’ 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and was
nominated for the 46th NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry.
Patrick Donnelly (Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin) was named Poet Laureate of
Northhampton, MA.
Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows by Eugenia Leigh is the winner of the 2015 Debut-litzer
Prize in Poetry.
Clean by David J. Daniels was a finalist for the 27th Annual Lambda Literary Award for
Gay Poetry and the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Kamilah Aisha Moon (She Has a Name) was named a Poetry Society of America 2015
New American Poet, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy.
Laurel Blossom was named Poet Laureate of Edgefield, SC.
Four Way Books News, Announcements, and Awards
Four Way Books is excited to announce a new collaboration with Little Free Library! Little
Free Library is an organization that supports free book exchanges in communities throughout
the world. This growing movement has inspired us, and we’ve decided to become a part of it
in two ways: Stewardship. In partnership with Friends of Washington Market Park, Four Way
Books has installed and maintains a Little Free Library around the corner from us. If you’re
in New York, you can find it near the gazebo in Washington Market Park. Additionally, each
month, Four Way Books selects a lucky library steward to receive a package of books from the
press. In the week since we’ve publicized this opportunity, we’ve already received almost 300
applications from stewards worldwide!
We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2015 Levis Prize in Poetry. Late in the Empire
of Men by Christopher Kempf will be published in 2017. Martha Collins was the judge.
Congratulations, Christopher!
Just around the corner: Bruce Bond, Betsy Bonner, Karen Brennan, Joel Brouwer,
Andrea Cohen, Henri Isreali, Jen Levitt, Nathan McClain, April Ossmann, Glen Pourciau,
Christina Pugh, Megan Staffel, Bruce Willard, and Allison Benis White.
Latitude
degrees
of
a poem by laurel blossom
Four Ways to Submit
The Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry
Judged by Vievee Francis
In 2016, submissions will be accepted from January 1-March 31, 2016.
The Four Way Books June Reading Period
In June, our editors will read poetry, novellas, and short story collections.
It’s No Contest
For a book-length collection of poetry (approximately 48-80 pages of text) in English by a
New York City resident (5 boroughs) for a first or second collection of poems.
November 15-December 15, 2016.
Four Way Review
Four Way Review (fourwayreview.com) is a biannual electronic literary journal from nonprofit, independent literary publisher Four Way Books. We publish poetry and fiction
from both established and emerging authors through our open submissions process.
for complete guidelines, please visit
www.fourwaybooks.com
How to order Four Way Books titles
Our books are available to the trade through University Press of New England,
www.upne.com, 1-800-421-1561.
Individuals may shop through Four Way Books at www.fourwaybooks.com.
You may also purchase our titles through local booksellers and online.
Course adoption information
If you would like to receive an instructor’s copy, please email us
at [email protected].
Author availability for readings
If you would like to schedule our authors for readings, please email us at
[email protected].
We are grateful to the Jerome Foundation for a generous grant that has supported the publication of this
catalog and our books, in particular books by emerging writers from New York City.
This catalog and the publication of our books are made possible by a generous grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
We are also grateful for the public funds we receive from the New York State Council on the Arts,
a state agency.
We wish to thank the individuals and private foundations who have supported Four Way Books.
Four Way Books is a proud member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Four Way Books is a 501(c)(3) organization. Donations are greatly appreciated and may be sent via
our secure website at www.fourwaybooks.com, or through regular mail. All gifts to the press are
tax deductible.
Catalog design: Maisonneke
GREGORY
PARDLO
DIGEST
Digest
by Gregory Pardlo
available now from Four Way Books

spring 2016 fall 2015

Transcription

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