Shopping List? A few recommended Poetry Books of 2012

If you are looking for poetry books from 2012 to buy as gifts (or for yourself) I do have just a few must-buys and recommendations. It’s always hard to pick exactly what I enthusiastically endorse each year, because I get so many books as a reviewer, and so many of them are worthy of praise. However, these are books I have read closely, already given to others myself, and can truly say – this book was a great read more than once! So, this is a short list, I’m leaving out a ton of other great poetry books, but rest assured these would all be great books to give as gifts or keep for yourself.
Yes, I’m including links to these books on Amazon, with the caveat that if you can buy them directly from the publisher or from your local independent bookstore (Seattle’s Open Books is a nice place that I’d like to see stay open!) that is probably the best way to support your publishers and bookstores.

Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin
I blurbed this book but I’ve been a fan of it (reading it in different iterations) for years. Annette writes with compassion, grace, and a surprisingly sharp and humorous eye about her experiences as a nun. This is not your grandmother’s nun poetry – expect a wonderbra or two flying at you from these pages. I can genuinely say Annette is not only a friend but probably one of the best poets I’ve ever read. You will not regret buying this book.

Juliana Gray’s Roleplay
This book of poetry has “geek cred” written all over it. You can read my review up at The Rumpus (http://therumpus.net/2012/10/roleplay-by-juliana-gray/) but suffice it to say that if you enjoy any combination of formal poetry, zombies, and Hitchcock trivia, you will enjoy this book. Juliana’s poetry is funny and smart and the kind of “gateway drug” that will get your comic-loving little brother to believe that poetry can be fun.

Kathleen Flenniken’s Plume
It’s not every book about America’s nuclear history that you can say: the author has actually lived that history. Kathleen worked at Hanford as an engineer, her father worked at Hanford, and she grew up in Richland cheering on teams with names like “The Bombers.” (For sci-fi geeks, a little trivia: Orson Scott Card was also born in Richland, WA.) This book is an amazing and dynamic combination of history of the Manhattan Project, Memoir, and Poetry. This is one book of poetry I could give to my engineer father that he actually read and enjoyed. (My formal review of the book is up at The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2012/05/lie-down-patriot-dont-ask/)

Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning
Sure, he’s everybody’s literary darling now, and his book won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, etc..but Eduardo has been writing insanely good lyric poetry for years now. He’s one of those poets I was begging other poets to read the minute I after I read his first poem seven or eight years ago. Besides some sensitive and keen-eyed tributes to his mother and father – those are my favorites in the book – Eduardo manages to address issues of immigration, sexuality, language, and being the “other” in a way that few other poets could pull off. (Not for anyone who would be put off by a blow job reference or three – these are definitely poems for adults.)

Also want to give a shout-out to: Poet’s Market 2013, a must-have for aspiring and beginning poets and Anything from Kitsune Books: This wonderful small publisher is closing at the end of the year due to the editor/publisher’s serious illness. Please go and buy a title before they go away and do what you can to support them- http://www.kitsunebooks.com/catalog-genre.html. I know you won’t be disappointed with any of their poetry books, but they also have Young Adult, Geek-friendly lit crit, and fiction.

Black Friday Poetry Deals!

In case you’re in the mood to shop – for poetry!

Black Friday through Cyber Monday, get a special deal – receive both of my books (Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World with free (Domestic) shipping and a free gift (surprise!) for $20! Remember, She Returns to the Floating World is about to go out of print at the end of December, so get your copy now! To get this deal, e-mail me at jeannine dot gailey at live dot com with the subject line “Black Friday Poetry.”

Happy Thanksgiving Week – Is it really almost December?

OK, I know everyone probably says this every year, but Oh my God how did it get to be almost December? Have I been asleep in some sort of time machine? Is everyone else ready for the holidays now? Because I am not. Yesterday there was flooding around town, some downed tree branches, but nothing big enough to use as a Christmas tree.

Thanksgiving will mean Osso Bucco and crustless cranberry meringue pies this year. We’re adjusting to my new dietary restrictions and plus, meals made in a Dutch oven rule for going out to the movies on Thanksgiving! (James Bond perhaps? Why isn’t The Hobbit out yet?)

I actually felt really good about the last Redmond Poet Laureate event, Kathleen Flenniken’s reading (for a summary and pictures here: http://redmondpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/11/kathleen-flennikens-redmond-reading-and.html) and loved meeting people interested in poetry. I mean, maybe I feel like I’m starting to have a little bit of a community out here in the tech-center-outskirts of Seattle. Yes, I might even say I feel optimistic. I’m looking forward to Kelli and Annette’s talk on December 6th on E-publishing and social media for poets at Redmond Library (7 PM.) Did I mention how great our library system is? Well, I feel thankful for that too.

I’m starting to get a little nervous/stressed/excited about getting all the book stuff for Unexplained Fevers ready by the end of December for a spring launch with New Binary Press – like, getting a new author photo, working with the artist to get cover art, starting to (eek!) think about setting up readings for the new book next year. Maybe a book trailer? (I do not currently have the skills to make a book trailer, so if you ever see one, it’s because someone helped me out. Maybe more than one person.) I may work with a PR service for the book this time around (YouDoPR is a very affordable PR service that is creating services for poets!) This is all new territory for me. Does having a book coming out seem lie it requires a lot more skills than it used to? But I am so thankful to have a publisher and a publishing date for this book.

So Happy Thanksgiving, you guys, however you celebrate, I hope you are warm and safe and loved. I’m going to decorate for Christmas early this year. We don’t have much money to spend – paying mortgages and car repairs and such has really curtailed our usual spending festivities – but we can start the celebration whenever we want.

Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken visits Redmond!

Today I have the chance as Poet Laureate of Redmond to host the Poet Laureate of the whole state of Washington, Kathleen Flenniken, as she reads at Redmond Library from her new book, Plume, at 3 PM. Afterwards I’ll host a short Q&A, and we’ll serve refreshments, and Kathleen will sign books! I’m really looking forward to hearing Kathleen read poems from Plume again – this is one of my favorite books of 2012 – I liked it so much I bought one for myself and one for my father!

It’s a stormy day out, perfect for curling up with a good book at the library, so come by if you can! (Refreshments include sea-salt-and-cocoa-dusted almonds and peppermint-chocolate cookies…)

Unexplained Fevers Goes to Ireland – Book Announcement for 2013!!

Unexplained Fevers plucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to “rescue the other half of [their] souls.” And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes wandering in the desert – their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also bring forth great surprise and wonder.
– Rigoberto González, author of Black Blossoms

Unexplained Fevers begins with that most familiar of phrases, “Once upon a time,” but the world we find inside these covers is deeply defamiliarized. Trapped by physical ills, cultural expectations, and the constraints of marriage, these heroines interrogate the world and propel themselves through it with cunning and sass. We follow, for example, Jack and Jill though a prose poem where they “somehow turned thirty without thunderous applause,” after having sworn they “would follow each other anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be a lot like Ohio.” At the center of these poems – urgent, mysterious, evocative – we find the great topic of all fairy tales, transformation. Read Unexplained Fevers, and be transformed.
– Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables

Anticipation, New Mexico Poems, E-publishing, and a Tuesday Announcement!

I’ve been busy with things that involve anticipation.

I’ll have an announcement about my third book on Tuesday!

Helping my mom prepare for a big job interview (Good luck Mom!) and signing contracts (!) and thinking about planning events for Redmond all the way through next spring. And November and December are so busy! Also we’re trying to squeeze in all our doctor and dentist appointments before December 31 as our company health care plan is getting much more expensive and paperwork-heavy next year (I hate to say it, but mainly due to the government’s new health care changes. They hurt me more than they help me, but I know I’m probably in the minority that way.) Still, these things require planning. And I’m already worried about next year’s taxes! This is going to be our most complicated tax year ever, I think. So, onward…

I’d like to direct your attention to the innovative project “200 Poems for New Mexico” – and one of the poems is one of mine, “America Dreams of Roswell.”

And Rachel Dacus has an interested post about the lack of e-book publishing  here. I would like here to make a pitch for those local to Seattle to come out and hear my friends Annette Spaulding-Convy and Kelli Russell Agodon talk about this very topic, e-book publishing for poets at the Redmond Library at 7 PM on December 6th, as part of the “Geeks for Poetry” initiative that I started as Redmond’s Poet Laureate. We’ll talk all about e-books, twitter, social media in general. It’ll be grand times! These guys know what they’re talking about, as they have already produced a fantastic e-book of women’s poetry called Fire on Her Tongue. You know, my new publisher is also interested in doing e-books! I think we poets need to embrace new ways to read poetry and get it out to as big an audience as possible.

I’m off to Annette’s reading for her first book, In Broken Latin at Open Books at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s a wonderful book. Check out this blurb. I wrote it, so you know I believe it!

“Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin is a collection that leads us with intelligence, wit, and compassion through a woman’s life in a nunnery and her slow disenchantment with the church. There’s a spark of hidden sensuality and humor hidden beneath the habit, as displayed in one of my favorite poems of the collection, ‘There Were No Rules about Underwear,’ where a fireman breaks into a nun’s room as she sleeps nude, saying he ‘needs to feel your walls to see if they’re hot.’ The poems here contemplate the gruesome origins of desserts created for saints, the daily rituals of women in the convent, performing a fascinating balancing act of playful irreverence and deep thoughtfulness about spiritual exploration.”

A new review on The Rumpus, and some upcoming readings you shouldn’t miss (but they’re not mine)

I’ve got a new (non-poetry) book review up at The Rumpus, of Jeffrey Skinner’s The 6.5 Habits of Moderately Effective Poets. I hope you enjoy it; I tried to have some fun, and the book itself doesn’t take itself too seriously, either.

Here are a couple of local events you all shouldn’t miss. They aren’t even my events, that’s how serious I am.

One is the debut reading at Open Books of Annette Spaulding-Convy and her new book on November 11, In Broken Latin. Here’s the link for more info: http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/archives/000546.html but just let it be known that you are in for some great poetry, AND it’s saucy nun poetry, which I don’t think really we have enough of. It’ll put you in a good mood no matter how worried you are about the election!

The other is the November 17 reading, at Redmond Library, of Washington state’s Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, from Plume. And after I will ask her questions in a nice little Q&A session and you can meet her and buy books and get them signed and ask her questions about Hanford. There will be refreshments. Come out! Did I mention this is the kickoff reading for my ambitious plan as Poet Laureate to get everyone to read one book of poetry a quarter, called “Redmond Reads Poetry?” Well, it is!

The last note is: one more month til my second book, She Returns to the Floating World, is about to go out of print from Kitsune Books, as they are closing at the end of the year. So if you want to buy it in either print or e-book form, get on it! I hear it’s a pretty good book!

And, I may have good news to announce soon about my third book, Unexplained Fevers, which was orphaned after Kitsune Books decided to close. It may be that I’ve found a new publisher. Who might it be? Stay tuned to find out…

Looking for some good news?

The storm coverage is still swirling, NYC underwater, the Jersey Shore in tatters. Election coverage is an incessant background noise in everything from comedy sitcoms to twitter.

So I know we are all looking for some good news, some hope. And then, I don’t know, Disney goes and buys Lucasfilm and announces yet another (inevitably terrible) Star Wars movies? Penguin and Random House are merging. The world, for writers, is looking a little grim. But when has it ever been otherwise? (Yes, I’m also writing this post after a brutal dentist visit – three fillings today with no Novocaine, so perhaps I’m looking for a little cheering up.)

I want to call your attention to a couple of articles I thought were worth reading. One was about the proposition of value that publishers bring to authors. My little brother asked me recently, what is the purpose of finding a publisher for your poetry books instead of just publishing them yourself? In the old days, I would have had a much clearer answer – something about publishers offering authors marketing, financial support, distribution into bookstores, legitimacy, even. Now, in this new era, still emerging with its e-books and Amazon dominancy and ever-shrinking-and-hard-to-find-poetry-audiences, I’m not so sure of the answer. So, do publishers need to offer more value to authors?

Poets are generally so grateful to have a publisher that they will waive almost everything – marketing expectations (even modest ones, say, an ad in Poets & Writers or even on a web site somewhere,) promised prize monies, royalties, say to where and how their work appears – in order to be published, to be “legitimate”. Is the author’s only other option to go rogue, self publish, and push their wares at readings and on twitter? As a reviewer, I’ve often found that small presses’ books are inevitably more interesting and better written than either large press or self-published work. I am a fan of the small, struggling press with one or two people trying to make it work; they have the courage to have a point of view, an integrity of taste, that even when it isn’t your taste, you have to respect.

And onto reviewing – many years ago a female poet told me that I have a duty to review, that there are not enough women reviewing books, and not enough books by women being reviewed. I did start reviewing because I felt it was something I owed the poetry community, to find interesting books and talk about them in a way that might make a reader, you know, want to read poetry. In particular, I wanted to find poetry that other people weren’t already celebrating, poetry that deserved celebration.
Here’s a link to Margaret Atwood writing in 1976 – when I was three years old – about being a woman writer, and about the problem of reviewing in particular.
http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/8/29/in-which-we-change-diapers-and-collect-china.html
The same sexual put-downs, the old sexist stereotypes – is she an “Emily” or a “Sylvia?” – are still sadly pretty freaking wide-spread. Read VIDA’s count to find out if the numbers have changed, because, for the most part, they haven’t.

Did I promise you good news at the beginning of this post? Somewhere floating around the internets this morning was a picture of a big rainbow over NYC, a reminder of the Biblical flood and its inexplicably happy rainbow ending:

(Source: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/rainbow_real.jpg)
If we believe the rainbow, things will get better for us. We will keep writing, even if we’re unsure of our audiences, how to reach them effectively, even how to communicate with our fellow human beings. We will keep creating because it is in us to create, to paint the rainbow even if it is absent in the story, because we all want to believe in happy endings.

High School Poetry Visits and Library Book Groups and Invisible Illness Impacts

Tonight is the first ever “Redmond Reads Poetry” book group meeting at the Redmond Library. I’m excited to try this out, but I have modest expectations for tonight’s attendance. Although I love our first book pick, Kathleen Flenniken’s Plume, and think it will be really fun for a Redmond techie-type crowd to talk about. Hopefully some folks come and we have a good time. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a poetry book club!

Monday I did a high school class visit at Redmond High, which I really enjoyed. Surprisingly, you might not believe me, but high school kids love Gluck. No joke, I have never had kids not love poems from Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands (the first poetry reading I took my then-seventeen-year-old little brother to was Louise Gluck when she was touring for Meadowlands, and he still has a signed copy of her book.) “Telemachus’ Detachment” has got to be one of the best teen poems ever. We also read some Lucille Clifton, and a poem from Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World. The students were really attentive, they laughed in the right places during the class, they were excited to talk about their latest comic book/video game loves, they wrote really good persona poems and then actually spontaneously clapped at each other’s readings of the exercise poems. One in particular I remember was a young man’s poem in the voice of a supervillain, which seemed to be a revenge poem but turned into a really touching meditation on mortality. The kind of poem I wish I had written! The teacher was also enthusiastic and great to work with.”Oh my God,” my husband said when he picked me up outside the school, “I’m on the set of Degrassi.” It is a school full of bright, articulate, telegenic teens. They asked me really interesting and thoughtful questions, like, “Was getting the MFA worth it, or was it mostly stuff you could have done on my own?” And after I answered the standard answer, that the MFA gives you discipline and encouragement and the benefit of experienced mentors, and they followed up with: “And it’s really hard to get poetry mentorship outside of a graduate program, right?” I said: “Not a day goes by I don’t wonder about that myself!” No, I didn’t, but I thought it loudly. They already knew about the youth programs at our local literary center, Hugo House, and about Poet’s Market. They were sure more aware of the writing “game” than I was at seventeen or eighteen.

I have to admit that I think the Poet Laureate work has been taking a bit of a toll on my health, I seem to have a never-ending flu (for about a month I’ve been running 101 fever and waking up coughing in the middle of the night almost every night) and some new migraine/heart stuff I’ve never had before. It’s always an internal argument with me; my physical, emotional, and mental energies aren’t exactly at the same levels, and I need to decide what’s worth the physical energy output, how protective I need to be. This is difficult to talk about in a public forum (anyone with “invisible” health problems like autoimmune or bleeding disorders or rheumatoid arthritis or allergies or MS or etc already knows this, because you look “fine”) but I think it’s worth discussing because a lot of writers have health problems that limit what they’re able to do physically. In fact, Christian Wiman recently wrote a really touching essay recently on his cancer, about having kids and having faith/hope in the face on an incurable and increasingly debilitating disease. I’m learning more – as scientists research more – about some of my genetic conditions, like for instance, with PAI-1 deficiency, a chronic low level of plasminogen may lead to increased inflammation, which may be the root cause of some of these never-ending illnesses and joint problems (although it does seem to decrease my risk of diabetes, at least, in rats.) I may be oversharing, but then again, I want to be honest about the chronic health issues and how that impacts my life as a writer, working, family life, even minor things like not being able to travel to AWP every year because sometimes I end up in the hospital with flu, or have to cancel readings. And I have to be aware of how much I take on, how many social engagements I make, how often I shake hands with children (whom I love, but who are, how shall I put this, terrific vectors for all things infectious.) It puts limitations on a life I wish could be lived without limitation. Then again, if I hadn’t gotten ill, chances are I would probably have decided to become a doctor, or at least remained an upper-to-mid-level manager at a tech company, instead of a poet. The enforced time of rest, of required disengagement from ninety-hour work weeks, meant I have had time to write for the past seven or so years, time to write, in fact, several books and attend a low-res MFA program (as discussed above) and spend time sending out poems – time I might not have had if I was totally healthy, time I might have seen as extravagance I couldn’t afford. Anyway, I just have to make decisions based on the information and health levels I have at the time, and adjust as I go. I look forward to things – like celebrating my fortieth birthday (and hopefully, a third book) next year. Making new friends. Having a positive impact on my community when I can, and maybe even creating, you know, art that makes a difference.

Five Questions with Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken and Autumnal Doldrums

First of all:
A short interview with Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken is now up at my Redmond Poet Laureate Blog here:
http://redmondpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/10/five-questions-with-washington-state.html
Go read all about Kathleen and her new book, Plume (which I reviewed a little while ago for The Rumpus…) as well as her duties as a State Poet Laureate. It’s very inspiring!

So, I’ve been in a serious case of autumnal discouragement, which is odd, because usually September and October are my GO! times, when I’m full of energy and ready to move forward. Part of this has been because of some difficulties at work, some discouragement with the poetry world in general (so much work, so little reward…I know I’ve been doing this for over ten years now, but sometimes writing the checks and submission packets over and over and doing the balance sheets…) and the many little things like cars breaking down, encounters with unpleasant humans doing unpleasant things, long cases of unremitting flu, then the cell phone and refrigerator breaking – I mean, none of these things are tragedies, but all taken together, they certainly have taken the wind out of my normally (I think) perky sails.

The weird thing is that a lot of my friends have reported similar feelings. I mean, we are in the middle of a pretty darn terrible economy, the worst and longest I’ve ever lived through, and that financial woe can be wearing. The elections this year also seem tinged with ill-will and weariness (although I just filled my voter sheet out and felt very American and empowered.) The poetry world is full of stories of presses and magazines folding, universities cutting back, grants shrinking and opportunities overall less frequent. I mean, I still enjoy reading poetry as much as ever, but my own writing has definitely suffered in terms of time and energy in the wake of all the Poet Laureate work, and sometimes I feel like I’m making Herculean effort and ending up with very little to show for it. Is that a poet’s world, after all? Karen Weyant talked on her blog about starting to write short stories, and I admit that I too have been dabbling in prose, flash fiction and essays and non-poetry-book reviews, etc. The question I keep coming back to is: in the current world, is anyone paying attention to poetry? Should we keep at it or try to get our art out in a different medium? The current Poets & Writers talks about the future of poetry. I do believe in a future for poetry, but I’ll admit I’m not sure at this point what it looks like. Twitter haikus and e-books and textual poetry on Tumblr?

Monday I’m visiting a local high school to talk to kids about poetry, and then Wednesday running a book group at Redmond Library to talk about Kathleen’s fantastic Plume. I better get my energy up!

If you’re a poet and feeling discouraged, leave a comment! We should at least try to cheer each other on, right? I hope it’s okay to talk on the blog a little about the bad times as well as the good. At least it’s honest.