All News Tuesday
Thanks again for all your help picking out the author photo. The winner was #4. Now you will have to wait to see the final version on the book 🙂
New River’s radio show on Art Internation Radio includes two poems of mine being read by a famous New York theatre actress, Patricia Randell. Here’s what they say:
Our premiere show is Emerging Women Poets: 24 minutes of poetry by Jeannine Hall Gailey, Melissa Range, Darcie Dennigan and Reena Ribalow, read by Patricia Randell, Randell Haynes and Lori Myers. Please check it out by going directly to http://urls.artonair.org/newriver (this show will also be featured on their homepage at www.artonair.org all this week).
My poems are the first ones up, and start around minute one!
Two wonderful new books of poetry just hit the shelves.
Kelli Russell Agodon’s second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room has made its debut. Here’s my blurb, so you know what I think of it:
“Agodon’s book is a bright, funny, touching meditation on loss, love, and the power of words. Her genius is in the interweaving of God and Vodka, bees and bras, astronomy and astrology, quotes from Einstein and Dickinson, a world in which gossip rags in checkout lines and Neruda hum in the writer’s mind with equal intensity.”
Jim Brock’s book, Gods & Money, was just released by WordTech Press.
Here’s my blurb for that book:
“Pop culture, poetry, politics, and religion—all subjects that come under scrutiny in James Brock’s book, Gods & Money. With his tongue-in-cheek humor and observant eye, Brock entrances us with his tales of the melancholy romance of soup, the connecting threads between Walt Whitman and the Florida Everglades.”
Also, Steel Toe Books is open for submissions again, this time for books with religious and/or spiritual themes.
In health news, I got a b12 shot yesterday. I run a little low on b12 sometimes, which I had forgotten about (I’m not a vegan or anything!) and luckily the doc checked for it. I’ve been sleeping ten hours a day lately and moving with the alacrity of a turtle, so hopefully this extra vitamin boost will help power me through the parents’ visit, finding an apartment, doing a reading or two in San Francisco in October, moving, and writing two new book reviews. And trying to write a poem a day, sending out subs, and trying to find work. B12 does give you superpowers, right?
Snippet day!
Allison Joseph, an excellent poet who also happens to edit the Crab Orchard Review, was chosen from the last Steel Toe open reading series…read more here!
Annie Finch talks about women poets and mentoring here…and Barbara Jane Reyes continues the discussion here…
Amy King has a great take on the “greatness” issue here
In the mail: my contributor’s copy of The Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and a little check with it! Hey, if every lit mag and journal paid us just a tiny bit, we poets would at least be able to cover our postage!
Some notes:
Friday I’m doing a talk at the local library (an august old building in Port Townsend) for the “youth writing group” on comic books, poetry, and persona. Good times! I’m really looking forward to it. It turns out I really like working with high school kids.
Today I was really excited to get contributor copies of the Spring 2008 5 AM. 5 AM is always compulsively readable and I am honored to be a part of it. The poem in there is completely autobiographical, which is a rarity for me. I’m kind of happy it’s not online, because it’s so personal, but the poem also fits in well tone and subject-matter-wise with the rest of the issue, which means some editors are working hard to make that happen!
Steel Toe Books announces two new books chosen from June’s open submissions: http://www.wku.edu/~tom.hunley/steeltoebooks/news.htm
The choreography on So You Think You Can Dance this season is so lame compared to the last two seasons. no? Still my favorite summertime show. I So Wish I Could Dance. That’s my version.
- At June 04, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Open Reading, Steel Toe Books
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Public Service Announcement:
Do you have a poetry book you want to be published?
Did you know Steel Toe Books’ Open Reading time is the month of June? See this page for details. The cost is only the cost of one book ($12) from Steel Toe Books catalog – you could get my book, or Mary Biddinger’s or John Guzlowski’s or Martha Silano’s – really, nothing but good choices 🙂
Good luck!
Sorry I’ve been away from the blog – I got swept up in politics (the Iowa stuff was so exciting! And I’m just as excited about tomorrow’s NH primary) and socializing (thanks to several friends who made the trek out to see me in my far peninsular corner in the wind and the snow!) and general busywork. I’m still battling a cough and ear thing that has just persisted and persisted, and hoping that our stint of 30-ish weather, bitter cold and greyish skies will break soon for some slightly warmer, sunnier weather. It was 70 today in one of my previous hometowns, Cincinnati. And 60 in NYC…Sigh. Here in the land of rain, fog, bitter cold winds, more rain, occasional blizzards and floods and windstorms, it feels like winter will last forever.
Yes, I am going to AWP (so send those party and reading invitations my way 😉 and I registered just before the crazy thing sold out! I’m not staying at the conference hotel (which I bet will be swamped anyway.) I am looking forward to the bookfair and running into old friends and doing my Steel Toe signing stint with Mary but am nervous about giving the pedagogy paper (eek!) I am also looking forward to NYC, a city that lots of people in the midwest and northwest assume I come from because I talk so fast.
I’ve just been in a bit of a doldrums lately, haven’t been good about writing or sending stuff out, and am still having hassles with Redmond’s post office of disappearing PO box mail, but I did manage to read two worthwhile fiction books – Haruki Murakami’s After The Quake, a terrific and apocalyptic set of short stories set after Kobe’s tragic earthquake where people mysteriously find and lose their souls, and Melissa Bank’s Wonder Spot. Melissa wrote The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which I felt ambiguous about – this book had several spots where I rolled my eyes at the author’s self-conscious cleverness, but also several where I nearly cried laughing and also felt that weird kinship where you’re lulled into thinking “this writer is just like me.” One of those pieces was when the narrator says she “likes Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but not Faulkner” and describes dealing with her claustrophobia at plays by eating lifesaver candy, because then she has the feeling that she can “escape through her mouth.” Ha! I bring candy to poetry readings and airplanes for exactly that reason.
Last of all, praise for my publisher, Steel Toe Books. God bless publishers who actually send poets royalty checks every year, especially when they’re broke after Christmas/right before AWP. I know some poets never hear back about their numbers and their promised royalties mysteriously never materialize. Tom Hunley is great about that stuff. And a big, big “Thank You!” to everyone who bought my book and taught my book this year.
