Hot off the UAkron Press

/ marybid

Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album by Philip Metres is here! It’s the winner of the 2014 Akron Poetry Prize, as selected by Maxine Chernoff, and it is downright amazing. Get your own copy, and enjoy.

Metres pic

Wrestling with the questions of travel, memory, and perception, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album is, at its core, an unrequited love song to St. Petersburg. The fever dream of Peter the Great, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Akhmatova, St. Petersburg is the occasion for a broader meditation on all we come to love and lose. Pictures began as a journal notebook in 2002, as the poet tried to capture this spectacle-rich and memory-laden city that he had visited ten years before. Scored to the movements of Modest Mussorgsky’s legendary suite—a work of art elegizing a lost friend, the artist Hartmann—Pictures marks, and sometimes sings, the incommensurability of word and world.

Friday reading & celebration

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megjohnsonThis Friday, February 5th, we’ll be celebrating the release of Meg Johnson’s newest poetry collection, The Crimes of Clara Turlington. Join us at The Hub Art Factory in Canton at 7:00 pm for a reading by Meg, as well as yours truly, and Eliese Goldbach, Robert Miltner, and Molly Fuller.

We’ve got Holly Brown’s fab new review of The Crimes of Clara Turlington here at Barn Owl Review.

I’m excited to read some poems from Small Enterprise on Friday, and perhaps something brand new, too.

February is off to an excellent start.

The Hub Art Factory is located at 336 6th St NW, Canton, Ohio. Event link here.

SpotiCzar

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The Czar is now on Spotify. Give it a listen!

jaymrobinson's avatarJay Robinson

2015-11-05 10.21.53

The Czar is now on Spotify. Czarname: theczarofczars.

Hence, the Czar can now make playlists for his playthings and otherwise create the soundtrack to the Czar.

In other updates, consideration of cover art has begun. The book has an ISBN. And the manuscript will be delivered on 12/1/15.

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Winter Wheat 2015 beckons

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It’s a cloudy November day in Akron, OH. What better time to pack up books for next weekend’s Winter Wheat Literary Festival at Bowling Green State University. I’ll be there with tempting titles from the University of Akron Press and Barn Owl Review, and I’ll also have copies of Small Enterprise on hand if you’d like one signed. Hooray for Winter Wheat! Also hooray for countdowns to Winter Wheat, and to Thanksgiving, and to the end of Fall 2015 semester.

A thousand uses for SMALL ENTERPRISE post cards.

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Whenever I have box of new book post cards I want to throw them EVERYWHERE. I want to fill a bucket or a tub with the post cards. I want to make a sandwich and fill it with post cards. I want to stuff post cards into bottles and send them out to sea (but that’s probably ecologically inappropriate). I want to stitch fifty or so post cards together into a quilt, and then shiver beneath it. I want to ride a giant post card down a snowy hill.

Instead, however, I’ll just put stamps on these and send them into the world.

Small Enterprise is Born.

/ marybid

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IMG_1040After a long day of teaching, I didn’t expect this box on my doorstep, and for a moment I thought I should wait until morning to unbox Small Enterprise, but then realized I’d be up all night wondering what she looked like. I have so much gratitude to Black Lawrence Press, photographer Heidi Thoenen, and many more folks. But for this morning, I just want to share two photos welcoming my 4th book to the world.