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In her second book, Jennifer Militello uses symptoms, diagnostic tests, and antidotes to illuminate tensions of identity that are central to illness and health. An endangered psyche confronts maladies and faces gods in poems that embody the complexities of self. Selected by Marilyn Hacker as a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, Body Thesaurus examines the failing conduit of human physicality, offering beauty as a counter-stream to struggle.
“Militello is one of our richest younger poets, and the poems of Body Thesaurus are opulent in their ‘goldrush want.’ ‘Dear body I do not resent, / experiment with me,’ she implores. Body Thesaurus is a haunted and haunting voyage through the body’s analogies, which expand to embrace whole worlds: the sensual, the material, and the spiritual.” — G. C. Waldrep
“In the face of supreme, and therefore extreme, quietude (‘The mouth of me is bitten off’), Jennifer Militello’s poems hand us over to that other life we nightly receive in dream, a dimension at once seamless and yet so strange. Body Thesaurus proves the self in despair is a self in a state of repair. As such, these poems prove the wrongs, wrong the rights, and disarm. Wronged enough by the world (which is god) to be compelled to conduct the many instruments of the body to sing their senses disharmonious, these poems don’t merely delve the psyche’s depths, they harrow, and they harrow fantastic.” — Cate Marvin
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Jennifer Militello is the author of Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and Body Thesaurus, named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best New Poets 2008. She is also the author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. |
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Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Lynn Emanuel
domina Un/blued dislocates the traditional slave narrative, placing the slave’s utterance within the map and chronicle of conquest. Charting a diaspora of the human spirit as well as a diaspora of an individual body, Ruth Ellen Kocher’s award-winning new book reaches beyond the story of historical involuntary servitude to explore enslavements of devotion and desire, which in extremity slide into addiction and carnal bondage.
“Ruth Ellen Kocher’s masterful fourth volume of poetry domina Un/blued is a book-length meditation on ownership, dominion, and domination. With admirable dexterity the book both decries power and celebrates empowerment. Perforated by white space, the poems seem to hover above the page, systematically undermining a linear reading. domina Un/blued is at once deeply moving and wildly intelligent… a wonderful book—sophisticated, beautiful, and innovative”— Lynn Emanuel
”domina Un/blued is resolutely austere, with each lyric appearing to start from the erasure of the preceding—like snowfall atop a snow bank. ‘Atop’ because these are chilling poems about power and powerlessness where the speaker seems ‘beautifully removed’ like ‘a lover’s eye//…a continent unto itself’; leaving the reader subject to the stark authority of Kocher’s eerie tableaux, her dissolutions of language, love and personhood. I did not read this book, I submitted to it.”— Douglas Kearney
”In domina Un/blued, Ruth Ellen Kocher painstakingly manipulates verse, visual field, and linguistics to reveal the historical violence and very personal implications of dominion, enslavement, and diaspora. The poems stutter and shudder through their observations toward their discoveries, merciless, feminist, and unforgiving. This is a book about power and powerlessness, and about suffering, about which Kocher is, unfortunately, never wrong.”— Kathy Fagan
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Ruth Ellen Kocher’s previous books include Desdemona’s Fire (Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets; Lotus Press, 1999), When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (Green Rose Prize; New Issues, 2001), and One Girl Babylon (New Issues, 2003). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Colorado-Boulder. |
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Calendars of Fire is an extended elegy whose grief is political as well as personal. Across barriers of tribe, history, and mortality, these poems carry us home with their music to a dwelling place in our own resonant bodies.
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Lee Sharkey is the author of six chapbooks and three previous full-length collections of poems, most recently A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid Press, 2008). She was the Maine Arts Commission’s 2010 Fellow in Literary Arts and recipient of the 1997 Rainmaker Award in Poetry, chosen by Carolyn Forché. Since 2003, she has co-edited the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest literary magazines. |
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In 2007, the Tupelo Press Poetry Project was established to provide poets and creative writing teachers with engaging, challenging prompts or provocations for writing new poems.
The Winter 2012 edition of the Poetry Project celebrated Valentine’s Day with a simple challenge: write a stunningly good erotic poem. Be bad. Be good and bad. To our delight, that challenge was met and then some. Sensual, witty, cerebral—the results are this anthology, modest in size only, which includes the winners, plus our favorites of the submissions.
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Marie Gauthier, Director of Sales & Marketing of Tupelo Press, is the author of a chapbook, Hunger All Inside (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Recent poems can be read or are forthcoming in The Common, Cave Wall, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She won a 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in addition to Honorable Mention in 2010. |
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Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize. A third book Jubilo will be published in 2013. |
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We are grateful to the Antonia and Vladimir Kulaev Cultural Heritage Fund for a generous grant in support of this book’s creation and publication.
Award-winning journalist, artist, and educator Patricia Rosoff offers a first-hand tour of the sometimes shocking, often challenging ideas and approaches that continue to fuel the art of today. Rosoff describes the sources of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed media in the works of such radicals as Monet, Kandinsky, and Joseph Cornell, who are now part of the tradition but who keep on catalyzing experimental innovators such as Ellen Carey, Spencer Finch, Janine Antoni, and Iñigo Manglano-Ovale.
With close (and sympathetic) consideration of conceptualists, including works by Sol LeWitt and Mierle Ukeles, and with special excitement about the inexhaustible potential in abstract art, Pat Rosoff is the gallery or museum guide you’ve always wished to have along.
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Patricia Rosoff is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA in Painting); she received her Master’s degree from Hartford Art School. Former Chair of the Creative Arts Department, she serves as Academic Dean of Humanities at Kingswood Oxford School, where since 1975 she has taught studio art and art history. Rosoff was first published Arts Magazine and was art critic for the Hartford Advocate newspaper, 1994–2007. Her essays frequently appear in Art New England and the magazine Sculpture. |
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In her Los Angeles Review of Books essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves,” Dana Levin describes Stacey Waite’s fusion of gender identities: “Pseudonyms, heteronyms, personae, all the ventriloquizing literary arts; point of view and tonal shifts: these are tools for speakers and speaking. But the sentence too has a voice: ‘i will not be the kind of boy who can not bear the memory of her body’ ... This is [Waite’s] genius ... to take innocuous syntactical phrasing and change the players mid-sentence — to get around English’s pronominal either/or by creating a syntactical both/and...”
“In this arresting collection, Stacey Waite is a pathfinder, charting with disarming honesty, humor, pathos and willful perplexity the uncertain terrain of gender in ways that shatter assumptions, unsettle easy presumptions, and yet, through the sheer grace of her craft and deft language, that open us to the beauty of our strange human enterprise.”
— Kwame Dawes
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Stacey Waite is the author of three collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O’Hara Prize), Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007), and the lake has no saint (winner of Tupelo’s 2008 Snowbound Chapbook Award). With both an M.F.A. in poetry and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pittsburgh, Waite now teaches courses in writing, gender studies, and pedagogy as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. |
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With support from the Irvine Foundation, Tupelo Press is proud to partner with Small Press Distribution and BookMobile to create our first e-book, Jan Richman’s Thrill-Bent. Watch the Tupelo website for details!
Journalist and armchair thrill-seeker Jan Richman gets a freelance assignment to write about the nation’s old-fashioned wooden roller coasters. Jan takes off across the U.S. to report on a fanatical sub-culture. This picaresque research junket dovetails with the wedding of her Tourette’s-riddled father, whom she hasn’t seen in years. Brazen and stingingly funny, Thrill-Bent zooms from Coney Island to New Orleans to the San Fernando Valley as our heroine learns how to be truly impulsive in a buttoned-down world.
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Jan Richman’s Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything (Louisiana State University Press) was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 1994 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has received an NEA grant in Literature, a Nation/Discovery Award, the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Felix Pollack Poetry Prize from the University of Wisconsin, and a San Francisco Bay Guardian Poetry Prize. She has a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University, and has taught writing at Brooklyn College, the Academy of Art University, and San Francisco City College. Richman lives in Oakland, California. |
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The Vital System is the first published book by a poet already setting off sparks among readers across the globe. In these poems, the body is always at stake — vulnerable — and the poet dares to try and illuminate what she has called “the protective capability of violence.” Burroughs’s compression of phrasing, subverted syntax, and ability to release a story through cinematically sequenced images allow her to expose particular tensions that are gendered and racial as well as essentially human.
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CM Burroughs was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned degrees from Sweet Briar College and the University of Pittsburgh. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Idyllwild Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and Callaloo Writers Workshop, and both the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum have commissioned her to create poetry in response to art installations. She lives in Chicago where she is the Elma Stuckey Emerging Poet-in-Residence at Columbia College. |
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Selected by Patricia Fargnoli as winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award
A meditation on the death of a mother, Meridian measures the hours and reflects on how experience collapses and elongates time, creating a lens through which we can look at how we’re connected and separated. And the poet asks: Is music our best refusal to accede to the irrationality of death?
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Kathleen Jesme is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Plum-Stone Game (Ahsahta, 2009); Motherhouse, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize (LSU, 2005); and Fire Eater (Tampa, 2003). Jesme holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and a BA in English from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Minnesota on a tree farm and works as a training consultant. |
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This is an inspiring book about writing and—more unusually—a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action despite every kind of obstacle. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition’s adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote: obsession. Ultimately Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as “a good secret” for our time, when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat.
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Lee Upton is the author of twelve books, including five collections of poetry, a novella, and four books of literary criticism. Her short stories have also appeared widely. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the National Poetry Series Award, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and the Miami University Novella Award. She is Writer-in-Residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College. |
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In his seventh poetry collection, Alan Michael Parker aims to surprise. Recombining lists, fables, and mathematical equations, Long Division is formally playful, wielding irony as a lever of political resistance. Here is a writer fascinated by comedy, by sadness, and by the unexpected ways that poetry makes both possible at once. When was the last time you laughed out loud reading poems? Parker’s new work is truly funny, exposing the impossibility of realism in a world where imagination is more trustworthy than experience.
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In addition to six other books of poems, Alan Michael Parker has published two novels and served as editor of the whimsical anthology, The Imaginary Poets (Tupelo, 2005). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The Best American Poetry 2011, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at Davidson College and in the Queens University low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in Davidson, North Carolina, with the artist Felicia van Bork. |
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In the late nineteenth century, in Washington Square, two children play with a red balloon... and so begins the strange romance between Daniel, beautiful and tiny, and Grace, known as The Fat Princess, an orphaned girl whose enormous girth matches her wealth. Each wishes for a life of the mind, for artistic mastery, to be read and to be understood — most of all by each other — but through their lives, the couple only occasionally meet, until Daniel uncovers Grace’s great secret in her House of Death.
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James Friel was born in the northwest of England to Irish parents from Donegal, his mother a native Gaelic speaker. In addition to four previous novels, he has adapted works of fiction for radio, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. He is Programme Leader for the M.A. and Ph.D. in Writing at Liverpool’s John Moores University, and he is Visiting Writer at L’Universite de Rouen, France. |
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Editors Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler have gathered conversations with nineteen of America’s leading poets, reflecting upon their diverse experiences with spirituality and the craft of writing. Bringing together poets who are Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan, Native American, Wiccan, agnostic, and otherwise, this book offers frank and thoughtful consideration of themes too often polarized and politicized in our society. Participants include Li-Young Lee, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forché, Gerald Stern, Christian Wiman, Joy Harjo, and Gregory Orr, and others, all wrestling with difficult questions of human existence and the sources of art.
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Ilya Kaminsky is author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004) and co-editor of The Ecco Book of International Poetry (2010) and editor of This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Barskova (Tupelo, 2010). He teaches at San Diego State University and in the New England College M.F.A. Program. He lives in San Diego, California. |
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Katherine Towler is the author of a trilogy of novels: Snow Island, Evening Ferry, and Island Light. She consults with schools and non-profits on publications and promotional materials, and teaches in the MFA Program in Writing at Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. |
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A Tupelo Press Lineage Series publication
Intimate is a hybrid memoir and “photo album” that blends personal essay, historical documentary, and poetry to examine the tense relationship between self, society, and familial legacy in contemporary America. Typographically innovative, Intimate creates parallel streams, narrating the stories of Rekdal’s Norwegian-American father and his mixed-race marriage, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and Curtis’s murdered Apsaroke guide, Alexander Upshaw. The result is panoramic, a completely original literary encounter with intimacy, identity, family relations, and race.
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Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000; Vintage, 2002), and three books of poetry. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. Her poems and essays have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, NPR, and Nerve, and in many literary journals. |
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Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield
The aftermath of death leaves many of us dumbstruck—turned inward and inarticulate. Having lost both parents, poet Rusty Morrison attempts to find in that shocked silence a language scored by the intimacy of that aloneness with death. Each poem-series in this book of multi-part sequences evolves a new form, stretching every sentence past expectation so as to disrupt the truisms of grief and find affinities in the shifting flux that death discloses. Readers are offered what the poet experienced in the writing process, not relief but a heightened intensity. Beyond elegy, Morrison’s new work embodies the volatility of death in life, which mourning allows us to experience.
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Rusty Morrison’s book of poems the true keeps calm biding its story was chosen by Susan Howe for the Poetry Society of America’s DiCastagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, chosen by Peter Gizzi, and was then selected by Rae Armantrout, Claudia Rankine, and Bruce Smith for the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award. Her previous book Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry, selected by Forrest Gander. She lives in Richmond, California, and is Omnidawn’s co-publisher. |
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There’s an undeniable audacity in a poet using the word “joy” in our beleaguered world. In her new book, Karen An-hwei Lee combines scientific precision and an appetite for far-flung vocabularies with a fascination for the sources of rapturous emotion.
In poems that roam from the intimacy of prayer to the art of brewing tea, from bamboo-related famine to quasars, the globe’s minor seas, and the nuptial flight of ants, Phyla of Joy reaches toward ecstasy.
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Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), selected for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize by Heather McHugh and chosen for the Norma Farber First Book Award by Cole Swensen. A former writing resident at the MacDowell Colony of the Arts and the Millay Arts Colony and recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts grant, she currently chairs the English Department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist. |
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Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award, Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Babel’s Moon eulogizes an immigrant grandfather, and in doing so explores boundaries that are at once geographic, historical, and cosmological. Brandon Som’s first book moves between vigorously detailed descriptive poems and austere, atmospheric lyrics as he finds new ways of reaching for (and even crossing) the horizons.
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Brandon Som holds degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Pittsburgh and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Creative Writing and Literature program at the University of Southern California. Recent work has been published in Best New Poets 2007, McSweeney’s Poets Picking Poets, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. |
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In Marc Gaba’s poems, austere typography reveals by suggestion, never declaration. In phrasing and imagery as precise as pencil drawings, the page’s white spaces are as active with import as what is visible. Have swerves formally among varied styles, constructing and awakening through the sign-language of a physical book an irrefutable question: Could any of us say that our life is our own?
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Marc Gaba is from Quezon City, Philippines, where he continues to live. He received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Also a visual artist who has had solo and group exhibitions, he is curator of the art gallery Krem Contemporary Art. Previous publications include two chapbooks and Atomic Neutral, a single-edition collection of poems published as part of an exhibit, Birdsounds. |
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Can we ever truly know another person, however well-loved? Brainy, decent, funny, and likeable, the members of Horace Houseman’s family and his closest friend possess quirky and compelling interior lives that they reveal to no one else. Nothing Can Make Me Do This, David Huddle’s tenth work of fiction, enters the minds of Horace, Eve, Hannah, Clara, Bill, and others over fifty years, leaping in chronology an intersecting the vantage points, in a kaleidoscopic vision of a contemporary clan (and their secrets).
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David Huddle holds the 2012-13 Acuff Chair of Excellence at the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts in Tennessee. Previously he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Hollins University in Virginia. He taught for thirty-eight years at the University of Vermont and continues to teach at the Bread Loaf School of English. He has published seventeen books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His novel The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was named a Distinguished Book of the Year by Esquire and a best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In 2012, LSU will publish his seventh poetry collection, Black Snake at the Family Reunion. |
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Floyd Skloot’s new book gathers sixteen stories that combine unsentimental comedy and forceful emotion. As in his award- winning poetry and memoirs, Skloot’s fiction shows how individual people, families, and communities face the starkest of challenges, including bodily maladies, the most harrowing of which often come with aging. Yet alienating experience can lead to moments of powerful intimacy, as dark times are lit by sudden incursions of love and hope, and a yearning for community summons poignant expression.
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Floyd Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including two volumes of poems from Tupelo Press, and the acclaimed memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith (2008). The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, and other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg, live in Portland, Oregon. With his daughter Rebecca Skloot, he edited Best American Science Writing 2011. |
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A buffeting sequence of dramatic monologues that provoke and disturb, Larissa Szporluk’s Traffic with Macbeth evokes a dark world linked to the black magic of Shakespeare’s tortured Scottish assassin, usurper of kings. Baroque in their sweep of high style and low slang, melody and dissonance, these poems use shifting animate and inanimate speakers and surrealist leaps to convey human brutality, the vulnerability of women and children, madness, and the struggle to escape the limitations of this world.
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Larissa Szporluk is the author of four previous books, including Embryos & Idiots (Tupelo, 2007). Born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she studied literature and writing at the University of Michigan, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of California–Berkeley, and the University of Virginia. She is an associate professor at Bowling Green State University. |
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Atlas Hour is a collection of poem-maps whose cosmology embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis’ Terezin transit camp and the poet’s own children. Sifting and selecting moments in history and in the annals of art, these poems bring the stuff of everyday into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed.
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Carol Ann Davis’s first collection Psalm appeared from Tupelo Press in 2007, the same year she was awarded a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Recent work has appeared in Volt, Agni, and The Threepenny Review. She directs the undergraduate creative writing program at The College of Charleston in South Carolina and serves as co-editor of the journal Crazyhorse. |
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