Tupelo Press

Publication Date:
August 2010
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ISBN:
978–1–932195–88–0

Price: $16.95

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The Forest of Sure Things is a layered sequence of poems set in a remote, historic village at the tip of a peninsula on the Northwest Coast, near where Lewis and Clark encountered the Pacific. A pair of newlywed drifters has arrived and settled there, starting the town’s first new family in a hundred years. When their second child is stillborn, the bereft family unravels and un-roots themselves. Megan Snyder-Camp’s poems reveal — like the shoreline exposed by a neap tide — an emotional landscape pressed upon and buckling under the complications of grief and the difficulties of language.

With hypnotic, incantatory phrasing and imagery and an innovative approach to chronology, Snyder-Camp tells the story of the grieving couple, then dramatizes the impact of this enigmatic story on her imagination, her artistic practice, and her own new beginnings in married life and parenthood.

Based in part upon a brief, true story she was told, Snyder-Camp’s mysterious yet uncommonly compelling poetic sequence will draw the reader as if along a current pulling through the book. Acknowledging the importance of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Snyder-Camp has spoken of her fascination with where language frays, as we try and use “story” to create what we remember and see where we are. What happens in a place, or a family, or a body, when time catches, or stops?

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Megan Snyder-Camp

Megan Snyder-Camp grew up in Baltimore and received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Washington. She has been awarded scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Espy Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center. She has taught at the University of Washington and the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, where she lives with her family.

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Publication Date:
July 2010
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Format:
Paperback Original

ISBN:
978–1–932195–87–3

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Rebecca Dunham’s thrilling new book is a multilayered account of the struggles and torments faced by women as wives, mothers, and daughters — a psychological journey in which the poet seeks communion with writers from the past, including feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft.

Using the metaphor of a “flight cage,” where birds are held captive, as physical manifestation of the space from which her speakers address us, Dunham reinvigorates the persona poem. Instead of “performing” historical figures such as Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Akhmatova, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she invites them to inhabit her, flickering in and out of sight, refusing an easy artifice.

A virtuoso of the phrase and image, Dunham displays a daring range of prosody. Drawing upon Wollstonecraft’s experimental travel narrative, the poet creates a threshold upon which the traditional “crown of sonnets” can be opened to the sudden breakage of collaged text, remaking both the received form and the now-conventional contemporary experimental poem.

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Rebecca Dunham

Rebecca Dunham teaches in the doctoral creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her first book, The Miniature Room (Truman State, 2006) won the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and AGNI.

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Publication Date:
March 2010
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Format:
Paperback Original

ISBN:
978-1-932195-83-5

Price: $11.95

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Polina Barskova’s poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to This Lamentable City, “Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images . . . with a deep sense of history and culture. . . . In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and . . . (w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address.” Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies — for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005) — this is the first book of Barskova’s poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

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Polina Barskova

In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad — now called St. Petersburg, as before — she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her six books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College.

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Ilya Kaminsky

Poet Ilya Kaminsky is an especially fortuitous translator for Barskova. Also born in Russia, he is the author of an acclaimed book of poems in English, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004), and he teaches writing and literature at San Diego State University. He is also co-editor of The Ecco Book of International Poetry, due in 2010.

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Publication Date:
April 2010
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Format:
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-84-2

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Gary Soto’s eleventh book of poems for adults, Human Nature is full of arresting images and surprising scenarios — and probably more uncanny opening lines than in any book you’ll read all year. These poems pretend to be “simple” portraits of remembered youth and of life at the other end, where a man is walking into old age. Yet their surface transparency gives way to burrowing (often troubling) insights. Over and over he finds arresting, surprising cause for pausing and looking further, deeper, in the motley comedy of street life and family life and the erotic realm of memory. There is comedy on almost every page, but also the sadness of perceived futility. As a poet, Soto’s characteristic vantage is bemused and amused, both. He has long been praised for his rich descriptions and strange imaginative leaps; he is well known for poems of childhood that are really open and exposed, and his work has connected powerfully with teenaged readers and their teachers. New in Human Nature are the bittersweet poems of aging, as an artist wonders aloud how something as quiet and delicate as a poem can hold its own in the raucous, rude, careening mayhem of our national public life. What should a poet do? Keep singing, of course. The muse must be given homage, no matter how worn out she looks. And even in his bruised uncertainty, Soto always brings a distinctive verbal mischief and descriptive beauty to the task of praising our not always very pretty world.

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Gary Soto

Gary Soto is a “multi-instrumentalist,” lauded with praise for his prose and poetry and one of America’s most prolific authors. Poet, memoirist, Young Adult and children’s novelist, and biographer, Gary Soto has also published thirty-five books, including ten previous poetry collections for adults, notably New and Selected Poems (Chronicle, 1995), finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. Soto has been featured as NBC Television’s Person-of-the-Week, and among his dozens of accolades are the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award. Soto lives in Berkeley and Fresno, California.

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Publication Date:
February 2010
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Format:
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-78-1

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René Char is the conscience of modern French poetry and also its calm of mind. Nancy Naomi Carlson, in these splendid translations, casts new light upon the sublime consequence of Char’s poetic character, and in Stone Lyre the case for sublimity is purely made.

—Donald Revell, poet and translator of Rimbaud and Apollinaire

Early Surrealist, resistance fighter, anti-nuclear activist, and exquisite poet, René Char is at the heart of 20th century French poetry. . . . Carlson gives English-language readers a real sense of Char’s depth and breadth. And her masterful translations catch the barely contained drama that gives Char’s work such tension and presence. . . .

—Cole Swensen, poet, translator, and founding editor of La Presse

René Char, intrepid explorer of the marvelous, witness to the catastrophe of history, plowman of ‘the metered field,’ stands revealed in Nancy Naomi Carlson’s splendid translations as a guiding spirit of our time. . . .

—Christopher Merrill, poet, journalist, and director of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program

(T)his new translation of Char’s work . . . shows us . . . the intensity, the dream-like language, the gravity of tone, and the constant impression that one is reading not words in the language, but sparks of flames. . . .

—from the Foreword to Stone Lyre, by Ilya Kaminsky, poet and author of Dancing in Odessa

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René Char

René Char (1907–1988) is among the most crucial of twentieth-century writers. An early Surrealist and close friend of the visual artists Braque, Giacometti, and Picasso, during World War Two he was a leader in the underground French Resistance and later an ardent opponent of nuclear technology. His poetry confronts the moral, political, and artistic challenges of modernity with a prophetic eloquence comparable to the poet-philosophers of ancient Greece.

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Nancy Naomi Carlson

Nancy Naomi Carlson earned a B.A. from Queens College and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Her Char translations have appeared in many excellent journals; her poetry chapbook Complications of the Heart won the 2002 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press, and her book of poems Kings Highway won the 1997 Writer’s Publishing House competition. She teaches at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Publication Date:
February 2010
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Format:
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-82-8

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What do you get when you cross Flannery O’Connor with Gerard Manley Hopkins? Something sprung of rhythm, fierce of feeling, dappled down and doubled over, whistled out of terror and intelligence. Welcome to the work of Martha Zweig.

—Heather McHugh

Martha Zweig’s fourth collection of poems is her strongest. With a voice and verbal texture like no other contemporary poet’s, she transfigures the sonorous traditional English lyric with an audacity that’s rugged and unruly but sublimely literary. Zweig’s etymological wizardry recalls the intoxicating word-play of the rustics and faeries in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yet in their dramatic candor, Zweig’s new poems are also as bull’s-eye direct as John Berryman’s blues-drenched Dream Songs. From the howling, buzzing, frosty reaches of the north woods we bring you . . . Monkey Lightning! The best work yet by a virtuoso conjuror.

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Martha Zweig

Participant in the semi-revolutionary turmoil of the 1960s, Martha Zweig worked for a decade in the garment industry at Concord Manufacturing in Morrisville, Vermont, including a term as shop chair for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and another ten years as an advocate for seniors in northern Vermont, where she has lived since 1974. Zweig received a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1999, and her poems have been published in many of the nation’s leading literary and political journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, The Boston Review, The Progressive, The Kenyon Review, and Sojourner. Zweig’s previous books include Vinegar Bone and What Kind (Wesleyan, 1999 and 2003). Currently she volunteers for North Country Animal League and for Restorative Justice, a community organization promoting a post-police process based on the “truth and reconcilation” approach developed in South Africa.

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Publication Date:
November 2009
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-71-2

Price: $9.95

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Winner of the sixth annual Snowbound Chapbook Series Award

John Cross’s poems are like prickly, finely wrought, shattered gems cast of awe and ruin. They are full of the guilt and pain and the ferocity of imagination it takes to get through the day. Antigone is at home in this world as much as a carny. staring at the animal is a tonally haunting songbook, a rescued hymnal, a guide for when we might ‘start upright in (our) seats.’

— Gillian Conoley, final judge for the Snowbound Chapbook Award

Spun from startling, meticulous twists of language, these poems make the spine tingle. Cross has a way of grounding association and insinuation in quick sound links that are both sensuous and cerebral. These short, swift pieces shoot us over the surface of a world we recognize just before he suddenly makes it look brand new.

— Cole Swensen

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John Cross

John Cross earned an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in New American Writing, Volt, Forklift Ohio, and other journals and was awarded the 2001 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award. He lives in Los Angeles, with his wife and four cats, and he teaches at Westridge School in Pasadena.

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Publication Date:
October 2009
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-76-7

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Tupelo Press First Book Award

Jennifer Militello’s work is ruminative and lyrical but with an unusually theatrical verve, which is displayed in associative leaps so agile that readers will be exhilarated by the imagination at work (and play) in each poem. This powerfully unified first book grapples with what is simultaneously gigantic and miniscule in human existence: the momentous everyday dramas of love and family.

Praise for Militello’s new book:

To walk into Flinch of Song is to enter a very particular kind of house, the kind whose corners sing as you pass them by, whose rooms promise a certain light — profoundly interior — and whose inhabitants seem to know you from the time before you were born. The poems call out, saying Here’s freedom! just as Emily Dickinson once did upon closing the door to her room, happy to be inside something so large. That these poems also glitter with loss and pain makes Jennifer Militello’s first book nothing less than a powerfully honest account of what it takes to survive when we find such freedom.

—Carol Ann Davis, final judge for Tupelo’s First Book Contest

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Jennifer Militello

Author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and widely published in journals, including Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Verse, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, Jennifer Militello has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in New Hampshire and teaches at River Valley Community College.

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Publication Date:
September 2009
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Format:
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-79-8

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A radiant, bravely reflective new book by a poet loved for poems that sing like psalms as they confront the challenges of persisting through time. Following her award-winning volume Duties of the Spirit (also available from Tupelo Press), the recently retired Poet Laureate of New Hampshire reaches further and delves deeper than ever in Then, Something.

From “Wherever you are going”:

you will want to take with you the mud-rich scent breaking through March frost,
     and the aroma of lemons sliced on a blue plate, their pinwheels of light.

you will want to take strawberries you have stolen from the farmer’s night fields,
     and the sleepy child you lifted from under the willow where she’d been playing.


Praise for Patricia Fargnoli’s new book of poems:

Patricia Fargnoli’s poems are vividly and gratefully aware of the comforts and assurances of the natural world; she does not miss a stitch of beauty, neither does she avoid the darker aspects of . . . human awareness of our continual aging, to which she gives sharp and poignant attention. I have been her champion since her first book Necessary Light was published, and I continue to be so.

—Mary Oliver

I love . . . reading a sister or brother poet and being struck by some beauty or truth, or both, and leaning forward and asking myself, How did she or he do that? This is the experience Then, Something gives me, poem after poem. Fargnoli’s ability to see and connect with the world around her, in its motions and stillness, its darkness and brightness, is uncanny. These haunting poems give comfort even when they probe the inevitabilities of suffering, aging, death. Perhaps it is because Fargnoli loves life, no matter what. Perhaps it is because the poems are simply beautiful.

—Alicia Ostriker

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Patricia Fargnoli

Patricia Fargnoli is the author of six collections of poetry. She was recipient of The Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry for her poignant collection Duties of the Spirit (Tupelo Press, 2005). Pat is a retired social worker and she served the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009. She is a graduate of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, the Hartford College for Women, and the University of Connecticut School of Social Work, she was also awarded an honorary BFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Arts.

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Publication Date:
September 2009
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Format:
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ISBN:
978-1-932195-77-4

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The Us, Joan Houlihan’s tantalizing third book of poetry, is a poetic sequence spoken in the collective voice of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Incompatible with a stronger, more advanced culture (“Thems”), the Us must live outside civilization in order to be free and fully alive. Practical and canny, the Us are also possessed by a sense of awe expressed in superstition and ritual. With echoes of classical mythology, age-old legends, and resilient allegory, this is an absorbing and altogether unique book of poetry. Houlihan’s language is ancient in sound and texture yet entirely modern in impact.

From “Froze by winter blast”:

Froze by winter blast
us could not grip on meat or crust,
fingers blackened down to all the hand.

And many fell that time
and so were fewer count of us
coming into weather, loosened snow,
water falling down around the stones.

Us heard command in that.

Praise for Joan Houlihan’s new book of poems:

The Us is like nothing I have ever read or seen. These poems are just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon. . . . In a voice that is elemental ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate . . . in a language both syntactically inventive and radically simple.

—Lucie Brock-Broido

And for Houlihan’s previous books:

. . . These rich, dense poems have a magical realist quality in which the objects and occasions of the everyday are transfigured into talismans brimming with meaning and contained yet powerful emotion.… a unique and vital voice in contemporary American poetry.

—Reginald Shepherd

. . . an impressive control of prosody and an arch yet tender sensibility throughout, often distilling perceptions of the physical world into exacting, resonant imagery. . . .

—Boston Review

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Joan Houlihan

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Joan Houlihan has been a teacher, technical writer, reporter, critic, and editor. Her previous books are Hand-held Executions: Poems & Essays (Del Sol, 2003) and The Mending Worm (New Issues, 2006). In 2004, she founded the Concord Poetry Center, and in 2006 she established the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference for advanced writers. She is also currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing program.

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