Pleiades reviewer Joan Houlihan was deeply moved by Sarah Hannah's Inflorescence, from her word choice to her approach to the subject matter. A sample of her review: ‘A world is evoked in a few words—locked, strung, stirred, outraged—and they are emblematic of the emotional landscape throughout. The last couplet in “The Garden As She Left It,” shows the “dim figure of the woman, / the recent flutter of the hands” and we “see” the departed mother (the air around the broom she left in the garden “furious”—a wonderful doubleness there, the image of dust having recently been stirred up by the broom, making the departure always a recent event in memory, coupled with the narrator’s own “fury” at being left).’

The full review is available here.

Congratulations to Natasha Sajé, author of Bend (Tupelo Press, 2004) for winning the coveted Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The honor was bestowed at the 98th Annual Awards Ceremony held on Monday, April 21st at the National Arts Club in New York City. The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award of $1,000 is offered in memory of a friend and benefactor of the PSA for a manuscript in progress. The award is partially endowed by the Estate of Rachel Dalvern. Other finalists were Kevin Prufer and James Richardson. This year's judge was Dean Young, who said of the winning manuscript, "Resourceful, restless, witty, and substantially intelligent-what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits...Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted, illuminated and stretched."

This year Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT is bringing back its national Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Competition, to be judged by Jeffrey Levine. The winner, whose chapbook will be published by Tupelo Press, will have a reading at the famous Sunken Garden Poetry & Music Festival in 2009. The runner-up will also have a Sunken Garden reading. Manuscripts may be submitted to Hill-Stead Museum between August 25 and October 15, 2008. The competition is open to all poets writing in English. For complete guidelines, see: hillstead.org/activities/poetry_adultcomp.html

Tupelo Press is extremely pleased to announce that Davis McCombs's recently released Dismal Rock (winner of the Dorset Prize) has been the recipient of TWO awards in the past week! The book received the Eric Hoffer Award and the First Place Prize in Poetry from the Kentucky Literary Awards. We offer our sincere congratulations to the Davis McCombs.

In addition Dismal Rock has also been selected as the campus-wide community reading choice for Fall 2008 by Kentucky's Owensboro Community and Technical College. Approximately 700 students will read and discuss the book, and the author will visit the campus as a guest speaker.

The Chico News & Review has written a small but positive review of Elena Karina Byrne's Masque.

In the spring, 2008 issue of Crab Orchard Review, reviewer Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum gives a long and overwhelmingly positive review of Brian Barker's The Animal Gospels “In poem after poem, Barker reaches for insight with the highest lyrical and narrative ambitions, moving within and between time and imagination, at all times examining the strange entanglement of elements that make us who we are. Like the "fizz and flash / of your spent filament" that briefly illuminates the "foggy-eyes stranger" in the mirror of "Self-Portrait With Burnt Out Light Bulb"-like that "smoky globe" which, when shaken, emits a "scarce, peculiar song of broken light"-it is the musical world that draws Barker to the poetic medium.” The complete review is available.

Chad Parmenter of Pleiades has written a comprehensive and highly complimentary review of Brian Barker's The Animal Gospels. He says, for example, “That mystical intimacy is part of what makes Animal Gospels a marvelous first book. It presents the reader with meditations on what it means to be the product of gospels seen as obsolete—those of Americana, of old–time religion, and of the intersection between the human and natural worlds.” The entirety of Parmenter's review can be read here.

The Spring, 2008 issue of The Southern Review contains an eloquent review of Carol Ann Davis's Psalm. Alison Pelegrin writes: “The finest poems in Psalm dwell on small things, itself a reminder that under the watch of the right eyes, everything can be sacred. In “Grief Daybook III,” Davis quotes some liner notes from a Coltrane record, which read, “it all has to do with it,” and she certainly adheres to that premise in her collection, with a song of praise for everything from grief and death, the sound of a child squealing, to stave church paintings.” You can read the rest of this perceptive review on the Tupelo Press website.

Floyd Skloot's eloquent book review, “Portrait of Stegner, Slightly Skewed” appeared in the Boston Globe, concerning Philip Fradkin's Wallace Stegner and the American West. You can read it at boston.com

Two excellent reviews appeared in the Spring 08 (Vol 34) edition of American Poet:

In her second book, Inflorescence, the late Sarah Hannah examines her role as a daughter and caregiver to a mother diagnosed with terminal cancer. A memoir-in-verse, this collection is finely wrought with humor even in its depiction of a time filled with shocking loss and grief. Hannah's unflinching eye absorbs every detail, yet each poem is cleverly punctuated with moments of subtle meditation, such as in “Sister Morphine”:

          Bustle in her dark body
          In the army hospital;

          In the Stones' saddest ballad;
          On our highest kitchen shelf

          I keep her for you—
          Cerulean, sublingual mixture

          Clad in brown glass

The poems of this collection are linked by both subject matter and Hannah's consistent use of wildflowers as metaphorical objects. Poised between the lyrical and narrative, her poetry gently turns us from joy to longing, from brute honesty to restrained grief. Ultimately, we witness Hannah's personal story evolving into a sequence of gleaming, transcendent truths.

In the introduction to O Woolly City, Priscilla Sneff's debut collection, David Baker describes Sneff as “an old troubador poet brandishing the wand of a postmodern trickster, a mixer of syntax and matter, self-conscious song and wild ceremony.” This bold and mature first book inhabits a wide range of forms—from prose to villanelles and rhymes quatrains—while traversing a strange and intoxicating urban landscape. In the title poem below:

        O Woolly City, each thing dings dully as an acorn
        And nothing that's glittery-clad, no sting is found; swain-necked
        Flasks (for don't we all crave beauty and contamination)
        Aren't, and faetted gold's drammed with gorgeous salts underground
        Where love's brooklike dagger shivers. Drat love's daggery thirst.

Sneff's poems speak in complex and playful voices rendered with such certainty that the reader deeply trusts the author and surrenders to her twists and turns of diction and direction.

The News & Observer of North Carolina contains a review of Michael Chitwood's Spill, beginning with this wonderful paragraph: “If you love the idea that poets are whacked-out crazies driven to drink, drugs and suicide by souls too sensitive for this brutal world, Spill by Michael Chitwood and Old War by Alan Shapiro will break your heart. ... [B]ecause they write with the sensitivity of poets, they will break your hearts anyway — just in different, smarter and more useful ways than the wild men."

The San Diego Weekly Reader's March 12 issue featured a cover photo and article on Ilya Kaminsky, titled “Tie This Guy Up, Make Sure He Stays at SDSU”. Here's a sample: “So this is how a Ukrainian poet from the city of Odessa came to live in San Diego. He got his appointment at SDSU because he’s a poet and on the reputation, the strength, of his first book, published when he was only 28, called, appropriately, Dancing in Odessa. It won the Dorset Prize and was published by Tupelo Press, one of the best independent publishers of poetry in the country. It also picked up a couple of other prizes after publication. It’s an astonishingly good book, not just a good first book, or a good book by a young poet, but an astonishingly good book. Period. I could go on about why I think so, but this is not a book review. If it were, the last sentence of the review would be ‘Read this book!’”

CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women, has published a laudatory review of Annie Finch's Calendars. Part of Cindy Williams Gutiérrez's review reads: “In Calendars, Finch is more shaman than formalist. She is keenly aware of the shape and sound of her poems. Whether in a chant, sonnet, ghazal, or even Billy Collins’ contrived paradelle, her skill is effortless: Form is merely the skin that allows her poems to breathe with ease.”

In August 2007, Mong-Lan was a sponsored participant in the Utan Kayu International Literary Biennale, a bi-annual festival that involved eighteen writers from around the world being invited to Indonesia. The festival involved a week of public readings in Jakarta and at the famous Borobodur Temple complex in eastern Java. Representing both the U.S. and Vietnam, Mong-Lan read selections of her work, including poems from Why is the Edge Always Windy? to large audiences.

In November 2007, the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam sponsored her in a series of lectures on Asian-American literature at Vietnamese universities in Saigon and farther south in the Mekong Delta. She met with Vietnamese faculty, students, and Vietnamese poets. At each university, she gave copies of Why is the Edge Always Windy? as well as donating one to the U.S. Consulate in Saigon, whose library is open to the Vietnamese public.

The Valparaiso Poetry Review has posted 2 excellent and in-depth reviews of Duties of the Spirit by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli. They appeared in two different issues of VPR and each is well worth the few minutes it tales to read them. Edward Byrne’s review reads in part... “...[A]gain and again, readers are repeatedly impressed by Fargnoli’s refreshing images of nature – the surrounding landscape and its animal inhabitants, the borders between wilderness and civilization, or the long course of coastline that separates the land-locked speakers in the poems from the vast openness of the ocean before them. Readers are particularly rewarded with poems revealing instances and experiences where contrasting elements of different habitats meet or the distinct environments come into conflict, as well as when an individual resident of one world trespasses upon another.”

To say that Michael Milligan of the Valparaiso Poetry Review likes Pat Fargnoli's Duties of the Spirit is to commit a vast understatement. His review reads, in part: "... Fargnoli so adeptly welcomes us into her world that we find ourselves deeply engaged at the outset, and identifying utterly with the poet. Her sense of place is impeccable – describing, indeed re-creating the physical and emotional landscapes through which she travels, Fargnoli fastens us securely to our own. Concurrently, all countries become the same country, all vistas the same vista – the boundaries between reader and poet dissolve and for a time we inhabit the same realms."

What can you say against a review that ends with "We can go on and on singing the praises for Aimee Nezhukumatathil, but even as a greedy boy we realize we don’t have space enough for avid gluttony, that is, for terrific poetry." Simply put, Alfred A. Yuson, a reviewer for the The Philippine Star, the world's largest-distribution English-language Filipino newspaper, loves At the Drive-In Volcano

Shannon Walsh, Associate Editor at Zoland Poetry, has written a heartfelt review of Sarah Hannah's Inflorescence. She writes, “It is a truly original book of linked poems about the deterioration and eventual death of Hannah’s mother, Renee Rothbein. Of course, this in itself grounds the book within the realm of the confessional; the subject matter of family death; the ever-pervasive form of linked poems. However, this intelligent, subtle, sometimes formal, and always darkly intense book has more depth than such labels can give.” You can read the full review at the Zoland Poetry Reviews section.

Tim Morris, a faculty member of the University of Texas at Arlington, writes on enjoying the fact that Annie Finch, the author of Calendars, has no truck with gloomy poetry. A sample of his review: “... Annie Finch has never hesitated to buck a trend. An exacting technical critic in an age when most poetics is vague, a parsable formalist in an age when the strongest trends in poetry lead toward the free and the obscure, she is also a happy poet in an age (like most ages) when poets are bleak and blear.”

The blog "Dust Storms", which describes itself as "Two chicks from Chuco [El Paso] talking lit", has posted a perceptive and surprisingly intense review of Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Other Fugitives and Other Strangers. In begins by saying that the book is “the type of poetry book some of us may be uncomfortable reading in that it challenges our comfortable distance from homoerotic love, which like all relationships, deals with issues of darkness, dominance and survival. The very things that were once hidden come to light with poems that take from the image of the body, its fragility and fleeting transitory nature and shine. It is the naked body, clavicle, skin, eye, pelvis and its animal nature that makes these poems honest and genuine in terms of the speaker’s dealing with human flaws and triumphs.” To read the rest of this hard-edged review, click here.

Davis McCoombs is the December 5th Poet of the Day at Poetry Daily. Two poems from Dismal Rock, "Noodling" and "The Last Wolf in Edmonson County" are available.

"Grief Daybook II" from Carol Ann Davis's Psalm was Poetry Daily's poem of the day for December 1, 2007.

Spill has been named one of the ten books to buy in post-Thanksgiving 2007 by Susan Davis, who writes for the Raleigh News & Observer. Her recommendation reads, “These are poems that manage to examine the tiny miracles of nature while praising the most profound truths of the universe. Chitwood is imminently readable and accessible, which can't be said about all poets or poetry.”

Davis McCombs's Dismal Rock is recommended as one of the poetry picks of 2007 by the Raleigh News & Observer.

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Tupelo Press is extremely pleased to announce the release of Selected Poems: 1970-2005 by Floyd Skloot.

Selected Poems gathers 99 poems, Floyd Skloot’s selection of the finest work from his widely-praised five volumes of poetry. These poems show Skloot’s technical range and mastery of craft, his thematic development, and his growing maturity as a poet celebrating life while facing squarely its harsh challenges and sudden losses. Selected Poems allows a fresh assessment of this “poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence.” (Harvard Review)

“Skloot continues to be a highly disciplined poet, confronting chaos to capture and tame this enemy. There is ferocity living in his forms, coexisting with the sweetness of vanquishing sentiment.” –Prairie Schooner

“Poet, essayist, and memoirist Skloot writes about family matters, the mysterious realm of long-term illness, the natural world, and the nature of art in refulgent and compelling poems, finely constructed vignettes that celebrate life while harboring bracing visions of death.” —Booklist

Tupelo Press is very happy to announce that Elena Karina Byrne's Masque is now available for purchase.

In verse simmering with sensuality, Elena Byrne eloquently reveals, then carefully slices away, layer after layer of the masks we wear until our most secret selves are exposed. Pretense is overthrown in her exotic and electric imagery, irresistibly drawing the reader into an unabashedly intimate internal dialogue.

“The Greeks highest compliment to Odysseus was to call him ‘myriad-minded.’ Shall we say of Elena Karina Byrne's amazing sequence that it is ‘myriad-masked?’ By turns poignant, intricate, ingenious — Byrne’s poems explore and dramatize the theme of mask into a multiplicity of insights and imaginings almost as rich as consciousness itself.”

        — Gregory Orr

Tupelo Press is both excited and proud to say that Spill by Michael Chitwood has arrived in the office. We have both a paperback ($16.95) as well as a limited edition, signed & numbered hardcover ($100.00).

Your purchase of the special hardcover edition supports the Tupelo Press National Poetry in the Schools initiative. Thank you for bringing the literary arts alive to students in elementary schools across the country.

Spill is a book of spiritual yearning, grounded in the here and now of airport terminals, the backyard, a rainy morning, and a broken down church van. With finely honed, vibrant imagery, this poet’s audacious imagination chisels away at the mundane and unearths the miraculous in his eighth poetry collection. The book is divided into three sections. Chitwood’s distinctive vision begins simply, as he evokes an Appalachian upbringing mired in pious certainty and yet haunted by spiritual craving. We follow the pilgrim’s path in the following segment, as he attempts to wring holiness from the merely terrestrial, finding only fleeting glimpses of the divine. The final section turns contemplative, as the speaker tries to comprehend the course he has taken and find solace and wisdom in his journey.

Chitwood’s verse is sharp, spare and unpretentious, wonderfully surprising and yet deeply profound. Words are neither wasted nor superfluous; he never forgets that this is an honest conversation with the reader, and he uses the common tongue and humor of a man in thoughtful dialogue with his fellow creatures.

Tupelo Press is thrilled to bring Psalm by Carol Ann Davis into publication. We have both a paperback ($16.95) as well as a limited edition, signed & numbered hardcover ($100.00).

Your purchase of the special hardcover edition supports the Tupelo Press National Poetry in the Schools initiative. Thank you for bringing the literary arts alive to students in elementary schools across the country.

Psalm affirms what’s most essential to ordinary life and to artistic expression: the fact that one is permitted to walk the earth and partake of its wonders.

Psalm searches for ways of verifying the world through art and experience. In a narrative arc, Psalm takes the poet from her father’s death to her son’s birth. In between are all the elements of the imagination: faith, art, music, culture. This world expands to include Vermeer’s nuns, Cornell on a bike ride on the Brooklyn promenade and the sound of Django Reinhardt all simultaneous to her son’s cries, his presence. The poet moves forward inside and then away from grief. Her lyric poems begin to furnish the afterlife, even as they do the time before birth.

“There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive.”   — August Kleinzahler

“Carol Ann Davis's poems are so precise they are almost hallucinatory. And in some poems she sets hallucination free.  The precision is true, creating a marvelously jarring effect.  She is always studying reality, with a microscope that creates sure distortions. There is a sad pageant going on in these poems, one that breaks your heart.  And then gives you your life back all over again.”   — James Tate

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Annie Finch

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2008
1:00 PM
Reading
Mother's Day Reading for Peace
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
New York
Telephone: (212) 614-0505
This is the Mother's Day Reading for Peace from White Ink: Poems of Mothers and Motherhood with Meena Alexander, Colette Inez, Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Ostriker, Marie Ponsot, and Jean Valentine

SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2008
3:00 PM
Reading
Merriconeag Poetry Festival
Merriconeag Waldorf School
57 Desert Rd.
Freeport, ME

Floyd Skloot

THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2008
7:00 PM
Reading
Looking Glass Bookstore
7983 SE 13th Ave
Portland, OR
Contact: Karen
Telephone: 503-227-4760
Website: lookingglassbookstore.com
Cost: FREE

Francine Sterle

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2008
7:00 PM
Reading
Open Hearth Poetry Salon
118B South Plaza
Taos, NM
Email: info@taosplazatheater.com
Cost: $7 suggested donation
Francine Sterle will from Nude in Winter, a collection ekphrastic poems. Slides of the artwork about which she wrote will be presented. Q. & A. and conversation follows.

Bibi Wein

SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2008
4:00 PM
Reading
Disturbance at the Edge: the New Pastoral
Sunday Best: Readings at Hudson View Gardens
The Lounge at Hudson View Gardens, Pinehurst Ave. and 183rd St.
New York
Contact: Patricia Eakins, Curator
Telephone: 212-923-7800 X1342
Website: fabulara.com
Cost: $7 admission includes one free drink
Bibi will read from her Tupelo-award-winning environmental memoir, The Way Home. Other readers: Lori Soderlind and Paquita Suarez-Coalla. Reception and conversation with the writers follows.

Cecilia Woloch

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2008
7:30 PM
Reading
The Highlander Pub
number 8, rue Nevers
Paris France
Contact: Suzanne Allen
Telephone: 01 43 26 54 20 (within Paris)
Website: the-highlander.fr
Cecilia will be reading with Jeffrey Greene, Ellen Hinsey and Cole Swenson.

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UPCOMING EVENTS

Patricia Fargnoli

SATURDAY, JULY 12, 2008
9:30 AM
Poetry Workshop: Relationships With Space (weekend, July 12 & 13)
Great River Arts
PO Box 48, 33 Bridge St
Bellows Falls, VT
Telephone: 802-463-3330
Contact: Alexis Doshas
Website: greatriverarts.org/
Cost: $350
Patricia Fargnoli will lead a two day writing workshop on "The Poetry of Spaces". Cost is $350. Participants may register through the above website or by calling Great River Arts. 20% off if you bring a friend. Some Scholarships available.

Annie Finch

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2008
3:00 PM
Reading
The Concord Poetry Center
40 Stow St
Concord, MA
Website: concordpoetry.org/

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2008
12 Noon
Workshop
Kundiman Asian American Retreat (faculty)
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA
Website: kundiman.org
Cost: FREE

Cecilia Woloch

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2008
7:30 PM
Reading
Shakespeare & Co. Books
Sterngasse 2
Vienna, Austria
Email: booksellers@shakespeare.co.at
Telephone: 431-5355053 (within Vienna)

FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 2008
8:30 PM
Reading
Cafe Kafka
Captistrangasse 8
Vienna, Austria
Contact: Hillary Keel
Website: Tupalo.com on Cafe Kafka.

THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 2008
7:30 PM
Reading
"Summer Poetry in Idyllwild"
Holmes Amphitheater at Idyllwild Arts
52500 Temecula Rd
Idyllwild, CA
Website: idyllwildarts.org/summer/programs.

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Tupelo Press
P.O. Box 539
Dorset, VT 05251
USA

Tel: 802-366-8185, Fax: 802-362-1883
Email the publisher

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