2015 July Open Reading Selections

This year, Tupelo Press is grateful to the editors and publisher of 3:A Taos Press for joining us in a six-months process of reading and evaluating each of the submissions, which came to us in record numbers — and record quality. Tupelo Press will publish two of the submitted manuscripts, and 3:A Taos Press, which makes absolutely gorgeous books, will choose one more (that announcement coming soon). Tupelo Press will distribute all three books.

This year, Tupelo Press is proud and honored to select for publication:

Leprosarium by Lise Goett of Taos, New Mexico.

Leprosarium was the 2012 winner of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in Poetry from the Poetry Society of America. Lise Goett’s other awards include The Paris Review Discovery Award, The Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry, the Capricorn Prize, the James D. Phelan Award, and The Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first poetry collection, Waiting for the Paraclete (Beacon), as well as postgraduate fellowships from The Milton Center and the Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Image, Mandorla, and the Antioch Review.

and

A Certain Roughness in their Syntax by the contemporary Argentine poet Jorge Aulicino in translation by Judith Filc of Beacon, New York.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Judith Filc received a medical degree from Buenos Aires University, but decided instead to pursue a PhD in literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first of four volumes of poetry appeared while still a medical student. Judith’s translations include poetry and fiction, public opinion research, women’s health and rights, and scholarly work in a variety of fields. She has taught creative writing in both Argentina and the US, in English and Spanish. In 2002 she returned to the US as a visiting scholar at Columbia University and decided to settle in the Hudson Valley, New York where she lives with her husband and son.

Jorge Aulicino has played a key role in the Argentine and Latin American poetry scene for more than thirty years as a poet, translator, journalist, and editor. He has published twenty poetry books, among them, La caída de los Cuerpos (The Fall of the Bodies), Hombres en un Restaurante (Men at a Restaurant), La línea del Coyote (The Line of the Coyote), and Cierta dureza en la Sintaxis (A Certain Roughness in Their Syntax). He has translated the work of Cesare Pavese, Pier Paolo Passolini, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, John Keats, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore, among others.

So many poets believe that Not Getting Selected is the same as “Rejection.” Not so, though of course it may feel that way, we read and fall in love with so very many books, and there must be at least 100 submissions we’d publish if we had the time and money. Therefore, it’s so important for poets to keep the manuscripts coming back, to keep them in front of us. It’s a vital part of the process of discovery and rediscovery (and revision).

Although the July Open Reading Period at Tupelo Press is not a contest (and therefore we don’t specify “finalists” or “semi-finalists”) we do want to single out manuscripts that we felt deserving of special mention this time around. Think of these as “Honorable Mentions,” all on the table right up to the final minute (and so many others, nearby, calling to us):

The Somatic Wager by Kristin George Bagdanov of Fort Collins, Colorado
Before by Jennifer Barber of Brookline, Massachusetts
Consequences of the Laws of Thermodynamics by Samiya Bashir of Portland, Oregon
Unburdened Blood, translations from the Spanish of poetry by Jeannette Clariond, by Curtis Bauer of Lubbock, Texas
Water Soluble Girls by Jessica Beyer of Baltimore, Maryland
Tramp by Joelle Biele of Ellicott City, Maryland
Technicolor by Michelle Brooks of Albuquerque, New Mexico
Acacia Road by Aaron Brown of Hutchinson, Kansas
Not Everything Lost Is Lost by Deborah Brown of Warner, New Hampshire
A Strange Insomnia by Christina Cook of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The Body of the World by Mary Easter of St. Paul, Minnesota
Scrap: On Louise Nevelson by Julie Gard of Duluth, Minnesota
The Brighter House by Kim Garcia of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Hum of Our Blood by Madelyn Garner of Denver, Colorado
Einstein’s Imaginary Daughters by Jennifer Givhan of Albuquerque, New Mexico
heft and sing by Doyali Islam of Toronto, Canada
as burning leaves by gabriel jesiolowski of Seattle, Washington
Slow Scrape by Tanya Lukin-Linklater of North Bay, Canada
The Stone in the Air, translations from the German of selected poems of Paul Celan, by Daniel Tobin of Boston, Massachusetts
The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence by Leslie Ullman of Arroyo Seco, New Mexico
Republic of Mercy by Sharon Wang of Ridgewood, New York
Kinship by Matt Yurdana of Portland, Oregon
And so many others. Keep faith. Believe in your work. What you do as poets matters more in the world than even you know.

Jeffrey Levine
Tupelo Press