April’s Good Stuff

News & new things from/with/about poets & writers in the Porkbelly family.

 

Pray, Pray, Pray by E. Kristin Anderson (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Set the Garden on Fire by Chen Chen (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Love Me, Anyway by Minadora Macheret (cover artist: Sharmon Davidson)

How Darkness Enters a Body by Sarah Nichols

Apples or Pomegranates (cover art: Anita Olivia Koester)

Dry Spell by Patrick Kindig (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (cover: Nicci Mechler)

The Girl by Donna Vorreyer (cover image: Alexandra Eldridge)

A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road by Amorak Huey (cover image: Alexandra Eldridge)

Found Footage by Maggie Woodward (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Dreamland for Keeps by Sarah Nichols (cover artist: Nicci Mechler)

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Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, 2018) & How Darkness Enters a Body (Porkbelly Press, 2018) by Sarah Nichols » @onibaba37

• One of Sarah’s Elizabeth Short poems appears in Drunk Monkeys: “Elizabeth Short Visits the Black Lodge.” Interested in more poems like this? Dreamland for Keeps (Porkbelly Press, 2018) has released this month—it’s a whole chapbook of erasure poems.

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Found Footage (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
by Maggie Woodward

• 5 poems are up at inferior planets!
• Anna Sandy Elrod reviews FOUND FOOTAGE over at Real Pants!

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Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Chen Chen » chenchenwrites.com

• Congratulations to Chen Chen on accepting the 2018 – 2020 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University!
• Chen’s “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party” up at poem-a-day. You can hear him read it here!
• When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry.

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Love Me, Anyway (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
by Minadora Macheret

• Congratulations to Minadora Macheret on winning the Justin Q. Owens Convention Theme: Creative Writing award from Sigma Tau Delta’s 2018 Convention!

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Apples or Pomegranates (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Anita Olivia Koester » anitaoliviakoester.com

• Anita’s manuscript Cartography of Grief was a runner-up in the Dorset Prize (selected by Dana Levin via Tupelo Press).
• “Cartography of a Missing Body” & “Cartography of a Keyhole” (two father poems) in the new issue if Up North Lit.

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Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
by Lindsay Lusby » lindsaylusby.com

• Lindsay’s manuscript Catechesis: a postpastoral was a finalist in the Dorset Prize (selected by Dana Levin via Tupelo Press).
• Blackbird Whitetail Redhand was released this month! The chapbook is handbound (Japanese stab binding) and features letterpress covers. » order

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A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016) by Amorak Huey » amorakhuey.net

• “Captain Picard Teaches My Son to Throw a Football” is up at Beech Street Review.
• Congratulations to Amorak Huey for winning the 2018 Vern Rutsala Prize. His book Seducing the Asparagus Queen is due out in late-summer via Cloudbank Books.

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Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016)
by Patrick Kindig

• Patrick Kindig reads three poems at The Poets Weave.

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The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Donna Vorreyer

• a new piece, “Painting Which is in Fact Not a Sky” is up in Juxtaprose.

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Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the Middle of the Night (Porkbelly Press, 2015) by E. Kristin Anderson » www.ekristinanderson.com

• A new essay up at Cotton Xenomorph in their manifestos series: “Anderson’s Rules for Writing Found Poetry.”
• EKA’s essay “Everything Could Never Be This Real” is up at Memoir Mixtapes!

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First Bacon of Fall (September’s Good News)

 

Apples or Pomegranates (cover art: Anita Olivia Koester)

hiku [pull] by James A. H. White (cover: Nicci Mechler)

A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road by Amorak Huey (cover image: Alexandra Eldridge)

Set the Garden on Fire by Chen Chen (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen into the Bay (Porkbelly Press, 2016) by Sarah Ann Winn (cover: Angie Reed Garner)

MEXICAMERICANA by Eloisa Amezcua (cover artwork: Sharmon Davidson)

Dry Spell by Patrick Kindig (cover: Nicci Mechler)

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Apples or Pomegranates (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Anita Olivia Koester » anitaoliviakoester.com

• “Constellation with False Moon” is up at Glass Poetry Journal.

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Love Me, Anyway (Porkbelly Press, 2018)
by Minadora Macheret

• “She Called Them All Bandit-God or How My Grandmother Survived the Holocaust” is up at Red Paint Hill.

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Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen into the Bay (Porkbelly Press, 2016) by Sarah Ann Winn » bluebirdwords.com

• Haunting reviewed by Kimberly Ann Southwick at Ploughshares blog.

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A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016) by Amorak Huey » amorakhuey.net

• A Map of the Farm reviewed by Kimberly Ann Southwick at Ploughshares blog.
• “Prayer for What I Do Not Want” is up at Third Point Press.

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hiku [pull] (Porkbelly Press, 2016)
by James A. H. White

• hiku [pull] reviewed by Kimberly Ann Southwick at Ploughshares blog.

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Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Chen Chen » chenchenwrites.com

• When I Grow Up… was long-listed for the National Book Award! (poetry)
• Set the Garden on Fire turned two this month!
• When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities reviewed by @shitty_book_reviews:

Because the word will not save you. Because an elegy is a body’s warm light unfolding. Because the tree cannot hold all of you. Because love’s glossolalia isn’t translatable. Because translation is a kind of murder. Because language is both the bread and the knife. Because we could all stand to be a little more like flowers. When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List Of Further Possibilities pairs well with a date to the zoo, the works of Paul Celan, and New York tap water. Chen Chen’s poems are hearts too big for their bodies. // @shitty_book_reviews

• Chen’s interviewed by Allison Peters for Michigan Quarterly Review.
  

  “I want to write and to read poems with this kind of scrappy don’t-fuck-with-me-but-also-gahh-I’m-a-human-ness,” says Chen. // more

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MEXICAMERICANA (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Eloisa Amezcua » www.eloisaamezcua.com

• “Watching Underworld, Inc. Episode 3: Human Cargo,” (from Mexicamericana), was selected for Best New Poets 2017.

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The Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Donna Vorreyer » donnavorreyer.com

• a review of The Girl is up on Glass! (review by Amorak Huey!)

These are poems to be believed. This experience is real. Fraught and complex and contradictory and imaginative and impossible, naturally, but real nonetheless.

… Vorreyer starts this collection with a bit of a mystery, our heroic girl stopping “mid-stride in the center of a crosswalk.” The world does not know what to make of her, frozen like this, getting in the way of things. The girl’s parents, the police, a priest — all of them are unable to persuade her to move. The poem ends that way: the world freaking out, the girl unflinching. // more

• Best of the Net nomination from Compose for “Because Ignorance is a Country with Many Coasts.”

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Dry Spell (Porkbelly Press, 2016)
by Patrick Kindig » pdkindig.wordpress.com

• new work in Timber Journal.

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Excerpt from Kimberly Ann Southwick’s reviews of three Porkbelly Press titles on Ploughshares blog this month:

Porkbelly Press is a Cincinnati-based press that puts out chapbooks and micro-chapbooks as well as a literary magazines and anthologies. It describes itself as an “indie queer-friendly, feminist press” and produces chapbooks that are hand-stitched. Porkbelly is as diverse as its description claims, boasting titles like Eloisa Amezcua’s Mexicamericana, Billie R. Tadros’ inter: burial places, and Wren Hanks’ Ghost Skin, in addition to those reviewed below, which exemplify the high-quality writing the press values. // more

Titles reviewed include: hiku [pull] by James A. H. White, A Map of the Farm Three Miles From the End of Happy Hollow Road by Amorak Huey, and Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen Into the Bay by Sarah Ann Winn.

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Porkbelly Press tabled at the Kentucky Fried Zine Fest (Lyric Theater & Cultural Arts Center, Lexington, Kentucky). We met some fab people & scooped up cool stickers, patches, & zines! Thanks for the welcome and all the writing&activism&life conversation, KFZ!

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January’s Good Stuff

Pray, Pray, Pray by E. Kristin Anderson (cover: Nicci Mechler)

Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen into the Bay (Porkbelly Press, 2016) by Sarah Ann Winn (cover: Angie Reed Garner)

A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road by Amorak Huey (cover image: Alexandra Eldridge)

Lost Birds of the Iron Range by Amber Edmondson (cover: Mary Woodworth)

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Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the Middle of the Night (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by E. Kristin Anderson » www.ekristinanderson.com

• “Velvet, velvet, velvet, knife,” is up at r.kv.r.y quarterly. (One of EKA’s Prince poems, dealing w/ physical & psychological effects of long-term hospitalization).
• EKA’s poem “Selkie” from We’re Doing Witchcraft (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016) has been nominated for a Rhysling Award.
• “At the freak-out point” is up at Lines+Stars. (It’s a Lois Duncan erasure!)

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Haunting the Last House on Holland Island, Fallen into the Bay (Porkbelly Press, 2016)
by Sarah Ann Winn » @blueaisling » bluebirdwords.com

• “Glinda Watches the Wizard of Oz” is up over at The Fem Lit Mag.

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A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016)
by Amorak Huey

• “Crimes I Did Not Commit” and “How Things Turned Out” are up in the new Adroit Journal. (You can listen to them too!)
• A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road is being taught in at least one University class this month! 🙂

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Lost Birds of the Iron Range (Porkbelly Press, 2017)
by Amber Edmondson

• Lost Birds of the Iron Range was released just this month!

Bacon (Good News from Porkbelly’s Poets&Authors)

What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark & hard (stack of books)

My Heart in Aspic by Sonya Vatomsky (cover: Shannon Perry)

Pray, Pray, Pray: poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (E. Kristin Anderson)

My Heart in Aspic (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Sonya Vatomsky // @coolniceghost

• Sonya’s full length, Salt is for Curing (Sator Press, 2015) is currently in pre-order. | teaser
• The first review of Sonya’s Salt is for Curing is up at The Belfry.
• My Heart in Aspic reviewed by Anna Elena Eyre via Hyacinth Girl Press.

“Vatomsky’s poetry explores this double edge of femininity in raw and exposing poems that surface in dreams as though they’re the remnants of a toothsome meal. Poems can be a shared breath, and Vatomsky allows us to breathe that breath that at once is an inhale/exhale or a birth and death.” | full review at HGP

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What’s pink & shiny / what’s dark & hard (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
by Sarah B. Boyle // @pyrrhicspondee

• “On D Block” (the opening poem in What’s pink & shiny/ what’s dark and hard) was nominated by Lunch Ticket for Best of the Net.
• Also nominated by Lunch Ticket for Best of the Net: “Sea and Salt.”

Pray Pray Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night  (forthcoming)
by E. Kristin Anderson // @ek_anderson

• Pray, Pray, Pray is available for pre-order & is set to launch Oct 20, 2015. (pre-orders out sooner!)
• chapbook, FIRE IN THE SKY, is forthcoming in 2016 from Grey Book Press.
• Her poetry is up on The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society!