New reviews of Drunk by Noon & For Girls (& Others)

John Findura has written a terrific review of Drunk by Noon for Jacket:

Knox may have hit on a truth much deeper than she knew when she finished off the first poem in the book, ‘Yowl of the Obese Spaniel’, with the line ‘I’m never gonna have sex, I’d sure like to kill something.’ It just feels very American, as it goes through the brains of millions of teenagers all over the world. [...] These are not poems to be placed on a pedestal. They are to be read and, most importantly, enjoyed. Knox gets it.

Read the rest.

And...the other day we mentioned that Powell's is offering For Girls as a prize in their April poetry contest, but they've also added it to the Staff Recommendations with a blurb by Sheila A. of the Poetry Team:

"In For Girls (& Others), Shanna Compton commandeers the prim, repressed language of antique advice books for girls and deftly manipulates it into subversion. Compton shows that while the style of these books is outmoded, the constricting messages they espouse are still, unfortunately, very much the norm. This collection made me laugh; it made me angry; it made me not shave my legs today."

Audioblogging from the road

Having some trouble getting Gabcast to work as it's supposed to. Episodes won't publish directly to the blog from the phone.

With this manually added embedded player, new episodes will show up, but only after we go online, log in, and add titles or tags to them. (That defeats the whole idea of audioblogging. If we were going to have internet access, we'd just type the dang posts.)

So, we'll capture some audio posts and just add them to the player when/if we do get access along the way. Stay tuned.

[Moved the audio player to the sidebar and erased those tests posts.]

It's going to look something like this

1 rental car
2 planes
3 poets
10 cities
1742 miles of skyway
2700 miles of highway

We've all committed to the NaPoWriMo challenge, and will be posting our poems here during the tour, along with photos and reading reports, and hopefully some interviews with friends we meet along the way.

A new poem by Sandra Simonds

Win 26 free books from Powell's!

Powells.com celebrates National Poetry Month with an invitation to write a poem of your own. Before midnight on April 30, 2008, submit an original poem — under 20 lines and in some way about Portland, Oregon — to poetrycontest[at]powells[dot]com for a chance to win 26 books of poetry (from small press poets to contemporary prizewinners to classics) and a handy Powell's rucksack!

One of the prize books being offered is our very own For Girls (& Others).

Entrance info here.

Drunk by Noon on the Poetry Foundation blog today

Ada Limón describes the symptoms of Knox Fever:

"I have had the great pleasure of introducing Jennifer L. Knox in a few different writing courses. The first thing that happens is a dilation of pupils, as if an art history teacher suddenly flipped the next slide to reveal the students’ own family photographs."

Read the rest.

Thanks, Ada!

Now available in the Bloof store: My Zorba by Danielle Pafunda

Get it here.

Powell's, Amazon, and other retailers to follow in about a month.

Or, if you catch us on the booktour, we'll have early copies too.

Gearing up...

...to get on the road, assuming the Midwest doesn't completely wash away in all these floods!



Without the following folks, we'd be spending National Poetry Month at our day jobs, which would be way less fun:

Katie Steinbrecher & Furrow magazine in Milwaukee
Amy Guth in Chicago
Jessica Block & Ann M. Erickson of Tributaries, Didi Menendez & Gabriel Gudding in Normal/Bloomington
Anne Boyer & Robert L. Baumann in Lawrence
Adam Deutsch in Urbana/Champaign
Peter Davis in Muncie (Pete made the cool flyer above)
Nate Logan in Moorhead/Fargo

Here's a story on the Illinois Wesleyan University conference we'll be doing in Bloomington on April 5. The conference is free and open to all. You can register online and get a full list of the events here.

And yes, we are then getting in the car and driving to Lawrence, KS to do a reading for An Actual Kansas later that same day. Because that's how we roll. (Compared to the 2005 tour, this is cake.)

The (naughty) birds & the (bloofy) bees

Hello, friends of Bloof. Here are a few new newsy bits for you:

1) Jennifer L. Knox is guestblogging at the Best American Poetry blog this week. Her first post was on animal sex (note: not sex with animals, sex between animals). Her second is allllllll about Burt Reynolds. What will she say next? Only one way to find out. She didn't think she could blog, but heck, she seems like a natural!

2) Which reminds us to tell you that Jen's poem "Another Motive for Metaphor" appears in The Best American Erotic Poetry, edited by David Lehman. (Scribner, 2008). You can read all the poems that come (ahem) before and after it in its native habitat, A Gringo Like Me.That's sexy.

3) Along with 99 other poets, Jennifer L. Knox and Shanna Compton appear in Poet's Bookshelf II, edited by Peter Davis & Tom Koontz, which is also a new release. (Barnwood, 2008). Shanna includes Dr. Seuss in her top 10, no kidding. You can sample her essay and a few new poems in the new issue of the DMQ Review too.