Let's hear it for May, which brings the (nearly) worldwide availability of My Zorba by Danielle Pafunda. Get it here, or here, or here, or here (erm, if you must), but by all means get it, ya hear?
So Verse Daily's timing couldn't be better. Nice!
Some of the people who attended Jennifer L. Knox's reading Monday night in Ashland, OR waited 2 years for the pleasure. (When we tried to visit in 2005 we were snowed out by a freak storm on Mt. Shasta). Was it worth the wait? Read a report here ("fucking hilarious...deliciously vulgar...tears of mirth") or listen in over here.
And Diagram agrees. Joanna Novak's written an awesome review of Drunk by Noon in the new issue. An excerpt:
"Knox challenges notions of who the speaker of a poem should be. Should this speaker say, for example, "eat the burrito / like you’re fucking it, Joel" (67)? Sure. The speaker slips into different affectations with ease. Sometimes rural, other times rhythmic, Knox sure-handedly sifts through colloquialisms and pop cultural reference points with such skill that I feel safe in saying that her speaker—while perhaps co-dependent, certainly racking up more rehab points than Robert Downey, Jr.—is a voice both savvy and saucy enough to defy gender and social standards all while maintaining eerily-precise diction."Read the rest.
There's also an effusive review in the latest MiPoesias:
"Knox creates lines of poetry at staggering levels of quality, peppered into each poem, regardless of the implausible image she is trying to sell...Full of the garish colors of life that can suddenly litter a landscape, it tells of the awkward, insignificant, yet very real pieces of humanness, however beautiful or unbeautiful."Read the rest.
Bill Knott proposes that Drunk by Noon might have been a better choice than Aram Saroyan's Complete Minimal Poems for the Poetry Society of America's recent William Carlos Williams Award, judged by Ron Silliman, and as much as we'd have loved that we're awfully happy for our friends at Ugly Duckling too.
Shanna Compton's flarf-festival poem "Boning John McCain," which originally appeared here during April, nearly shut down a LiveJournal poetry group. Best censoring we've ever received (& thankfully the controversy blew over). Nice reminder that context is important, eh? We're still not voting for him though. Video from the festival, perhaps, to come.
In news of the future, a review of For Girls (& Others) should be popping up in Rain Taxi soon, and we're expecting several for My Zorba too. For most of the summer, we'll be hard at work on Sandra Simonds' Warsaw Bikini as well. When/if we've got time to read submissions, we'll open the gates. (But please remember we're very very (very) small and will only be doing 2-3 books a year, with several candidates already on our desks.)
That's it for news & reviews...but we'll be in DC this Sunday and would love to see you if you're around:
Sunday, May 18 at 3:00 PM
in Washington, DC
Jennifer L. Knox, Shanna Compton & Wade Fletcher
read for the In Your Ear Series
Hosted by Maureen Thorson & Cathy Eisenhower
DC Arts Center
2438 18th Street NW
(Between Belmont & Columbia)
Washington, DC
Free for DCAC members or $3
