Excerpt from The Death of the Beautiful Subject by Paula Koneazny
air strike (“what comes over the wall”)
air struck oxygen to burn
blaspheme
start with a shaky principle dependent on how the relationship goes
______________________ ___________ _____________
(family name, first name) (domicile) (occupation)
cover huge swaths of the world with vanishing languages
cut border into the gorgeous distance
where honeybees gather
flight paths unravel
(we still haven’t dealt with the money)
Download PDF:
Paula Koneazny_The Death of the Beautiful Subject
For an accessible version of this excerpt, contact amber@kelseyst.com
Paula Koneazny lives and writes in Sebastopol, California where she earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Aufgabe, New American Writing, bone bouquet, OR, and Interim. Her reviews have been published in American Book Review, Verse, Rain Taxi and Tarpaulin Sky. A version of her chapbook Installation was a finalist for the 2009 inaugural Firewheel Chapbook Award. She is currently an assistant editor of Volt. She can be contacted at paulagraphpress@gmail.com.
July 29, 2010
Kore Press 2011 First Book Contest
Judge: Bhanu Kapil
Deadline Extended August 31, 2010
“I like to think of this contest as providing a potentially catalytic boost forward for the life of a writer…and as a beacon of possibility to new writers out there who struggle every day in the solitary practice of writing. We are over here saying “I know you can, I know you can.”
- Lisa Bowden,
Kore Press Co-Founder & Director
2010 Winners
Laura Newbern’s
Love and the Eye
selected by Claudia Rankine
Previous First Book Award Winners:
2009: Heather Cousins’
Something in the Potato Room
selected by Claudia Rankine
2008: Holly Iglesias’
Souvenirs of a Shrunken World
selected by Harryette Mullen
2007: Spring Ulmer’s
Benjamin’s Spectacles
selected by Sonia Sanchez
2006: Sandra Lim’s
Loveliest Grotesque
selected by Marilyn Chin
2005: Elline Lipkin’s
The Errant Thread
selected by Eavan Boland
the contest
A prize of $1,000 plus book publication by Kore Press will be given for a book-length poetry manuscript.
Deadline: August 31, 2010
This competition is open to any female writer who has not published a
full-length collection of poetry. Writers who have had chapbooks of
less than 42 pages printed in editions of no more than 400 copies are
eligible.
How to submit:
Submit your manuscript and $20 reading fee on-line here.
Comment box should include:
daytime and evening telephone numbers
where you heard about the contest.
Manuscripts must be:
anonymous (do not include your name anywhere on the manuscript)
original poetry written by applicant (translations are not eligible)
For more information email kore@korepress.org, or call 520-327-2127.
the judge
Bhanu Kapil is a British-Indian writer, and new U.S. citizen, who
lives now in Colorado, where she is core faculty at Naropa
University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She also
teaches writing at Goddard College in Vermont. She is the author of
four books: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street
Press, 2001), Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006),
Humanimal: a Project for Future Children (Kelsey Street, 2009), and
Schizophrene (forthcoming from Nightboat Books, 2011.)
Special deal for contest entrants only!
For $39, your manuscript will be entered into the contest and you
will receive one copy each of the two latest First Book Award
winners. For $45, you will be entered and will receive one copy each
of the three latest First Book Award winners. Please e-mail kore@korepress.org to take advantage of this deal!
July 20, 2010
New work from Stacie Leatherman.
K
We’re revised as we speak.
To attune.
Kitsch, of course. Kites and high-flying plutocracies.
The body’s lace its organs the child beating within.
It lifts like a sunburn and I am borne into it.
The finesse of loving, as if relationships could be held in tow.
The long sidewalks to hell and back,
straight and smooth as a syringe.
And where someone or the self pulls us off,
a light wave, a frequency.
The process of something we once knew.
Your lowing cattling us through the night.
You find the trails strong as any writing.
Iron horsed,
the bad luck fruition,
the clustering, the badlands,
ribbon fish, you glide through like a transition,
your body sliced more than half your length,
a cut thread, swimming.
*
The dead over under us, at eye level.
I refuse to discuss in separations. I am not my own language utterly.
Doors and wounds, disappearances, returns.
Reliance on hands, mind, teeth.
*
The drifting backwards into disrepair,
the unclotting, the swift dislocation.
The swifter we go.
Drift of continents and islands.
Words threshed, chaff from grain.
Updraft, uprising.
Words catching in the backdraft.
*
If a collision, or elision, or what has clapped silently above me.
The knots tying it together.
Spring flowers dusting ditches and roads,
you walk,
cottonwood blowing like the sifted alphabet,
the approach of solstice.
Light as the waiting and receiving.
The kissing words backwards until they have breath.
Until a flock breaking upwards in flight,
the sky breathing, insistence of motion and intent and wandering.
Seeds scattering, a spume,
an umbrella of sparks.
*
The signing of the entire body,
the circular motions.
Your body’s lamplight.
The last time is not the last time.
*
There is the painful retaliation.
The crosshairs.
The splitting of,
the close shave.
*
Lightning a savage crop,
fierce as your broken heart.
Inchworm inching across my arm,
contracting
the crashing and impetuosity.
Slouch erected straight as a wave curling over,
the origami of moments,
beach gored with light.
The unknown more intimate,
under the finger in the lung.
Stacie Leatherman’s first collection of poems, Stranger Air, will be published by Mayapple Press in early 2011. Work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in New American Writing, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Diagram, and Crazyhorse, among others. She has an MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
June 29, 2010
Gesture, July 1, 2010 — August 27, 2010.
Gesture
July 1 – August 27, 2010, 2010
Reception for the artists: Thursday, July 1, 5:30-7:30pm
Opening at Brian Gross Fine Art on July 1, 2010, Gesture is a group exhibition exploring various uses of gesture in abstract painting—ranging from spontaneous and expressive, to meditative and ritualistic. Featured artists include Donald Feasél, Robin McDonnell, Ed Moses, Robert Sagerman, Nellie King Solomon, and Amy Trachtenberg.
Whether they are utilizing negative space to investigate the expressive qualities of line, or employing color and mark-making in a more organic, painterly style, the artists featured in Gesture attest to the continued relevance of gestural abstraction in contemporary painting.
Amy Trachtenberg, Feelings are Facts III, 2010, pigment and polymer resin, aluminum, shellac on wood, 18 x 60 inches
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday 11-5:30pm, Saturday 11-5pm
(415) 788-1050
gallery@briangrossfineart.com
www.briangrossfineart.com
June 20, 2010
New poems by Sarah Suzor!
Poems from Sarah Suzor’s The Principle Agent.
Of all the things to lie about:
Download more poems from this selection. Sarah Suzor_The Principle Agent_KSP blog
Sarah Suzor was born and raised in Wyoming. She is the author of It was the season, then. (EtherDome Chapbooks) and the forthcoming Isle of Dogs (Toadlily Press). Her interviews, reviews and poems have appeared in numerous online and print journals including, Rain Taxi, Tarpaulin Sky and OR: A literary tabloid. She lives in Venice, CA, where she an editor for Highway 101 Press and a guest lecturer at the Left Bank Writers Retreat.
May 12, 2010
Small Press Traffic Reading Report: Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios at SPT. By Jai Arun Ravine
Gevirtz and Tabios on communities and empires at Small pPess Traffic.
By KSP Guest Blogger Jai Arun Ravine
On May 7, 2010 a large white tent ballooned in front of the main entrance to the CCA building. Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios were not reading inside this tent. Cloaked in a lecture hall tucked away in the back, every seat enabled with retractable desk tops and ethernet jacks, approaching the architecture of “empires” and “community” began for me with Susan’s hair.
Its shape fascinated me. Nudged against a partially obscured EXIT sign [“exit up, naked eye”], her hair was pinned into/around/as space much like fabric was pinned into/around/as a mannequin in the gallery and post office tray plastic was sculpted into/around/as the nearby stairwell. ———————————————————————————————— Here I drew a line to Eileen’s son’s fascination with viewing the night sky through a telescope. ———————– As a child I was also enthralled by stars and planets and volunteered in my hometown’s art and science museum, where I spent much time in the planetarium.
Leaning back in its slightly slanted seats, we focused intently on the space above our heads. The dome pulsed with a glowing ring of city lights, slowly fading into a deep black sky—and in it, all the stars there could be. In that dream-like night the many things I desired to learn and know, so vast as to be unknowable.
In witnessing Susan and Eileen’s performances adjacent to each other, I began to map the distances between “empire” and “community”—a sky/space traversed by matters of “control” — “translation” — “manipulation” — “attachment” — “transnational” — “adoption” — “adaptation” — “inertia” — “airplanes” — “transport” — “tornadoes” — “fury.”
Susan, in reading excerpts from AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger, charts the practices and trajectories of control and transport in air traffic, translating the sky into a place one can travel across and through, attaching fragments of sound to the landscape of the space above, the page becoming a tightrope of arrivals [“...tightrope...sew arm...seaweed...sun lag...”].
The practice of charting, naming and controlling the very air above you seems absurd, as does the idea of “owning” airspace above any given country [“no grammars find me”]. Here empires tower up into the sky, boundaries of breath are rigorously policed, as impossible as naming the stars. I found that some of the text of her latest book was performed as a sound and visual piece, words coming together within the temperature of music, the climate of sound [“not betwixt”], being enveloped by language like a sky.
Eileen, in reading a series of haybun from The Thorn Rosary, charts the practices and trajectories of adoption and adaptation in transnational translations enacted on the bodies of mother and child [“...froze back into another fist / mountain / smoke...”]. In sharing both successful and failed processes of adoption, Eileen opens up the space between government agencies and malnourishment, in which the inertia between a potential mother and child is interrupted by tornadoes and fury, catalogued disorders and inabilities of connection, —lines broken— [“shatter my once drawn heart”].
The orphanage becomes a constellation of disposable friendliness and second-hand toys, of surface presentations and meaningless gestures, where only a certain few have the power to connect the dots [“Dear Government Agency In Charge Of Children...”]. The form of Eileen’s “haybun,” a pairing of prose poem with hay(na)ku, becomes a vehicle that transports emotion and compresses it into compact fists [“...wind smolders song...silk sunders wind...”].
Under an umbrella-ed sky/space I began to think about the ways we are dictated and transformed by practices and movements we can’t fully understand—a bureaucratic system in another country or swimming in the Aegean Sea—large impermeable regimes or the air that continues to envelope us.
[“Sometimes the world cannot be fitted into the poem,”] says Eileen, but can we fit the world into the sky? The sky into a poem? We can agree to another attempt to engage, to attach in the action of our poetics. Maybe then hope will once again live, and we can lift a lip of space to reveal—————————————————————
–
Jai Arun Ravine is the author of the chapbook IS THIS JANUARY (Corollary Press, 2010) and a Kundiman fellow. Jai’s work appears most recently in Galatea Resurrects #14 and the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat and Lantern Review. For more information, visit http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/
May 9, 2010
An evening with the Brown(e)s! SPT Reading Report by Mg Roberts.
Laynie Browne and Lee Ann Brown on bodies at Small Press Traffic.
KSP Guest Blogger: Mg Roberts
Art by Nascha Poole
I parallel park in less than two turns, somewhere my grandmother is smiling with lipstick smears at the edges of her mouth. It’s 7:49PM. Dinner. Juliana. Late. And I am early enough to find a seat on the couch across from a wooden vessel encased in glass. Take NOTE [of the] SLIGHT CHANGE IN VENUE. My pen dies. We explore the Brown(e)’s aura via an intro by CA Conrad.
Lee Ann Brown begins the reading; her southern lilt fills the Macky Room. She introduces a surrealist game, splitting the room in two. I am a series of interrogations, while the other half is the reply. Returning to the topic: On Bodies, Brown reads from her latest work—sonnets embodying the physical bodies of children, elementary education, and play—the interior and external appendages specific to children. Her daughter reads quietly. The reading nears its end with a ballad from Brown’s The Sleep That Changed Everything, but not before the audience gets to correspond and define exultation, daylight, a kiss, and I learn the answer to what an adjunct is: “duodenum—just say it”.
Yes, the replies to questions. The correct reply. A solution to the problem. A correct solution. Respond. Correspond.
Intermission is decided against and Laynie Browne continues the conversation: On Bodies by reading from The Desires of Letters, “She reads a mirror” and “lists prepositions as indistinct sound”. Once again I return to the night’s theme: On Bodies, but this time as a landscape and its relation to children—to scaffolding. I am most struck by Browne’s usage and description of the difficulty of space in the Bay Area typography, occurring as “lodged, fragmented, splintered without visible space,” which Browne correlates to the difficulty of raising children in such a landscape and the difficulty of community and avoiding utter self –righteousness, stemming from the physical attributes of living in a fractured space that demands we are “bodies enmeshed as coastlines,” subject to the ebb and flow of tides, broken I-bars, retrofitting, erosion.
Even several days after the reading I am still in conversation with the Brown(e)’s navigation of motherhood and its relation to the physical space of the body as architecture and geographic landscape. As I re-enter into my own household as wife, mother, writer how do I navigate this physical space connected by bridges and tunnels, how am I “to embrace you without infinite affection” at the interstice of this location? Where everyday, as my daughter likes to say, is earthquake weather.
MG Roberts was born in Subic Bay, Philippines. She is an MFA graduate of New College of California, where strange tricks were added to her bag. Currently, she teaches in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, Wordriot, horse less review, and13:after. If she weren’t a poet she would be a snake handler, or maybe just a good speller.
April 21, 2010
SELECTION ANNOUNCED FROM KSP’s LAST OPEN CALL
Many thanks to all those who submitted manuscripts during our open reading period in Fall 2009. We are excited to announce that Kelsey Street will be publishing An Atlas of Lost Causes, by Marjorie Stein.
Marjorie Stein was born in 1958 in rural southwestern Michigan. She traveled to San Francisco during Spring Break in 1978 and decided to stay. Marjorie lives in Santa Rosa, California, where she works as a Sustainability Analyst for green building design. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor for VOLT. Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, VOLT, zaum, Phoebe, Poetry Motel, Pavement Saw Press, and other publications. Her chapbook manuscript “Flammable Histories” was a finalist in the Pavement Saw Press Chapbook Contest in 2002. A self-taught artist, she has always been moved by the power in simple line drawings. An Atlas of Lost Causes is Marjorie’s first book.
From An Atlas of Lost Causes:
Yes, there are many ways to look at a crime—a wing-slashed sky. You begin with a tincture of salt—an animal thirst. Next, the facts can be ground through an iterative process and new theories float out like stardust. Like the exhalations we share, and share again. How could I know what happened? You left and I have only photographs—the negatives—moisture has absorbed into the grains of the paper, temporarily resembling an unidentified body in the river.
April 15, 2010
WILLA: Women in Letters & Literary Arts
WILLA: Women in Letters & Literary Arts recently launched its website. As outlined in its mission statement, “WILLA seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.” Apropos Christian Bök’s recent postconcerning the rejection of an AWP panel proposal featuring the University of Calgary’s Creative Writing program where Bök teaches, WILLA similarly arose from a rejected panel entitled “Arsenic Icing: Sentiment as Threat in Contemporary American Women’s Poetry” that poet Cate Marvin proposed for AWP’s annual conference.
Read more of this post by Alan Gilbert on The Poetry Foundations blog, Harriet.
April 4, 2010
from Scorpyn Odes by Laynie Browne
KSP is pleased to share new poems from a manuscript-in-progress by Laynie Browne:
Scorpion venom with nanoparticles
Selket or Serget eases childbirth
Venom employed in tumor painting
Assures greater surgical accuracy
Scorpion venom blocks bone loss
from-Scorpyn-Odes_Laynie-Browne
Look for two new or forthcoming books from Laynie Browne: The Desires of Letters, Counterpath Books (March, 2010) and Roseate, Points of Gold, Dusie Books (Spring 2010) the following events. And don’t miss her at one of the following events:
AWP
Counterpath Books Reading
Friday, April 9 from 6-10 at the Mercury Cafe
Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First Hundred Days, Anthology Publication Reading
Saturday, April 10, 6-8:30 PM
Reading and Book Party for Starting Today anthology
Paris on the Platte Cafe
Denver, CO
Poetry Flash Reading , April 29th, 7:30 pm
Moe’s Books in Berkeley
Laynie Browne & Lee Ann Brown
Small Press Traffic, April 30th
Nahl Hall, CCA Oakland Campus
Laynie Browne & Lee Ann Brown
Guest Artist, July 5th-11th







