Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones. Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest books are a poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). Now We’re Getting Somewhere was published by W.W. Norton (March 2021). Exit Opera is forthcoming in September 2024.
EXIT OPERA will be out from Norton in September. Preorder it here at BOOKSHOP.ORG and support independent bookstores: https://bookshop.org/shop/kimaddonizio
Blas Falconer’s forthcoming collection, Rara Avis, will be publsihed by Four Way Books in September 2024. He is the author of Forgive the Body This Failure, The Foundling Wheel, and A Question of Gravity and Light as well as the coeditor of two anthologies, Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets and The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity. The recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, he teaches in San Diego State University’s MFA program and is the editor in chief at Poetry International Online.
Rara Avis is availble for preorder from Four Way Books now. https://fourwaybooks.com/site/rara-avis/
Idra Novey’s new poetry collection, Soon & Wholly, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in September. She is the author most recently of Take What You Need, a New York Times Notable Book of 2023 and finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and two other novels. Her second poetry collection Exit, Civilian was chosen by Patricia Smith for the National Poetry Series. She is the co-translator with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She teaches creative writing at Princeton University.
Soon & Wholly is available for preorder now at Wesleyan University Press now. https://www.weslpress.org/9780819501288/soon-and-wholly/
About the books:
A new volume by acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio, whose work is known for its streetwise, unflinching explorations of love, lust, and mortality. Set in locations from dive bars to Montparnasse Cemetery, from an ancient Greek temple to a tourist shop in Assisi, Exit Opera explores the ever-vexing issues of time, mortality, love, and loss, and considers the roles of art and human connection. Whatever their nominal subject—jazz, zombies, Buddhism, Siberian tigers—these poems make for a compelling mix of humor and pain, difficulty and solace. In a nod to Keats, one of the many fellow travelers in these poems, Addonizio invites us to “[inscribe] a few verses on whatever water / you can find” and assures readers that they are not alone in navigating the challenges and changes of mortal life. As she writes in “My Opera”:
The staging is difficult. Exploding stars
are involved, high-redshift galaxies, interior chambers,
a little country blues, a little jazz guitar, a jam jar containing
a tiny ocean & a tinier rowboat rocking gently in the swells
that I am steering toward you in the dark.
Praise for Rara Avis:
Regally bearing its Latin title, Rara Avis captures in sparse, moving verse both the splendor and the loneliness of what it means to be exceptional — a rarified specimen, a strange bird. A son, a husband, and now a father, seasoned poet Blas Falconer explores the relationships among men — between peers, lovers, parents and children — to consider and question existing models of authority and power. Falconer’s lucid but feeling gaze reveals social complexities with searing and graceful imagery, asking what it means to live outside the heteronormative experience while existing as a man, simultaneously a casualty and a participant in the project of masculinity.
These poems carefully delineate the casual cruelties of queer youth and the beautiful and bitter revelations of adulthood. The wisdom propelling Rara Avis is the knowledge that we are each of us that rare bird; we share our singularity. Everyone has a pancreas, but only one organ matters when Falconer learns his father’s is afflicted. Alchemized by love, one thing, unlike any other, becomes all things. “All day, everything, / no matter how / small, makes me // think of it…The bee / crawling in / blossoms // scattered on / the glass / tabletop. The sound of // a pitcher fill- / ing slowly / with water.”
Rara Avis’s keenest ace is its clear-eyed focus on family care and dissonance and on the eureka of generational love and forgiveness. Falconer, the pioneering queer father of adopted sons, resists showiness and controversy by employing telltale silence and the sturdiness of longstanding but still expressive modes and forms— couplets, cento, ekphrasis. In these supple, affecting poems, Falconer averts predictability and dwells (and even heals) instead in the kingdom of epiphanic memory, of nuance and caesura—poetry’s kingdom. —Cyrus Cassells
In these exquisite and musical poems, Falconer seeks answers to the abiding question of who we are and what could have been. Beautiful meditations on fatherhood, the complications of our pasts, and the urgent present reach to us with outstretched arms. In poem after poem, we feel the light touch of a hand on our backs reminding us that we must slowly rise and greet what lies ahead, though the music of the past beckons us to linger. Falconer’s tender and wise poems are gentle reminders that we move forward because we are called to those we love. We move forward because we see in the periphery, the past still holds us in its care. —Oliver de la Paz
Blas Falconer could teach a master class on lyric subtext. Rara Avis’s precise, wrenching poems are all about the layering of what is said and unsaid; the strata that form of wound, scar, skin. “When I look / in the rearview, he turns toward peaks // in the distance,” observes a speaker of his newly sullen son, “and when I ask him / to explain, shaking his head, he sighs as if // it isn’t worth the trouble.” Falconer’s handling of boyhood, fathering, love, and masculinity in these pages is startling in its revelations and deeply necessary in its grief. I’ll be thinking about this collection for years to come.—Sandra Beasley
New poetry by the author of acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need faces the complexities of life on a swiftly heating earth.
Idra Novey’s first collection in a decade, since Patricia Smith chose Exit, Civilian for the National Poetry Series, brings a lyric intimacy to the extremes of our era. The poems juxtapose sweltering days raising children in a city with moments from a rural childhood roaming free in the woods, providing a bridge between those often polarized realities. Novey’s spare, contemporary fables move across the Americas, from a woman housesitting in central Chile, surrounded by encroaching fires, to a man in New York about to give birth to a panda. Other poems return to the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia, where Novey revisits the roads and creeks of her childhood: “Maybe we knew we only appeared/to be floating, but soon and wholly/we’d go under.” Like Lydia Davis and Anne Carson, Novey draws from the well of her work translating myriad authors, from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector to Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, and from her own award-winning novels. These are deeply lived poems, evoking both a singular life and the shared urgencies of our time, a collection of great inventiveness and wit, conjuring our “bit part in the history of the future.”
Praise for Soon & Wholly:
“I was nowhere I had ever before been, reading Idra Novey’s remarkable third collection, Soon and Wholly, though a world I recognized was everywhere in its pages. Here, ekphrasis, epistolary, and lyric sequence masterfully trace, over hours and months, the daily textures of experience—”the particles of our lives”—where “meaning is a hunger” we do not expect to sate. With a poet’s restraint, a translator’s discernment, and a novelist’s devotion, Novey has gifted us a book of formidable intelligence, humor, grief, artistic kinship, and unfettered imagination that is uniquely and wholly hers. Read it right away.”
~Charif Shanahan, author of Trace Evidence
“With Soon and Wholly, Idra Novey turns the familiar inside out and dwells in the strangeness of the world. Bearing the spoils from her travails as translator and novelist, she returns to her native genre of poetry to regale us with wit, wisdom and an open heart tempered by the itinerant work of her imagination. This collection is more home than homecoming. From one poem to the next, she’s off again, sweeping us in the updraft of her flight, taking our breath away.”
~Gregory Pardlo, author of Digest
“In these marvellous poems, the poet’s perception is the keenest of instruments, revealing a gorgeously unexpected cross-section of experience. We perceive – as in Novey’s resonant duets with artist Erica Baum’s collages — the close-packed layers of parenthood and politics and ecology and fear and language and grief and tenderness. A poet of lapidary gifts, Idra Novey lays bare the startling juxtapositions and poignant adhesions that lie hidden under the skin of dailiness. These poems are effortlessly original and utterly indispensable.”
~Monica Youn, author of From From
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