AlIcE JAmES BookS

A l i c e J a m es B o o k s
Fall 2014
INSIDE
1 From the Editor’s Desk
2 New Titles
4 Author Interview
Philip Metres
9 News and Events
11 Forthcoming Titles
12 Donors
13The Alice Fund
14 Featured Backlist Title
15 Alice Asks
Mary Ann McFadden
fall
n e w s l e t t e r
A lice J ames B ooks
2014
Volume 19, Number 2
AJB STAFF
Carey Salerno
Executive Editor
Alyssa Neptune
Managing Editor
Nicole Wakefield
Senior Editorial Assistant
Debra Norton
Bookkeeper
Board Of Directors
Anne Marie Macari
President
Carey Salerno
Executive Editor
Craig Morgan Teicher
Vice President
Peter Waldor
Treasurer
Jan Heller Levi
Secretary
Editoral Board
Tamiko Beyer
Michael Broek
Monica A. Hand
Sally Wen Mao
Angelo Nikolopoulos
Cecily Parks
Suzanne Parker
Matthew Pennock
Erica Wright
INTERNS
Rachel Anderson
Ashley Haroldsen
Victoria Luce
Elise Musicant
Front cover from Eros Is More (9/2014)
Image credit: “Scherzo di Follia,”
Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822-1913),
Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY
Image of Alice James
pf MS Am 1094, Box 3 (44d)
By permission of the Houghton Library,
Harvard University
poetry since 1973
Dear Friends:
Welcome to the fall newsletter. This is a season of great change and challenge for the press. It is a
time of great excitement and also of great anxiety. You will see, as you turn and read these pages,
that the press has never been more vibrant in its work. Our three incredible poets; Juan Antonio
González Iglesias (as translated by Curtis Bauer), Mary Ann McFadden, and Philip Metres are
all writing poems with pulse. Their collections are ones that call to be read over and again. They
provoke us and challenge the ways in which we view history: the highly personal, the cultural—the
inextricable link between the two. They consider the co-creator of history and time. These three
poets and their books demand an active participation in their work.
With regards to the overall operations at the press, you probably know that the press underwent
historical change over the spring, as we announced the formation of a dedicated board of directors.
Effectively the long-standing cooperative board divided into two entities: business and editorial.
This allows us to continue to accomplish our ambitions to publish incredible poets and provide
continued support for some of the poets we’ve already had the honor of partnering with.
We’ve also launched the Alice James Award, which
is the press’s flagship book award, and currently the
editorial board is hard at work reading submissions.
The change has been positive for us, and positively
received in our community of Alices, readers, critics,
and beyond, and we are incredibly thankful for that
enduring support, which is so critical to enacting
positive change.
Amidst all of this, we are facing one of the most
difficult years financially that we have ever faced, and
absolutely the hardest year I’ve seen. First, we were
dealt a blow when we did not receive an Arts grant
from the NEA this year. Then, some months later,
the University of Maine at Farmington, our affiliate
school of over twenty years, dropped its bombshell:
they would need to cut their pledged funding by $30,000. AJB’s budget has now become an
incredibly sobering reminder that we can never take anything for granted.
In order for the press to have a secure future, we need the long-standing and staunch support of
not only friends just like you, but from many others out there who feel just as passionate about
poetry, the arts, and the necessity of their presence in our society. Please take a second to consider
this; do you know anyone who loves literature as much as you do? Do you know someone who
is looking to make a difference in our community just like you? If so, let’s reach out. Let’s use the
power of friendship to bolster the press in its time of need, and perhaps even go beyond that to
secure its future as an influential press in the national scene. Do you know anyone that could help?
This autumn, our news is mixed, and considering this leads me to our future. What will our
news be next year? How will our current challenges be translated into growth and prosperity?
We hope we may look back with a great sense of pride for how we worked to overcome such an
intensely trying period, rejoicing in the fact we have an abundance of reasons to feel secure, our
endeavors sheltered from the worry of how. Security for our mission and vision and security for
talented poets and devoted readers; let’s make that happen.
Yours in poetry,
Carey Salerno, Executive Editor
new titles
2
Mary Ann McFadden is a poet who has just returned to the U.S. after 15 years living in Mazatlan and in San
Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in 1995 and Eye of the Blackbird was published in 1997. Her poems have shown up in Green Mountains Review, Bloom, PsychologyTomorrow, The Marlboro
Review, Southern Poetry Review, The American Voice, Moving Out, and elsewhere. In 2005, several poems were
set to music by the composer Gerald Busby and performed at The Carnegie Center, New York City. McFadden
taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and gave workshops at The New York City Libraries, and at the Biblioteca
in San Miguel. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in Riverside, California.
Night Windows
The neighbors are making love again, their sighed, resonant cries
drawn out unexpectedly, honestly, into a summer night
that was longing for them, waiting to be filled.
My cats stir and shift on their pillows. And if,
at an exhibition, I am struck dumb standing in front of
Hopper’s Night Windows, it is not by the half-dressed woman,
or the breeze that flies out of the painting and lifts my hair,
but by the love that renders them and strips them bare.
Sarah E. McCabe
My own loves and failures, of which even now it is difficult to speak,
have been forgiven here. I can go on. I am not unlike
the happy man next door. I can hear him whistling in the shower.
DEVIL, DEAR
November 2014
,
D
l
ear
i
v
e
D
Mary Ann McFadden
Praise for Devil, Dear:
“Devil, Dear teems with erotic life. These poems adore the world within
us and outside us, embracing our hungers and imperfections alike. I love
Mary Ann McFadden’s range of tones and her long, musical lines, shaped
by the pressures of intelligence and deep honesty. She takes us to the edge
of an irresolvable mystery and lets us see its beauty.”
—Joan Larkin
“When Mary Ann McFadden lures us into her fertile and earthy-pungent
poems, we become lost in her world of “jellied forms,” in “clouds of milk in
water” and we feel as the speaker of these poems feels when she says “The
things of this world fill me up.” These poems are sly and full of generous
humor and wisdom. To read McFadden is to be surprised, in poem after
poem, by the ecstatic.”
—Anne Marie Macari
M a ry An n M c Fadde n
new titles
3
Idoia Elola
Anne Provoost
Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Salamanca, 1964) is Professor of Latin Philology at the
University of Salamanca, Spain. He has translated Ovid, anonymous Romans, Horace,
Catullus, James Laughlin, Stendhal, and Sebastiano Grasso. In addition to Eros es más, his
other collections of poetry include La hermosura del héroe (Premio Vicente Núńez, 1993),
Esto es mi cuerpo (Visor, 1997), Un ángulo me basta (IV Premio Internacional de Poesía
Generación del 27, Visor, 2002), Olímpicas (El Gaviero Ediciones, 2005), and most recently,
Del lado del amor: Poesía reunida 1994-2009 (Visor, 2010). Eros es más was selected by El
Cultural, El Mundo as the best collection of poetry in Spain in 2007.
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry collections: his first, Fence Line, won the John
Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish Sketchbook is a bilingual English/Spanish collection published
by Ediciones en Huida in Seville Spain; and The Real Cause for Your Absence is forthcoming
from C&R Press in 2013. His poems and translations have appeared in The Southern Review,
The Indiana Review, The Common and The American Poetry Review, among others. He is the
publisher and editor of Q Ave Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations Editor for From
the Fishouse, and he teaches Creative Writing and Translation at Texas Tech University.
Mon Tout Dans Ce Monde
Mon Tout Dans Ce Monde
Palabras de otro idioma, de otro siglo,
de otro amor: aceptarlas
para poder decir cómo te quiero,
lo que eres para mí.
Exactamente eso: mi todo en este mundo.
Words from another language, from another century,
from another love: to accept them
in order to say how I love you,
what you mean to me.
Exactly this: my everything in this world.
September 2014
EROS IS MORE
Juan Antonio González Iglesias
translated by Curtis Bauer
Praise for Eros Is More:
“The voice of Juan Antonio González Iglesias, translated with great
beauty by Curtis Bauer, seems miraculous in its clarity. Crucial and
inevitable, the poems speak directly from our time, and simultaneously
through the layers of time. I lifted my face from reading as from fresh
essential water. This is poetry that resuscitates.”
—Marie Howe
“Eros is more or less everything in the magical world of Juan Antonio
Gonzláez Iglesias. What good luck to have his poems in the elegant translations of Curtis Bauer, for here is a poet who understands the centrality
of love, or, more precisely, beauty, to our works and days—a theme that
he explores with rigor, wit, and wisdom.”
—Christopher Merrill
author interview
4
Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode,
2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008), and Behind the Lines: War
Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa, 2007). His work has appeared widely,
including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four
Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He
teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. See http://www.philipmetres.com for more information.
)(
Robert Muller
As if, somehow, I were responsible. Patriotism is a feeling,
the student wrote, that is rotted deep inside every one of us, and
it’s hard to let something such as your country go to shame. The
photos of hijackers in the newspaper looked like a Warhol
of our family album (the women oddly absent), portraits
bleared in displaced layers of ink. Who fed you, who
changed you, who memorized your hands, who breathed
you in? The ex-editor of Life lays down the old rule of thumb
in journalism: one person dead in your paper’s hometown equals
five dead the next town over equals fifty dead in the next state or
5,000 dead in China. The homeland is late blue, and tastes
of metal, like blood in the mouth. My cousins my demons
my plotting and foiled selves, what have you done, what
have we done with us?
Sand Opera
An Interview with Philip Metres
AJB recently conversed with author Philip Metres
about some of the literary, design, and research
elements that went into the creation of Sand Opera.
In this interview, Philip sheds light on his overal
vision for his deeply powerful collection.
ALICE JAMES BOOKS: When you began composing your
collection Sand Opera, what was your initial vision and did it
evolve as you pieced everything together?
PHILIP METRES: It’s strange to think that “in the wake” of
September 11, 2001, my wife Amy and I conceived our first
child, and that my life as a father and the years of the War
on Terror have run in parallel tracks (each, at times, leading
through the tunnels of sleeplessness and panic attacks). Now,
well over a decade later, we are still “in the wake,” “in the
dream,” or “in the nightmare” of this Panoptical Era, where
we presume that we are always being watched. Sand Opera
is very much a post-9/11 book, a book about what it means
to be living and raising children and writing in the center of
Philip Metres
empire, in an age of “permanent” war.
Sand Opera began out of the vertigo of feeling unheard as an Arab
American, in the decade after the terrorist attacks of 2001. After
9/11, Americans turned an ear to the voices of Arabs and Muslims,
though often it has been a fearful or selective listening. Even
the noted documentarian Errol Morris chose to interview only
Americans for his film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” which
explores the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It seems almost absurd
that in our global and digital age, Morris did not interview or even
meet with detainees. My friend, the poet Fady Joudah, calls this
phenomenon the Oliver Stone Syndrome—where the American
filmmaker’s war movies and our obsession with the wounds of
American soldiers come to erase Vietnamese people, literally and
figuratively. War stories and war poetry, far too often, valorize the
soldier (or soldier-victim) at the expense of civilian-victims, who
number about 90% of war casualties since the First World War.
Perhaps every time we read a soldier poet, we should find nine
civilian-victim poets—just to get the proportion right. And if we
did, how would that change our vision of war? Imagine if nine out
5
author interview
January 2015
(continued)
of every ten “war experts” on
television news were civilians
in combat zones. The fact that
those poets and voices are so
marginalized, are so hard to
find, means that we are living
in the center of empire. (Our
privilege, to paraphrase Amiri
Baraka, is the luxury to be
ignorant, comfortably.)
Sand Opera has been about a
decade in the making, though
in another sense I’ve been
writing it my whole life. I
can see elements that thread
back to some of my earliest
memories. My father was a
Vietnam War veteran, who worked with families of P.O.W./M.I.A.s
and became a psychologist. My mother, a lifelong pacifist, left the
convent to study literature and later met and married my father.
In the mid-1970s, with two young children, they “sponsored” a
Vietnamese refugee family—which meant helping them find an
apartment, work, and start a new life in San Diego. For a short time,
I shared my bedroom with two of the sons, Lam and Dủng. I asked
my parents, “where is their home?” The book also propels forward
through my work with the peace movement since the 1990s and
the critical study, Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the
American Homefront (2007). The most memorable of my late
1990s activist pieces was a “post office action,” in which fellow
activists and I attempted to send basic medical supplies through
the U.S. postal service to Iraq, which was suffering under nearly
a decade of U.S.-led economic sanctions; we invited journalists to
cover the fact that the post office would not allow it. It was illegal
to send band aids and aspirin to Iraq because of the brutality of the
sanctions regime. According to U.N. sources, perhaps hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis died during the ten years of sanctions due to
preventable disease.
The book begins with a representation of a martyrdom: the
beheading and skinning of St. Bartholomew. With the recent videos
of ISIS’s beheadings of American journalists, I was shocked to reread the first poem—about the depravity of human beings, and
our human longing to try to transform or redeem that suffering.
Yet why is it easier for us to imagine the act of decapitation as more
depraved than a drone attack, initiated thousands of miles away
by someone in the comfort of a cubicle, that levels a home chock
full of people—all of whom will be called terrorists if they are men
between the ages of 15 and 95?
recitatives and arias—two primary modes of the opera form,
roughly corresponding to narrative and lyric, poems of story
and poems aspiring to music. Even that distinction is blurred in
each section, since each section oscillates between these modes.
Growing up, my dad loved to listen to opera, large voices
keening their despair; I think, in hearing those huge upwellings,
he felt contained somehow, held by them. At the time, I didn’t
really understand it (or him); I was much more interested in the
murmurings of R.E.M. and the cathartic squalls of Husker Du,
Fugazi, and the Replacements.
The literal meaning of “opera” is “works”—the plural of “opus.”
Opera is always a multiplicity. I’m inspired not only by the
poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Anna Akhmatova, Langston Hughes,
Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich,
Lev Rubinstein, Mahmoud Darwish, C.D. Wright, and Mark
Nowak, but also by Leo Tolstoy and his grand vision of the
Napoleonic War in War and Peace; I’m interested in works that
are dialogic, polyvocal, polyphonic.
Finally, Sand Opera is bookended by poem-prayers. The first is
a prayer to bid the voices to rise, and the last is asking God to
“open the spine binding this sight.” I wanted to begin and end
in incantation, an incantation pitched past pitch of grief.
AJB: The first section of Sand Opera, “abu ghraib arias,” contains
poems that recount the abuse inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners in
the Abu Ghraib prison. What did you hope to accomplish with this
section? Do you feel you reached your goal?
METRES: Without question the trauma of Abu Ghraib opened
into what would become Sand Opera. “abu ghraib arias” emerged
from a crisis of representation; at some point, after poring over
the photographs taken by military police at Abu Ghraib of their
abuse of prisoners, I decided that I could not write my way
into or out of them. To continue to circulate the photographs
themselves would only complete the total objectification of the
bodies and souls of those tortured Iraqis.
AJB: But why call it an opera?
It was only when I stumbled on transcripts of the testimony
given by the Iraqi prisoners themselves (thanks to Mark
Danner) did I discover a way to slip inside that prison. I think
of Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”: “through me many long dumb
voices, / Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and
slaves, / Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of thieves and
dwarfs.” I love the weirdness of Whitman’s phrase, “long dumb
voices,” because it seems to contain both the derisive silencing
of those the society perceives as inhuman and the sense of their
prolonged muteness. How victims are always doubly victimized
when they aren’t heard, or lose the authority to speak. \
METRES: Although in some ways Sand Opera began as an act of
occasional testimony, it morphed with the title. Structurally, the
opera conceit enabled me to embrace the movement between
The aria poems began as a way to read the testimonies of the
tortured at Abu Ghraib, which were too painful for me to read
straight through. The only way I could bear to read them was to
t
author interview
(continued)
work with them, to see words and phrases vibrate on the page and
to choose them, to bear down with them, rather than to accept the
suffocation of the entire narrative.
I’m grateful to Sommer Browning and Tony Mancus (of Flying
Guillotine Press) for publishing this work as a chapbook in 2011,
the first press run of which had a haunting cover made by a veteran
(Chris Arendt, of Combat Paper) from recycled army uniforms.
“I
don’t want to transcend suffering
with beauty; I want to live with
this suffering, I want to hear and
bear the voices that bear this pain.
The voice itself is testament to its
survival.
”
AJB: Another feature of the first section is the inclusion of “The
Blues” poems, which reflect the testimonies of six correction officers
who were stationed in Abu Ghraib. Out of all the testimonies you
used as research, what made you choose these six voices? What is the
significance of interlacing the Blues poems with the “(echo /ex)” series?
METRES: The poem began as a witness to the voices of the
detainees, but the poem found its “other half ”—like hemispheres
sides of the same brain—when I began to work with the language
of the Standard Operating Procedure manual and words from
various U.S. military personnel who served at the Abu Ghraib
Prison. Before that, I’d focused entirely on the language of the
prisoners, which was the big gap in the mainstream narrative
of Abu Ghraib; yet I wanted to pull back a little, as in that
photograph from the Abu Ghraib scandal where Ivan Frederick
is visible looking down the image captured in a silver camera
cradled in his hands, in the foreground of the picture where the
infamous picture of the hooded detainee is standing on a box with
wires attached to his hands and feet. The leaping between these
hemispheres, I hope, sutures together the testimony/cries of the
abused and the logics of the soldiers—some of whom participated
in the abuse, and some of whom tried to end it. I wanted to
represent a range of responses by soldiers: the witnesses (Lane
McCotter, Ken Davis); the rationalizers (Javal Davis); the sadists
(Charles Graner); the complicit (Lynddie England); and the
whistleblowers (Joe Darby). In a dialogue with Iraq War veteran
Micah Cavaleri about the arias, I was grateful to hear that he felt
the depiction to be fair.
And why are they Blues? I see in them a kind of lamentation, one
that feels at times to be stylized and performative, at times to cut
to the bone—both of which characterizes the blues.
AJB: In the “(echo /ex)” poems, lines from the Bible are interlaced with
the appearance of a reoccurring character named “G,” who treated the
prisoners inhumanely. What is the significance of including “G” and
what was your reasoning behind introducing and naming such a dark
character?
6
METRES: G is, of course, Charles Graner. But in the process of
writing (or unwriting) these testimonies, I began to see Graner as
a kind of Obscene Father, an evil manifestation of God. He was,
after all, in the psyches of the prisoners, a figure of absolute power,
who struck terror in them. The theological meaning of torture
revealed itself as I rubbed away the words; torture, for Elaine
Scarry in The Body in Pain, requires an assault on the subjectivity
of the tortured. It is to strip not only dignity, but identity itself,
from its victims. In this way, the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal began
to resemble a perverse version of the Book of Genesis, in which
God decreates Adam (one of the prisoners, of course, is A). Which
is why I began to interpolate phrases from The Book of Genesis.
Now Graner himself seems like an archetypal psychotic bad guy;
yet Abu Ghraib was not a case of “a few bad apples” spoiling
the barrel, as some people argued at the time. What happened
there was explicitly encouraged by Military Intelligence and the
C.I.A.; they bear responsibility for rupturing of the military chain
of command, and they were authorized to do so by the highest
echelons of government.
AJB: The extended title of your collection is Standard Operating
Procedure. Will you please expand on how you decided on Sand
Opera as the official title?
METRES: One day in the mid-2000s, I received an email from
WikiLeaks, an organization whose notoriety had not yet become
front page news. The email noted that they had attached the
Standard Operating Procedure manual from the Guantanamo
Bay Prison. I was, for all the reasons you can imagine, a little
wary about opening it. I weighed the personal risks of opening a
potentially-classified document against the risks that WikiLeaks
(and others) had taken to share this information, and decided in
favor of opening.
What I discovered was an intricate procedural manual for running
Camp Echo in the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Prison complex. It was
absolutely fascinating to read, to see the care of its authors not
only to detail procedures to ensure the day-to-day security of the
prison, but also how to handle the Koran in a respectful way—or,
more ominously, how to conduct a proper Muslim burial.
How tragic (in the sense of Greek tragedy, truly) that this
manual—with its attempts at cultural sensitivity and its appeal
to rational order—was completely contravened by the actions of
U.S. military and intelligence services in the prison, who tortured
and abused prisoners with its so-called “Enhanced Interrogation
Techniques”—which included pretending to smear menstrual
blood on prisoners and throwing Korans into the toilet. The
success of these dark “operations” and “procedures” were rapidly
exported to Abu Ghraib and to black sites throughout the world,
which is why I employed the SOP manual alongside the testimony
of Abu Ghraib detainees.
I couldn’t help but think of Slavoj Zizek’s notion of Kant/Sade—
7
author interview
(continued)
that the underside of the Enlightenment was sadomasochism. Or as
Gandhi said, when asked what he thought of Western Civilization:
“it would be a good idea.”
AJB: Sand Opera also contains two sections of “recitative” poems,
as well as “Hung Lyres.” Could you talk about their place in the
middle of the book?
The title Sand Opera, then, nested in the longer gray-scaled Standard
Operating Procedure embodies this contradiction. If it were just
Sand Opera, it would risk reifying or commodifying the suffering
of others. I don’t want to transcend suffering with beauty; I want to
live with this suffering, I want to hear and bear the voices that bear
this pain. The voice itself is testament to its survival.
METRES: The recitative poems employ a range of forms and
styles—sonnets, an embedded sonnet, a fractured sestina,
diagrams, epigrams, prose blocks, an epistle, a pantoum, heroic
couplets, ekphrastic pieces, a toast, and a simultaneity—an
attempt to bring us the voices of people who have borne the
wars in different ways: the curator of the Iraq National Museum
who’s sharing slides of devastation to his cherished museum
during the U.S. invasion; two lovers exploring their bodies, at
a time when lovers in Iraq are identifying their lover’s bones
in mass grave; a U.S. State Department analyst who’s jumped
off a bridge for unknown reasons, an Iraqi exile who’s written
a cookbook about Iraqi food; a drone operator who isn’t sure
who he may be killing; the wife of a soldier who has the chance
to enter the tank where her husband died; a soldier who had a
chance to arrest a murderer but could not hold him because he
wasn’t a terrorist; an Arab American child whose father works
for the military and finds himself playing a Gulf War video
game his dad; etc.
Finally, I suppose it’s possible also to read the title ironically, since
placing “sand” next to “opera” is to juxtapose the low and the high,
the natural and the artificial, etc. “Sand,” of course, is also a silly
Orientalist stereotype about the Middle East, whose geography and
ecosystems are quite varied.
AJB: Many of the poems throughout your collection have redacted text,
or “blacked-out” words. Because of redaction, there are several ways to
read each line, especially in relation to the surrounding lines. What did
you intend to convey by utilizing these redacted lines and how do you
envision them being interpreted?
METRES: I can’t recall why or how I began to employ the black
bars of redaction, but redacted text is, of course, standard operating
procedure for declassified documents, and redaction itself makes
present both the interference of an Editor and also the absence of
a full narrative.
As soon as I started reading the poems in public, it was clear that the
text called out for polyvocal renderings. Pretty quickly, I decided
that if each redaction could be read as “classified,” so the Editor
(Homeland Security? The National Security Agency? Empire?)
would become embodied in a direct way. Once, I had a person
read those parts aloud from the audience, or from the side of the
room, to create that disruption. Now, when performing the arias,
I typically ask another person from the audience to read alongside
me. Each reader brings her own rhythm and voice to that role, and
the black lines become a script for each to interpret.
There is also the matter of grayscale text (which offers another
effaced voice), not to mention the white space itself. All of these
materialities invite multiple readers (which is my preferred method
of “reading” these poems aloud), as well as multiple interpretations.
I have performed “abu ghraib arias” with three other readers (one
Editor, one Echoer, and one Voice of Genesis) alongside my friend,
the musician Philip Fournier—whose manic piano improvisations
added another layer to the polyphony. We also have done an audio
recording of the “arias,” produced by “Mac” MacDonald at John
Carroll University.
Of course, every poem exists in the eyes and the mouth of each
reader, and could be read as that reader imagines. As Lev Rubinstein
once wrote, “the author’s version is just a version.”
“Hung Lyres” is a series of autobiographical lyric poems that
meditate on my daughter’s new life (and my becoming a
father) during a time of imperial and terrorist violence. My first
daughter, conceived in the months just after 9/11, was born into
a country very much at war. I remember when she was born, the
first thing that stunned me about her were the reticulations of
her beautiful little ears, so invisible in utero. The utter fragility
of her being, her sweet and vulnerable body, seemed more
fragile and vulnerable surrounded by the machinery of warfare
and violence—not only over the airwaves, but above our city
streets, where police helicopters hovered nightly over Cleveland.
The title is a gloss on Psalm 137, which is translated variously,
but one of which is “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
down, we also wept, when we remembered Zion. We hung our
lyres on the willows in its midst.” In the poetic sequence, but
also throughout Sand Opera, the question of the art and its role
in a world of devastation recurs; does one give up, “hang one’s
lyre,” and just weep? It’s intriguing, of course, that this is a song
recalling a time when it was impossible to sing. I’m wary about
art that pronounces its own feebleness, and as wary about art
that refuses to see itself as a kind of privilege.
AJB: One of the features of the printed version of Sand Opera is
the inclusion of transparent vellum pages. These pages overlay the
“Black Site” poems, which are constructed around maps of locations
of black sites, secret U.S. prisons located throughout the world. How
do you feel these overlay pages add to the collection?
METRES: I’m so grateful to the editors at Alice James for
their bold design suggestions. What I loved about the idea of
the vellum page overlays is that since so many of the poems in
t
author interview
8
(continued)
Sand Opera are polyvocal collages, creating a transparent overlay
enables the reader to excavate the layers of poems—in particular,
between the enigmatic black site diagrams and the floating
testimonial lines of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.
the poem, which should be out in early 2015.
AJB: In the final section of Sand Opera,“Homefront/Removes,” a new
voice is introduced: a voice that is proud of its Arab heritage, but also
feels silenced by its identity. Will you please explain the importance of
Bashmilah was a Yemeni detainee who was “rendered” to these this new voice?
various secret prisons and, while in prison, drew pictures of each
cell in order to retain a semblance of sanity. The vellum materializes METRES: The book’s final section juxtaposes the testimony
the ghost-text aspect of the work, the hauntedness of survivors.
of Bashmilah with the voice of an Arab American, captured or
contained what I think of as prose cells or boxes or windows or
AJB: The poem “Cell/(ph)one (A simultaneity in four voices)” begins mirrors. “Homefront/Removes” is dedicated to the victims of the
with instructions for four readers to perform a simultaneous reading terror war, especially to Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, held
of each of its four sections. Will you please explain your thoughts on and tortured in secret U.S. prisons. Bashmilah’s legal case against
this poem and the significance of its performance?
Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary, was for its knowing
participation in the “extraordinary renditions” of detainees in the
METRES: The piece is inspired by two other works—one was a War on Terror. Throughout the book, one can find renderings
play I saw in 2000 composed of monologues by/about Palestinian of drawings by Bashmilah (thanks to Justin Petropoulos for his
refugees, which began with all the monologists talking at once, design expertise!).
then breaking off and properly “beginning” the play. It was so
powerful that one of our companions, Rima, a Palestinian refugee, I don’t think of the Arab American voice as a “new” voice in the
burst into tears and left the theater immediately, waiting in the car book, but it is more frankly autobiographical, drawing us back to
for the duration of the performance.
the hectic moments after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.
9/11 was a sort of coming-out for me and other Arab American
The other source of inspiration was work of Jackson MacLow, and Muslim American poets. From the older generation I think
an anarchopacifist poet and conscientious objector during the of Lawrence Joseph and Naomi Shihab Nye in particular, who
Second World War who was a friend of John Cage. MacLow’s “Jail had written moving and brilliantly before 9/11, but whose work
Break” was performed in various demos, beginning with protests took on a new urgency. From my generation, my poetry brothers
of the continued imprisonment of CO’s in Danbury Prison after and sisters—Kazim Ali, Hayan Charara, Suheir Hammad, Mohja
the Second World War. In Behind the Lines, I called the poem a Kahf, Khaled Mattawa, Fady Joudah, Deema Shehabi, shukran to
“simultaneity”—a performance piece meant to be read by multiple RAWI (the Radius of Arab American Writing)—have come out
people, overlapping voices. And also, to quote from that book, in not only to contribute to American poetry, but also to challenge
the directions provided for a later version of the poem, Mac Low and change American thinking about the Middle East, about
instructs the poem needs “five [people] who speak clearly, listen Arabs and Muslims. We saw (and sometimes felt) the racism and
closely to each other & all environing sounds, & let what they hear hatred against Arabs and Arab Americans, and we could not afford
modify how they speak” (195). Read aloud, “Jail Break” rapidly to be silent anymore. But in order not to be silent, I needed to
moves from message-driven protest to an incantatory language listen. Sand Opera is the sound of my listening.
event. More than a protest statement, and more than a lyric poem,
this simultaneity opens out into community and is only realized
by communal participation; such a poem has cultural use-value as
a protest chant that itself is subject to nuance, listening, alteration,
change.
THANK YOU
This piece evolved over multiple performances with friends and
students, but it when I discovered the voice of a Guantanamo
detainee, it began to connect explicitly the predicament of our
cellular existence in the United States with the cellular existence
of post-9/11 detainees. I love the chaos of multiple voices reading
simultaneously, particularly when juxtaposed against the narrow
bandwidth of the typical poetry reading. I read somewhere that
we can only understand about two voices at once; when a third
voice is introduced, our comprehension fails. To include a fourth
voice is to court the madness of information overload.
I’m grateful that Nick Kuhar, a former student and rock drummer
for The Commonwealth, is currently producing a film version of
for helping make AJB’s
#GI
INGTUESDAY
such a success!
@AliceJamesBooks
9
news and events
Kathleen Aguero
is reading at 2:00 P.M. on January 18, 2015 at the Brookline Public
Library, in Brookline, MA, during the Brookline Poetry Series.
Catherine Anderson
had her third full-length collection published by Mayapple Press, Woman
with a Gambling Mania. She has new poems published in the I-70 Review
and forthcoming in The Laurel Review. She read and discussed writing on
October 25 at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines, IA.
Carole Borges
published her memoir, The Dreamseeker’s Daughter. She recently had two
magazine articles published on Knoxzine.
Michael Broek
has a book of poetry from Alice James Books forthcoming May 2015,
Refuge/es. Sections of his collection have been published in and are
forthcming in the Beloit Poetry Journal. This summer he attended a
fellowship at the MacDowell Arts Colony. In January he will be teaching
a poetry workshop at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway.
Cathy Linh Che
will be reading on December 21 at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts
Center in Vencice, CA, on February 5 at Northwest Academy in Portland,
OR, at 7:00 P.M. on February 5 at Literary Arts in Portland, OR, at 6:30
P.M. on April 1 at the University of New Haven in West Haven, CT, on
April 8 at AWP in Minneapolis, MN at the on-site event, “Contemporary
Vietnamese Poetry, 40 Years after the War,” along with Tiffanie Hoang,
Hieu Minh Nguyen, Bao Phi, and Paul Tran, and on May 5 at the Library
of Congress in Washington, D.C. with Eugenia Leigh, R.A. Villanueva,
and Ocean Vuong.
Deborah DeNicola
has a poem forthcoming in with in the Packingtown Review.
Theodore Deppe
had his fifth book of poems published in Ireland by Arlen House and
distributed in the U.S. by Syracuse University Press, Beautiful Wheel.
His poem “Shouting at the Windows of the Night” was included in the
Forward Book of Poetry 2015, a collection of the best poetry published in
the U.L. and Ireland in the past year. On February 7-15 Ted and Annie
will be visiting writers at Bay Path College in MA, on March 5-7 at Trinity
Prep School in FL, and March 16-April 11 at Randolph College in VA.
Xue Di
read on October 1 at Brown University, during an event sponsored by the
Internation Writers Project.
B.H. Fairchild’s
has a new book from W.W. Norton, The Blue Buick: Selected and New
Poems.
Joanna Fuhrman
has a new book of poetry from Hanging Loose Press forthcoming spring
2015, The Year of Yellow Butterflies. She is reading on April 9, 2015 at the
Solar Arts Building in Minneapolis, MN, during an offsite reading at
AWP. She has a new website, where you can find our more about her current
projects and publish your own prose poems: theyearofyellowbutterfiles.
weebly.com.
Eric Gamalinda
has a novel from Akashic Books, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man
Asian Literary Prize, The Descartes Highlands.
Allison Funk
has her fifth book of poems forthcoming from Parlor Press, Wonder
Rooms. She will be on a panel at AWP in Minneapolis.
Rita Gabis
has a memoir from Bloomsbury US/UK forthcoming April 2015, A
Guest At The Shoorters’ Banquet; My Grandfather and the SS, My Jewish
Family, A Search for the Truth. Two poems from her second in-progress
poetry collection, Feng Shui In The Spirit House of the New Family are
forthcoming in Tin House.
Eric Gamalinda
has a novel from Akashic Books, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Man
Asian Literary Prize, The Descartes Highlands.
Dobby Gibson
has a new book from Graywolf Press, It Becomes You. He is a visiting
associate professor at the University of Texas-Austin for this fall semester.
Forrest Gander
has a new book from New Directions, The Trace.
Stacy Gnall
collaborated with composer Dale Trumbore, who composed a choral
setting of Stacy’s poem “Flare,” which is forthcoming from music
publisher Boosey and Hawkes.
Janine Joseph
has a book of poetry from Alice James Books forthcoming May 2016,
Driving Without a License. She recently had a poem published in Hyphen,
two poems published in Eleven Eleven, and four poems featured in
Connotation Press: An Onlinee Artifact. She has poems forthcoming in
Drunken Boat and The California Journal of Poetics. She conducted the
forthcoming interview, “Putting Feet on It—A Conversation with Ron
Carlson,” which is forthcoming in Weber: The Contemporary West. On
November 14 she presented at Facing Race: A National Conference in
Dallas, TX, during the panel “The Poem and Social Space,” along with
Ken Chen, Lupe Mendez, and Randall Horton. She recently collaborated
with composer D.J. Sparr on a song cycle, commissioned by the Houston
Grand Opera, about the Houston Ship Channel, “On This Muddy Water:
Voices from the Houston Ship Channel;” this song cycle will be perfomed
at 5:30 P.M. on December 10, December 17, January 7, and January 14.
Lesle Lewis
has a new book from Cleaveland State University Poetry Center, A Boot’s
A Boot. She recently had a poem published in B O D Y.
Timothy Liu
has a new book from Saturnalia Books, Don’t Go Back To Sleep.
Sarah Manguso
has a book from Graywolf Press forthcoming March 2015, Ongoingness:
The End of a Diary.
Alice Mattison
had a story published in The Southapton Review. She has a book about
writing forthcoming from Viking, The Kite and the String: On Writing,
Especially Fiction.
news and events
(continued)
Shara McCallum
has recent or forthcoming poems appear in The Best American Poetry
2014, Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World, Give the
Ball to the Poet: a New Anthology of Carribean Poetry, The Book of Scented
Things, The Southern Review, Great River Review, Crazyhorse, MiPOesias,
and The Account.
Laura McCullough
edited an anthology forthcoming from U of Georgia Press, A Sense
of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. She will be touring as part of the
Florida Writers’ Circuit the last week of January 2015 at the west coast
Florida colleges. She joins the faculty of the Sierra Nevada low res MFA in
January 2015 and will teach in the Poetry and Prose Getaway Confrence
in January 2015 at the Seaview Resort Hotel in Absecon, NJ.
Jane Mead
read on October 19 as part of a Poetry Flash poetry reading and book
launch with Judy Halebsky at Diesel in Oakland, CA. She will read with
Eric Linsker at 4:30 P.M. on December 1 at Princeton University in
Princeton, NJ.
Mihaela Moscaliuc
has a new collection of translations of poems from Carmelia Leonte
from Carnagie Mellon University Press, The Hiss of the Viper. She has a
forthcoming collection from University of Pittsburgh Press, Immigrant
Model. She was awarded a Fulbright Award and will be teaching during the
spring semester in Romania at the University of Iasi. She will be moderating
a panel on the work of Gerald Stern and reading for Great River Review
at AWP in Minneapolis. She will be reading on April 15 at San Diego
State University and on April 21 at the University of Southern California.
Attention Alices
Don’t see your news listed, but have some
you want to share?
Be sure you’re included in the Spring 2014 Newsletter
by contacting the AJB office today!
write to us
ajb@alicejamesbooks.org
or call
(207) 778-7071
We want to hear from you!
10
Idra Novey
collaborated with Erica Baum to publish an new book of poems and
images , Clarice: The Visitor. On October 17 she read in the Academy
of American Poets Poets’ Forum on the panel “Poetic Beginnings” with
Rigoberto Gonzalez and Victoria Redel.
Cecily Parks
has her second collection of poems forthcoming from Alice James Books
in April 2015, O’Nights.
Jean-Paul Pecquer
has a new chapbook from Greying Ghost Press, To Embrace Sea Monsters.
Carol Potter
won the 2014 Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press for her new
collection forthcoming April 2015, Some Slow Bees. She has recent or
forthcoming poems in River Styx, Hanging Loose, Field, Calyx, Sinister
Wisdom. She will be at AWP in Minneapolis.
Donald Revell
has a book on the role of pageant in Dante, Shakespeare, and
contemporary poetry from Omnidawn forthcoming March 2014, Essay:
A Critical Memoir. From April 8 - 11 he will be at the AWP Conference
in Minneapolis and will be part of the panel “Translation as Love Affair.”
Lisa Sewell
won the 2014 Tenth Gate Prize from The Word Works for her forthcoming
collection, Impossible Object.
Willa Schneberg
has a new book of poems, Rending the Garment. She will read on
December 8 at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Holocaust Education
Center in Portland, OR. One of her poems will appear in the forthcoming
anthology from Lost Horse Press, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets
Occupy the Workplace. Her poem “Biscuits” was read on September 14
Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor.
Chad Sweeney
has a new book of poems from Marick Press, White Martini of the
Apocalypse.
Adrienne Su
has a new book forthcoming from Manic D Press, Living Quarters.
Brian Turner
has a new memoir published in the U.K. from Jonathan Cape/Random
House and the U.S./Canada from W. W. Norton & Company, My Life
as a Foreign Country. He will be reading on January 15 at the Carlow
University low-res MFA reading in Pittsburgh, PA, on February 18 with
Dunya Mikhail during the Oklahoma City University Lecture Series in
in Oklahoma City, OK, from February 22-26 as part of the Birmingham,
AL poetry circuit, on March 12 at Grinnel College in Grinnel, IA, from
April 14-15 at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in La Crosse, WI,
from April 23-25 in Arkansas, from April 29-30 at Grossmont College in
El Cajon, CA, from May 1-3 in Asheville, NC, and from June 1-6 during
the Arvon Foundation Course in Lumb Bank, U.K.. In January he is
directing the MFA residency at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe, NV,
and will be at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis.
11
forthcoming titles
Coming Spring 2015
Praise for Yearling:
Yearling
Lo Kwa Mei-en
Available
April 2015
Ari Kellond
“Lo Kwa Mei-en’s Yearling is brilliant—blindingly smart and lit
at midnight—hard and beautiful, so sharp ‘you could baptize
a battlefield in it.’ Through its excavation of memory, trauma,
girlhood, the body itself, it electrifies form and narrative in
poems that are rich, journeyed, dark, resilient. So brave, too,
in their song of recovery: wings and war and eggs and maps
and scars and somehow, in the morning, vision. I am in awe
of this book, will no doubt reread and reread it.”
—Anne Marie Rooney
Praise for O’Nights:
O’Nights
Cecily Parks
Available
April 2015
Carrie Patterson
“In Cecily Parks’ luminous and graceful poems, thought
inhabits the wilderness, and wildness permeates the interior of
human perception. Within these nightscapes, we find ourselves
among the foxes, watching, listening, aware of our role as
trespassers and witnesses. Thinking about weapons, thinking
about how a wound heals, thinking about words, captured,
released, spilling over, following a sound that seems at once
ancient and new.”
—Elizabeth Willis
Praise for Refuge/es:
—Martha Collins
Refuge/es
Michael Broek
Available
May 2015
© Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
“Juxtaposing our wars, our disturbed cities, our flawed policies
with the erotic and domestic, Michael Broek creates, in
Refuge/es, a stunning love song for our troubled nation
and world. Consisting primarily of three sequences, this
audaciously original first book is actually one complex collage
with recurrent points of reference, assembled with uncommon
skill and passionate care.”
donors
12
AJB thanks the following individuals for their generous contributions
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featured backlist title
14
Loved To Play Dead
Night Sale
As a child he loved
to play dead
and he never out grew it,
so there he was
at fifty, grabbing
his chest, writhing
and collapsing.
He did it for laughs,
but once someone
had a heart attack.
He loved to roll
down steps in front
of a crowd.
I was his shill.
I lifted him over
my shoulder and hobbled
a few steps before
I too collapsed,
and you know what.
Gold initials
nearly
rubbed out.
The briefcase
prongs snap
like snare drums.
A smell of old
cologne curls
like a genie.
An overripe
voice addresses
death, quietly,
a ring
on the pinkie
like one book
at the end
of a shelf.
Lucky night—
on the last
onion skin,
a signature,
wet and blue.
DOOR TO A NOISY ROOM
Peter Waldor
Praise for Door to a Noisy Room:
“Waldor’s spare irony—sometimes tender, sometimes bawdy—deals in dichotomies: love
and hate, frailty and strength, fear and faith. These elliptical and colloquial lyrics draw
equally from parable, prayer, and elegy. Hesitating on the threshold between isolation and
community, the poet focuses a distortingly accurate microscope on what matters in our lives.
. . . familial, humane, and loyal to the good people and the simple delights of this world.”
—Publishers Weekly
Peter Waldor is the author of Door to a Noisy Room (Alice James Books), The Wilderness Poetry of Wu Xing (Pinyon Publishing), and Who
Touches Everything (Settlement House), which won the National Jewish Book Award. His book-length poem, Leg Paint, appeared in the
on-line magazine Mudlark. The Last of the Original Forms is forthcoming in 2015 from Settlement House. His work has appeared in many
journals, including American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and Mothering Magazine.
Waldor works in the insurance business and lives in northern New Jersey.
Ginny Twersky
“. . .The reader must learn to forfeit expectation and simply tune in, like listening to a
koan…these poems generously reward the concentration their language demands. Waldor
asks us to listen to the noisy world as he hears it, and he opens our ears.”
—Boston Review
15
alice asks
alice asks...
Mary Ann McFadden
AJB: Tell us about a dream you had recently.
MCFADDEN: I was going somewhere in New York or Paris and I
had to dress up, but I was me, so of course I didn’t have a thing to
wear. I decided to go for it, walked into a posh shop and whipped
out my credit card. The madam understood that I was to be made
beautiful and elegant and hang the cost. She considered a little and
then brought out her seamstress. They conferred. She brought out
their wonderfully costly cloths, loosely woven and difficult to work
with. Impossible to wash, I told myself. Must remember not to spill
and slop my dinner.
AJB: If you could be any animal, what would you be?
MCFADDEN: I would be an elephant if I weren’t being hunted for
my ivory.
AJB: Where is your ideal vacation spot?
MCFADDEN: A clean, wild beach with pristine tide pools and great
snorkeling. Some excellent cafes nearby. Shade trees with hammocks
in them. Free lemonade. No mosquitoes, fleas, scorpions, water
bugs, lice, or bedbugs.
AJB: If you could be a character from a famous film, who would you
be?
MCFADDEN: If there were a female Harry Potter, I’d like to be her.
AJB: If someone wrote a biography about you, what do you think the
title should be?
MCFADDEN: A line from one of my failed poems: “This Life, This
Life And No Other.”
Sarah E. McCabe
The woman took measurements and told me to come back the next
day. When I walked into the store next morning, the morning of
the Big Event, the seamstress dressed me, and I assumed a kind of
power that took my breath away. The gown was incredibly beautiful,
elegantly cut. Then she brought out the rest of it and put it around
my shoulders and the beauty of it was beyond speech, was almost
holy. It was a fur made from two wolves, the heads meeting in front.
It was shocking and although I loved the power of it, I knew I had
to tell her that I couldn’t wear the skins of those animals whose lives
had been taken for the sake of some furrier, for money. So she quietly
took them away, those gorgeous kings, that pair who had lived and
died in the snow of the ------------ mountains, who had not given
themselves to me. And she brought a lesser mantel, a lovely shawl
of the same fabric as the rest of the outfit, not a gown exactly but a
kind of cross between gown and suit, perfectly elegant, understated
and rich. I could not stride in it, but had to walk slowly, with tiny
steps, but that was all right, since the Event was partly to be seen, to
be celebrated, to hold one’s head up as one walked graciously across
the room.
AJB: If you were a box of cereal, what would you be and why?
MCFADDEN: I would never, never be a box of cereal under any
circumstances. No nutrition whatever.
AJB: If you were a type of food, what type of food would you be?
MCFADDEN: Maybe a Brussels sprout? Is this a trick question?
AJB: What is your favorite Muppet?
MCFADDEN: Kermit. I love his existential angst. It’s SO not easy
being green.
AJB: What is the funniest thing that happened to you recently?
MCFADDEN: Well, usually it’s that I do something silly, and
everyone else laughs. Not too long ago I was visiting my son in Costa
Rica and my chore was to take out the compost and throw it on the
compost pile. It was fairly dark, and I was nervous because a very
large python had been seen in the area some months earlier and it
could have been lurking. I was looking around anxiously as I threw
the garbage in the general direction of the pile and I noticed a very
short individual with a hat who was standing over the edge of the
hill about twenty feet away. He didn’t say anything, just seemed to
be waiting for me to speak first. So, in my very best Spanish, I
asked him how he was doing and immediately warned him about
the very large python that was almost certainly nearby. He didn’t
seem alarmed, however, just stood there being very short and sort
of gazing into the distance. He seemed to quaver a bit in the fading
light, and I began to wonder what he was doing there anyway, so far
out of town and in my son’s yard and all. I started back to the house
and looked closely and sternly at him as I went by, only to realize
that he was actually one of those deceptive lamp posts made out of
cement that looked exactly like a....well, you get the idea. The thing
was, I explained to my kids as I was telling them, and who were
rolling around on the floor in hysterics, that I was so polite to him.
I truly used my very best Spanish.
Alice James Books
anne provoost
idoia elola
Sarah E. McCabe
“Mary Ann McFadden’s wise and compassionate poems celebrate a world of wild-life
and animal warmth, oceanic communions and ecstatic sexual unions. Old flames
rekindled by intimacy reveal the hard-won heart-truths that state, “We are truer
together than we are alone.” “Now I mourn the loss of magic,” the poet writes. “Now I
see it everywhere.”” —Louis Asekoff
Juan Antonio González Iglesias (Salamanca,
1964) is Professor of Latin Philology at
the University of Salamanca, Spain. He
has translated Ovid,
anonymous Romans,
Horace, Catullus, James
Laughlin, Stendhal, and
Sebastiano Grasso. In
addition to Eros es más,
his other collections of poetry include La
hermosura del héroe (Premio Vicente Núńez,
1993),Esto es mi cuerpo (Visor, 1997), Un
ángulo me basta (IV Premio Internacional
de Poesía Generación del 27, Visor,
2002), Olímpicas (El Gaviero Ediciones,
2005), and most recently, Del lado del amor:
Poesía reunida 1994-2009 (Visor, 2010). Eros es
más was selected by El Cultural, El Mundo as
the best collection of poetry in Spain in 2007.
Curtis Bauer is the author of three poetry
collections: Fence Line (BkMk Press, 2004),
won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize; Spanish
Sketchbook is a bilingual
English/Spanish collection
published by Ediciones
en Huida in Seville Spain;
and The Real Cause for
Your Absence was published
by C&R Press in 2013. His poems and
translations have appeared in The Southern
Review, The Indiana Review, The Common and
The American Poetry Review, among others.
He is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue
Press Chapbooks, the Spanish Translations
Editor for From the Fishouse, and he teaches
Creative Writing and Comparative Literature
at Texas Tech University.
“ The voice of Juan Antonio González Iglesias,
translated with great beauty by Curtis Bauer,
seems miraculous in its clarity. Crucial and
inevitable, the poems speak directly from
our time, and simultaneously through the
layers of time. I lifted my face from reading as
from fresh essential water. This is poetry that
resuscitates.” —Marie Howe
“Contemplative and utterly sensual, Bauer’s
translation of Eros Is More stands at the brink
of oblivion with such tenderness, gratitude,
and reverence for the brief bodies of things
(birds, lovers, letters) that we cannot
help but be emboldened by these poems.
Provocatively and playfully they enliven my
thinking and seeing: “October, like a truce.
Like an absence of everything/ that exceeds
limits. May it be for us/ liberation.” This is a
beautifully masterful collection, at once lucid
and mysterious. In this book we are in the
hands of two generous and beautiful poets.”
—Aracelis Girmay
Eros Is More
t r an sl at e d by C urt i s Baue r
Eros Is More
“Devil, Dear teems with erotic life. These poems adore the world within us and outside
us, embracing our hungers and imperfections alike. I love Mary Ann McFadden’s
range of tones and her long, musical lines, shaped by the pressures of intelligence and
deep honesty. She takes us to the edge of an irresolvable mystery and lets us see its
beauty.” —Joan Larkin
Devil, Dear
“When Mary Ann McFadden lures us into her fertile and earthy-pungent poems, we
become lost in her world of “jellied forms,” in “clouds of milk in water” and we feel as
the speaker of these poems feels when she says “The things of this world fill me up.”
These poems are sly and full of generous humor and wisdom. To read McFadden is to
be surprised, in poem after poem, by the ecstatic.” —Anne Marie Macari
Devil, Dear
Jua n A n ton i o G on z á l e z I gl e sia s
poetry / $15.95
González Iglesias | Bauer
Mary Ann McFadden is a poet who has just returned to the
U.S. after 15 years living in Mazatlan and in San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico. She won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in
1995 and Eye of the Blackbird was published in 1997. Her
poems have shown up in Green Mountains Review, Bloom,
Psychology Tomorrow, The Marlboro Review, Southern
Poetry Review, The American Voice, Moving Out, and
elsewhere. In 2005, several poems were set to music by the
composer Gerald Busby and performed at The Carnegie Center,
New York City. McFadden taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY,
and gave workshops at The New York City Libraries, and at the
Biblioteca in San Miguel. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell
Fellowship. She currently lives in Riverside, California.
M c Fadde n
Poetry/$15.95
“Eros is more or less everything in the magical
world of Juan Antonio González Iglesias.
What good luck to have his poems in the
elegant translations of Curtis Bauer, for here
is a poet who understands the centrality of
love, or, more precisely, beauty, to our works
and days—a theme that he explores with
rigor, wit, and wisdom.”
—Christopher Merrill
Alice James Books
Alice James Books
Farmington,Maine
SAND OPERA
fa r m i n gto n , m a i n e
M ary Ann M cFadde n
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PhiliP MEtRES
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GREG GALE, 2012
traumatize, yet never define it.”
— PA I s L E Y r E K dA L
“A tough, wise, and beautiful book about the human destruction of the earth and everything trying to live here: ‘the poisoned planet poisoning.’ All this brilliant poet’s
knowledge and experience have been gathered into this fierce, grieving book, laid at
the feet of our global kingdom and power: ‘How much can you subtract now / How
much and still get by’.”
— j e an val e n t i n e
“Money Money Money | Water Water Water addresses not only the economic politics of
water, but also the economic politics of investing in your own life. It’s costly, and
this book counts the ways. It’s a book of ecopoetics in an unusually large sense—and
one that contributes complexly to the genre’s commitment to the political—but it
also marks a structural advance in lyric poetry. Sound here is always foregrounded,
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put completely at the servicewww.alicejamesbooks.org
of a highly poised and highly intentional play of aphoristic, almost ephemeral, passages against grounded, yet open-ended, poems that
build into a life—both that of a person and that of a people. It’s a beautiful, seamless
book that never stops gathering force—one in which the strength, brilliance, and
www.alicejamesbooks.org
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movement of the phrase is the ultimate
ecosystem.”
www.alicejamesbooks.org
— g ol e s we n s e n
SPLIT
A l i c e Ja m e s B o o k s
FArmington, mAine
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S a l l y We n M a o
CATHY LINH CHE
LO R E M I P S U M P O E M
Dolor sit amet, consectetaur
adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod
tempor incididunt ut labore et d
aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam
nostrud exercitation ullamco lab
money money money
water water water
aliquip ex ea commodo consequ
Duis aute irure dolor in reprehe
voluptate velit esse cillum dolor
nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint oc
cupidatat non proident, sunt in
officia deserunt mollit anim id e
Et harum, dereud facilis.
Nam liber te conscient to factor
jane mead
Iowa,delicate,
respectively.
is the
“Cathy Linh Che’s first collection, Split, is aofbrave,
and She
terrifying
author
of that
threehas
previous
collections
account of what we do to each other. Here’s
a voice
to speak.
Split crosses borders, exposing truths and dreams,
violations
of body
of poetry,
most recently
The Usable
and mind, aligning them until the deep push-pull
silence
andJames
songBooks. Her
Field, alsooffrom
Alice
become a bridge. And here we cross over into
a landscape
beauty
poems
have beenwhere
published
widely in
interrogates, and we encounter a voice that refuses to let us off the hook.”
anthologies and journals and she is the
— Y u s E f K o m u N YA K A A
recipient of grants and awards from
“In her debut collection Cathy Linh Che summons
forth
a daughter-self
the Whiting,
Guggenheim
and Lannan
that jolts, blazes. It’s a voice that orbits a harrowing
girlhood
andyears
a warFoundations.
For many
Poet-intorn Vietnam. It’s a voice that veers into tenderness and ferocity. It’s an
Residence at Wake Forest University,
exquisite voice. Line after line burns with pictorial verve, melodic grace.
now
grows zinfandel
and cabernet
This voice, this daughter-self, is a stunningshe
and
scorching
performance.”
sauvignon wine grapes on the property
—EduArdo C. CorrAL
her grandfather purchased in the early
“Cathy Linh Che’s debut examines the complex
in which
1900’s ways
in Napa
Valley. the
She past
teaches in
imperils our present. In these heartbreaking poems, rape and abuse are
the Drew University low-residency
not private traumas, but a terrible inheritance that continues through
MFA
program
in
Poetry
Poetry
generations. Here, the Vietnam War becomes a psychic backdropand
against
in Translation.
which one family still struggles to heal, reliving
past cultural wounds that
“Money Money Money |WaterWaterWater offers us both a voice and an undervoice, and
the tension between them achieves a loose-limbed elegance—whatever once had to
be built can now be simply uttered, trusting the words to be as eternal—or more
so—than the world we pass through. I feel utterly transported in Mead’s presence,
surrounded by—and imbued in—her language.”
— n i c k f ly n n
CATHY LINH CHE
ater spitting ‘the light out because
transformssense (and sentence)
onary poems are not only astute
verbal experiences. Worldly, wily,
but.”
—Terrance Hayes
“Jane Mead’s mission is to rescue—to search and rescue; and the mind, above all,
does the work. She says—twice—in one poem that “the mind gives over its small
grave of secrets.” She is searching for the “sentence written in stone—far enough
back so the water can’t get it.” Her poems are a beautiful search for liberation and
rebirth. I praise them to the sky.”
— g e ral d s t e r n
SPLIT
delicious diction: ‘archipelago . . .
nd feral, we curl;’ ‘mouth on your
also offers a heightened attention
The poet takes us all over the place
dubon’s dreams to sputnik to hive
lovely debut collection.”
—Kimiko Hahn
poetry/$15.95
CATHY LINH CHE is a
Vietnamese American poet
from Los Angeles, CA. She has
received awards from The Asian
American Literary Review, The Center
for Book Arts, The Fine Arts
Work Center at Provincetown,
Hedgebrook, Kundiman, The
JANE
MEAD received
her BA in
Lower
Manhattan
Cultural
Economics
from Vassar
College and
Council's
Workspace
Residency,
andearned
Poets an
& Writers.
is a from
MA and She
an MFA
founding
editor
of Paperbag.
Syracuse
University
and the University
PHoTo CrEdIT: KATIE BLoom
Mad Honey SyMpoSiuM
h a breathtaking assurance and
ygen: I’m energized by audacious
lligence and depth. The charged
ubjects. Passionate and cerebral,
criptor brilliant.”
—Alice Fulton
Mad Honey
SyMpoSiuM
P o E T r Y/ $ 1 5 . 9 5
m on e y m on e y m on e y | wat e r wat e r wat e r
he Bay Area. Her poetry has been
est American Poetry 2013 and
ch as Colorado Review, Guernica,
Review, Third Coast, and West
The recipient of fellowships and
diman, 826 Valencia, and Bread
ce, she has been nominated for
Pushcart Prize anthologies. She
negie Mellon University and an
iversity.
Mao
o was born in Wuhan, China and
legum odioque civiuda. Et tam n
modut est neque nonor.
jane mead
Winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize
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www.alicejamesbooks.org
www.alicejamesbooks.org
When you choose to be an Alice James Books subscriber, AJB will automatically mail you each new book
we publish (six books a year), so you’re guaranteed not to miss a title! The cost is $70/year (two seasons of
books, including shipping)—that’s about 50% off the cover price! Take advantage of this great offer now!
Call us at (207) 778-7071, email ajb@alicejamesbooks.org, or visit our website to enroll.
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an affiliate of the University of Maine at Farmington