Four Way Books

One of our authors, Patrick Donnelly, has a busy season coming up full of readings at exciting events. We hope you can go to at least one!

Sunday, 9/16, 3pm: Reading with Preston Hood and Jacqueline Loring for the Calliope Poetry Series at the West Falmouth Library (575 West Falmouth Highway (Route 28A)) in West Falmouth, MA. 

Sunday, 9/30, 5pm: Donnelly will read with Peter Covino at The Elevens (140 Pleasant Street) in Northampton, MA. 

Thursday, 10/4, 7pm: Patrick Donnelly and Jean Valentine reading for The Collected Poets Series at Mocha Maya’s Coffee House (47 Bridge Street, 413-625-6292) in Shelburne Falls, MA. 

       
Tuesday, 10/19, 7pm: Patrick Donnelly and Richard Yañez will be featured readers as part of La Sociedad para las Artes’ Annual Hunger benefit in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The event will take place at Beverly Hills Hall and Pavilion (150 Hermosa Avenue). Tickets are $10.00. The benefit, which will raise money for Casa de Peregrinos, will also have a silent auction, door prizes, a carnival-style midway, a chile cookoff, and an after-party with live music and delicious food.

We know after hearing Lea you’ll want more. Here is a link to our website to order his book, Young of the Year. 

Congratulations to Alex for receiving an incredible review from RATTLE for his chapbook, American Boys. And don’t forget! His first full-length book will be published by us this spring, Begging For It!

“Upon first finishing Alex Dimitrov’s conversationally direct, unapologetically glitz-filled American Boys, I immediately wanted to pick up numerous women at local bars and write unflinchingly about my heartbreaking experiences with them. More importantly, though, I felt that beneath each poem’s defensive, deflective exterior (these are very, “I don’t care what you think, reader” poems) was a voice I could both relate to and believe.

While my own straightness means I navigate a romantic context parallel to (rather than perpendicular with) Dimitrov’s, his poems instantly struck a chord with me in the same way that James White’s do in The Salt Ecstasies, or Mark Doty’s do in My Alexandria, or Carl Phillips’s do in The Tether. If you have a pulse and are a human being and want to have sex with other human beings–to be hurt, praised, desired, ridiculed, and occasionally loved by them–then the work of these poets is essential.” Click here to finish the review. 

“Berl’s usually has the latest, loveliest chapbooks by local and national poets (in addition to other small-press books and wares), and they set up shop at The Brooklyn Flea, which ensures some non-poet-buying, we’d wager. Here’s a bit on that topic from their interview with Joshua Edwards:

I love knowing that somewhere in America a lava lamp and a chapbook could end going home together. Has talking about contemporary poetry with people in such a space—one where it may come as a surprise, one where it is surrounded by all sorts of things—changed the way you think of poetry’s relationship to community?

Farrah Field: Absolutely. When we first started, I thought for sure we were going to hear comments like who cares about poetry or that kind of thing. Stuff parents say. Jared and I even practiced answering random questions like what is a poem and what do poets write about, but we’ve very rarely been approached with stuff like that.”

Congrats, Farrah and Jared! Great work. For more of the interview on The Poetry Foundation website, click here. To read Farrah’s poetry, visit our website to look at her book, Rising. 

Congratulations to Alex Dimitrov for being the featured poet for “The Paris-American” this week! Here is one out of three of his featured poems, Blue Curtains. 

For more of his featured poems and for Dimitrov’s bio, click here. His first book of poetry, Begging For It, will be coming out as one of our titles this spring! Stay tuned!

Fall is almost here and with it comes a whole new season of readings for our authors.

On Wednesday, September 5th, Debra Spark will be reading at the Portland Public Library from 12-1pm.

On Friday, September 21st, Sydney Lea will read at the Burlington Book Festival.

On Sunday, September 30th, Patrick Donnelly and Peter Covino have a reading at Esselon Cafe in Hadley, MA from 3:30-4:30pm.

We hope you can make it! Be sure to keep a look out for our continued posts about upcoming readings and don’t forget that pretty soon our fall books will be coming out…

“… I found Cynthia Cruz, in 2006, in a hand-me-down copy of the American Poetry Review, two poems that later appeared in her debut collection Ruin. I read,

Woke on the highway,
Thin in my dead brother’s clothes.
I was gone but still dreaming.

A desert city strobing in the distance like sex

and fell instantly in love. Her poems were spare, fierce, dark little packages that managed to feel both mystical—almost like fairytales—and contemporary with their references to drugs and Greyhound stations. The speaker in those poems was consumed with guilt and self-loathing, precariously navigating her ruined world, the forfeited kingdom of childhood. She seemed, in my grim 24 year old brain, to speak directly to me. Ruin was the first book I’d ever ordered before it was released. That was six years ago and I am seriously giddy about her second collection, The Glimmering Room, due out from Four Way Books this October.”

Read the interview here and be sure to visit our website in the fall when you can get a copy of The Glimmering Room.

Debra Spark’s “A Wedding Story”, from her novella and story collection, The Pretty Girl, is now in Narrative Magazine. Congratulations, Debra! 

On Sunday, September 30th at 2pm, Debra Spark and Lucille Lang Day will be reading at The Writer’s Center (4508 Walsh Street) in Bethesda, MD. Spark will be reading from her novella and story collection, The Pretty Girl, which you can order from our website. Day will be reading from her memoir, Married At Fourteen. This is a free event and you can order you tickets by calling 301-654-8664. For directions, click here. Hope you can go!

“A black-clad waiter gingerly steps through the crowd, carrying a tray of wine glasses. A petite plate of parmesan slices and cranberries rests on the coffee table at my elbow. Four stately half-opened windows overlook Fifth Avenue. This isn’t your mother’s poetry reading series, unless your mother was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In fact, this isn’t merely a reading series. It’s Wilde Boys, a monthly invitation-only salon where young queer poets and poetry lovers gather to experience queer and queer-friendly authors in an intimate atmosphere. Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate Louise Glück perches on a plush wing chair in poet Tom Healy’s spacious living room, an apartment he shares with his longtime partner, Fred Hochberg. Glück is tonight’s featured guest and the reason I am here. As a Glück fan and a straight male writer, I‘m thrilled to have scored an invite to the evening.” Read more of this fascinating piece by Jeffrey McDaniel on Alex Dimitrov’s “Wilde Boys” series. And remember, Dimitrov’s first book of poetry, Begging for It, comes out in Spring 2013!

Four Way Books author and Warren Wilson faculty member, Daniel Tobin, Four Way Books Founder, Director and Warren Wilson faculty member, Martha Rhodes and Warren Wilson alumna, Christine Casson will read this Thursday, August 23rd at The Highlands Coffee House (189 Main Street) from 5:00-6:30pm in Thomaston, Maine. If you’re in the area…

You can buy Tobin’s latest book, Belated Heavens, on our website. For more on the readers and their books, click here. 

Torn, Young’s most recent book of poetry, can be purchased on our website. 

Congratulations to our very own Victoria Lynne McCoy, Publicist and Assistant Editor at Four Way Books, on being chosen as a poet for the Best New Poets 2012 anthology! 

Victoria Lynne McCoy holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Used Furniture Review, PANK, and Union Station Magazine, among others.

“Today’s poem is an eerie parable, fairly characteristic of Kevin Prufer’s recent work.  His poems are haunting because they are genuinely and fascinatingly haunted. His speakers don’t seem to be thinly disguised versions of Prufer – rather, they seem to express different moods of a postmodern Tiresias, emoting with a stunned but mutedly down-to-earth credibility.  They speak with a dual awareness of their isolation and the fact that their feelings and impressions must also represent those of others. Perhaps the best introduction to my favorite kind of Prufer voice is to imagine a Greek play’s chorus collapsed into a single omni-reflective persona, placed in the context of a recently collapsed political/cultural system, in an alternately snowy or sooty landscape stripped of natural fertility and even stability on the geological, planetary level.  I could go on – but I’d rather you just read the following poem, which appeared in New Ohio Review 8, Fall 2010.” Read his poem, A Giant Bird and more of Rosser’s thoughts here. 

And don’t forget! You can get his books In A Beautiful Country and National Anthem on our website. 

This Sunday, August 19th at (precisely) 1:32pm, Farrah Field will be reading at Outpost 186 (186 ½ Hampshire St., Inman Sq.) in Cambridge, MA. She will be one of many readers at the Dog Day Poetry Marathon going on this weekend. For more on the marathon, click here. To look at and purchase her collection, Rising, click here. 

Four Way Books author Rigoberto Gonzalez writes a thoughtful and intriguing review of the poetry collection, Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral for the El Paso Times. 

“Eduardo C. Corral is the first Latino to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in its 106-year history. His debut collection “Slow Lightning” (Yale University Press, $18 paperback), which has already earned him a number of prestigious recognitions, is a testament to the importance of the journeys and dreams of the border-crossers he writes about.

There is so much figurative and literal thirst in the Arizona Sonora desert that rain and water are irresistible gifts from the poet’s verse, a respite from the pejorative term “mojado” or “wetback.” For one person, “the first man she saw naked / was the rain. The dark of her knees / a watermark.” For another, “rain collects in the small of his back.” And “To the Mojado Who Died Crossing the Border,” the following resting place: “The arroyo is the color of rust. / Sometimes a gust of snow / floats across the water / as gracefully as a bride.”

Corral presents a unique vision of the day laborers and kitchen workers who once “slipped through a fence like mice,” who trekked “three days in the desert & [were] still too close to Mexico.” They are people fueled by their creativity and imagination, who thrive with humor, resilience and, when necessary, defiance.” Read the rest of the review. 

Click here to get a taste of Gonzalez’ poetry and to get a copy of his collection, Black Blossoms. 

One of our titles this spring The Always Broken Plates Of Mountains has received a wonderful review in The Los Angeles Review. Congratulations to the great poet Rose McLarney!

““So people could try to grow / on the good land,” a neighbor declares in “Where I Will Live,” “they built in the hardest places.” Apart from the book’s self-proclaimed “Ars Poetica,” this statement seems to serve as the guiding principle for McLarney’s poetics. Meticulously crafted and delicately poised, her poetic “house” sits squarely in the rural.  Her concern is with the people, processes, and histories of a North Carolina farming community. Each of her delicately-crafted lines is as musical and finely tuned as the next; as a whole, the poems are characterized by the restraint that was “all I had to distinguish myself” (“Covenant”). Surely, in today’s cacophonous and insistently urban poetic landscape, thriving in such terrain is a difficult undertaking.

McLarney’s strength is also, of course, her weakness: this reader wishes at times for poems that deliver more formal innovation and more overt engagement with their poetic forbearers. Yet, just as she rejects a hipster aesthetic, McLarney rejects showiness for its own sake. These deeply-engaged lyric narratives nonetheless deliver consistent surprise. In two of the book’s closing poems, “Desire,” and “I Learn to Be Still Like the One I Love,” McLarney uses short, pliant lines to reference both Emily Dickinson and Greek mythology. “My love is a hunter,” she writes. “I learn / a new aim: leaving no / fingerprints, making no mark.” This is “an emphatic Thumb” whose emphasis is on its deep concentration, a hunter whose survival depends on her ability to observe the environment. McLarney’s eye and ear are dead-on. The result is a stubbornly-rooted first collection of impressive insight and craft.” Here is the rest of the review. 

Visit our website to look at this book and others from this season. 

“Every society and every generation has its version of the apocalypse: swine flu, genetic mutation, global warming, nuclear fallout, the second coming, peak oil, mass extinction, giant irradiated ants, zombies… Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days is the first anthology of its kind to bring together the poetry and prose of some of America’s finest (though not always most well-known) literary voices with an eye for the literary and the popular, for story and lyric, for the past and the future, for the psychological and the physical, for the real and the fantastic.” Read this for more on the anthology and the selected writers. 

Congratulations, Kevin! To help get excited for this anthology, get a copy of one (or both!) of Kevin’s books with us, In A Beautiful Country  and National Anthem. 

C. Dale Young, the author of Torn will give a talk and reading with Sascha Feinstein at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA on Tuesday, November 13th. C. Dale’s talk will be on “Poetry and the Professional World” at noon in the Walls Lounge in the Langone Center and Sascha Feinstein will talk about “Jazz and Memory” at 4pm in the Willard Smith Library  in the Vaughan Literature Building. They will both read at 7pm in the Bucknell Hall. Click here for more details for the day. 

Four Way Books poet, Kevin Prufer will be reading on October 23rd at 8pm at UNT Golden Eagle Suite, University Union (1155 Union Circle) in Denton, TX. You don’t want to miss it!

Read some of his work before you go hear him. Visit our website to take a look at his books of poetry, In a Beautiful Country and National Anthem.