Four Way Books

We are thrilled to announce our presence on Pinterest. Please click here to see our board!

We are thrilled to have Unbuilt Projects, a collection of short fiction, as our of our books coming out this fall. The author, Paul Lisicky, just had four of his short fiction pieces published in Cedars’ Issue 3 Autumn 2012. Congratulations, Paul!

Three past Coldfront contributors, Farrah Field (a Four Way Books author whose second poetry book, Wolf and Pilot, will be coming out with us next month), Jared White and Dan Magers, are about to embark on the White Wolf Party Tour.

Sept 30: in Boise, Idaho with Kyle Crawford at The Crux (1022 W Main Street) at 7pm for the Ghosts and Projectors Series

October 2: Portland, Oregon with musical guest import/import at Recess Gallery (1127 SE 10th Avenue) (207-409-6763) at 7:30pm for the “If Not For Kidnap” Series

October 5: Oakland, California at Studio 1 Art Center for the Studio One Reading Series

Oct 6: San Francisco radio appearance on Poet as Radio, airing Saturday from 9-10am

Oct 8: Poetry talk and tea with students at Cal Arts (24700 McBean Parkway) in Valencia, CA at 4pm

Oct 9: Los Angeles, CA reading with Jared White and Dan Magers at The Pop-Hop bookstore (5002 York Boulevard) in Highland Park at 7pm

Oct 10:The book tour ends in NY! At the NYU Main Bookstore (726 Broadway) at 6:30pm celebrating new work from 2012 CLMP Face Out Grantees! Grantees include: Cynthia Cruz (another Four Way author!), Farrah Field (Four Way Books), Dan Machlin reading for Frances Richard (Futurepoem Books), Dan Magers (Birds, LLC) and Kristin Prevallet (Belladonna Books).

We hope you can make at least one of these readings. If you haven’t already, you should look at Field’s first book of poetry, Rising, on our website. And be on the look out for Cruz’s poetry collection, The Glimmering Room, which will be coming out next month as a Four Way Books Fall 2012 title.

Farrah Field, the author of Rising and Wolf and Pilot (forthcoming as one of our Fall 2012 titles), will be reading on Friday, October 5th for the Studio One Reading Series: First Fridays  (at Studio One Arts Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland, CA 94609) along with Jared White and Dan Magers. The reading will begin at 7:30pm but  you should arrive at 5:30pm for Bites off Broadway where you can get some great snacks! Refreshments will also be served at the reading. 

With her third book of poetry, Woman Without Umbrella, coming out next month as one of our fall titles, Victoria Redel was interviewed by Leah Umansky for THEthe Poetry Blog.  

“Risking is central to poem making I’d wager for every poet. If the tightrope I walk in making these poems is that of sentimentality, I’m okay with that challenge–mostly because I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. These were the poems I needed to make here in the middle of my life. Death, illness, love, divorce, hilarity, hope, foolish hope–none of these are sentimental. The courage to get up everyday is not sentimental. Living is not for sissies. Or avoiders. If I “avoid sentimentality” that’s good–but it won’t be because of “avoidance”. I’d rather run headlong toward that difficult possibility.” See what else Redel has to say in this interview and be sure to keep checking our website for the launch of our Fall 2012 books of poetry and short fiction. 

One of the many readings Donnelly will be giving this fall is coming up!

On Sunday, September 30th, at 5pm he will read with Peter Covino at The Elevens (140 Pleasant Street) in Northampton, MA. If you’re in the area, we hope you can make it. 

To order a copy of his book of poetry Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, visit our website. 

What: “If Not For Kidnap” Poetry Reading  
Who: Dan Magers, Farrah Field, and Jared White, with musical guest import/import
When: Tuesday October 2nd, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Recess Gallery 1127 SE 10th Avenue Portland, OR 97214 (207-409-6763) (new location!)

Wolf and Pilot, Farrah’s new book coming out with us this fall, should be available for purchase on our website soon along with our other books of poetry and short fiction coming out this fall. In the meantime, if you haven’t read her other book with us, Rising, you should. 

Vermont poet laureate and Four Way Books author Sydney Lea will be reading and speaking at the Burlington Book Festival along with Tracy K. Smith, Emily Bernard, Tim Brookes, Emily M. Danforth, Bill McKibben, Howard Frank Mosher, Garret Keizer, Barbara Walsh and Michael Hastings. The festival will be taking place at various locations downtown in Burlington, VT this weekend, Friday, September 21st through Sunday, September 23rd. All events will be free and open to the public. For more on the festival and the participants, click here. Should be another wonderful festival…hope you can make it!

Don’t forget to get Young of the Year, Lea’s book before hearing him read. 

One of our authors and the Vermont poet laureate, Sydney Lea, wants to spend his term as poet laureate reading at community libraries in Vermont. 

“Sydney Lea, Vermont’s current poet laureate, wants to use that honorary position to clear away some of the fog that he believes surrounds poetry these days.

‘I would like to de-mystify poetry,’ he says. ‘Poetry is really just another way of looking at the world.’

…By the end of this year, he will have read his poems and had discussions at 50 libraries scattered the length and breadth of Vermont. There are some 300 community libraries here, an extraordinarily large number for so small a state, and Lea hopes to read in all of them. He will have three more years as poet laureate of Vermont to do so.

‘I’ll visit every one that will have me,’ he says. ‘I wanted to go to some place where people were literate, but not necessarily literary.’” Read the rest of the article. 

For a look at Lea’s writing, look at his book, Young of the Year, which you can buy on our website. 

This Friday, September 21st at 7pm, Monica Youn (one of our authors) will be reading with Stephen Burt at 18 Bridge Street in Brooklyn. Singularity & Co. is the host of this event, which is free. Hope you can be there! For more info, click here. 

One of our books of poetry coming out this fall, The Glimmering Room by Cynthia Cruz, has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Congratulations to Cynthia!

“The second collection from Cruz (Ruin) makes no bones about its milieu: Goth kids, teens in trouble, severely damaged by sexual abuse, prescription drugs, and adult neglect, trying to save one another, and to understand one another’s pain, in a ‘Kingdom of never-/ ending medicine.’ Caught in a ‘Foster home nightmare, kinder-/ Slut, maybe,’ Cruz also looks back at time spent in the mental health system, ‘when/ I was locked in the Starver’s Ward/ With the other almost-girls.’ Praying to an absent ‘God of gas station bathrooms/ And of girls held hostage/ Inside their own bedrooms,’ holding on to a ‘Plastic baggy filled/ With kiddy pills,’ Cruz also casts herself as a modern Persephone: ‘Groom of the Underworld, please/ Come with me// To the discotheque at the end. Of the world.’…”

NOTE: Our fall books will be coming out soon and available on our website for you to purchase! 

Farrah Field’s book of poetry coming out with us this fall, Wolf and Pilot, has been reviewed by Publishers Weekly. Congratulations to Farrah!Here is an excerpt from the review.

“’Girls are prey to everything’ in Farrah Field’s second book, a dark sequence about twisted domesticity that speaks from an insular, sisterly ‘we’: ‘We are stronger than blackbirds,’ Field writes, ‘we don’t know what anything means we put our/ hands on the cool glass called a window./ Once upon a time all adults used to be children.’ People appear and reappear throughout four unnamed sections, becoming haunting figures in silhouette: the detective, the witch/mother, the teacher. Field mimics childhood’s flailing attempts at sense making through narrative gestures cut short in favor of whimsical leaps: ‘I heard you love falling./ How come dress up the detective doesn’t?/ It’s a party! It’s a date! It’s a party!’ A little bit bildungsroman, a little bit fairy tale, these poems feel constantly urgent: ‘Walking around a grieving household/ makes out ink it could be picked up/ in the palm and put in the oven./ Come on, little house. Say something.’ But Field writes, ‘We can never be too aware of what’s really being said,’ and throughout these poems, because we can never become fully privy to sisters’ experiences, what’s being said could mean wildly different, and powerful, things to different readers.”

Wolf and Pilot and our other titles coming out this fall will be available soon to order on our website. 

Publishers Weekly has reviewed Victoria Redel’s Woman Without Umbrella, one of our poetry books coming out this fall. 

“Winning and elegant at its best, unified and honest throughout, this third collection from Redel (Swoon) follows the poet and a brace of her characters through romantic and familial episodes, from youth to late middle age, from moments when everything seems new to ‘babies grown, gone from home,’ ‘death/ of an old school friend.’ A beautifully unguarded poem entitled ‘Today, We’re This World’s Darling’ concludes by praising (without divulging) ‘Those gorgeous, scandalous/ tender words you say to me each morning.’…”

Congratulations, Victoria! Be sure to keep an eye on our website for our fall books which you’ll be able to order soon!

On Friday, Sept. 21st at 6pm, there will be a great event (including a “happy hour” and poetry readings) at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 W. 17th Street, NY). “The Allen Ginsberg Estate is pleased to join the Rubin Museum of Art and Origin Magazine for Ginsberg in the Galleries: Holy Soul Jelly Roll Album Release. Eighteen years after its release as a box set on Rhino Records, Holy Soul Jelly Roll, the most comprehensive compilation of Ginsberg’s recorded works, is finally getting a digital release in September 2012. Poets and friends of Ginsberg, Eileen Myles, Alex Dimitrov, Sharon Mesmer, Anne Waldman, and Steven Taylorwill be reading and performing songs and poems from the collection as well as their own work in celebration of the event. ” To learn more about this event, click here. 

Sydney Lea, Vermont poet laureate and Four Way books author, wrote his thoughts on translation and poetry for the Burlington Free Press. 

“Not long ago, I collaborated with the superb Canadian poet John Lee on a few poetry events in Ottawa. One of these was a reading and discussion by interactive television with some francophone poets and intellectuals. Their questions were bright and challenging, and, in my case, because I had rendered several of my own poems into French, several had to do, precisely, with issues of translation.

I have strong opinions on the matter of translation, the strongest of which one might think unassailable: if you are going to translate a poem from another language, you’d better know that language. The idea, oddly, is not universally accepted.” Continue reading the article. 

For a copy of Young of the Year, Lea’s book of poetry, click here. 

For a copy of Donnelly’s book, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, visit our website. 

The Offending Adam reflects on Four Way Books author, David Dodd Lee, and his writing. 

“David Dodd Lee’s poetry is a medicine show of delirium and rude wit. His speakers engage the world like itinerant explorers, witnesses to its finest subterfuge and its ugliest wonder. “Sad Flowers” is a brilliant fusion of the speaker’s idiosyncrasy with a charming and beautiful eye for matter and meaning in Howard Hodgkin’s painting. “Here’s a blueprint of my pocket” the speaker says midway through the poem. This type of sincerity is what contemporary poetry needs.” Read on. 

Take a look at Lee’s books with us, The Nervous Filaments and Arrow Pointing North. 

“And yet a strange thing happened  (or perhaps not so strange). In teaching that course, ineptly, I’m sure, given my utter lack of credentials, I found that old itch returning. It had been suppressed for more than half a decade, but now I began to write again myself.

I began, though, to write poetry. Why?… And yet I knew I’d prove no genius. I wasn’t Mark Twain. I wasn’t Willa Cather. I couldn’t resort to dialect without on the one hand sounding condescending, which was the opposite of how I felt, or simply sounding “off,” or both. I came to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that if I used poetry to tell their stories – or rather to tell stories suggested by their stories – I might capture the rhythms and cadences of that old-time, entrancing speech without having to imitate it.”” 

Click here to read more of what Lea has to say about becoming a poet. And for a copy of his book Young of the Year, click here. 

Two of our authors, Tina Chang and Monica Youn, will be participating in this year’s “Lit Crawl NYC” hosted by Pen America along with poet, Deborah Landau. It takes place this Saturday, September 15th at Bantam (17 Stanton St (near Chrystie St)) at 8pm on the outdoor patio on the Lower East Side. All three poets will be reading new work and this will be the last stop of the “Lit Crawl” so after the reading and discussion, continue on for more poetry, drinks and friends at the “Happy Ending” bar. For more info on “Lit Crawl NYC”, click here. Hope you can attend!

Follow these links to order Of Gods & Strangers by Tina Chang and Ignatz by Monica Youn.