To all New Yorkers and those nearby: Happy to announce a Free Verse Editions Reading with new books by Jean Gallagher (Rivermouth Shouting), Lewis Meyers (Field Notes of a Flaneur read by Ellen Doré Watson) and Tracy Zeman (Interglacial). April 9 @ 5.00pm Housing Works Bookstore, 126 Crosby Street, New York, NY. Brilliance guaranteed!
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Happy to announce a Free Verse Editions Reading of our brand-new books by Jean Gallagher, Lewis Meyers and Tracy Zeman on April 26 at 3.00pm. Please register here for the event! Much brilliance on display!
Siobhán Scarry, Figure in a Field: Poems & Investigations Suffused throughout with epistolary energies, Figure in a Field is a hybrid text containing poems, erasures, and other works that blur the distinction between poetry and criticism. The pages of this book grow from the deep middle of the country and its prairies, extending its lyric investigations into the pastoral mode, motherhood, and “the protean shapes care will take” as we tend the animacies of a precarious future. Siobhán Scarry is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Bethel College, in Kansas. She is the author of the poetry collection Pilgrimly (Free Verse Editions, 2014). More on the series here. Because Lewis Meyers is no longer with us, I thought I'd very briefly stand in for him and offer a sample of his wild brilliance, going at it full throttle. If you like what you see, more is available from his brand-new collection, Field Notes of a Flaneur, just published by Parlor Press in its Free Verse Editions series.
Summer Letters Tree, the sun’s brainchild. The caterpillars are crawling to heaven. The porcupine ate the delectable car tire. Wind bends the tree. I couldn’t do that. The black raspberry’s passion for a drop of sunlight. While I wrote, a butterfly, that critic, rode my wrist. Brown velvet gown trimmed in yellow with blue polka dots. A bird squeezed itself through the air. A bird swallowed space and then exhaled it. Rain. The saplings. It skins them alive. A shotgun echoes despairingly from the valley. Choral mushrooms. Queen Anne’s lace sweetens wild carrot breath. The earth’s rigid plates drift below the daisy. Backgammon on grass, losing every game to ants. The sun and clouds playing honeymoon bridge. Creams and lotion. Brushes to apply the lesson. Like the black lily that comes up year after year despite the hostility of the gardener. To sleep like an opera star, still singing. Deplorably rocky meadows. Toadflax, orange and yellow, opposed to black’s pure repulsion. The cows’ rustling mouths, but God will scatter their teeth. The light is too dark for colors to help. The grape is squashed in bitter prejudice. Turtlehead, Indian pipe, purple bergamot, heal-all, bull thistle! The whitewashed wood snaps in exasperation. Pearly everlasting is my girl. I recently went to Lily's, a neighborhood restaurant in Raleigh, famed for its pizzas. It was on a Thursday night. I was shocked to see that all the tables were completely empty. Not a soul in the place. It was open--but it was operating to service take-out orders, just like in the bad old days. Before Covid, the joint was always full--bursting with patrons and the hubbub of conversation and of course thumping loud music. You had to weave in and the crowds to fetch your own cutlery. It appears that many have lost the habit, the appetite, for eating out. Some of this can be put down to financial belt-tightening but not, I think, all of it. It looks to me like the tendency in American culture to center everything--eating, socializing, working, entertainment-- in the home is taking another prisoner. Cinemas in the U.S. are languishing too--barely holding on with reduced attendance. Most new films can be seen at home immediately on platforms like Netflix or shortly after opening. To me, it feels like there's a greater and greater contraction of social space in the U.S. since Covid. Less places to see others, to come into contact with others, less opportunity for spontaneous interaction. I hope I'm wrong. If I'm not, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in this country will only become more severe...
Delighted to announce two new titles from Free Verse Editions: Lewis Meyers' brilliant--and posthumous--collection, Field Work of a Flaneur (winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize) and the wonderfully audacious, mesmerizing new collection by Jean Gallagher, Rivermouth Shouting. Available on the Parlor Press website, your favorite online vendor, and discriminating bookstores everywhere!
Directed by Boris Lojkine, this film traces two days in the life of an African immigrant in Paris who works as a bike messenger delivering food. Although the film is fictional, it has a documentary "feel" to it. But the film's heightened suspense comes from the dramatization of his daily struggles. And everything is a struggle and there is much that is working against him, not least his color and his lack of resources. Because he is applying to become legal, and does not yet possess work papers to make what little money he earns he is forced to borrow, at an extortionate rate, another bicycle messenger's license. The film owes much to the great nineteenth-century tradition of naturalism where the protagonist finds himself or herself pitted against a pitiless system. But the film adds a twist to the time-honored formula. A close-to-the-bone rendering of the small daily struggles of immigrants: doesn't seem like the stuff of a thriller. But it is.
Happy to announce Free Verse Editions' newest title, INTERGLACIAL by Tracy Zeman. A wonderful and most timely collection. Available online from Parlor Press, other online vendors and the best bookstores. Be sure to check it out!
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