FORTHCOMING BOOKS...

NEW BOOKS IN PRODUCTION AT THE POET'S PRESS, GRIM REAPER BOOKS AND YOGH & THORN BOOKS

December 2009. Here's a short list of books now in production:

Jody Azzouni. TITLE HERE.

Beyond the Rift: Poets of the Palisades. Across the Hudson from Manhattan and beyond the Palisades, northern New Jersey is home to scores of intriguing poets. This new anthology, edited by Paul Nash, centeres around poets who have been featured at the North Jersey Literary Series, one of the area's lomgest-running reading series. Originally centered around Alda Xavier's magazine The Rift, the readings have surpvived that journal and some of the poets first published there have blossomed and produced fine work.

The Rhode Island Writers' Circle 2010 Anthology. Selected and Edited by Rose Pearson and workshop leaders of The Writer's Circle, Rhode Island's best-known organzization supprting new and established poets, writers, and playwrights. This fourth collection features work produced in Writers' Circle workshops as well as material from established Rhode Island writers.

Marlborough and Other Poems, by Charles Hamilton Sorley. A new edition of the work of one of the best British poets of World War I. Sorley, killed in the trenches at age nineteen, left a slender volume of poems, praised by Robert Graves and other later poets. Poems range from nature panegyrics from the poet's native Wiltshire, to poems rooted in Greek and Roman lore, to tragic musings on the horrors of the war. Sorley, who was travelling and studying in Germany when the war broke out, harbored no hatred for the Germans and expresses Everyman's bafflement at the cataclysm that nearly ended European civilization. (A Yogh & Thorn Edition.)

Tales of Wonder. Collected and Edited by Matthew Gregory Lewis. The landmark 1805 anthology of supernatural poetry, the first in English, includes material by Lewis (author of the dreaded Gothic novel The Monk), Walter Scott, and Robert Southey, and translations from Goethe and other German and Nordic masters. This new edition is annotated by Brett Rutherford, including source material for the poems, some going back to medieval times. (A Yogh & Thorn Edition),

May Eve: The Supernatural Poem Since 1800. Intended as a companion volume to M.G. Lewis's Tales of Wonder, this volume starts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and traces the supernatural poem and ballad through Shelley, Byron, Poe and other masters. The book concludes with an ample selection from today's supernatural poets. This volume is in preparation but is still open to submissions from poets.

The Collected Writings of Emilie Glen 2: Fiction and Prose Poetry. The second volume of Emilie Glen's work gathers together her fiction published in magazines and a long prose poem that appeared in New Directions. (A Grim Reaper Edition).

NEW BOOKS...

THE WRITINGS OF EMILIE GLEN 1: POEMS FROM CHAPBOOKS

March 2009. The Poet's Press, a small press based in Providence, Rhode Island, has issued a landmark 460-page collection of poetry by Emilie Glen (1906-1995), one of Manhattan's best-known poets and one of the most widely published narrative poets of the second half of the twentieth century. The Writings of Emilie Glen 1: Poems from Chapbooks brings together the full text of thirteen out-of-print chapbooks and includes a biographical sketch of the poet by Brett Rutherford.

Glen, an eccentric poet who pretended to be thirty years younger than her chronological age, ran a poetry salon in her Greenwich Village apartment for almost three decades, and had a writing career spanning more than 40 years. Her early fiction was published by H.L.Mencken in his American Mercury, and her poems were published in every conceivable venue from newspapers to obscure small press journals. Rutherford calls her "the poet's poet" and recounts how Glen mailed out a dozen magazine submissions a day, publishing thousands of poems over the years.

Although Emilie Glen was a throroughly modern poet, avoiding formal meter and rhyme, she steered clear of modernism's obscurities. Her poems are crisp, clean, comprehenisble narratives, often miniature monologues, portraying both the real and the fantasic. "She still believed in, and wrote for, the common reader," Rutherford observes.

Many themes and interests play through this huge span of more than 300 poems: Glen was an avid bird watcher and naturalist, so animals figure large. Outsize fantasies abound, as when the poet fancies herself becoming a mermaid, leaving behind a bemused husband; or imagines choosing different fathers for succesive children, a la Isadora Duncan; or makes a list of potential assassination targets. Other poems accumulate into an autobiography rich in tragedy: an elegy for her brother Willard, who drowned as a teenager; a veteran husband wasting away in an upstate hospital; an alcoholic daughter who died of a drug overdose; and the joys and trials of raising a grandchild alone in her 70s. Classical music also plays a role in these poems as Glen recounts her childhood and youth as a budding concert pianist, a career she abandoned for her writing. The poet's accounts of Greenwich Village Bohemia and off-off-Broadway theater also add historic interest to the volume. Annotations help clarify the poet's references to New York City locales and architecture, and to classical music.

This book will be followed by three additional volumes during 2009-2010, devoted to fiction and prose poetry, poetry published in magazines, and unpublished poems from manuscripts. The Writings of Emilie Glen 1: Poems from Chapbooks ($24.95)(464 pp.paperback, ISBN 0-922558-35-3) is available from The Poet's Press on-line at http://www.poetspress.org.

–NEWS ABOUT POET'S PRESS AUTHORS

JOEL ALLEGRETTI

A special program at Kean University (Union NJ) on Thursday, April 23 willinclude the world premiere of "A Cycle by the Sea," a song cycle by composer Frank Ezra Levy based on the poetry of Joel Allegretti.  Levy, composer-in-residence at Kean University and retired cellist for the Radio City Music Hall Orchestra, will conduct a soprano and a chamber ensemble of ten instrumentalists. In addition to "A Cycle by the Sea," the composer and the musicians will present two other compositions of his. The composer's symphonic work may be heard on a CD in the American Classics series on the Naxos label, a series that includes recordings of compositions of such figures as John Cage, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Ives.

The Allegretti poems LEvy chose to set encompasses poetry from two Poet's Press books, The Plague Psalms and Father Silicon, plus a poem written specifically for the song cycle.

Thursday, April 23
World Premiere
Frank Ezra Levy: Cycles by the Sea
For soprano and orchestra,
Based on poems by JOEL ALLEGRETTI,
Kean Hall
Kean University
1000 Morris Avenue
Union, NJ
8 p.m.              $15 (student discounts available)
Contact:          908-737-7469 (tickets)
                       908-737-4325 (info)

BRETT RUTHERFORD

D.H. MELHEM

Poet D.H. Melhem was featured in three new poetry anthologies published in 2008: Inclined to Speak (Charara, Univ. of Arkansas Press), Language for a New Century (Chang, Handal, Shankar, W.W. Norton), and Long Island Sounds (Nuzzo-Morgan, NSPS Press).

Recent poetry acceptances include: Al Jadid, And Then, Asbestos, Big City Lit, Home Planet News; late last year: Banipal (England) and Offshoots (Geneva, Switzerland). Review-essay of Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, was published in the March 2008 issue (No. 46) of Socialism and Democracy, a distinguished journal of research.