NEWS NEWS NEWS
>>> The new Constant Critic, edited by Karla Kelsey, is up and beautiful! With new (and now ongoing) reviews from Karla, Jordan Davis, Vanessa Place, Ray McDaniel, and Christina Mengert.
& >>> Our new issue is up online! With work from Catherine Wagner, Philip Jenks, Gillian Conoley, Alice Notley, Lara Glenum, Rilke, Noah Eli Gordon & MORE. Order a subscription here, or single issue here.
& >>> Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity received a starred review from Publishers Weekly:
Lake Antquity Brandon Downing. Fence (UPNE, dist), $40 (189p) ISBN 978-1-934200-27-8
In this heavily illustrated collection of hyperkinetic text and image collages, Downing—poet, visual and video artist—presents a wild array of unexpected juxtapositions. Found text is cut and pasted atop images culled from flea market crates of various paper ephemera, and these pages are brimming with chance-operational meditations on innocence, experience, and empire; readers will be left stunned by the “highly colored evening scene,” for example. With hallucinatory intensity, Downing depicts an America under miraculous spell: “If you could see a picture of what has happened in the last thousand years in the United States, you would probably be surprised” are among the words superimposed on a print of urns, kettles, trunks, and saddles. This is an America obsessed with illusion—with taxidermy, film, and theme parks—and always lusting after the next frontier. While impossible to summarize in words—the poems at times feel secondary to the images—Downing’s collages create a bizarre and incredible universe.
Order Lake Antiquity (at a discounted rate) here.
& >>> Douglas Kearney (author of NPS winner The Black Automaton) on the radio: the Moe Green Poetry Discussion, w/ Rafael F J Alvarado & Brett Candance
& >>> An interview with Laura Sims, author of Stranger, here at Coldfront. New reviews of Stranger here and here.
& >>> Our Fence Modern Poets Series contest is open through the month of February. Past winners include Prageeta Sharma, Geraldine Kim, Christopher Janke, James Shea, Macgregor Card, and Nick Demske. The winning manuscript will be published by Fence Books in 2011. Guidelines and entry forms are here.