No One Knows Their Blood Type: An Online Book Launch

Join us for the international online launch of the novel No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, translated by Hazem Jamjoum.

Find us Sunday, October 13, at 12 noon ET (Cleveland time), register here: https://tinyurl.com/NoOneKnows2024

Qs? Write h.plum [at] csuohio [dot] edu. Hope to see you!

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“There’s a remarkable coiled power to this slim novel—it moves in unexpected directions, its characters’ lives tossed about by the collision of history and personality.” KAMILA SHAMSIE

“No One Knows Their Blood Type rejects the impulse to hyper-explain Palestinian life, instead taking the reader into the inner lives of characters shaped by the exile and instability that have come to define the Palestinian condition. There are no perfect victims here. Instead, we get intimate, honest portraits of actual human beings, in their kindness and cruelty, their failure and triumph. The masterful English translation is a triumph of language over trauma. Through and through, this is a story told by Palestinians, for Palestinians. Now, more than ever, we deserve to tell our stories.” EMAN ABDELHADI

“No One Knows Their Blood Type offers a gripping, textured vision of what it can feel like to be human amidst colonial dehumanization. In this novel, the deep disruptions of war and oppression sharpen universal family complexities and prod the young Palestinian women at the novel’s center to examine their own places in the world. I loved this tender, troubling book.” KATHARINE BEUTNER

2023 Essay Open Reading Results: Debut Essay Collection from Michael Loughran

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Reading Period for Essays and Essay-Like Things earlier this year. We’re elated to share that we’ve selected Michael Loughran’s essay collection Windower for publication.

Michael Loughran’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia. Windower is his first book.

Windower will publish in 2025 alongside selections from our next reading period for full-length manuscripts of poetry, opening this fall.

Forthcoming in 2024: Book-length Essay by Sam Ace

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center is thrilled to announce our acquisition of Sam Ace's book-length essay, I Want to Start by Saying. The book will publish in 2024 alongside Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's No One Knows Their Blood Type (a novel translated by Hazem Jamjoum), as previously announced.

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea (Black Radish), Meet Me There: Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash. (Belladonna* Germinal Texts), and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton (Chax). Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series.

Our 2024 catalog will also include a selection/s from the current Essay Series Open Reading Period, which runs until January 15, 2023. Selected manuscripts will be announced in late spring/early summer 2023.

Haaaaappy Anniversary: 60 years at the CSU Poetry Center

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. An independent small press survives through the care and good vibes of its readers, and we thank you for participating in six decades of literary exchange and adventure. Here are the exploratory, culture-making endeavors we’re up to this year, as well as ways you might join in or support our work:

Publishing

Preorder our fall catalogue—featuring new poetry by Michael Joseph Walsh and Raúl Gómez Jattin (tr. by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott).

Follow three new series at our digital space, Exclamation’s Gauntlet—named after a poem by the Cleveland poet, playwright, editor, and composer Russell Atkins—featuring commentary on editing, process, and creativity:

And Could They Hear Me I Would Tell Them: interviews with small press authors about their newest books, publishing experiences, and the social aspects of their writing and reading lives.

Arch(d)ives: artifacts and ephemera plucked from our press’s dust, placed in personal, contemporary, and historical contexts.

Index for Continuance: a podcast series featuring conversations with workers at independent, small-press, and DIY literary presses and projects, and offering grassroots knowledge about how to edit, collaborate, reach readers, and build community (coming in 2023).

Programming

Lighthouse Reading Series: hosts eight poets and nonfiction writers annually, including a 60th-year anniversary reading and celebration in April 2023. Events are in-person and open to the public.

NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium: provides students opportunities to hear from visiting writers about their experiences in editing, arts administration, journalism, translation, or community programming, offering an expansive definition of literary work and where it takes place.

Bookfairs: find us at Loganberry Books' Author Alley, Lit Cleveland’s Inkubator, AWP, SMOL Fair, and Mission Creek, among other literary gatherings.

Pedagogy and Community

Graduate assistantships: we offer multiyear graduate assistantships to NEOMFA students interested in gaining experience in literary publishing and editing while pursuing an MFA in creative writing. We also teach literary editing and publishing and offer internship and volunteer opportunities.

Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Publishing and Writing: a two-year postgrad fellowship offering an emerging writer time to work toward a first or second book and professional experience teaching creative writing and engaging in community-oriented literary work in collaboration with the CSUPC. Our next application period will open in winter 2023/2024.

Cleveland partnerships: we collaborate with local writers and organizers at Lake Erie Ink, Cleveland Review of Books, The Refugee Response, Cleveland Drafts, grieveland, Lit Cleveland, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, The Dodge, Mac’s Backs Books, and Loganberry Books.

Possibilities

The CSU Poetry Center is a nonprofit independent literary press and arts center whose funding comes from book sales, individual donations, and occasional grants. To support the work we do you can buy our books, attend our events, or MAKE A DONATION.

Announcing the 2022–2024 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing

Every two years, as applications open for the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, we’re honored to hear from wonderfully impressive and engaged emerging writers—who are also teachers, editors, scholars, critics, organizers—from around the country and world. To encounter this breadth and depth of literary work is a source of hope.

We’re delighted to announce that in 2022–2024 we’ll be joined by the prose writer Joseph Earl Thomas, coming to us from Philadelphia, as the new Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing, hosted at Cleveland State. Thomas’s stunningly innovative, inimitable memoir of childhood, Sink, is forthcoming in 2023. He writes across genres, his work omnivorously informed—by the structures and insights of video games, Black Studies, fantasy and sci-fi, digital life, realities of race and economic inequality, the speculative building of new possible worlds—and committed to creating new forms. We’re thrilled to welcome his writing, teaching, editing, and community work to Cleveland.

—Hilary Plum, interim director, CSU Poetry Center

Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from the University of Notre Dame and studies English in the PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir Sink won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.

photograph by Drake Masters

We're hiring! Applications Open for a Part-Time Managing Editor

We're delighted to share that applications are open for a part-time (20 hours/week) managing editor position at the CSU Poetry Center. This is a staff position within Cleveland State University's English department. Apply by May 15 with a cover letter and resume via the link below.

Information and application here: https://hrjobs.csuohio.edu/postings/16888

Announcing the 2020–2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing

We’re thrilled to share the news that the poet Kamden Hilliard will be joining us as the next Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. 

It’s been a terrific two years with Leila Chatti, our current & inaugural fellow. Warmest thanks to Leila for sharing her time and work with our press and with the city of Cleveland—and congratulations on Deluge, just out from Copper Canyon Press! 

For their support of this fellowship, we want to thank Karen Long and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the Cleveland Foundation, our advisory board (Hayan Charara, Kima Jones, Janice Lee, Adrian Matejka, and Prageeta Sharma), the CSU English department, and all the people & organizations who make Cleveland’s literary life so vibrant and inspiring. We’re delighted to welcome Kam. 

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Kam is a Black, nonbinary settler from Hawai’i and author of three chapbooks, most recently henceforce: a travel poetic (Omnidawn Books, 2019). They are thankful for support from the Davidson Institute, Sarah Lawrence College, the UCROSS Foundation, Callaloo, and the University of Iowa. Kam earned a BA in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. They study surveillance, race, queerness, and American politics. You can find Kam’s writing in West Branch, Black Warrior Review, and Tagvverk. Formerly, they are upset, a teacher, and a scholar. Currently, they are the 2020–2022 Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing. Forever? Find ’em on the internet at kamdenihilliard.com.

2019 reading recommendations from the CSU Poetry Center

Here are some favorite books our staff read in 2019 (published anytime). Happy reading!

Ali Black

One of the reasons I read is to get inspired to write. These are a few books that I read in 2019 that really inspired me to not only write, but to also think deeply about education, blackness, personal responsibility and art.

We Want To Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones

Codependence by Amy Long

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics by bell hooks

Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Leyna Bohning

Poetry:

Tantrum – Stella Corso

Nonfiction:

One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter – Scaachi Koul

My Private Property – Mary Ruefle

Fiction:

Find Me – Laura van den Berg

Severance – Ling Ma

Her Body and Other Parties – Carmen Maria Machado

Slade House – David Mitchell

Leila Chatti

Dorianne Laux – Only as the Day Is Long

Ilya Kaminsky – Deaf Republic

E.C. Belli – Objects of Hunger

Meg Freitag – Edith

Yanyi – Year of Blue Water

Mary Ruefle – Dunce

Ada Limón – The Carrying

Adélia Prado (trans. by Ellen Doré Watson) – Ex-Voto

Natalie Eilbert – Indictus

Alessandra Lynch – Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment

Leslie Harrison – The Book of Endings

Ellery Akers – Knocking on the Earth

Kristin Prevallet – I, Afterlife

Jon Conley

Aug 9 – Fog – Kathryn Scanlan

The most physically beautiful item (book) I can remember holding. Short, beautiful, mysterious passages torn from a found diary that you will quickly reread over and over and over.

Machine: A Novel – Susan Steinberg

Another aesthetically beautiful book—“linked” stories with words and punctuation like a painting, telling a story that resists narrative in the way life does.

Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin

If I had a dollar for every time... I’d have 4 dollars. Amazingly controlled narrative that produces terror and awe through the colloquial sentence.

The Driftless Area – Tom Drury

It’s like a mystical, airy ride through the currents of small town Iowa. Distinct voices speaking in wry prose, the whole book woven with the magic of coincidence and fate.

The Iliac Crest – Christina Rivera Garza

An unknown woman shows up at the narrator’s house and all existential hell breaks loose. An amazing and confusing walk through language and self, examining how they attempt to affect and define each other, or how they refuse to, or how they don't matter and also you do not matter. This book whipped me around like a little baby feather in the wind.

Paul Noodleman (aka Tube Guy)

Actual Air by David Berman

Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It by Natalie Lyalin

every issue of Sky Mall

Wild is the Wind by Carl Phillips

Caryl Pagel

Some writing I read and loved this year:

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib (University of Texas Press)

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Acker-Brodesser (Random House)

Litany for the Long Moment by Mary-Kim Arnold (Essay Press)

Blackfishing the IUD by Caren Beilin (Wolfman Books)

Way of Seeing by John Berger (Penguin)

Partial Genius by Mary Biddinger (Black Lawrence Books)

Earth by Hannah Brooks-Motl (The Song Cave)

Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole (Random House)

Being Here Is Everything by Marie Darrieussecq tr. Penny Hueston (Semiotexte)

Time Is A Thing the Body Moves Through by T Fleischmann (Coffee House)

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (New Directions)

Heavy by Kiese Laymon (Scribner)

Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger tr. Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon (Dorothy)

Stet by Dora Malech (Princeton University Press)

Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann (University of Chicago Press)

The “Happily” series by Sabrina Orah Mark (The Paris Review)

Blue Flame by Emily Pettit (Carnegie Mellon Press)

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco (Tin House)

Looking at Pictures by Robert Walser (New Directions)

The Appendix Project by Kate Zambreno (MIT Press)

Zach Peckham

10 Books I Remember Reading This Year, In Approximate Chronological Order, And So Should You

Soft Science – Franny Choi

Clap For Me That's Not Me – Paola Capó-García

The Life of Poetry – Muriel Rukeyser

Deaf Republic – Ilya Kaminsky

Destruction Myth – Mathias Svalina

Adagio Ma Non Troppo – Ryoko Sekiguchi, translated by Lindsay Turner

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude – Ross Gay

The Government of the Tongue – Seamus Heaney

Kings of the F**king Sea – Dan Boehl (but I read this book every year, so it maybe doesn't count)

Goat In The Snow – Emily Pettit

Hilary Plum

Read / reread especially gratefully in 2019:

Domestications: American Empire, Literary Culture, & the Postcolonial Lens by Hosam Aboul-Ela (Northwestern University Press)

Blackfishing the IUD by Caren Beilin (Wolfman)

The Walmart Book of the Dead by Lucy Biederman (Vine Leaves Press)

The Undying by Anne Boyer (FSG) & Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer (Ahsahta)

This Little Art by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo)

Clap for Me That’s Not Me by Paola Capó-García (Rescue Press)

If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish, trans. Fady Joudah (W.W. Norton) (still always rereading)

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (reread, after decades, and gladly)

“A Real American” by Farid Matuk (and still thinking of Matuk’s The Real Horse)

Xamissa by Henk Rossouw (Fordham University Press)

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ed. Larry Siems (Little, Brown)

Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked by Ivan Vladislavic (W.W. Norton)

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (reread; thanks, Caryl)

Book Interview: Jane Lewty & Penelope Jeanne Brannen

What for you is the function of the body, embodiment in your poetry? With so much transference (trauma to mind, mind to body, etc.), at what point does the text become an extension of this for you?

A book called Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (a professor of internet governance) has been a huge influence on me; he keeps using the phrase “archives are dangerous” — something we’re sadly all too familiar with, owing to social media. If you revisit an online conversation, there is seeming comprehensiveness but digital evidence does not truly reflect what “really’” transpired. It’s a false construct. By triggering recall of what is forgotten (or suppressed), digital remembering has the ability to confuse us with conflicting memories that may affect our review of certain events or interactions. We may stop trusting our own memory and, instead, supplant it with an artificial past, one that is not only open to interpretation, but utterly dependent on the emotion that one has when scanning back.

I think it’s similar to the ways in which a body has its own archive and method of storage/remembering. Erratic and erroneous playback can also occur. In One Form to Find Another draws upon the condition of somatic symptom disorder; the conviction that sickness is present or incipient. For the patient, respite — diagnosis, compassion — is often found in online communities where one’s post may remain in static form, unanswered for years, as a testimony of anxiety and suffering to be picked over and misinterpreted long after the writing of it. The book is ordered into case studies, a different speaker for each imagined or partially-experienced medical condition. Many focus on the networks of the female body, and how the aftermath of trauma can linger via unexpected and unidentifiable physical symptoms Each speaker has their own story but owing to the digitized environment in which they share that story, I imagined a process of cueing and echoing where words, themes, obsessions and events collide and morph into one another. I had an idea of the text being malleable, like a noticeboard, or another interface. The back-and-forth dialogue in #6 is elaborated upon and then dismantled in #34. Understanding can't be reached, the solace and chemistry is gone, the screen fades to blank, there is death in repetition. Many of the poems have a shadow-meaning, offered at the end of the book in a piece made of end-notes, and (to quote Stephanie Strickland in the title) “overlying keywords”. For example, a poem that, in the body text, references Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, secretly gives you advice about curbing your addiction to web browsing. I guess the book can be read as a network of many conduits and transfers, a set of trails to follow.

Memory seems to take on a sharp definition in your work, transforming into the tangible. In “Case Study # 31: Telesthesia” you ask: “Did I know / that people in Mesopotamia, 4th century BCE externalized memory, too?” in reference to cuneiform writing. In many ways writing itself is a form of mnemonic embodiment. What advice do you have for other poets in dialogue with somatic approaches to poetic becoming?

The line “You are tired, and you have moved something around your body for years” (the final line of Case Study #10) compiled itself in my head a long time ago, before the book really took shape. The question is, how does memory truly return and what power do we have to compartmentalize it? How can we trust our memory? In One Form To Find Another relays the mirror-and-echo effect of communication between people who are trying to reconstruct their own histories, recognizing that heartbreak, death, violence, abuse, and smaller though lingering disappointments have affected their ability to live in the present, and within their own body. The patient is left at the mercy of a body that has held onto a memory. I tried to write poems that registered this concern with retrieval and false intuition. It can be argued, though, that writing — and reading —  is an uneasy form of mnemonic embodiment; in the endnotes I cite the following lines from the Myth of Theuth, God of Writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, spoken by Socrates: “O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ words because they will not use their memories, they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence.” On that note, I’m not certain I’d be the best source of advice to other poets, but I did enjoy writing  the long poem-essay at the center of the book (Case Study #19: Disequilibrium) that analyzes the failures of different types of memory, clinical, implicit, semantic, eidetic, etc., and suggests that the body is the best conduit for accessing the truth of a prior event: the feeling of a grainy wall, the spikiness of a plant, fabric slipping from shoulders. I ask the question: Do I really want a memory that unfolds itself from objects? The object in question is a photograph; all the sensory impressions are generated from that. It was a very meditative experience, sinking back into the body, asking it to recall further, deeper.

Your book is broken into five sections, in what ways is this structure informed by the content of your poetry?

Each section carries the weight of what has passed before, similar to reading a long conversation thread. The voices are fragments that speak and reappear in a different setting: “Words migrate from scene to scene. They carry their previous incarnations” (Case Study #34). Illnesses mutate into those more serious, those more able to be defined. The text can be read linearly, but there are also embedded “conversations.” Case studies #4, #28 and #31 engage with one another, as do #7, #17, #22 and #24. I hope the reader, when faced with the terrible pronouncements of section five, such as “Take me into your skin/Archives hide those who tell” will have seen them coming.  

This book is rife with end notes. Where do you see artists and philosophers intersecting with your poetry? In what ways are you in dialogue with these references?

The "forms" in the book include architecture, dance, sculpture, animals, film, horoscopes....and a whole host of other things. I've tried to make the collection stylistically peripatetic whilst registering the realities of theory and social/psychological issues. While I wouldn’t order anyone to engage with the book in a specific way, the endnotes do function both as a coda, and, sometimes, a deepening of certain pieces. For example, I refer to Roni Horn’s urban installation Portrait of an Image - with Isabelle Huppert (2005), which meticulously catalogued the face of Isabelle Huppert, who reenacted the expressions of her previous roles/characters, solely on the basis of her memory. Horn’s concept appears sporadically throughout In One Form To Find Another, one scornful observation being that Erika from La Pianiste would be Freud’s wet dream, but mainly in reference to Huppert’s process: muscle memory and recall. Another poem incorporates the film Inconsolable Memories (2006) by Stan Douglas, an enquiry into the act of repetition. When displayed in a gallery, one film reel is longer than the other which produces a different combination of images over time. Unica Zurn and the trauma that seeps from every iteration of her life, art, and being was undeniably a huge influence on the book. Not just her own writing, but the manner in which her body was abused and exploited by Hans Bellmer in his creations — the “altered landscapes of flesh” that constituted his bondage drawings.

Is there anything that you’re currently working on? What are your future plans?

I’m reworking a manuscript I actually wrote before In One Form To Find Another. It used to be called Mistune. It centers on the industrial decline of a city, and how that process can be registered polyvocally. The poems track the loss of a regional accent and contain many linguistic variations; all reverberating in the sound of 1990s dance music and within the topology of a place that can never be regenerated, either for the individual or the community. I experimented with historical narrative, and consequently found myself researching soccer hooliganism and ornithology alongside linguistics and electronica. In case it doesn't work out or if it stalls again, I’ve forced myself to tentatively start a new project that I feel nervous about consolidating into a statement or description. Here’s a few of the books I’m consulting to help me out, though. Maybe they will say more: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Burnett; On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, by Susan Stewart; Bluets by Maggie Nelson; Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism by Maurizia Boscagli. I’m interested in how the experience of mourning can find its place in objects; how we discard, how we hoard. I guess I’m still stuck on/in memory.

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Jane Lewty is the author of Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013), winner of the 1913 First Book Prize in 2011, and In One Form To Find Another, selected for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Competition in 2016. She has also co-edited two essay collections, Broadcasting Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2010) and Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apocalypse (Litteraria Pragensia, 2009). She has taught at universities in the UK, The Netherlands, and the USA.

New books by Anna Maria Hong, Nicholas Gulig, & Shaelyn Smith

Our spring catalog is now available for purchase! Click the photo below to order new books of poetry by Anna Maria Hong and Nicholas Gulig as well as Shaelyn Smith's debut collection of essays. All titles are also available at Small Press Distribution.

End-of-Year Round Up

We’ve had a wonderful year at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, and as the days get shorter and the air gets chillier, we’d like to bring you some of our most exciting news and updates. If you’re inspired by what you see below and would like to donate to our cause of publishing 3-5 collections of contemporary poetry, prose, and translation a year in addition to running The Lighthouse Reading Series and providing pedagogical and outreach opportunities for CSU students please know that your support is what allows us to continue publishing and programming throughout the year.

AUTHOR NEWS

James Allen Hall’s collection of essays, I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, appeared on SPD’s bestsellers list; QNotes’ “Ideas for the LGBTQ book lovers on your holiday gift list;” and Anomalous Press’ “Books to Watch Out For.” Hall was interviewed by Alex DiFrancesco at the CSU Poetry Center blog and appeared on Woodstock Book Talk in October. Colorado Review says Hall handles fraught topics “deftly, with a sly sense of humor;” Newpages writes that “a collection of essays has never been so utterly tragic and full of truth;” and Queen Mob’s Tea House says I Liked You Better “takes the cool, intellectual quality of conceptual writing and poetics and turns it in on the self, allowing for experimentation while maintaining intimacy.” More can be found at American Microreviews, Reviews by Amos Lassen, Hunger Mountain, and The Rumpus.
 
In Entropy, Carrie Lorig writes of Jane Lewty’s second book, In One Form to Find Another, that “Lewty feels through the body’s ferocious, complex response to trauma while refusing to create a linearity and narrative arc which names or details the transgressive / traumatic event.” Lewty’s collection was named “Book of the Week” at the Volta and excerpts can be found at La Vague and Verse Daily.
 
Sheila McMullin’s first book of poetry, daughterrarium has been beautifully reviewed at Forward Reviews, Southern Indiana Review, Heavy Feather Review, Galatea Resurrects, and So To Speak, where Kristen Brida writes that, “McMullin focuses and reveals the many ways the feminine body is exploited, is overpowered in the patriarchal schema of the world.”
 
You can also find new books, poems, reviews, or interviews by Leora Fridman, Allison Titus, Lo Kwa Mei-en, Phil Metres, Dora Malech, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Zach Savich, Sandra Simonds, Elyse Fenton, Lee Upton, and Lily Hoang. Shane McCrae, author of Mule (CSU Poetry Center, 2010) ) was the winner of a Lannan Literary Award and a National Book Award finalist for his newest collection, In the Language of My Captor, published this year by Wesleyan.

CSU POETRY CENTER GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIPS

The CSU Poetry Center offers graduate assistantships in small press editing and publishing for CSU-based students in the NEOMFA (Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing). If you or anyone you know is researching MFA programs in creative writing you might consider Cleveland State where we’re lucky to host the Lighthouse Reading Series, Playwrights Festival, and Whiskey Island Magazine, among other exciting writing programing. The NEOMFA is the nation's only consortial MFA program in the nation and boasts four schools’ worth of creative writing faculty and a great visiting writers series (this year includes CAConrad, Kelly Link, Emily Mitchell, Rob Handel, and Adam Gopnick). Application deadline: January 15th.

TRANSLATION SUBMISSIONS

The CSU Poetry Center invites queries regarding book-length volumes of poetry in translation for a new occasional series. Please send 1) A cover letter describing the project and confirming any necessary permissions; and 2) a sample translation of at least 20 pages. Full manuscripts are welcome. Email materials to associate director Hilary Plum at h.plum [at] csuohio [dot] edu. Submissions will be open until December 31, 2017.

LIGHTHOUSE READING SERIES

This year’s Lighthouse Reading Series has hosted Abraham Smith, Hayan Charara, Sheila McMullin, and Eric Fair, all of whom absolutely blew our audiences (and us!) away. Spring readers include Yona Harvey and James Allen Hall (2/9/18), and Dave Lucas and Renee Gladman (3/30/18). If you live in Northeast Ohio, we hope to see you in the spring!

Book Interview: James Allen Hall & Alex DiFrancesco

Alex DiFrancesco: You’re an accomplished writer of both poetry and lyric essays. How do you feel the two overlap, and how do they differ? How does your process vary?

James Allen Hall: The essay is roomier and can accommodate a more disparate range of tones, so that the tragic and the comic inform and inflect one another. Essays come more piecemeal—it's like writing a suite of poems, or a crown of sonnets: each one approaching the subject from a different angle.  

I think metaphor is where the poet and the essayist overlap. Trying to say the unsayable, to make shock familiar or familiar shocking.  I like making other poetic elements—the compression of white space, the reverberating silence of the line break, burnished sonic texture, the structure of feeling—work for narrative's sake as well.

Poems use two compositional processes simultaneously: the line and the sentence. Nothing else can do that, talk with two mouths. It's why poetry endures.

AD: You’ve spoken in previous interviews about how you love the distance and closeness that metaphor allows a writer. Are there topics that are easier to write about in metaphor that we might not broach in conversation or less symbolic and lyrical writing? Do you write poems and essays you’d never be able to have a conversation about?

JAH: Metaphor can make it easier to touch a subject that is fraught or painful for the writer. It's a welder's mask or mitt. Sometimes I think it's a way of tricking the writer to get out of her or his or their own way and discover how we truly feel about complex subjects.

I often will talk about tough things with friends first, then try to form them into a poem or an essay. Sometimes I write both about a subject (for instance, being raped), and of course because form is a way of thinking, all of these are different. The conversation asks: can I be understood? Is there something I haven't seen yet? The poem has a different question: What is silence's role in what happened to me? The essay's question: How does this keep happening; how is this a social building block?   

AD: A lot of your work is very personal. As a writer of such essays, where are the lines of what you feel is fair game for writing about and what you feel is not? How does the James Allen Hall on the written page differ from the James Allen Hall in the world?

JAH: The ethical aim is to treat people fairly—and to subject someone to no more investigation or excoriation than you would yourself. That said, some stories don't belong to you. In an essay called "In Lieu of Drugs," I discuss my brother's addiction and recovery, and the story of his "rock bottom" is one I feel I can't say. It's not mine to say. But, that story had its impact on me as well, and I needed to include it in the essay. I ended up using line and stanza break marks and large chunks of white space to mimic the gaps, the silences, the unknowingness and instability and brokenness of how I experienced that time. In other words, I won't tell his version of that story (what might be seen as his story), but I can tell the version of it as it unfolded to me. There's a way to write about other people.  

I feel like my best self—the most honest about my flaws, the most emotionally intense part of me (the part of me I like best and am most embarrassed by since I don't know where it fits into the world) is on the page. The James Allen Hall in the world calls himself "Jamie," his given name that only intimates know. I try to as vulnerable in my life as I am on the page: maybe vulnerable isn't the right word. Maybe open. I think my blessing as a writer, and my curse as a person, is that I let in too much world.

AD: You’ve spoken previously about writing from the margins, but in a way that more people than those of your experience can access. What craft suggestions and tools do you have for writers looking to accomplish similar things?

JAH: I am in love with image so powerfully because of its ability to activate the limbic system in our brains, so that readers participate in the brick-and-mortar building of the worlds we describe. Metaphor, too, does this: makes the art participatory, genial, a gathering of minds for like-minded purpose. I think of Melanie Rae Thon's story, "Xmas, Jamaica Plain," in which Thon uses metaphor and image to introduce us to a character we may not like, or whose values we may not espouse. Image and metaphor create an immediate connection. I also think about point of view and tone—an "I" can create immediate connection as well, but not if its not perceived of as genuine, honest, and capable of beautiful and tense and surprising truths, all while incorporating some self-critical distance. Tone must be at odds with subject matter as well: since it is the way we perceive feeling, it needs to establish a voice's reasonableness or ethical stance before moving to the very emotional (there are of course exceptions). Craft remains paramount—no subject writes itself compellingly without craft.

AD: What are you working on now?

JAH: I am loving the way I can think in the essay right now. It feels adequate formally to respond to our moment. I'm writing a collection of essays, the core of which concern a particularly rough spate of time in which my grandmother died, my boyfriend broke up with me, my brother became an addict, my best friend was ousted from her job in our academic department, and I was suffering from suicidal ideation. You know. Happy stuff.

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James Allen Hall is an associate professor of English at Washington College, where he also serves as Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House. In April 2017, he published I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, a book of lyric personal essays which won Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Essay Collection Competition, judged by Chris Kraus. Also a poet, Hall is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation of the Arts, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and others. His first book of poems, Now You're the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008), won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Poetry in Translation: Open Call

The CSU Poetry Center invites queries regarding book-length volumes of poetry in translation for a new occasional series. Please send 1) A cover letter describing the project and confirming any necessary permissions; and 2) a sample translation of at least 20 pages. Full manuscripts are welcome. Please email materials to associate director Hilary Plum at h.plum [at] csuohio [dot] edu. Submissions will be open until December 31, 2017.

Summer Celebrations

SUMMER CELEBRATIONS

Join us in celebrating our 2017 catalog, recent contest winners, author news, and reviews. If you'd like to review, teach, or host a reading for one of our authors, contact us at poetrycenter@csuohio.edu for more information.

Lily Hoang's essay collection A Bestiary is a finalist for PEN Center USA's Literary Awards in Creative Nonfiction.

Martin Rock, author of Residuum, will be included in 2018's Best American Experimental Writing.

Lo Kwa Mei-en, author of Bees Make Money in the Lion, is a finalist for the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

Leora Fridman, author of My Fault, has new prose at The Rumpus, Temporary Art Review, and Pacific Standard.

Congratulations to the winners of our annual book contests — Anna Maria Hong, Nicholas Gulig, & Shaelyn Smith — whose books are forthcoming Spring 2018.

NEW BOOK NEWS

Sheila McMullin's daughterrarium
Reviewed at Galatea Resurrects. 
Reviewed at Heavy Feathers Review.
Reviewed at Foreward Reviews.

Jane Lewty's In One Form to Find Another
Reviewed at Entropy.
Book of the Week at The Volta.
Excerpt at Verse Daily.

James Allen Hall's I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
Reviewed at Colorado Review.
Reviewed at NewPages.
Reviewed at Queen Mob's Teahouse.
Interview at The Rumpus.
SPD's Bestsellers List / Nonfiction.

2017 SPRING CATALOG

Our spring catalog is now available for purchase! Click the photo below to order new books of poetry by Sheila McMullin and Jane Lewty as well as James Allen Hall's debut collection of essays. All titles are also available at Small Press Distribution.

Book Interview: Lily Hoang & Scott Krave

Scott Krave: Throughout the book there are recurrences of mythological images and retellings of those stories. You "have tangled the fairy tales [you] write with [your] life." What drew you in that direction?

Lily Hoang: I understand the world through fairy tales. I often say that I spend 50% of my life toiling and 50% of my life marveling. My ability to marvel is also my devotion to the marvelous, to the fairy tale. It only makes sense, then, that my non-fiction essays fold fairy tale and myth as a lens to understand the real—whatever the real even means because it’s a term that fully eludes me.

SK: Our society's scientists threaten rats with drowning, tempt them with addiction, gage their loneliness. Where do you see the line, if there is one at all, between instinct and social conditioning? What is it about rats and the tests they undergo that speaks to you so much?

LH: Quite honestly, my interest in rats had to do with the necessity of talking about rats for the Year of the Rat. Rats and psychology experiments weren’t part of the first incarnation of this essay at all though. I completely rethought the essay when I was given the opportunity to revise the book. The original essay was called “On Captivity and Rats,” and it had much more to do with imprisonment (of people, not rats). When I re-titled and re-conceptualized the essay as “On the Rat Race,” I naturally thought of rats and experiments. I wanted to talk about rats in maze boxes, and through research (and an obscene amount of research, too, I might add), I found many more apt experiments for the essay, such as the Morris water maze. And I say this in “On Scale,” but when I re-connected with my college obsession Jacob, who’s now a forensic neuropsychologist, I wanted to impress him with my rat knowledge, but then he taught me so much more about how rats are used with addiction research, which served as perfect foil to my nephew’s heroin addiction. So whereas it wasn’t coincidence, per se, it was maybe more fate—not in a religious way, more of in the inevitable way of magic stories. Perhaps, then, I am obliquely answering instinct v. social conditioning and saying social condition began the process with “On Captivity and Rats” and instinct took me to “On the Rat Race,” to the sorrow and loneliness of addiction and loneliness.

SK: Many portions of the book are temporally fluid, moving from point to point with little regard for linearity of narrative. What about this stylistic choice helped you to create your desired mood?

LH: It’s funny because I get permutations on this question all the time, and I always think of it as a process question so I’ll answer it in those terms (I hope you don’t mind). I wrote the book how I did because it’s the only way I know how to write. My brain moves in little pieces that connect via unpredictable routes to make a greater whole. A question I often frames my style as a whole that is broken into pieces and scattered around—almost as if haphazardly or accidentally re-ordered—but the essays come out as you read them. Every piece is intentional, insofar as that’s the way the essay comes to form in my brain. It’s the only way I know how to understand things.

SK: What are you working on next?

LH: I’m currently revising—re-writing—a novel I’ve been writing for the past decade. It’s based on a true story of a woman who rolled over her four children with the bulk of her 250 pound body as punishment and revenge on her husband for fighting with her. The novel attempts to force you to empathize with the serial killer—it humanizes her to an almost painful limit—only to slap you in the face with her undeniable monstrosity.

***

Lily Hoang is the author of five books, including A Bestiary (winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s inaugural Essay Collection Competition) and Changing (recipient of a PEN Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She is Director of the MFA program at New Mexico State University and serves as an Editor at Puerto del Sol and for Jaded Ibis Press.

AWP 2017: Washington DC

Join the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and Rescue Press for an AWP offsite book launch and reading. Our presses believe in the future of books and the necessity for innovative literature; we're thrilled to spend an evening celebrating new poetry and prose.

Our event will take place from 7-9 p.m. on Thursday, February 9th at The Black Squirrel, a gastropub in Adams Morgan (Washington, DC).

Readers will include:

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb
James Allen Hall
Douglas Kearney
Andrea Lawlor
Jane Lewty
Sheila McMullin
Hilary Plum
Adrienne Raphel
Zach Savich

We'll have pre-release copies of our 2017 spring catalogue available for purchase throughout the weekend; if you can't make it to the launch reading, stop by our table at the AWP Conference book-fair (#616-T). See you in DC!!

Lighthouse Reading + Open House (Friday, December 2nd, 2016)

Both events are free and open to the public; RSVP here.

Fall 2016 Catalog News

Thank you, dear readers, for your generous and thoughtful responses to our spring 2016 titles including reviews of Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary—our very first collection of nonfiction—at Publishers Weekly, Small Press Book Review, 3AM Magazine, Angel City Review, Full Stop, AsianAmLitFans, Winter Tangerine, the Ploughshares blog, Heavy Feather Review, Barrelhouse, and ZYZZYVA. A Bestiary has appeared at the top of SPD’s nonfiction bestsellers list for the past six months and interviews with Lily Hoang can be found at Late Night Library, Brazos Bookstore, The Conversant, and Essay Press.
 
Leora Fridman’s debut collection of poetry, My Fault, has been featured or reviewed at Publishers Weekly, Mass Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Small Press Book Review, Litseen, and Tell Tell Poetry.
 
Praise for Martin Rock’s Residuum appears at Fanzine, Transart Triennale, and Essay Press. Upcoming readings and events can be found here.
 
New poems, interviews, or reviews of Lo Kwa Mei-en’s The Bees Make Money in the Lion can be found at Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers, Heavy Feather Review, Public Pool, and at our own blog with NEOMFA student Emily Troia.

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We’re hard at work on our 2017 catalog which will include:
 
Sheila McMullin’s daughterrarium
Winner of the 2016 First Book Poetry Competition
Selected by Danile Borzutzky
 
Jane Lewty’s In One Form to Find Another
Winner of the 2016 Open Book Poetry Competition
Selected by Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, & Jon Woodward
 
James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well
Winner of the 2016 Essay Collection Competition
Selected by Chris Kraus

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If you live in Cleveland, we hope to see you at this year’s Lighthouse Reading Series and in our new space on the 4th floor of the Michael Schwartz Library (Rhodes Tower) in downtown Cleveland.

Thanks to our NEOMFA students and Poetry Center staff for keeping this magnificent literary machine in motion.

Follow us on Facebook or Twitter for news throughout the year.

Book Interview: Lo Kwa Mei-en & Emily Troia

Emily Troia: In The Bees Make Money in the Lion, you play with several poetic forms—especially the abecedarian. What made you choose the abecedarian as a principle form?

Lo Kwa Mei-en: “The Alien Crown” was the most crucial series of poems for me, and the most demanding. The series’ constraints borrow from the abecedarian, the sonnet, and the sonnet crown, and for half a year I floundered in frustration that I could not “master” the form I was obsessed with. A direct result of the flailing was my understanding that the systemic constraints I had been so attracted to in the full range of these poems were guiding me within the larger themes of the work. Once I had reframed my relationship to the form, the work took on its own liveliness and seemed to make unusual, provocative, meaningful demands of me. The abecedarian form I used demands both rule-based, pre-ordained conclusions and ethical dedication to sensual, whole-hearted inquiry. For me, this paradox clarified something unspeakable about a lifetime’s worth of struggling at the crossroads of repression, violence, and creative energy. I think the double-sided abecedarian form is a way into experience. It is a cave that will change your voice. It is in and of itself the way I feel about many things. It made itself central to the book.

The primary texts of inspiration that led to my curiosity about abecedarianism were Inger Christensen's book Alphabet, Jasmine Dreame Wagner's book Rewilding, and Rebecca Hazelton's poem "Both Sides".

ET: Even though you strictly adhere to the forms you employ in The Bees, the writing never feels cramped or limited by them. Do you have any recommendations for other poets on how to use the constraints of form without becoming mired in them?

LKM: If there is a way to use the constraints of form without becoming mired in them, I would love to learn about it! I suppose one way is to only work with constraints that demand little to no real effort of you as an artist. But if you are working with formal constraint in an effort to grow artistically/personally, then I think becoming enmired, and spending considerable time in that place, is a valuable and unavoidable experience.

Maybe one practical suggestion is to consider the myriad possibilities that your formal constraint contains, to spend more time exploring its dynamic potential than you do trying to “get it right.” I don’t know that this is a great writing tip, but it’s key to the pleasure I found in developing my relationship to form.

Also, do not ignore your relationship to the formal constraints at work in literature that reach beyond the rules of, for instance, what makes a sonnet. I’m talking about how white supremacy, for example, shapes the canon and therefore our poetic education and therefore the distribution of resources and power in the publishing industry and therefore the authors that are most visible and likely to be read and therefore the state in which we ourselves approach the blank page. One of the most meaningful questions we can ask ourselves as poets is how we relate to the constraints of social inequity. Creativity within constraint is in large part about drawing new connections we had not seen before, and resisting the impulse to capitalize on the easiest proferred solution when we feel that we are enmired. I think that this is also an example of valuable and unavoidable work for artists.

ET: The Bees is in five parts but has elements braided throughout the entire book. Can you share a little bit about your process in structuring the manuscript?

LKM: The Bees Make Money in the Lion used to be in three parts. One section for all the poems that I titled “The Romances,” one for the Babel series, and one for the abecedarians, which I thought of as the science fiction section. I did this in part to bridge the different formal lens, and in part to close with the abecedarians, but at the end of the day, this structure bothered me. Its framing felt like a showcasing of formal technique and I was afraid that the story elements that resonate between the different voicings and tones would get lost. In addition, the “Okay, you’ve seen all there is to see of that; now come look at this” rhythm felt suggestive of a tourism narrative. In my first structural revision, I split both the first and third section into unresolved halves, so that there is the necessity return to as well as leave behind the different worlds I portrayed. (If someone is reading the book from beginning to end, that is.)

The book’s structure also echoes the double-ended constraints that are so prevalent in the poems, and this felt very right to me, as did Caryl Pagel’s idea to edit the second and fourth sections down to six poems each. One of my secret-ish goals for this book was to embrace the nature of formula. The interconnected lives of (social) bees are incredibly formulaic, and yet bees are one of the wildest subjects in the world, in my opinion. I wanted to see if I could submit my will to the formulaic aspects of poetry and still make something that sang with a voice of its own.

ET: In Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” she writes, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” How would you describe the “light” in The Bees?

LKM: The light in The Bees Make Money in the Lion is almost audible in its insistence that it has the right to exist, and to exist without restraint, no matter the constraints of its environment. The light cannot avoid the violence that exists inside as well as outside its burning.

ET: What are you working on right now?

LKM: I’ve been working primarily on my health. The Bees Make Money in the Lion is without a doubt the last book I will have been able to write while compromising the work of taking care of myself—and if I’m honest about it, the book was only half-written in carelessness. (The first draft was completed while I was still drinking, and the revision process occurred after I had stopped.) This has been the first year that I have been able to commit to a widening range of “basic” health practices while also working multiple jobs.

In terms of writing, I have several books on deck, including the first book of an epic fantasy trilogy in poetry about the character Pinnochia and a science fiction novella about addiction, emigration, and love. But I haven't progressed in either of these works for a while. This year, I had to start over in the most foundational areas of my writing life. I am tragically results-oriented, so even the concept of experience being its own reward is in danger of being exploited by my ego: perhaps what I need to let go of is the idea of the reward at all.

As a result, I've been prioritizing forms of writing that I previously—secretly—shamefully—considered not worth what little free time I have. Free-writing, journaling, collecting, annotating. I used to journal relentlessly and with deep trust in the process. Sometime around my beginning to apply to MFA programs, and definitely by the time I started graduate school, I just… quit. I've been trying to look honestly at why that happened and to open the door to that climate of writing. I can't believe how hard it has been to allow myself to write without restraint and without expectation of concrete “results.”

ET: Do you have any words of advice for young poets?

LKM: You know what’s awesome and terrifying about this question is a) the number of times a year I look up articles on the internet titled things like “Umpteen Pieces of Advice for Young Writers” for my own consumption and b) the fact that, despite the aforementioned, I do actually have some words, here. I’m interpreting “young” to mean somebody who is still figuring out their poetry practice.

In my life, reading comes before writing. I must put reading first, or there is no writing that is creative in nature. I don’t think this must be anybody else's experience, but I do recommend that you ask questions about your reading that equal the depth and hunger and courage of the questions you ask about your writing. Desire as much for yourself as a reader of poetry as you do for yourself as a writer of poetry.

. . . That said, if you’re like me and you have a tendency to use your love for reading books as a defensive fortress in which you can hole up and avoid going out into the uncertain territory of writing, and you secretly yearn to be more connected to your own creative acts, then pencil that shit into your calendar and make sure you’re making time to explore your own language, too. (And don’t let how others relate to their time dictate how you relate to yours. Sometimes people who are giving you advice, including myself, are ignorant of certain life realities that make time operate very differently for their readers. Figuring out your practice is an ongoing process that you are best qualified to outline for yourself, not anyone who is less “young” in any way.)

Remember that growth can be painful, so don’t deny yourself that experience.

Remember that growth can be pleasurable, so don’t deny yourself that experience.

***

Lo Kwa Mei-en is the author of Yearling (Alice James Books) and The Bees Make Money in the Lion (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) as well as two chapbooks: The Romances from The Lettered Streets Press and Two Tales from Bloom Books. She is a Kundiman fellow from Singapore and Ohio, where she now lives and works in Cincinnati.