2020 Lighthouse Poetry Series Results

The CSU Poetry Center is delighted to announce that our 2020 Lighthouse Poetry Series judge, Randall Mann, has chosen Tobias Wray’s No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man for publication in our fall 2021 catalog. Thank you to everyone who sent us work this year—it was an honor to spend time with your poetry and we’re grateful for your writing, readership, and support of small press publishing.

An editor, literary event planner, and critic, Tobias Wray’s work can be found in Blackbird, Bellingham Review, Meridian, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. His poems also appear in The Queer Nature Anthology (Autumn House Press) and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures (Seagull Books). He directs the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing Programs at the University of Idaho.

Judge’s honorable mention
Nathaniel Rosenthalis’ I Won't Begin Again

Finalists
Karen An-hwei Lee’s On the Beautiful Immunity; Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak; Danielle Blau’s peep; Jack Christian’s In Plain Air; Stella Corso’s Rat Year; Patrick Durgin’s Case Comparison; Joshua Edwards’s Lamps and Paths; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Athena Kildegaard’s The Magritte Poems; James Meetze’s COSMOGRAPHEME; Colleen O'Brien’s Reel; Abraham Smith’s Insomniac Sentinel; Alicia Wright’s You're Called By The Same Sound; Felicia Zamora’s I Always Carry My Bones

Semi-finalists
Rachel Abramowitz’s The Birthday of the Dead; Toby Altman’s Discipline Park; s.c. bostwick’s places we might find her body; Elizabeth Breese’s Landscape with peephole; Mike Carlson’s Connoisseurship for Aficionados; Kate Colby’s Reverse Engineer; Michael Flatt’s Parallaxis; Melissa Ginsburg’s Doll Apollo; Christine Gosnay’s The Starlight Lounge; Isaiah Hines’s Null Space; Zefyr Lisowski’s Girl Work; Karyna McGlynn’s 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse; David Meeker’s Revolving Doors in the Age of Vanishment; Orlando Menes’s The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds; Addie Palin’s The Cautery; James Shea’s Failed Self-Portrait; Anthony Sutton’s Zombie Apocrypha: A Reassembly; Terese Svoboda’s Ark; Franke Varca’s Chill & Stupor; Lisa Wells’s Prisoner’s Cinema

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Fall 2021 catalog

Tobias Wray’s No Doubt I Will Return a Different Man will be released in fall 2021 alongside Valerie Hsiung’s outside voices, please (selected by Nicholas Gulig, Dora Malech, & Sheila McMullin for our 2019 Open Competition); Julie Marie Wade & Brenda Miller’s Telephone: Essays In Two Voices (selected by Hanif Abdurraqib for our 2019 Essay Competition); and an expanded 10th anniversary edition of Shane McCrae’s Mule including new poems, and an introduction by Victoria Chang.

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Coming Soon — pre-orders begin 8/18/20:

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Russell Atkins and Anne Lesley Selcer for being named poetry finalists for the 2020 Ohioana Book Awards.

Congratulations to Amy Long for being nominated for CLMP’s 2020 Firecracker Award in nonfiction.

Congratulations to Oliver Baez Bendorf for winning the 2020 Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle.

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.

INTERVIEW: Conor Bracken & Zach Peckham

ZP: You might recall, when I introduced you at the Poetry Center’s Lighthouse Reading back in October, there was a problem with the sound system and the signal from our podium mic came out sounding super distorted and echo-y on the audience end. I kind of regretted putting together such a stupidly verbose intro as soon as that started, but the joke afterwards was how that kind of noisy, awkward intro was actually pretty fitting, and probably what Khaïr-Eddine would have wanted for his own work in the end. I wonder if we could revisit that notion a little. What is it about noise, distortion, maybe even the edge of understandability, that seems particularly applicable to Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine? I’m tempted also to make some connections between things like signal breakdown, clarity, authority (or lack thereof), and the process and politics of literary translation, but I’m curious whether this sparks any ideas for you, and if it does, how it all might relate back to Khaïr-Eddine’s work, his life, and then your own process and experience of bringing Scorpionic Sun into English.

CB: For what it’s worth, Zach, I thought your intro was super generous and sharp, and wouldn’t want it cut down at all, no matter what the A/V system was trying to say. It was fitting, though, you’re right, that this act of contextualizing Khaïr’s work was deranged by its means of broadcast. Like it was insisting on being an experience and not a subject.

But so you point at a lot of great avenues that radiate off this question which we could wander down (the one about authority in translation beckons to me in particular) but I think it’s worth talking about Khaïr’s work before we talk about my translating, and how distortion operates in it. Because it’s always been a key feature to me, and one of the major achievements of his poems, which always seem to be very successful in resisting apprehension. This has political and economic implications (you can’t imprison or commodify what you can’t catch), and though Khaïr was a co-founder of the Souffles magazine, which was an avant-garde advocate for decolonization in all forms, the reasons for this slipperiness run even deeper than these temporal ones. There’s no denying Khaïr’s political chops (he lived in exile for over a dozen years) but his poems abjure easy comprehension because he saw language as a kind of adversary (he described his composition method as ‘a linguistic guerrilla war’ which I love—poet as insurgent taking potshots against the lumbering forces of language). The sinuousness of Khaïr’s poems is a strategy for eluding not just bourgeois and totalitarian bullshit but also the traps and pitfalls of language and—especially—its prior uses. So, for me, often what’s being communicated in a Khaïr poem is this struggle of the poet to be equal to the language, as much as the narrative, lyrical, iconographic content of the poem itself. It’s audacious—and impossible—but, considering the political implications (that language is a tool for oppression and it bears the residue of its complicity with it), it’s essential. And the goal, like in all good poems in my opinion, is to refresh the language; you can see this in the vast range of registers Khaïr gathers and deploys—he’s a collector, he loves language and the possibilities of precision and smoke. But the stakes are really high, and the language needs to be refreshed in the same way the tree of liberty is refreshed—with blood. And so their feet are always moving, their idioms being taken apart and reassembled, their victims and villains swapping places. They’re trying to surprise their opponent—language—as much as themselves.

ZP: Yeah, wow. That’s great. I love this answer. That idea of rattling so fundamentally against language reminds me of the moment in Pierre Joris’s intro to your translation of Scorpionic Sun, where he quotes Khaïr-Eddine’s idea that “the true writer is always a stranger to the language in which he expresses himself” (ix). I also can’t help noticing how the vocabulary of warfare (or perhaps battle, becoming struggle in the abstract) seems required when discussing Khaïr-Eddine. The poetics are the politics and vice versa. Given the importance of that overlap, and the ever-present need (or want) to contextualize MKE in a particular political-aesthetic space in order to amplify or ensure his resonance (to be a proper steward to the work), I wonder what challenges you encountered as a translator. Obviously not everything can carry over, but in this case it seems hard to even begin. How did you become fixed on this project, what was your process like, and how did concerns with authority and context inform decisions at the levels of process and language?

CB: In terms of the lexicon of warfare—or better yet, insurgency, maybe? He invokes this in “Black Nausea” and “Exile”—yeah, it’s really tough to think of other frameworks for understanding the fierce aggression that is at the heart of this and all his work. This was part of what drew me to the work in the first place: its sheer ferocity. I’d been looking through various anthologies of francophone poetry and a couple of his poems reached out and seized me by the ears. I hadn’t seen anything like this before in the annals of francophone lit, nor was I super well-versed in stateside stuff that operated this way either. It felt like an awesome hybrid of Lorca and Baraka and instructed by Fanon and Césaire. As I started in on the project, I came to understand just how little I understood about what was going on in the poems. At first, I was worried—what the hell was I doing? Would other readers resonate with this if they couldn’t ‘get it’? And why should I—a cishet middle class white dude from the US, with only a few months of Morocco experience to his name—be the one doing this? At the intersection of these feelings was the practice I chose to try to follow as best I could: try to honor the poems as visceral documents as much as English and my grasp of it and French allowed. No doubt there are some interesting experimental approaches to translating a work like this, but when the source text is motivated so much by the marginalizing and lethal effects of colonialism, I didn’t want my translation process to reproduce this marginalization, even incidentally. There were times when I had to resist domesticating or explaining elements in the poems, or particular puns or turns of phrase, but in these moments of doubt I’d look back to a few things: the reader is smart; this translation should be an invitation to others to translate as well or investigate the source text in their own way; and that what I found to be most important in the text was momentum, sonic impact, and its ambiguities—if I’m not altering the source text in the service of communicating one of those three, then I should not be altering it.

ZP: That last point has to be a smart rule for translation in general. Keeping it in mind, it seems like another potential area for translational slippage or de-fanging would be form. I think of the way MKE uses the page in poems like “Barrage” and “Manifesto”, changing up lineation schema and shape, often quite erratically, and how crucial this sense of the poem teetering just on the edge of control is to our understanding of the work, how it hits us. Since translation occurs in such a controlled process—does it?—there’s maybe an additional obstacle (or even paradox) for the translator approaching work that shirks control formally as well as lyrically. And in a more basic way, French just takes up space differently than English. I wonder if any of these factors presented challenges for you when it came to setting MKE down on paper, and if there were moments at the crux of lyric and form where you could just feel him flipping you off from the great beyond. Did you struggle with these forms at all?

CB: Oh yeah you’re absolutely right in bringing up that point. And it preoccupied me quite a bit—I was diligent to the point of obsequious in trying to preserve the general visual impression of the poems. This came out of a lot of what I said above, but also from the sense that these poems emerged spontaneously, in sustained bursts of improvisation, so the choices in visual form seemed to me one of the few areas where we could see Khaïr trying, if not to tame, then to order, the torrents springing from his mind. They felt like a rare site where we could see Khaïr, in a book of headlong velocity, keeping a pace. I’m lucky to be working in English, which, true, doesn’t always have the same economy as French (which did here and there present issues, especially when it came to reflexive verbs and the formal versus informal you), but the alphabet is the same and the syntax is similar so it didn’t present an inordinate challenge to keep things in generally the same shape and ratio. The trim size of the original books did make it difficult, though, to perceive in poems like “Black Nausea” where Khaïr and where the margin broke the line; I’ll confess that I didn’t try to nail down which was which, and stuck with what went where in the original, even though the trim size on the translation allows for longer lines. If there were any significant difficulties of note, formally speaking, it would be whether to add some visual breathing space among the big prose chunks in the longer poems, like “Gennevilliers” and “Manifesto” (we went with no, since the airlessness seemed part of the aggressive point), and how to reproduce rhyme in “Annigator,” which is one of the few love poems in the book, and which shows Khaïr refining his raw material so it fits rhymingly into a smaller space—something I’ve been contending with a lot more as I’ve been working on one of his later books, Resurrection des fleurs sauvages, which is replete with these smaller, more meticulously arranged, formally stricter poems.

ZP: I’m also interested in getting back to that idea about authority, if we can, and maybe it’s possible from here, because I think the question of who gets to translate who is a really serious one (one that is continually being processed in the literary world) which is actually being advanced in a critical sense with the publication of this book. When you acknowledge your own authorial background and make plain the inherent limitations of that perspective—limitations you may not even be fully aware of; perspective being demarcated by linguistics as much as economics, nationality, race, gender, etc.—that would seem like part of the work. Another part would be, well, the work itself. But what else do you feel is involved in being able to take on a translation project of this sort in good faith? Like, I’m a cishet white dude too. I’m interested in translation, but I have trouble with the idea that everything should just be available to everybody. And of course we got a little vacuum going now (“lit bois talk translation ethics” is probably a podcast that can be flung down a well) and at a certain point the answer is just “go ask someone who doesn’t look like you”, but I am very curious about your thoughts on this, and how these types of questions came up or were addressed in the process of making this book.

CB: This question, about how to take on a translation project in good faith, especially one that emerges from vastly different subject positions and conditions than those of the translator, it’s one I think about often. I also wonder how much things should be just available to people, and how much of it should be pre-digested for them. Like, shouldn’t people go out on their own and engage with these works on the work’s terms? That’s an ideal world, but the one we’ve got is one where people need some sense of what’s out there if not coaxing, though, so it does have to come to them (in somewhat Schleiermacherian terms). In some ways, I’ve framed this issue of how to present a translation in my head as existing on a spectrum, with the erotic on one end, the didactic on the other. When I say erotic I mean in full and unmediated sensuousness—the translated text unencumbered by interpretive apparatus, so the reader can experience it as an aesthetic and sensory event. And by didactic, I mean with as much interpretive apparatus as possible (I think of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, burdened with glosses on prosody and historical context and other things not communicated by the text, but ambient if not performed by the source text in the original language). Obviously, every translation has to exist somewhere between these two poles, since translation is interpretation, and since one can’t fully convey the sense of the original in the original language in its original context—temporally, politically, socioculturally, aesthetically, etc.—without some recourse to framing. But I think we can both agree that in that framing is the danger of minimizing or canonizing—somehow simplifying the raw and wild text as an artifact of a time and place. And I balk at that. I want people who encounter this text to be wowed and nonplussed by it in all of its torrential fury. At the same time, though, I want them to be as informed as possible about who this work is responding to/in conversation with. I want to immerse them in historical context before they even pass the title page.

Of course, I’ll get both wrong in some way, due to personal dead angles built in by my particular conditioning. And it’s likely that I’ll get things wrong because of my privilege, among other things. So the hope then, is to see this translation as an invitation—to others to translate it and to readers to discover it in their own way. I try to position it this way when I talk about it, but also to perform the translation such that it is recognizably a translation from a different time and place than the culture that’s receiving it, through syntax, diction, leaving references in the text unobstructed and unexplained (except here and there in the glossary) so the reader is reminded that this wasn’t initially for them, and that if they’re going to receive it in the way it was delivered, they’re going to have to work alongside me to research themselves into that mindset, if not begin their own translated version of it. Because there’s nothing wrong with multiple versions (the anti-capitalist and anti-hegemonic benefits of which Johannes Göransson does a great job elaborating in his book Transgressive Circulation), and the process of producing them is such a pleasure, if not an homage (cf. Kate Briggs in This Little Art).

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995) was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles. He authored many novels and collections of poetry, among them Agadir, Soleil Arachnide, Ce Maroc!, and Legende et vie d’Agoun’chich. Scorpionic Sun is the first book-length translation of his work into English. 

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, At Length, Colorado Review, Diode, Indiana Review, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. His chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Recent translations include Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay. 

Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Massachusetts who left his marketing job to study poetry in Cleveland, Ohio. He is a candidate in the NEOMFA and works at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

INTERVIEW: Anne Lesley Selcer & Jon Conley

Conley: I wanted to ask something about form, but the phrase "relationship to form" kept coming up and sounded awful. I know that you write in multiple genres and "form" is something you might play with, and that play leads me to believe that your personal beliefs about form are ultimately irrelevant in being your reader. So instead I wanted to ask this of you: Can you rank your five senses in order of importance during your writing process? Your work (I'm thinking specifically of Sun Cycle), is wonderfully cerebral, as if thinking and the brain are the ultimate sense, but how do you incorporate the physical senses of the body when writing? What does this process look like for you?

Selcer: I love this question! Yes, 'thinking' as the ultimate sense....beautiful. I'm obsessed with the senses, the sensory, sensing, and slippage between the words "sense" and "meaning." Historically, counter-sense, nonsense or aleatory sense got us out of meaning; my work wants new sense, new senses.

As a writer, I am always listening; this sense does not reside at the top of my body, but deeply within it, and distributed all throughout. A receptive orientation is my main sense. The other sense I love is proprioception: the sense of one's body in space. It gives me information about my surroundings, my subjectivity, and my relationship to all of it. Recently, I've been favoring it most. Sight reveals my work in ratio to "the beautiful." Alongside music, sight guides how I revise and edit, the major part of my writing process. I am not always attempting to make my work beautiful, sometimes the opposite, or tones in between. Ekphrasis is also something I employ all throughout Sun Cycle.

Worlds reside in the space between the senses. Lately, I've been thinking about synesthesia as reparative. Poet Sean Bonney is one of my favorite thinkers on the senses. I'll leave you with a quote, “The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” Marx describes the smooth transmutation of human love into stone, metal, money, information and power (the five senses of capital). The possibilities of statement that [Amiri] Baraka would seek to embody in his poem attempt a block on that trajectory, seeking to show that those senses were built from stolen materials, and that they have in any case been violently limited by the forces of capitalist need. In a recent essay Baraka has suggested that the limitation to five senses was produced by capitalist alienation, and that there may be infinite sense, reaching backward and forward into time “in modes and directions that we do not even know exist.”

Conley: What a thing to think about—how we might be living under conditions that are limiting our potentially limitless senses. Maybe some of this limitlessness takes the shape of the worlds "[residing] in the space between the senses" that you explore in your work. If that's the case, I would guess that these worlds, as discovered by individual thinkers/artists/sensors, are, at least in part, idiosyncratic or autonomous. Can you give me some kind of idea of your worlds? The ones that you have discovered/are discovering on your own? I feel like, on a simple level, I'm asking you to give me a description of what you have seen of your imagination, but this is also about synthesis. What are your discoveries?

Selcer: I love your question again. I want to clarify. The premise of my idea (and Sean's) is opposite from worlds as discovered by individuals, but rather, full and deep perception of our world. I access this world vividly and fully lately at rave or dance nights where bodies move together sensorily in space, music expanding our social boundary. The electronic sounds being made now rework the technology we are forced to interact with almost all the time, technology which, inherent to its interface, its teleos and genealogy is capitalistic, atomistic, binaristic, and separating. This electronic music roots deeply in black culture. Sorting and shifting all these elements into patterns made for play and connection feels reparative. Taking formal inspiration from Nanni Balestrini’s book The Unseen, and The Bernadette Corporation’s collectively written Reena Spaulings, I am thinking about a project I'm calling CLUB SPACE. The Unseen was based on the space of political protest, and I want to illuminate a line between these two spaces, thinking about intentional collectivity, identification, affinity and boundary. Nightclubs have historically been spaces for queer culture and artists, the first iterations of performance art germinating in New York City’s downtown 1970’s clubs. I want to seek out Noah Brehmer’s “communism of the affects, the suspension of strictly commercial or state usage of communal space,” [1] and Jenny Schlenzka’s suggestion that, “Stumbling out of the club into daylight, I became convinced that contemporary art institutions should stop looking to museums or theatres as role models and, instead, learn from nightclubs.” [2] I also feel critical of any Dionysian teleology. I want to think about borders and exclusions, clubs and groups. My research into beauty has found Immanuel Kant’s sensus communis to be a productive driver of thought—communities of sense in agreement about taste, yet entrenched both genealogically and relationally in the requirements of the Greek agora: citizen as property owning male, a person not of color. What are aesthetic communities? Are communities driven by the aesthetic (by Eros)? What are the limits to the concept of community when we have “membership” reappropriated as reoccuring fees? When social death pervades U.S. social life? In Blank Sign Book, I write about sensory rich spaces: the Ferguson Uprising's common will and understanding...the complicated and imperfect relationship between Occupy and 'real life'...Dolores Dorantes' swarm of revanchist horror girls...my own solidarity with the decades-long protests of museums that show Carl Andre, the artist accused of killing artist Ana Mendieta. Senses are all around us. One thing writing can do is archive them in language.   

Conley: That bit about electronic music—that's great. It's refreshing whenever you hear an aesthetic or artistic process-perspective that includes, rather than a shunning of the complexities of societal constructions, a recognition/reconstruction/repurposing of those elements. I like the idea that within the state sanctioned performance of living, there are hidden (i.e. buried?) worlds of living that are less performative to the state-prescribed tenets of what should constitute a "healthy" sense of identity. These worlds, like the nightclub, like electronic dance and music, use the tools of prescribed normality, like technology, to create a space where what is buried beneath the state-sanctioned visible world is unearthed and celebrated. Of course, this thinking largely comes back, for me, to the ideas of capital and technology—where constructs of control and normalcy are borne and projected through any given regulated medium. But I'll take a slight turn here (not that this isn't all related). How do you feel after leaving one of these clubs? And then, the next morning? The next day? The motion, the sound—how does this group recognition and celebration of what is largely unrecognized (on the mainstream cultural surface level—particularly institutionally as you point out) affect you as a human body,  and then what steps do you take to "archive [this] in language" as you said?

Selcer: I feel the atmospheric drop from inside to outside; I am a sailor coming back to land. We are ridiculous, ancient, working with infinite time; we have not done anything, we have been non-productive, we triumphed, invigorated by stupidity and sound. We are curling on the sand to watch the sunrise (it's pink) then gently unpieceing into dreams next to dreams. Or I am alone, I am lonely. The light is too thin. I organized space, I am a godlet. I'm not defending it.

Says artist Sharmi Basu, "sound is a variation in atmospheric pressure." "Sound can be a model for where the material and immaterial intersect and are one and the same." "Creating sound allows us to be the trigger rather than being triggered."   In Sharmi's sound workshop I wrote, "voice is a transducer to transform absence to presence." Sun Cycle and Blank Sign Book concern the difference between presence and visibility.

Conley: I have to know more about the sound workshop. This is not something I've heard of before.

Selcer: Sharmi Basu is one of my favorite artists right now. Her sound opens a space anchored by myth, history, transformation, and jouissance. I have not before experienced such synesthesiacally color-rich compositions, nor have shared such fiercely femme sound space. Her sound workshop [3] has been widely taught. She also performs as Beast Nest [4]. Oakland is lucky to regularly get to hear her. 

Conley: Your work in Sun Cycle seems to lean into that idea of composition. There's a multiplicity of voices or a pooling of resources and thoughts and ideas—and it all seems like a part of the whole thing, the work that is being done. How much do orchestration, arrangement, and composition play into your process? In some cases, like with “The Picture of Dorian Gray (at 16 frames per second)”, this is the obvious technique. Is this always a part of your process? Do you tend to fold in resources or do they sometimes lend themselves to being the catalyst for a given piece? I imagine that it is a bit of both, but I'd just love to hear how you handle this a bit.

Also, to end on a note of dessert, what has been bringing you joy lately on a day-to-day level?

Selcer: Your question gives me a chance to talk about my Cleveland connection. My "great uncle" is Ben Selcer who was the first chair violist of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1934-1978. I met this sparkling person at a family event when I was around ten and bonded to him immediately. He was the first artist I'd met in my family, or maybe ever. He wore a bow tie and I loved him. In forth or fifth grade, for a school project, I asked him for the "story of his life." He wrote me a series of ten page long-hand letters which included his history of labor organizing the Cleveland Orchestra. I do not subscribe to essentialist or genetic origin narratives, but I've wondered if a tendency toward music in my family lays ground for the "orchestration, arrangement, and composition" (as you put it) in my writing. There should be another sense to name what happens—like listening with the eyes while a giant oar guides sense aurelly underneath, where sound and vision come together, where reading with the eyes and ears merge into a new sensory competencies. My poetry is orchestrated by the music and mathematics of human speech, of literature, of rhetoric, and of actual music. Discovering dissonant and non-resolving music was huge in my early development; it opened everything. In Sun Cycle, I play in the rhythm of Western thought, mostly in the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics. Throughout the book, there are incursions or drop-out pieces which perform an abject, feral feminine cast out of what constructs her. Then there are moments in Sun Cycle when insurgent energy rises. This power is gathered, accrued, borrowed, and built upon from my time (the 80s through Trump) and place (the upper West coast of the North America), and shared with readers in the form of a gigantic black abolitionist anti-sun.

When I recently made the performance piece "The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls" [5] I got the chance to play with digital sound editing. The piece layered a long poem, live opera, and recorded language elements. Moving a needle over bits of language and deleting, repeating and layering felt like a breakthrough! I had a similar feeling when Sonya Rappoport made my poem "The natural world frozen" into an art installation [6]. Something about moving from two dimensions into three. Recently the Cordite Review published "Main Street Mamas: Stay Safe Beauty:)" [7] which I plan also to take off the page into sound or sound+image. Last year I performed “Sun to Moon” [8] a few different ways in different places. I read in front of a video with a soundtrack that moves from a slowed down song by The Fall to a up-tempo pop song by Kiiara. On screen, slow motion legs dance in a lace dress throwing shadows all over the visual field. I worked along the contours of the tone change in the poem "Sun to Moon" from Sun Cycle, which is about sexual violence as well as the ambient violence of gender [9]. Other artists I admire who are working this way are Ronaldo Wilson, Juliana Huxtable, Jennifer Scappettone, and Caroline Bergvall.    

[1] https://blindfieldjournal.com/2019/07/18/rave-accelerate-die/

[2] https://frieze.com/article/what-art-spaces-can-learn-legendary-berlin-nightclub-berghain  

[3] http://www.sharmi.info/decolonizing-sound-workshop

[4] http://www.sharmi.info/beastie

[5] https://www.instagram.com/p/B71J7zehmpR/

[6] http://www.sonyarapoport.org/portfolio/the-transitive-property-of-equality/

[7] http://cordite.org.au/poetry/earth/main-street-mamas-stay-safe-beauty/

[8] https://www.instagram.com/p/BpyqH4JnGCn/

[9] https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp_IpoQn9mg/

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Anne Lesley Selcer is the author of Sun Cycle, selected by CA Conrad as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 First Book Poetry Competition, as well as the essay collection Blank Sign Book and from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain Press Award. Her writing on art includes Banlieusard, a book-length text for Artspeak, as well as essays for museum and gallery catalogs and art magazines. Writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound.

Jon Conley is a writer, musician, and educator from Cleveland. He is currently a first-year poetry candidate in the NEOMFA. His work has been published at Hobart, Bending Genres, Bodega, FIVE:2:ONE, Bad Nudes, Hello Horror, and others. He produces and performs music as Beach Stav. Find him online @beachstav.

INTERVIEW: Amy Long & Leyna Bohning

1. When writing about this topic or even when thinking about writing about this topic, was there any moment of hesitation for you? Was there something that you thought you shouldn’t talk about, but forced yourself to anyway?

That’s a reasonable question! There is a lot of stuff in the book I probably should have hesitated to include. For instance, that I admit to ever having used drugs recreationally or taken any pill that wasn’t prescribed to me could, if a doctor who treats me read it, put my pain management at risk. I admit to having made decisions, such as dating David, my main romantic interest in the book, that I knew when I made them would likely hurt me later. Or that, the first time I got my own Vicodin prescription, I thought Oh, this could be fun for me (which seems kind of funny now since that was exactly the point at which drugs stopped being fun)—anything like that not only makes me seem like a bad patient but could also undermine the reader’s sense of me as a sympathetic character or someone who deserves narcotics for her pain. Those stories complicate the narratives we tell ourselves about drug use and addiction and pain management, which makes the book important but also can make it kind of a hard sell: people who know only the opioid narrative they’ve read in newspapers and heard from the government or TV shows might not know how to approach a book that doesn’t fit with our discourses around addiction or even illness. 

So, I knew I was kind of going out on a limb. But I really didn’t hesitate about anything. The story is too important to not tell fully and honestly, and I’m not sure why I would have written it if I didn’t want to be honest or wasn’t willing to make myself vulnerable—even to real-world consequences. I think readers can tell when you’re hiding from them, and I have to trust the reader to do a lot of interpretive work, so I need to earn their trust. I hope that my disclosures encourage readers to think harder about how we enact our ideas about addiction and whether the bright lines and neat distinctions we draw around “the patient” and “the junkie” are really all that clear cut in practice. And, as a reader, I’m more invested and more willing to do that interpretive work if I know the author is being completely, nakedly honest with me. I also didn’t want to be the angel patient or the poor naive girl who gets abused by an evil man and takes no pleasure in any part of that relationship or, worse, goes into a doctor’s office and gets a prescription and finds herself accidentally addicted. (And I’m not addicted; I’m dependent on opioids. My use enables my functioning—on an appropriate dose, I can have a job and write and leave the house—rather than hindering it, as in colloquial definitions of addiction when someone keeps using a substance despite the harm it causes.) Those are exactly the narrative frames I want to disrupt, and I can’t do that if I’m hiding “bad behavior” for any reason. 

But I rarely hesitate when I’m writing. I don’t have that kind of self-protective filter that would make me go I don’t know if I want this in the world. If I’m going to write from my experience, I don’t feel like I have a right to be precious about what I include and how I might come across. That doesn’t serve the work or me as a writer/narrator/character and certainly not the reader. Especially not in this book. 

2. Despite the levity of your tone in some places, you discuss some pretty heavy things. Were there a lot of things that were difficult to write about? Did you find yourself needing to take a break often?

I mean, it’s a pretty dark version of levity! Usually, when I make a sarcastic aside or kind of joke about something, it’s because I’m pissed about it or want to emphasize some absurdity in whatever I’m writing about. So, I guess that is a type of break taking. Because I really didn’t take physical breaks. I’d write for six or eight hours without stopping for more than a playlist change or a handful of cereal or to wait for a pill to kick in. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and that was all I wanted to do. 

In so many areas of my life, I have to shut up about pain and pills and doctors and studies that show I’m right that the opioid crisis did not originate in doctors’ offices and the government and media narrative is wrong. Or, when I’m in a doctor’s office or a professional setting (or talking to my mom), I have to tell little lies about my relationship with David or, in the former case, never mention that I know that side of drug doing. But, when I was writing, I could focus on these things that most people don’t want to hear about in regular life or that I don’t get to talk about as much, so writing it was almost more like the break for me. The page was the place where I didn’t have to compartmentalize or fake or minimize anything. 

3. I’m curious about the structure of this piece. The structure is very clever—my favorite is the essay “Product Warning”—how did you decide on these structures? How did you come up with the idea of the Manhattan map?

Oh, “Product Warning” is my favorite structurally, too! I wrote that one largely because I had made this medicine cabinet in Matthew Vollmer’s creative nonfiction workshop. He had us make 3D objects that incorporated writing for our final projects, and I bought an old medicine cabinet on eBay and narrated my drug history in it, mostly with short essays folded into pill bottles or bags of fake coke or the empty Suboxone packets I kept finding in my purse. There are two essays in Codependence that are shaped like motel keys, and they come basically straight from the keys I made for the medicine cabinet. But the pill bottles had really detailed labels that worked via this code that I guess someone else might have been able to figure out (they were dated, and the dates mattered either for chronology or because the refill date or a lack of one told you something about how I used that drug or about my and David’s relationship—David introduced me to drugs, so of course he had to be in it; I printed out his best mug shot so people could see why I was attracted to him!), but it was mostly a way of coding stuff for myself. I really loved the pill bottle format and how much story I could tell in such a small space, and I wanted to figure out how to get what I’d made onto a 2D page. “Product Warning” was my first major attempt to do that. I took one of the information sheets that always come with my oxycodone prescriptions and used it as a template. I wanted the subheadings (“Uses,” “Side Effects,” “Interactions,” “Overdose”) to relate to whatever part of the David story I was telling with that drug—like, the part of the story in the “Side Effects” section usually complicates the main conflict, the story under “Interactions” usually involves other people or outside influences, “Overdose” usually depicts some kind of an end—even though it’s not necessarily an obvious interpretation of the term in the subheading or a one-to-one kind of similarity. That one was really fun and a lot like a puzzle, which is part of what I like about using received forms: they’re generative because you have to figure out how to fit your story into the shape, 

So, a lot of those decisions came from the medicine cabinet—and sometimes the decision was This needs to go in a braided essay because, in those, I had more room to spread out in my thinking or could take a second look at something I’d already written about in an experimental essay. The form had to add something to or fit really well with the content; I didn’t want it to feel like a gimmick. 

But the map was a little different. I’d tried to write about my anxiety around my prescriptions and the ways that informal rules or actual regulations affect my life as a pain patient, and it always ended up feeling too much like the essay really was the thing it pretended to be, if that makes sense (I tried for a long time to get a “doctor-shopping guide” to work, but it turned into a literal how-to guide for getting a doctor to write opioids, and I couldn’t get a story to nest in it). I’d borrowed from Matthew this anthology, Where You Are (edited by Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen), that is kind of like a box set; you open it and pull out all these different map essays. I got the idea to do a map essay from that and narrowed it down to the pharmacies where I took my prescriptions when I lived in New York. That way, I could get in all the anxiety stuff and the problems with doctors and pharmacists, and it had a built-in story because I had to get from one to the other to the other and had a reason for visiting each one and stories to go with that. But I couldn’t figure out how to draw the map! I went ahead and wrote a draft and sent it to Silas Breaux, a really talented printmaker I’m lucky to have known since middle school whose work engages a lot with territory and geography. I told him it was his map and to make whatever he wanted. I love what he did with it. The symbols he uses to show what each pharmacy means for me are so smart, and his aesthetic decisions give the essay a texture it wouldn’t have if it were just made of words (or if I’d used the shitty maps I drew!). 

4. Did writing Codependence help you understand things differently, or realize something you hadn’t noticed before?

Yes, but I think a lot more about what I realized or noticed in editing. I was so lucky when I was in grad school in Virginia and, before that, in New York. I had doctors who cared about me as a person and believed not only in my pain but that I deserved to have it managed the way I wanted it managed. All of the events in the book take place before 2016, when the CDC put out a new guideline for primary care doctors to help them figure out appropriate opioid dosing for patients in acute pain who’d never taken opioids before, and it was supposed to be voluntary. It’s not legally binding, and it was not supposed to apply to patients on stable doses or whose pain is chronic, but—and this always happens with regulations designed to reduce initial opioid prescriptions—doctors, the DEA, insurance companies, legislators, and pharmacies have used the guideline, respectively, as a reason to limit patients’ opioid intake or taper them down to the guideline’s ceiling dose, identify doctors who “overprescribe,” punish doctors who write doses over the guideline’s ceiling (one insurance company reduces all payments to a doctor who writes even one patient more than a certain number of milligrams per day; so, if my doctor wrote me what I took in Virginia, which was not an excessive dose but is now over the CDC recommendation, it would cut all of its payments to him—even if he saw someone for a totally non-opioid reason—by 10%), codify those limits into laws, or refuse to fill a prescription that’s over the guideline dose. I moved right after the guideline was published, and ever since then, my pain management has been substandard. I feel dumb for ever complaining about anything that happened pre-2016. It’s so much worse now. Patients are being forced off opioids entirely because doctors don’t want to deal with it or make themselves targets. We did pretty light editing on the book, and it was harder on me than actually writing the book because, when I wrote the book, I had good pain management, and now I’m in pain all the time because my doctor won’t adjust my dose, and I’ve needed an adjustment for nearly two years. So, I realized in a different way how vital a good doctor and an adequate opioid dose is to me as a writer and a person who wants to have a life and that I had been so lucky to have the ones I did when I did.

5. Is there anything you’re currently working on? Do you have any future plans?

I have a plan, but I’ve finished about two essays since I finished the book in 2017, which is paltry; I wrote all of the essays in Codependence within two years. But it’s hard to write when you have pain in your head all the time, and looking at a computer screen damns you to days of worsened pain. So, I’m still mostly in the planning stages. If I get to write, it’s a good day. But, really, my future plans are all about getting to a place where I can write for about six hours about five days a week, which I can’t do now. I worry that it will mean my career stalls out before it fully starts. But my plan is to center the next book on relationships and let pain take a little break from its center-stage role in my writing. If that’s possible. I can’t write anything that doesn’t have some relationship to pain. I also want to write a 33 1/3 on Taylor Swift’s reputation (2017) not because it’s her best album but because it’s a good gateway to all the most interesting parts of her career and persona and fanbase. It would be nice to have a writing project that got me away from me but still obsessed me, and if you want me to talk for an hour straight, ask me about opioids or my book or Taylor Swift gossip. 

***

Amy Long is the author of Codependence, selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of the CSU Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a master’s degree in women’s studies from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She serves as a contributing editor at the drug history blog Points.

Leyna Bohning is a second-year NEOMFA fiction writer at Cleveland State University and has had her works published in various corners of the universe. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she was the co-Editor for Underground Pool and an intern for The American Poetry Review. When she’s not writing she’s teaching herself Korean, listening to Paramore, or doing color-by-numbers.

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)

Writers at Work, Fall 2019

LIGHTHOUSE READING SERIES 2019-2020

PRE-ORDERS AVAILABLE NOW!

Order books by Anne Lesley Selcer, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Amy Long, Russell Atkins, and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine today!

2019 Book Competition Results

The CSU Poetry Center is excited to announce the results of our 2019 book competitions. The following five books were selected for publication from nearly 1,000 manuscripts. Thank you to everyone who sent us work.

Winner of the First Book Poetry Competition
Judge: Brenda Hillman
Alen Hamza’s Exit Empire, forthcoming September 2020

Alen Hamza immigrated to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina as a refugee. He has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Believer, Fence, Narrative, Diagram, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He’s pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, where he serves as poetry editor for Quarterly West.

Editor’s Choice Selection (First Book)
Shelley Feller’s Dream Boat, forthcoming September 2020

Shelley Feller grew up figure skating across the Midwest. They hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, and are currently pursuing a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Their work can be found in Interim, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.

Judge’s Honorable Mentions
CL Young’s Retrograde Interior; Bronwen Tate’s The Silk the Moths Ignore.

First Book Finalists:
Kanika Agrawal’s Okazaki Fragments; Steve Barbaro’s Plane of Consummate Finitude; Travis Brown’s In the Village That Is Not Burning Down; Ashley Chambers’s The Exquisite Buoyancies: A Sonography; Shelley Feller’s Dream Boat; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Clare Jones’s It only seems that way; Colleen O’Brien’s Reel; Sara Lupita Olivares’s Migratory Sound; Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif; Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman’s MELEKH!MELEKH!MELEKH!MELEKH! An Assimilation; Jay Thompson’s Like Honey; Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Lazarus Species; Emma Winsor Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape.

First Book Semi-Finalists
Christopher Adamson’s Arguments for the Pit; Danielle Badra’s Like We Still Speak; Chelsea Balzer’s fruit diaries; Kerry Banazek’s You, Siphon; Madeleine Barnes’s You Do Not Have To Be Good; Julie Phillips Brown’s The Adjacent Possible; K.M. English’s WAVE SAYS; Maria Flaccavento’s 108 Olivia; Margaret Foley’s Keel; Matthew Girolami’s Fire Regime; Eric Komosa’s Like You Are Breathing; Christopher Murray’s Black Observatory; Rachel Mindell’s No Miracle ; Alleliah Amabelle Nuguid’s Prodigal Daughter; Jessica Reed’s White Thread into Stone; Brandon Rushton’s The Air in the Air Behind It; Dennis James Sweeney’s In the Antarctic Circle; Mars Tekosky’s The Catherine Wheel; Kate Thorpe’s The Marriage of Art and Industry; Shelley Wong’s As She Appears.

Winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition
Judges: Nicholas Gulig, Dora Malech, & Sheila McMullin
Valerie Hsiung’s outside voices, please, forthcoming September 2021

Poet, performer, and sound artist, Valerie Hsiung is the author of four previous poetry collections: YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books, 2020), e f g (Action, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (OBP, 2013). Her poems can be found in or are forthcoming from dozens of publications, including The Nation, The Believer, jubilat, Chicago Review, PEN America, The Rumpus, Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, and beyond. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of the 2019 Kay Murphy Prize, she has performed her little poetry theater at Treefort Music Festival, DC Arts Center, Common Area Maintenance, Casa Libre en la Solana, Shapeshifter Lab, and The Silent Barn. Born and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in southern Ohio, Hsiung now divides her time between Brooklyn and Hudson.

Editor’s Choice Selection (Open Book)
Lauren Shapiro’s Arena, forthcoming September 2020

Lauren Shapiro is the author of Easy Math (Sarabande, 2013), which was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Debut-litzer Prize for Poetry, as well as a chapbook of poems, Yo-Yo Logic (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2011). With Kevin González, she co-edited The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Rescue Press, 2013). Recent poems have appeared in jubilat, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, DIAGRAM, and Forklift, Ohio. She is an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. [Photo credit: Heidi Wiren Bartlett].

Open Book Finalists
Carrie Olivia Adams’s Setting Fire; Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s For Dorothy in the Dark; Carrie Bennet’s Expedition Notes; Lily Brown’s Blade Work; Rachel Galvin’s Uterotopia; Claire Hero’s The Raw & The Cooked; Dennis Hinrichsen’s This is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go; Genevieve Kaplan’s blueroombrowngreenrooms; Danielle Pafunda’s Along the Road Everyone Must Travel; Lauren Shapiro’s Arena; Larissa Szporluk’s Virginals; Gale Thompson’s Dummy Prayer.

Open Book Semi-Finalists
Sarah Boyer’s Home is the Proudest of All Institutions; Molly Brodak’s The Cipher; Stella Corso’s Driving; Mary Crow’s Begin with a Stepped Pyramid; Darren Demaree’s a child walks in the dark; C. Violet Eaton’s Cant; Jennifer Habel’s The Book of Jane; Rochelle Hurt’s Screen Tests for [ ] Girls; Josh Kalscheur’s Picture of Health; Justin Marks’s If This Should Reach You In Time; Jessica Marsh’s Dysmorphelia; Kent Shaw’s Gigantic; Robert Thomas’s Sonnets with Carpenter and Dirty Snow; Laura Wetherington’s Parallel Resting Places.

Winners of the Essay Collection Competition
Judge: Hanif Abdurraqib
Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade’s Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, forthcoming September 2021

Brenda Miller teaches in the creative writing program at Western Washington University. Her memoir-in-essays, An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016), won the Washington State Book Award for Memoir, and her creative nonfiction has received six Pushcart Prizes. Julie Marie Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University. Her most recent collections are The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019), co-authored with Denise Duhamel, and Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2018). Miller and Wade’s collaborative essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Normal School, River Teeth, Tupelo Quarterly, and in two recent anthologies of contemporary collaborative work.

Essay Collection Finalists
Leora Fridman’s Static Place; Mariko Nagai’s Bodies of Empire; Liza Porter’s Bruce Springsteen Sang to Me; Catherine Theis’s L’Avventura; Vivian Wagner’s Everyday Carry; Nicole Walker’s Who Would We Animals Be If Not For Animals You?.

Summer Celebrations

Congratulations to Anna Maria Hong, whose debut collection of poetry, Age of Glass (CSU Poetry Center, 2018), won the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America!!

Judge’s Citation:
Though "[d]one with iambics," Anna Maria Hong's Age of Glass uses the sonnet's other ancient materials to build a sequence song "out of all possible solutions." That double preposition—"out of"—signals both invention and exhaustion, the hope and risk which come with deploying that old form in this latest age. But Hong will not oppose these senses, instead making invention from various forms of exhaustion: most of the poems are not content to rhyme only on their right margins, but anywhere else in the line as well (exhaustion as overabundance), while one sonnet uses only four words to do all its work (paucity as fatigue). This play of too much and not enough, what one sonnet calls a "few too / many or few too few," isn't just a way through the problems of a form that dates back to the 13th century, it's a description of the disaster of our present age, its "capitalist / suicide songs" and "Liberticide." The sonnet is the confinement of "the vox" to a kind of "box" (many of the sonnets have this word in their titles) and the box is both "a nation" and "a one-person show," "all containment all the time." For all the pleasure this book takes in its wits and sounds, in choosing new ways to sing in the optional cage of the sonnet, that pleasure feels at best "ferociously happy," because the book knows too that there is no way as yet to get out of the "endless project" of an unjust present, which is only "our time to savage." It takes wit to see the "age" in "savage," but wit in Hong's work is pain made generous. (Geoffrey G. O’Brien)

Congratulations to Shaelyn Smith, whose debut collection of essays, The Leftovers, won CLMP’s Firecracker Award for best creative nonfiction published by an indie press.

Judge’s Citation:
The strength and poignancy of Shaelyn Smith's The Leftovers rests in the work itself not being easily categorized. Emerging out of a critical engagement—one might even say a fixation—with Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist art installation The Dinner Party housed at the Brooklyn Museum, The Leftovers encapsulates feminist testimony, art criticism, and personal discovery while rendering the visual as tactile and vivid. Smith goes well beyond asking who has been brought to the table and who has been left out—she erects platforms for voices and perspectives, both historical and contemporary, that speak to how historical recovery can also be a trap. The viewpoints she brings together offer universal truths held by individuals and community through a tightness in structure, voice, and overall composition. With prose that encourages a kind of infectious curiosity, Smith cracks open what writing about art can mean for how we read the world around us. The Leftovers is singularly engaging and as essential to our shelves as it is to our everyday dialogue.

Book Interview: Sheila McMullin & Penelope Jeanne Brannen

In poems like “Olga’s Book” (“‘he blames me’ ‘for’ ‘not having pregnancies’”), you talk about gender expectations and inequality. How does your work as an intersectional feminist and activist affect your poetry? How is poetry feminist work?

I want to thank you, first, Nellie, for inviting me to participate in the interview. The act of invitation is feminist work, and then for the occasion to be poetry reminds me of the heart of the matter. I am grateful to take this offer. 

Labor is relational. And is often held in the extremes of unequal power dynamics. So the work for an activist becomes holding a relationship that bends those dynamics, and for me unfolds on feminist foundation. When feminism contains the propelling motion of reclaiming space—alchemizing the historic and cultural perspectives of land, voice, body fostered by creative plurality—poetry, then, can refract light onto the unnamed. I talk about intersectionality to acknowledge systematized workings of hierarchy that diminish innate value, to recognize we will always be finding ourselves and finding ourselves changed, and in solidarity against community and law-making built through the consciousness of white supremacy that depletes human ambition and destroys our earth’s immune system. 

And then, I also feel like I’m not holding these tenants in balance lately. In the beginning, poetry gave me space to think about myself, and feminism gave me space from which to write. As an activist today, I feel burnt out knowing the seriousness of the 11th hour, feeling like there’s no time to catch up, knowing simultaneously this is capitalism working within me, and every moment I give to it will be devoured. So the work becomes not the harmony of poetry and activism and feminism like I want, but the active state of balancing plates. I’ve really been looking toward others for guidance in the answer to this question, fully knowing there many varied ways that these very crucial aspects of my life can cohabitate, but not quite being there yet. Having a lingering taste from a moment when I did and working to be here again, naming my relationships based in uneven power dynamics, and resituating to take back my space. 

The discrete poems in your book are interrupted by pages of short, italicized lines without titles. How did you arrive at this structure?

I admire poems that seemingly get to the heart of the matter and then buckle your knees with a deeper story told as if in an aside. One of my colleagues in grad school, Catee Baugh, did this beautifully. Sarah Vap is a goddess of this work. I’m reading Samantha Hunt’s The Sea currently and I find this magic in every scene. In writing the Firelight Mediations, I looked toward form as a way to say what I was struggling to write. What I needed for myself at that time was a pep talk. And I needed a pep talk that wasn’t dismissive of the anger I was conjuring. I appreciate your naming the poems discrete, because I feel that too. Writing them was uncomfortable for me, both in the way I was looking at myself and in metaphor. I was listening daily to the old lectures of Ram Dass while working at the front desk of a venture capital firm (I know...talk about community feminist work and writing…but hey, I finished my manuscript thanks to that job) and was hearing repeated messages on the art of returning. That our work is in the practice of remembering and witnessing our coming into being at every opportunity. So what I wrote was my work of remembering. And saying it plainly, buffered by space, and in short bursts was as much bravery as I could muster.

And thanks to CSU Poetry Center’s editor, Caryl Pagel, who was able to translate the integrity of my manuscript into book form, dedicating two pages to each of the mediations which signals a slowing down to the reader. The practice of each page turn, an arriving into the present. 

What advice would you give to emerging poets?

Keep close your explorer’s mind. That meditating on patience helps with a lot of anxiety around perceived notions of productivity, success, and worthwhile creativity. That if even talking about patience makes you feel like you have a knot in your chest it’s normal, because I feel that myself right now too. That small compounding actions are how poetry is written. Making rituals out of your daily habits can bring a lot of joy back into areas that may have started to feel mundane or uninspired, and bonus if you share some of those rituals and compound your joy. That journaling is important, and so is sharing your work, as well as taking the risks to ask people to participate in that process with you.

Which dead person would you say your work is most informed by, that you’re in dialogue with most urgently in this book?

While her passing is recent and she was very much alive during my writing of daughterrarium, Ursula K. LeGuin refracted light on my desire of divine feminine power. After reading “She Unnames Them” the glow stick of my intestines cracked into a neon dance party, and I started digesting so much love and admiration for feminine willfulness, living outside of the obedient/disobedient binary, and being a self-propelled actor. A feeling of clarity of purpose is always strong after reading LeGuin’s works. Similarly, with poets like H.D. I feel that urgency of spirit to transmute what was told to us was evolution, but was really a caging of our wild nature. I chose to purge stagnation and give light to creativity. So, in pursuing publication for daughterrarium I made a commitment that if I was going to create an artifact out of the persona writing the book, I would honor my wild woman nature and speak as truthfully as I could for where I was in that time in my life.

What are you currently working on?

My root chakra. As an apprenticing green witch with the Gaia School of Healing and Earth Education, I have begun a revolutionary understanding of myself and the way I want to tend my time. Writing this on the first day of the new year, I can acknowledge the expansion I began in 2018 with a building allyship with plants and a reweaving of ancestral knowledge into my daily movements. I’m working on a new manuscript, tentatively titled Thank You that deepens the conversation of shame, blame, and anger initiated in daughterrarium.

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Sheila McMullin is the author of daughterrarium, winner of the 2016 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize chosen by Daniel Borzutzky. She co-edited the collections Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot from Shout Mouse Press. She is a community organizer working with youth to amplify their voices through storytelling and civic participation. She holds an M.F.A. from George Mason University and volunteers to maintain the free little libraries in her neighborhood. Find more about her writing, editing, and activism online at www.moonspitpoetry.com.

NEOMFA Writers at Work - Spring 2019

Please join us at the Poetry Center for Writers at Work conversations in February and April. Details below!

What We've Been Reading

In the spirit of holiday gifting and celebrating those books we loved spending time with, here’s a collection of what we’ve been reading (other than our own books!) at the CSU Poetry Center:

Leila Chatti

5 Favorite Books Read in 2018:

1. Analicia Sotelo – “Virgin”

2. Emily Jungmin Yoon – “A Cruelty Special to Our Species”

3. Catherine Barnett – “Human Hours”

4. Courtney Kampa – “Our Lady of Not Asking Why”

5. Rebecca Lindenberg – “Love, an Index”

This year, I am aiming to read 100 books (on book 90 as of today!), so I had quite a lot to choose from! I was stunned by the debut collections of Analicia Sotelo and Emily Jungmin Yoon; these are powerful, sharp books, bold and unflinching. I will be returning to them again and again. Another 2018 collection I thoroughly enjoyed was Catherine Barnett’s “Human Hours.” I read this book while in San Francisco for my best friend’s wedding, and could not help but share poems from it with friends on and offline. It is a brilliant, truly human, book. Courtney Kampa’s debut, which came out last year, is intimate and vulnerable in a way I trusted and admired. I find myself disinterested in books that lack heart; Courtney Kampa’s work has a heart beating loudly at its center. Finally, I was profoundly struck by Rebecca Lindenberg’s 2012 “Love, an Index.” I’m not even sure I can quite articulate my feelings about it. It is a gorgeous and devastating portrayal of a love, a life.

Leyna Bohning

The Biography of Alexander Hamilton—Ron Chernow: I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, great. Another biography of a white man written by a white man.” Well, you’re right. Entirely. But, this one is one of the most interesting biographies I’ve ever read. Forget everything you’ve learned in the Hamilton musical because it’s partially incorrect and doesn’t include a great deal of his greatness as a writer. If you like history and biographies, you’ll like this.

Selected Poems—Colette Bryce: Great poetry. Trust me.

Nature Poem—Tommy Pico: Also great poetry. Think (good) Twitter poetry put in a book.

If We Had Known—Elise Juska: Super topical novel. It’s about a teacher whose student commits a mass shooting. The media then finds an essay that the student wrote in the teacher’s class that may have hinted to his twisted state of mind. Really tense, really real, really good.

The Largess of the Sea Maiden—Denis Johnson: No words. Okay, a few words: mental illness, suspense, heart break, and “Dear Satan, I did not enjoy it at your Jamboree last night.”

Ali McClain

American Street by Ibi Zoboi (Fiction, Young Adult)

Virgin by Analicia Sotelo (Poetry)

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Poetry)

The Carrying by Ada Limon (Poetry)

Caryl Pagel

A few of the books I loved spending time with this year:

Rachel Arndt’s Beyond Measure

CA Conrad’s While Standing In Line For Death

Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy

Nick Dybek’s The Verdun Affair

Jenny Erpenbeck’s (tr. Susan Bernofsky) Go Went Gone

Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor

Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields

Nicholas Twemlow’s Attributed to the Harrow Painter

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Winter Newsletter

AUTHOR NEWS

Anna Maria Hong’s first book of poetry, Age of Glass, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was recently named one of Entropy’s Best Poetry Books of 2018. Age of Glass was recognized on the Kenyon Review blog and Poetry Foundation’s spring reading list for the magic of its subversive sonnets. In Green Mountains Review Anita Olivia Koester says “Hong’s innovative sonnets elevate the natural and human world by preserving it, and yet these sonnets also… allow for deeper truths about sexism, misogyny, and power structures, to emerge.”
 
Find out more about Hong’s work in interviews at Literary Bennington and Speaking of Marvels, where Hong says “The writing of this book was driven by the question of how or whether one can be a responsible and ethical member of empire, particularly in the face of white, hot reversals and upheavals.”
 
In American Literary Review, Brian Clifton writes of Nicholas Gulig’s second book, Orient, that “By looking at noise and sound (as they collide in human language), Gulig attempts to understand how we define ourselves and how we define others. In this way, the book becomes both a thing that speaks and a thing that listens.” In Poetry Northwest Jane Wong observes “Gulig’s collection is all encompassing—all heart, all terror.”
 
Orient was named one of Entropy’s Best Poetry Books of 2018 and Gulig discusses his process, ethics, aesthetics, and form at Speaking of Marvels.
 
Shaelyn Smith’s collection of essays, The Leftovers, was one of Poets & Writers’s featured debut collections of literary nonfiction in 2018 as well as an “SPD Recommends” title, and one of Entropy’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018. Learn more about The Leftovers in a review at the New Orleans Review and an interview with James Allen Hall at Essay Daily.
 
We’ve also been happily catching up with new books, reviews, or awards for our previous authors: Leora Fridman, Jane Lewty, Dora Malech, Shane McCrae, Phil Metres, and Sandra Simonds.
 
The Poetry Center staff is hard at work on our forthcoming titles, which will be released in September 2019: Anne Lesley Selcer’s Sun Cycle; Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Advantages of Being Evergreen; Amy Long’s Codependence; The Selected Poems of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough; and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun, translated by Conor Bracken.

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're researching MFA programs you might consider Cleveland State where we’re lucky to host the Lighthouse Reading Series, Playwrights Festival, and Whiskey Island Magazine, among other exciting programing. The NEOMFA is the nation's only consortial MFA program and boasts four schools’ worth of creative writing faculty and a great visiting writers series (this year includes Sloane Crosley, Suzanne Buffam, Srikinth Reddy, and Paula McLain). Application deadline: January 15th.

ANISFIELD-WOLF FELLOW IN WRITING AND PUBLISHING

It’s been a delight to welcome Leila Chatti, our inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing in Publishing, to Cleveland. Check out new work by Leila in Kenyon Review online, Narrative, Willow Springs, and Frontier Poetry.

LIGHTHOUSE READING SERIES  

This year’s Lighthouse Reading Series has hosted Nicholas Gulig, Brian Blanchfield, Leila Chatti, and Lindsay Turner, all of whom blew us away with their performances. Spring readers include Jason Koo and Shaelyn Smith (2/22/19), and Caren Beilin and Anna Maria Hong (4/12/19). If you live in Northeast Ohio, we hope to see you in the spring!

SUPPORT THE CSU POETRY CENTER

If you'd like to DONATE to our mission of publishing 3-5 collections of contemporary poetry, prose, and translation each year in addition to running The Lighthouse Reading Series, the Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, and providing pedagogical and outreach opportunities for CSU and NEOMFA students please know that your support is what allows us to continue our work throughout the year.

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.

Lighthouse Reading Series 2018-2019

Check out our 2018-2019 Lighthouse Reading Series lineup! We're overjoyed to be hosting this stellar group of poets and essayists in Cleveland. In addition to the readings, we'll be presenting a new Writers at Work colloquium series for NEOMFA and Cleveland State University students. These events will take place prior to each reading. Please scroll down to our next post for more detail on Writers at Work.

NEOMFA Writers at Work Colloquium 2018-2019

This colloquium offers CSU and NEOMFA students the opportunity to hear from visiting writers about their experience in editing, publishing, arts administration, translation, criticism, and/or community programming and outreach, and thus to gain a deeper knowledge of the breadth of literary work taking place today. Please join us at the times and locations below.

September 21, 2018 at 4 pm
NEOMFA Writers at Work
Nicholas Gulig and Brian Blanchfield
RT 415 (CSU Poetry Center)

October 25, 2018 at 6 pm
NEOMFA Writers at Work
Lindsay Turner
MC 427

November 29, 2018 at 6 pm
NEOMFA Writers at Work
Philip Metres
MC 427

February 22, 2019 at 4 pm
NEOMFA Writers at Work
Jason Koo and Shaelyn Smith
RT 415 (CSU Poetry Center)

April 11, 2019 (time TBD)
NEOMFA Writers at Work
Caren Beilin
Location and time TBD

2018 Book Contest Results

The CSU Poetry Center is excited to announce the results of our 2018 book competitions. The following three books were selected from nearly 1,100 manuscripts and will be published in Fall 2019. Thank you to everyone who sent us work—it was an honor to spend time with your writing.

Winner of the First Book Poetry Competition
Judge: CAConrad
Anne Lesley Selcer: Sun Cycle

Anne Lesley Selcer is an art writer and a poet in the expanded field. She is the author of the forthcoming Blank Sign Book, a book of essays on art. She also wrote from A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain chapbook award. Her writing for galleries and museum catalogs includes Banlieusard, a book length text that interacts with two visual projects. Work is included in nine anthologies, and writing occasionally manifests as moving image or sound. Poems and essays have recently appeared in The Chicago Review, Jacket2, Art Practical, and New Media Art 2017: Back to Nature.

First Book Finalists: Teresa Carmody’s Motherpieces; Ashley Chambers’s The Exquisite Buoyancies: A Sonography; Shelley Feller’s Dream Boat; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Kirsten Ihns’s Sundaey; Ricardo Alberto Maldonado’s The Life Assignment; Kathleen Miller’s Bitter Melons; Dusty Neu’s Poor Horses; Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif; Ariel Resnikoff’s Unnatural Bird Migrator; Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman’s MELEKHMELEKHMELEKHMELEKH: An Assimilation; Jessica Stark’s Savage Pageant; Jay Thompson’s Like Honey; Grey Vild’s Dear Gone; Devon Walker-Figueroa’s Be Thou; Emma Wood’s Preferred Internal Landscape

First Book Semi-Finalists: Bryan Beck’s Femme Cro-Magnon; Sarah Blackman’s In My Heart is the Heart of My Heart; Catherine Cafferty’s Krone; Christy Davids’s Woo Me; Kat Finch’s After Omens; Michael Flatt’s Parallaxis; Sam Gilpin’s Apoptosis; Nicole Hospital-Medina’s Sea Foam; Jake Levine’s Lonely Crowds; Angelo Mao’s Abattoir; Daniel Moysaenko’s Speak and the Sleepers; Christopher Murray’s Black Observatory; Jenifer Park’s Autobiography of a Horse; Zeeshan Pathan’s The Minister of Disturbances; Michael Peterson’s Repeater; Cat Richardson’s Lit Interior; Jon Ruseski’s Sporting Life; Bret Shepard’s Living as Magnets

Winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition
Judges: Samuel Amadon, Leora Fridman, & Jane Lewty
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Advantages of Being Evergreen

Oliver Baez Bendorf grew up in Iowa and received a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His first book The Spectral Wilderness won the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has been translated into Russian and can also be found in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, he is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Open Book Finalists: Cynthia Arrieu-King’s Continuity; Rosebud Ben-oni’s The Last Great Adventure is You; Carrie Bennet’s Expedition Notes; Lillian Bertram’s Travesty Generator; Caroline Cabrera’s (Lack Begins as a Tiny Rumble); Eryn Green’s BEIT; Claire Hero’s The Raw & the Cooked; Ann Huang’s Saffron Splash; Amelia Klein’s Brilliant Dust; Megan Kaminski’s Everything is Leaf in my Empire of the Heart; Kimberly Lambright’s Doom Glove; Danielle Pafunda’s Along the Road Everyone Must Travel; Elizabeth Robinson’s Personal Spiritual Handbook; F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Ghost Apiary; Gale Thompson’s Expeditions to the Polar Seas; Felicia Zamora’s Body of Render

Open Book Semi-Finalists: Jennifer Andrea’s Keşke; Sarah Boyer’s Righteous, Chrillis, My Mimi, & the Owl; Nicole Callihan’s Chigger Ridge; Stevie Edwards’s Lush Country; Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s Basic Needs; Melissa Ginsburg’s The Dreams of Weapons; K. Lorraine Graham’s Opera; Jason Gray’s Radiation King; MC Hyland’s A Book of Borrowed Light; Henry Israeli’s Our Age of Anxiety; Annie Kim’s Uses for Music; Peter Kline’s Mirrorforms; Michael Robins’s Ruination; Dan Rosenberg’s The Book of Esau; Broc Rossell’s Necessary Fictions; Laura Sims’s Walking Dead Love Songs & Other Love Songs; Jennifer Tseng’s Not So Dear J----

Winner of the Essay Collection Competition
Judge: Brian Blanchfield
Amy Long: Codependence: A Novel in Essays

Amy Long earned an M.F.A from Virginia Tech's Creative Writing Program in 2016. She holds a B.A. in English and Women's Studies and a Master's degree in Women's Studies from the University of Florida. She previously worked in communications for drug policy reform and free speech advocacy groups in Santa Cruz, CA; Washington, D.C.; and New York City and as a bookseller at Bookpeople in Austin, TX. Currently, she teaches English at Northwest Florida State College and serves as a contributing editor to the drug-history blog Points. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden's Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Essay Collection Finalists: Jennifer Militello’s Knock Wood; Sarah Minor’s Beats of the Interior; Sejal Shah’s Things People Say; Jill Talbot’s Distance: Essays and Reckonings; Julie Marie Wade’s Telephone: Essays in Two Voices; Julie Marie Wade’s The Hourglass: Meditations on the Body; Marco Wilkinson’s Madder

Essay Collection Semi-Finalists: Julia Cohen’s Freak Lip; Adam Fagin’s Fagin the Jew; Wes Jamison: Echo Frequency; Elizabeth Kadetsky’s The Memory Eaters; Elizabeth McConaghy’s Migrations; JH Phrydas’s Imperial Physique; Matt Reeck’s Armistice Day; Suzanne Scanlon’s The Book of Displacement; Marcela Sulak’s Drawn That Way

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The CSU Poetry Center will also publish the following two books in Fall 2019:

The Selected Poems of Russell Atkins, edited by Kevin Prufer

Cleveland-based poet, music theorist, composer and dramatist Russell Atkins is the author of several small press chapbooks, including A Podium Presentation (1960), Phenomena (1961), Objects (1963), Objects 2 (1964), Heretofore (1968), The Nail, to Be Set to Music (1970), Maleficium (1971), and Whichever (1978). Prior to his Selected Poems, Atkins’s only full-length poetry collection was Here in The (1976), also published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. In 1950, with Adelaide Simon, Atkins co-founded Free Lance, a long-running literary journal of the Black avant-garde. He is most recently the subject of a volume in the Unsung Masters Series called Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of an American Master.

Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun, translated by Conor Bracken

Mohammed Khair-Eddine was an Amazigh Moroccan poet and writer born in 1941 near Tafraout, in the anti-Atlas Mountains. In the 1960s, he established the Poésie Toute movement and, with Abdellatif Laabi and Mostafa Nissabori, co-founded the avant-garde journal Souffles. He lived in exile in France for fourteen years due to his provocative and vocal criticism of King Hassan II, before returning to Morocco, where he lived out the rest of his life until 1995 in Rabat. He advocated for a “guerrilla poetics,” an improvisatory, erudite, and visceral blend of registers which is often as ornate and lush as it is unstable and aggressive. He authored many novels and collections of poetry, among them Agadir, Soleil Arachnide, Ce Maroc!, and Legende et vie d'Agoun'chich. Called by some the Moroccan Rimbaud, Khair-Eddine is a critical and incendiary figure in postcolonial life, politics, and art in the Maghreb.

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, At Length, Colorado Review, Diode, Indiana Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. A former poetry editor at Gulf Coast, he received his MFA in poetry from the University of Houston and will be an assistant professor of English at the University of Findlay starting in Fall 2018.