SPD RECOMMENDS DAVID LEHMAN'S BEST!

 

Congratulations to David Lehman whose new "Chapter One" book, THE BIRTH OF THE BEST, is on SPD's Recommended List!

PRAISE FOR BRIAN COCHRAN'S TRANSLATION ZONE!

Congratulations to our Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize recipient Brian Cochran whose book Translation Zone was noted in Poets & Writers' feature "Ten Questions for Cintia Santana." You can see it HERE but here's an excerpt:

 

4. What are you reading right now? 

I’m currently rereading a couple of things. Hugh Raffles’s poetic and encyclopedic The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, a book that came to my attention early in the pandemic, thanks to a beautifully written New York Times review by Parul Sehgal. I’m also rereading Translation Zone, winner of the 2022 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. It’s a first book by a friend, Brian Cochran. His poems are these acts of emotional and linguistic magic. I’ve been his fan for a long time, and over the last few years his work has reached a level such that I’m always asking myself after reading a poem, “How did he get there?” I also just returned from CDMX, where I did some catching up on contemporary Mexican poetry—recent works by Sara Uribe, Tedi López Mills, Eva Castañeda, and Elisa Díaz Castelo.

MARY MACKEY NOMINATED FOR THE NBCA

Congratulations to Mary Mackey whose book--Creativity: Where Poems Begin--has been nominated for the 42nd Annual Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction as one of the best works by a Northern California author published in 2022!

MARY MACKEY ON CREATIVITY!

You are invited to read Mary Mackey's essay "Creating Creativity" on Sheila Bender's blog, Writing It Real. You can see the whole thing HERE but here's an excerpt:

"I nearly died from a high fever just before my third birthday. I remember the experience well because it was the first time I saw how thin and bright the world could be. I remember lying on a green couch in an over-heated room. It must have been winter, because frost coated the windowpanes, and snow lay on the bare branches of the trees in big lumps. My mother had given me a bottle of Coca-Cola on the principle that I needed to take in more fluids. My temperature must have been somewhere between 105  and 106 Fahrenheit because I was already experiencing that wonderful, detached floating feeling I always get above 105....

I couldn’t have had much of a vocabulary at that age. Nevertheless, words streamed into my mind and came out of my mouth, combining and re-combining into entirely new things. I believe this was the moment when I was given the gift of poetry."