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Happy Belated Birthday Conor O’Callaghan
“I toast my new age. I drink its tongue-roll, its wheel-whirr, on the road to Montecarlo. Quarantaquattro, quarantaquattro, quarantaquattro …” Conor O’Callaghan turned 45 on September 20th. All of us here at Wake Forest University Press toast Conor as he embarks on quarantecinque. The quote above is from The Pearl Works, a collection of 52…
Continue ReadingDream Language
” …you swim from core state to fugue state in undirected milky water to a black-filled circle, which is your fully fledged city dwindled into a village” — from “Broken Pot Used as Writing Material” Here at WFU Press we’re busy with the final…
Continue ReadingSpeaking Out for the Small Press
Publishing is a constantly changing industry. Every day, new ideas rise out of companies, expertly crafted to improve customer experience, to make book buying simpler. New technology is pushed to the forefront and heralded as the future of publishing; soon, as it is prophecized over and over, all publishers will be using ebooks and turning…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week, plus Paula Meehan’s Appointment as Ireland Professor of Poetry
The View from Under the Table was the best view and the table itself kept the sky from falling. The world was fringed with red velvet tassels; whatever play ran in that room the tablecloth was curtains for. I was the audience. Listen to me laughing. Listen to me weeping. I was a child. What…
Continue ReadingConor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King: Shockingly Vulnerable and Painfully Tender
In his newest book, The Sun King, Conor O’Callaghan invites readers into the shockingly vulnerable and sometimes bitter consciousness of a speaker who offers an unedited confession of his most intimate experiences.
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “Milk” by Moya Cannon
Milk Could he have known that any stranger’s baby crying out loud in a street can start the flow? A stain that spreads on fustian or denim. This is kindness which in all our human time has refused to learn propriety, which still knows nothing but the depth of kinship, the depth of thirst. –Moya…
Continue ReadingRealizing a Destiny in Full: On the Death of a Friend
“When asked to pronounce on Seamus’s death, a phrase coalesced in my mind: he did his work.” This, according to poet John Montague in his Sept. 7 memorial in the Irish Times, is the most succinct way to describe the late Seamus Heaney. But his description, which seems so far removed from the beauty and…
Continue ReadingLouis MacNeice: Collected Poems NY Times Book Review
In his New York Times Sunday Book Review of Louis MacNeice’s Collected Poems, entitled “Free Range”, David Orr praises the palimpsestic nature of MacNeice’s final volume. There is a haunting quality, perhaps to do with MacNeice’s talent for refrain, which provides a chilling echo that permeates the soul and leaves the reader with lingering questions…
Continue ReadingPoem of the Week: “On Cutting One’s Finger While Reaching for Jasmine” by Medbh McGuckian
(photo from flowersreview.blogspot.com ) On Cutting One’s Finger While Reaching for Jasmine She talked about the aboutness of life, the eternal false illumination of the leftover nights, her lavender- skirted self who paced around the tousled bedroom, the otherwise good you. She incessantly made Os, Os of all sizes, Os inside one another, always drawn backwards in…
Continue ReadingFingers Crossed for Harry Clifton!
We’re delighted that Harry Clifton has been nominated for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award for 2013. Clifton is nominated for The Winter Sleep of Captain Lemass; he previously won this most prestigious award in 2008 for Secular Eden. Winners will be announced on Sept 7. Stay tuned for the results! –Megan Latta
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