Free Verse Editions Press Release 2009

New Free Verse Editions Selections . . .

Parlor Press is pleased to announce the 2008 selections for its Free Verse Editions series, to be published in Fall, 2009

Parlor Press’s poetry series, Free Verse Editions, is also pleased to announce The New Measure Poetry Prize, which will carry a cash award of $1,000 and publication of an original, unpublished manuscript of poems. Cole Swensen will select the winning manuscript. Other manuscripts not selected for the New Measure Poetry Prize may still be eligible for publication by Free Verse Editions. Submissions for the prize must be postmarked in April or May of 2009. The nonrefundable entry fee is $25.00. Please see www.parlorpress.com for full submission requirements at

Contacts

Jon Thompson, Free Verse Editions Series Editor [email protected] David Blakesley, Publisher, Parlor Press [email protected]; 765.409.2649 Existing titles in the Free Verse Editions series may be ordered securely on our website or at bookstores anywhere. Visit www.parlorpress.com

Free Verse Editions 2008

January 23, 2009

Molly Bendall, Under the Quick

In Molly Bendall’s fourth book of poems, the verbal underworld of doing and undoing--oath, love charm, prayer, curse—becomes a refuge of tenderness and malediction. One of her generation’s most subtly imaginative poets, Bendall overhears—and whispers to the reader—a lost language which is by turns brainy and promiscuous, clueless and inscrutable, bewitching and bereft: a voice skirting a strange silence, a “goblin market” of snares, cures, trifles, and métiers inconnus. Under the spell of these poems, worlds once imagined break into growls and fingersnaps undoing the rough magic of impersonation.

Ger Killeen, Blood Orbits

In a richly musical, startlingly surreal language, Ger Killeen’s third collection, Blood Orbits, takes up narratives that encode oppression, violence, and dishonesty, both the grand narratives that structure our place in history as well as the stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives in their ordinary, lived reality. Blood Orbits enlivens what Stevens called “the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,” exploring ideas as ideas but also evolving a poetic language that squarely confronts the consequences of those ideas in real human lives.

F. Daniel Rzicznek, Divination Machine

Re-examining the ancient intersection between human imagination and nature, F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Divination Machine takes us to the anonymous lawns of suburbia, the forests and marshes of the Midwest, a small island in the Gulf of Mexico, and the surreal terrain of the afterlife. Combining sequences of lyric narrative with meditations on humanity’s relationship to the planet at large, these poems find the dreamer confronted with thickets of images where the world stares back from the faces of birds, beasts, and creatures unknown.

Ashur Etwebi, Poem from above the Hill & Selected Work Translated by Brenda Hillman and Diallah Haidar

Free Verse Editions is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Ashur Etwebi, one of Libya’s leading poets, in a translation by Brenda Hillman, one of the U.S.’s leading poets. Ashur Etwebi (poet, translator, novelist; b. 1952) is a physician and senior lecturer at Zawia Teaching Hospital in Libya. Since 1993, he has published four collections of poems, most recently A Box of the Old Laughs (2005).  His work is widely anthologized in the Arab-speaking world and Europe, including the Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry (France).  In 2001, he ventured into prose with his first novel, Dardaneen.

Parlor Press

www.parlorpress.com

Free Verse

A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics