The Dark Touch of Genius

In Rebellion, Chris Crittenden writes of “storms in heartbeats.” It’s a suitable metaphor for the poems in this book. They throb, they sizzle. They singe the reader with “syringes of ice.” We stand face to face with the modern monsters who have gone over to the Dark Side. Crittenden’s genius is an imp in the forest. He sets rebellion afoot on a mythic scale. This book is a perfect storm of heartbeats. The imp of Crittenden’s imagination affords him smashing poem titles and killer endings. This collection has become a talisman on the tao of light for me. (Medulla Publishing.)

Excerpt from “Ghost Song:”

the dead laugh,
they race to our end
and return,
outflanking lazy hops of sun.

they rush past our questions
and back many times,
amused.

the dead laugh,
coveting our worries,
springing off our breaths.

Everywhere At Once

Schroedinger’s Cat is Wanda Schubmehl’s open invitation to become “a cosmic hitchhiker.” That’s a phrase from “Moon Rider,” a poem to the moon that makes you gasp. It’s just one of numerous numinous moments in the collection. This poet’s first book contains ekphrastic poems—Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper, for example, seen in words through Schubmehl’s wondrous eyes. Her voice speaks in “winged language” that reports the weather of the universe. With the poet we learn to “hoard/ the memory of rain” and understand our envy for the wind in its “desire to be everywhere at once.” (Foothills Press, 2011.)

Excerpt from “I Do Not Hear the Wind”

vii
I knew you by the trees
in your eyes

I met you in the center
of the earth

where there can be
no trees

but there you were,
containing a forest

and since I had brought
sparrows

we had everything
we need

I think I’ve mentioned here before that my co-editor and I wanted to offer our Kindle eBook (for issue 5, Animals), for free, but Amazon is kind of the boss of us in that regard and won’t necessarily do what we say. However, Kindle Direct Publishing is running this promotional thing at the moment; the ins and outs of it are not completely clear to me, but the upshot is that we can offer the eBook free for five days every six months.

Two of those days are happening right now, so if you go to the Amazon page here, on Thursday 22nd and Friday 23rd of December, you can send yourself, or anyone you wish, a free copy of the eBook.

YB is not, as an animal, overly Christmas-oriented, but since we are approaching that celebration (which is celebrated by some of us but not all; some of us just dread it and have meltdowns on Facebook over it, five days early or whatever, for example) you know, you could gift it to yourself and/or other poetry people and that kind of thing.

It was most fabulously formatted by my co-editor Sherry, and I’m eager for everyone to see her great work, as well as the great work of all our contributors.

The pic: Dorothee Lang took this and put it on her beautiful blog, and I poached it from there because I like doing that and I liked this pic lots. It’s from Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands.

Footnote (and as such labelled as such yet curiously not referenced to in the body of this post; I would say then, some kind of floating, footnote): If you are a reader interested in what (the editors) Sherry and I have been doing lately, or fairly lately, two of our books are also on offer for free for the same time period, under the same promotional program at Amazon; go here for my A Foal Poem, and here for Sherry’s fabulous The Peppermint Bottle.

Happy octopus spotting!

I am very happy to announce the start of a regular feature here on the blog. From now on YB will be running mini-reviews of poetry books throughout the year. They will be by Karla Linn Merrifield. 

We are most happy to welcome Karla to the YB blog. Welcome Karla!

Now, without further ado, over to you Karla:

Step into the Stiff Current of History  

Just open the covers of Campbell McGrath’s Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. It’s a marvelously imaginative long narrative poem full of drama about and pathos for the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery who was lost for eighteen days. This is his story of survival, of life on the edge of death where young George Shannon must ask: “Have I capacity/ to endure?” Does he? Find out! And understand, his story is not for history buffs alone. McGrath puts you there and with authoritative panache, unalloyed genius. Come, readers, to the West when it was wild, and sit in the tall grass beneath “prolific showers of shooting stars.” (Ecco 2009.)

Excerpt from Part II, “Shannon:”

Dog-tired from driving the horses all day
The brown one especially
Being contrary and prone to lurch & stumble
Yet is my sleep postponed
By these prolific showers of shooting stars
Blazing their luminary trails across the heavens.
Much is writ in their countenance
But not the destiny of men or such trifles.

America the Not-So-Beautiful

It’s nothing short of a photo-poetic phenom.  It’s From Milltown to Malltown by poets Jim Daniels and Jane McCafferty with photography by Charlee Brodsky.  This too embraces American history, but of a more recent era. This trio of canny artists takes you to Homestead, “one of the most distinctive and ethnically diverse working-class communities in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania region.” But the old steel town has been transformed by urban renewal into a yuppified center of commerce.  The poems and photographs give you both views—the gritty life that was and the sanitized life that is.  Remarkable stuff. An artistic trifecta. (Marick Press, 2010.)

Thank you for all the great feedback we’ve received regarding YB Issue 5: The Animal Issue, which we released—like a happy animal from captivity—a week ago.

We are most happy with the issue and are most happy that other people are happy too, because being happy is better than being sad we think although there are some who disagree with that.

This butterfly was sent to me by my good friend Dorothee Lang. As it happened, and as you might expect, there were quite a few insects in YB Issue 5. For example, this one. And this one. And there’s one in here too.

Here is a partial list of some of the other animals that were featured in The Animal Issue: a donkey, a plumed serpent, a black cat, a calico cat, a junkyard dog, a sleeping dog, a squirrel, a monkey, a crane, a gazelle, a giraffe, a kangaroo, a fish, a pelican, a wallaby, a crocodile, a mr cow, a snail woman, a reindeer, a rat, a wolf, and starlings. And more! That’s why it’s a partial list.

Hey, so actually I had another reason for writing a blog post today, but I think I will put that in a separate post. That’s right, because I CAN. Because I am the boss of ME.

So here we are, YB Issue 5: The Animal Issue.

We are now live online and also have an eBook, available at Amazon for 99c. We want to be free I think but Amazon won’t let us at the moment. We are working on that….

If you’re new to YB we know you’ve probably seen eBooked poetry before and some of it doesn’t turn out so great. Rest assured this is really beautiful and perfect over at Amazon – we are thrilled with it.

This is all due to the hard work of my assistant editor and sole eformatter Sherry O’Keefe, and my most profuse thank yous go out to her wonderful self.

There are more thank yous on the site too, so without further ado, here is the online issue.

The image: “Bluefish Commotion.” (True.) :) It’s part of the image gallery in issue 5, by Ron Kostar.

So here is the cover for the Kindle book, to accompany the online edition of issue 5 of YB, the Animal Issue – all of which will be going live in about a week.

The cover was designed by Julia Davies.

Here is the base image that inspired it, which Julia called “Light Whiskers.”

There are sixteen poets featured in this issue, which makes it YB‘s biggest yet, and I feel very proud, happy, and excited about that, and more importantly, the quality of the work. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running a little work-in-progress, screenshot:

We like the work-in-progress at YB.

And because I am with the images this early morning, here’s one more, related to the post below:

Thank you Sherry! This is Sherry’s writing. Sherry mailed these, because if I tried, they would most likely not reach their destination. I don’t grapple with the post down here anymore; it’s a losing battle, and there is no point to it.

I was up very early today, if 3:30 am can be considered early, or just the middle of the night really. I have an insomnia situation developing. And I typed this entire blog post firstly in the wrong blog. Don’t you hate it when you do that? I have five WordPress sites/blogs, so it’s easy to scroll down and hit “new post” on the wrong one, and not notice until you’ve finished it/hit “publish.”

This post was going to be like Denis Johnson’s short story “Two Men,” where you never hear anything about the second man, not in that story anyway. But then I decided to put both things in the same post after all.

So, the first thing: Submissions for Issue 5: Animals, close this Sunday, 20 November. We’ve got lots of great stuff so far (fantastic!), but still have room for a few more, if they are super. In particular if you have reviews, send those.

Second thing: We’ve sent, or are sending as I speak (thank you Sherry, who is doing the actual sending since I can’t) – our Pushcart nominations. The Pushcart is something I don’t quite understand, and I’m not afraid to admit it, and there you have it. We are sending our nominations anyway. They are the same as for the Best of Net, earlier. Here’s that post. Or scroll down two posts. You know how to scroll don’t you? If you’re me, you put two fingers on that little rectangle wedged in between the heels of your hands and nudge up, now that OS Lion changed things around. (Used to be: nudge down; i.e., if you wanted to go down the page, you nudged down, which made sense didn’t it. Now, if you want to go down, you nudge up. This is what’s known as an upgrade.)

So – second thing continued: Most hearty thanks to our nominees Brittney Corrigan, Risa Denenberg, Daniel Romo, Troy Urquhart, and Megan Williams. And most hearty thanks to all our contributors.

Third thing! (Ha! That went the other way.) The pic: is a cat. Yes. There have been a lot of whiskers appearing around these parts lately…. This pic is the doing of Karyn Eisler.  She is having computer problems at the moment but I hope she will be back soon.

Are more computers crashing these days, or is it that more people are reporting it? It seems to be happening all the time now, whereas a few years ago I rarely heard of it. I had two hard drive crashes on my less-than-year-old MacBook, and the third could happen anytime, and there is no Apple Store anywhere near here and international warranties are not so international as they are said to be. OK that’s the end of my techno/computer rant.

This is a post to express excitement about various things happening in the life of a YB.

Firstly, YB would like to formally welcome Sherry O’Keefe as the permanent assistant editor.

Sherry does an amazing job reading and commenting on submissions and also, you know she did the eBook for issue 4? And you know eBooking poetry is no cakewalk right? And that she worked it all out, from scratch? That’s some smarts, right there…. So I’ve managed to convince her to eBook our issue 5 too. Also she is lots of fun and awesome person and poet, and if you don’t know her blog already you should; here it is: too much august not enough snow. OK. That’s enough with the mushy stuff. :)

In other news, after the release of issue 5, we will be running regular/semi regular mini-reviews of poetry books on the YB blog. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now, except that I’m most excited about it, and a new addition to the YB family.

So – issue 5: Animals!

Did I mention it will be our biggest issue ever? We’ve received so many wonderful submissions and are still reading, by the way. :)

Above is not the eBook cover, but kind of a riff off a cover idea, which is developing. Dorothee Lang, most awesome friend of YB and designer of the cover for issue 4 – sent it to me. It’s taken from a picture by Julia Davies, called “Light Whiskers.” More on that, and the actual cover, next post/soon….

So we did our nominations for the Best of the Net, 2011.

Since I skipped publishing a December issue due to some problem, ah, yes, traveling and general upheaval – all our nominations come from the one issue, issue 4, the Windows issue, which was co-edited by Sherry O’Keefe and John Riley. In terms of the process, what we did was choose our six poems independently, and looked at the others’ picks after we’d committed to our own. (This might be obvious, but I don’t know what other journals do really. For the first three issues it was just me.) Anyway, so it turned out all three of us picked the same poem in only three cases. For the other three we haggled, and we all compromised. So the six we ended up with are no one’s original six, en todo.

Here they are, in alphabetical order:

Brittney Corrigan. “Visiting Lighthouses.”
Risa Denenberg. “I first saw cancer.”
Daniel Romo. “Declaration.”
Troy Urquhart. “when it’s just spring: two sestinas.”
Megan Williams. “Denomination,” & “Supposing Things Were Different.”

I hope it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway!) – that we were most extremely fond of every last poem in this issue, and the decision was tough and as always, subjective, and we very much enjoyed the discussion.

A warm thank you to all our contributors and submitters.

The pic: is the doing of Dorothee Lang. To continue the theme of the issue that we are now reading for – “animals” – as well as the previous, windows issue….

Dorothee doesn’t take so many pictures of animals it’s true, and as she points out. She correctly guessed that this pic would be appealing to me however. It’s some graffiti in Paris, from memory; I believe that’s correct.

Yeppers. The theme is: Animals!

This donkey turned up near my house here in Puerto Vallarta maybe a month ago. I haven’t seen it since, and it’s also possible it’s a mule. Animals are like that, you think they’re one thing and they turn out to be another. Kind of like people….

Feel free to interpret this theme widely, as always.

As with issue 4, I am most pleased to have Sherry O’Keefe and John Riley join me as co-editors.

Please submit through Submishmash. General submission guidelines here.

We look forward to reading your work!