We are happy to report that two
recent alumni from the English Department's Creative Writing MFA program have
new poetry collections available from United Artists Books (Editor, Lewis
Warsh).
United Artists and Shoestring
Press, a fine art print shop and art space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn,
will be hosting a book party and reading for Toot Sweet by
Daniel Owen and Shut Up, Leaves by Tony Iantosca.
When:
Saturday, November 21, 2015, at 7
PM.
Where:
Shoestring Press
663 Classon Ave.
Brooklyn, NY
Directions:
2/3/4/5 to Franklin (on Eastern
Parkway)
C or S to Franklin (on Fulton)
A to Nostrand
G to Classon.
About the books....
Daniel Owen
Cover by Pareesa Pourian
ISBN 0-935992-41-3
58p. $15.00
“Like its punning title, Dan Owen’s
agile first collection is playful but with a subtext of urgency. “We ask for
nothing less than new / means of new streets,” he writes, but the request goes
unanswered—which is what happens when poems end but whatever prompted them
persists. Here, the prompts range from the cannibalism of cockroaches to the
terrifying specter of ‘the Capital skull,’ from an image of ‘40 active war
heads” to an intuition of existing in “a prison of safety.’ The cumulative
effect is one of a quiet, persistent claim to some kind of agency against the
odds. Even the puns and wordplay in Toot Sweet make for small
acts of resistance, not in lieu of but in line with action in the world
(‘things happen so we / take to the bridge’)—for puns also have the power to
divert traffic from its prescribed course. Owen has developed a disabused but
undeterred lyric mode, fit to metabolize ‘futurity’s bitty / beads of
fat.’” Anna Moschovakis
“Toot Sweet, Daniel
Owen’s exquisitely scaled long poem full of jaunts and song and a wry
foregrounding of diction, strums delight. And values bewilderment. And
acknowledges, without giving into, the power of despair. Its line--the sense of
where you are in a poem--goes horizontal when you think you’ve caught its
rhythm, never settles, is unmachine-like and possessed by touch. This makes for
a pleasure-giving, complex, and quite beautiful read, open to anyone who looks
for such qualities in this world.” Anselm Berrigan
Tony Iantosca
Cover by Zachary Cummings
ISBN 0-935992-42-1
96p. $15.00
“Tony Iantosca's sentences sharpen
all the senses at once; the heard world is as present as the seen and touched.
"I’m tapping my foot to nothing much," but actually, it's the
profound rhythm of elegy disguised as mundane, everyday life: street, couch,
phone, heart. Something or someone is missing, it could be a dog, it could be
the poet. There are rumors of Ted Greenwald and Joseph Ceravolo in these poems,
amidst their self-deprecating vernacular, calling to mind William Carlos
Williams when Spring and All was green. ‘Once poetry / was important I guess or
at least / peripherally relevant to something / everyone else was doing.’ This
is unfashionable and excellent poetry. Consider reading it to a lover so as to
elicit a reciprocal feeling, ‘or whatever.’ It will work.” Matvei
Yankelevich
“The poet-voyeur in Shut Up, Leaves
walks his reader into a world of senseless losses and discrepancies. We go
along, each poem a door to a new labyrinth of paradoxical situations, and we
believe we are really heading somewhere. Iantosca’s poems are compelling in
their imaginative engagement with language and emotion, and they make us
rethink the way we see and live in the world. This is a necessary book.” Barbara
Henning
Both books are available from the
following:
Small Press Distribution, spdbooks.org
United Artists Books, www.unitedartistsbooks.com.
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