Mark Dow: Plain Talk Rising


Former LIU adjunct faculty member and past Downtown Brooklyn contributor Mark Dow has self-published a collection of poems titled Plain Talk Rising, which is available for purchase here. If you would like to request a review copy, please email mdow@igc.org


Congratulations, Mark!

See below for more information:


"Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising hovers above poetry and prose. It also transmutes one into the other, poetry into prose, and then back again, like an alchemist let loose in a writing workshop that may set alight our era of MFA's for good. 'The past, alight, hovers nearby with open eyes.' You will simply have to find your seat in the dark theater without flashlight or usher. Once seated, you will begin to identify with the author seated at his desk, dropping down the words toward the white landing area below. 'Oh and another thing.' (He is talking to you). The words stay there, falling into place when you have closed this unforgettable book, funny and wise."
            --David Rosenberg, author of A Literary Bible and co-author (with Harold Bloom) of The Book of J  


"A truly remarkable and challenging book."
            --Laurence Lieberman, author of The Creole Mephistopheles and Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets





Mark Dow's Plain Talk Rising, before being "self-published," was a finalist in the Colorado Prize, New Issues, and Yale Series competitions (selected by Donald Revell, Linda Gregerson, and W.S. Merwin, respectively). It was also a semi-finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press.

Dow's poems and nonfiction have appeared in AgniAlaska Quarterly ReviewBoston Review, Caribbean Review of BooksChicago ReviewConjunctions, Drunken Boat, Fascicle, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Paris Review, PN ReviewSLAM! WrestlingSouthern ReviewThreepenny Review, and Word for/Word, among many others. His e-chapbook "Feedback" and Other Conversation Poems(2015) is at Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics.

Dow is also author of American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (California, 2004) and co-editor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (Routledge, 2002).

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