Quarantine Prompt a Day <3 Community
30 March 2020
Make art about the changing nature of community in these times.
Posts tagged ‘Books’
Quarantine Prompt a Day <3 Through that Window
17 March 2020
Often we’re too busy to notice the view right in front of us. One of my students, when I asked about what they missed being away from home, softly described the view of the city at night from his bedroom window in what he called ‘the projects where I live.’
“At night,” he said, “the lights go on forever, and every light, I think, is a soul.”
Make art about seeing the world through your window.
Monday Must Read! Corn Exchange by Helen Vitoria
Helen Vitoria is an award winning poet and an artist living in Pennsylvania. Her poems and photographs appear widely online and in print. She is the author of nine poetry chapbooks, a poetry pamphlet, a full length poetry collection and a collaborative ekphrastic poetry/photography collection. Her poems have been nominated thrice for Best New Poets & several Pushcart Prizes.
Corn Exchange (Wild Chestnut Press. 2013), her first full length collection of poetry won the 2014 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) SILVER MEDAL for Poetry, the 2014 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Book Award, in addition to having placed as a finalist for the 2014 Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye Award & the 2014 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, and recently been nominated for the 2015 Tufts Discovery Award.
Cover photo : The Cornfield by Kathy Harcom , http://www.kathyharcom.com
Praise for Corn Exchange
“Invoking Anne Sexton’s brand of highly personal, confessional verse, Vitoria’s tragically intimate collection fearlessly attempts to reconcile ideas such as fear, suicide, family, commitment, pornography, memory, and experience through the binary elements of sight and touch. Vitoria shows a clear understanding of the safety existing in the eyes, in the act of seeing and observing, and in its inherent physical distance that the hands cannot and do not carry. Not until there exists a trust able to reconcile that physical distance and, as Vitoria explains, “spread the body, [using] thumb and palm and say: here, be happy.”– Hoffer Award judges had to say to the US Review of Books
Corn Exchange has been taught in MFA courses in Umbria, Italy, and her poem, We Were Horses, taught in various Creative Writing MFA classes throughout the US.
She is the Founding Editor & Editor in Chief of the award winning, Thrush Poetry Journal & Thrush Press. She also served as a Poetry Editor for Poets & Artists Magazine. She teaches a free monthly poetry workshop in her community and will be teaching poetry to inmates in Pennsylvania Corrections Facilities. She is working on her second full length collection of poetry, NEBRASKA. Visit her listing on Poets & Writers here.
Monday Must Read! The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
A must-read for any writer or storyteller, I think.
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist
“A jaunty, insightful new book . . . [that] draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us.”
—New York Times
—New York Times
Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. Now Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems–just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal and explains how stories can change the world for the better. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.
“This is a quite wonderful book. It grips the reader with both stories and stories about the telling of stories, then pulls it all together to explain why storytelling is a fundamental human instinct.”
–Edward O. Wilson
“Charms with anecdotes and examples . . . we have not left nor should we ever leave Neverland.”–Cleveland Plain Dealer
Monday Must Read! Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse by Valerie Nieman
Love this book!
Buy Leopard Lady Here from Press 53!
You have not before read a book like this one. This one will take you where you have never been. Yes, you may have seen a circus but that is not exactly what is here. Nor have you met these people before. Unique, deeply moving, funny, and withal composed on the edge of danger and enlightenment, Leopard Lady is masterful. Nieman’s syntax, rhymes, meter and scenes make music while the reader is charged with an energy that takes us closer and closer to the singular truth we must bear.
—Kelly Cherry, former Poet Laureate of Virginia
Here, readers are taken on an unexpected adventure. In “Destroyed by Fire Flood and Ice,” the Gypsy Queen asks, “Do you dare see the secrets past the veil?” Readers, be ready to find what you did not know you were seeking, as the Leopard Lady will take you on an unforeseen journey and, indeed, you will discover secrets as you travel these wondrous paths.
—Jill Gerard, Editor, Chautauqua
Daily Prompt Love <3 What They Don't See
“the wages of empire is myopia” ―
Make art about the blindness of the empire, about the short-sightedness, about the willful ignorance of those who benefit from the empire
Monday Must Read! Paradise Drive by Rebecca Foust
Rebecca Foust won the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry for Paradise Drive. Her other books include God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (Tebot Bach, 2010), a collaboration with artist Lorna Stevens that received a 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award; All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving, 2010), which received the 2008 MMM Press Poetry Book Prize; and two chapbooks, Mom’s Canoe (Texas Review Press, 2009), and Dark Card (Texas Review Press, 2008), both winners of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook prize. Foust earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College in 2010 and is the recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place and The MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in journals including The Hudson Review, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, North American Review, and Sewanee Review, and her prose is in American Book Review, Chautauqua, Poetry Flash, The Rumpus, Tikkun Daily, and other journals. Her essay, “Venn Diagram,” won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Malahat Review in 2014. Foust lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area as a writer, freelance editor, teacher, and Marin Poetry Center board member.
Learn more about Rebecca here!
Praise for Paradise Drive
“There is great music in these poems, and sonnet after sonnet is masterful. Not since Berryman’s Henry have I been so engaged by a persona: Pilgrim, who ‘like most of we’ is good and bad, hapless sometimes, other times approaching wisdom, always sending deeper and deeper her primary roots.” — Thomas Lux
“In Rebecca Foust’s splendid book-length sonnet sequence, Paradise Drive, we come upon a Pilgrim contemplating the deadly sins while hiding out in the bathrooms at some of Marin County, California’s swankiest parties. Foust drives her Keatsian sensibility straight into the 21st century of terrorism and autism, divorce and yoga, soldiers and syringes, booze and valet parking, determined to prove that truth makes beauty.” — Molly Peacock
“Foust does it: she reinvents the sonnet form, making it a unit of expression again, not a museum piece sitting on its plinth, forlornly wishing we’d quit paying homage to it. She strews the individual poems with savagely sparkling jewels of satire, insight, and wit. This is a masterful book, yes, and also a great deal of fun to read.” — James Cummins
Monday Must Read! Dark Roots by Caroline Malone
Caroline Malone was born and lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee. A graduate of The University of Tennessee with a B.A. in English and Classics, she earned the MFA in Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Dos Passos Review, Women’s Voices, Women Period, Heartwood, and others. The collection Dark Roots explores the meaning of family, heritage, and identity. Currently, she teaches writing and literature at South College in Knoxville, TN. She also plays Irish traditional music on the bouzouki, mandolin, guitar, concertina, and fiddle.
“Stark and haunting, these poems dig deep to the roots of identity and the self.”–Julia Watts, author of Gifted and Talented
“I know how things sink in;” drawing deeply from the ancient land, the collective soul that hums beneath her feet, and in her words, Caroline Malone does, indeed, know, and reveals to us that knowing, of fear and prayer and loss, of the paths we make to seek—and find—our own souls, even when they seem to flee from us, into the history of the secret city of Oak Ridge, to the rubble at the feet of the Parthenon, into the arms of the Civil War ghosts who linger at the shoulders of every Southerner. -Mary Carroll-Hackett, author of (Un)Hinged, Death for Beginners, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, and The Night I Heard Everything.
Monday Must Read! Haunted City by Julie Brooks Barbour
Julie Brooks Barbour is the author of two full-length collections, Haunted City (2017) and Small Chimes(2014), both from Kelsay Books, and three chapbooks, including Beautifully Whole (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2015) and Earth Lust (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems have recently appeared in South Dakota Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Whale Road Review, and The Indianapolis Review. She is co-editor of Border Crossing and Poetry Editor at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. She teaches writing at Lake Superior State University and is a Guest Artist Mentor for Wilson College’s MFA Program.
Praise for Haunted City!
Julie Brooks Barbour’s exciting new book, Haunted City, occupies the edge between poetry and fable, dream and nightmare. These vivid prose poems, themselves between genres, construct a terrifying metropolis of desire. -Stuart Dischell, author of Backwards Days and Dig Safe
This book of prose poems, or perhaps it is a short novel with poetic lines backlit by lightning, is mysterious and involving, indeed haunting. Barbour is a true poet with a muse at her side. As she explains, what she has created is “really what someone else created when I relinquished control.”-Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems
Presented in brief glimpses of lyric prose, an extended sequence of image-driven evocations, Barbour gives us experimental writing at its very best, offering innovations in form and technique that are thought-provoking as they are charged with affect and suspense. This is an accomplished book by a truly remarkable writer. -Kristina Marie Darling, author of Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories 2007-2014
Happy Reading!
Sometimes the Day Is the Poem <3
“As a man thinketh in his heart so is he
whatever you dwelling on is the reality that you’re creating”
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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