"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Posts tagged ‘Doug Van Gundy’

Must Read Monday! Doug Van Gundy: A Life Above Water

 

VanGundyThis week meet Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water. Doug teaches in both the BA and MFA writing programs at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Oxford American, Poems & Plays, Ecotone, Appalachian Heritage, Waccamaw and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is currently co-editing an anthology of contemporary writing from West Virginia for WVU Press and working on his second book of poems, tentatively titled, No Dog Inside.

Doug has also has been an elephant keeper, a copywriter, a country radio disk jockey, a letterpress operator, a television game show winner, and is a multi-talented musician. He’s an incredible old-time fiddler (along with playing a kajillion other instruments), performing with Paul Gartner in the duo Born Old.

Buy Doug’s beautiful book!

http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=F6650841-8509-33C3-0C69-129FD872CC95

Praise for A Life Above Water

Doug Van Gundy s poems are pitch-perfect and packed with indelible images, each as striking and distinct as a hawk in a clear blue sky above one of his beloved mountains. This poet has a genius for quick characterization, too; I love his crow-eyed bachelor men/who lived on the hillside and smelled/of fried potatoes and machine oil, for instance. Some of these poems are like whole novels. Doug Van Gundy has captured a culture in this book. –Lee Smith

More about Doug, poetry and music, at his website

http://www.dougvangundy.com/

Learn More About Doug’s Music and Born Old

https://www.facebook.com/bornoldband

http://www.countysales.com/products.php?product=DOUG-VAN-GUNDY-%26-PAUL-GARTNER-%27Born-Old%27

Read More from Doug Online

http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/poetry-october-2009/137-doug-van-gundy-poetry

http://www.storysouth.com/poetry/2008/06/west_virginia_vs_extractive_in.html

http://www.fishousepoems.org/keeper/

http://appalachianheritage.net/author/dougvangundy/

http://www.datelinewheeling.com/blog/2015/10/22/music-and-muse-mountaineer-poet-says-the-two-meld-perfectly

Hear Doug Read

https://soundcloud.com/storyweb/doug-van-gundy-a-beautiful-jar-of-jelly

And Play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOj7nLF3_Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnKAOWSO410

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZisqgmidCc

 

 

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Family, Gratitude, Love, Music, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Trailer Park Oracle! So Excited! My newest book released!

Special delivery today!

 FullSizeRender (86)

Thanks to Karen Kelsay Davies and Aldrich Press for giving these crazy little poems a home ❤ Thanks to Amy Tudor, Doug Van Gundy, and Julie Brooks Barbour, for the time and lovely words they offered about this odd little book, and special eternal BIG LOVE and gratitude to my former student artist angel baby extraordinaire Aaron Persh for the unbelievably beautiful cover art! 

Trailer Park Oracle now available on Amazon, y’all! Get it here! 
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This is a book that peers from the edges of wild places: from the flickerings of a French film to the heady thrills of train trestles, from the doorways of long-abandoned houses to the quiet of the vigils at the hospital bed. With a voice both gentle and fierce, Carroll-Hackett’s poems are unafraid to see us as the aching creatures we are, to ask the hard questions of language and loss, not even flinching as they reveal the wonder and pain of our very world like the title poem’s Oracle, “calling them as they played, no cushioning of the blow.”

— Amy Tudor, author of A Book of Birds and Studies in Extinction

The needs that haunt our lives also haunt Mary Carroll-Hackett’s newest collection. In Trailer Park Oracle, there is a need for food and love, and to find the true self. But Carroll-Hackett also reminds us that among all of the shining things in this world, we might sometimes forget who we are. “So you repeat, some mantra you think you’re making, until it all just becomes shaking.” Through the rich narrative of this collection, we are reminded of the path back to ourselves, how “the seed knew, at last, its own light.”

–Julie Brooks Barbour, author of Small Chimes

These poems are anchored in love – stubborn, earth-bound, unrelenting love and the generosity that it engenders. And while Carroll-Hackett is NOT the oracle of the title, she is a diviner nevertheless, looking through the quotidian – bread & blankets, Ferris wheels & automotive transmissions, dead deer and starving bears – for clues to the mysterious nature of our human hearts.

–Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water 

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, book tour, Books, Creativity, Dreams, Gratitude, Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

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