Matthew Guenette (Safety Book #28)

1. Could you tell us the name of a book that you love, and why?

For 15-years I’ve been crushing hard on Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. It’s probably the first experimental writing that resonated with me. Though a “novel” (17 barely-related chapters; in some but not all, a character utters the phrase, “My cousin, my gastroenterologist…”), I consider this book more like poetry (& as visceral as cinema).  The word-play, the vicious & sudden turns like punch-lines, the music & velocity, how—like a poet—Leyner seems hell-bent on reaffirming formal traditions such as narrative & plot only to knock those traditions on their ass. I actually read excerpts of this book to my mother once; she laughed herself to tears.

2. Where were you when you first read, or saw, or heard of this book?

Grad school. I was probably shaking with energy while I read it…

3. Did this book influence your own writing, thinking, sense of the world, or work?

This book totally changed what I thought was possible. Because I came to poetry late, and wasn’t well-read at all when I got to grad school, I spent my first year in workshop trying hard (too hard, & having not much fun) to write the kind of serious (see: narrowly linear, totally narrative) poems that I thought I was supposed to be writing. Those poems went against everything I actually wanted: a poetry that could be fueled by, say, 80s video games, the wonderfully entertaining absurdity of early MTV & Skinemax, the irony (political & otherwise) of comics like Richard Pryor & George Carlin, Devo records (& Devo philosophy), Streak-ums & cheese-whiz, kung-fu, Jerry Springer, too much McDonald’s & Coca-Cola, Creature Double Features…

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist was the first book to show me that pop-culture—with its attendant language & manners, concerns & subversions—was legitimate material.

4. Give us a line or excerpt from the text that intrigues, engages, mystifies, inspires, disgusts, or transforms you…

Here’s a link to the “The Suggestiveness Of One Stray Hair In An Otherwise Perfect Coiffure”, a “story” that might as well be a prose poem for all its heightened imagery & metaphor. I give this one to all my students—composition, creative writing, literature—because it blows minds every time. My favorite lines are the last three: “You got a car bomb, he says. The man rolls his eyes. I know that, he says.”

5. Who did you send this book to, why?

I sent the above-link to my friend (& the dynamite) Josh Bell. Josh was the one who turned me on to My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. The entirety of my email to Josh goes: Remember this? I can’t wait to see what he writes back…

***

Brief Bio: Matthew Guenette is the author of American Busboy (University of Akron Press, 2011) and Sudden Anthem (Dream Horse Press, 2008). He lives, works, and loses sleep with his family in Madison, WI.

Bianca Stone (Safety Book #27)

Bianca Stone + PG Wodehouse

1. Could you tell us the name of a book that you love, and why?

Selected Stories by P.G. Wodehouse.

I love this book for many reasons, one because it’s hilarious and well-written. And secondly because it embodies my grandmother so much. She was a poet, but she mostly read “other things.” He favorites were science magazines and P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) the Über English humorist. One of the strongest memories I have of her, is her laying in bed eating chocolate bars and intermittently cackling and cracking up while reading Jeeves and Wooster stories.

This particular Everyman Modern Library edition from 1958 was sitting on her bedside table when she passed away. Without thinking, I took it, and couldn’t let it go. I’ve had it close by me every since. I smell the pages.

2. Where were you when you first read, or saw, or heard of this book?

I hadn’t read much on my own of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories until after college when grandma was always listening to them on tape—since she’d lost her eyesight. There’s nothing better than an classic English actor reading classic English humor. I was hooked.

But I first “saw” the books in her house in Goshen, VT. They’re all still there, scattered throughout all the bookshelves.

3. Did this book influence your own writing, thinking, sense of the world, or work?

Whenever I read his work I start thinking and acting like an aristocrat. I start peering into fancy brownstone windows on West 10^th street in Manhattan and picturing having someone around to fix my social problems and help me with hangovers.

And it makes me want to write prose. It’s absolutely influenced the tone in a lot of what I do. And how I serve a martini—total finesse. Like a 20’s bachelor.

4. Give us a line or excerpt from the text that intrigues, engages, mystifies, inspires, disgusts, or transforms you. Discuss…

“I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare—or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird—who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping. And what I am driving at is that the man is perfectly right.” (Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest, 50)

Jeeves and Wooster stories might actually be the equivalent of bro-mance movies. Perpetual bachelors who grow up mostly surrounded by pals at Eton and Oxford, and controlled by overbearing aunts… it’s definitely an Oscar Wilde world of witty men in clubs and country houses, strolling the gardens having cigarettes in the moonlight. Overly educated, but completely child-like, Bertie Wooster relies entirely on his “gentleman’s personal gentleman” (Jeeves), the quiet, dignified Sherlock Holmes-sized brain that keeps his life together via restorative hangover cocktails, impeccable servitude and overwhelming foresight. The juiciest part is the experience are the prose—which is conversational and direct, narrated by Wooster with his dry incredulous tone. It’s unendingly entertaining and a refreshing change from the usual prose style.

5. Who did you send this book to, why?

I’m going to send a version of this book to the poet Dara Wier. Whose probably already read it, but what the hell. I think she’d appreciate it.

***

Bio: Bianca Stone is a poet and an artist. Her book of poetry, “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” is forthcoming from Tin House/Octopus Books. She lives in Brooklyn.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Safety Book #26)

Safety Book by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Necessary Stranger by Graham Foust (Flood Editions 2007).

I’ve never written about what Graham Foust’s work has meant to me, I don’t think, except in passing. My friend Julie Doxsee lent me a couple of his books—his first two—when Julie and I were living in Denver about eight or ten years ago. What can I say about them? Sometimes you find poetry that’s “good” but it doesn’t move you; sometimes you hold onto some shitty books because they moved you early on—and you feel tangled up with the feelings they brought out in you. Necessary Stranger is the opposite of all that: the power’s still there and it blasts me—back to when I first found them and forward to a future calmer somehow pleasing to want to live in.

JMW + Necessary Stranger

I was always giving little books to my friend Solan to take to Antarctica. Over the years I think he took Jay Wright’s Music Mask & Measure, Danielle Dutton’s brilliant first book, Attempts at a Life, and others… you see, size was key. Little books. Nothing bulky, no hardcovers. Thin, short, slender was the rule, and it was fun to think of books under those considerations—books that would make it further south than where the vast majority of people who have ever lived will never even see.

Solan and I grew up in Seattle together, and he’s been going to Antarctica for the past ten years now, for about 5 months at a stretch—so reading material is crucial. He’s not a poetry reader, per se, but he digs some of the stuff I give him. I think he’s an Eric Baus fan. Anyways, he’d always humor me—and take something I told him he’d be better off with. What did I know about it? The closest I’ve been to Antarctica is probably the Panama Canal.

There’s something about Foust’s third book Necessary Stranger that crystallizes everything he was doing at the time. The poems are short, yeah, but they’re funny in this fucked up and sad way that develops a voice and a sensibility—a sort of verbal countenance, I guess—that hooks me. I re-read them. I read them aloud. I hear Foust’s low voice in them, too. I feel childish and sentimental about them. Nobody does what Foust does: it’s not really lyrical, it’s not cute or sarcastic. It’s not new sincere or old sincere. And it doesn’t mistake Google for a typewriter.

Here’s how the book’s first poem “1984” opens:

Look at the sky, go

back inside. Cocaine

makes its way to Wisconsin.

There’s something pre-internet about the poems in Necessary Stranger that makes me long for a false past, almost a longing for the longing itself. It fuses the high and low (morphing Wallace Stevens’s Necessary Angel with Van Halen’s 1984—my older brother had the cassette tape), but gives me a window onto what boredom used to be like when we were kids, without the gadgets we’ve surrounded ourselves with. It makes me think about what Adam Phillips says, when he calls boredom: “that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.”

I guess, for me, the poems in Necessary Stranger produce a kind of nostalgia for a recent inchoate present. The mass of just-passed and unattributed effects of the former now that we only later realize was a time—a year, a season, a decade, an era. These poems love boredom, blandness, and surfaces—not the usual fodder for poetry, right? But every tired, spent thing gets refracted back through the prism of Foust’s eerie grammatical contractions—sounding like they’re a stenographer’s shorthand for a cross between what was said in passing, what was thought but left unsaid, what was dreamt colorfully, and what was longed for but starkly missed out on.

There’s a Well, you’re never gonna arrive so get used to it, kid kind of feeling set against a sort of Did you even think you could mention that without getting laughed out of the room? feeling. I know that sounds silly, but that’s what these poems are asking me to say in order to try and describe their clunky blear, their sort of half-said overstatements and curtailed hyperboles. Can poems have a sort of passionate resignation? A lonely clamor? These do. Like realizing how hard you wanted something by how loudly you’re dismissing it, relegating it to pile of goods you never got your hands on. And the Brian Calvin portrait on the cover is the most fitting artwork on a book I know of: too awkward for plaintive, yet too stark and colorful to be banal—despite the very banality it traffics in.

I’m glad Foust’s on to longer poems, and I like his new To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (just out from Flood Editions, too) very much. Maybe he’s tired of being known as the short poem guy, and I can understand that. Still, it makes me nostalgic for the nostalgia I had for having discovered these poems in Denver, in 2007 when they came out and first split my head in two: when I left school in Denver for a job in Chicago…when I ended one hard relationship only to start another that crushed me that much harder. Anyways…

I like that this book made its way to the ice. Here’s Solan reading Necessary Stranger in Antarctica shortly after the book came out.

Foust on Ice

JMW, Tucson, May 29, 2013

2013 Black Box Poetry Prize

The Black Box Poetry Prize
June, 2013
Judge: Heather Christle

Rescue Press presents The Black Box Poetry Prize, a contest for full-length collections of poetry, open to poets at any stage in their writing careers. This year’s submissions will be accepted during the month of June 2013.

To enter:

1. Attach your manuscript and cover letter to an email (.pdf or .doc only) addressed to: rescuepressprize@gmail.com. The cover letter should briefly introduce yourself and include any biographical details, acknowledgements, contact information, or notes you may wish to send. Your name should not appear in the manuscript beyond the title page, and simultaneous submissions are allowed but please notify the editors if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Students or close friends of the judge are ineligible.

2. Participants have the option to submit a reading fee via this Paypal link. Rescue Press is supporting an offer-what-you-will payment method. In other words, you are not required to pay a fee in order to enter the contest but donations of any amount are appreciated and go toward publishing the winning manuscript and potentially an editor’s choice. Let us know if you have questions.

3. Rescue Press editors will send a select number of anonymous manuscripts to our judge, Heather Christle, who will choose the 2013 Black Box Poetry Prize winner. Results will be announced in Fall 2013 on our website and via email, and the winning manuscript(s) will be published in Fall 2014.

Judge: Heather Christle is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. She has taught poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Yellow Springs, OH.

Previous Winners:

2011
Judge’s Choice: Blueberry Morningsnow’s WHALE IN THE WOODS, selected by Sabrina Orah Mark

Editor’s Choice: Philip Sorenson’s OF EMBODIES

2012
Judge’s Choice: Todd Melicker’s RENDEZVOUS, selected by Zach Savich

Editor’s Choice: Hannah Brooks-Motl’s THE NEW YEARS

PENNY, N. for sale:

Rescue Press is excited to announce that Madeline McDonnell’s Penny, n. is now available for purchase on the Rescue Press website!!

Get your copy now!!

Read more about Penny here.

Check out Madeline’s first collection of three short stories, There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out here.

Open Prose Series: Anne Germanacos

Rescue Press is thrilled to announce that the editors of our Open Prose Series, Hilary Plum and Zach Savich, have selected Anne Germanacos’ book-length prose manuscript TRIBUTE for publication in Spring 2014.   

Anne Germanacos’ work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Her collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions. She and her husband live in San Francisco and on Crete.

Congratulations to Anne and thank you to all who sent in manuscripts of fiction, nonfiction, and electric prose!

THE NEW CENSUS: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry

We’re pleased to announce the official Table of Contents for THE NEW CENSUS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY–edited by Kevin Gonzalez and Lauren Shapiro, with graphics and design by Sevy Perez and contributor illustrations by Lauren Haldeman–to be released by Rescue Press this June.

Stay tuned for updates on contributor readings, teaching materials, teacher discounts, census stats, and pre-orders! Stop by our table at AWP for more info!

Table of Contents:

Carrie Olivia Adams
Eric Baus
Nicky Beer
John Beer
Ciaran Berry
Jericho Brown
Suzanne Buffam
Heather Christle
Eduardo C. Corral
Kyle Dargan
Darcie Dennigan
Sandra Doller
Timothy Donnelly
Joshua Edwards
Emily Kendal Frey
Dobby Gibson
Yona Harvey
Steve Healey
Tyehimba Jess
Keetje Kuipers
Nick Lantz
Dorothea Lasky
Dora Malech
Sarah Manguso
Randall Mann
Sabrina Orah Mark
Chris Martin
J. Michael Martinez
Adrian Matejka
John Murillo
Sawako Nakayasu
Kathleen Ossip
Kiki Petrosino
Zach Savich
Robyn Schiff
James Shea
Nick Twemlow
Sarah Vap
Jerry Williams
Jon Woodward