| Schoolhouse Press | |||
| The SILAS-KENYON GALLERY | |||
| NICK FLYNN READING FROM NEW AND OTHER WORK Sunday, June 8 at 8:00 PM at THE SCHOOLHOUSE CENTER CONTACT: Michael Carroll 508.487.4800 X 105 mcarroll@schoolhousecenter.com The Silas-Kenyon Gallery at the Schoolhouse Center is pleased to present NICK FLYNN, MARK BIBBINS and MAGGIE NELSON reading in the gallery on June 8 at 8 PM. The event is open to the public. The Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown’s historic East End Gallery District. Limited parking is available. Nick Flynn's first book, 'Some Ether' (Graywolf Press, 2000), a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, a 'Discovery'/THE NATION prize, and The Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University. 'Blind Huber,' his second collection of poetry, appeared from Graywolf in 2002. Stanley Kunitz has called it 'an act of the poetic imagination unlike any other'. He has also been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, which allowed him to spend the last two years moving between Italy, Ireland, and Tanzania. 'Father's Day,' a memoir about his father and homelessness, is due out from Norton in 2004. Blind Huber: “In Blind Huber, Nick Flynn has collaborated with a swarm of honeybees and a sightless old French beekeeper of a distant century to produce a cycle of poems Nick Flynn’s Some Ether was one of the most acclaimed first poetry collections in recent years. In this extraordinary second collection, Nick Flynn invites us to consider the intricate geometry of the beehive. Our guide to this new world is Blind Huber, loosely based on the eponymous eighteenth-century beekeeper whose fifty-year obsession uncovered most of what we know today about the hive. “I sit in a body & think of a body”, Huber says, commanding us to “think of / a hive, each bee, each thought, the hive / brims with thought.” Blind Huber is an act of creative obsession about the body, love, and devotion, about nature and the limits of knowledge. Nick Flynn’s bees and beekeepers—sometimes in a state of magnificent pollen-drunk dizziness—view the world from a striking and daring perspective.
“Flynn is unquestionably one of the most interesting poets writing today, and avid poetry readers should be lining up for this book.” —Library Journal “Flynn imaginatively enters the rarefied existence of a French 18th century beekeeper named François Huber. . . . As fascinated by the bees’ point of view as by Huber’s phenomenal ability to divine their ways through sound, touch, and smell, Flynn writes with exquisite delicacy and transporting agility not only of the blind apiarist’s vivid perceptions but also of the experiences of drones, workers, and queens. Spellbound within wax edifices beneath a honey rain, Flynn succinctly and resonantly contrasts the dense and thrumming bee realm with our own buzzing, bittersweet world of avid appetites and aggressions. longing, and valor.” —Booklist “The compact and compelling lyric sequence imagines Huber, Burnens, and the bees themselves as they reveal their nature, and their behavior over Huber’s long and patient life.” —Publishers Weekly
“These poems are expeditions, seeking out alternative ways to love: Plath without the angst and equally memorable.” —Library Journal “Passionate, sharp-eyed, and humane.” —POETRY “Aided by a landscape of nightmares, Flynn never asks for our sympathy, and he succeeds in writing fascinating, powerful poems that transcend the lapses of confessionalism.” —Boston Book Review “At the center of these poems of sorrow, pain, and desire to move beyond those emotions is a goddesslike, husbandless mother who commits suicide, leaving her son forever haunted by her memory.” —Booklist, Top 10 Poetry Books of 2000 “Some Ether combines nakedness, elegance, and emotional intelligence. The poems are beautifully clear in their particulars and meanings. And the question of whether or not the speaker can awaken from the dream of the past, whether telling can effect this self-redemption, whether confession works, is a deeply affecting drama.” —Ploughshares “Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut.” —Mark Doty “When both hands are empty what remains is Nick Flynn’s astonishing debut collection. In their roaming uneasiness, these poems enact the hypodermic activity of grief. We are guided by a stunning and solitary voice into lives that have spiritually and physically imploded. No one survives and still there is so much to be felt. Here is sorrow and madness reconciled to humanity.” —Claudia Rankine CONTACT: J. Robbins, 651-641-0077/robbins@graywolfpress.org ~~~~~~ Maggie Nelson is originally from northern California. Her first full-length collection, Shiner, was published by Hanging Loose in 2001, and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including The Best American Poetry 2002 (ed. Robert Creeley), Heights of the Marvelous: A New York Anthology (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), The Hat, LIT, Open City, and Shiny. She is a founding editor of Fort Necessity, a small literary magazine, and has taught at Wesleyan University and the New School Graduate writing Program in Creative writing. She is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and lives in Brooklyn. “These poems manage to say everything about everything—each determining day, each shifting sense of inexhaustible person. Back of it all is an extraordinary ear for the way words find place, make a passage from here to there, blessedly keep on talking.”—Robert Creeley “Few poets are strange and quick enough to capture the frenetic quality of contemporary life. But Maggie Nelson is more than up to the task. Her poems move fast, think on their feet, hit and run with equal parts humor, glamour and horror. In every way, she is a thoroughly original voice for our time.”—Elaine Equi Hanging Loose Press, founded in 1966, publishes Hanging Loose magazine and individual collections of fiction and poetry. The press has received many awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The Latest Winter, the second poetry collection by Maggie Nelson, will be published by Hanging Loose Press on March 1, 2003. For more information call: ~~~~ Sky Lounge/ Mark Bibbins: “Imagine Vladimir and Estragon have changed their names, slipped into our century, and become so thoroughly distracted by piped music that Godot is the one who waits. This is the world Mark Bibbins has achieved in the phenomenal Sky Lounge. Here poems are narcotic ambles among prepositions that refuse to position, fix or point us in any final direction. Time, these poems rakishly understand, will never run out. Or it is better to run out on time than to connect the self to that which is mortal. A remarkable achievement.” —Claudia Rankine “I love Sky Lounge. Mark Bibbins splices together idioms and idiolects into cool, smooth, transporting lyrics--compact monologues that also resemble plays, explosive and evaporating, with no wrong moves, and with a welcome surplus of charm. He is an aesthete, but he is not obsessed with artifacts; the objects of his regard are moods, as they manifest in words. His poems are exactly what I want to be reading right now.” “Mark Bibbins’s poems zoom in on the minute gestures of social life and the products that attend them. In this world between desolation and wonder, “the orange smoke of the plastics/ factory is/ beautiful against the moon.” Under staccato rhythms and clipped everyday speech, an emotional depth gradually builds as its bright surface flashes by.” —Peter Gizzi In his restless and unpredictable debut, Mark Bibbins offers a virtuosic poetry. Lovers struggle to connect; groupies, hustlers and corporate drones covet better—or at least different—lives; locations fluctuate, without forewarning, from bars to beaches to city streets. With beguiling tonal and formal variety, these poems constantly question the ordinary and unwitting acceptance of the status quo as they hover where “error arranges itself.” As indebted to Stereolab and Siouxsie Sioux as to any poetic lineage, Sky Lounge introduces an imagination committed to making irreverence, sensuality, and elegy into a provocative new music. Mark Bibbins teaches writing workshops at The New School, where he also co-founded LIT magazine. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and in the anthology Take Three:3. He lives in New York City. More at www.markbibbins.com. CONTACT: J. Robbins, 651-641-0077/robbins@graywolfpress.org
| |||