The Next Scott Nadelson

The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress, a new collection of autobiographical essays by Scott Nadelson (poetry, ’11) is available from Hawthorne Books.

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From the publisher:

Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson’s life fell apart. His fiancée left him a month before their planned wedding. He moved into a drafty attic. His car’s brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he’d struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances.

More than a collection of autobiographical essays, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man’s halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating – some self-lacerating – they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear.

Read an interview with Scott at Miami Book Radio.

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Beverley Bie Brahic Finalist for Northern California Book Awards

The Little Auto, a translation of work by Guillaume Apollinaire  by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry ’06), is a finalist for the Northern California Book Awards in the poetry translation category. The awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, May 19th at the San Francisco Library.

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Read excerpts from the book at cbeditions.com.

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Angela Narciso Torres Wins Willow Books Award

Congratulations to Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09), grand prize winner of the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award in Poetry. Angela won $1,000 and a Willow Books publishing contract.

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The Willow Books Literature Awards recognize literary excellence in prose and poetry by writers from culturally diverse backgrounds. Willow Books is an imprint of Aquarius Press.

Read more at Willow Books.

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Reading Announcement

Jayne Benjulian (Poetry ’13) and Rebecca Foust (Poetry ’10) will read at Why There Are Words in Sausalito Thursday, April 11, at 7 PM.

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Jayne Benjulian

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Rebecca Foust

The Why There Are Words Series is curated by Peg Alford Pursell (Fiction ’96).  For details visit whytherearewords.com

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Rose McLarney Receives George Garrett Award

Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) has been named winner of the 2013 George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry. She is the author of the book of poetry, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, published by Four Way Books.

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She will receive the Garrett Award during the Celebration of Southern Literature, produced by the Southern Lit Alliance.  The event will take place April 18 to 20 in the Tivoli Theatre in downtown Chattanooga.

“We are pleased to present Rose McLarney with the 2013 George Garrett New Writing Award for Poetry,” said Allen Wier, FSW Chancellor. “Giving awards to and recognizing distinction in literary writing is central to the Fellowship’s purpose.” Founded in 1987, the Fellowship of Southern Writers recognizes and encourages excellence in Southern literature.

DOMESTIC

from The Always Broken Plates of Mountains

The sows are in heat, squealing and pink.
The wild boar comes from the forest
to batter at their pen.

I go out and smash the ice
on the trough. The water
breaks free. This takes
a pick ax. Wielding it, I feel wild.

But the only strength in this story
is the fences’. Not even boars are wild –
imported for hunting a hundred years ago,
crossing the sea in a rich man’s crate.

When I hang up the pick ax
it freezes to the nail, clinging as I do,
making my living elsewhere and

returning to farms after sunset,
the barns symbols
just discernable in the dark.

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Hum for the Bolt

“Hum for the Bolt,” a poem by Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) appears online at Poetry.

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It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  woodcrumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment.  …[Keep Reading]…

Jamaal is the author of Hum (2013, Alice James Books).

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The Half-Life of Home

The Half-Life of Home, a novel by Dale Neal (fiction, ’89) is available this month from Casperian Books.  Read an excerpt from the first chapter at CasperianBooks.com.
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Standing your ground is hard when you can’t trust what’s underfoot.

Sorting what’s true and what’s only wished is even harder in a place like Beaverdam, where stories sprout faster than grass on a new grave.

Beaverdam’s children heard tell of the Witch Woman who lived in a ruined  cabin, who would cuss you or worse if you dared knock on her door. They were warned of the Snakebit Girl, how the rattler’s fangs struck her pudgy hand reaching into the nest for the hen’s eggs. Rather than tell a soul of her plight, she swelled with poisoned pride, and for her silence she was buried in the sloping graveyard. They knew of the Failed Farmer who lost all in the last depression of  the nineteenth century. He sold off his plow horse, but still found necessity for the useless halter: his body was found hanging from a rafter in his empty barn.

But the oldest story was of a curse that lay on the land itself. The first whites who crossed the gap encountered no Indians, but the occasional arrowhead could be unearthed in the black fields by the creek, once dammed by the creatures who lent the cove its name. Besides those napped flints, those first hunters had left behind a legend…

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Eighth Stage of Love

“Eighth Stage of Love,” a poem by Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears in the current issue of the Boston Review.

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Tell me I am not the only one
            who saw the hawk in the tree.  Who saw

the bird’s swift descent.  Once you said
            you wanted to be my adventure.  Tell me

now.  Here, where shade is scarce.  Where
            the sidewalk is burning and dogs

walk with purpose.  Remember when you found me
            by the lake and we heard the rain?

How close it came but never reached us?  Tell me
            it reached us. […]

Read the entire poem in the spring 2013 issue of the Boston Review.  Laura is the author of Inkblot and Altar (2006, Pecan Grove Press).

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The Boss Who Fired Me During the Recession

“The Boss Who Fired Me During the Recession,” a poem by Bethany Pray (poetry, ’88) appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Ploughshares.

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise
but when she walks in her custom-size narrow boots
she minces, or half-dances like a pony,

the sort of pony who is dear and a little silly
and wears a hat with a ribbon.
A little of this and a little of that – lacking a territorial integrity,

she slides vertiginously from apprehension to sourness to glee.
She told me she had a wandering eye as a child,
but in fact, she still does.

To think she doesn’t know how the one eye floats out
to the right, or that resulting air
of being wholly lost.

Frankly, Cubism is painful, as much for the viewed
as for the viewer:   the girlish gewgaws
and the monkish face above

and the fixed, unaligned eye.
She looked out at us with the other eye.
To her we were as paper, without dimension,

viewed as the Cyclops viewed Ulysses
and his men in the cave –
foreign, and a scourge.

Visit the magazine’s website for more from this issue of Ploughshares, including “The Complex Sentence,” a poem by faculty member Tony Hoagland.

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The Country and the City

“The Country and the City,”  a story by Denise Delgado (fiction, ’10) appears online at Hinchas de Poesía.

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In the beginning I died to see a movie. I’d never seen one. Where we lived was all farms. Before we married, my husband came to my parents’ house and we’d sit in the living room and talk. Domingo was always a tremendous talker. He harvested pineapple as a kid and he was built like a tree trunk. His shoulders looked like they would burst through his suit. And while he talked I imagined he was projecting a movie out of his mouth. Moonlight from the window hit the wall across from him. While he talked and talked and talked and talked I looked at the wall and imagined his mouth played a man and a woman kissing. Or a woman running from houses to beach. Or a woman writing by machine. Honestly, I don’t remember.

How did the other Beatríz and I end up living together?

After we got married my husband was a lawyer. Practically a lawyer. He worked for this political man named Arturo Betancourt. They’d go out to dark bars to smoke and scheme against both Castro and Batista. Domingo always came home saying he was the only muerto de hambre in the party—the only one dying of hunger. The only poor one. So I’d starch his one white suit so nice you thought he put on a new one every single day.

Read more

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