Upcoming Readings: Joe Wilkins

Don’t miss these upcoming opportunities to hear Joe read from his acclaimed poetry collection Killing the Murnion Dogs. (Note that the Chicago date is at AWP, where we’re throwing a killer party with our friends at Devil’s Lake! We’re so excited!)

Wednesday, February 8th
Briar Cliff University
Stark Student Center
Assisi Room
Sioux City, IA
7:00 pm
Thursday, March 1st
Black Lawrence Press/Devil’s Lake Reading @ AWP
Salud Tequila Lounge
Chicago, IL
7:30 pm

Tuesday, March 13th
Grand Valley State University Writers Series
2215/16 Kirkhof Center, Allendale Campus
Allendale, MI
7:30 pm

Reminder: The Big Moose Prize Deadline is Jan. 31!

Fiction writers, don’t forget that next Tuesday is the deadline for our Big Moose Novel Prize: click here for more details. Last year we offered contracts to the winner of the contest and to the first runner-up, so don’t let this opportunity pass you by!

Larry Matsuda Reads “Higo’s Five and Dime”

Larry Matsuda, author of the incredible poetry collection A Cold Wind From Idaho, recently read “Higo’s Five and Dime” at the Wing Luke Asia Museum in Seattle. Click here to see it on YouTube! The reading was part of the opening night festivities for the exhibit “Meet Me at Higo: An Enduring Story of a Japanese American Family,” which is on display through May 27, 2012. (Artisan gallery KOBO at Higo is located at 602-608 S. Jackson St. in Nihonmachi.)

Brad Ricca on Verse Daily

A poem titled “Customs of Golems,” from Brad Ricca’s phenomenal collection American Mastodon, is up at Verse Daily. (Click here to buy a copy.)

Coming up in this week’s Sapling

This week, we talk chapbooks, chapbooks, chapbooks with Greying Ghost Press founder Carl Annarummo. Also, we feature the latest from the likes of: The Kenyon Review! Sentence! Finishing Line Press!

Sapling goes out via email every Tuesday. To join our growing list of Sapling subscribers and to read a little more about what we do, visit http://blacklawrence.homestead.com/sapling.html.

Weekend Event: Helen Marie Casey in Cambridge, MA

Bostonians: Helen Marie Casey will be one of six authors of books published in 2011 to read at the National Writers Union (Boston Chapter) Book Party on Sunday, January 22nd, at the YMCA in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She will read from her biography, My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer. The reading will be followed by member book sales and celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the National Writers Union, including an address by NWU President Larry Goldbetter. Don’t miss it! (And if you won’t be in town, click here to buy a copy of this lovely biography.)

Joe Wilkins: A Master of the “Poetry of Place”

Escape Into Life’s Kathleen Kirk included Joe Wilkins’ collection Killing the Murnion Dogs in her year-end review, and writes “Reading Wilkins, I had an experience very like the one he reports in this excerpt from “Daybreak, Spokane, September 2001,” about reading the poet James Wright:

I dream winter—wind leaning hard
down the mountains, blown snow

and ice—reading James Wright
for the first time.

How sad and lovely,

because in his poems everything and everyone
was always dying,

yet looking up from the page
I had never before wanted so wholly to live.

Read the entire review here, and buy your copy of this beautiful book here.

Coming up in this week’s Sapling

This week, poetry chapbook author Erin J. Mullikin shares some strategies for getting started with the Sapling community. Also, we feature the latest from the likes of: Omnidawn! the bad futurist!  Patasola Press!

Sapling goes out via email every Tuesday. To join our growing list of Sapling subscribers and to read a little more about what we do, visit http://blacklawrence.homestead.com/sapling.html.

Verse Daily selects Lisa Fay Coutley’s Poem as a “Favorite of 2011″

Lisa Fay Coutley’s beautiful poem “Barefoot on the Pulpit” was selected by Verse Daily as one of their favorites of 2011! (Click here to buy her equally lovely chapbook, In the Carnival of Breathing.)

Best of 2011 Poetry: SAINT MONICA and KILLING THE MURNION DOGS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Scrapper Poet lists two fabulous BLP titles to their Best of 2011 list: Mary Biddinger’s Saint Monica makes the chapbook list, and Joe Wilkins’ Killing the Murnion Dogs is named one of the best poetry collections of the year. See what everyone is talking about and buy these collections here and here!