Two San Francisco Poetry Center events

Thurs/Feb 2, 4:30pm (SFSU Poetry Center library)

Kathleen Fraser in conversation with Steve Dickison focused on the founding of the American Poetry Archives, under Fraser’s directorship (1972-1975).

Sat night/ Feb 4, 7:30 (Unitarian Church, SF)

Kathleen Fraser reads from her new book.
She will be joined by poet Brandon Brown.

and in Los Angeles:

Otis College of Art & Design

Wed/ Feb 8, 7:30 pm

Fraser reads from her new book.

Joined by poet Jane Sprague

Kathleen Fraser’s inventive new book showcases poems from four recent collaborative artist books that exhibit “her longtime love of words as objects into play” (The New York Times). These new poems, many created through her unique collage and hand paste-up techniques, continue Fraser’s ambitious exploration of the boundaries of language and the limits of the page.

“I love Kathleen Fraser’s extraordinary intelligence, her persistent care for where she is—and for all those she finds there too”—Robert Creeley

KATHLEEN FRASER, author of 18 books of poetry and prose, including her selected poems, il cuore: the heart and her essay collection, Translating the Unspeakable. She lives in San Francisco and spends each spring in Rome.

Nightboat Books invites you to celebrate the publication

Calling all Poets:

Please submit your manuscript to this year’s Nightboat Poetry Prize.

Forrest Gander (pictured above) is the judge.

The postmark deadline is November 15th.

Details can be found here.

*****

Schizophrene, the new book by Bhanu Kapil, is now available. Order it here.
Read her interview with Katherine Saunders in Bomb.

“The Frank O’Hara of his generation.”—Ted Berrigan

A Fast Life establishes Tim Dlugos—the witty and innovative poet at the heart of the New York literary scene in the late 1970s and 1980s and seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic—as one of the most distinctive and energetic poets of our time. This definitive volume contains all of the poems Dlugos published in his lifetime, a wealth of previously unpublished poems, and an informative introduction, chronology, and notes assembled by the volume’s editor, poet David Trinidad.

Born in 1950, Tim Dlugos was in was involved in the Mass Transit poetry scene in Washington, D.C., and later, in New York City, in the downtown literary scene. His books include Entre Nous, Strong Place, and Powerless. Dlugos died of AIDS at the age of forty.

David Trinidad’s most recent books is the forthcoming Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Chicago, where he teaches at Columbia College.

Join us at the Poetry Project on Wednesday, May 11, at 8pm for a launch event with the following people reading Tim’s work: Anselm Berrigan, Tom Carey, CA Conrad, Jane DeLynn, Alex Dimitrov, Cheri Fein, Brad Gooch, Duncan Hannah, Patricia Spears Jones, Erica Kaufman, Michael Lally, Chip Livingston, Jaime Manrique, Stephen Motika, Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Aaron Smith, Stacy Szymaszek,  Marvin Taylor, David Trinidad and Terence Winch. Details can be found here.

We’re delighted to announce the winner of the

2010 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize:

Inmost by Jessica Fisher

Selected by Kimiko Hahn to be Published March 2012

Jessica Fisher’s first book of poems, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, Puerto del Sol, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly, and her translations appear in The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, where she is currently a Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Kimiko Hahn’s citation:

“In Inmost, the individual poems coalesce to create their own kind of chronology:  rather than sequential order, the reader is drawn into strands of thought on such topics as mothering and reading. Fisher gives us an intoxicating new book.”

The Finalists:

Eva Heisler for Drawing Water (Meditation on the Line)
Matt Reeck for When the Mimes Left for Paris

And Semi-Finalists:

Serena Chopra for Penumbra
Dot Devota for The Division of Labor
Lisa Donovan for Untouched
Rebecca Lilly for Creatures Among Us
Nils Michals for Chantepleure
Sawnie Morris for Notetaker
Rob Schlegel for Wrack Line
Ravi Shankar for The New Transcendence
Andy Stallings for sleepless above

Celebrating new publications by

Caroline Bergvall (Meddle English)

Daniel Borzutzky (The Book of Interfering Bodies)

Michael Burkard (lucky coat anywhere)

Dawn Lundy Martin (Discipline)

Leah Stein (A Lily Lilies, with Josey Foo)

At Poets House

10 River Terrace, at Murray Street

Lower Manhattan

1, 2, 3, A, C, E to Chambers Street

Sunday, February 13, 3pm-5pm

Readings by the authors, Reception & Book Sale

Free and Open to All

We’re thrilled to announce that Caroline Bergvall’s Meddle English: New and Selected Texts is here. This book gathers a decade of her innovative pieces, including her long out-of-print performance text Goan Atom, inspired by the graphic contortions of Hans Bellmer’s Doll and violent love fantasies of other radical body-inspired artists; The Shorter Chaucer series of contemporary tales exploring social mores in a feisty mix of languages; and the recent hybrid and visual prose pieces Cropper, Cat in the Throat, and Middling English. This volume—rich, multi-layered, acerbic, humorous—creates a strong case for how new literature can provide speculative and performative excursions into post-urban lives and idioms and explore renewed visions for language practice.

CAROLINE BERGVALL is an international writer who works across media and art forms. Her projects alternate between books, audio pieces, performances, and installations. Her publications include Goan Atom, Fig, and Alyson Singes. She has presented projects at MoMA,  Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, and held teaching residencies at Dartington College of Arts, Bard College, and Temple University. Currently an AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts (2007-2010), she will be a Visiting Fellow at the University of Copenhagen in Spring 2011. She lives in London.

PRAISE FOR CAROLINE BERGVALL

“Thank heaven for Caroline Bergvall, an artist and poet pushing the boundaries of language in a blogged-up and twittering digital world….her new lingo reads like a wild blend of Chaucer, SMS-speak and Anthony Burgess’s droog slang.” —The Guardian

“Caroline Bergvall has emerged over the past decade as one of the most brilliantly inventive poets of our time.” —Charles Bernstein