January 29, 2016 We look over the side of the pier and wonder where footholds might help a person up, but we can’t find any. We think of last night’s drinkers, one of whom might have stumbled in. We think of despair—so many homeless, so many loves gone bad—and we think of families, but we see no one who looks any more personally involved than simply considering the hazards of his own living.
January 8, 2016 When Philip Levine gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt, the room was packed. But in his introduction to the event, Vereen Bell bypassed entirely the impressive literary credentials of the Pulitzer Prize-winner. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties.
December 1, 2015 “After class, I sat outside on the lawn, revisited Baudelaire. Were there chemicals in my book that made me swoon––something in the paper of Les Fleurs du Mal that affected my senses? I licked a page to see if it had LSD on it. How did poetry achieve the effect of making me feel drunk?” Marilyn Kallet will discuss a new translation of Chantal Bizzini’s poems at Union Ave. Books in Knoxville on December 3, 2015, at 3 p.m.
October 16, 2015 Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for more than twenty years edited the journal Poems & Plays. His most recent books are a ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost, and the cookbook-memoir The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire, both published in 2015. At noon on October 23, 2015, Brewer will give a free public reading at University Center on the campus of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.
Nate Marshall
University of Pittsburgh Press
80 pages
$15.95
“In his powerful debut collection, winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Marshall explores the perils and praise songs of black lives on the South Side of Chicago. Much of the collection takes shape through the voice of a young black man navigating high school, family, friendships, and the physical and mental dangers that surround him as he strives toward manhood.”
—Publishers Weekly
Corey Mesler
Lulu.com
110 pages
$7.50
“Opaque Melodies That Would Bug Most People is filled with young, vibrant poems from a wise voice. The poems often wax reflective, filled with the historicity of experience, yet always returning to the now.”
–From the publisher
