Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize
With Midnight Down Your Throat
by Caitlyn Curran
Published: 2022
Price: $15.95
Caitlyn Curran holds an MFA from the University of Idaho and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Her recent work can be found in: The American Journal of Poetry, Basalt, Grist, Hubbub, Miramar, PANK, Raleigh Review, SALT, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Willow Springs Magazine and elsewhere. She was a 2018 Centrum Fellow at the Port Townsend Writers Conference, recipient of a 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize, and runner-up in the 2021 Grist Proforma Contest.
ACME
Nightcall
by Andrea Jurjevic
Published: 2021
Price: $10.95
Andrea Jurjevic’s Nightcall offers surreal explorations of both our concrete reality and the disorienting terrain of self. These poems traverse a gritty landscape of memory , love, sorrow, and sex with unswerving honesty and stunning imagery. Erotic, devasting, and deeply searching, this is a book anchored by yearning and the willingness to search out its answer in every doorway and street, and on every shore.
The Time Machine
by Laura Kasischke
Published: 2022
Price: $10.95
Laura Kasischke’s “The Time Machine” offers us surreal and transformative explorations into memory, mortality, and femininity. In the opening poem, Laura tells us: “This is what it feels like / to be a woman / who is also a vulture.” In a sense, Kasischke’s 9th book of poetry is an elegy for the present-self, at once a reminder of all we have lost – “You / were loved wildly before you even had time to open your eyes. / But now you can never catch up. / And that’s the problem” – and all we have to gain if we dig deeply into ourselves – “In the end, no / training was needed… I taught myself so well. / It’s all I can do now.”
Laura Kasischke has published eleven collections of poetry (most recently Where Now: New & Selected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2017) as well as nine novels and a collection of short fiction. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, among other honors. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches in the Residential College and the English Department, where she is the Theodore Roethke Distinguished University Professor.
Tooth and Shoe
by Heikki Huotari
Published: 2018
Price: $10.95
Simultaneously hyper organized and utterly chaotic, Tooth and Shoe asks us to take a second glance at the seeming normality of our daily lives. Keeping with the American surrealist tradition, Huotari’s leaps of semantic faith confront us with the bizarre nature of our time. In this chapbook, Huotari’s lyrical prose poems oscillate between intense moments of scientific clarity and non-sequitur absurdity – “If I own the microscope, the microscope has never bitten me or I have never seen the microscope before today I’ll say, my microscope won’t bite” – in order to isolate moments of oddity. In this chapbook, Huotari reminds us that, while the world is comprised of an entirely entropic chaos just beneath our thin veneer of reality, “The universe is largely laughing matter.”
As a child, Heikki Huotari attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. As an adolescent, he served, against his will, in the Vietnam-era army and was discharged, medically and/or as a conscientious objector. As a professor of mathematics, he held down a corner in the study of statistical inference and the shape of the related metric spaces. On retirement from academia in 2012, he became a would-be poet. To date, he has published poems in forty or more journals, including Crazyhorse, The Journal, and Spillway, one collection, and two chapbooks, one of which won the Gambling the Aisle Prize. He is constantly amazed at his good luck.
Black Postcards
by Michael McGriff
Published: 2017
Price: $10.95
Michael McGriff is the co-author, with J.M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His poetry collections include Home Burial, a New York Book Review Editors’ Choice, Dismantling the Hills, and a forthcoming volume, Early Hour. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Poetry, Bookforum, The Believer, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and PBS NewsHour. He teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.
The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution
by Karyna McGlynn
Published: 2016
Price: $10.95
Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande Books 2017), I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl (Sarabande Books 2009), and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, Ploughshares, and The Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day. Karyna’s honors include the Hopwood Award, the Verlaine Prize, and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and recently earned her Ph.D in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston where she served as Poetry Editor and Managing Editor for Gulf Coast. She is currently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin
Startle Pattern
by Larissa Szporluk
Published: 2015
Price: $10.95
Larissa Szporluk is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Traffic with Macbeth, published in 2011 by Tupelo Press. Recent poems have appeared in Talisman, Everyday Genius, and The Journal. The recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, she teaches creative writing at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Drunk on Salt
by James Nolan
Published: 2014
Price: $10.95
James Nolan’s previous poetry collections are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, and his translations include volumes of Neruda and Gil de Biedma. He also published Poet-Chief, a study of Whitman and Neruda. His most recent book is You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories, and his fiction has won a Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal, an Independent Publishers Book Award, and a Next-Generation Indie Book Award. The recipient of an NEA and two Fulbright fellowships, he has taught at universities in San Francisco, Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing, as well as in his native New Orleans, where he now lives in the French Quarter.
You Won’t Need That
by Robert Gregory
Published: 2013
Price: $10.95
Robert Gregory received his PhD in English from the University of California Irvine and is the recipient of the 2001 Blue Lynx Prize and 1992 Bluestem Poetry Award. He currently lives in Frankfort, KY, where he works as a technical writer for the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky.
Growing on a Thin Man
by Ray Amorosi
Published: 2012
Price: $10.95
Ray Amorosi was born in Boston’s North End in 1946. He earned an M.A. in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts. His books include A Generous Wall, Flim Flam, and In Praise. A fourth full-length volume, Lazarus, is forthcoming from Long Horse Press. He has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Northeastern University, and Adams State College. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Michigan Quarterly Review, FIELD, Crazyhorse, Willow Springs, Prairie Schooner, Kayak, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and many other publications. He lives in Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts.
No Time for Dancing
by Adam Hammer
Published: 2010
Price: $10.95
Adam Hammer was born in 1948 in New Jersey, where he became a high school basketball star. He later studied at Emerson College, the University of Massachusetts, the University of California Santa Barbara, Colorado State University, and Bowling Green State University, from which he received a PhD in Popular Culture. His books are On a Train Sleeping and Déjà Everything. With Yusef Komunyakaa, he was co-founder of the literary journal Gumbo, which he edited for several years in the late 1970s. A wild, irreverent, and totally original person, he died in an automobile accident in 1984.
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