New Free Verse Editions
Announcing the 2009 Free Verse Emily Carr, 13 Ways of Happily
Editions and the winner of the
New Measure Poetry Prize
Published Fall, 2010
Parlor Press’s poetry series, Free Verse Editions, is also
pleased to announce the second annual New Measure
Poetry Prize competition, carrying a cash award of
$1,000 and publication of an original, unpublished
manuscript of poems. In 2009, the judge was Cole
Swensen. Manuscripts not selected for the New Measure
Poetry Prize may still be eligible for publication by
Free Verse Editions. Submissions for the prize must be
postmarked in April or May of 2010. The nonrefundable
entry fee is $25.00. Please see www.parlorpress.com for
full submission requirements.
Contacts
Jon Thompson, Free Verse Editions Series Editor
freeverse_editor@chass.ncsu.edu
David Blakesley, Publisher, Parlor Press
editor@parlorpress.com; 765.409.2649
Existing titles in the Free Verse Editions series may be
ordered securely on our website or at bookstores anywhere.
Visit www.parlorpress.com
Free Verse Editions 2009-2010
January 6, 2010
Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize 2009
“If ostranenie—‘to make strange’—is the mandate of
contemporary poetry, Emily Carr has achieved this both
brilliantly and beautifully. Kaleidoscopic in its glimmering
slivers, the life she brings us is built of charged familiars
slightly and completely changed: the sun turns on its stem;
the stallion rolls in a pasture of blue ether. Although she
references poetic antecedents from Wallace Stevens and
William Carlos Williams to Joan Retallack and Mary Ruefle,
it’s not their voices, but their facility for invention, itself here
reinvented, that keeps waking us up into a world sometimes
alarming, often unsettling, and always careening until we, too,
arrive ‘delirious & shredded, sailing sideways through the
greenly ravished vowels.’”
—Cole Swensen
Lisa Fishman, Current
Current is the fourth book by Lisa Fishman, whom Michael Palmer
has called one of the “most promising practitioners” of American
exploratory lyric. By means of attention to the moment (there is
dailiness here) and a deep listening to the cross-currents of making
over time (there is music that hears), Current enacts a poetics of the
uncanny, with no project in mind. The book begins with a scribal act, a
transcription of Barrett Browning’s notes in the margins of her Greek
and Hebrew Bibles, compelled by such comments as “The Holy Spirit
does not deal in synonimes” to copy them out and see what happens
over a decade of attending. This meditation opens onto other linings
enfolded in Current, such as the countering proposition (which names
the final section), “All beauty couldn’t fit outside a book.” In this
collection, Fishman ventures further into forms of thinking in touch
with the possibilities and limitations of vision and art. Sounding them
out, her voice is itself.
Parlor Press
www.parlorpress.com
Free Verse
A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics