Erica's Blog

Best Of

I mark time by what I'm reading. Or, more accurately, I associate particular books with specific time periods. Senior year in college: Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. First real job at a snooty art gallery: Cesare Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires. This past fall: John Ashbery's Notes from the Air: Later Selected Poems. In an effort to remember the books I read that don't somehow carry nostalgia with them, I began keeping notes this year, which gives me the opportunity to make my own "best of" list for 2007. However, these are the ten books I most enjoyed reading this year, not necessarily ones released in 2007. In alphabetical order:

Armitage, Simon Book of Matches POETRY (Thanks, Ricardo)

Ashbery, John Notes from the Air POETRY

Bynum, Sarah Shun-Lien Madeleine Is Sleeping FICTION

Brown, Nickole Sister POETRY

Carey, Edward Observatory Mansions FICTION (Thanks, Stephanie)

Celan, Paul Snow Part (tr. Ian Fairley) POETRY

Didion, Joan Slouching Toward Bethlehem NON-FICTION

McEwan, Ian Chesil Beach FICTION

Murakami, Haruki Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World FICTION

Seidel, Frederick Ooga-Booga POETRY

InDigest Mag

The new online journal InDigest has just published three of my poems, HERE.

Fellow poet and Guernica Mag Managing Editor Tiffany Noelle Fung and I have a chat in the InDialogue section, HERE.

And Tiffany's poems are HERE.

Thanks for reading!

New Adonis Translations

Translations of three Adonis poems by Michael Beard and Adnan Haydar, HERE, at Guernica. Thanks for reading this year!

Teaser from "Mask of Songs":

In the name of his own history,
in a country mired in mud,
when hunger overtakes him
he eats his own forehead.

Bateau

I am delighted to have a poem included in Volume 1 Issue 1 of Bateau, for sale HERE.

Bateau is a particularly charming literary journal with letterpress cover and editors' note explaining their mission: "we're trying to take you somewhere. Gift you progress (in the humblest of terms) somehow."

Other contributors include fellow Columbian Lytton Smith as well as Matt Hart, Peter Jay Shippy, and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, et al.

Beautiful, all around.

Suggested Reading

If I planned ahead more often, I could recommend more than one reading a year. My better-late-than-never suggestion is Alice Fulton at Reading Between A and B tomorrow night, Monday the 10th at 7:30. This exceptional reading series is located at 510 E. 11th Street (Manhattan). Not only is Alice Fulton one of my favorites, but she's reading with a poet I just discovered, Nickole Brown. I highly recommend Brown's debut collection, Sister, recently released from Red Hen Press. Rounding out the lineup is Kathleen Rooney.

A few lines from Alice Fulton's poem "Failure" (which is right-justified, but I don't know how to do that in html):

The kings are boring, forever
legislating where the sparkles
in their crowns will be. Regal is easy.
That's why I wear a sinking fragrance
and fall to pieces in plain sight.

Elizabeth Hardwick

Obituary in The New York Times

passage from Sleepless Nights:

In the evening, wine may revive the dead Ph.D. and in the warmth the weed-choked garden of ambition and love seems to burst forth with thorny, brave little blossoms like those on an ancient, untended rosebush. It is like the song in the hymnal, one of the many B-flat offerings of consolation.

The sun is sinking fast,
The daylight dies;
Let love awake and pay
An evening sacrifice.

And yet the perennial, hardy hope cannot last out dinner. This is New York, with its graves next to its banks.

For Those of You Keeping Up

The music video shot at my dad's garage in Wartrace, TN is finished, and you can have a look HERE. That's my dad's 1968 shiny red Camaro, too.

The song is "Shiftwork" from Kenny Chesney's new album titled (in case you thought this was irrelevant) Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates. 

New Guernica Poem

"Why Can't We" by Kim Hyesoon translated by Don Mee Choi

Teaser: We make Buddha ride an elephant like the way a village boy rides on a man’s shoulder, and we let Buddha run and play, then make him cry, and we make him couple blissfully with a buttery woman and call it Tantra, but then we make him smile by himself in emptiness...