A new translation by Lawrence Schimel of Argentinian poet, Fabián Iriarte, appears this month in Poetry Northwest.
“While Fabián and I have not yet met in person, I’ve been reading his work for many decades, and was drawn to the poems in this book, which are both erudite and sexy, sophisticated but playful, unquestionably queer in both content and how they tackle and subvert language.”
Read, “Nicole Wanders by the Riverbank” on Poetry Northwest. We’ll be publishing “The Confessions,” the first full-length English translation of Iriarte later this fall.
Shin Yu Pai’s “Ensō” was a finalist for Poetry Society’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award. Award judge Lillian-Yvonne Bertram noted it for “its elegant collection of the artist’s interdisciplinary poetic projects collected and undertaken over time.”
Easily our most complicated project to date, it was nice to see a little recognition for this book that had to survive not only my near heart attack, my house catching on fire, and getting dropped right into the lockdowns of the pandemic!
In working with Shin Yu, I hoped that we’d create a book that would be useful and inspiring to students by highlighting how poetry and poetic intention, and practice can appear in many guises and formats. I think this book does that beautifully.
Like all our books, this comes with a set of audio— in this case, not only Shin Yu reading her essays and poems in the book, but music and installation projects she has created and collaborated on. Here is some of it on our Soundcloud. https://soundcloud.com/entreriosbooks/sets/enso
I am happy to send anyone interested in considering it for coursework a PDF or physical copy to review. Just drop me an email.
I am grateful there are awards specifically interested in hybrid and genre-bending projects. Congratulations to Lauren Russell for her book Descent and all the other finalists.
It’s a bit late for new news, but we wanted to acknowledge our excellent publishing intern, poet Phoebe Farrell-Sherman! She spent part of last summer remotely working with us, organizing marketing lists in Airtable, coming up with some ideas for our next project, The City of Dreadful Night, and conducting some interviews with amazing local women working in the book industry that we’ll start sharing soon!
Phoebe is a student of philosophy and poetry at Smith College in Northampton, MA. After winning the Choral Arts “Finding Your Voice” poetry award, she had the honor of having one of her poems set to music by composer John David Earnest. She has also been published in Resistance Writing, and in 2017, she was selected to be part of the Hugo House Young Writers Cohort. Along with her love of reading and writing poetry, Phoebe is interested in political writing, public-facing philosophy, and medical ethics.
ERB: What’s your favorite poetry book?
PFS: It is really hard to choose a favorite book of poetry, but I think maybe a collection I have of Walt Whitman, “Whitman, selected by Robert Creeley” (it’s the only Whitman book I have– I don’t have a regular copy of Leaves of Grass). The poems are so thoughtful and joyful, and they feel so direct to me even though they were written in 1850-60. There is one poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” where he says “I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born… Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” and it is amazing, and believable somehow, to think of Whitman thinking about me in 1850!
ERB: What are you reading now?
Right now I am reading a collection of essays by George Yancy, “Across Black Spaces,” that discuss race in America, doing philosophy while Black, and the tradition of Black philosophy in America. I saw Yancy speak at Smith two years ago, and I think in both his writing and his style of speaking he is a really amazing example of what public-facing philosophy can do.
ERB: Could explain a little how your major in Philosophy and this focus on poetry came to be? Why did you pick this in school? What are your hopes with a degree like this?
I chose a philosophy major because it lets me approach things in other fields, like medicine, for example, but from a totally different angle, which is often an opportunity to consider how they could be more human and more just. My poetry concentration is essentially a minor that goes with that, and lets me do what I love– reading and writing poems– and be creative, as well as academic. I’m still figuring out what will come after graduation for me, but I definitely want to keep writing and reading both poetry and philosophy, possibly apply for a poetry MFA, and then pursue a career in publishing, medical ethics, or something else in between.
Thanks so much to Phoebe for spending a strange remote summer with the press and a shout out to the Praxis Program at Smith College which funds internships for students working with art and literature groups like ours as we would have never been able to come up with the money to pay for her help!
Our next book has arrived! E. Briskin’s Orange, a queer hybrid text on grief and dog behavior.
Brandi Homan calls it, “A dazzling Rubik’s Cube of a book where every solution is a right one. E. Briskin’s Orange is an extended meditation on grief and memory in diamond-precise language that allows for the liminality of human existence in all its inanity and largesse. E. writes: “It’s just a story. Don’t imagine I got over it.” I don’t imagine I’ll be over this book for quite some time, if ever. Ingenious.”
Our pre-orders have started shipping and you can now request it from your favorite local bookstore through our distributor, Small Press Distribution.
If the snow doesn’t cancel, it should be a fantastic evening of two gay poets writing about the West.
Thanks to Michael Dylan Welch and his work organizing the very long-standing SoulFood Poetry Night.
More information about this reading and the whole series here:
https://sites.google.com/site/soulfoodpoetrynight/
Entre Ríos Books invites you to an afternoon of poetry on the 39th floor: an intimate reading series with sweeping views of the Sound and city.
For our first reading we are pleased to welcome Prageeta Sharma and Deborah Woodard.
THIS IS A TICKETED EVENT DUE TO LIMITED SEATING AND BUILDING SECURITY. You will not be allowed up the elevator without a ticket. Please help us make this a success by getting a ticket.
TICKETS HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/poetry-on-the-west-edge-sharma-woodard-tickets-88956353849
ABOUT OUR READERS:
PRAGEETA SHARMA is the author of the poetry collections Grief Sequence (Wave Books, 2019), Undergloom (Fence Books, 2013), Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004), which won the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize, and Bliss to Fill (Subpress, 2000). She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Art. A recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award, she has taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.
DEBORAH WOODARD is the author of two collections of poetry, Plato’s Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006) and Borrowed Tales (Stockport Flats, 2012) and the recent dramatic poem, No Finis:Triangle Testimonies, 1911 (Ravenna Press, 2018). She has published several translations of Italian poet, Amelia Rosselli, including Obtuse Diary with with Roberta Antognini and Dario De Pasquale (Entre Ríos Books, 2018), The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems, 1953-1981 (Chelsea Editions, 2009) with Giuseppe Leporace and Hospital Series (New Directions, 2015) with Roberta Antognini and Giuseppe Leporace. She teaches hybrid creative writing and literature classes at the Richard Hugo House.
Share a space with Entre Rios Books!
I am particularly poor at keeping our news on the site updated— focusing instead on keeping all the social media alive — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even SoundCloud and YouTube.
For those of you that don’t follow us on a “platform”, it’s been rough, but hopeful start to our fourth year. Like many of the smallest, new presses, ours started in our home and over the course of our first three years had completely taken over my personal time and then finally physical space with storing books. Perhaps over a year ago, I could see that we would definitely need some storage and that perhaps a better distinction between press work and the rest of my life would be a “good thing”. Having never used a storage space before, I was shocked to find out how much a temperature-controlled space would cost, so then thought it might well be more cost-effective to find a small office with some storage.
Early in the summer, we got notice that a space would be available in September in the Jack Straw building. To make this work on our limited finances, we would need to find someone to share the space. All summer, we wavered if moving out of the house would be the right thing to do. I’ve worked from home since 2006 as a free-lancer, so while the idea of a commute again intrigued me, signing a lease and dedicating myself to it was daunting.
And then our house caught fire.
Those that follow our social media know that the fire was not too large, but surprisingly disruptive. I had no idea. Our house was emptied of almost everything, which we won’t see again until perhaps this time next year. Luckily, our inventory escaped with no smoke damage and remains in hand.
I had expected September to be a challenge between setting up the new office and getting our next three books— all of them much more difficult than anything I have tried to this point— out to press. I had no idea how our month would actually turn out. It is now the last day of October and one book is out, one is very close and the other remains, unfortunately too much of a mystery. I cannot recommend a house fire while trying to get books on press.
But I will claim that our office is now functional, and we are ready to find someone to share our space with.
Our extra room is $300 a month. We could go month to month, though I’d love to have at least a verbal commitment to try it for 3 months. It’s a clean, white box, 10′ x 7. 5′, but either its tragic element or best feature is that it has no window. So this is a room for someone who is looking for either dark space to work, such as a video editor or writer with distraction issues.
Our office comes with 24/7 access, janitor service, internet. Our shared space has a “lobby”— that is a few chairs and a work table for occasional meetings, a microwave, small fridge.
This would not be the right space for someone with lots of meetings, lots of phone calls, or the need to rock out— the walls are so thin, I even wear my headphones due to the office next door, but I’d love to meet anyone who thinks this might be a good solution for them. It is ready to move in now.
Please email me DIRECTLY at knox@entreriosbooks.com to get more information and set up a time to visit.
Thanks to everyone who came out on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon for the pre-launch party of our newest book, Woodland. Featuring my own poems, it’s obviously a more personal look at our press and directions I think it might be heading as far as our book production and thematic concerns. It was great to have to do some of the anxiety-producing speaking that all of our other authors have had to deal with— ah, the selling of books!
It was a huge honor to get to read at Open Books, which is one of my happy places on this earth and truly the epicenter of my poetic education and my sense of the poetry community. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without this space.
One thing I had not realized and have been thinking quite a bit about is how important these early readings are to understand how to perform work from the book and how they shape readings that happen after and despite all the practice and thinking about order, how one still needs an audience to understand what is clicking and what is not.
I am excited to bring the work to Hugo House for it’s official launch reading. This will likely be the only time people in Seattle will get to hear pianist Aaron Otheim playing the work live. Erin L. McCoy will join me on stage to read some of the work.
https://www.facebook.com/events/318184075517790/
Woodland’s poems feel dark, romantic and sultry, and they include strong ecological imagery that’ll leave you swooning after every page. Throw in images of partially burned sheet music…and the haunting melodies of keyboardist Aaron Otheim… and you’ve got yourself one hell of a book… Readers will instinctively know Woodland is about climate catastrophe, but they’ll also come to recognize a deep-rooted warning in Gardner’s poems: there is beauty coiled in danger, and we must look at it dead-on.
We are delighted that our first review for Woodland comes from our area’s local press and so a huge THANK YOU to Christina Butcher for her reading and Tacoma’s Weekly Volcano for carrying book reviews.
The full review is here: Electric and fire-filled books
In it, she mentions the poem and music from “A Swift Willing Light”— you can hear that on Soundcloud for free.
And finally, Christina runs an incredible small press herself and you should check it out— Blue Cactus Press!!!
Here’s what we brought back from the Buenos Aires Book Fair, as well as books recommended to us from our new Argentinian authors, or booksellers that we met. Be sure to check our social media to see our recommendations for book stores and other Buenos Aires delight.
Again, Northwest poets, we share these with you and are happy to lend these difficult to get locally books with you if your interest include contemporary Spanish-language poetry. Just drop us an email. Obviously, we are very interested in doing what we can to promote any of this work being translated.
Finally, a note on our selections, and particularly coming from me— a person who is not fluent in Spanish and is new to the literature of Argentina. First, let it be known that we asked our awesome editor, Erin L. McCoy, to select whatever books she found engaging. Second, as per our press, we are definitely interested in women writers and queer writers as a default state of being. We were interested in learning more writers outside of Buenos Aires. Per my current interests with the press, I was looking for interesting looking hybrid texts (much rarer to see than in the US Market) and prose poetry. And I was not interested in poetry that was extremely first person or “flat” which seems to be a trend and one that drives me a bit crazy. Sometimes I would pick up a book and Erin would say, “Oh, that would actually drive you crazy…” and sometimes I would pick up a book and she would say, “Oh, that is an interesting find!” Finally, I might have bought a few of these books just based on something to do with the production and for that, I did not ask Erin. I know what I like on production.
