Cahiers de Corey: New Things Arise

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

New Things Arise

I'm thrilled to be part of some great new doings in the literary arena at Lake Forest College, namely:

- The creation of Lake Forest College Press and its imprint, &NOW Books (inspired by the &NOW Festival of Writing as a Contemporary Conceptual Art;
- The launch of a new biannual anthology, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, to be published under the eponymous imprint;
- The Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, offering a two-month residency at Lake Forest, a $10,000 stipend, and book publication for a writer under forty years of age with no major publications (chapbooks excepted).

Exciting stuff! You can read more about it here at the blog of my colleague Bob Archambeau. I'm grateful to Bob and Davis Schneiderman for making me a part of their plans for literary empire-building.

In more personal news I can announce some upcoming personal appearances at which you can hear (and see) me read my poetry:

- On Friday, April 11 I will be reading with Juan Manuel Sanchez at Illinois State University in Normal as part of their Pierre Bourdieu Memorial Reading Series. It will take place at 7 PM in the University Galleries (here are some directions). Thanks to Gabe Gudding and Kristin Dykstra for making it happen.
- On Wednesday, April 16 I will be reading at The Book Cellar in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago along with Eddie Kilowatt, Robert McDonald, Patricia Stewart, Saadia Ali Aschemann. It starts at 7 PM; the Book Cellar is a nifty little independent store at 4736 Lincoln Avenue, right on the CTA's Brown Line.
- For those of you willing to brave the northern suburbs on a Tuesday afternoon, I'll be reading on the Lake Forest College campus at 4 PM on Tuesday, April 24 in Meyer Auditorium, Hotchkiss Hall, Middle Campus.
- On the weekend of May 2 - 4, I will be a player in Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater alongside Melissa Severin and Fred Sasaki to kick off Returning from One Place to Another:
A Poet’s Theater Showcase at Links Hall in Wrigleyville.
- Finally, my European fans will be able to catch me presenting a paper on Charles Olson and avant-pastoral in Brussels during the Poetic Ecologies Conference that will be happening there from May 14 through the 17th. I'm looking forward to this truly international gathering of critics and poets concerned with, as the conference subtitle has it, "Nature as Text and Text as Nature in English-Language Verse."

So if my infrequent blogging bothers you, chances are you can catch me in person at one or more of these events.

Finally, for all you Sadie Gray fans out there, here are a couple of more pictures off the camera phone:

Looking alert in her car seat.

We've been looking for a new apartment. Sadie seemed to like this one.

Laughing at, rather than up, her sleeve.

Smiling at her great-grandpa.

Looking for spring.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

Available from Omnidawn Publishing and wherever books are sold.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

Available from Amazon in print or Kindle editions, from Small Press Distribution, and from the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Now available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Goodreads

Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading