Cahiers de Corey: Literary Announcements

Friday, February 26, 2010

Literary Announcements

I'm extremely pleased to be able to announce a new development regarding the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency. Jennifer Moxley, who any reader of this blog knows is one of my all-time faves, has graciously agreed to serve as judge of this year's competition. The winner will spend two months in residence at Glen Rowan House on the campus of Lake Forest College completing and revising the winning manuscript, which will then be published by the &NOW imprint of Lake Forest College Press and distributed by Northwestern University Press. In addition, he or she will meet with students and faculty, visit classes, and participate in the 2011 Lake Forest Literary Festival. And did I mention the $10,000 prize?

We invite applications for an emerging poet under forty years old, with no major book publication, to spend two months (February-March or March-April 2011) in residence at Lake Forest College.

Send:

1) Curriculum vita
2) No more than 30 pages of manuscript in progress
3) A one-page statement of plans for completion to:

Plonsker Residency
Department of English
Lake Forest College
Box A16
555 N. Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, IL 60045.

Bob Archambeau, Davis Schneiderman, and myself will continue to administer the prize and winnow the field, but the final decision will be made by Jennifer Moxley.

The first Plonsker Prize-winning book, Jessica Savitz's Hunting Is Painting, will be going to the printer soon. And Gretchen E. Henderson, the charming and ferociously talented author of the second winning book, Galerie de Difformite, is hard at work revising that piece of hybrid prose and generally making herself invaluable on our campus.

Speaking of hybrid prose, the 2010 Lake Forest Literary Festival takes place next week, and the public is welcome to attend. In addition to Gretchen, the featured readers include Vanessa Place, Teresa Carmody, Lily Hoang, Angela Jackson, S.L. Wisenberg, and our keynote presenter, Shelley Jackson (author of the feminist Frankenstein cut-up Patchwork Girl and an acclaimed novel about Siamese twins, Half-Life). A complete schedule can be found by clicking on the link above.

Finally, I've decided to attend this year's AWP after barely attending last year's and missing the New York conference altogether (my daughter was busy being born). Looking forward as always to old friends, new books, and overpriced hotel bar drinks.

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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