Cahiers de Corey: SOON Reads Soon

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

SOON Reads Soon

SOON Productions founders and local poets, Theo Hummer, Josh Corey, Karen Anderson and Aaron Tieger team up to present selections from their work on Friday, August 25th at 7:30 in the Poet's Corner at Bookery II, 215 North Cayuga Street, Ithaca, New York.

SOON Productions was formed in 2004 to support innovative and small press poetry in Ithaca. According to Aaron Tieger, "We are committed to bringing new poetic and critical voices from across the region and around the country to present their work in the community." You can find out more about SOON Productions at http://soonproductions.org/wordpress/index.php.

Theo Hummer earned an MFA from Cornell in 2004 and is now at work on a PhD. Her poetry has appeared in Sentence, Vox, and The Indiana Review and on the Verse magazine website, and will be included in the Best New Poets 2006 Anthology. Her first chapbook, The Parrot Bride, recently appeared from Anchorite Press.

Josh Corey is the author of two prizewinning poetry collections, Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), as well as the chapbook Compostition Marble, and mantains a popular blog on poetry and poetics at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com. He has been a Bookery II employee since 2003.

Aaron Tieger moved to Ithaca in 2004 from Cambridge, MA, where he was Poetry Editor at the magazine Art New England. In addition to numerous online and print publications, his work has appeared in the chapbooks Sea Shanties of Old Vermont (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), Merge Point (Anchorite Press, 2004), Days and Days (Pressed Wafer, 2004), and February (Fewer and Further Press, 2006. His blog can be found at aarontieger.blogspot.com. He is the editor of CARVE, a small magazine dedicated to innovative and under-the-radar poetry whose seventh issue has just been released.

Karen Leona Anderson is a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop and the recipient of a Rotary Scholarship to New Zealand who has had work published in Jubilat, Verse, Indiana Review, The New Republic, Fence, Pleiades, and VOLT. She is currently writing a dissertation on poetry and science at Cornell.

Bookery II is the city's largest and oldest independently owned bookstore and is located in the DeWitt Mall, in the heart of downtown Ithaca. Open Monday through Saturday from 9 am to 9:30 pm and Sunday 9:30 am to 6 pm.

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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