If you will be attending the AWP conference in Philadelphia, please join us for a reading from Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora: Friday, March 25, at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern Time). Four wonderful poets and translators will share work from the anthology: Athena Farrokhzad, Armen Davoudian, Kaveh Bassiri, and Sholeh Wolpé. More details about the event are here. Hope to see you there! And do stop by our table (1247) and say hello.
Robin Tomens wins the second Wishing Jewel Prize!
We are delighted to announce that Robin Tomens has won the second Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for an innovative manuscript that challenges expectations of what a book of poems can be! Resurrecting seemingly obsolete technology, Tomens uses a typewriter to create evocative visual poems that both invite and resist being read. Invigorating and a little disorienting, one comes away from these poems with the mind aswim in possibilities. You Would Say That will be published this summer. Pre-order your copy here; it’s not a book to be missed.
”Using typewriters, print, acrylic, carbon paper, and pen, Robin Tomens in You Would Say That playfully captures that ‘chattering’ in his head ‘that won’t stop’ as he unmoors letter from word, word from sense, each poem typed and retyped, layering the page. Sometimes a piece crystallizes out of that atomic layering into a moment of familiar clarity. A word or phrase. A complete sentence. And then, as often as not, a piece simply, beautifully—I think happily—stalls in a ruckus built for the eye. Page by page, Tomens not only maps the angularity and dynamics embedded in visual poems but simultaneously reveals the angularity, the false starts, the do-overs, the frustrations, in the process of that utterance. Tomens’ You Would Say That is a tactile, pleasurable read—ink on the hand, ink in the eye—that cuts to the heart of the alchemy between letter and word, and ultimately, thinking.” —Dennis Hinrichsen, author of schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize
"Robin Tomens’ You Would Say That explores the dead language of manual typewriters, a poetry which chatters from craft to architecture. The familiar logic of the typewriter, the anchor of our desk, slips away and letters slide off the grid into a choreographed questioning, pirouettes of punctuation. Hold tight, read differently, and open your mind to an atomistic collision, bonds forming and breaking in a bountiful microscopic ballet."
—Derek Beaulieu, Banff Poet Laureate
About the Author
Robin Tomens has been making art since producing zines in the Punk era. His multimedia collages and visual poetry have been featured in the exhibition Visual Poetry on the Page: With, Within, and Without the Word and with The Tunnel collective in London. Timglaset (Sweden) and Redfoxpress (Ireland) have published his booklets; his work has also appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and Explorations In Media Technology. His art has been used for album covers, and he makes his own artist’s books, most recently a collection of typewriter art called Yes I No. He has also written a book on Jazz, Points of Departure: Essays on Modern Jazz (Stride, 2001) and contributed to Cut Up! (Oneiris Books, 2014). He lives in London.
A fond thank you to everyone who sent a manuscript for us to consider. It has been an honor to be entrusted with so much fine work. Sincere congratulations to the finalists, whose work we found truly remarkable:
Aimee Wright Clow’s Dear, A Ballerina
James D’Agostino’s The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
Carol Ann Davis’s From Their Salts
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton’s Tilt
Molly Fuller’s Honey Suckle Wolf
Rae Gouirand’s The Velvet Book
Don Hogle’s Meet Me at Waterloo Station
Donald Platt’s Tender Voyeur
Dan Rosenberg’s Esau
Announcing the publication of James Hoch's Radio Static
Brilliant in its treatment of childhood, brotherhood, and war, James Hoch’s Radio Static is the selection from the 2020–21 chapbook open-reading period. It can be pre-ordered here for a December 21 publication. And join us on February 1 for James’ reading from the chapbook. Register here.
Praise for Radio Static
James Hoch is a visionary, able to find meaning in everything around him—dreams intersect with fields of poppies, a brother embodies a misguided war. His language is both precise and reckless—each word like a thread he’s been gathering his entire life, which he somehow weaves into broad fabrics of sound, into delicate tapestries that somehow stand before us, breathing. These poems are alive.
—Nick Flynn, author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
“Sometimes standing beside him, / I hear the wind whistling / through my brother,” James Hoch writes, in this spare, beautiful sequence about America’s newest generation of forgotten soldiers. These are heartbreaking poems that bear witness to both the devastation of war and the quiet ravages of coming home.
—Patrick Phillips, author of Elegy for a Broken Machine
“I love the only way I can,” writes James Hoch, and that love is woven throughout this excellent treatise on compassion and masculinity. Hoch knows a great deal about the complexities and solace of brotherhood, and in these poems we experience an endangered tenderness—the recognition that another can be both yourself and not yourself at the same time. This willingness to grapple with differences and come away with a connection merits your attention. Pick up the walkie-talkie and you will hear “each calling the other: / You there? You there?”
—Elizabeth Scanlon, editor, The American Poetry Review
BOOK LAUNCH READING: Richard Jones' The Minor Key
Join us Tuesday, November 9, at 8:00 p.m. CST to hear Richard read from his new magical book, which sings of the daily joys and transcendent sorrows.
Praise:
There are so many pleasures to be found in The Minor Key, and as much celebration here as lament. Sure, Jones like Keats gluts his sorrows—in the tender manner he dresses his mother who suffers from dementia or invites the Buddha in for tea and discussion of the first noble truth, and his acknowledgement of the gift of becoming invisible in old age. By turns retrospective, imaginative, and formal, Jones unfolds these new poems with his characteristic, cheerful directness and urgency. We often don’t know where he’s leading us nor toward what revelation, but we hold on to these poems as we do to our lives and to each other, “happy, / if happy is the word for the way this feels.”
—David Axelrod
Invoking the melancholic nature of the minor key, this fine book is acutely aware that melancholy’s great practitioners, like John Keats and Robert Burton, also celebrate life. Richard Jones’ poems remind us that it is our duty to remain “shining as best we know how, brightly together.” Not afraid to ask the difficult questions—What should I have done with my life? How does one get on with living?—Jones is equally committed to seeing “the sunlit summer sumacs sparkling,” to finding answers to life’s large questions. Here are poems that console without sentimentality and see clearly without falling into easy, unheroic despair.
—Michael Blumenthal
Richard Jones gives us melancholy music in The Minor Key, but a music so suffused with tenderness that all suffering trembles into love and light. These poems arise from “blue notebooks,” travel the world, and return to rooms lit by candles or to a backyard full of roses, visited by fox and deer, where two people sip perfect martinis as evening falls.
—Kathleen Kirk
BOOK LAUNCH READING: Dennis Hinrichsen's schema geometrica
Join us Tuesday, October 12, at 8:00 p.m. (CST) to hear Dennis Hinrichsen read from his new collection, schema geometrica, winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize.
Praise:
Some of us are content to rearrange the furniture. Dennis Hinrichsen has dismantled the walls, attached a wheelbase to the flooring, and reconfigured the power lines. And wait, I think he has levitated the shrubbery too. But fear not. Page by page and image by image, he leads us through the time- and memory-altering adventure that is schema geometrica. The poems are wild and rigorous at once, joyful and irreverent, abundant with intellect, and sometimes, yes, driven by rage at the wreckage we have made around us. This is not a comfortable couch of a lyric vision. This is lyric determined to imagine a future, and I admire it deeply.
—Linda Gregerson
schema geometrica is a “box of light” whittled from a life marred by darkness. Biblical ekphrasis & Daft Punk, Godzilla & gonorrhea, an extinct paddlefish & an Instagram model’s bodily brand of philanthropy—there are no subjects Dennis Hinrichsen can’t juxtapose & wield like a gilded mirror to orient the self in this confounding era. Lyrically dexterous, formally inventive, & humming with vulnerable surprise, schema geometrica is the work of a master poet.
—Marcus Wicker
BOOK LAUNCH READINGS!: Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora
Please join us for two evenings of poetry to celebrate the publication of our groundbreaking anthology, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which features 130 poets and translators from ten countries.
October 19 at 8:00 p.m. (CST) — register here —
Mansour Alimoradi, Kaveh Bassiri, Mandana Chaffa, Amin Fatemi, Mahdi Ganjavi, Fayre Makeig, Daniel Rafinejad, Parisa Saranj, Chad Sweeney, Ali Zarrin
October 20 at 8:00 p.m. (CST) — register here —
Roja Chamankar, Armen Davoudian, Tyler Fisher, Gary Gach, Persis Karim, Haidar Khezri, George Reiner, Siavash Saadlou, Niloufar Talebi
The Hive Poetry Podcast: Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora
Click here to listen to a conversation about and readings from Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, featuring host Nikia Chaney, editor Christopher Nelson, Armen Davoudian, Farnaz Fatemi, Persis Karim, and Arash Saedinia. This podcast aired Aug. 22, 2021, on KSQD, 90.7, Santa Cruz.
Dennis Hinrichsen has won the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize for schema geometrica!
Cover Art: Adrián Fernández
Dennis Hinrichsen has won the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize, awarded for a manuscript that challenges our notions of what poems can do and what a book can be. schema geometrica, Hinrichsen's ninth full-length collection, is nothing short of visionary. It juxtaposes quasi-sonnets and erasures with illustrations by Marnie Galloway, a Chicago-area cartoonist and illustrator, and Julian Van Dyke, a Lansing-area muralist, painter, and children’s book author. schema geometrica will be accompanied by a number of audio and video poems, available online this fall; this is a multimedia collaboration between Hinrichsen and Dylan Rogers, a Lansing-area musician and proprietor of The Robin Theatre, and Tom Larter, musician and composer.
It is slated for publication on Sept. 21, 2021, and can be pre-ordered here.
Third printing of Meg Kearney's The Ice Storm!
Third printing of Erika Brumett's bonehouse!
Get your copy here.
The Ice Storm author, Meg Kearney, in Conversation with Gayle Heney
Write Now with Gayle Heney features Meg Kearney, author of The Ice Storm.
Launch Reading: The Ice Storm by Meg Kearney, in Conversation with Cornelius Eady
Announcing the Publication of Meg Kearney's The Ice Storm!
Meg Kearney's most recent book of poetry for adults is Home By Now (Four Way Books 2009), winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award and a Finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year. Her first collection for adults, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions in 2001. Kearney is also author of three young-adult verse novels (all by Persea Books) and an award-winning picture book titled Trouper (Scholastic). In the past, her poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry East, Cave Wall, Post Road, and The Kenyon Review. Natasha Trethewey chose her poem "Grackle," first published in The Massachusetts Review, for the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology. She is founding director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program and lives in New Hampshire.
Praise for The Ice Storm
In Meg Kearney’s masterful crown of sonnets, The Ice Storm, the drama of a disintegrating marriage plays out against the backdrop of storms and disasters, natural and man-made. The opening line of the first sonnet, “The marriage is over before the storm strikes” also serves as the opening line of the fifteenth, since this is (in all senses) a heroic crown. But throughout the interim, we accompany this unhappy couple, intimately experiencing with them “the silent storm that tears a marriage to rags / and leaves [them] wondering what hit them.” In retrospect, this marriage clearly seems to have been doomed from the beginning, but the painful journey of discovery the reader shares with these two people is nonetheless tonic and exhilarating because of the sequence’s happy marriage of artistry and insight.
—Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town
Meg Kearney writes The Ice Storm with passion and a skill so subtle that sometimes you're not aware you're in the midst of a crown of sonnets—but solely in the tempest of a breakup. This magnificent sequence infuses the end-of-love sonnet tradition with poignancy, anger, and damage. The marriage “starts like a lullaby, innocent as rain,” but when the union implodes, “outside the window is ice.” All the practicalities that rarely make it into poetry, from money to sump-pump batteries, appear in Kearney's verse page-turner. Her sonnets writhe and fracture with emotion that “sweeps in ruin,” making a monument to the swift talent of this splendid poet.
—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems
In The Ice Storm, Meg Kearney tells the story of a marriage disintegrating against the backdrop of the traumatic events of 9/11 and their aftermath. Whether read as a single long poem or a crown of sonnets ending with a marvelous final cento, The Ice Storm reveals this wonderful poet’s tonal and formal accomplishment, as well as her refusal to look away when the world is “imploding again,” or from the painfully raw truth of “how love can die so quietly.”
—Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors
In Solidarity with Black Lives Matter
Green Linden Press stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. We encourage all readers to help—however they can—move us toward a more just society. Today we're donating $500 to the Black Futures Lab.
Announcing the Publication of Richard Jones' Avalon!
It is with great excitement that we announce our first full-length poetry publication: Avalon by Richard Jones! Scheduled for release in June, you can pre-order Avalon here. The author of sixteen previous books, including Stranger on Earth, Apropos of Nothing, and The Blessing, Jones is also the award-winning editor of Poetry East. A frequent contributor to Under a Warm Green Linden, you can read his poems in Issue 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7. In keeping with his style of lucid observation and humble self-reflection, Avalon invites readers into a world where the mundane and the spiritual intersect.
Praise for Avalon
Richard Jones’s new poems typically start out on common ground, but after only a few lines, a seemingly effortless shift occurs that transports his reader into magical realms of the spirit and imagination, some serene, others sorrowful. Jones is a poet who not only knows that the world around us is full of secret gates but has a key that fits every one he tries. Rarely in poetry has clarity served as a springboard into such stunning, sweetly rendered, and utterly believable fantasies. Avalon had me locked in; I could hardly wait to get to the next poem.
—Billy Collins
Tomas Transtromer once wrote “I am not empty, I am open,” a distinction these visionary inquiries called poems also make with luminous results. Not since Rilke have poems made me this certain that, if anything can, art will mend the world. Whether he is traveling by foot, like Basho, another pilgrim, or exploring the metaphoric landscape of the soul, Richard Jones is our guide to “the true things that last forever.”
—Connie Wanek
From Avalon
Still Life
I keep returning to the unfinished painting
dry on the easel, a still life
of yellow apples and a blue pitcher.
In the quiet of my sunny room
I’m free to walk around,
to observe the canvas from near and far
in differing aspects of light.
I close my eyes for a time,
trying to clear my vision.
I stand to the left, the “gospel side,”
as the hour passes and the room grows dim.
In the flickering light of candles,
the painting grows more mysterious than ever,
and I more shadowed and unseeing.
Many days I work like this,
never once mixing paints, never lifting a brush.
Announcing the Publication of James Scruton's The Rules!
The fifth publication in the Green Linden Chapbook Series is James Scruton’s The Rules, which “evokes an American childhood both familiar and exotic, poignant and enthralling,” writes Richard Jones. “Childhood,” he continues, “is a mysterious country we are lucky to survive, yet yearn for as we age. Our nostalgia is not for old wounds or an innocent heart, but a longing for the once-bright recognition of reality in its shining glory.”
To get your copy, visit our store. You can read a sample poem, “Cribbage,” in Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 7, and “Ghost Runners,” in Poetry.
Launch Reading for Dennis Hinrichsen's [q / lear]!
![Dennis Hinrichsen reads from [q / lear] at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (photo: Jill Doster Marcusse)](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/541f04e8e4b09b50ed9d911b/1571238362013-NJ2CG8INMV1748SYS3KZ/Dennis+at+Books+and+Mortar.jpg)
Dennis Hinrichsen reads from [q / lear] at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (photo: Jill Doster Marcusse)
Announcing the Publication of Dennis Hinrichsen's [q / lear]!
On behalf of Green Linden Press I am excited to announce the publication of [q / lear], a chap-book by Dennis Hinrichsen, the first poet laureate of Greater Lansing and the author of seven award-winning collections!
Of these poems Sue William Silverman says, "[q / lear] concerns itself with the big issues of mortality and madness—like the play it uses as a backdrop. While some of these poems refer to bodies in decay, the poems themselves build, accrete, and pulse with Hinrichsen’s trademark restlessness and energy. As a great poet of the soul as well as the flesh, Hinrichsen explores the primordial dance between the human spirit and our vulnerable bodies while making us experience it anew."
A sample of poems from the chapbook can be read in Issue 5 of Under a Warm Green Linden.
[q / lear] and all of our chapbooks can be found in our store. In accordance with our green mission, a portion of sales supports reforestation efforts; to date we have planted 300 trees.
If you are in the Greater Lansing area, I hope that you will join Dennis at the following events:
September 14 & 21: Workshop at Grand Ledge Area District Library (1–3 p.m., both days)
September 19: Reading at the Midland Center for the Arts with Grace Carras (7:30 p.m.)
September 22: Reading in Eaton Rapids with Lansing Poet Laureate Laura Apol (2–4 p.m.)
September 26: Reading in Charlotte at the Windwalker Underground Gallery (6–8 p.m.)
October 5: Keynote speaker at Michigan College English Association Conference "Borders, Walls, and Bridges" at Michigan State University
October 12: Reading in Alpena with Robert Fanning, Christina Kallery, Keith Taylor & David James (5–7 p.m.)
October 15: Reading at Books & Mortar in Grand Rapids with Sue William Silverman (time TBD)
October 17: Reading in St. Johns at the Wilson Center with Lansing Poet Laureate Laura Apol (7–8:30 p.m.)
October 18: Two readings with Ron Riekki in support of Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice: (1) at the Public Library in Ovid (time TBD), and (2) at Everybody Reads in Lansing (6 p.m.)
October 22: Reading at Howell Library (2 p.m.) and at Pages Bookstore in Detroit with Ron Riekki, Jim Lewis & Keith Taylor in support of Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (6 p.m.)
October 23: Reading in Ann Arbor at Crazy Wisdom (7 p.m.)
October 25: Reading in Bay City at 99 Trees Bookstore with Ron Riekki & others (2 p.m.)
October 25: Reading in Flint at Totem Books with Ron Riekki & others in support of Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (5 p.m.)
October 26: Reading at Kazoo Books with Ron Riekki, Joy Gaines-Friedler & Eric Torgersen in support of Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (7–8:30 p.m.)
October 29: Reading at East Lansing Public Library with Lansing Poet Laureate Laura Apol, Brian Gilmore & Jan Shoemaker (7 p.m.)
October 30: Reading at Michigan State University with ML Liebler, Cindy Hunter Morgan in support of RESPECT: An Anthology of Poems on Detroit Music (7:30 p.m.)
November 6: Workshop and Open Mic at Crosswalk Teen Center in Charlotte (4 p.m.)
November 7: Reading at Ransom District Library in Plainwell with Andrew Collard & Kimberly Ann Priest (7 p.m.)
November 12: Reading at Nicola’s in Ann Arbor with Terry Blackhawk (time TBD)
November 14: Reading at The Bookman in Grand Haven with Kathleen McGookey and Jennifer Clark at (7 p.m.)
November 17: Reading at Lansing Poetry Club (2–4 p.m.)
January 14 & 21: Ekphrastic Workshop at Lansing Art Gallery and Education Center
January 28: Reading at Skazat! Poetry Series at Sweetwater Cafe in Ann Arbor (7 p.m.)
March 17: Olivet College
March 25: Reading at Royal Oak Library as featured reader
April 16: Reading at Royal Oak Library with Keith Taylor & Ann Marie Oomen (7 p.m.)
And please mark your calendars: our next open-reading period for chapbook manuscripts will be from December 21, 2019 to March 20, 2020. Poetry submissions for upcoming issues of Under a Warm Green Linden and the accompanying broadside series are read year-round, as are interviews and reviews.
2019 Firecracker Award Finalist!
We are honored to be a finalist for CLMP’s 2019 Firecracker Award for best magazine debut! Many thanks to the poets, critics, and readers who have made Under a Warm Green Linden successful.
Erotic Poetry Contest Results
A fond thank you to everyone who sent poems for our inaugural Erotic Poetry Contest. It was a delight to read so much evocative work. Matthew Murrey's "In the Thick of It" has been selected as the winner. His poem will appear in our broadside series and the forthcoming Issue 7. You can pre-order the broadside here.
We would also like to acknowledge the following poets and their astonishing erotic poems, which will be included in Issues 7 & 8 later this year:
David Axelrod: "Lastness,"
"Song of 45° N, 118° W"Amber Brodie: "Lover in the Pacific"
Katie Kurtz: "fucking"
Philip Metres: "Interior with Silk"
William Palomo: "Anonas"