The Melville House blog points us to the fact that over 15 Turkish publishers have contributed books to a “free, donated public library, open to everyone,” reminiscent of the Occupy People’s Library: According to the Turkish English language newspaper, Hurriyet Daily News, a local publisher, Sel Publishing House, is calling on other publishers to donate [...]

There are many people to thank for bringing out this landmark edition of Ashbery’s seminal poem “The Skaters” from his 1966 title Rivers and Mountains. We caught wind of it yesterday through Jacket2. What’s in the package? This: In its current state, this edition offers: – a plain text version of the poem, with optional [...]

If you thought City Lights was all about poetry, we’re reminded today of the store’s connection to punk. City Lights has a long history of engagement with the punk rock scene, you may know already that V.Vale started the insurrectionary Search and Destroy fanzine with financial help from Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. Ruby Ray who took [...]

Evie Shockley contributed this fantastic analysis of the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, published in 2011, edited by Rita Dove, to the Boston Review. Mostly, Shockley spends a stupendously thorough amount of time in her write-up dissecting Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler’s responses to this anthology and laying out what’s at stake for [...]

You are going to this wild party, non? If ouais, then (as the French would say) sorry Charlie, you missed the discounted online tickets and gotta buy your billet at the door for vingt palourdes (twenty clams). The door! Horrors. What are we talking about, you ask? We dunno, our crush is a piece of [...]

If you’re in New York on June 13, get yourself to Greenpoint for a surely solid reading to benefit legal activist Jerry Koch, who is currently serving time for refusing to testify in response to a federal grand jury summons. More info from organizers Josef Kaplan and Aaron Winslow: Dear friends, Hope to see you [...]

Folks all over the interwebs are getting their lists together for summer reads. If you make your way over to Insert/Blanc Press now, you can be sure to reserve your copy of A Slap in the Face: Four Russian Futurist Manifestos in time for some heady beach reading. This is the first in their “Manifestohs” [...]

Turns out, in the literary death match between Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, it’s Plath all the way! Or, that’s to say, Plath’s poem “Edge” (which scored a 1.42302654867) is closer to the “professional” end of the spectrum according to the Poetry Assessor, an application created by an Australian team of computational linguists to quantify [...]

Juan Felipe Herrera teaches poetry at the University of California, Riverside and since 2012, has served as California’s poet laureate. This spring, he joined forced with one-hundred fifth grade students from Moreno Valley’s Towngate Elementary School to launch i-Promise Joanna, an anti-bullying awareness project, and an official Poet Laureate Project, at UC Riverside’s Gluck Day [...]

The Library Spider sent us this hot tip: apparently a number of schools are teaching a poem written by American author, Nancy Willard, but telling students that the poem was written by William Blake! How did this happen? Teachers searching the Internet for examples of poetry to use in their instruction are finding a poem [...]

The 25th-annual Lambda Literary Awards (AKA The Lammys) were announced yesterday, after their fancy get-down at Cooper Union on June 3 got some shut-eye for the night. As we mentioned, it was a record year for the awards, for both nominees and publishers. The winner in the Lesbian Poetry category (tough one!) was Sea and [...]

Whoever Lemon Hound’s intern is, we’re so grateful! Just posted yesterday is a piece by Lisa Robertson on Denise Riley, originally published in the Globe & Mail on September 8, 2001. Robertson looks at Riley’s use of flowers and fauna. An excerpt: They are girls in old holiday photo albums, and they are today’s fine [...]

Michael Robbins wrote about Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s new book, My Love Is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press 2012), for the Chicago Tribune, beginning with the blanket, “Most poetry published is mediocre at best, and often plain awful” (could be, could be!), but moving to “Ackerson-Kiely is setting the woods on fire.” More: Here’s the end [...]

Futurepoem Press announced the winners of its 2012 Open Call: Sueyeun Juliette Lee, for her manuscript, Solar Maximum, and David Buuck, for his manuscript Site Cite City. Congratulations to Sueyeun and Buuck! This year’s guest editors for the 2012 Futurepoem contest were Christian Hawkey, Richard Maxwell and Juliana Spahr. Futurepoem Press will announce the guest [...]

Indian Country profiles Navajo poet, Sherwin Bitsui, with a particular interest in the creation of his book Flood Song, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. If you don’t know Bitsui already, this interview is one great way to get to know him. When did you realize you were going to be a poet? I [...]

This week’s Omniverse reprints a lengthened version of Evelyn Reilly’s talk entitled “Environmental Dreamscapes and Ecopoetic Grief,” which she presented at the 2013 U.C. Berkeley Eco-poetics Conference. Reilly’s talk includes fantastic analysis on the state of ecopoetics, what it feels like to be an eco-poet, thoughts on Alan Gilbert’s recent scholarship on interdisciplinary arts in [...]

Take off your harness winkers and get thee to Archive of the Now, where the first recording from the new U.S./UK simultaneous reading series, UnAmerican Activities, has just flown forth. Reading One, which took place on May 12 in New York and May 12 in Cambridge (Cubism rise!), featured Lanny Jordan Jackson on our side [...]

This just in, from our friends at Melville House: on Saturday, a Chilean judge ordered police to start looking for one man, who may have killed Pablo Neruda. This command is the culmination of a two-year campaign to investigate the Nobel laureate’s cause of death, which began when the poet’s former driver alleged that Neruda [...]

We don’t usually book-announce, but this is one to know: The gorgeous UK-based Skysill Press has just announced the long-awaited first full-length from New York poet Arlo Quint, whose poems, as John Ashbery blurbs here, “have the remote, enraptured quality of the lines that Orpheus copies down from his car radio in the Cocteau film, [...]

Good news: Notre Dame’s Letras Latinas (the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies, if you aren’t awares) is turning some leaves in a new partnership and book series with Noemi Press; the initiative will showcase new books by Latina/o writers! First book to be published will be Boxing the Compass, by Sandy Florian. [...]