American Reader Series – serie

In his first collection of essays on poetry in 27 years, W.D. Snodgrass goes after that seminal quality, the poet’s individual voice, that separates the best poetry from the merely technical and pedantic. Beginning with an essay on the poetic impulse, and continuing through prosody and musicality, Snodgrass gives us an essential handbook for poets and poetry readers.

Responsible for the emergence of American confessional poetry, W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his first book, Heart’s Needle. He lives with his wife, critic and translator Kathleen Snodgrass, in Erieville, New York, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

In the foreword to Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, “What characterizes Li-Young Lee’s poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets.

Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.

“Reading Anthony Tognazzini is like having a surprise party thrown in your honor on every page. I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These turns cartwheels, plants daisies, and sings love songs in honor of all that is strange, sad, serious, and sublime about being alive.”—Myla Goldberg, author of Bee Season

I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is a collection of fifty-seven pieces that range in length from compressed paragraphs to ten-page stories. Characters, voices, and surreal scenarios are unified in a playful vision of the world sustained by metaphor, memory, cartoon, tragedy, love story, and song.

Speed and brevity are a large part of the collection’s design. In a culture where attention spans are shorter and more fractured, the need for a literature for the subway and the waiting room—something to resonate in the smaller gaps of our lives—is emerging. To this end, I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These is quick, colloquial, and comic, yet challenges readers to think. It offers—at a glance—a journey into a fictional world that is poetic and narrative, fantastic and familiar, accessible and adventurous.

“The Difference”

Although I was never an early riser, my father always counseled me to rise with the sun. “Early bird gets the worm!” he told me. “Sure,” I said, “but the worm who sleeps late, lives.”

Anthony Tognazzini lives in New York City, where he makes his living as a teacher and freelance journalist. His awards include an AWP Award, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Greer Artist Foundation Fellowship, and a Hemingway Fellowship.

From "The Glass Girl":

On certain evenings in dark motels, she could transform her lip into the edge of the bottle, imagining her face was made of amber glass and the men paused above her only to take a drink of breath. Over the years, men drank and drank until there were only two sips left inside. They began sucking the air out of the glass that grew warm in the wrong places because of heat radiating off their hands. The men's breath along with white feathers fell over autumn winds drifting through open windows.

In this collection, Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize–winner Aimee Parkison's characters struggle to understand what happens when the innocent party becomes the guilty party. With magical realist flair, secrets are aired with dirty laundry, but the stains never come clean. Carol Anshaw writes, "Aimee Parkison offers a distinct new voice to contemporary fiction. Her seductive stories explore childhood as a realm of sorrows, and reveal the afflictions of adults who emerge from this private geography."

Aimee Parkison has an MFA from Cornell University. She is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches creative writing.