2015 23rd Annual Poets House Showcase Exhibition Catalog |Poets House|10 River Terrace|New York, NY 10282|poetshouse.org| 5 The 2015 Poets House Showcase is made possible through the generosity of the hundreds of publishers and authors who have graciously donated their works. We are deeply grateful to Deborah Saltonstall Pease (1943 – 2014) for her foundational support. Many thanks are also due to the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Leon Levy Foundation, and the many members of Poets House for their support of this project. 6 I believe that poetry is an action in which there enter as equal partners solitude and solidarity, emotion and action, the nearness to oneself, the nearness to mankind and to the secret manifestations of nature. – Pablo Neruda Towards the Splendid City Nobel Lecture, 1971 WELCOME to the 2015 Poets House Showcase! Each summer at Poets House, we celebrate all of the poetry published in the previous year in an all-inclusive exhibition and festival of readings from new work. In this year’s Showcase, we are very proud to present over 3,000 poetry books, chapbooks, broadsides, artist’s books, and multimedia projects, which represent the work of over 700 publishers, from commercial publishers to micropresses, both domestic and foreign. For twenty-three years, the annual Showcase has provided foundational support for our 60,000-volume library by helping us keep our collection current and relevant. With each Showcase, Poets House—one of the most extensive poetry collections in the nation—continues to build this comprehensive poetry record of our time. BUILDING THE EXHIBIT—AND THE POETS HOUSE LIBRARY COLLECTION Every summer, Poets House invites poets and publishers to participate in our annual Showcase by donating copies of poetry titles released since January of the previous year. This year’s exhibit highlights all poetry titles published in 2014 and the first half of 2015. In building the Poets House Showcase each year, we strive to include as many different poetic schools, forms, and communities we can find, and we work to build relationships with all types of American and foreign publishers, from university press to letterpress studio, so that we can continue to promote and support their important work. Individual titles are also contributed by authors themselves, by library patrons, and by poetry lovers (often far from New York!) who send us books they think we might need. Every donation is welcome, appreciated, and featured, if the publication date is appropriate, in the Showcase. ORGANIZATION AND SCOPE The Showcase is organized alphabetically by publisher to make apparent the editorial vision of each publisher, to give insight into the changing landscape of poetry publishing in the United States and beyond, and to provide a resource for writers seeking a home for their work. The Poets House Showcase focuses on individual collections of poetry, but it also includes a wide array of prose and criticism, anthologies, chapbooks and multilingual volumes. As in past years, the Showcase includes poetry presented in atypical formats: from traditional broadsides and ephemera, to calendars and poetry trading cards, to one-of-a-kind handmade artist’s books and art objects. The focus of the Poets House Showcase is on United States presses and publishers, but the collection is also 7 designed to serve an international community of poets. Poets House includes English-language works from international publishers, in particular those from the UK and Canada, but from a number of other countries—from Singapore to Finland—as well. EXHIBITION DATES AND PROGRAMS The 2015 Poets House Showcase opens to the public on June 25, 2015 and remains open during regular library hours until August 8, 2015. During these seven weeks, readings will be held in celebration of the Showcase from a few of the many authors whose works are featured in the exhibition, including Bill Berkson, Dorothea Lasky, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Elizabeth Willis, Timothy Liu, Sara Jane Stoner, Yolanda Wisher, Magdalena Zurawski, Ellen Hagan, Parneshia Jones, Anne Marie Macari, Jean Valentine, Nickole Brown, Betsy Fagin, Jessica Jacobs, and Thomas Mayer. On July 30th, the Showcase Reading Series will conclude with our Member Reading, an opportunity for those Poets House members with books featured in the Showcase to share their new work with our whole community. At the close of the exhibit, Showcase titles move upstairs to our recent titles shelf, where they are alphabetized by author, rather than by publisher, so that they can be accessible to visitors wishing to browse the collection’s most recent titles. At the time of next summer’s Showcase, our 2014 titles will be integrated into the main collection of our 60,000-volume library. THE NUMBERS The 2015 Poets House Showcase includes 3,042 titles from 737 publishers and presses. This includes 335 chapbooks, 100 anthologies, 46 prose works, 5 broadsides, 21 artist’s books, and 9 multimedia works. 64 of the titles are foreign-language, bilingual, or multilingual. Of the 3,042 titles, 2,090 were published in 2014 and 952 in 2015. 30 are uncorrected proofs and advance reading copies of books yet to be published. HOW TO PARTICIPATE IN THE POETS HOUSE SHOWCASE Poets House is happy to accept donations for our annual Showcase all year long, and all titles donated to us within a year of their publication will be included in that year’s Showcase. As the Showcase is an inclusive event, Poets House encourages all publishers and poets to submit one copy of their most recently published poetry titles to Poets House to be featured in our next exhibit. Please direct your submissions to Gina Scalise, Poets House Librarian, and spread the word! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Poets House wishes to thank each author, publisher, and poetry lover who contributed the thousands of books in this exhibition. We know that publishing poetry is often a labor of love, undertaken at personal expense, and we’re so grateful to be able to share your work with our community here. Special thanks to Brent Cunningham and the rest of our friends at Small Press Distribution for contributing many key titles to our exhibition. Many thanks to the Board of Directors for their unflagging support of this program. Thanks to Lee Briccetti, Executive Director, and Jane Preston, Managing Director, for facilitating and encouraging this endeavor. 8 Thanks to the Poets House staff—Joe Fritsch, Reggie Harris, Suzanne Highland, Alice Kaasik, Christina Lem, Suzanne Lunden, Krista Manrique, Stephen Motika, Mike Romanos, Bleuberthol Scott, and Suzanne Wise— for their constant support and advice. The 2015 Showcase is presented in loving memory of Deborah Saltonstall Pease, whose support of this program and Poets House helped it make the institution it has become. This has been my second year tackling the Showcase with Poets House’s librarian, Gina Scalise, whose creative solutions, commitment to serving her community, and grace under fire remain an inspiration to me and the rest of Poets House. Many thanks as well to all of the Poets House volunteers and interns who generously gave their time to help us catalog, alphabetize, shelve, display, and otherwise keep tabs on over 3,000 books: Matthew Anish, Randy Carfagno, Amy Carlberg, Brian Carpenter, Madison Chafin, Nicole Gnafakis, Claire Hogan, Cheryl Koh, Eli Landau, Carolyn Lee, Martha Lerski, Delsa Lopez, Daniel Marx, Leonor Miller, Alana Mohamed, Esti Petrushka, Lauren Routt, Miriam Starc, Felicia Tsao, Ryan Yamada, and Precious Musa, our tireless alphabetizer. Finally, many thanks to the people we’ve built this Showcase for: our readers, visitors, and Poets House patrons. The Showcase reminds us that writing does not happen in isolation, but is an act of communication and community. Our work is not our own as soon as we are brave enough to share it; once we share it, the world is different and richer. Lauren Clark 2015 Poets House Showcase Coordinator 9 Listings by Publisher (Great) Indian Poetry Collective ○ Hajratwala, Minal, Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment, 2014. ○ Kombiyil, Ellen, Histories of the Future Perfect, 2015. 1913 Press ○ McFarland, Scott, O Human Microphone, 2014. ○ Obadike, Mendi and Keith, Big House/Disclosure, 2014. 1913 Press / Assless Chaps ○ Conrad, CA, Full Moon Hawk Application, 2014. 226 Press ○ Purdom, Christopher William, With Our English Dead, 2014. 3: A Taos Press ○ Brown, Bill, Elemental, 2014. ○ Early, Max, Ears of Corn: Listen, 2014. ○ Golos, Veronica, Rootwork, 2015. 3Ring Press ○ Bomze, Bracha Nechama, Love Justice, 2015. 7th Grade Poetry Foundation ○ Williams, Aaron; ed., Poetry on Our Terms: Winners of the 2014 7GP 7th Grade Poetry Contest, 2014. ○ Williams, Aaron; ed., Poetry on Our Terms: Winners of the 2015 7GP 7th Grade Poetry Contest, 2015. 826NYC ○ Bronx Leadership Academy II, Class of 2016, Growing our hearts & brains : poems on love, technology, and success, 2014. 918studio ○ Bertram, Erin M. and Ryan R. Collins, Where the Wind Bends Backwards, 2015. ○ Georgiou, Trisha, A New Life and Other Poems of Living , 2014. Able Muse Press ○ Baer, William, Times Square and Other Stories, 2015. ○ Balmain, Melissa, Walking in on People, 2014. ○ Conelly, William, Uncontested Grounds, 2015. ○ Drury, John Philip, Sea Level Rising, 2015. ○ Goodman, D.R., Greed: A Confession, 2014. ○ Kaufman, Ellen, House Music, 2014. ○ Light, Carol, Heaven from Steam, 2014. ○ McGovern, Martin, Bad Fame, 2015. 10 ○ Merrin, Jeredith, Cup, 2014. ○ Newman, Richard, All the Wasted Beauty of the World, 2014. ○ Videlock, Wendy, Slingshots and Love Plums, 2015. ○ Woodard, Chelsea, Vellum, 2014. above/ground press ○ Lea, N. W., Present!, 2014. Chapbook. ○ mclennan, rob, from Hark: A Journal, 2014. Chapbook. ○ Pirie, Pearl, Vertigoheel for the Dilly, 2014. Chapbook. ○ Schmaltz, Eric, Mitsumi Elec. Co. Ltd, 2014. Chapbook. Abrams Books ○ Schwartz, Amy, 100 things that make me happy, 2015.