2007 titles: the year of poetry

Letters to My Sister
by Angela Vasquez-Giroux

Composed as a series of letters to a family member serving in Iraq, Angela Vasquez-Giroux's first poetry chapbook is a vivid evocation of the fear, displacement, and uncertainty that war imposes on those who are left behind. Through images of fragmentation and fragility—misreadings of scripture, partial glimpses of a loved one in a news report—Letters to My Sister speaks of the challenges of survival, both for those in the field and at home. (more)

The Bridge and the River
by Timothy Carmody

From Detroit and Chicago to Harlem to Dublin, The Bridge and the River gives us a poetry as notable for its geographic exploration as its literary ambition. While Timothy Carmody's poems create new landscapes of the temporal, linguistic, and structural, it is, in the end, Carmody's empathy that makes his writing so powerful. (more)

Pure Pop
by Tim Lane

"Pure Pop is just that—a little bit of Coke, a little bit of homage to the Pops of the New York School, and a lot of heart. Tim Lane's gracefully fluent lyrics are celebratory, immediate, full of feeling, and full of life. Without falling into sloppy sentimentality or clunky derivation, Lane conjures his own world while stealing fire from the masters."
—Lisa Jarnot, author of Black Dog Songs and Ring of Fire (more)

Nine Poems
by Gavin Craig

"Nine Poems' minimalism isn't austere, but intimate and guarded, like fragments from a whispered, feverish conversation. Each poem withholds more than it gives. You read them as you would read a bruise hidden under a shirtsleeve, guessing that the discolored surface signals a story that's unlikely to be told. But there's also something bracing and reassuring about their silence, their insubstantiality; the signs of secrecy, a shared moment, a conspiracy."
—Timothy Carmody, author of The Bridge and the River (more)

Nine Poems

Nine Poems by Gavin Craig

"Nine Poems' minimalism isn't austere, but intimate and guarded, like fragments from a whispered, feverish conversation. Each poem withholds more than it gives. You read them as you would read a bruise hidden under a shirtsleeve, guessing that the discolored surface signals a story that's unlikely to be told. But there's also something bracing and reassuring about their silence, their insubstantiality; the signs of secrecy, a shared moment, a conspiracy."
—Timothy Carmody, author of The Bridge and the River

Poetry, 11 pp. Click here to download PDF.

Gavin Craig is a graduate student at Michigan State University, where he co-founded The Offbeat, and served as Editor from 1999–2001.

365 short days ago

It was one year ago today that we posted our first Revelator chapbook, Line Jester and Other Stories by Michael Duncan.

Help us celebrate our first birthday by downloading Line Jester, or one (or all) of our other great chapbooks:

Pure Pop, poems by Tim Lane
The Bridge and the River, poems by Timothy Carmody
Letters to My Sister, poems by Angela Vasquez-Giroux
The Nijinsky Poems, poems by Meg Sparling
Between the Water and the Air, drama by Andrew Hungerford

As always, all of our titles are available as free PDF downloads.

Thanks to all of the writers and readers that have made our first year such a success!

Pure Pop

Pure Pop by Tim Lane

"Pure Pop is just that—a little bit of Coke, a little bit of homage to the Pops of the New York School, and a lot of heart. Tim Lane's gracefully fluent lyrics are celebratory, immediate, full of feeling, and full of life. Without falling into sloppy sentimentality or clunky derivation, Lane conjures his own world while stealing fire from the masters."
—Lisa Jarnot, author of Black Dog Songs and Ring of Fire

Pure Pop delivers all of the delicious, unmitigated pleasure implied in its title. Tim Lane's poems, jubilant and experientially engaged, prove that joy too is serious stuff.

Poetry, 27 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Tim Lane lives, writes and paints in Lansing, Michigan.

The Bridge and the River

The Bridge and the River by Timothy Carmody

"In the years I have worked with Timothy Carmody I have been frequently amazed and occasionally annoyed by his habitual production of really outstanding work. If The Bridge and the River sometimes betrays its influences—Charles Simic, James Baldwin, Frank O'Hara—it must be conceded that the poet's choices are admirable, and the raw materials are always his own. These are early poems, and in them Mr. Carmody experiments with imagery, narrative, and voice, but his experiments are never simply academic, and the results are both sophisticated and affecting. Place matters. Memory persists. The pleasures of the world, slow and hard-won, are worth savoring. The same can be said of this collection."
—Gavin Craig, editor of Offbeat/1

From Detroit and Chicago to Harlem to Dublin, The Bridge and the River gives us a poetry as notable for its geographic exploration as its literary ambition. While Timothy Carmody's poems create new landscapes of the temporal, linguistic, and structural, it is, in the end, Carmody's empathy that makes his writing so powerful.

Poetry, 25 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Timothy Carmody was born in Detroit, Michigan. He currently lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he studies Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Letters to My Sister

Letters to My Sister by Angela Vasquez-Giroux

Composed as a series of letters to a family member serving in Iraq, Angela Vasquez-Giroux's first poetry chapbook is a vivid evocation of the fear, displacement, and uncertainty that war imposes on those who are left behind. Through images of fragmentation and fragility—misreadings of scripture, partial glimpses of a loved one in a news report—Letters to My Sister speaks of the challenges of survival, both for those in the field and at home.

Poetry, 15 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Angela Vasquez-Giroux is a textbook middle child. Her fascination with words began at age three, when her mother taught her to say extraordinary. She lives in Lansing with her partner and daughter.

Proliferation

"Line Jester" by Michael Duncan has been published by the online magazine Void.

Congratulations to Mr. Duncan, and for those who like "Line Jester," be sure to check out the additional stories available in Line Jester and Other Stories.

Up next

We've been quiet for a while, but we've been busy, and over the next several weeks, you'll finally get a chance to see what we've been working on.

As I write, we're putting the finishing touches on Letters to My Sister, a powerful set of poems from Angela Vasquez-Giroux. We're also knee-deep in The Bridge and the River, a collection of poems from Timothy Carmody. Finally, we have third project in the works, which is a bit of a stretch for us, but we're really excited about it. I don't want to say too much and ruin the surpise.

So that's what we're working on, but we'd also like to know what you'd like to read. What should we be looking for? More stories? More scripts? Poems, poems, and more poems? If you have ideas or requests, please let us know.

A nice tie-in

The New York Review of Books has posted, from its archive, a 1999 essay by Joan Acocella on Vaslav Nijinsky. (I'd like to think that the NYRB's timing is a response to Meg sparling's recent collection, The Nijinsky Poems, but it probably has more to do with Acocella's new collection of essays, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, which is reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates in the NYRB's current issue.)

On a recent rainy Wednesday

Meg Sparling, author of The Nijinsky Poems, writes about an exhibition of Nijinsky's drawings in New York.

2006 titles

Fiction

Line Jester and Other Stories
by Michael Duncan

Michael Duncan's debut chapbook takes the reader through surreal landscapes, where art is both necessary and impossible. Throughout his writing, the force of Duncan's ideas is matched with an exacting attention to language and detail. Line Jester and Other Stories offers a bracing reminder of the power of beauty, and a singular, expressionist aesthetic. (more)

Poetry

The Nijinsky Poems
by Meg Sparling

In The Nijinsky Poems, Meg Sparling has crafted a sensitive and insightful revisiting of the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. Combining the biographical with the lyrical, Sparling's writing embodies the power and contingency of the dancer. The Nijinsky Poems is a haunting tribute to a delicate and beautiful man, and a nimble, unerring performance of its own. (more)

Drama

Between the Water and the Air
by Andrew Hungerford

By turns wistful and compelling, Between the Water and the Air is the story of a father and a son, a brother and a sister, a girl, and a mechanic. Ken, a former scholarship student with a habit of running away from responsibility, is forced by his father's declining health and increasingly insistent family to confront his sense of displacement within his own life. (more)