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.