CHRONIC
How I love the hospital
Gift shop—pocketing the penny
The Hartnell College Planetarium and the Homestead Review are pleased to announce the 17th annual Poetic Voices Poetry Festival. This event will take place at 7pm in the Hartnell College Planetarium. This year’s featured readers will be a bevy of local poets: Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, Jennifer Fellguth, River Tabor, Bob Barminski, and Maria Teutsch.
Poetic Voices Poetry festival celebrates the poetry of college students, and will also feature 10 student poets who will receive the Circo Prize for poetry. Students wrote poems about various celestial bodies and/or planets. Andrew Lindsey, planetarium coordinator, will display celestial images to accompany the poets
The event is sponsored by the Homestead Review literary journal and the Hartnell College Foundation. Student winners: Erica Craddock, Helen Dunston, Jaime Flores, Celia Jimenez, Jennifer Le, Joel Pablo, Monroe Vallejo, Christina Veitenheimer, Jacob Vosti, and Paige Wolfe
The reading will take place at the Hartnell College Planetarium at 7PM, Thursday, April 27th, 2017. The event is free and open to the public.
Poet Republik Ltd. is proud to present the dual launch party for two extraordinary books of poetry:
Invitation to a Rescue by Kate Lutzner and Occassionally, I Remove Your Brain Through Your Nose, by J. Hope Stein with guest readers Jameson O’Hara Laurens winner of Ping-Pong Free Press Poetry Prize, 2016, Maria Garcia Teutsch, Christine Hamm, Karen Hildebrand, Martha Cambridge, Sherry Stuart and musical guest, Orly Bendavid
Saturday, April 22nd at Botanica Bar, 47 E. Houston St., in Soho, NYC from 6-8.
The post-reading party info is to be announced.
Kate Lutzner is also having her “soft book launch” at this reading — there will be preview copies of her new chapbook, Invitation to a Rescue, published by Poet Republik, Ltd. Her poetry and stories have appeared in such journals as Antioch Review, Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Rail, BlazeVOX, Rattle and Barrow Street. Kate holds a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from City College and has been featured in Verse Daily. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as the Best of the Net Anthology.
Jameson O’Hara Laurens completed her MFA in poetry and translation in 2014, and has collaborated with artists, choreographers, and translators. She is fortunate to call a bilingual secondary literature classroom her professional home, and has recently received research sabbatical and leadership grants for teaching projects. Having grown up in the West, she has an ongoing concern for the natural world, and for all things apiary. She became a feminist writer by necessity. Her work has appeared in Enclave, Alexandria Quarterly, Hawkmoth, and Poet Republik. Medeum is her first collection.
J. Hope Stein is the author of experimental chapbooks Corner Office, [Talking DolI] and [Mary]. She is a Consulting Producer of the film Don’t Think Twice and an Associate Producer of the film Sleepwalk with Me. She is the editor of PoetryCrush.com.
Maria Garcia Teutsch’s chapbook, The Revolution will have its Sky was chosen by Heather McHugh as winner of the Minerva Rising contest in 2015. She still thinks that’s the coolest thing ever. She has published over 25 poetry books in her vast career as Editor in chief of the Homestead Review, Ping-Pong Journal of Art and Literature and the presses, Ping-Pong Free Press and Poet Republik Ltd. In her spare time she teaches at Hartnell College, and serves as President of the Board of Henry Miller Memorial Library.
Christine Hamm has a PhD in American Poetics, and is an editor for Ping Pong Free Press. She is currently an MFA poetry student at Columbia University. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Nat Brut, BODY, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at Pace. The New Orleans Review published Christine’s chapbook, A is for Afterimage, and nominated her work for a Pushcart in 2014 and in 2017, Ghostbird Press is publishing an excerpt from her ongoing manuscript, Notes on Wolves and Ruin.
Have you ever been at war with yourself? Have you ever not been? “Devotional poem” by Kate Lutzner, explores this particular human predicament with the precision of an astro-physicist studying the star that may one day annihilate the earth. We here in the Poet Republik love all of Kate’s poetry, and this is just a sample of her forthcoming collection, Invitation to a Rescue which will be out by Poet Republik Ltd. later this month.
Devotional poem
I am at war with myself, all the cells
in my body gathering their weapons,
their fists. The doctor says there will
be a decline, to look for it, to give
myself over to it when the time comes.
I was used to suffering before words
formed on my tongue, my mouth
filled with a concern, the opposite
of empathy. Bits of grief build
like nodules in my throat, all
the devotion that will someday
form there threatening to dissolve
into need. Help me to express
all the uses of my being, to learn
what it means to live with this
urge, this right to nothing
but lending myself to others,
this right to be healed.
Kate Lutzner‘s poetry and stories have appeared in such journals as Antioch Review, Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Rail, BlazeVOX, Rattle and Barrow Street. She was awarded the Robert Frost Poetry Prize by Kenyon College and is recipient of the Jerome Lowell Dejur Award and the Stark Short Fiction Prize. Kate holds a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from City College. She has been featured in Verse Daily. Kate has a novel, The Only One Who Loves You, on Amazon Kindle.
I am apoplectic with joy to be reading with Lisa Samuels on April 17th for the folks at Torn Page Poetry Parlor
from Wild Dialectics (Shearsman Books 2012)
Peephole metaphysics
Listening for you listening notes for right to seek up
futures as a buffer against permanence can you make
actuality not a matter of argument I’m sirry I’m political
ready to drag down changeable as the crew people
jumping in to small boats showing their interest
without necessary attributes to be hot, so hot
sirrah listening to the heart boats bombing are you
new to the names amidst your hectares get along
new to your improves on several hats beside the year’s
tasted aperture months ready to open pour in
astonished to discover mouths underneath the boats
craggy as fashionable creamy broody belts in range
out of range the edges of the heart mouths totally
unsteady drama groovy coming along worth trying
to sell our inherited personalities for settlement when
people came here they planted themselves in utterly familiar
and hills coming along at the edges of the heart
mouths planting the recognizable in water at the moment
falling through the atlas trope sway comprehensive
for another album of highlights everybody getting a little
somefin a tiny mouthful louche over the skin of the teeth
a point especially clear when terms of value broken
across the example becomes clear a like simple
economy of scale transient as the top blend came on
a simple feat hot off the head as hundreds rippled
like scales real as existence marbles tottling on
the edges of the site kept at it fully every rim
consistent turning square to diamante pusher
folly coming along saying flask as catskin blueberry
rich or cast is it what you expectation frag there
slightly animistic with an absolute forearm
or what it means to compromise with cultural life
as you make room make room stead skulldigger
in a roaring mind the trophy on your head your own
juggy code out at the stuck late skin in show
I often kilter or a separately repeated to see how
it changes a man with a fixed expression in plastics
a cast as what you expectation frag there yes
Lisa Samuels is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, with recent experiments in memoir (Anti M, Chax 2013) and the novel (Tender Girl, Dusie 2015). Her poetry is in anthologies such as Out of Everywhere 2 (Reality Street 2015) and has inspired scholarly work and musical scores internationally. Her literary essays include Over Hear: six types of poetry experiment in Aotearoa/New Zealand (TinFish 2015), and in 2016 she is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington Simpson Humanities Center, writing The Civic Unconscious (poetry) and The Long White Cloud of Unknowing (prose) and continuing experiments in soundwork. Some of her writing and recordings can be found via the Electronic Poetry Center, academia.edu, and pennsound.