Low Rent

I grew up in a house
built as budget permitted,
one room at a time,
chicken wire poking
through crude plaster,
walls out of plumb. Read More >

Sonnet for Donnie Morgan

Some days, in order to survive, we allow ourselves
belief that the posts smashing through the grill
of the Toyota, that the impact of, not one or two, but a whole row
run through, as he veered off the road for reasons
unknown, rendered him unconscious, unaware
he was trapped by twisted wood, angled metal
braces growing hotter on his legs that couldn’t run.
Someone so young, being struck lame, already a god-
damned shame. Now, this violence, this end, crisp glass
in the wind, in our eyes.  We don’t ask what the reports
might say, what ignorance enables us to push away –
him, awake, burning. Some days, his laughter echoes
up the stairs, heaven’s lucent snow.  But mostly,
the house is silence.  Mostly, flame.

Melanie Graham holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Lancaster, UK and recently completed her MFA at Sierra Nevada College. Her poems have appeared in Drunken Boat, Cherry Tree, The Mailer Review, a​nd as a finalist in several competitions, including The Southeast Review, Split This Rock, a​nd S​o To Speak. She won the 2016 Kakalak Poetry Prize. Her poem “Honeybees Returned” for Sylvia Plath is forthcoming in Fat Gold Watch, an anthology dedicated to Plath.

Dylan Krieger’s collection, no ledge left to love, is the recipient of the Ping-Pong Free Press poetry prize of 2017, chosen by judge and poetry badass, Brian Henry. It is my extreme pleasure to share with you a sneak peek–one of my favorite poems out of this fascinating and essential collection, release date: December 1, 2017. Read More >

CHRONIC

How I love the hospital

Gift shop—pocketing the penny

Read More >

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.

AWP Off-site reading, Dupont Circle!

I will be reading at the Mad Hatter for Minerva Rising Press on February 10th.

My book signing at Minerva Rising Press, AWP 2016

The Mad Hatter Dupont Circle

The last time I was in Dupont Circle it was to march with my friends against the first Iraq War under George H.W. Bush’s regime. We chanted “no blood for oil!”

Washington D.C. doesn’t know what’s coming—we are!

Ping-Pong Free Press and Poet Republik Ltd. Books will be exhibiting with Henry Miller Memorial Library at the AWP Conference & Bookfair next week in Washington DC. You can find us at table 733-T. We feel like it’s kismet the conference takes place in Washington D.C. Writers and intellectuals have always been on the frontline of resistance. We are not the voice of the voiceless, they have a voice: we are merely the conduit from which these varied and disparate voices can be heard. We are committed to the writings of refugees, immigrants, women, and many under-represented groups, oh yeah, men too, we love men. We are committed to resistance to fascism in all its forms.

River and Poet Laureate of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera, AWP 2016

Our newest books from Ping-Pong Free Press tells the story of that proto-feminist Medea, in Jameson O’Hara Laurens’ Medeaum. We also have A Small Suitcase of Russian Poetry featuring those writers who were persecuted, imprisoned and killed for their writings against the state, timely no? Forthicoming publication of Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts’ poetry collection, White Fire.

Poet Republik Ltd. is proud to publish Kate Lutzner’s Invitation to a Rescue, a delicate tale of lovers.

We’re super proud to release J. Hope Stein’s collection, Occasionally, I Remove your Brain through Your Nose, an experiential and experimental collection of poems in the land of chaos. Official release in April. Advance copies will be available at AWP and here.

Forthcoming from Poet Republik Ltd:

Haunted by Waters, by River Atwood Tabor

Cock, Love poems from a radical feminist, with the micro-fiction collection: A Small Book of Porn for my Husband, by Maria Garcia Teutsch

Back by popular demand: Pussy T-shirts from Maria Garcia Teutsch’s eponymous collection, get yours in hot pink or black!

photo credit: art by Tim Youd

Here’s a groovy interview with me conducted by Climate Activist, Dan Linehan for Monterey Poetry Review

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.