Reader Robin Lippincott, whose most recent title is In the Meantime, and who is also a contributor, recommends we add Susan Sontag to our list.

DeWitt Henry, founding editor of Ploughshares, whose most recent title is Sweet Dreams: A Family History, suggests Doug Crandall’s fourth novel, They’re Calling You Home.

Memorious contributor Mary Biddinger, whose most recent book is Saint Monica, suggests we keep our eye out for upcoming titles from Akron Poetry and Poetics, including the winning book of the Akron Poetry Prize, former Memorious contributor Emily Rosko‘s Prop Rockery, and the editor’s choice selection, Jason Bredle’s Carnival.

Last but not least, Memorious contributor Kent Shaw, the author of the poetry collection Calenture, recommends we keep our eye out for Patricia Lockwood’s Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, which is forthcoming from Octopus Books in 2012.

For original poetry, fiction, interviews, art, and art song, please visit our magazine at

www.memorious.org

Fiction:

Joanna Luloff, I Love You, Come Home Soon (Algonquin 2012). Luloff’s story “Counting Hours” appeared in issue 9 of Memorious by way of our wonderful former fiction editor Jessica Murphy Moo, and we have been waiting for Luloff’s story collection to be released ever since. I Love You, Come Home Soon is a collection of linked stories set in Sri Lanka, where Luloff served in the Peace Corps. Her first novel is also under contract with Algonquin, so  this is a writer to watch out for over the next few years.

Poetry:

Paula Bohince, The Children (Sarabande 2012). After first publishing Bohince’s gorgeous poems “Sin” and “The Young Martyr” in Issue 5, I have been thrilled to watch her gather such awards as the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Amy Clampitt residency, and an NEA fellowship, and to read her first collection Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. This is a poet whose work I want to keep reading, and I am glad the editors at Sarabande seem to agree.

Traci Brimhall, Our Lady of the Ruins (Norton 2012). This book made contributor Caki Wilkinson’s 2012 list this week, but this new collection by the author of “Requiem for the Firstborn,” from issue 14, is worth a second mention. Her first book came out with the one of my favorite series, Crab Orchard Series, which has published books by contributors whose work I adore: Brian Barker, Jake Adam York, Todd Hearon, and upcoming contributors Oliver de la Paz and Tyler Mills.  Rookery was a finalist for the ForeWard Book of the Year Award, and Brimhall is now following up that strong debut with this new book selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the Barnard Prize.

Steven Cramer, Clangings (Sarabande 2012). Selections from Cramer’s  new sound-rich sequence of poems that refer to Clang Association (explained in his poems’ as “in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, dissociated ideas conveyed through similar word sounds”) appeared in Memorious 17 and a wide range of other journals, including Slate. The poems I’ve read so far are excitingly dense and musical and unlike anything else I have read. This year we’ll get to read the sequence in its entirety. (And if you’ve gotten this far and are thinking of buying both  Cramer and Bohince’s books, check out this amazing book subscription with Sarabande, for which they’ll send you their 2012 poetry titles.)

Patrick Ryan Frank, How the Losers Love What’s Lost (Four Way 2012). Frank (no relation) also appeared in Issue 9 of Memorious with three poems, and his first collection is now being released as the 2010 Four Ways Intro Prize Winner. His poems came to my attention by a stroke of luck: his friend brought him to a potluck block party in the middle of my street of eight houses in Cambridge, MA for just long enough for me to pass him a card for the magazine. This reinforces my theory that if you spit in Cambridge, you’ll hit a poet. And most of the time, a good one.

Katrina Vandenberg’s second collection, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World (Milkweed 2012), is a much anticipated follow up to her debut, Atlas, which holds a heartbreaking section about a lover who was a hemophiliac with AIDS and the community he was part of.  Vandenberg’s poems appeared in issue 13. (And if you have ever been to an artist colony, or wonders what goes on there, “The Night the Painter Unpinned Her Hair” is a must read.)

Rodney Wittwer, Gone & Gone (Red Hen 2012). Wittwer was one of our earlier contributors, first appearing in issue 2 and then in issue 12. I discovered his work through his title poem, which originally appeared  in Ploughshares, and I’ve been waiting to see a full collection of his poems ever since. There’s just the right dose of imaginative strangeness in these poems, and there’s always something substantial beneath the verbal play.

Please note that this list is not comprehensive: follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get news about contributor releases and successes as they come to us. We are fortunate to have published so many talented and committed writers that we can’t fit all the good news in one post. (And if you are the one with good news, you can always send it our way.)

For original poetry, fiction, art, art song, and interviews, visit our magazine at www.memorious.org.

Yes, We Read Nonfiction

Some of our readers have expressed disappointment that we do not publish nonfiction in the magazine, and our table at AWP is often swamped by people who believe the name Memorious refers to memoir. (I know you, dear reader, immediately got the Borges reference.) But we want to let you know that we not only like nonfiction writers, we read them, too! Here are a few nonfiction books I’ll be buying in the new year:

Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll, Joe Oestrich (Lyons Press).  I first crossed paths with Joe Oestrich in Daytona Beach, as fellow employees of the Educational Testing Service (yes, AP grading used to happen in the fair town of Daytona Beach, and yes, the grading vault is a great place to discover some new writers), and I have never forgotten the story he told me about how many band members can live in one New York apartment. It’s still a logistical mystery to me, and I can’t wait to read his forthcoming book.  Who doesn’t want to hear about the Rock n’ Roll life when the book description reads, “Everyone knows the price of fame. Hitless Wonder measures the price of obscurity. What happens when you chase a dream into middle age and, in doing so, risk losing the people you love?” This is clearly a book for my generation.

Double Time, Jane Roper. (St. Martin’s Press). Jane Roper, author of the novel Eden Lake now brings us a memoir about what happens when a novelist and a singer-songwriter become the parents of twins. I’m not a parent, yet Roper reels me in with her broader cultural commentary, her sometimes biting humor on family and writing life, and her honest exploration of her experience battling depression as a writer and a mother of young twins. Her narratives and meditations on her  blog on twin parenting are moving and entertaining, and she has drawn from them for this full length memoir that takes us from the challenges of conception to the constantly averted chaos of having twins. Granted, not a subject for everyone, but it’s on my list for Mother’s day gifts.

The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Kevin Young (Graywolf). I’m still reeling from Young’s ambitious latest collection, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, which was twenty years in the making, and I can’t wait to get my hands on this Graywolf Nonfiction Prize winner, which the press calls an “encyclopedic book [that] combines essay, cultural criticism, and lyrical chorus to illustrate the African American tradition of lying—storytelling, telling tales, fibbing, improvising, “jazzing.” The title comes, of course, from the Danger Mouse mashup album, and reflects the broad base of music, cultural history, and language play that we can expect from this record collector, library curator, and poet. See, we don’t just love Graywolf for its poetry.

For original poetry, fiction, interviews, art, and art song, visit our magazine at

www.memorious.org.

In Anticipation of Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet

The first time I caught sight of Ben Marcus was in the late ‘90s.  Clad in black, shaved head gleaming, he stepped up to the podium at Brookline Booksmith and teased a yard of electrical tape from his mouth.  It was as if an eel had risen from its home in his pancreas.  I gazed on.  Was this a writer?  Or some pretentious art twat playing one for kicks?  Certainly, I thought, he was no rifleman.  Because at that point in my (slow) literary education, real writer = rifleman.

Thanks to a rural New Hampshire youth, I’d once been a decent shot.  From a dozen yards, with my Crossman pump-action air rifle, I could drop a robin resting in an apple tree.  Impressive, I know.  More instrumental, I grew up in the presence of men who both shot animals and wrote novels.  They were the writers-in-residence at UNH, my father one of them, and overall they were an accomplished bunch, whether National Book Award winners, Esquire and/or Atlantic and/or New Yorker contributors, or Random House groomed.  They rode motorcycles.  They fly-fished for steelheads in the Pemigewasset.  They played regular, high-stakes poker.  Some mornings I’d go for my Sugar Pops and find these bad asses seated around our kitchen table, doing what they could to close out last night’s card game.

It’s hard not to look back and see the rough handling of Ernest Hemingway all over these men.  Not that they weren’t profoundly their own characters, but still, it would be hard to say the Hemingway myth hadn’t colored this particular pocket of literary culture and magnetized a whole lot of lean prose.  (Only later would I comprehend that someone like, say, Virginia Woolf could rough up Papa whenever she wanted.)   The idea, as I understood it, was that a fiction writer should embrace the clear and simple view, should induce in a reader the full physical experience of whatever reality was underfoot.  More generally, the writer kept himself, or herself, but really himself, the hell out of the picture.  Anything else was show-offy, undisciplined bullshit.

You wouldn’t dream, for instance, of floating a sentence like the following one, from Ben Marcus’s first novel, Notable American Women:

It will help to scan smartly away from Ben’s [the character Ben Marcus’s] form on occasion to the more realistic objects in the landscape—the trees and houses and people that happen to fill your view, or the bookcases, lamps, and flowers—in order to appreciate just how wrongly Ben’s body juts out of nothingness into a space worthy of a more substantial creature or household object; considering all the while, if you are able, what a miracle it is that even routine self-examination on this part—while brushing his teeth or soaping his face before a mirror—has not yet led him to quietly end his own life down at the river, with a rope or gun or razor, and give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence.

In the New Hampshire school you cut that sentence down to:  Ben tried to zip up his worsted wool slacks.  They were three sizes too small.  Pale winter sun was glancing off the motel television and he found his neck wet with sweat.

Back at that Marcus reading, I bought his book, a collection of stories called The Age of Wire and String, read a few of its “experimental” entries—a toxic word around my childhood household—and mothballed it for a decade.  Later on I tried the first few pages of Notable American Women and felt similarly exhausted.  Sure, he was wickedly funny and scarily smart, but in the end: no rifleman.  He wrote idea-driven fictions pumped high on seriously hot, flaunting air.  I repaired to the etched subtleties of Ray Carver, et al.

But then a few things happened.  As time passed I found myself increasingly bored by yet one more realist novel about a family in decline.  Then I read a couple of Ben Marcus’s more recent stories.

I’m betting “Rollingwood” and “What Have You Done?”—published last year in The New Yorker—grabbed a wide range of readers, whether old school or new, plot-ravenous or idea-consumed.  These stories are not only vintagely Marcus, ie: wickedly funny and acidly cerebral; they bite hard at the edges and even straight into the heart of flat-out realism (if realism tends to feature scene, setting, and John Gardner’s definition of fiction as a “vivid and continuous dream”).  A memorable sample line: “His sister and Rick whispered and cuddled and seemed to try to inseminate each other facially….”

So I hauled my cautious reading ass back to what had been spoiling on the bookcase.  This time around I got a somewhat better handle on what had initially put me off:  Marcus’s rigorously stilted, oddly rhythmic prose, his scathingly anxious comedy, and most vitally, the strains of real pathos running hard beneath.  That pathos just presented differently from what I was used to.  Years ago I was maybe intimidated by or too quickly dismissive of the brute intellectual display, but now I leapt fast at Harper’s December excerpt of Marcus’s upcoming novel, The Flame Alphabet.

In an excellent interview of Marcus archived on Harper’s online site—one that any fiction writer or reader could benefit from—the novel is described in this way:  “The United States is in crisis: families are being torn apart by an epidemic of lethal children’s speech. The narrator, Sam, and his wife, Claire, are eventually forced to flee their daughter to live in silence, but Sam is determined to find a cure for the effects of toxic language and reunite the family.”

Okay, not exactly Ray Carver, but I plunged in (if five pages requires plunging).  And this further dialed up my appetite for The Flame Alphabet.  The novel appears to be a brilliant admixture of everything Marcus has got.  It features his trademark brew of cerebral apprehension and glinting, frightening humor but also—to this eye—vivid traces of what surfaced in those New Yorker stories, i.e., the facsimile of an unfolding, actually-lived reality.  An example:

The sickness rode in on my name, loaded and weaponized: Samuel, which Esther was old enough, her mother and I thought, to call me.  A little grace note of parenting that seemed to work for other people, and that we proudly took up as though we had invented it.  But Esther wasn’t impressed by this privilege.  She barked my name until it became an insult, said it louder, softer, coughed it up and spat it at me.

To steal Marcus’s word, he’s weaponizing language and story in a new, thrilling, disciplined manner.  Sounds like a new-century rifleman to me.

For original stories, poems, interviews, art, and art song, visit our magazine

at www.memorious.org.

Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Poems (Knopf)

Traci Brimhall, Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton)

Catherine Wing, Gin & Bleach (Sarabande)

Mark Strand, Almost Invisible (Knopf)

Adam Vines, The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press) [Cover N/A yet]

A.E. Stallings, Olives (TriQuarterly) [Cover N/A yet]

For original poetry, fiction, art, art song, and interviews, visit our magazine at www.memorious.org.

I feel remiss as a poet. What does it mean that the books I’m most drawn to in the coming year are by novelists by and large? Poetic failing, perhaps. But I prefer to think the writers here transcend genre, or approach their prose with a poet’s sense. An ear, as they say. An eye, a voice. What I want from a book is not dissimilar to what one hopes for the new year. Something about the thrill of what’s possible. These are books that won’t disappoint.

Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away: Essays:  Yeah yeah yeah, call him what you will but Franzen shines in the short form, as anybody who’s read How to Be Alone, or his recent work in the New Yorker, can attest. Farther Away collects these pieces with assorted speeches and other short essays. Read it for his heartbreaking, now famous, meditation on David Foster Wallace, his great friend and rival. Or read it for his take on birding in China, which is about so much more than just birding in China. Read it because you want to be taken someplace entirely different from where you intended to go.

Margot Livesey, The Flight of Gemma Hardy: Though probably best known for her 2001 novel Eva Moves the Furniture, about a girl guided by two spirits whose intents are unclear, Margot Livesey writes compassionately of the deep mysteries of life without losing touch with simple, often painful reality. In her seventh novel, an orphaned young Icelander finds herself adrift in a world of secrets and startling revelation as she seeks her place in love and family.

Denis Johnson, Soul of a Whore and Purvis: Two Plays: Here is a man who can do everything. Now, on the heels of his taut novella Train Dreams, comes this little duplex of plays. I’m always a little wary of reading what feels like the scaffolding for another art. But anybody who’s read “Steady Hands at Seattle General” knows how Johnson can crack whole worlds open with a pair of human voices. This is a must read.

Don Lee, The Collective: It makes a certain sense that Lee, the longtime former editor of Ploughshares, would find himself drawn to the maelstrom of fascination, envy, and self-destruction that sometimes imperils artists and the communities built around them. Lee’s books are filled with scenes of imploded ambition, misplaced desires, and occasional artistic self-immolation. The Collective follows the lives of a painter and two aspiring writers from their first meeting in college through fame and scandal, suicide and the volatile reverberations that follow.

Ron Rash, The Cove: I came to Ron Rash’s work late, having only read a couple poems he published a few years back. And I’m sad to say I never read Serena, his lauded fourth novel about a 1920s Carolina timber magnate and his cruelly ambitious (and eponymous) wife. But I was able to read an advance copy of his forthcoming novel The Cove, which has all the elements that made Serena catch fire: the moody, almost mystical Appalachian landscape; the delicate interplay between endurance and human frailty; and a dogmatic ambition that threatens to unravel it all. And all throughout, the pulsing of Rash’s lush prose, which reads as though someone unspooled a single poem over several hundred pages.

Michael Lowenthal, The Paternity Test: The details are still being inked about the actual release date of Lowenthal’s fourth novel, so its inclusion here might seem a bit hasty. But fans of his, whether they came to his work early or were drawn by his breakout third novel Charity Girl, are hoping sooner than later. The Paternity Test is a searingly honest portrait of a gay couple on the brink of fatherhood. It promises to be moving, insightful, and utterly essential.

For original poetry, fiction, art song, art, and interviews, visit our magazine at www.memorious.org.

The Flame Alphabet (Knopf) by Ben Marcus [1/17/12] – Although Ben Marcus looks like he’s just as obsessed as the rest of us when it comes to widespread disease and the collapse of society, his new novel takes a new perspective on both scenarios and examines what the world might look like if the sound of children’s voices became toxic to adults.

Stay Awake: Stories (Ballantine) by Dan Chaon [2/7/12] – Always a precise and intense storyteller, Chaon is one of our most vital short story authors.  Like his previous collections, Among the Missing and Fitting Ends (both by Ballantine), Stay Awake will force us to question our own dark motives.

No Animals We Could Name: Stories (Graywolf) by Ted Sanders [7/3/12] – Sanders has been making a name for himself over the last few years as the author of excellent stories like “Obit,” which appeared in the O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 anthology.  “Obit” will be featured in his new collection, of course, but there will be plenty of other goodies included.

Boleto: a Novel (Graywolf) by Alyson Hagy [5/8/12] – Hagy is one of the few authors I trust to depict the changing landscape of the American West.  If readers of Memorious #17 enjoyed the stories delivered by Holly Wendt and Nina McConigley, Hagy’s Boleto should stay on their radars.

The Blondes (Doubleday Canada) by Emily Schultz [5/15/12] – As awesome an editor as she is an author, Emily Schultz is also the co-founder of Joyland: a Hub for Short Fiction, a brilliant online publication that features regional fiction from equally brilliant authors.

Lionel Asbo: State of England (Knopf) by Martin Amis [8/21/12] – Like clockwork, Amis’s annual novel release is most likely going to be a feast of caustic prose, complete with a gin & cocaine bender.

Visit our magazine at www.memorious.org for original poetry, fiction, interviews, art, and art song.

Six works of fiction I can’t wait to get my hands on in the new year:

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

Forgotten Country by Catherine Chung

Fires of Our Choosing by Eugene Cross

My Only Wife Jac Jemc

Stay Awake by Dan Chaon

The Collective by Don Lee

Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James) by Amal al-Jubouri, translated by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi, forward by Alicia Ostriker (Dec 13, 2011) – This contemporary female Iraqi poet portrays life before and after the war using coupled poems that add real nuance to an area of the world that is ever-present in our minds, and yet rarely actually thought about.

Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press) by Anne Marie Rooney (Jan 11, 2012) – Rooney’s voice and style feel genuinely new. This text handles the body with a wrench, while it does the same to otherwise traditional poetic forms.

The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) by Samuel Amadon (Mar 1, 2012) – The author of Like a Sea, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Amadon takes on Hartford as engagingly as his potential stylistic/aesthetic predecessors, Schuyler and Olson handled their own poetic-geographic obsessions.

Deadbeat (Four Way) by Jay Baron Nicorvo (November 2012) – These are tense, tight little poems with salt and vinegar, and a sense of humor that center around a central character, Deadbeat. The name stands for all he is, and for the limitations of language, for all that the connotative substance a title alone could never contain.

Collected Poems (Knopf) by Jack Gilbert (March 3, 2012) – More than fifty years of poems by the idiosyncratic, and wonderful, if sometimes too tender poet.

Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books) by Hannah Gamble (2012) – This collection was chosen by the phenomenal Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series. It’s visceral, thinky and gorgeous, and I can’t think of a book of poetry over the last ten years that more engagingly confronts family. Oh, and Bernadette Mayer chose it.

My Love Is Large—My Love Contains Multitudes

          I’m sure I first encountered Walt Whitman in high school. Sure because I remember poring over “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” in a literature class, trying to make sense of it. Sure because, when I stood on my desk along with my senior-year classmates and shouted “O Captain! My Captain” to send off our beloved English teacher at the end of the year, I knew we weren’t just referencing Dead Poets Society—we were channeling the great sweaty-toothed madman himself.

         But it wasn’t until I was nineteen, when my friend Stacey Waite gave me a copy of Whitman’s Selected Poems, that I accepted Walt’s invitation: “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.” I stopped. I had spent days and nights searching for big love in romantic partners, in various religions, in dance clubs, in rambling wilderness—and I often found it. But it wasn’t until Walt came along, leaning and loafing, that I discovered the origin of all my poems: my big love for the world, in all of its grandeur, its blandness, its beauty, its cruelty.

I had always been an avid reader, but now, with Walt’s words in my hands, in my mouth, I felt compelled to read every poem aloud—no doubt my roommate grew weary of my ecstatic oratory. I had scribbled words in notebooks for years, but now I allowed my language to be more like my life—to be rangy, full of encounters with the world, to wander around on the page and not worry about where it would end up. To paraphrase Walt, poetry was larger, better than I thought, I did not know it held so much goodness.

And then I met Emily. I had known her for years, too. She showed up in those same literature classes, acknowledging Death’s kindness in stopping for her. I heard her fly buzz when she died and felt the funeral in her brain, but mostly she puzzled me—she intrigued me, but I felt unsteady, dizzy in her presence, and once Walt came along, it was easy to forget about her.

Many years later, though, my friend Rebecca Hazelton told me about an essay by Alice Fulton, who wrote about how many poets with clearly Dickinsonian leanings will cite Whitman as their primary influence instead. I began to look back over my own poems, and quite quickly, I discovered that Emily, too, was my big love—but she was my secret love, my love that dared not speak its name, not even to me. But she’s left her marks all over my poetry—her longing, her intimacy, her music, even her penchant for devising her own rules for punctuation.

Walt may have introduced me to the pleasures of poetry, but Emily showed me how to find that pleasure even in the most spare language, to exact lusciousness from “the pea within the pod,” to wrap sensuality in formal constraints and find delight in that restraint. She taught me, too, how to “tell it slant,” to let the speaker in my poems “tell all the truth” through voices with whom I felt an affinity, but who were decidedly not me, who were just askew of me. Those personae could “dazzle gradually” in a way I couldn’t—in a way Walt couldn’t, with his bold cosmic love—and I thank Emily for the years she stood by me, for the Wild Nights when she moored in me.

Walt and Emily, how different you were, how good you have been to me, how dearly I love you both.

For original fiction, poetry, interviews and art song, visit our magazine: www.memorious.org