Lori Desrosiers, editor of Naugatuck River Review, asked me some wonderful questions about the wee book, coming out soon now from Finishing Line Press’ New Women’s Voices Series (May 31st!).
Many thanks to Lori for her unflagging celebrations of poets and poetry, and for being one of the first to publish from this collection: “Letting Go of a Man at the Montague Book Mill” first appeared in NRR, and the journal also nominated the poem for a Pushcart Prize.
I forgot to tell you: “Thanatos” is up at Full of Crow Press’ great flash fiction journal, MiCrow. The Spring 2013 issue is here: Luminous (pdf)
Also, I’ll have a poem called “Obscenity (The Holographic Principle)” coming soon in the exciting inaugural issue of Slippage, which celebrates work “at the intersection of science and art” – I’ll link it when the issue goes live some time this spring.
It’s National Poetry Month. A good reason to write a poem a day, since tons of people are offering daily prompts for the month of April. For example:
Ms. Quickly prompts
NaPoWriMo prompts
We Write Poems prompts
Or, pick up this great tool: Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry (Yes, a couple of my poems are in there with one of my favorite teaching-exercises – but this book is fantastic, and packed with great ideas, prompts, and inspiration).
For a smart, funny take on the hazards of NPM, or possibly just of life, check this out, by Paisley Rekdal at Harriet:
“We’re taught, simultaneously, to treat poetry as the purest, most elevated art at the same time we declare it culturally dead, with no practical or economic use. Both positions put poetry outside of our lives and our understanding, making it, essentially, invisible. And how can we read or appreciate what we don’t really see?
I suppose that is what NPM is meant to do: throw poems in the path of people who wouldn’t normally see them. But treated as sound bites, we see them the way we see the latest Dove commercial: as a kind of feel-good ad that is, in the end, still trying to sell you something to stick in your armpits. It doesn’t–and can’t– solve the problem that most concerns me, which is that the ways we treat poetry often exacerbates the larger problems that we have with reading now: that it is a purely passive, not active engagement with language, in which meaning “happens” if it relates to the personal life of the reader, or if it “moves” us. This really does have long-term cultural and political effects for us as a nation, because if we don’t believe we are in control of our reading—that we can parse a sentence to evaluate not only its pleasurable effects but to comprehend its arguments—then we are screwed.”
I find myself thinking about the habitual language of discomfort we use about unabashedly smart women [writers or not] – I find myself thinking about how often I hear it, the discomfort, and I keep thinking: I find myself, thinking, and so do you, so maybe that’s the source of your discomfort.
Thanks for tagging me, Maggie Cleveland! Check out Maggie’s interview here. I can’t wait to read Atom Fish.
What is the title of your book?
Kitsune
Where did the inspiration for the book come from?
A kitsune is the Japanese iteration of a trickster fox spirit found in storytelling and myth traditions around the world. Depending on context and culture, it is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes human-shaped, sometimes fox-shaped, sometimes a shape-shifter, always extremely seductive, and eternally, insatiably hungry. Continue reading
Click here to order “Kitsune” – New Women’s Voices Series, Finishing Line Press
The book ships May 31st, 2013.
This beautiful cover art is by Mark Mandica.
You can read the blurbs & first reader responses here.
Here’s my “Next Big Thing” interview about the book.
And here are some of the poems: audio is from the Word Festival in October, 2012.
It’s in, and it’s beautiful.
Made for me by herpetologist/artist/musician Mark Mandica, whose work is extraordinary and wide-ranging: from scientific illustration to iconographic logos and wonderful blends of realism and impressionism. Go check him out.
So happy to have Mark’s art on the book!
“Three words emerge like a chant in Kitsune, Jessamyn Smyth’s extraordinary collection of poems: flame, sweetness, yes. Follow Smyth through these ashes, taste honey on the other side. Follow her with a yes that beats out of your ribcage. This is her gift to readers, the gift of her brutally beautiful “animal heart.” To read Kitsune is to follow a warrior woman through the wilderness, only to end up balanced on the tip of her spear.”
- Elizabeth Eslami, author of Bone Worship: A Novel
“If anything remains with us of the human-animal divide, Jessamyn Smyth’s Kitsune abolishes it at a bound. These poems inhabit the real, impossible ground where spirit and viscera entwine, embrace and rip asunder. Her words deliver their own best evidence of the “ferocity and intent; fire-like focus” that make this testimony of possession “consuming and dangerous exactly as you hope such things will be…” I have never encountered a more vivid, sustained, and profoundly lived-through literary work.”
Eric Darton, author of Free City, Orogene, Divided We Stand: A Biography of the World Trade Center, and Notes of a New York Son
“In Kitsune, Jessamyn Smyth writes about “something very like love/but harder to escape.” …Thank goodness for these poems, which guide us out of the worst kind of hurt and lead us toward what we really might need.”
- Camille Dungy, author of Smith Blue and Suck on the Marrow
First readers respond:
These are all so achingly beautiful. I can wrap myself in them and let them reflect or embody my own losses and hopes. The book has an icy heat, like a chisel splitting frozen wood, a glowing fire in an iron stove. Be warned: you can’t read a naked thing fully dressed.
- Nora Streed
* * *
I made many, many doubling-backs over the especially exquisite and shattering parts, which is to say: just about all of it. It’s devastating. Completely ripped me up like almost nothing ever does. Yanked me from the get-go, and still has me in some kind of spell. It just spoke to me so immediately, all of it, speaking straight from marrow and cell so raw and real and muscular. Left my own emotional synapses in tangles. And sobbing.
- Michael Clark
* * *
I love how Smyth played with the kitsune myth and turned it into something new/different. There’s a neat interplay between the slightly oblique vs. the personal; it speaks to random, total strangers in a beyond-useful way. It’s compelling. Hits the sweet spot in a way that resonates.
- Beth Lowe
* * *
Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices chapbook competition top ten
Advance copy / prepublication sales: Feb. 18 – Mar. 27
Release date: May 31, 2013
My poem “Letting Go of a Man at the Montague Book Mill” (from Kitsune, forthcoming from the New Women’s Voices Series of Finishing Line Press) was just nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Naugatuck River Review. Thank you, NRR!
The Center for New Americans hosts 30 Poems in November each year to raise funds for their exceptional literacy programs.
Berkshires poet, teacher and musician Cassandra Cleghorn and I have decided to participate in the project by collaborating: we will each post a poem a day in November, and the poems may begin to speak to each other in visible or invisible ways as they sail up and down the Mohawk Trail.
Cass will be listening to trees, their wood, and the instruments they make; I will be listening to the lake where I live, and talking back to it.
Read along, talk with us in the comments, and please donate! Every little bit toward this marvelous agency matters.
Come on over and see us at Letters of Water and Wood.
from the Word Festival last weekend.