Traveling Light

I travel light. On my recent train trip to Chicago for AWP, I took one lightweight shoulder bag of clothing to leave in my room, a sturdy zip-up book bag from a previous AWP conference, and my gigantic purse, big enough to hold hairbrush, toothbrush, protein bars, and random coincidii.

But, of course, I traveled home heavier, acquiring a new AWP book bag, red & white, and filling both book bags with books and journals. Hence, a "fat Tuesday" of reading abundance the blog!

I took cash from teaching poetry to buy poetry, but a thrill is that many journals offer stellar deals or hand you back issues for free! So here is what I came home with:

Books:

Why We Make Gardens (poems), by Jeanne Larsen (Mayapple Press)
Fuse (poems), by Mark McKee (Black Lawrence Press)
Close Quarters (essays), by Amy Monticello (Sweet Publications)
The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (essays), edited by Charlotte Pence (University Press of Mississippi)

Journals:

Barn Owl Review (#5, current + #3, a back issue)
Ninth Letter
Puerto del Sol (forever in love with this journal, as they published my first short story in a national magazine!)
Arsenic Lobster (3 print anthologies)
Bellingham Review
The Helix Magazine
Thin Air

Contributor Copies:

Poems & Plays #19 (3 poems in it!)
Lake Effect #16 (sold out at table, but I found my contributor copies in the mail when I got home!)
blossombones (4 poems, online)
Medulla Review (2 poems, online, mentioned yesterday)

Random Coincidii:

Albert Goldbarth was at the Kenyon Review table, signing letterpress foldout broadsides of his poem "Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators' Houses," which had been published in the Kenyon Review Online, Spring 2011, so I got one. What a charming man!

Charlotte Pence (see Poetics of American Song Lyrics above) has 3 poems in the same issue of Poems & Plays that I'm in, and I also got to attend her panel, hearing excerpts from her book and the story of how it came to be.

My chapbook Nocturnes (night songs) has one poem in it that does follow the structure of a song, with verses & variations on a refrain. It is just now out from Hyacinth Girl Press, which shared a table with Arsenic Lobster and Solace in So Many Words (anthology edited by Ellen Wade Beals, with Philip Levine, our Poet Laureate, in it, and we heard him speak at AWP; more to come on that), and it just about sold out, as I came home with only 2 copies of it. More to be printed, so editor Margaret Bashaar can send it to subscribers and those who pre-ordered, and so I can get some to sell locally.

I think I exercised 1) serious restraint 2) my shoulders.