Bushra Rehman’s mother says Bushra was born in an ambulance flying through the streets of Brooklyn. Her father is not so sure. Since there are no definitive records of the time of her birth, there is no real way of knowing, but it would explain a few things. Bushra is a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a book bag full of poems. Now, she performs her poetry regularly in theaters and colleges around the world. Lately, she’s been spending her time flying through the streets of Brooklyn and writing an on the road adventure novel for Muslim girls.
Jai Arun Ravine's investigative review / encounter with Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal, in collaboration with Lucas de Lima, is live at Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal
Congrats, dear Jai!
Half [ ]-half [ ]-half [ ]: Trauma and Transformation in the Humanimal
Letters to Bhanu Kapil
by Jai Arun Ravine and Lucas de Lima
Note to reader: In 2010, Ching-In Chen asked Jai Arun Ravine to interview Bhanu Kapil for a speculative literature issue for Asian American Poetry and Writing. At the time, Bhanu was in India and unavailable for an interview, so she asked Lucas de Lima to answer Jai’s questions as an interpolate. The result of Lucas and Jai’s collaboration constitutes part one of this piece. Lucas’s replies to Jai — substituted for potential statements or responses by Bhanu — appear in italics: below. The dirty starlings are his, just as the triplicate, mutating calf is Jai’s. In 2013, Bhanu, Lucas and Jai re-convened with Bhanu asking Jai and Lucas questions. The feral appendix they created appears in part two of this piece. Even though the original interview was never published in AAPW, Jai thanks Ching-In for instigating this collaborative exploration.
Read the rest of the piece here.
August 27: Tamiko Beyer, Matthew Olzmann, & Jamaal May read at Word for Word in Bryant Park
Word for Word Poetry welcomes Alice James Books
Bryant Park Reading Room
(mid-block on the 42nd Street side of Bryant Park)
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
7:00pm – 8:30pm
More here: http://tamikobeyer.com/readings-and-events/
Tamiko Beyer spent the first ten years of her life in Tokyo, Japan, and has since lived in cities near the water on the West and East coast. She is the author of We Come Elemental (Alice James Books) and bough breaks (Meritage Press). She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was awarded a Chancellor's Fellowship. Beyer has received grants and fellowships from Kundiman, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and VONA/Voices. She is the Senior Writer at Corporate Accountability International in Boston.
Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and educator from Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. He is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, Nov 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine and The Whetting of Teeth). His poems have been published widely in journals such as POETRY,Ploughshares, The Believer, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and New England Review.
Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle, and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation.
Yes to Eugenia Leigh & Ocean Vuong for making the list of 23 More People Who Made Me Care about Poetry in 2013--now up at HTMLGiant.
Congrats, dear Eugenia and Ocean!
Check here to view the list, now up at htmlgiant.
Eugenia Leigh is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014), which was a finalist for both the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including PANK Magazine, North American Review, The Collagist, and the Best New Poets 2010 anthology.
Born in 1988 in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong was raised by women (a single mother, aunts, and a grandmother) in housing projects throughout Hartford, Connecticut and received his B.A. in English Literature from Brooklyn College.
He is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an American Library Association’s “Over The Rainbow” selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. A recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts, as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Connecticut Poetry Society’s Al Savard Award. Poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Quarterly West, Passages North, Guernica, The Normal School, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize. Work has also been translated into Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, and Russian.
Sejal Shah is this week's Kenyon Review Online feature for her essay "Street Scene"!
Congrats, dear Sejal!
Street Scene
by Sejal Shah
Parisians call this neighborhood mixed. Mixed is code; it means immigrants. Think Brooklyn, Caitlin says. We are in the 20th Arrondissement, near Père Lachaise. I am here to see the Louvre and the Turkish Baths; I am here to visit my friend, Caitlin. I have a map and some time for wandering. To travel by yourself and enjoy it is a skill; I don't practice enough.
The 20th Arrondissement. Storefronts with fuchsia and blue signs; Senegalese behind tables of patterned scarves, watch caps, and leather bags; music, a low flare around which we warm ourselves at the park, at pool tables, at long wooden bars. LeeAnne isn't here to tell me where she stayed in Paris. When I think of her, I see us talking in my backyard, splashing in the pool, upstate New York summers. It surprises me. She was never there, but I can see it: the blue pool, our hideaway; beach towels; instant iced tea. I imagine we lay ourselves out on the uneven flagstones, waiting to be hot enough to peel ourselves off and fling ourselves into the water. If I close my eyes hard enough, if I squint, I can almost see it, this scene-that we grew up together. She was that kind of friend. As I walk through Paris, I keep expecting to catch a glimpse of her, vanishing into some narrow street.
. . .
Sejal Shah is a writer and teacher of writing. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in journals and books including the Asian American Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Seal Press).
Jennifer S. Cheng's from "Letters to Mao" published at Web Conjunctions
Congrats, dear Jennifer!
"Letters to Mao" are the this week's Web Conjunctions Exclusive! To read the poems, click here: http://www.conjunctions.com/webconj.htm
Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of a chapbook, Invocation: An Essay (New Michigan Press). Her writing appears in the Seneca Review, The Collagist, Quarterly West, and Fifty-Fifty, an anthology of Hong Kong writing. She lives in San Francisco.
W. Todd Kaneko's "Slash Plays the National Anthem" is now up at The Fiddleback
Congrats, dear Todd!
To read the poem, click here: http://thefiddleback.com/issue-items/slash-plays-the-national-anthem
Soham Patel's poem "song" is now up at The Volta
Congrats, dear Soham!
Check out her poem here: http://www.thevolta.org/twstbs-poem59-spatel.html
Tamiko Beyer's "We Come Elemental" reviewed at Lamba Literary
Congrats, dear Tamiko!
"Tamiko Beyer packs a good deal of complication into We Come Elemental, her slim new book of poetry from Alice James Books. With a lean, lyrical style, Beyer asks the reader to contemplate the connection between the natural world and ourselves; how water and mud and land intersect with identity and body and politics; and whether the lines we draw are as firm as we would have ourselves believe."
To read the more, click here: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/?s=tamiko+beyer&submit
Bushra Rehman interview now up at The Village Voice
Congrats to our dear Bushra!
Read the article here: bit.ly/15hr8PS
Bushra Rehman's first novel, Corona, is a fragmented, poetic, on-the-road adventure told from the perspective of the charismatic Razia Mirza. After coming of age in a tight Muslim community surrounding the first Sunni Masjid built in New York City, a rebellious streak leads to Razia's excommunication, prompting the young heroine to flee. Stories that alternate between childhood memories and the misadventures of her young adulthood slowly reveal glimpses of the past that Razia is escaping and the Queens neighborhood that has shaped her life.
Rehman's poems, stories, and essays have been featured on BBC radio and in the New York Times, among other publications, and she co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Here, via e-mail, she talks about the Muslim community in her native borough, being a new mother, and why her protagonist aspires to be shameless.