HOLIDAY GARLAND OF BOOKS, part 1

It's holiday book-buying time, so here are some additional suggestions for gifts. For more ideas, go to the side bar and take a look at the Books of the Week, as well as Poets of the Week. You'll find plenty to entice a reader there.

In part one of our garland, I've gathered three current books NC or former NC writers.

Here's a new book of stories by a long-time friend of mine, poet and Editor of Shenandoah, R.T Smith. I met Rod many years ago at the Critz Writers Workshop, where A. R. Ammons held forth to a motley crew of us aspiring writers in Virginia. Rod has published numerous books of poetry and has edited Shenandoah right up into the top ranks of the country's literary magazines.



This new collection, as Ann Pancake says, "is part bluegrass symphony, part speaking in tongues... it is the most beautifully sung story collection I have read in years."

George Singleton calls some of the characters "wonderfully warped, melodic, Appalachian" and others "flat-out idiomatic poetic," which ought to whet any one's appetite.

On the menu (consider them appetizers):
Cockers for Christ
Tastes Like Chicken
Sugar
Fig Honey
Red Jar
Ruminants.....
Sound good? You can go to http://www.irisbooks.com/ to order the boo

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John Amen's new book, At the Threshold of Alchemy, holds the same intensity and surprising turns of language and perspective that have marked his earlier work. I find his poetry energizing, instructive, exhilarating, and for those long dark nights that follow Christmas, it would be ideal for keeping one's imagination pulsing. John will be coming to WCU in the spring to take part in our WCU Spring Literary Festival, so I will be posting more about him in March.



"Poems such as these, and there are plenty in this book—John Amen’s third—keep resounding in the mind the way great poetry does...."
—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal

John is the author of three collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003), More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and At the Threshold of Alchemy (Presa 2009), and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget). He is also an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. Amen travels widely giving readings, doing musical performances, and conducting workshops. Further information is available on his website: http:///. Contact: pedmagazine@carolina.rr.com

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Linda Annas Ferguson now lives in Charleston, SC, but she is a native North Carolinian. Her latest book, Dirt Sandwich, is just out from Press 53 in Winston-Salem.

Linda is the author of five collections of poetry, including Bird Missing from One Shoulder (WordTech Editions, 2007); Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk (Finishing Line Press, 2006); Last Chance to Be Lost (Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, 2004); and It’s Hard to Hate a Broken Thing (Palanquin Press, University of S.C. Aiken, 2002). She was the 2005 Poetry Fellow for the South Carolina Arts Commission and served as the 2003-04 Poet-in-Residence for the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C. A recipient of the Poetry Fellowship of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, she is a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors. She was a featured poet for the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon Series. Her work is archived by Furman University Special Collections in the James B. Duke Library. A North Carolina native, she now resides in Charleston, SC. Visit her website at http://www.lindaannasferguson.com/.

SHENANDOAH: The Washington and Lee University Review

(Billy Edd Wheeler / "Coon Creek Girls and Billy Edd"
(Rosie Foley and Lily Man Pennington; from a photograph by Warren Brunner)oil, 16" x 20", 2002)

SHENANDOAH is probably my favorite literary magazine. Its editor, R.T. Smith,is a friend from way, way back and one of the country's finest poets. He's also a fiction writer worth reading, too. The magazine always has his Editor's Note at the end, this issue's piece titled "Heart and Coal: An Appreciation." As Rod describes it, "It's about coal mining, songs about the people and specifically about Kathy Mattea's album Coal."



To read an interview with Rod Smith, go to http://www.cortlandreview.com/issuethree/rodandjohn3.htm



(R.T. SMITH)

This Spring/Summer issue is a reader's dream. How could it be otherwise with the lead-off story being one by Lee Smith? Maxine Kumin gives us an essay, "Swift to Its Close," and the list of poets ranges from Richard Foerster to Hanes Eason, with David Wagoner, Elton Glaser, James Malone Smith, and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, among others, in between. Yes, there are book reviews, too, and an interview with Dominica Radulescu by Sarah Kennedy, herself an outstanding poet. To see the entire table of contents, as well as read excerpts from earlier issues, go to www.shenandoah.wlu.edu.

After you visit the website, SUBSCRIBE. OUR LITERARY MAGAZINES NEED OUR SUPPORT.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick has long been a poet whose work I've admired; I'm happy to present her poem from this current issue, "After the Cave Paintings" below.




After the Cave Paintings

Why do I stand unmoved,
jaded as a tabloid, refusing
astonishment, not down on
my knees, but sober as stone—
surely 17th century spelunkers,
pranksters, or WWII resistance
fighters passing hours in the belly
of the mountain made these
bison, these bearded horses.

But carbon dating brings me
to my senses. Whatever I can’t take
in—1500 generations, 32,000 years—
here’s human memory on the horns
of an ibis, our ancestors making it up
from scratch.
Is it all too near
to where I’ve been? Birth & Death.
Back and forth across that stuttering
line, illness a long darkness with only
a lantern and my love’s strong
arm, the uneven, the unearthly
underfoot.

Stalactites make their own
sense of water and limestone
as I’m to make something wholly new
from the dripstone of another life.

Just as well we’re not as firmly
anchored as we think.
In the thinned air, the wavering light,
easier to find that other self, who knows
as the animal knows, as the bears
in these caves once knew, standing
upright on the old riverbed,
so daughters of Adam, sons of Eve,
took up what the bears laid down,
dark claw on limestone, and drew.

Kathryn teaches poetry, Irish Studies, and environmental literature at Appalachian State University. Her most recent book is Out of the Garden (Mayapple, 2007)