Come to Prairie Lights in downtown Iowa City this Friday at 10:00 for The Muybridge Dreams Anthology!

FEATURING:
Barrett Baumgart
Daniel Cesca
Jessica Dwelle
Briony Gylgayton
Thor Nystrom
Katherine Sherman
Rachael Small
Lesley Wheeler

AND SPECIAL MUSICAL GUEST:
Ben Shattuck

Let us celebrate life and literature and beauty.

Poecology is a new literary e-journal for poetry, fiction and nonfiction about ecology, place, and the environment. They recently published my poem Within the Foothills in their debut issue.

In an age of increasing disconnection from the physical world and the myriad communities of people, plants, animals and topographies, Poecology seeks to revitalize interconnectedness. The writing published here will meditate on ecological and place-based themes from various perspectives and aesthetics, pushing boundaries and experimenting whenever possible.

Check out their first issue here!

I also absolutely adore the front cover of this issue, by artist Nikki Rosato.

Patricia Killelea and I will be reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night! The event begins at 8 P.M, with an Open Mic at 9. The John Natsoulas Gallery is located at 521 1st Street. Information about the event follows below!

Join the Facebook event for this reading!

Patricia Killelea & Briony Gylgayton

A recent graduate of UC Davis, Briony Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis, a manuscript of poetry about psychological disorders, was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. Briony Gylgayton will begin her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in August, 2011.

Patricia Killelea is the author of the new poetry collection Other Suns, now available from Swan Scythe Press (2011). Originally from the Bay Area, California, Patricia has placed her poems in The Seizure State, The Tule Review, and Suisun Valley Review, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, and holds an M.A. in English & Creative Writing, also from the University of California at Davis. She has taught the Introduction to Native American Literature course at UCD since Fall 2009.

Attendees are encouraged to arrive early at the John Natsoulas Gallery to secure a seat, and to sign up for a spot on the Open Mic list. The Poetry Night Reading Series, organized and hosted by Andy Jones, occurs on the first Wednesday of the month at Bistro 33, and third Thursday of every month at the John Natsoulas Gallery.

Who: Briony Gylgayton and Patricia Killelea
What: The Poetry Night Reading Series
When: Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 8 pm
Where: John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street
Media Contact: poetryindavis@gmail.com
The John Natsoulas Gallery – 756-3938

I’m currently working on a project with the Poet Laureate of Davis, Allegra Silberstein, called the Davis Poetry Book Project.  We’ll be compiling, producing, and distributing an anthology of poetry written on the subject of Davis, by current and past Davis residents.

Out goal with the anthology is to bring poetry to those citizens of Davis who do not usually receive exposure to it. I have a vested interest in shaking off the idea that poetry is inherently inaccessible to people who don’t write it. Because the book’s subject matter will be of general interest to all who live in Davis, I have great hopes that it will not only feature the excellent work of our many talented local poets, but also bring to Davis a shared appreciation for the art of poetry.

If you’re interested in becoming a part of this project, submission is free and can be done online! Submission guidelines and more information about the project can all be found at DavisPoetryBook.com.

You can read an article from The California Aggie about the project here:
New poetry anthology aims to capture the soul of Davis

On Friday, April 15th, the poetry reading series The Other Voice presents Briony Gylgayton and Traci Gourdine as the featured poets. The series is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis, located at 27074 Patwin Road. We meet at 7:30 in the library of the church. Refreshments and open mic follow the reading.

Traci Gourdine and Briony Gylgayton

Briony Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis, a manuscript of poetry about psychological disorders, was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. Her work has been published extensively in local journals, including The Tule Review, The Yolo Crow, the Blue Moon Literary and Art Review, the Suisun Valley Review, and Nameless Magazine. Briony currently works as the head of public relations for the Poetry Night Reading Series, and as a web designer for Eager Mondays, where she specializes in creating websites for poets and writers. She will begin her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop this August.

Traci Gourdine’s poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has been anthologized within Shepard and Thomas’ Sudden Fiction Continued (Norton Publishing). Traci and Quincy Troupe were paired in a year long exchange of letters for the anthology Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books). She is co-editor of Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming (Candlewick Press), an anthology of writing by young Native writers, as well as We Beg to Differ, poems by Sacramento poets against the war. She has also co-edited the Tule Review with Luke Breit for the Sacramento Poetry Center. Traci Gourdine is a professor of English at American River College and chairs the Creative Writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts. She was Chair of the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for four laureate terms. For ten years she facilitated writing workshops within several California state prisons.

I’m very excited for this featured reading, and hope to see you there this Friday!

For the last two years, every April I have written a poem a day to celebrate National Poetry Month and to kickstart my Spring writing. These short, mostly unedited poems are available at my In-Progress writing blog, The Spider Songs of Mister Spector. I’ll be posting some of the slightly more polished versions over here.

April Poems, 2009
April Poems, 2010

First poem of April, 2011:

There is fountain grass in my limbs
plumose flowers
that turn in my fingers like blind caterpillars.
I move my hands over boxes and tape,
move through my house
deliberately,
taking,
like a pupa moving through leaves.

I will miss my jar of flour,
my broken floor lamp,
my half-things.
I move my hands along them,
and dig my fingers into the carpet.
There are scratches near the doorframe
and holes where nails and pins went.
I will miss taking these bites.
I will miss breaching my house.
I pass my hands along my walls
as I move through my house, filling them.

I move through my house,
watering and feeding.
My bones are fountain grass
and the brushes in my bottle arms
are branching.

My poem “Box Without Hinges” will be published in the upcoming issue from New York-based The MOM Egg, Volume 9, coming out in May of 2011. I’m especially excited about this publication, which features poetry by or about mothers. This poem, originally titled Couvade, was part of Louder Walls as a poem about sympathetic pregnancy, a condition in which the partner of an expectant mother experiences the sensation of pregnancy.

Box Without Hinges

woman with a white chest big
as a barrel and slick as an oyster
with sweat in the morning by the toilet
I hold my ballooned belly in thick wristed
hands as it swings and sticks and swims

I eat mostly pitted
fruits, crave an inconvenience
as it is winter and apricots are
dry as old women’s wombs
I push knobbled fingers against
my temples the tremble thrills
against me and my teeth snap
so hard they float
before day breaks I have not slept once

the falling and hatching
it is at once the only cure
my eyes on different shards of
my belly shell, I see at two angles
the last of me, my
sweet yolk glossed,
sun sopped and gently cooking
sun sopped and gently cooking

My poem “In Parts Only” has been published in the Winter 2011 edition of the Sacramento journal, The Tule Review. I’ll be at the R25 Arts Complex in Sacramento on Monday, April 18 for the 7:30 reading celebrating this recent release!

This event, presented by Tule Review co-editors Linda Collins and Theresa McCourt, is usually standing-room only and a great opportunity to connect with local Sacramento poets. I hope to see you there!

James saw the slingsby grasshopper’s high, strut-braced wings,
that open truss framework an open gate, and James trembled
and felt forever the space between him and the airplane

Like James, the grasshopper was easily dismantled,
hid in pieces while James practiced

First the wings of real grasshoppers, catch nets and wing nets,
then eggshells, until tin foil, until commissary cutlery,
until James tasting broad stripe on wing sides
that open truss network like frosting on mixing blades

James felt around grasshopper hinges, wings, joints, leaked over pieces
the grasshopper was designed to break to

James, his light oil throat closing over
him, the grasshopper,
the world compressed down
until James full of metal came to dinner
to ask for one of those things which you take from a chicken
and pull apart
meaning a wishbone

My poem “Some Old Boyfriends” will be published in the Spring of 2011 in the Kansas-based magazine, Inscape!

Some Old Boyfriends

The Cuttlefish
A cuttlefish wove nets,
his body the warp, the water the weft.
The way rain sleets off streets
his rapid skin could shift,
two skin layers that swayed,
the lower shadowing through
until he turned grainy, sand colored,
with a twist in the water
to show where he’d been.

The Guinea Fowl
A guinea fowl hollered his call,
“buckwheat, buckwheat,”
at the shape of his own feathered shadow.
The loudest bird, he’d sound the alarm
for anything, fox or milkman, cold wind.
With wings and wattle trembling,
his head nodded violently
on a neck thin and blue as a vein.

The Elephant
A bull elephant in full must
stinky and extra aggressive
made an unexpected visit
in the early afternoon.
Young, inexperienced, his tusks
still squat as flower buds
and his big flat eyes,
the elephant followed behind my safari vehicle
long after I’d stopped waving.