Tourist at a Miracle
Mark Statman

Tourist at a Miracle is Mark Statman’s first full collection of poetry. His poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in many anthologies and in such publications as American Poetry Review, The Hat, Hanging Loose, Tin House, and Florida Review. His translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York (with Pablo Medina) has been widely praised; John Ashbery called it “the definitive version.” He is also the author of Listener in the Snow: The Practice and Teaching of Poetry ( Kenneth Koch said “teaching poetry may never be the same again”); The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing (with Christian McEwen); and The Red Skyline: Poems, a chapbook. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Statman is an associate professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College of The New School and also taught for many years for Teachers & Writers
Collaborative. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Katherine, and their son, Jesse.

Praise for Tourist at a Miracle:

“It’s very rare to watch the birth of a new style. It’s like watching through a new set of Proust’s kaleidoscopes. Mark Statman has been working for years on a vision of himself and parts of the city—concentrated and bare as any poetry. It’s hard to compare it to anything except a commentary on the real and the imagined— pointillist poems almost without figures and adjectives and false decorations. But it all adds up, like a fire hydrant taken by Rudy Burkhardt, because everything is unexaggerated, convincing as a street sign. He has gotten away from any lyric leftovers, and in his anti-anti-poems he makes a lot of magic and music out of elegies of a city mouse. He has a family, a loved wife, and son, and a past—he has a constant politics and is not seduced by the political. He makes us bewildered tourists at his everyday miracle.”—David Shapiro

“Tourist at a Miracle is a big title to live up to. Mark Statman delivers the tourist’s wonder and distance in spare, deliberate music—American poetry’s grand plain style descended from William Carlos Williams and James Schuyler. His miracles are those we all experience if we have our eyes and feelings open—love, friendship, fatherhood, loss, anxieties, frustrations, fears...the everyday and always. Statman is a head-on poet willing to risk clarity in pursuit of the marvelous we might encounter anywhere.”—William Corbett

“‘The letters glow like ghosts’ concludes Mark Statman’s poem ‘Losing Buttons’ which is a memorable and a signifying cipher of how every gesture and commonplace, every person and place known has its negative, reverse, absent “one left out,” the “what I’m not seeing’’ ‘second question.’ The poems in Tourist at a Miracle attend to the enigma of how it is ‘the other half is still unknown’ imply the indescribable silence and loss when the baseball game on the radio is suddenly turned off. Yet, evident, everyday things are engaged with, loved and seen. ‘Yellow Jerusalem artichoke/Jesse said.’ The hard, fast quick chasms of Statman’s particular urban topography register in a stripped down intimacy that shares a propensity with James Schuyler for splices of weather, signals of season ‘winter facts’ obliquely seen. These poems compel us to notice instances of being in shorthand like (my favorite) ‘syrup, algebra, love’ amid the ‘heights, lost, heights / resolve, view, found.’”
—Kimberly Lyons

“The way to redeem the world, Mark Statman writes, ‘is not to fall in love / but to stay in love / to use the word love / every day in your life / and mean it.’ How surprising, and how wonderful, to find a poet who builds meaning this way, and insists on meaning what love means. In Tourist at a Miracle, Statman gives us language as commitment, commitment as imagination, imagination as soul-making. Statman has translated Lorca brilliantly, and here he gives us a version of New York that Lorca would recognize and welcome. This book is a delight.”—Joseph Lease

 

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Dialect of a skirt
Erica Miriam Fabri

Erica Miriam Fabri is a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and received her MFA in poetry from the New School. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Texas Review, Hanging Loose, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly and Good Foot Magazine. She has lectured and led seminars at Cooper Union School of Arts, New York University, Columbia University and Penn State University. She is also a spoken word mentor and curriculum writer for Urban Word NYC. She currently teaches creative writing and performance poetry at The School of Visual Arts, Pace University and for the City University of New York (CUNY) at Hunter College and Baruch College. This is her first book.

Praise for Dialect of a skirt:

“These aren’t poems. They’re ball gowns.”—Rachel McKibbens

“Wouldn’t you like to know what happened when Marilyn Monroe made love to Joan Crawford? (Hint: a webbed foot was involved.) Why holy is a secular world? What Barack Obama’s grandmother thought? What the poet said to the truck driver? And why a fourteen-year-old girl would throw her newborn out a window? In Erica’s impressive first collection we hear a myriad of characters speak—some hilarious, some ironic, some tragic—and we can’t help but listen. And learn.” —Sharon Mesmer

“The poems in Dialect...are raw, honest, and built of a dance that takes place in trees. They are that kung-fu. This first book of Fabri’s challenges the landscape of contemporary verse and makes us joyful for having followed her in the end.”—Roger Bonair-Agard

 

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Vacations on the Black Star Line
Michael Cirelli

MICHAEL CIRELLI'S FIRST COLLECTION, LOBSTER WITH OL' DIRTY BASTARD (HANGING LOOSE, 2008), WAS A NY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM AN INDEPENDENT PRESS AND WAS FEATURED IN THE "DEBUT POETS" ISSUE OF POETS & WRITERS MAGAZINE. HE HAS ALSO AUTHORED TWO CURRICULA, POETRY JAM (RECORDED BOOKS, 2010) AND HIP-HOP POETRY & THE CLASSICS (MILK MUG, 2004), AND IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF URBAN WORD NYC. HE HAS BEEN FEATURED IN WORLD LITERATURE TODAY, SPOKEN WORD REVOLUTION REDUX, KING MAGAZINE AND HBO'S DEF POETRY JAM. HE LIVES ON THE MOON.

When We Were Countries
The Hanging Loose Press High School Writing Collection

When We Were Countries is a collection of extraordinary poems and stories by 73 of the nation’s most outstanding high school age writers. All the work first appeared in the special high school section of Hanging Loose magazine, the standard for cutting-edge work by teenage writers since 1968, offering young writers the opportunity to have their work published alongside that of professionals in one of the country’s oldest and most distinguished literary journals. The poetry and fiction in this volume, as in the previous three, has been selected by Hanging Loose editors Mark Pawlak, Dick Lourie, and Robert Hershon. And When We Were Countries incorporates a new feature not included in the previous collections. Four accomplished poet/teachers share their perspectives on how they have nurtured teen writers: Marty Skoble teaches at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn; Kathleen Aguero is a professor at Pine Manor College near Boston and instructs teenagers every summer at the New York State Young Writers Institute; Kip Zegers teaches at New York City’s Hunter College High School; and Joanna Fuhrman instructs students at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She is also an alumna of the magazine: Her own early poems first appeared in the Hanging Loose high school section 20 years ago, and she has gone on to publish four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which won the prestigious 2009 Kinereth Gensler Award.

Poet and critic X. J. Kennedy concludes his introduction to When We Were Countries with these words:
“ . . . any old futzers who assume that teen-agers nowadays spend all their time at video games or texting away on their cell phones will suddenly wise up and find reason to rejoice. To anyone over the age of (maybe) ten, these stories and poems will ring true. To any young writer: as you toil at your computer screen or paper, this book will assure you that you are not alone. Teachers: you’ll be heartened and encouraged by what this rich gathering proves possible. Everybody: grab this book, if you know what’s good for you. Devour it, digest it, and be regaled.”

SMART LIKE ME
“These poems are by teenagers themselves, expressing an incredible range of thought and feeling on a wide variety of topics.... The levels of insight and maturity are often astounding....” – School Library Journal

BULLSEYE
“offers teenagers and adults a glimpse at America’s literary future: simple, spare free-form poetry; fiction with insightful wit and impressive depth.” – Booklist

SHOOTING THE RAT
“Images leap from the pages full of surprises, from classical allusions to brand name references, presenting readers with sharp slices of life and a variety of philosophical musings. The prose pieces – some stories, other captured moments – showcase writers who have mastered their craft and found their voices.” – VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates)

Find out more about the High School Writing Collection

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The World in a Minute
Gary Lenhart

This is Gary Lenhart’s fourth collection of poetry. He has also published two other recent books, Another Look: Selected Prose (Subpress) and The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (University of Michigan Press). He teaches writing at Dartmouth World Center.

Writing about an earlier collection, Kenneth Koch said: “Not only does the strong emotion catch the reader very quickly but, almost as soon as it does so, it is undercut by an irony and/or a new understanding that leaves one shaken up, not sure exactly of where one has been (emotionally) but certainly sure that one has been traveling to important places. These high-bounding, twisting-about experiences are made possible, and plausible, by a remarkable quality the poems have of being absolutely true, true to what the poet thinks and feels, and not only convincing but also endearing....”

 

“Gary Lenhart’s The World in a Minute combines all the best of intellect and heart. This compendium of histories takes in the political, ranging from ancient Rome to the Vietnam war to the present; the personal, which verges on memoir in its reminiscences of his life from its working-class childhood roots; and an intimate look at his relationships in the world of art and literature. Lenhart’s talent is in fusing public events and injustices with the day-to-day details of an individual life. Writing in a variety of forms with a sly humor and sophisticated wit, he allows us access to personal revelation at the same time that he gently remains the outsider. Yet, everything in Lenhart’s world of the self is informed by the state of flux around him: the brevity and intricacies of life mirrored in the events of friends’ lives and the historical and social fabric that knits us together. His love for the lived life of art and contemplation—which takes in the world’s chaos—finally determines the subject of this book. Whatever tonal understatement exists here is set against passionate thought, equal parts humor and a wonder undercut by grief, as he reveals our complexities in these fine, distinctive poems.”
—Cleopatra Mathis

 

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Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems
Jeni Olin

This is Jeni Olin’s second full collection of poems, following her exciting debut, Blue Collar Holiday. 

Writing about that book, John Ashbery praised her “wonderfully caustic and vulnerable lyrics,” adding that “Olin’s voice is both raw and strangely accommodating.  This is a marvelous debut.” 

A native of Houston and a resident of New York, Jeni Olin studied at Oxford and Cambridge before receiving her BA and MFA degrees from Naropa University.  Her work has appeared in  The Portable Boog Reader, The Hat, LIT, Hanging Loose, and many other magazines.

3/03
Chuck Wachtel

Chuck Wachtel is also the author of the novels Joe The Engineer, winner of the Pen/Hemingway Citation, and The Gates; a collection of stories and novellas: Because We Are Here (all Viking-Penguin); and five collections of poems and short prose, including The Coriolis Effect and, most recently, What Happens to Me, both published by Hanging Loose Press. He has written the screenplay for Joe The Engineer currently in development as a film. His short fiction, poetry, essays and translations have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies both here and abroad. He lives in New York and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at N.Y.U.

Praise for Chuck Wachtel’s fiction:

3/03 “Part love song, part lamentation, Chuck Wachtel’s 3/03 calls to mind the work of generous, lyrical moralists from Walter Benjamin to Grace Paley. It’s a beautiful, immensely serious, immensely tender portrait of the way we live now.” —Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening and Breakable You

BECAUSE WE ARE HERE “Wachtel is a fluid, modern Aesop.” —The Los Angeles Times

THE GATES “Wachtel has given us a memorable and altogether believable story of regeneration, reclamation and self-discovery.” —New York Times Book Review

JOE THE ENGINEER “Wachtel achieves a gripping narrative because his eye for nuance and detail is exceptionally vivid, and because his knowledge of his characters’ lives, the emotions they bear, is direct and unsparing.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune