Changing Hands

#ArtLitPhx: Friday Poetry with Jeredith Merrin at Changing Hands

Superstition Review

jeredith-merrinJeredith Merrin will be reading from her new book Owling this Friday, October 14 at 7 p.m. at Changing Hands Tempe. Her latest poetry collection won the 2016 Grayson Books Chapbook competition.

Merrin, brought up in the Pacific Northwest, took her MA in English (specializing in Chaucer), and a PhD from UC Berkeley in Anglo-American Poetry and Poetics. Cup, a special honoree in the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, is her third collection; her previous books are Shift and Bat Ode (University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poets series). She’s authored an influential book of criticism on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Her reviews and essays (on Moore, Bishop, Clare, Mew, Amichai, and others), and poems have appeared in Paris Review, Slate, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review and elsewhere. A retired Professor of English (The Ohio State University), Merrin lives near Phoenix.

For more information, please visit Changing Hands website.

#ArtLitPhx: Reading for Crossing the Horizon – Laurie Notaro

Superstition Review

Crossing-the-horizon-Laurie-NotaroNew York Times bestselling novelist, Laurie Notaro, presents her debut historical novel, Crossing the Horizon. She will be presenting her book at Changing Hands Phoenix on Thursday, October 6th at 7:00 p.m. The presentation will include a short reading, a film, a short talk from an experienced aviatrix from the Phoenix chapter of the 99s, and book signing. Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W Camelback Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013.

Laurie Notaro was a reporter and columnist for The Arizona Republic. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Idiot Girls’ Action Adventure Club, Autobiography of a Fat Bride, I Love Everybody and Other Atrocious Lies, We Thought You Would Be Prettier, Idiot Girls’ Christmas, There’s a Slight Chance I Might Be Going to Hell, The Idiot Girls and the Flaming Tantrum of Death, Spooky Little Girl, It Looked Different on the Model, and The Potty Mouth at the Table. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

For more information, please visit Changing Hands website or the Facebook event.

#ArtLitPhx: Changing Hands and the Piper Center Present Garth Risk Hallberg

Superstition Review

Gary-Changing Hands

Garth Risk Hallberg will be visiting Changing Hands Phoenix with his debut novel, City on Fire. The event is co-presented by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. The New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Vogue, Newsday, The Atlantic, and others named City on Fire the Best Book of the Year.

The event takes place on Wednesday, September 21st at 7 PM – 9 PM. For more information about the event, please visit the Facebook page or the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing page.

The author was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

Hemming Flames Now Available

Superstition Review

Patricia Colleen MurphyWe at Superstition Review are very pleased to announce that our founding editor, Patricia Colleen Murphy, recently had her first collection of poetry, Hemming Flames, published by Utah State University Press. Hemming Flames was chosen by Stephen Dunn as the winner of the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award.

 

Hemming FlamesThroughout this haunting first collection, Patricia Colleen Murphy shows how familial mental illness, addiction, and grief can render even the most courageous person helpless. With depth of feeling, clarity of voice, and artful conflation of surrealist image and experience, she delivers vivid descriptions of soul-shaking events with objective narration, creating psychological portraits contained in sharp, bright language and image. With Plathian relentlessness, Hemming Flames explores the deepest reaches of family dysfunction through highly imaginative language and lines that carry even more emotional weight because they surprise and delight. In landscapes as varied as an Ohio back road, a Russian mental institution, a Korean national landmark, and the summit of Kilimanjaro, each poem sews a new stitch on the dark tapestry of a disturbed suburban family’s world.

 

Patricia has two upcoming readings:

Thursday September 1st at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap at Changing Hands Tempe.

Thursday September 22nd at 7 pm she will be reading with Sarah Vap and Dexter Booth at ASU’s Hayden Library.

 

On August 20th, Four Chambers Press held a book release for Hemming Flames. If you missed it, you can watch it here.

 

The book is available from Amazon. For more information about the book, please visit its website.

Owling by Jeredith Merrin

Superstition Review

Owling by Jeredith Merrin CoverGrayson Books recently published Jeredith Merrin’s chapbook, Owling. Owling won the 2016 Grayson Books Chapbook Competition.

Jeredith describes her book as follows:

The naturalist John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” In my new chapbook project, each Owl species is observed/described for its own sake, and each species also “hitches” to something else, some set of human behaviors or concerns.  Each owl–who knows how these things happen?–has led me somewhere I didn’t know I was going and has suggested its own form. I have always been interested in natural history as well as psychology, and would like to think this has resulted in an outward- as well as inward-looking poetry.

Below is one of the poems from Owling  (originally published in Zoomorphic and now through Grayson Books).

The Maned Owl
(Jubula lettii:  classified [2013] as “Data Deficient”
by the International Union for Conservation of Nature)
 .
About the maned owl
there is little to tell
because little is known.
It gets its leonine name
from bushy, face-framing
ear tufts. It lives
in Gambon, Cameroon,
Liberia, the Congo
(in what numbers we don’t know),
in closed-canopy rainforest.
Its habits are secretive
and nocturnal.  Presumably,
given heavy lumbering,
its survival’s at risk.
About reproduction and diet,
information is scant.
Its call may be
(we’re not sure)
a low, dove-like coo.
As is the case with
the wide coral reefs,
or with each creature’s
closed-canopy mind,
or with almost anyone’s
mother or father,
too little is known about them.
And then they’re gone.

 

Owling is available online from Grayson Books and Amazon. It is also available at Changing Hands.