The Online Literary Magazine at Arizona State University
The Narrative Storytelling Initiative‘s goal is to enhance access and public engagement with narrators and narratives. They are currently looking for messages written to Mother Earth in the future, with a maximum of 100 words. These messages will be included in a special exhibition piece at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory during the last two weeks of October.
Learn more and submit your message here!
On September 14 at 6pm, Lauren Kuby will be at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix to exchange poetry and stories about the environment and environmental crisis. Please note that performer signups are limited, and these signups close September 7.
The Changing Hands Bookstore is unique to Arizona and offers new and used books. They often host author events.
Lauren Kuby is a sustainability scientist at Arizona State University and a recognized national champion for climate action and clean energy.
Register here to join!
David Baker’s new book Whale Fall, published by W. W. Norton & Company, is a poetry collection that operates on both a macro and micro level. As Baker’s poetry delves into global ecosystems, it also delves into his personal life. His masterful ability to blend these themes is apparent even early on in the book. His poem “Mullein,” the second in the collection, relates the scientific names of plants to the intimate nicknames Baker’s father gave to friends and family.
Whale Fall is filled with scientific terminology. In fact, the title itself is the name of a particular phenomenon. As Baker explains in his interview with Renee Shea in World Literature Today, a whale fall is an “oceanographic term that describes three stages of [a whale’s] death and decay.” It can take years for the whale carcass to settle on the ocean floor, and its body can provide nutrients to other organisms for decades.
Baker’s poetry is known for its sense of place and environmental message, and Whale Fall follows this trend. For those looking for beautiful nature imagery grounded in environmentalism and threaded with a personal narrative, Whale Fall is the perfect poetry collection.
A virtuoso of eco-poetry and acoustics, Baker meditates on the nonpareil majesty of the planet with rigorous consideration and reverence… Baker’s careful, captivating writing sinks under the skin, summoning a long-forgotten need for stillness, wonder, and attention to the sacrosanctity of the world.
publishers weekly
David Baker has written nineteen books, thirteen of them poetry collections. His work has been published in American Poetry Review, Antaeus, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. To learn more about Baker, visit his website.
From the shadow of the garfish to the memory of seabed in Ohio sandstone, nothing appears to be too slight or too immense for David Baker’s powers of lyric transformation. In book after eloquent book, his artistry has become more purely his own: pared down to essentials while refining its scope of generous inclusion. Baker’s method, like his subject, is the fine pulse of human encounter: here in its most distillate manifestation.
Linda Gregerson, author of prodigal: new and selected poems and magnetic north
You can purchase Whale Fall through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Baker’s poems “Never-Ending Birds” and “The Truth About Small Towns” appeared in Issue 3 of Superstition Review. To read them, go here.
Join Superstition Review in congratulating past intern Ljubo Popovich on his forthcoming novel, The Arden, out April 8th. Together, Ljubo and his wife wrote this science fiction, horror, comedy under the pen name L.S. Popovich. The story follows Kaneda, a homeless hacker, who, finding a portal, visits the future with his band mates and must “discover how an ecological disaster turned Earth into a man-eating forest to prevent the apocalypse”. With this as its plot, the novel explores ideas of both environmentalism and anti-environmentalism.
“This dark, environmental fable is a thought-provoking strange trip that I didn’t want to end.”
David David Katzman, award-winning author of A Greater Monster
To order your copy of The Arden click here. Also be sure to check out Ljubo’s website, as well as, his past work with Issue 8.