Marie Gauthier

I have another sales rep meeting before the textbook rush begins, and so have been flipping through various university press catalogs.  Some highlights:

Texas Tech UP

• Wild Flight, by Christine Rhein, Winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Competition in Poetry.  March.  Hardcover, $21.50.  I think printing in hardcover only is a mistake.  Too bad, because I really like the excerpt printed in the catalog.  And the design is great.

Louisiana State UP

• They have a pretty vibrant poetry list, with new books coming out from Reginald Gibbons, Betty Adcock, and David Huddle, among others.
• It was a terrible cloud at twilight, by Alessandra Lynch.  Winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize.  April, paperback, $16.95.  Excerpt:  “Fireflies faltered, lit into/his bony lattice, the fretted ribs, mating/between collarbone and pelvis…” 

Fordham UP

• Corinna, A-Maying the Apocalypse, by Darcie Dennigan.  February, paperback, $18.95.  I don’t know this poet, and the catalog only has a couple lines excerpted, not a poem, but she’s got blurbs from Mark Jarman, Alice Fulton, Matthea Harvey, and Tony Hoagland, so I guess that’s deemed sufficient.

McGill-Queen’s UP 

• Palilalia, by Jeffery Donaldson.  April, paperback, $14.95.  Catalog copy: “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, palilalia is ‘disordered speech–an involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences.’  Listening to someone with palilalia, you might think he is emphasizing his point, pleading with you to hear him.  But then you realize that he is talking to himself, quietly drifting away at thought’s end.”  Excerpt: “Don’t you know/that mine too was the ventriloquist’s thrown voice,/and that what I spoke was a stirred echo?”

That’s it for now–but the Pitt Poetry Series has some good stuff coming this spring, too, not to mention the slew of great poetry books coming from the many small presses.  More to come.