NEW PRESS SPOTLIGHT (5/27):
BY JESSE DAMIANI
Founded originally as a literary magazine in 1998 and then expanded to include Fence Books in 2001, Fence has published some of the most important contemporary work of the past decade. They host several book prizes: The Fence Modern Poets Series, The Motherwell Prize (formerly the Alberta Prize), and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose; as well as participating as a publisher for the National Poetry Series. Since 2007, Fence and Fence Books (as programs of Fence Magazine, Incorporated) have been affiliated with the University at Albany and the New York State Writers Institute. {MORE}
FEATURING:
Joyelle McSweeney was born in Boston and spent most of her childhood in suburban Philadelphia. She has a BA from Harvard University; an MPhil in English studies from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
McSweeney’s collections of poetry include The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series, and The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004). She is also author of the novels Nyland, the Sarcographer (2007) and Fret (2007). {MORE}
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AND REVIEWS OF:
Each line in this collection moves with violent immediacy, generating atmospheres that can be as touching as they are unsettling. Though existing in the flux of voice-driven poetry that the new century has especially given rise to, Reines’s irony does what irony is supposed to do: it hurts. {MORE}
A dizzying swirl of cultural references, historical figures, animals, places, and ideas, reading Legault’s second collection is akin to what one would feel if Wikipedia were a roller coaster. The Other Poems is simultaneously hyper-reflexive and something altogether antithetical to it—pointing inward by groping relentlessly outward—embodying the idea of “otherness” by embodying everything in sight. {MORE}
Though these poems are found works in origin, they are anything but arbitrary—the thematic linkage between image and text is expertly nuanced, allowing each to build on the work of the other. What we find is a poet who is as willing to deconstruct that which we consider significant, holy, or meaningful as he is to re-create it. {MORE}
RECENT FEATURES | An Interview with Tayari Jones |An Interview with Hannah Pittard | An Interview with Sandra Simonds
REVIEWS | Darcie Dennigan, Madame X | Melissa Range, Horse and Rider | Emily Pettit, Goat in the Snow | Jenny Boully, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking towards them
Visit our ARCHIVE for more.
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Ariana Reines,
Paul Legault,
Brandon Downing,