Sugar's 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominations

We are excited to announce our Pushcart Prize nominations for this year. Thanks to all of our contributors for two fantastic issues in 2011. We wish our nominees lots of luck.

• Katharine Cole's "Trail Guide"
• Katie Kingston's "Concourse A Exhibit"
• Steve Langan's "The Midwest"
• Greg Pape's "Waking to Rain"
• Patricia Smith's "Laugh Your Troubles Away"
• Theodore Worzobyt's "Fugal"

Issue 5: Fall/Winter 2011 Launch

Sugar House Review Issue 5 Reading

Wednesday November 16th 7:00—9:00 P.M.

Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111

Celebrate the release of recent issue of Sugar House Review with readings from Shanan Ballam, Star Coulbrook, Jen Hawkins, Cathy Peppers, and Mike White as part of the City Art Reading Series.

Shanan Ballam poetry has appeared in several journals, including Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Cream City Review. Her chapbook, The Red Riding Hood Papers, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She teaches poetry writing and academic writing at Utah State University.

Star Coulbrooke directs the Utah State University Writing Center and is responsible for Helicon West, a bi-monthly open readings/featured readers series. Her poems are published in journals and anthologies such as Redactions: Poetry and Poetics and A Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. Her poem, “How I Stopped Selling Life Insurance,” was named Editor’s Choice in the anthology, New Poets of the American West. Star lives in Smithfield, Utah, with her partner, Mitch, and their three labby-heelerish dogs.

Jen Hawkins is an English/Philosophy double major and Art minor at Idaho State University. Her writing and artwork have been published widely and have received numerous awards. A recovering masochist, Jen enjoys caffeining, shebeening (with all due moderation) and making stuff. She loves Joe with all her bleeding heart.

Cathy Peppers holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University, a PhD from the University of Oregon and has taught at Idaho State University since 1998. She lives with singer-songwriter Bob Picard on a one-hundred-year-old farmstead with superfluous creatures, including a blackjack of cats, two horses, a motley of chickens and a goat. Her poetry is loosely collected in a few manuscripts; the poems here are from Arts & Sciences (call it love), regressing forward and in loving detail.

Mike White poems have appeared in venues including Poetry, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The Threepenny Review, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Witness, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize anthology on six occasions, most recently by Sycamore Review. He is a graduate of the doctoral program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and a former editor-in-chief of Quarterly West.

Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.

The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.

Nick Demske & Rob Carney Reading

Sugar House Review in partnership with the Utah Humanities Council is pleased to announce a reading with poets Nick Demske, author of Nick Demske, and Rob Carney, author of Story Problems on Monday, October 24^th at 7:00 p.m. at the Mount Tabor Lutheran Church (175 South 700 East). This event is free and open to the public and is part of the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. Sugar House Review would like to thank them for their sponsorship.

Nick Demske’s first collection, Nick Demske, is ostensibly a collection of sonnets, though it’s more like sonnet taxidermy, the sonnet eviscerated. The hide is in place, the constraints are there, but our pet is no longer our pet. The eyes are different and the lips curl up just so. The fourteen lines are present, except when they trail off. The rhyme schemes, while they shift from poem to poem, are nearly always present though Demske innovates on the form by simply breaking words as is convenient to make rhymes work, a move now known as “the Demske.” These breaks are startling, confusing, and simultaneously hilarious once the pattern begins to emerge.

Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room, but non-biodegradable, sticking around, the pancake makeup also strangely persisting, rendering his face plastic and one with the material of the film, the celluloid itself. How can we tell this dancer from his nasty dance? The sonnet is one brief sequence played backwards and forwards until its fake, twitchy face says everything. –Joyelle McSweeney

Nick Demske lives in Racine Wisconsin and works there at the Racine Public Library. His self-titled manuscript was chosen by Joyelle McSweeney for the Fence Modern Poets Series Award and published by Fence Books in 2010. He is a founder and editor of the online forum boo: a journal of terrific things (http://boojournal.wordpress.com/) and curates the BONK! performance series in Racine (http://bonkperformanceseries.wordpress.com/). To find reviews, interviews, poems, audio, video and a list of upcoming readings, please visit http://nickipoo.wordpress.com/

Rob Carney is originally from Washington State and earned his BA from Pacific Lutheran University, his MFA from Eastern Washington University, and his PhD from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the author of New Fables, Old Songs (Dream Horse Press, 2003) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), which won the 2004 Utah Book Award for Poetry. His collection This Is One Sexy Planet won the 2005 Frank Cat Press Annual Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he won The National Poetry Review's 2004 Chapbook competition for The Book of the Living. His writing has appeared previously in Atlanta Review, Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and many others, as well as in the collection Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006). Currently, he is a professor at Utah Valley State College and lives with his son Quentin in Salt Lake City.

Reading & Publication Party with Sugar House Review

To celebrate the release of our new issue, Ken Sanders Rare Books is hosting a reading with some of our local contributors on Wednesday, December 29th at 7:00 p.m. (268 South 200 East, Salt Lake City). Readers include Curtis Jensen, Sandy Anderson, Rob Carney, Andrew Haley, Sundin Richards, and Michael McLane. Copies of the newest issue and back issues will be available.

Curtis Jensen is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College. His work is forthcoming in The Equalizer and The Bridge. He is the author of five chapbooks, and he co-curates the Prospect literary series. Previous to Brooklyn, he has lived and worked in Utah, Wyoming and Ukraine. He maintains a blog at http://theendofwaste.blogspot.com.

Sandy Anderson has been involved in organizing and giving poetry readings and workshops since 1965. She was a founding member of Salt Lake Younger Poets in the 1960’s, Word Affair in the 70’s and she worked for nearly two decades as the guiding force behind the City Art Poetry Series, for which she has been honored for her tireless efforts on behalf of other writers by the City of Salt Lake and Park City’s Writers at Work Series. She is the author of two books – Jeanne Was Once a Player of Pianos and At the Edge in White Robes.

Rob Carney is the author of Weather Report (Somondoco Press, 2006) and Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts (Pinyon Press, 2003), both winners of the Utah Book Award for Poetry—and two chapbooks: New Fables, Old Songs and This Is One Sexy Planet. His newest book, Story Problems, is out this fall (Somondoco Press, 2010). His work has been published in dozens of journals and in Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton, 2006).

Andrew Haley’s poems, translations, and short stories have appeared in Girls With Insurance,
Otis Nebula, STOP SMILING, Quarterly West, Western Humanities Review, Zone and other journals.

Michael McLane completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Colorado State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Interim, Colorado Review, and Sugar House Review, among others. He is a minister, loves Western history, and has a permanent 5 o’clock shadow.

Sundin Richards’ poems have appeared in Girls With Insurance, Zone, Colorado Review, Interim,Volt, Cricket Online Review, Elixir and Western Humanities Review, where he won first place in the 1999 Utah Writers’ Contest. His book The Hurricane Lamp is forthcoming from ONLS press. He lives in Salt Lake City.

For more information please call or email:
Ken Sanders Rare Books
268 South 200 East
(801) 521-3819
books@dreamgarden.com
www.kensandersbooks.com

Pushcart Prize Nominations

Sugar House Review is lucky and honored and still amazed to have Paul Muldoon's poem from our first issue (Fall/Winter 2009) included in Pushcart Prize XXXV--Best of the Small Presses, which is out now and available for purchase. We have a copy and recommend it, not only because of Muldoon's poem, but because it's a great anthology of work, illustrating the wonderful job small presses are doing.

This new Pushcart anthology signals not only a great collection, but also that it's time for this year's nominations. We had a difficult time narrowing it down to six, because we love all of the work we've published this past year. Here are the six poems we nominated:

• Steven Cramer's "Versions of Mandelstam" (v3)
• Yolanda Franklin's "Porch Sitters Sippin' Sweet Tea in Heaven" (v2)
• Randall R. Freisinger's "Alien Sex" (v2)
• William Kloefkorn's "Sundown Syndrome" (v2)
• Janet Sylvester's "Away From the Flock" (v2)
• Pimone Triplett's "I Dream of Jeannie: Parabolic Lens" (v3)

Congratulations to these six poets!

We want to thank all of our contributors--obviously, we wouldn't have any Sugar without you--we appreciate you and your work.

New Poets of the American West

About a month ago, Nathaniel and I attended a reading for the anthology New Poets of the American West in Tremonton, Utah on the Holmgren Historical Farm. It was an amazing evening--a reading in the barn, with a bon fire to follow. Such a beautiful setting and beautiful work.


A couple of weeks after that, a few of our editors attended the Helicon West reading in Logan, Utah (posted previously on this blog) also featuring poets from the new anthology. It was another excellent evening of poetry and several of the poets at both readings have had work in Sugar House Review. If you don't already have a copy of the anthology, we here at the Sugar, endorse it--it's big, it's Western and it has some great poets.

Rob Carney has two poems in our current issue--he read part of one of them that night.

Star Coulbrooke has three poems in our first issue, is the founder of Helicon West and organizer of this evening's reading, plus she won editor's choice award for her poem in this anthology.

Michael Sowder has three poems in the current issue of SHR.

Chris Kokinos

Katherine Coles, Utah's Poet Laureate

You might not guess it, but Utah really has some incredible writers. Tomorrow night at Helicon West (Thurs., Nov. 11) our review editor, Mike McLane will be reading with Rob Carney. Both of their work is great, so if you're around, go see them.

Where Have All the Stanzas Gone?

Stanza breaks, people. Stanza breaks. Stanza breaks? People? What happened to stanza breaks? Why this trend of what many of us call "the blob?" Where, oh where have all the stanzas gone? And why do people think readers no longer need a break? Or a little guidance?

Over the last year, I've read more poetry than I have in my entire life. Not because I'm being a diligent reader, but because I'm being a moderately-diligent editor. Reading other people's poetry in mass quantities has given me a wider, much more clear picture of the contemporary poet population's trends. Much is good. Much is mediocre. Some is bad (dripping orange orgasms, for instance).

One trend that particularly worries is the lack of stanzas. I read a lot of submissions without a single stanza break. By the end of such submissions, I am gasping for air--I have been given no time to breathe for an entire five poems. Poets? Why oh why would you do this to either of us?

The stanza break gives your message space. It gives the reader some room to take a breath, a moment to contemplate what's going on. The stanza break gives you as a writer a way to pace your work, a way to tell the reader how to proceed, where to take that breath. It gives you more control.

Thomas Sayers Ellis, one of my advisers during my masters program, says that each stanza is a room and a poet must decide how the reader will enter that room. The most obvious way is the door, but what if you take a helicopter and come in through the roof or climb up through the window? The more rooms a poem has, the more opportunities the poet has to direct the reader through the house. And what if you never actually create your rooms? Well then, you have no control over how anyone enters or exits your work.

I'm not saying every poem needs stanza breaks. There are clearly instances where a lack of stanza breaks actually helps the poem, enforces a message of being strangled, of being squished, of emulating a giant jello mold. My argument is that there are far fewer poems that are made stronger by a lack of stanza breaks, than the opposite.

So seriously, give me a break. I want a stanza break (or two or three or ten). People! Poets! Poets and people who submit, it's time to give us all a chance, a break, a breath, some room to rest our little poet heads.

--Natalie