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With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Afaa Michael Weaver’s Spirit Boxing, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Refugees, and Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, for a glimpse into the worlds of these new and noteworthy titles.
Phillip Pullman to publish new book trilogy; bookstores encourage political protest; Morgan Parker on Beyoncé and her new collection; and other news.
Submissions are currently open for the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award. A prize of $10,000 and publication by Graywolf Press is given for a poetry collection by a U.S. writer of at least forty years of age who has not published a full-length book of poetry.
Using the online submission system, submit a manuscript of forty-eight to eighty pages with a biography that includes publication history by February 27. There is no entry fee. Visit the contest page for complete guidelines.
The Emily Dickinson First Book Award is an occasional contest that is not held annually. Previous winners include Hailey Leithauser, Brian Culhane, and Landis Everson. The winner of the 2017 award will be notified by April 30, and announced publicly at the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards ceremony in Chicago in June.
Love poems and anti-love poems for Valentine’s Day; a case against English academia; Amazon to open brick-and-mortar store in California Bay Area; and other news.
“The Love Song for Shu-Sin”—written around 2000 BCE in ancient Mesopotamia—is considered the oldest love poem that exists in text form, but also functioned as a song performed during a sacred marriage ceremony for Shu-Sin, a ruler in the city of Ur. Read through Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer’s translation and think about the elements of the writing that tie it to its specific time and context. What feels ancient about the poem? Can you extrapolate or interpret its meanings in a way that reflect your own experiences of contemporary love? Write a love poem that meditates on love as it might have been expressed four thousand years ago versus how you see it today.
Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, and featuring poems by Ron Padgett, Paterson stars Adam Driver as a bus driver who writes poetry and whose favorite poet is William Carlos Williams.
Arundhati Roy’s impact on Indian literature; the state of journalism in the digital age; a history of the Paris Review; and other news.
Javier Marias on fiction and politics; the social-media team behind the Merriam-Webster dictionary; the resurgence of aphorisms; and other news.
How many exclamation points to use in fiction; Swansea University announces the longlist for the 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize; fiction writer William Melvin Kelley has died; and other news.
“We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes. / We forget the display is blind.” Sandra Beasley, winner of the 2008 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in poetry, reads “Inventory” from her third poetry collection, Count the Waves (Norton, 2015).
