As Always, Julia edited by Joan Reardon

As Always, Julia The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto is a collection of letters edited by Joan Reardon who took extraordinary care to present these two amazing women’s correspondence as accurately as possible in regards to timeline and clarifying names and subject mentioned throughout the correspondence. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, this collection is fascinating and endearing.

Julia Child’s initial letter to Mr. DeVoto is answered by his wife, Avis, and the two women continue back and forth on all manner of subjects from knives to recipes to politics in the McCarthy era. Avis DeVoto is able to utilize her editorial skills and connections to the publishing world to assist Julia Child as she and her colleagues create the now famous cook book: Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Julia is able to teach Avis how to create particular dishes she misses from her own travels to France and the two women trade ideas about education, social classes and more throughout the years.

For those who enjoy good food or have a fondness for Julia Child this book will not disappoint. Charming to the end, it is a wonderful read and highly recommended to anyone who loves good food and/or old fashioned letter correspondence. I love both and so I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

If you enjoyed this review you may pick up a copy at your local library, visit your local book-store or follow this link below to order a copy on-line of As Always, Julia edited by Joan Reardon at:

http://www.amazon.com/As-Always-Julia-Letters-DeVoto/dp/0547417713/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325437899&sr=1-1

Thanks always for reading, please stop in again next week…

Zygote In My Coffee Open Submissions

You may send 3-8 poems (no simultaneous submissions please) with a brief biography as well as a bio picture via e-mail. Be sure to include a subject heading of some kind similar to “Last name/Poetry Submission” and have your contact information along with your poems in the body of the e-mail and send it to:

submissionsATzygoteinmycoffeeDOTcom

To learn more about the press, go to:

http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/

For exact details on submission guidelines, go to:

http://www.zygoteinmycoffee.com/submissions.html


Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for another featured good book…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://sites.google.com/site/larrydthomasfar/3
“#3” by Larry Thomas

https://sites.google.com/site/47rhpissue/howie-2
“Visiting Hours” by Howie Good

Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus

doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus is published by Epic Rites Press and is a dead-pan collection of poems focusing on every day life epiphanies and circumstances. Mr. Yamrus pulls no punches, his work is straightforward and to the point. Below I am happy to share a sample with you:

i just now

agreed to an interview.

this one’s
for monday.

it’ll be
the same old questions,

like:

“how’d you get
started?”

“who
do you read?”

and
“who are you influenced by?”

all the same questions
and never once
do i get asked
the right one.

in my
opinion,
the only one.

the one that
says:

“you write a lot about
dogs…

why is that?”

if they’d only
ask me
that

i’d go away
happy.

i’d sit them down
and tell them

exactly

what the dogs
do for me…

they teach me
joy,

perseverance

and
acceptance.

they teach me
total concentration
on a single task.

and
most of all
they teach me
the secret…

the answer to
the one question
i’m asked the most.

the one question
that i’ll never
answer.

they wouldn’t
believe me
even if i
did.

they’d think
i’m lying.

but, you won’t,
will you?

the truth
is

the great secret
these dogs
teach me

is
there isn’t
any.

I like this poem because I am usually the one interviewing someone else and hoping I can go beyond the typically asked question and know the writer has a question they’re dying for someone to ask them. This poem illustrates it perfectly along with adding the wisdom of canines—that there are no secrets in life, just life itself.



giving

them
what they
want

can
be hard

on
a man’s

soul.

This poem speaks the plain and simple truth, no further words needed.



New York just

wasn’t
the same.

i remember
as a kid

everything was
gray and brown

like
the old movies,

and my uncle
had this
2nd floor
walk-up,

with a
single bulb
hanging from a wire
at the top of the stairs.

i remember the night
someone
dropped
a bag of bottles
down the steps,
and the neighbors
yelled,

and my uncle
yelled
back

and the soft
grays

and warm browns

felt safe,

and
we lounged around
in the alleys of the universe.

no, New York’s not
the same.

nothing is.

except for maybe
that old girl,
sorrow.

This poem casts a warm glow on an unusual memory of bottles crashing down the stairs amidst the brown and gray tones of city life. I can’t help but wonder what the poet saw the next time he was in New York that brought about this particular memory and lament.

Mr. Yamrus has published 17 volumes of poetry and 2 novels, his work has been translated into several languages and has been taught in high school and college curriculums. Some of his titles include: New and Selected Poems, Blue Collar, Shoot The Moon, Someone Else’s Dream (a novel), and many more. If you enjoyed this review of doing cartwheels on doomsday afternoon by John Yamrus you may purchase a copy for $20.00 from Epic Rites Press by going to:

http://www.epicrites.org/bookstore.html

Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

How A Poem Happens Blog

Brian Brodeur’s blog states “Contemporary Poets Discuss the Making of Poems” and delivers! Interviews with poets about their work and about poetry take place here, read on for inspiration at:

http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/


Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…

Two Shot: War Medal and Fat Chance by Hosho McCreesh

Hosho McCreesh strikes again with stories that crawl inside your head and stay there.
In the first of two short stories available at http://www.smashwords.com , War Medal, a young boy named Henry spends his day with Buck, a man that was best friends with his father in the armed forces. Buck gets around by using a wheel-chair and Henry gladly spends time pushing him around town on his birthday which happens to be the 4th of July. Buck is out-spoken and bitter, cracking unseemly jokes and causing “scenes” wherever they go. Buck is a vet with a drinking problem, Henry is a boy of 12 trying to understand the jokes Buck spouts and the emotional reactions Buck has to the world around him. Buck spouts off about losing his legs, about a bottle of booze breaking on the sidewalk, and to Henry’s delight, reminisces about Henry’s Dad. For those who know someone like Buck, this story will make your skin crawl. For those who don’t, your skin may crawl anyway as we read about a grown man dealing with the loss of his legs, his best friend, and his attempts to befriend the son of his dead best friend. Told from Henry’s perspective you get a sense of Henry’s innocence, his desire to hear all he can about his Dad, and his longing to make sense of someone like Buck. The ending to this story is disturbing, it has the makings for tragedy of the worst kind and then leaves us hanging. So many lives never tie up neatly and the ending leaves us believing the same thing for both Henry and Buck—how their lives will continue on with loose ends dangling.

The second story, Fat Chance, is about Patrick, a working class man in a working class neighborhood who gets a call from a woman he knows and she asks if she can crash at his place and catch some sleep while he goes to work. He says it’s fine and spends his day thinking about her, forgetting about the hardships of his working shift, dreaming of the things they’ll do together after work, such as heading to the bar Fat Chance. Patrick is the underdog, a man who endears himself to you as you champion his dreams for the night. Does he get the girl or not? To find out how it ends, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

Hosho McCreesh’s stories are always dead-pan and startling, taking the hard-working and turning life on its ear. I highly recommend reading these two stories,War Medal and Fat Chance, are available as a “double shot” for a mere .99 cents at:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/106823


To learn more about Hosho McCreesh and see what other poetry and stories he has published, visit his web-site at:

www.hoshomccreesh.com
Thanks always for reading, please drop in January 2nd when I have returned from spending time with family and friends for the holidays. I wish you and yours Happy Holidays and Happy New Year…

Nerve Cowboy Open Submissions

If you are a poet looking to break in, this is a great place to do so, they were my first acceptance and I am proud to be part of their journal. They also publish great work by seasoned veterans along with artwork and short stories, it’s a well-rounded journal that’s been around for a long time—they like attitude and you need to visit their web-site and/or order a journal to see what I mean.

Having said all of that, they are open to snail-mail submissions year round: Send up to five pages of poems with your contact information on each page along with a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope to:

Joseph Shields and Jerry Hagins, Editors
Nerve Cowboy
P.O. Box 4973
Austin, TX 78765

For more details, go to:

http://www.jwhagins.com/submission.html

and

http://www.jwhagins.com/nervecowboy.html

Good luck to all who submit, please stop in tomorrow for a review of two short stories…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

http://juked.com/2011/12/breakfastinslidell.asp
“Stopping for Breakfast in Slidell” by Ann Barngrover

http://www.sundresspublications.com/wickedalice/young.htm
“Little Red Riding Hood” by Jessica Young


Thanks for clicking in, please drop by tomorrow for more open submissions…

The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander

Henry Denander’s latest collection of poems and one short story, The Accidental Navigator, is published by Lummox Press and has a conversational, close-friend tone that is familiar and comforting. The poems themselves describe Mr. Denander’s amazing life (amazing compared to mine, anyway) of his time working for a record company and meeting such famous people as Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Keith Jarrett. In addition, living on an island in Greece affords him wonderful tales to tell in poetic form as well. From poetry to music to every day life, Mr. Denander covers it all in a natural way that has you reading page to page before realizing the stories are coming to an end. I look forward to more poems and more stories from Mr. Denander and I’m happy to share a few of them with you:


Beauty Sleep

I am sleeping with a CPAP,
it’s a device that blows
air into my nose.

For years I’ve been snoring heavily and
suffered from sleep apnea.

With this tube attached to my nose
I no longer snore and I have a
good sleep.

But when I strap the mask on at night
my wife realizes I no longer look like
the handsome young man
she married

but more like Hannibal Lecter.

But I think she prefers
the Silence of the Lambs
to the Thunder in the Night.

This poem made me laugh. If you don’t know or remember who Hannibal Lecter is he is a character in the movie Silence of the Lambs and is known as a murdering psychopath. I love that this poem is conversational in tone, as though the poet is leaning into you and telling you this story.



The revenge of the couch potato

Zapping through the TV-channels
I stopped at Jeopardy, when I
Recognized a familiar face from
35 years ago.

It was an old teacher I remembered
for his beard and his clogs.

He was a besserwisser and here he
Was on prime time and I was sitting
on my couch watching him miss
almost every question.

At last he got what was coming to
him, Mr. Know-It-All.

I wish I could’ve been there in the
studio to tell him to do his lessons
better next time.

Mr. Denander’s story of sweet-sweet revenge watching a teacher who harassed him as a kid failing at Jeopardy is another one that makes me laugh aloud. We all know this type of person and we all feel grateful when they are put in their place, another great poem.



Accept your name

Henry Chesney Baker
and Henry Charles Bukowski;

if I had known about these guys when
I was young perhaps I would have liked
my own name better.

My name is OK now but I was never very
pleased with it when I was a kid.

At that time no one here in
Sweden knew about Chet or Buk
but now it’s god to be able to
tell people that both of them were
named Henry.

And no one needs to know that
Buk never liked Henry
but used Charles instead.

This poem is one I can relate to, I hated my name as a kid. My grandmother still doesn’t like her own name. This poem’s title is simple and true, accept your name, and then discover other people you admire with the same. A lovely poem that gets you thinking.



The SASE

On eBay I bought a self-addressed and
stamped envelope that the poet Charles Bukowski
sent to Chiron Review in the 80’s.

This is the system, you send poems to a
magazine or a publisher and if they like them
they will use the SASE to reply to you.

More likely they will not use your poems and
return them in the SASE with a brief standard note
telling so.

Many poets have written about how they received
their first rejection letter or how they have their
drawers full of rejection slips.

Even Bukowski got rejection slips. In the early days.

I have framed the Bukowski envelope and
it looks nice on my wall.

It’s a nice conversation piece; when someone asks
about it I tell them the story of how it works and also,
sort of by the way,
I tell them that the Chiron Review is
actually the magazine where I had my
first poem published.

And I don’t mention any of my
rejection letters.

This poem is a tribute to all writers, in my opinion. All of us pine for a personal piece of a writer we admire, we all have those rejection letters saved (some of us shred them or delete them from our e-mails but we always have one or two saved). This poem is a guilty pleasure of mine to share with you all, simple as that.


If you enjoyed this review I urge you to Lummox Press for a copy of your very own. There are so many poems I would like to share but feel it better for you to indulge yourselves by finding a copy for yourself. To purchase a copy of The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander for $15.00 (not including S/H), visit Lummox Press at:

http://www.lummoxpress.com/

To learn more about Henry Denander go to:

www.henrydenander.com



Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…

Press Press Press Blog

Every year around this time I make sure to include a link to this blog because they showcase the latest published chapbooks by the small presses and this is yet another great way to find that perfect gift for the poet, writer, or reader in your life:

http://presspresspress.blogspot.com/

Thanks for clicking in, please stop in tomorrow for another featured poet…

Indiana Review Open Submissions

While IR only accepts about 1% of manuscripts submitted I still say it’s worth sending your best work to them, especially since they offer $5.00 per page upon publication in addition to two contributor’s copies which is a rare and happy find. You may use their on-line submission manager or snail mail 3-6 poems. The link to the on-line submission manager is on the submissions page linked below. You will need to include a brief bio and a cover letter with any previous publications included.


Be sure to read the guidelines at the link below, if you do snail mail your poems be sure to include your contact information at the top of each page and enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for your poems to be returned. The mailing address is:

Poetry Editor
Indiana Review
Ballantine Hall 465
1020 E. Kirkwood Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405


See the guidelines and on-line submission manager at:

http://indianareview.org/submit/

Good luck to all who submit, please drop in again next week…

Poems Found by Poet Hound

https://sites.google.com/site/46arhpcitiesi/doug-mathewson
“Amherst, Massachussetts” by Doug Mathewson

https://sites.google.com/site/46arhpcitiesi/tina-barry
“Hackensack” by Tina Barry


Thanks for clicking in, please stop by tomorrow for more Open Submissions…

The Allen Ginsberg Project

For all things Allen Ginsberg, visit this intellectual and tantalizing blog:

http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/

Please drop in again on Wednesday as I still have not had time to finish reading various books for reviews. The holiday season is in full swing so I apologize again for having less time to get the reviews out weekly but there are more posts the rest of the week so please check in starting Wednesday…

Maybe Next Week...

Hello and apologies again for not having a book review up for this Friday. Please drop in again Monday and I’ll try to finish my book before next Friday…

Blue Mesa Review Poetry Contest

Co-poetry editor Nora Hickey passed along the details for the contest below:

2012 poetry contest guidelines:
 All unpublished poetry manuscripts of 5 poems maximum will be considered.
 The winner will receive $750 and publication in Blue Mesa Review Issue 25, and two copies of issue 25.
 Please submit and pay $17 online to our new online submission manager
 ENTRY DEADLINE: BY DECEMBER 31st, 2011
 Submit here: http://bluemesareview.submishmash.com/submit

*Also, Dana Levin is judging the contest

To visit the main website go to:

http://www.unm.edu/~bluemesa/


Good luck to all who submit, please stop by again soon…