R Johnson: the eye may be said to be the sun in other form

Wednesday, July 18, 2012


Here are some pics of our Ark Press Marathon Reading (6.22.2012).  Thanks to featured readers for making it a HUGE success: Halina Duraj, Eryn Green, Caroline Klocksiem, Esther Lee, Pepper Luboff, Christine Marshall, Hazel McClure, Gina Myers, Brenda Sieczkowski, Mike Sikkema, and Jen Tynes.  And special thanks to Lauren and LOW for hosting the reading.  Sure was dreamy to have so many loved ones, old and new friends alike, mixing it up in the same place.  

Stay tuned for a downloadable Mp3 recording of the event.



Eryn Green


Halina Duraj




Esther Lee

Pepper Luboff




Christine Marshall
Hazel McClure
Gina Myers
Brenda Sieczkowski





Caroline Klocksiem

Mike Sikkema

Jen Tynes and Mike Sikkema

Jen Tynes








Thursday, June 14, 2012


MARATHON READING
poetry, fiction, + banjo
ARK PRESS      JUNE 22 7-9

At LOW (upstairs in Espresso News)
Downtown Boone


HALINA DURAJ
Halina Duraj teaches creative writing at the University of San Diego, and is so happy to be reading in North Carolina. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary journals including Witness, Third Coast, and Confrontation. Her novel, Fatherland, was a finalist for the 2010 UC Davis Maurice Prize in Fiction, and other work has been recommended for the 2009 PEN/O’Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize.







ERYN GREEN
Eryn Green is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver and holds an MFA from the University of Utah. He has been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, awarded by the Poetry Foundation, and recently his collection Eruv was selected by C.D. Wright as a finalist for the 2011 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize. Eryn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Jubilat, Colorado Review, the tiny, Bat City Review, H_NGM_N, Word for/ Word, Rhino, Iron Horse Review, Pheobe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Esquire.com and Denver Quarterly.





CAROLINE KLOCKSIEM
Caroline Klocksiem's poems have appeared in a variety of journals, including The Iowa Review; Hayden’s Ferry Review; The Pinch; BlazeVox; H_NGM_N; and others. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship recipient and 2011 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Look for her chapbook, Circumstances of the House and Moon, from Dancing Girl Press this summer. Originally from South Carolina, she holds an MFA from Arizona State University and teaches English and Literature at the University of Alabama, where she lives with her husband, son, and orange cats. The first time language blew her mind was in kindergarten when she realized that "stop" is "pots" spelled backwards.


ESTHER LEE
Esther Lee is the author of Spit, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, The Blank Missives. Her poems and articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Hyphen, and elsewhere. A former Kundiman fellow, she pursues a Ph.D. in Creative Writing/Literature at the University of Utah and was awarded a Tanner Humanities Doctoral Fellowship to work on her second book.


PEPPER LUBOFF

Pepper Luboff is an Oakland-based poet, visual artist, and freelance writer/editor. She holds a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Utah. Her chapbook, And when the time for the breaking, is forthcoming from Ark Press.









CHRISTINE MARSHALL
Christine Marshall lives and teaches in Davidson, North Carolina. Her poems have been published in 2009 Best American Poetry, Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, gutcult, Nimrod, and Western Humanities Review and featured on Verse Daily. Her current writing project involves poems about holes, others, and insomnia. The name, Marshall, is derived from her place of birth in a brightly lit corridor on the planet Mars, and she is, herself, descended from a majestic line of talking cats.


HAZEL MCCLURE
Hazel McClure lives and writes in Grand Rapids, MI, where she's an English and Writing librarian at Grand Valley State University.  She has a black belt in keeping it real and the t-shirt to prove it. Her work's appeared in Coconut, Mirage #4/Period(ical), RealPoetic and in the chapbook Nothing Moving from Lame House Press.


GINA MYERS
Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (Spooky Girlfriend, 2012). Hold It Down, her second full-length collection, will be published by Coconut Books in 2013.


BRENDA SIECZKOWSKI
Brenda Sieczkowski's poems and lyric essays have appeared in a wide variety of journals. Her chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, is available from dancing girl press. A full-length collection, Like Oysters Observing the Sun, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2013. 


MIKE SIKKEMA
Mike Sikkema believes in people who believe in cryptids, believes in cornbread, in swamp funk, in radical vernacular.  He knows that he is and is not his voice. He gathers poems and mushrooms, books and friends. These days he's writing a documentary with Jen Tynes about two mystical/mythical figures often accused of rowdyism, Pepper and Whiskey.   


JEN TYNES
Jen Tynes is the founding editor of Horse Less Press. She is most recently the author of The Black Mariah (DoubleCross Press) and, with Michael Sikkema, Autogeography (Black Warrior Review). She has chapbooks forthcoming from Projective Industries and Dancing Girl Press. 



Sunday, June 10, 2012

Our first ARK PRESS chapbook is now available!!!


Levi Negley's Fruit in Every Path of the Eye 


5.25"x 6.25"
Hand-bound
Printed on a laser printer
Limited edition 75


See PAYPAL LINK.






Deeply committed to J Spicer’s “infinitely small vocabulary,” Negley’s Fruit in Every Path of the Eye claims simply to want “to know all/ of the sounds of my house by heart” (“Song of Maryland”). Cleaving to the humility of this proposition startled by impermanence, we find “mountains/ as jagged as grief” (“Song of California”), moments of terrible beauty that open expansively as limits are transgressed: “anything you say is real—/Ly, I love you” (“Song of Montana”). “Holy// star of God” is written in crayon (“Untitled”) and we learn “we must never/ speak of this again” (“Song of Vermont”).



Sneak preview ::