Pen & Anvil Press is a not-for-profit literary publishing house operated by the Boston Poetry Union. We publish books, journals, chapbooks, and posters.
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NEWS FROM THE PRESS: We are happy to announce the release of four new chapbooks in the Hawk & Whippoorwill catalogue: Songs for Salamanders, Poems for Plovers, Music for Myotises, and Cicada S*x-Songs.
These chapbooks are reflections on oft-overlooked members of our natural world. And in the Anthropocene era, once-prolific animals like salamanders, bats, cicadas, and plovers have suffered detrimental effects to their habitats. Poets from across the country, but particularly from New England, are gathered in these chapbooks.
Free PDF copies are available for download. Choose a chapbook via the link below and look for a link that directs you to "Click to read this chapbook online in PDF".
Click here to download for free: http://penandanvil.com/hw/chapbooks/animals/
Interested in purchasing a physical copy? Go ahead and fill out the form here: http://bitly.com/SummerChapbooks2020
The poems in these four sibling chapbooks are more than plaques beside zoo exhibits, sharing a few tidbits of natural history for nature tourists. They are the screech of a car before a salamander crossing the road to a vernal pool. They are an audible gasp upon hearing the first clicks of cicadas i...
They're here. #ravageandsnare #smallpresspublishing
Buy it here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0991622294
We teased Matthew Carey Salyer's upcoming book Ravage & Snare with his chapbook Lambkin, and now an interview by way of NERObooks. Read on as Jonathan Maniscalco gets to the root Salyer's personal history, writing, and more.
#BostonBooks #SmallPressPublishing
A soldier, a scholar, a poet and a teacher, Matthew Carey Salyer will see his first full-length collection debut this December. Our interviewer Jonathan Maniscalco reached him by email to look under the hood of his personal history, to learn a bit about his outlook on writing, and to establish the t...
Have an inquiry about a chapbook, book, submission, or something else? Direct it towards our [email protected].
A workshop/open mic opportunity for Boston folks: Stone Soup Poetry is back this Wednesday (tomorrow, Oct. 23) for a special feature with guest host Toni Bee. Located in its new home of New Fort Point Arts Community's Assemblage Gallery.
This summer's most hotly anticipated bat-themed poetry anthology is coming soon. #batsonbatsonbats #hawkandwhippoorwill
Good news from one of our periodicals. The 'zine Unfamiliar Forces has released their latest chapbook issue, their sixth since launching. It can be found on their new, "lo-fi" webpage, at http://penandanvil.com/forcesinconnues. Here is their post announcement, from https://twitter.com/forcesinconnues/status/1098581914741542912:
"digital anabasis. issues 1 and 6, bookends, are now available in uncorrupted code at http://penandanvil.com/forcesinconnues. more soon. new #6 features hot little drops from @Surazeus @UttaranDasGupta @aboutadaughter and @aladdinrcollar. ps submit to us. heathens. peasants. villains. do it."
We second the call for you to submit! Unfamiliar Forces publishes "stories, imagery and implications of the mysterious, the magical, the magnificent and the malevolent", in quarterly chapbook issues of 8-16 pages each. Each year's set of issues is then bound into a print omnibus volume, along with issues of its sci-fi spec-fic sister 'zine, SPACEPUBMAG.
A Writers Resist reading co-sponsored by Pen & Anvil, held at the Boston Sculptors Gallery in Boston's South End in January 2017. (For more information about this event, https://www.facebook.com/events/132262637263338)
🍂 In these days of loss upon loss, endangerment and extinction, we recall Daniel Hudon's Brief Eulogies for Lost Animals.
"I wanted to honor these animals..." - Daniel Hudon
http://penandanvil.com/brief-eulogies/
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https://www.instagram.com/penandanvil/
Our chapbooks editor has recently launched a weekly email newsletter on literature, art, reflection, and hope. Subscribe to the Kettle & Wolf newsletter via the link below.
Kettle & Wolf Email Forms
Paul S. Rowe's "caldera" is featured in Hawk & Whippoorwill's Winter 2018 issue.
Read the full issue here:
http://penandanvil.com/hw/6/
#poetry
#literarymagazine
đź“– my friend Paul S. Rowe was recently published in the winter issue of Hawk & Whippoorwill. here is "caldera." #amreading #poetry
http://penandanvil.com/hw/6/rowe/
One of our poets, Georgia Park, recently lost everything in a fire. Please consider donating to a GoFundMe to help her back on her feet.
Last night in Salem, a fire ravaged the home of writer, poet, and beautiful soul, Georgia Park. She and her little dog made it out and are healthy and well but her home has been destroyed and along with that so has the majority of her belongings. Without clothes, food, or any of her precious me...
Breakfast All Day is available on Goodreads. Have you already read this chappie, or is it on your to-read list? What do you think of it? We're curious!
Taking the time to cook a proper morning meal is a daily, feasible luxury, so long as you can muster the energy to roll out of bed. Break...
Georgia Park, as featured in Breakfast All Day, a chapbook published this past summer.
http://penandanvil.com/breakfast/
🍳 "...the image of my feet / wrapped around your legs ..."
🥓 "This House" by Georgia Park, from Breakfast All Day, a chapbook out of Pen & Anvil Press. (Available here: http://penandanvil.com/breakfast/ .)
✍ Looking for more poetry by Georgia Park? Check out her collection, Quit Your Job and Become a Poet (Out of Spite!), out now on Amazon. #poetry
https://www.amazon.com/Quit-Your-Become-Poet-Spite/dp/1720097186
The Charles River Journal || Boston
North mill towns so big so hard to die however did. My ma still pensions their parliament of graves and I do the right thing. I'm told I fit, strong face, keep fit, but class is bone-bred, guess. So school me to bed: bet you bounce. I'll do the right thing and you do you, you know? For the scene I f...
Nazione Indiana
Quando l’amico Zachary Bos mi ha inoltrato il messaggio accorato del figlio primogenito di Keith Botsford, Aubrey che annunciava, lo scorso 19 agosto, la fine di un’esistenza – per molti di noi Keith era l’essenza stessa del fare letterario come ricordava Massimo Rizzante qualche tempo fa proprio qui su Nazione Indiana – ho provato una grande tristezza e insieme l’ingiustizia di tale sentimento. Perché incontrare Keith a Torino era sempre una gioia, come la volta in cui in un albergo a pochi metri dalla casa in cui Xavier de Maistre aveva scritto il mitico Voyage autour de ma chambre, mi aveva raccontato del suo incontro con Cesare Pavese, proprio l’estate in cui avrebbe posto fine ai suoi giorni.
The New England Review of Books returns from a summer hiatus this week with a new interview. Vlad Savich talks with Philly poet Brittany Brown about childhood heroes, literary influences, and writing as compulsion: http://nerobooks.org/2018-july-savich-talks-with-brown/
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: In conjunction with the latest revival of the nature-themed literary magazine Hawk & Whippoorwill, Pen & Anvil is pleased to announce a series of chapbooks dedicated to endangered and threatened animals in the New England area: plovers, salamanders, myotis bats, and cicadas.
Please direct your submissions to [email protected]. Thank you!
A big batch of chapbooks is now on its way to our friends at the online journal http://assesofparnassus.tumblr.com.
Pictured: a broadside created for the occasion of Ben Mazer's launch of "Selected Poems" at the BU Editorial Institute. Limited quantity! Email [email protected] to find out how to get one, if you're unable to attend the reading in person (about which event: https://www.facebook.com/events/144485709638913/).
New England Review of Books today presents a new poem by Russell Bennetts, in which the English traveler to New England odes the holistic egg-and-eggplant pell-mell on display at Harvard Square's Clover Food Lab: http://nerobooks.org/2017-russell-bennetts/
Egg and eggplant sandwich beats down the menu; the egg and eggplant sandwich Of summer burns along the board And thins the menu with appropriated air, Till from the off-menu a regular Orders an eggplant sandwich, no egg. Still the $7.95 spills out my pocket A large note in either hand. And echos of?...
Ampersand is the Pen & Anvil blog. Just posted, this conversation between Zachary Bos and Cassandra Jones, regarding the use of writing as a tool to find a path through times of upset and violence, precipitated by the tragic events of the #LasVegasShooting: https://penandanvil.blogspot.com/2017/10/on-writing-after-tragedies.html.
On the morning after the latest massshooting , one of the largest in US history, a writer and an editor met up in a chat channel to talk...
Now available on the webpage of the New England Review of Books, a poem by Sara Rivera -- "The Split."
http://nerobooks.org/2017-sara-rivera/
NB: Sueño refers to Francisco Goya’s etching “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (1799), Plate No. 43 in the artist’s caprichos series. A scan (cropped) of a 1797 prepatory drawing of this etching is used as the banner graphic on this page; the original, held by the Prado Museum, is in the publ...
At last week's Stone Soup reading (feat. Zachary Bos and Russell Bennetts) at Out of the Blue Gallery Two in Cambridge, emcee Chad Parenteau shared copies of the latest issue of Stone's Throw, the 'zine he runs to feature Stone Soup and Oddball contributors.
Here we share the cover image of this "Democracy Benefit Issue", by artist Adric Giles. #trumpdump
Find the full issue online at http://www.chadparenteaupoetforhire.com/stones-throw.html; the issue announcement can be found at
http://chadparenteaupoetforhire.blogspot.com/2017/06/stones-throw-4-is-out-now.html.
#bostonart #artistsoffacebook #dumptrump #resist #thisisnotnormal #toilethumor #zines #centralsquarema #democracy #editorialhumor #illustration
We're proud to present the eighth chapbook in our bite-sized KOMMA SERIES, “Swing All the Way Up and Smack” by Veronica Mattaboni.
In the tradition of Jack London's "To Build a Fire", this short tale follows, moment by moment, a woman doing what needs to be done to keep herself warm through the night. The wood pile is depleted. The glow from the wood stove is beginning to grow dim. Martha must venture out into the snow for more fuel. But there is other work, as well, that needs doing, if she's going to survive — for it isn't just the cold that threatens.
Copies can be had for $0.85 via http://penandanvil.com/chapbooks/komma-8-mattaboni.
Veronica Mattaboni is an author, poet, and freelance writer from Pennsylvania. She studied creative writing at West Chester University.
An excerpt from the latest issue of The Charles River Journal, edited by Danny Simonds and Paul S. Rowe.
"Alone, in my company / the stationed chairs, lacquered thick in syrupy shellac," writes Kristen Bulger in "All Life is Furniture". Read more here: http://penandanvil.com/crj/7/kristen-bulger/
In a new book review featured on the NERObooks frontpage this Monday, Paul Rowe reviews Zachary Mason's challenging, breathtaking sophomore novel, the dystopian Void Star: http://nerobooks.org/2017-apr-rowe-on-mason/.
Pen & Anvil is publisher of the New England Review of Books... and as well of The Charles River Journal, in which you can read an excerpt of Mason's first book, The Lost Books of the Odyssey: http://www.penandanvil.com/crj/2/zachary-mason/.
is a phantasmal and speculative romp through a futurescape wherein drones patrol destitute favelas in Southern California and human memory is confiscated by rogue AIs. The novel's daring percipience is dreamlike in its sheer vastness. Much like his rebel AIs, Mason is entirely cognizant of his own s...
Critic Thomas Graves on Ben Mazer, author of three P&A collections: "Born in 1964, he is the best pure poet writing in English today."
While we are wary of hyperbole, we have to say... we sort of know what he means. Read the full review of "February Poems" at https://scarriet.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/february-poems-by-ben-mazer-reviewed.
As the shadows lengthen on American poetry in the 21st century, one is naturally prepared to think there was a noisy, sunny noon of poetry with noisy, popular poets. But there never was such a thin…
PR: Is the study and practice of creative writing in and of itself political in nature? Is the act of writing in response to undemocratic activity the most democratic response available to humanists?
SA: All writing is in some sense political, as it positions the self with respect to a culture or subculture and therefore implicitly takes a position about how a self should (or, as the case may be, can) so position itself.
* * *
This exchange comes from an interview published today on New England Review of Books, with the critic Seth Abramson: http://nerobooks.org/2017-jan-rowe-talks-with-abramson.
Many readers will know Abramson primarily as a poetry reviewer for Huffington Post, but more recently he's been writing about the worrying evidence of undemocratic activity connecting the Trump campaign to FBI director Comey's late-in-the-game election involvement.
Our interviewer Paul Rowe -- a local poet affiliated with Suffolk University and Merrimack College -- reached out to Abramson to ask why a poet is writing so journalistically about politics.
A specter of "greatness" looms on the horizon like a malevolent titan, promising to haunt the ruins of America's dismantled democracy. However true it was before November 10th that all poetry is political, this fact is now obtrusively apparent. Writers, editors and publishers are working furiously t...
In lieu of yet another 2016 best-of booklist, allow us to share this retrospective guest post by young Nigerian author Chukwuebuka Ibeh, on how he has "learnt to learn": http://penandanvil.blogspot.com/2016/12/i-have-learnt-to-learn-new-years-essay.html.
In these last days of December, we're all taking stock, totting up the wins and losses of the past year and looking ahead to the year to co...
Published this morning in our New England Review of Books, a review by Robert Morris of Nathan Hoks' poetry collection "The Inner Circle": http://nerobooks.org/2016-jul-morris-on-hoks/.
This is a semi-blind review of The Narrow Circle. Blind, in the sense that I’ve read no other reviews of the book, and have no prior awareness of Hoks’ poetry. I haven’t, and won’t, read the back cover description. It’s just me and the poems this afternoon. It’s a warm summer day and my music librar...
We're pleased to see a new poem by Ben Mazer appearing online at Scarriet. Visit https://scarriet.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/ben-mazer-poem-from-his-forthcoming-book/ to read ""The Greatest Joy Known to Mortal Man" by Ben Mazer, from his forthcoming collection FEBRUARY POEMS to be published this autumn by Grolier Poetry Press.
To see sample poems from his most recent collection, DECEMBER POEMS, please visit the Pen & Anvil website, penandanvil.com/december-poems-by-ben-mazer/.
Greatest poet of his generation? Ben Mazer in Romania last month. Photo, Scarriet THE GREATEST JOY KNOWN TO MORTAL MAN The greatest joy known to mortal man, shall live beyond us, in eternity. Catch…
New in the New England Review of Books (http://nerobooks.org), Paul Rowe and Daniel Simonds consider two recent books by Ben Mazer in a review-as-dialogue. "Ben Mazer’s Luxuriant Madness", at http://nerobooks.org/2016-jul-rowe-and-simonds-on-mazer.
Books reviews, readings, and feature content.
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