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Greetings Dear Readers, Celebration of National Poetry Month continues here at Longfellow Books with tomorrow's gathering of three incredibly talente
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Greetings Dear Readers,
Celebration of National Poetry Month continues here at Longfellow Books with tomorrow's gathering of three incredibly talented Maine poets all sharing pieces from their latest collections. While good books and I have shared a longtime love, much in the world of poetry has continued to confound me. But whether you can recite Frost by memory or make a habit of skipping over poetry passages in your books, take a minute to read David Sloan's poem below from The Irresistible In-Between. And give yourself a few extra moments just to take it in. It is stunningly beautiful. |
A Marriage
lasting this long can feel leaden,
stacked slabs in some oppressive
monument. Why don't we feel crushed
by the accumulation of years?
They feel instead like sea-colored
pebbles collected at the shore.
Out of millions, we chose these few,
pocketed them for safekeeping.
Or they seem like layers
of light rising within us.
Every day we have cleared fields,
Levered up and sledged
stubborn rocks, lit brush piles.
We have kept pledges to stand
near each other, as birches do
under a winter moon,
interlacing branches streaked
with silver. And in you
I have seen for years now,
in countless tiny gleamings,
flecks of a deeper light
that promise gold still to come. |
Maine Poets Stuart Kestenbaum, Peter Harris & David Sloan
Thursday, April 17th, 7:00pm at Longfellow Books
Stuart Kestenbaum has been the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine since 1988. He is an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council and a recipient of the Distinguished Educator s Award from the James Renwick Alliance. He is the author of three collections of poems, Pilgrimage, House of Thanksgiving, and Prayers and Run-on Sentences.
Peter Harris, born in 1947, has taught at Colby College since 1974. His chapbook, Blue Hallelujahs, won the Maine chapbook competition in 1996. His work has appeared in, among other places, The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, and Green Mountains Review. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Red Cinder House, and the Tyron Guthrie Center in Ireland, and has been awarded a Martin Dibner Writing Fellowship.
Davis Sloan is a graduate of the University of Southern Maine s Stonecoast MFA Poetry Program and loves living in Maine, at the edge of the world, with his wife Christine where they both work in Maine's only Waldorf high school. He is the author of two books on teaching: Stages of Imagination: Working Dramatically with Adolescents, and Life Lessons: Reaching Teenagers through Literature. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Barefoot Review, The Broome Review, The Café Review, Carpe Articulum, Innisfree, The Naugatuck River Review, The Northern New England Review, Passager, The Prairie Wolf Press Review and Words and Images. He is a recipient of the 2012 Betsy Sholl and Maine Literary awards, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Join us for an evening with three talented Maine poets as they share their latest works and, of course, sign your books! As always, Longfellow Books events are free and open to the public. |
 TUESDAY, 4/22 | |  THURSDAY, 4/24 |
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Neurocomic by Hana Ros and Matteo Farinella (Nobrow Press, $24.95)
Neurocomic is a journey through the human brains: a place of neuron forests, memory caves and castles of deception. Along the way, you'll encounter Boschean beasts, giant squid, guitar-playing sea slugs and the great pioneers of neuroscience. Neuroscientists Dr. Matteo Farinella and Dr. Hana Ros unravel the mysteries of the human brain in this groundbreaking graphic novel that provides a unique insight into the most complex thing in the universe.
"This is a book for laymen and beginner students, not experts, but if you’re interested in taking a surreal but simple trip through the incredibly complicated landscape inside your skull, this might be the rabbit hole you’re looking for." -Wired
Click here to read more and order now... |
The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass by Edward O. Wilson & Robert Hass (Bellevue Literary Press, $16.95)
In this shimmering conversation (the outgrowth of an event co-sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History and Poets House), Edward O. Wilson, renowned scientist and proponent of “consilience” or the unity of knowledge, finds an ardent interlocutor in Robert Hass, whose credo as U.S. poet laureate was “imagination makes communities.”
As they explore the many ways that poetry and science enhance each other, they travel from anthills to ancient Egypt and to the heights and depths of human potential. A testament to how science and the arts can join forces to educate and inspire, it ends in a passionate plea for conservation of all the planet’s species.
Click here to read more and order now... |
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Pantheon, $24.95)
From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption.
“Extraordinarily accomplished, one of those books that tears around in your cerebellum like a dark firework, and which, upon finishing, you immediately want to pick up again.” -Financial Times
“For once, the hype matches the talent ... Wyld’s writing seems to come from somewhere deep somewhere a little bit unnerving.” -The Sunday Times (London)
Click here to read more and order now... |
Chop Chop by Simon Wroe (Penguin, $26.95)
An outrageously funny and original debut set in the fast-paced and treacherous world of a restaurant kitchen. Fresh out of the university with big dreams, our narrator is determined to escape his past and lead the literary life in London. But soon he is two months behind on rent for his depressing Camden Town bed-sit and forced to take a job doing grunt work in the kitchen of The Swan, a formerly grand restaurant that has lost its luster.
"In his fiction debut, Wroe, a freelance journalist and former chef, invents (or possibly recalls) the life of a chef ... Wroe’s imaginative metaphors and gritty kitchen colloquialisms are the key ingredients in a story that will appeal to anyone with a taste for the morbid and the whimsical." -Publishers Weekly
"A brutally funny look at the world of professional cooking. Sometimes the truth is so strange it needs to be sautéed in a pan of fiction." -Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
Click here to read more and order now... |
Fools: Stories by Joan Silber (W. W. Norton & Co, $14.95)
When is it wise to be a fool for something? What makes people want to be better than they are? From New York to India to Paris, from the Catholic Worker movement to Occupy Wall Street, the characters in Joan Silber’s dazzling new story cycle tackle this question head-on. Fools is a luminous, intelligent, and rewarding work of fiction.
"[These] deftly interconnected stories are devoted to those dreamers who act rashly out of their better natures, who never quit asking the world, 'Can’t you do better than that?' —a question certain to become increasingly urgent as this twenty-first century progresses." -Jim Shepard
"Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement." -Dan Chaon
Click here to read more and order now... |
A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York by Liana Finck (Ecco Press, $17.99)
In an illustrative style that is a thrilling mash-up of Art Spiegelman's deft emotionality, Roz Chast's hilarious neuroses, and the magical spirit of Marc Chagall, A Bintel Brief is Liana Finck’s evocative, elegiac love letter to the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants who transformed New York City and America itself.
A Bintel Brief "A Bundle of Letters"—was the enormously popular advice column of The Forward, the widely read Yiddish language newspaper begun in 1906 New York. Written by a diverse community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, these letters spoke to the daily heartbreaks and comedies of their new lives, capturing the hope, isolation, and confusion of assimilation. Drawn from these letters—selected and adapted by Liana Finck and brought to life in her appealing two-color illustrations—A Bintel Brief is a wonderful panorama of a world and its people who, though long gone, are startlingly like ourselves.
Click here to read more and order now... |
Is Nothing Something?: Kids' Questions and Zen Answers about Life, Death, Family, Friendship, and Everything in Between by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press, $16.95)
In Is Nothing Something? Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh answers heartfelt, difficult, and funny questions from children of all ages. Illustrated with original full-color artwork by Jessica McClure, Is Nothing Something? will help adults plant the seeds of mindfulness in the young children in their lives. The book includes the first complete children’s biography of Thich Nhat Hanh, along with basic, kid-friendly instructions for mindful breathing and mindful walking. Both humorous and profound, Is Nothing Something? is the perfect resource for kids with questions, adults looking to answer them, and anyone with questions of their own.
Click here to read more and order now... |
In Books We Trust,
Chris & Co. |
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