Hello friends and followers and fans. I'm writing this note to let you know that DIAGRAM 9.6, our 54th issue, and the last issue of our ninth year of publication, is up. It is exciting to be turning ten so soon. In fact we have big plans for it, featuring a special print
10th Anniversary Spectacular, coming in February. More on that in time. For now we should celebrate the release of 9.6, which is pretty great. It's available at:
<
http://thediagram.com/9_6>.
This email is kind of long, so here's a brief ToC of the email: 1. DIAGRAM 9.6 description and sample; 2. New chapbooks by Ben Mirov and Genine Lentine available; 3. Hybrid Essay Contest Results; 4. Two new rocking Monson books forthcoming. 5. Random nude photograph (not really).
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1. DIAGRAM 9.6!
It has texts by: Lucy Anderton, Steve
Barbaro, Douglas Basford, Simeon Berry, Bill Carty, Laura Didyk, Natalie Eilbert, Roxane Gay, Loren Goodman, Marj Hahne, Kristin Hayter, Joy Kettren, Jon Liberzon, Ben Mirov, Sally Molini, Michael Ogletree, Rachael Peckham, Patty Seyburn, Matt Swetnam, and Bill Yarrow.
The schematics included in this issue are: The Anatomy of a Divorce; A Diagrammatic, Pictorial Illustration of the Electrical Wiring As Associated with the Table and the Backboard; Path of Dough Piece in Umbrella-Type Rounder; Pet Display Clothing; The Response of a Dog to Rage and Fear; Social Penetration with (A) an Acquaintance, (B) a Friend, and (C) an Intimate; Spectacular Machine; Typical Feelings Man; and an infographic on the Use of the Family Car.
How about a sample from the issue:
I IS TO VORTICISM by Ben Mirov
as red leaves are to riverbanks.
As American History is to blackout drunk.
As blackout drunk is to flying away.
If you come upon a vortex in your laundry tonight
don't be afraid.
Give it a name like
Scheherazade.
Take it to dinner,
feed it oysters and champagne.
They don't teach you this in college
or how to deal with moving faster than the
speed of lightinto a brick wall,
but that’s how I got my diploma
knocking around in the chrysalis
until they pulled me out
and the figment in my wings dried
and my tongue refused to bifurcate.
Mighty big snow-globe head.
Mindful of harmless laser beams.
Three or four ideas spinning around a coat hanger.
Lasso after lasso.
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2. New chapbooks:
So come on down and check the issue out! While you're there, enjoying the Ben Mirov and others, pick up both of the new NMP chapbooks: chapbook contest winner Ben Mirov's I IS TO VORTICISM is pretty hooked up, plugged in, and good. Don't believe me? Think we're biased? How about what these folks have to say about it?
"A recurring character in the poetry of Ben Mirov is Ben Mirov, part charming host, part self-inflicted lab experiment in a debut dedicated to demonstrating our daily, perilous transformations. These poems are sudden, agile, heart-strong, and as wonderfully unsolvable as their analogical title. Welcome to the surgical theater. You're finally going to learn how to sleep with your eyes open." --
Dobby GibsonAlso: "These poems and parables celebrate the idea of no self, even as they sing a host of eccentric alter-egos and delightfully strange secret-identities into being. Using 'interstellar ventriloquism,' Ben Mirov is able to inhabit several worlds at once. He deftly mixes the mythic with the mundane, the literary with the cartoonish, sincerity and simulacra. The result is an impressive, often hilarious, book that truly works on many levels." --
Elaine Equi$9. 48pp. Perfect-bound, color cover, and all. Order online at <
http://newmichiganpress.com/nmp/ordering.html>.
Ships today!
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Our other new chapbook, just out (technically it'll be released on Tuesday, at which point we'll be shipping it) is Genine Lentine's MR. WORTHINGTON'S BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS ON SPLASHES. Which rocks. Obviously. We have heard many good words about this one. For instance:
"Reading Genine Lentine's poems--so ardent and playful, risky and affecting--I kept thinking that it's not true, what
René Char once said, that 'no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.' These poems plunge headlong into uncertainties of both language and life and, in doing so, they are so original that I often felt while reading them that I was in the grip of a brand new and still unnamed emotion." --
Richard McCann"These clear, refreshing acts of attention seem to wake us to another way of seeing, and to the problems and pleasures of saying what we see. Have we taken the act of speech for granted all along? In her short, formally inventive pieces--and especially in her dazzling long poem about language's power and limits that anchors this collection--Lentine sounds like no one else. Her wry, astonished, aching voice is a fresh presence in American poetry." --Mark Doty
"Beautiful experiments from the spiraling ladder of someone who has spread out her root hairs and patiently attends the right words to assign; one who is there to honor the instant something shimmers before it disappears, be 'it' the meaning of 'all this' or the lack thereof, not unlike Mr. Worthington photographing a droplet's splash he so ingeniously rigged to measure. And what doesn't Genine Lentine's aqueous breath expel--a disquisition on Softsoap, a sideways look at the motivational expression of
Grenville Kleiser, the speed of sperm, along with a little consideration of the comma, the prefix un-, the contour of a vowel. Ms. Lentine's experiments begin and end with the parent body as it breaks away, that 'which asks nothing of us, only that we're here for it.' She is here." -- C. D. Wright
"These thrilling poems--restless, calm, reckless, wise--interrogate themselves by hovering over moments of aching beauty, as well as utter bewilderment, until they become the world itself." --
Nick FlynnJesus, those are some blurbs, no? Yes they are. Pick it up. It's great. $10, 77pp, perfect bound, color etc. You know what to expect from us by now, right? Order online at <
http://newmichiganpress.com/nmp/ordering.html> or via Amazon if you swing that way.
(We also sell a 2009 chapbook subscription, so you get both chaps + Brent Armendinger's awesome UNDETECTABLE for $21 + shipping. Unbeatable. Order on the website. Makes excellent make-up gifts for those friends who sent you gifts but whom you forgot. You know there are so many. You have so many friends. You are popular. Imagine what ordering a friend the 2009 Chapbook Subscription will do for you. Jesus. It's going to be an amazing year.
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3. Hybrid Essay Contest Results!
Next up, maybe you've heard already. Our 2009 Hybrid Essay Contest reading & judging is finished. Our winner is Cheyenne Nimes, for her essay, "Section 404 of the
Clean Water Act and the Santa Cruz River Sand Shark, subtitled 'This troublesome regulatory constraint.'" She rocks. It rocks. We all rock. She received $1000 and publication in DIAGRAM issue 10.1, out at the end of February.
We'll also publish three excellent finalist essays in that issue:
--Josh MacIvor-Andersen and Roderick McClain: "How To Talk Up Gravity and Take Down a Tree"
--Raquel
Maldonado: "How My Baby Would Kill the Devil and God With A Bat of Her Non-Existent Eyelashes"
--Lucas Farrell: "A Description of the Hook I am Capable Of"
That enough for you? Didn't think so. Okay. We have much more to come in our next 10 years. And we'll keep you looped. $5 Innovative Fiction Contest is heating up (deadline: 03.08.10), and the chapbook contest guidelines will be out in a week (deadline later this year, 04.30.10).
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4. Editorial self-promotion, for which your editor is duly ashamed, and fare-thee-wells:
And that is it. All the news. Looking forward to a big 2010 for you and yours. Editor
Ander Monson (that's me, horn-honk, faux-third-person POV of email violated) has two books forthcoming: VANISHING POINT, a nonfiction, is out on 03.31.10. Check out the website for it if you like: <
http://otherelectricities.com/vp>. And THE AVAILABLE WORLD, poems, comes out in June. I hear he'll be touring around and doing some readings, so if you want him in your town, drop him a line to say so, and he'll see what he can do. Expect a self-serving email with a special discount for DIAGRAM readers around the pub date. Because that's what we're born to do.
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We out,
Best,
Ander Monson, Editor
