Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen
edited by Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper, with a preface by Willy Braun of Reckless Kelly
We know who’s in this collection, out November 19, 2024
This anthology of poems and short stories is an homage to Texas singer/song-writer Robert Earl Keen, who stands in the songwriter/storyteller tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, John Prine, and Keen’s contemporaries Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry. The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen’s songs, some expansions of themes of Keen’s songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work. Keen’s songs are impressive for their literary sensibility (he was an English major at Texas A&M University) and have influenced many songwriters as well as authors of fiction and poetry.
Contributors:
Preface: Willy Braun
Poetry: Alan Birkelbach – Rick Campbell – Greg Clary – Andy Coat – Rupert Fike – Carl Freeman – Carol Kraus – karla k. morton – Jeff Newberry – Garrison M. Somers
Fiction: Heath Bowen – Michael Cody – Ron Cooper – Sandra Cooper – Patrick Michael Finn – Scott Gould – Donna Wojnar Dzurilla – Bobby Horecka – Patti Meredity
Memoir: Kim Davis
Screenplay: Janna Jones
South Carolina natives Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper have lived in Florida since 1988 and have been fans of Robert Earl Keen for nearly as long. They both teach at the College of Central Florida where Sandra specializes in American literature, and Ron specializes in philosophy and world religions.
We received 74 total submissions. The first round was read by Joshua Robbins and Darius Stewart. Winners were chosen from a shortlist of amazing work by final judge, Marilyn Kallet, Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 27th, 2018-July 2020. For more information about the contest and the judges, visit The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Submission Page.
Winner
Amanda Chimera, by Mary B Moore
Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Prize 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center 1998; the prize-winning chapbooks are Amanda and the Man Soul 2017, and Eating the Light 2016.
Mary’s poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), Poetry, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Nimrod, Gettysburg Review, Terrain, and more. She has won Birmingham Review’s Collins Prize and NELLE’s Three Sisters Award, and she won second place in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Award, and third in Terrain’s awards.
Runner Up
Incidental Pollen, by Ellen Austin-Li
Ellen Austin-Li’s work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, and many other places. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks—Firefly (2019) & Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021).
Ellen is a Best of the Net nominee. A Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship recipient, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives with her husband in a newly empty nest. You can find her at www.ellenaustinli.me.
Honorable Mention
Red Camaro, by Dwaine Rieves
Thanks much for reading and considering Red Camaro…very kind…all best.
Dwaine Rieves is a medical imaging scientist in Washington, DC. His collection, When the Eye Forms, won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry.
Short List
Four Junes, by Sara Dudo
The Ugliest Girl in Columbiana County, by Elizabeth Tussey
a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as someone who grew up in California with Mexican ancestry. Readers experience a state of bardo, a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision. —Charlotte Pence, final judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and author of Code
A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize
The Parting Glass, like the old Irish song, is a toast to the places and people who make up the author’s roots and base. However Appalachian at its root, it tells a universal story about what grounds and keeps us, even as we move in cities and circles far from home. At its core, this book brings the thread of downhome with its voices and song, to the cities and cultures the author moves through. The poems raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.
A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize
An Anthology of Contemporary Prose Poems edited by Gerry LaFemina
2023 Acceptances Announced
Anthology publication planned for Spring 2024.
This is the call Gerry LaFemina put out for this anthology:
The prose poem is the literary sphinx, the literary chimera, minotaur, gryphon–part one thing, part another and at their best, they’re magical, mythical. Fantastic Imaginary Creatures seeks to collect the best contemporary prose poems that demonstrate the potentiality and plasticity the form allows, previously published or brand spanking new. We’re not looking for short short stories, but rather work that explores the liminal space between story and lyric, the luminous spark of possibility in the form.
And of the many fine poets who answered Gerry’s call, these are the poets and the poems Gerry selected:
Valerie Bacharach
“Momento Mori”
Ujjvala Bagal-Rahn
“Just Enough House”
Ned Balbo
“O Christmas Tree,” and “That Which We Discard We Also Cherish”
Madeleine Barnes
“Key Rock,” and “Self Portrait in My Mother’s Closing Lines”
Michelle Boczek Evory
“Absolution,” and “Dislocation”
Rick Campbell
“Parable of the Forest Pygmy,” and “Forgetting the Nicene Creed”
Joseph Capista
“Room for Error,” “Myth,” and “Song”
Gary Ciocco
“Being and Becoming”
TS Coody
“Mimesis”
Jim Daniels
“With Apologies to the Tom Tom Club,” and “At Last”
Anthony DiMatteo
“Every Time”
gary fincke
“The Hands”
Jeff Friedman
“Giver of Gifts,” “Terrorists,” and “Lost Memory”
Molly Fuller
“Home Again, Home Again,” and “Tale of the Flopsy Bunny”
Joy Gaines-Friedler
“Daffodils,” “Act 20:14,” “Traveling with the Band,” and “The Children’s Ward”
George Guida
“Trip Wire,” and “The story of a Life”
Luke Hankins
“A Voice out of the Ruins”
Gretchen Heyer
“Pasiphae Answers Questions,” “Missionaries Breakfasted on the Word of God,” and “Jute, Two Inches in Diameter”
Tom Hunley
“My Chili Recipe (An Ars Poetica)” and “Questions for Further Study”
Anna Jacobson
“This is to That”
Peter Johnson
“Vaccination, in the Broadest Sense of the Term,” “Crickets,” and “Nice Socks”
Richard Jordan
“Jesus in the Café,” “With Feathers,” and “Mackerel Day”
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
“At 45th Parallel, Halfway Between the Equator and the North Pole,” and “Tabula Rasa”
Nina Kossman
“Kharkiv”
Gerry LaFemina
“Fantastic Imaginary Creatures,” “Happy Pigs,” and “Bad Medicine”
Joseph Lerner
“The Black Egret”
Geri Lipschultz
“Aphrodite in Manhattan”
Lorette C. Luzajic
“Feathers,” and “January River”
Gary McDowell
“Prose Poem on the Nature of Things; or, Armchair Philosophy,” and “Another Apocalypse”
Kathleen McGookey
“Night Sky with Calculus Worksheet”
Jennifer Militello
“Identifying the Pathogen,” “Dear B,” and “Antidote with Attempts at Diagnosis”
Robert Miltner
“Wolf Dancing,” and “Hopeless”
Erin Murphy
“Ekphrasis,” “Gerunding,” and “Hula Dancer”
kerry neville
“Decade”
Robert Perchan
“The Unselfish Elfins with their Trusty Hammers,” “At Home with Marlboro Jones,” and “The Orgun Box Junkies”
Christine Rhein
“Drone Pilot,” and “Sunday Night Retail”
Jane Satterfield
“Latin 121,” and “Abbreviated Inventory”
Katherine Smith
“Crossword,” and “Quilt”
Joshua Michael Stewart
“Yellow,” and “Book of Love”
Virgil Suárez
“Chinese Weather Balloon”
Matthew Thorburn
“A Hundred Birds,” and “How it Starts”
Eric Torgersen
“My Blindness”
Patricia Valdata
“Mayfly”
Doug Van Gundy
“Sideshow, Barbour County Fairgrounds, 1975,” and “To Join the Circus”
Elinor Ann Walker
“Object Impermanence,” and “Fugue State”
Greg Watson
“Why I Live in a Cold Climate”
Cathy Wittmeyer
“Max Beckmann, Still Life with Fallen Candles, oil on canvas, 1929,” and “Otto Dix, Horse Cadaver, etching & drypoint, 1924”
George Yatchisin
“Leap Year”
Michael T. Young
“Quoting Blake to Mother,” and “Sweaty Palms”
About the editor, Gerry LaFemina
Gerry LaFemina’s flash creative nonfiction essay collection, The Pursuit: A Meditation on Happiness, came out in 2022. His poetry collections include Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping, The Story of Ash and Little Heretic. His essays on prosody, Palpable Magic, came out in 2015 and Kendall Hunt recently released his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically.
Winner of The 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Upcoming publication date Spring 2024
“a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as someone who grew up in California with Mexican ancestry.
Throughout this book, readers experience a state of bardo, a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. Take for example an evocative poem placed early in the book: ‘To live at the scene of an accident.’ The two-line poem simple states: ‘To go on living / at the scene of the crime.’ Such sparsity emphasizes the stark reality of the situation and faces it directly without adorned language that could distract from the fact’s horror. What’s more, the book presents readers with four variations of this poem, emphasizing how trauma is not only situated in the past, but something that interrupts the present—and never leaves the body.
One poem tells readers that ‘this is not really a lullaby for the end of the world this is a map to the beginning of the body.’ Such a statement is not a dichotomy, but simply a reality wherein grief and celebration share spaces. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision.”
—Charlotte Pence, final judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and author of Code
Finalist for The 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Upcoming publication date Spring 2024
“A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually, but searches to internalize such knowledge as in this breathtaking poem ‘Bird Call Koan with Glossary’:
Across the hall I lay in the dark contemplating this, the infinitely expanding universe of what I don’t know. Stars exploding and being born. Moons in our own solar system still uncounted. And yet some things I think I know with certainty: I’m not pretty. I don’t deserve to be loved.
If I trill my mating call, who will answer me?
I forget the moon is always whole.
These lines are representative of the well-crafted poetry readers will find in this book, each poem creating scenes with such vivid details, readers feel as if they are with the speaker, perhaps as an adult gazing at the stars or as a child hiding behind the Life cereal box. Not only are the details engaging, but the form of each poem closely aligns with its subject, be it in the form of a question mark or the dwindling lines in ‘Submission Guidelines.’ All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flight is a book that sings back to the exploding stars.
