Archive for March, 2012
Invasion of the Night
Kristine Ong Muslim has reviewed Peg Duthie‘s Measured Extravagance:
What I admire most about this book is Peg Duthie’s masterful treatment of highly politicized topics (such as the political inclinations of well-known scientists) into a non-politically-correct lattice.
Also, news for 140 And Counting contributors: Neil Ellman has two poems in Spinozablue this week; and Francis W. Alexander currently has a haibun in the March 2012 Haibun Today and a story in Night to Dawn, Issue 21, which also has work by Marge Simon.
31 March 2012
the great flesh markets of Bangkok
The brand new Buzzymag, which bills itself as “Your Premier Source for Everything Sci-Fi & Fantasy,” features a compelling new biological suspense story by 140 And Counting alum Ken Liu called “Exotic Pets.”
The Mainichi Daily News announced their annual selections for 2011, and 140 And Counting contributors Helen Buckingham, Deborah P. Kolodji and Alan Summers all received Honourable Mentions!
Finally, Neon: A Literary Magazine has posted a mixed review of Heather Kamins‘ Blueshifting:
There is much to ponder in this collection. The recurring scientific imagery is used to make observations about our relationships to each other, the natural world and the universe as a whole. These themes are poetic staples, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing new to say about them. In particular, the scientific theme helps dissolve the artificial divide between science and art.
30 March 2012
bring me my captain’s hat and other news
“A Multiple of Sorrows” and “Good Morning,” two poems by Measured
Extravagance author Peg Duthie, have been published by Houseboat. They accompany photo prompts No. 26 and No. 27.
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Berit Ellingsen (a 140 And Counting alum) has a short story in Rocket Science, an anthology due to be published in 2012 by Mutation Press.
Also a 140 And Counting contributor, Lucas Stensland has a short poem (“Bring Me My Captain’s Hat”) in the March issue of Four and Twenty. |
And, in the Wish We’d Seen This Before It Happened category, turns out that URB editor Joanne Merriam‘s reading with Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance) and Mary Alexandra Agner (The Scientific Method; The Doors of the Body) was a Critics’ Pick in last week’s Nashville Scene.
26 March 2012
perfect circles
URB editor Joanne Merriam read poetry with Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance1) and Mary Alexandra Agner (The Scientific Method; The Doors of the Body) today at the Nashville Public Library, and blogged about it here.
And, some new publications from 140 And Counting alums: Aurelio Rico Lopez III‘s poem “Eastern Demons” appeared at Every Day Poets on March 22nd; Simon Kewin‘s short story “Live From The Continuing Explosion” from Perfect Circles (which cover photo, incidentally, appears to be of the same Prague astronomical clock featured on the cover of Blueshifting) was reviewed at length by StoryADay; Berit Ellingsen has work in issue 2 of Lost in Thought; S. Kay was featured at trapeze on March 15th. | ![]() |
1Which is now available at Barnes & Noble!
24 March 2012
“I love this. I reread it already. I will reread it again.”
Marissa Lingen reviews (and likes) Peg Duthie‘s Measured Extravagance.
22 March 2012
Take five or one forty
Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume Four will contain tanka by 140 And Counting authors Alan Summers, Alex von Vaupel, Alison Williams, Carol Raisfeld, Chen-ou Liu, Christina Nguyen, Deborah P. Kolodji, Helen Buckingham, John Stevenson, Kath Abela Wilson, Liam Wilkinson, Lucas Stensland, Miriam Sagan, and Stella Pierides. Their work was selected from over 18,000 pieces published in 2011. Congratulations to all!
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Simon Kewin had a very short story today at trapeze, and Deborah Walker had a lovely little poem there last week.
In addition, the always thoughtful Ron Silliman wrote a blog post about the haiku form, Haiku 21 (which contains work by Jim Kacian and John Stevenson, and possibly other 140 alums unmentioned by Silliman), Jim Kacian‘s Long After and john martone’s Ksana. |
16 March 2012
Measured Extravagance now live on Amazon
Measured Extravagance is now available on Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES)!
Still to come: the ePub version will go live sometime this month. |
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15 March 2012
Measured Extravagance
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Employing sonnets and sestinas as well as open forms, Measured Extravagance lyrically documents the messiness of grief and explores the complexity of devotion. Peg Duthie celebrates the conflicting demands of journeys as she travels from a Nashville recording studio to a congested street in Prague to the Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, and introduces us to sharpshooters, scientists, musicians, bakers, the dead and those living on the edges of reality as they romp past boundaries, rage at expectations, and tangle with skepticism and belief. Read this book—and throw jump shots with Shakespeare, play duets with Heisenberg, and find out what relish trays and rifles really have in common.
From Measured Extravagance:
The Sharpshooter Assembles a Relish Tray
Some afternoons, everything she touches
reminds her of how bodies are so soft,
even as she delicately wields
chopsticks, toothpicks, tongs, and teaspoons
to place the artichoke hearts just so
among the starflowers carved from radishes.
Eggs with sesame-seed eyes and carrot-sliver beaks
nest within mounds of curly herbs. Around some people,
she can’t helping wanting to claim that it’s all
for the sake of her daughter, whether “it” is the it
of resolutely drilling fake pigeons and falling plates
to defeat the dreams that insist on plaguing
her nights with paper golems and phantom goons
or the it of donning lipstick and hose and heels
as a gesture not of submission but grace, the uniform
of the Sunday suppers she manages to attend. It
is indeed for her daughter—the being prepared
for both monsters and manners—but it is not all.
It would be a meal of only meat, just as a life
without her partner and child would be merely
a serving of stems. She scoops a spare olive
into her mouth, savoring its slide across her tongue:
salt. flesh. seed. The tray is a passable garden
but in the end, it is but an end—its meaning a matter
of preserves and pretenses, a prelude to sustenance.
Poems from the book available online:
These links all open in a new window.
- At Youtube, from a reading at the Nashville Public Library on 24 March 2012: “Playing Duets with Heisenberg’s Ghost,” “Schrödinger’s Top Hat,” “The Language of Waiting,” “Deep and Crisp and Even” and “Hymn“; watch together in a playlist.
- “By Way of Sorrow,” Strange Horizons, 11 January 2010.
- “Deep and Crisp and Even,” The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, December 2009.
- “Kol Nidre” (text and audio). qarrtsiluni, 28 September 2009.
- “The Language of Waiting” and “Fuel,” The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Summer Sabbatical Issue, July 2009.
- “The Sharpshooter Assembles a Relish Tray” and “A Stack of Cards,” flashquake, Volume 8, Issue 2, Winter 2008/2009.
- “As She’s Dying,” flashquake, Summer 2008.
- “A Particular Truth—1941,” Contemporary Rhyme, Volume 4, Issue 4, Fall 2007.
Reviews:
Contemporary poetry on Jewish religious subjects is rare in America outside the pages of specialized Jewish publications. Thus, Peg Duthie’s delightful new collection Measured Extravagance (Upper Rubber Boot Books) is doubly welcome… Peg is a poet we must hope to hear more from.
— Martin Berman-Gorvine, “A Measured Feast,” InTheMoment, 25 September 2012.
I’m delighted. Extravagant and clever, the poem is a fitting introduction to a collection that spans decades, personages, and cities with ease…
Toward the end of the collection we end up in Chicago, England, and Boston in “Between the Hints.” The speaker muses about “what we can make is what // will do for now. . .” Oh how we humans are forever striving! Duthie cleverly twists that idea into all its permutations within the rhymes of this poem’s form, using iambic pentameter and quatrameter so wickedly that the reader doesn’t even realize how smoothly he/she has been schooled.
In all, Peg Duthie has put together a thoroughly extravagant collection of poems. The reader journeys through locations of the mind as well as those of the earth; I was never quite sure what I’d get as I turned the page, but I was always surprised. As the speaker says in the poem “Extravagance”—”Such a feast.”
— Christine Klocek-Lim, “Three Poetry Reviews for National Poetry Month,” November Sky Poetry, 28 April 2012.
The title appears to be an oxymoron. How can something measured be extravagant? We can ask that question of poetry itself. Taking it to the bard as we shoot hoops, we might ask how it’s possible to seize something as tight and as structured as a sonnet and stuff it full to bursting. The answer… well, the whole book is an answer to that question.
We might just as easily ask the same question of life, with its well-defined form and obvious boundaries. How can we live extravagantly within our measured years? In “As She’s Dying”, we meet a mother intent on not living while she was alive: “she/who regarded my writing as a squandering/of time and ovaries.” And in its companion poem, “A Stack of Cards”, we imagine a quiet moment after the funeral, going through the mother’s things, “this mourning of a life you wouldn’t have lived/even if you’d had the heart for it.” Both poems are 13 lines, not rondeaus, sort of deformed sonnets if you like, a bit clipped like the mother they contemplate.
A life lived within the measure of its confines is no life at all, but a life lived with extravagance becomes more than the sum of its years.
— David Allan Barker, “Review: Measured Extravagance, by Peg Duthie,” Nouspique, 20 April 2012.
…it’s a sestina, and a good one! I’m not typically a big fan of form poems—with sestinas about half way through the poem I usually feel like, as a reader, that I can see the writer trying too hard to get those end-words in—but Duthie seamlessly blends them in.
— Renee Emerson, “Measured Extravagance by Peg Duthie (a review),” This Quiet Hour, 10 April 2012.
What I admire most about this book is Peg Duthie’s masterful treatment of highly politicized topics (such as the political inclinations of well-known scientists) into a non-politically-correct lattice… Measured Extravagance delivers. What a gorgeous collection!
— Kristine Ong Muslim, “on Peg Duthie’s ‘Marvelous Extravagance’,” 1 April 2012.
I think my favorite, my best delight, in this volume, was ‘Deep and Crisp and Even,’ which title will make those who know me go, well, of course–and it’s got apples and snow and winter, but it’s Peg’s Nashville winter and not my own, parallax again, different views, different angles. I love this. I reread it already. I will reread it again.
And sometimes things find you where you are and you don’t entirely wish to say why, and ‘Hymn’ is like that, and if it finds you where you are, too, you will know. Recommended.
— Marissa Lingen, “Measured Extravagance, by Peg Duthie,” Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway, 21 March 2012.
2 comments 14 March 2012
“Kamins has attempted something very difficult, which is to give substance to the ephemeral and the fleeting that make up much of what we tend to view as permanent.”
Read Robert Hewitt’s review of Heather Kamins’ Blueshifting.
12 March 2012
It’s Read an Ebook Week!
For Read an Ebook Week, 140 And Counting author M. Darusha Wehm has 50% off everything at Smashwords, except Beautiful Red, which is free (use the coupon code REW50); and asbestos boots on beatnik feet has just published three poems by Neil Ellman.
And! Upper Rubber Boot now has a Smashwords account, so we can sell PDFs. 140 And Counting and Blueshifting are both available now in PDF, and Measured Extravagance is available for the first time in any edition. Measured Extravagance will be released shortly in epub and mobi.
11 March 2012