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Black Lawrence Press & Mary Biddinger
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All of us at Black Lawrence are thrilled to announce that Mary Biddinger just signed on to publish a fourth book with our press: Small Enterprise, a full-length collection of poems, is due out in the summer of 2015. Her chapbook Saint Monica and her collection O Holy Insurgency are available now. Her third Black Lawrence Press title, A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, will be published in June.
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The time: creeping toward the millennium, yet before Y2K panic inspires everyone to stockpile bottled water and cheap wine. The place: a Midwestern metropolis with echoes of Chicago and Detroit, a city trying to preserve the past as a future arrives with gut rehabs and shuttered churches. The dramatis personae: corner bar denizens, bad girls with big plans, novels and their writers, a petulant lake, flocks of grandmothers with rosaries, a wrecking ball or two. Mary Biddinger’s fourth full-length collection of poems, Small Enterprise, introduces us to a world of risk and risk management, a continual struggle to stay afloat, and a hot triangular romance between man, woman, and city.
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RISK MANAGEMENT MEMO: CONTINUING EDUCATION
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Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.
Tonight even the polyester curtains are an opiate
worth banning. I’m a terrible student, victim
of harrowing perfectionism mixed with remnants
of crazy-legged wonder. Not to mention
inelegance. My renegade professor’s mistakes
declared genius by an academy composed
of countless lake flies and a sinister duffel bag.
If this is the library, then I’m the only one
doing the shelving, which is fine. I know enough
numbers to enter the right bus with shoulders
thrown back like he taught me: This is your
mean walk, this is your into-a-lake-walk
which ends in unspeakable tragedy. Save
the lake bottom for other rocks. Don’t let
anyone walk through your body, little cadet.
But the best way to learn is to disobey.
And that was the first thing he ever taught me.
(This poem was originally published in Guernica)
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| | We'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank the other Black Lawrence authors who have signed on to publish three or more titles with our press: Marcel Jolley, Daniele Pantano, Bruce Cohen, Abayomi Animashaun, TJ Beitelman, David Rigsbee and Carol Guess. Thank you all for trusting us with your work!
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