issue three: guest-edited by Geoffrey Young

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #3

edited by Geoffrey Young

see here for Geoffrey Young’s introduction and biography

the third issue features new work by:

Elaine Equi

Ron Padgett

Terence Winch

Thomas Fink

Annabel Lee

Michael Lally

Jerome Sala

Lydia Davis

Barry Schwabsky

Clark Coolidge

Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland (In Memoriam)

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Author biographies:

Clark Coolidge lives in Petaluma, CA with his wife Susan. Recent books include Life Forms Here (Pressed Wafer 2016); Selected Poems 1962-1985 (Station Hill 2017); POET (Pressed Wafer 2018). He continues to play drums with the free-jazz band Ouroboros.

Lydia Davis’s most recent collection of stories is Can’t and Won’t (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). Her translation of Proust’s Letters to His Neighbor appeared in 2017 from New Directions, and a collection of her essays will be published by FSG in the fall of 2019. She is currently preparing a second volume of essays and completing a translation of stories by the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders.

Elaine Equi lives in New York City with her husband, the poet, Jerome Sala. Her books include Sentences and Rain, Click and Clone, and Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (all from Coffee House Press). A new collection, The Intangibles, is forthcoming in 2019. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The New School.

Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of 9 books of poetry, most recently Selected Poems & Poetic Series (Marsh Hawk P, 2016), 2 books of criticism, and 3 edited anthologies. His paintings hang in various collections. His work appears in The Best American Poetry 2007, selected by Heather McHugh and David Lehman.

Tony Hoagland was the author of seven collections of poetry, including Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. He was also the author of two collections of essays, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays and Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He taught for many years at the University of Houston. Hoagland died in October 2018.

Michael Lally’s thirtieth book came out in 2018, Another Way To Play: Poems 1960-2017, from 7 Stories Press, with an introduction by Eileen Myles. Award-winning books include The South Orange Sonnets (92nd Street Y “Discovery Award”), Cant Be Wrong (PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award “For Excellence In Literature”), and It’s Not Nostalgia (American Book Award). He writes a blog called Lally’s Alley.

Annabel Lee is the author of Minnesota Drift (forthcoming from Wry), Basket (Accent Editions), Continental 34s (Vehicle Editions) and At the Heart of the World, translations of Blaise Cendrars (O Press). As publisher of Vehicle Editions, in 2018 she co-published, with her daughter Irene Lee, A Book of Signs: The Women’s March, January 21, 2017. She lives in Brooklyn.

Ron Padgett lives in New York and spends time in northern Vermont, near Canada. His forthcoming (2019) book of poems is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). Other poems of his were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. One of Padgett’s favorite contemporary poets is George Bowering.
  
 Jerome Sala’s books include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier) and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press). He lives in New York City, with his wife, poet Elaine Equi. His blog – on poetry, pop culture and everyday life, is espresso bongo: http://www.espressobongo.typepad.com

Barry Schwabsky’s most recent book of poetry is Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square, 2015). Other publications include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and Heretics of Language (Black Square, 2018); forthcoming is The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg, 2019). He is art critic for The Nation.

Terence Winch’s most recent book of poems is The Known Universe (Hanging Loose, 2018). Born and raised in the Bronx, he has lived in the Washington, DC area for many years. The son of Irish immigrants, he has also played traditional music all his life and was a founder of the original Celtic Thunder, the acclaimed Irish band. His most recent recording is a CD called This Day Too: Music from Irish America (2017).

Geoffrey Young : issue three : preface

You’re taking a shower, a heavy winter wind blowing outside, soap’s everywhere, and all of a sudden the lights go out, the water stops, and you are there in the dark, wondering what to do, how long you’ll have to wait, and will the power come back on?

          By the time it does, you’re fully dressed.  You’ve found a flashlight and you’re reading the latest issue of GUEST in the dark, enjoying the veteran voices, the satirical probes, the conceptual humor, the sustained concisions, the idiomatic bumps, the inspissate grinds, the attention to syllabic detail and image clarity.

          One thing follows another.  Another follows thing one. Time in, time out.  Different voices, different runes.  The second reading different than the first.  The text on the page, the sound in your ear.  Poems aspire to a life-time, or even longer. Enjoy, “enjoy.”

26 February 2019

Geoffrey Young [photo credit: Walter Robinson] has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. For the last twenty-seven years he has presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures, founded in Berkeley, CA, was in business for 30 years, ending in 2005, after publishing 135 books of contemporary poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Recent chapbooks of his poems and drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017); SAUCE (World Wide Suicide, 2018); and Sight Unseen (Giant Squid, 2018). In addition, he has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.