#BLauthor13: Sara Biggs Chaney

Follow Sara Biggs Chaney on  Facebook.

#BLauthor13 is Sara Biggs Chaney.

Sara Biggs Chaney received her Ph.D. in English in 2008 and currently teaches first-year writing in Dartmouth's Institute for Writing and Rhetoric. Her first chapbook, Precipice Fruit, was released by ELJ Publications in October 2013, and her second chapbook, Ann Coulter's Letter to the Young Poets, is forthcoming from dancing girl press this summer. Sara's poems and flash fictions have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Word Riot, PANK, SunDog Lit, Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Menacing Hedge, Whiskeypaper, and other places. You can catch up with Sara at her blog.

BL interviews #BLauthor9 Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

"prophet rejected," by addison

If you haven't checked out two new prose poems by Sarah Hulyk Maxwell yet, do that because in the upcoming interview, Sarah talks about the characters in those pieces, and shares how she disciplines herself to write regularly.

BL: Tell our readers a little more about the characters of Gingerine and DagoBerto from your prose poems. How many pieces have you written about them? What draws you to fleshing out characters in short prose/verse like that?

SHM: Gingerine and DagoBerto are both guilty pleasure characters. I say this mostly because I have so much fun writing about them and their always-imaginary, never-for-real love story. They are actually two parts of a triangle, a character named Anderson making up the third part, but he doesn't appear here. Roughly 20 poems make up their little saga as of right now, and while the manuscript they are contained in may gain muscle mass, I'm not sure Gingerine and DagoBerto will take part in more than these 20 or so pages. These poems are heavily influenced by Sabrina Orah Mark's Tsim Tsum and Jenny Boully's not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, so their prose form is no surprise to me. For me, Gingerine gushes in containment. She is mostly emotion and memory, and living in her head. The block-like, prose form felt appropriate for those moments, tiny windows of text, where she is trying to tell you so much in so small a space that there is simply no time to break or breathe.

#BLauthor9: Sarah Hulyk Maxwell

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After a brief hiatus, we’re back now with #BLauthor9, poet Sarah Hulyk Maxwell.

Sarah Hulyk Maxwell lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She has two cats, a husband, and an MFA from Louisiana State University. Her work can most recently be found in The Nassau Review and Common Ground Review and is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander.

Stayed tuned for an interview with the poet next week, but for now, here are two new prose poems and art by addison:

What’s a poem?: What’s a review? of Kristy Bowen’s “the shared properties of water and stars,” by Stacia M. Fleegal

Get the shared properties of water and stars

Sometimes the stigma is that small and pretty = intellectually lightweight. But Kristy Bowen has written a small and pretty book of prose poems that is, in actuality, going to completely rock your safe little genre-loving world.

Bowen found the perfect home for the shared properties of water and stars at Noctuary Press:

“seeks to create a public space for women writers

… [who are not] simply challeng[ing] the notion of genre, but

… assessing both the artistic possibilities and the dangers inherent in maintaining genre categories.”

The girl with the blonde hair lives next door to the man who keeps rabbits. (p. 9)

Talk about genre-busting. This book is prose poem, short fiction in verse, fairy tale, myth, dystopian fiction, fable, folk tale –

Every shoebox marked open me? (p. 10)

#BLauthor1: Kristy Bowen

Follow poet Kristy Bowen
on Twitter @dancinggrlpress
and friend her on Facebook, plus
check out her website at www.kristybowen.net.

Told you we were switching things up.

For our very first biweekly, spotlight-an-author post, we are so pleased to be able to offer three new prose poems by Kristy Bowen. Kristy's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Stolen Island, Yew Journal, Projectile, Requited, Diagram and Delirious Hem. She is the author of several longer and shorter works, most recently the shared properties of water and stars (Noctuary Press, 2013) and beautiful, sinister (Maverick Duck Press, 2013), as well as a longer collection of poems girl show (Black Lawrence Press, 2013). She is editor of the literary journal wicked alice, as well as dancing girl press.