Tag: t.a. noonan

National Poetry Month Playlist: T.A. Noonan’s Picks

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To celebrate National Poetry Month, our Sundress editors are sharing some of their favorite poems, most influential poems, and poems that they are really digging right now. Put them all together, and you have the Sundress Poetry Playlist!

Today’s picks come from SAFTA’s Literary Arts Director and Sundress Publications Associate Editor T.A. Noonan!

“America,” Allen Ginsberg
Picture it: I’m a high-school freshman reading Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Frost. I flip through my textbook and find “America.” My mind was blown. (Seriously, I didn’t even know you were allowed use the word “fuck” in a poem before reading Ginsberg.) This poem was the first to make me realize that there was so much about poetry I didn’t know and needed to find out.
“Angels of the Love Affair,” Anne Sexton
Pure invocation, this is easily my favorite Sexton poem and one of the most influential poems of my life. I’d read “Her Kind” at eighteen or so and thought, Okay, she wrote about witches. Maybe I can do that, too. But it was “Angels of the Love Affair” that convinced me that the stories I wanted to tell with The Bone Folders were worthy.
“Fall,” Robert Hass
I was lucky to take an independent study in Contemporary Poetry as an undergraduate, and this was the very first poem we read there. It still resonates, reminding me simultaneously of childhood and marriage, fear and delight.
“To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons,” Linda McCarriston
Another piece introduced to me in the aforementioned independent study, “To Judge Faolain, Dead Long Enough: A Summons” was the first poem addressing domestic abuse I’d ever read. To this day, the last few lines strike me as the most brutal curse ever committed to paper.
War Music, Christopher Logue
It almost feels like cheating to pick this, as it’s a multi-volume project. Still, Logue was the first to get me to rethink the nature of translation, and I really have a thing for book(s)-length projects.
Nox Anne Carson
Another cheat. Really, I could pick anything from Anne Carson. I’ve made no secret of my intense love affair with her work. That said, this book moved me to tears from the moment I saw it. No mass-market book I own will ever be as beautiful. No elegy will ever feel as real.
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T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently four sparks fall: a novella (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, 2013) and Dress the Stars (Dusie Kollektiv, 2013). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming inReunion: The Dallas Review, Hobart, Ninth Letter, specs, Delirious Hem, Phoebe, and more. A weightlifter, crafter, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she will be moving to Knoxville in January 2014 to serve as the Literary Arts Director for the Sundress Academy for the Arts.

Meet Danny M. Hoey, Our 2013 Fiction Judge for OUTSpoken

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Danny M. Hoey, author of The Butterfly Lady (Flaming Giblet Press, 2013), will be one of the Sundress Academy for the Arts’ judges for the OUTSpoken competition. His novel has achieved acclaim throughout the entire LGBT community. Hoey says he wrote The Butterfly Lady “to give Gabriel, or someone like Gabriel, a sense of humanity – to show that they are not a spectacle, but a real person.”

He goes on to explain that writing this story has not only helped himself to feel empowered to be truthful, but also encouraged his friends to write the truth and to remain truthful in their writing, “It’s helped me to not be afraid to write the truth, even the hard parts. I was afraid and then I let it go. I’m not as afraid as I was before. I can write things that matter.”

This led him to meet and work with author T.A. Noonan, who informed him of SAFTA and the OUTSpoken program. Hoey described his excitement at the opportunity to work with and judge for this organization, saying, “We need more LGBT voices. I think it is important to help the arts in any way we can because art is political. We need to give people an area to express themselves and who they are and give them an opportunity to be who they are.”

The Butterfly Lady was just named a Finalist for the Foreward Book of the Year in Gay and Lesbian Fiction.

Submit your work today!

 

Press Release: Not Somewhere Else But Here

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Knoxville, TN — Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the release of Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place, edited by Erin Elizabeth Smith, T.A. Noonan, Rhonda Lott and Beth Couture. This book is Sundress’s first anthology and contains poetry, fiction, and non-fiction pieces exclusively featuring contemporary women writers. In this 300+ page eclectic and engaging multi-genre anthology, the reader will find literature that transports them across the entire globe, written by women who have boldly traversed it.

Writers include Marjoie Maddox, Wendy Call, Barbara Crooker, Marthe Reed, Karyna McGlynn, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Dianne Seuss, Sarah Sloat, and many,many more!

“Miniature celebrations of place, the writings in Not Somewhere Else But Here deftly maneuver through imagined spaces and bustling Manhattan streets, the impossible page and the architecture of Japanese homes. Here, place is questioned and subdued: it is the hot gloss of sun on concrete.”

-Lily Hoang, author of The Evolutionary Revolution and Changing

“The writing in Not Somewhere Else But Here is at turns haunting and infused with a deep magic. The work carries the reader from Beirut to Vermont, from Japan into dream worlds, bodies as maps. Landscapes are often treacherous, populated with, “mouths of razor-wild men,” enchanted with, “fists opened to explosions of diatomic stars,” and each woman in this collection navigates those spaces with a deft grace. Step into the worlds they have summoned.

-Margaret Bashaar, Editor of Hyacinth Girl Press

To find out more or to order a copy for sale or review, visit the Sundress Publications website at www.sundresspublications.com.

The Big Poetry Giveaway 2013!

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To celebrate National Poetry Month, Sundress Publications will be participating in The Big Poetry Giveaway, by offering copies of Marcel Brouwers’ The Old Cities and T.A. Noonan’s The Bone Folders for free to our winners!  

To enter for a chance to win, simply include your name and email address in the comment section of this blog post!  A winner will be chosen at random at the end of April, that cruelest of months.

Thanks to Susan Rich for curating this year’s giveaway!