Tag: marcel brouwers

SAFTA Reading Series: TA Noonan and Marcel Brouwers

KNOXVILLE, TN – Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA), a branch of Sundress Publications, is pleased to announce an upcoming reading from writers TA Noonan and Marcel Brouwers. Part of the SAFTA Reading Series, both writers will be reading from their collections, which will be for sale after the event during a meet and greet with the authors.

 The event is free and will be held at The Birdhouse, at 800 N 4th Ave in Knoxville on Sunday, June 22, at 3:00PM.

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, with Erin Elizabeth Smith, Skate or Die (Dusie Kollektiv, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review, West Wind Review, Hobart, Ninth Letter, and Phoebe, among others. A weightlifter, crafter, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she serves as the Associate Editor of Sundress Publications, Founding Editor of Flaming Giblet Press, and Literary Arts Director for the Sundress Academy of the Arts.

Marcel Brouwers is the author of the chapbook, The Rose Industrial Complex (Finishing Line Press, 2009). He lives in Knoxville, TN, with his wife, LA Hoffer, and works at the University of Tennessee. A lecturer in the English Department, he is currently the Acting Director of the Writing Center and teaches creative writing, literature, and composition classes. His first full-length poetry collection, The Old Cities, was released by Sundress Publications in 2012.

 

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The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ colony on a 29-acre farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All events are guided by professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in Eastern Tennessee.

 

Web: http://www.sundresspublications.com       Twitter: SundressPub

Email: safta@sundresspublications.com               Facebook: SundressPublications

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!

Now available: The Old Cities

At turns both funny and devastating, Marcel Brouwers‘ debut collection, The Old Cities, takes you on a linguistic adventure around the world and home again. The poems here are playful, smart, and never boring. This is a collection that any lover of language and travel should own. Pick up your copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Sundress store–just in time for the holidays!

The Old Cities
The Old Cities by Marcel Brouwers

“Marcel Brouwers’ debut collection The Old Cities is a travelogue of local and national curiosities, and in that the poems range so freely, there is a glide to this work, a welcoming ease. In that every subject in poetry, considered both carefully and freely, is as skewed as we are, these poems reveal, piecemeal–what other way, honestly, do we live out most of our lives–who we are at our least pretentious and most lively. The reader of these poems will find a plurality of intimated joys and sorrows. And, as well, a voice that is never merely shrewd but, and more consistently than any reader has a right to expect, ready at any moment to redress the ironies it registers so aptly. I love this book because it is in love with oddness. And it’s word-wise: just read the first poem: not a received noun or a stock phrase that isn’t affectively queried. If language got us into this mess, these poems seem to say, language will have to get us out.”

— William Olsen, author of Sand Theory

“These poems come at us much as contemporary culture comes at us, full-bore, multi-barreled, incessant. They engage with the frenzy of our time, and, in perhaps one of poetry’s most vital functions, they are subversive. They question, they put every thought under review. These are powerful, wistful, bemused poems–the health of poetry has just improved.”

— Arthur Smith, author of The Late World: Poems

“One of my teachers in graduate school once told me that a ‘decent’ first book of poems only needs about three ‘very good’ poems. If this is true, then it must be that Marcel Brouwers’ debut collection The Old Cities is an exceptional book. There are echoes of, among others, Frost and William Matthews–not bad company–but these poems are all Brouwers. His voice is equally compassionate and ironic, his vision equally expansive and precise, evidenced in a poem about his country: ‘Children who die go down as heroes / gone down.’ Humor often sidles up to grief in these poems, but it’s the pathos that rings the loudest: ‘I’m not in favor of the end / but it’s hard to think of what’s missing, a love / that wishes it be different and how it ultimately is.’ Just one of many beautiful moments The Old Cities possesses.”

— Alexander Long, author of Still Life