Of Brauer’s book, poet Molly Fisk writes: “Haunted by loveliness and by ghosts . . . At Ease in the Borrowed World maps out a new geography of belonging. Not to place, exactly, or to family, but to a suspended world where everyone gathers: parents and children, women and men, characters from novels, from history, the dead. It’s a sharply etched but comforting landscape, where reader and writer are both allowed temporary reign; where we ‘climb to the top of it and see farther,’ and then ‘place the sleeping residents / back in their beds, and fold the quick dark around them.’ ”

Read more of Brauer’s work here: http://www.sixteenrivers.org/wordpress/barbara-swift-brauer/at-ease-in-the-borrowed-world/

Of Fleming’s book, poet Joan Larkin writes: “All through The Choreographer, we encounter our own humanness in mirrors both dark and bright, as Gerald Fleming reveals us to ourselves. Each of these pieces feels unexpected yet somehow inevitable. I love their mordant wit, their sparseness and precision, their relentless truthfulness. This book is filled with music, and Fleming’s lyrical mastery is nowhere clearer than in the stunning sequence at its center—prose poems sprung from fifteenth-century Sephardic songs that seduce us into his imagined world of irresolvable ache, foolishness, and joy.”

Read more of Fleming’s poetry here: http://www.sixteenrivers.org/wordpress/authors/gerald-fleming/the-choreographer/

And of course, you can purchase copies of both these books on our website at http://www.sixteenrivers.org/wordpress/donate-2/

Please join us at one or more of the following readings. We would love to see you there.

Saturday, April 6, 7 p.m.
Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Boulevard,
Corte Madera, Tel: (415) 927-0960

Sunday, April 7, 5 p.m.
Redwood Cafe, 8240 Redwood Hwy.,
Cotati, Tel: (707) 795-7868

Thursday, April 11, 7:30 p.m.
Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Avenue,
Berkeley, Tel: (510) 704-8222

Friday, April 19, 7 p.m.
Books Inc., 2251 Chestnut Street, San Francisco,
Tel: (415) 931-3633

Tuesday, May 14, 7 p.m.
The Barkin’ Dog Grill, 940 Eleventh Street,
Modesto, wegenerspage@yahoo.com

Gerald Fleming with Jack Marshall:
Tuesday, June 11, 7 p.m.
Albany Library, 1247 Marin Avenue
Albany, Tel: (510) 526-3720

If you would like to read further samples of these poets’ work over the coming month and stay abreast of all the news from Sixteen Rivers Press, please Like our Facebook page.

Sunday, April 7, 5 p.m.
Redwood Cafe, 8240 Redwood Hwy.,
Cotati, Tel: (707) 795-7868

Thursday, April 11, 7:30 p.m.
Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Avenue,
Berkeley, Tel: (510) 704-8222

Friday, April 19, 7 p.m.
Books Inc., 2251 Chestnut Street,
San Francisco, Tel: (415) 931-3633

Tuesday, May 14, 7 p.m.
The Barkin’ Dog Grill, 940 Eleventh Street,
Modesto, wegenerspage@yahoo.com

Gerald Fleming with Jack Marshall:
Tuesday, June 11, 7 p.m.
Albany Library, 1247 Marin Avenue
Albany, Tel: (510) 526-3720

The deadline for our 2013 manuscript open submission is approaching fast. All submitted manuscripts must be postmarked by February 1, 2013 [Please note that our deadline has been extended to March 1]. Winners will be notified by July 1, 2013, and the winning books will be published in spring 2015. Please see our complete submission guidelines here.

Sixteen Rivers Press is excited to announce that our two newest books will be released on April 2, 1013. They are The Choreographer by Gerald Fleming, and At Ease in the Borrowed World by Barbara S. Brauer. Readings will be held in Marin County, the East Bay, and Modesto, so keep an eye on the Reading and Events page of our website and our Facebook page for reading dates.

Sixteen Rivers is also thrilled to announce the release this fall of Miriam Bird Greenberg’s chapbook, All Night in the New Country. This chapbook is the winner of our second chapbook contest for poets under forty. Greenberg, a former Stegner fellow who was recently awarded an NEA grant, will be reading from her book in September. We’ll share more information as the date gets closer.

And speaking of our chapbook contest for poets under forty, Judy Halebsky’s book Space/Time/Gap/Interval has gone into its second printing! If you haven’t read this wonderful book, you can read some of Judy’s poems here.

Also this year, Sixteen Rivers will release its first bilingual book, I Know, by French author Ito Nago, translated by the author and Sixteen Rivers poet Lynne Knight. Published in France by Cheyne Éditeur as Je sais, this book is in its sixth printing there. Readings from I Know will be given by Lynne and the author in the fall.

In 2014, we look forward to a collection from Beverly Burch, winner of our 2012 manuscript contest, and to a second book of poetry from Murray Silverstein, author of Any Old Wolf, published by Sixteen Rivers in 2007.

Carolyn Miller (Light, Moving, 2009, and After Cocteau, 2002) will lead Taking Flight: A Writing Workshop in France this summer, June 1–8, 2013. Join a small group of participants producing new work in prose and/or poetry in the Lot Valley, about 45 minutes from Cahors. The site is Mas de Garrigue, a fifteenth-century hunting lodge and fortified farmhouse that has been converted to a four-star B&B. This workshop is for both beginning and experienced writers. For more information on the content, schedule, and cost of the workshop, e-mail Carolyn at cmiller355@sbcglobal.net. For information on accommodations, please go to www.masdegarrigue.com and the Mas’s Facebook page.

And for those of you who have been concerned about our website, all is now well! We no longer appear to be selling drugs through Canadian pharmacies on the side. Thank you for your patience as we traveled the very long path toward rectifying this Internet hacking issue. You can find our now easily located website at http://www.sixteenrivers.org/wordpress/.

And now a poem from Swimmer Climbing onto Shore by Gerald Fleming:

Elegy

When the shift key sprang into flower
he knew he’d stared wordless too long
& took his keyboard to the garden and buried it.
He went penless for a year: traveled.
Leaned on the metal railings of cheap motels,
breathing with his ears the sound
of young men/too much beer/
hawking from the depths of their guts,
swallowing. He swallowed too, no matter
where he was: Burma, Biak, Kalimantan,
Burkina Faso—penless, bookless,
intentionally mapless,
& thought often of that keyboard buried
like crocus, its big corm ready in spring
to send whole swords of words through soil
then bloom past the grass, higher
than the iris, spray those verbs
into the blue light—this fruit of his labor
which later, as dried flowers, intricate, radiant,
he’d tack upside-down on the walls,
have no need ever for electricity.

Mark, you never made it home.
Dave’s at your place, your wife
is water in his hands
and the rain’s leached away the letters
of those silicon bones.

Don’t look down.

Sixteen Rivers is pleased to announce the winner of the 2012 manuscript competition. Our newest member is Beverly Burch, for her manuscript How a Mirage Works. We look forward to working with Beverly and to publishing her book in 2014, when we will also publish The Master of Leaves, a second book by Sixteen Rivers member Murray Silverstein.

We are also happy to announce the winner of our second chapbook contest for poets under forty. This year’s winner, chosen by Camille Dungy, is Miriam Bird Greenberg. Her book will be published in the fall of next year.

The press is thrilled with our two new books for spring 2013: Barbara Swift Brauer’s At Ease in a Borrowed World and Gerald Fleming’s The Choreographer. Keep an eye on our blog and on future newsletters for more information about these books, their authors, and upcoming readers. We know you won’t want to miss out.

We are also working on our first translation project, I Know, by Ito Naga. Originally published in France by the poetry publisher Cheyne Éditeur as Je sais, the book has been translated into English by the author and Sixteen Rivers member Lynne Knight. It will be published in a bilingual edition in September 2013, along with Miriam Bird Greenberg’s chapbook, making a grand total of four books next year for the press.

On November 17, 2012, Sixteen Rivers will host their annual fundraiser at a beautiful home in Marin County. This year’s featured reader is acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield, whose most recent book is Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011). Please save the date and join us for this wonderful evening.

Our two 2012 authors—Judy Halebsky (Space/Gap/Interval/Distance) and Jacqueline Kudler (Easing into Dark)—had a well-attended spring reading series and will read again this fall, beginning with the Petaluma Poetry Walk and the Sonoma County Book Fair. Keep an eye on our website and on future newsletters for further details.

Sixteen Rivers Press also has a Facebook fan page. “Like” us on Facebook and receive posts about upcoming readings as well as monthly excerpts from some of our books.

And now for a poem from Judy Halebsky’s chapbook:

A BREAKING WORD

There’s that part
after Basho writes
old still pond
of pressing a fingerprint into wet clay

where the word ya
holds a space in the air
a cloud changes shape in the sky

make it a dash, a murmur
a breath on the inhale

this old pond
so many have tried to open

a sigh, a hum, a—

frog jumps in

sound of water says Hass
plop says Watts
kerplunk says Ginsberg

We are pleased to introduce Easing into Dark, Jacqueline Kudler’s second book with Sixteen Rivers Press. Of this book, David St. John writes, “The power and consolations of family resonate throughout all of the poems in Kudler’s moving and deeply reflective new collection. . . . Joy is generational and renewable, making the slowly encroaching ‘dark’ more tolerable and even, at times, something to honor. Mature and wise, replete with the pleasures of the natural world, Easing into Dark is a volume to savor again and again.” Read more of Jackie’s work here.

We are also excited to introduce Judy Halebsky’s chapbook, Space/Gap/Interval/Distance, the winner of our first Poets Under Forty Chapbook Contest, which was judged by Forrest Hamer. He writes, “Space/Gap/Interval/Distance engages the reader in rapt translation—between languages, among the visual, the semantic, and the kinesthetic—by way of a poet’s journey of return and what remains unsaid. What singles this work out is that after reading each poem, we are left with evocative images that initiate journeys of translation continuing long after we leave the page.”  Read more of Judy’s work here.

Jackie and Judy will be giving readings all around the Greater Bay Area. You can catch them in Oakland, Modesto, Corte Madera, Menlo Park this spring, with additional readings coming in the fall. To find out more about these readings, check the Readings and Events page on our website.

Our 2012 catalogs, featuring Easing into Dark and Space/Gap/Interval/Distance as well as our entire backlist, have been mailed. If you did not receive one, but would like to, please contact us at info@sixteenrivers.org. We would be happy to send one to you as soon as we can. We count on annual subscriptions to our new titles as well as  donations to keep the press alive.

May 1, the deadline for our second Poets Under Forty Chapbook Contest is rapidly approaching. If you are a poet in that age group, please consider sending us a manuscript; if not, we’ll hope you’ll get the word out to your age-appropriate poet friends. The book will be published in spring 2013, and all poetic styles and forms are welcome. The winner will receive $500 and 25 copies of the chapbook. The winner will not be required to become a member of the press, though he or she must commit to giving three or four readings in the Greater Bay Area to support the chapbook. The final judge for the manuscripts will be Camille Dungy. For more information, see our guidelines on the Submissions Page.

Congratulations to Christina Hutchins (The Stranger Dissolves, 2011). Her book is one of four finalists for the Audrey Lorde Poetry Award from Publishing Triangle. The Stranger Dissolves has also been nominated for the Lambda Literary Award. The winner will be announced in June.

Jeanne Wagner (In the Body of Our Lives, 2011) has won the 2012 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize from Smartish Place. And her poem “My mother was like the bees” was featured in column 366 of Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. You can read it here.

Gerald Fleming (Swimmer Climbing onto Shore, 2005) will read in the Hanging Loose Press/Magazine 100th Issue reading at the Brooklyn Public Library on April 25. The next night, April 26, he’ll read with Bob Hershon and Steve Shrader at the NYU bookstore, 726 Broadway in Manhattan, at 6:30 p.m. More information can be found at http://hangingloose.blogspot.com/.

Gillian Wegener (The Opposite of Clairvoyance, 2008) has just been named poet laureate of Modesto, California. Gillian will read on Saturday, April 21, at 7 p.m. with Connie Post, James Maughn, and Ed Colletti, all poets who curate poetry reading series. The reading is hosted by Katherine Hastings of Word Temple poetry and will be held at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, 6780 Depot Street, Sebastopol. Find out more at http://www.wordtemple.com/blog/?page_id=14 .

The annual benefit reading for Sixteen Rivers Press will be held on November 17 in a private home in San Rafael and will feature Jane Hirshfield. Stay tuned for more information in the late summer. This will be an evening you will not want to miss.

And now for a poem from Jacqueline Kudler’s new book, Easing into Dark:

After the Long, Bitter Season

Each day in April, they are here again,
high on the open slopes, under the pine,
beside the suddenly garrulous streams,
pushing up from last summer’s cemeteries:
the iris, the lupine, the baby blue eyes.
And we are waiting for each new appearance—
each new signal of redemption—
the earth returning to us again
after the long, bitter season.

I want to talk about the Calypso orchids,
here this Wednesday all at once—
two days of the sun’s touch just enough
to coax them out from the cold.
Winged pink petals on leafless stems,
they grow where least expected,
the ground rocky, inhospitable, shrouded
with sparse dead pine shards.

Each year we think to find them
in a kinder context, the new, tender
grasses of a meadow, perhaps, but no,
this is the soil, the shade, the hardship
that sustains them.
I want to sit down on this stony hilltop,
in the middle of this bitter year,
watch how the orchids
launch their pink parachutes out
between one darkness
and another.

Our two newest authors, Jacqueline Kudler (Easing Into Dark ) and Judy Halebsky (Space/Gap/Interval/Distance) will be reading in the following series of events in the Bay Area:

April 1, 3 p.m., Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland.

April 10, 6 p.m., The Barkin’ Dog Grill, 914 11th Street, Modesto.

April 15, 7 p.m., Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera.

May 6, 5 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway, San Francisco.

May 23, 7 p.m., Kepler’s, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park.

Sept. 12, 7 p.m., Studio 333, 333 Caledonia St., Sausalito (Jacqueline Kudler).

Gerald Fleming will be reading at a Hanging Loose Press/Magazine 100th issue event at the Brooklyn Public Library on April 25, and on April 26 he’ll be reading with Bob Hershon and Steve Shrader at the NYU Bookstore in Manhattan.

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We’d like to thank our designer, Cathi Bosco, of Madison, Connecticut, who was able to intuit the look of our press and give us a new design that preserves but enlivens the spirit of our rivers logo.