Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: About the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

About the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

This site was founded in 2004 by Doug Holder. It is dedicated to reviewing books of poetry, non-fiction, fiction, as well as featuring interviews of poets and writers. We also review plays, and other arts-related events. To have your book reviewed send it to: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 dougholder@post.harvard.edu (also use this contact email for inquiries about advertising)

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So Spoke Penelope by Tino Villanueva

(To purchase click on picture) “The Penelope of Homer’s Odyssey is a match for her famous husband: devoted to their marriage, playing the long game, nobody’s fool. In So Spoke Penelope, Tino Villanueva shows us the world through her eyes. Villanueva succeeds in imagining Penelope’s inner life and outer surroundings, with the sea and the possibility of Odysseus’ return always present, even as the suitors, her own anxiety, and the violent hexameters of Phemius the Bard’s “hard-strummed song” oppress her. So Spoke Penelope is illuminating and rewarding.”--- Diane Arnson Svarlien/ Translator, Euripides’ Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women

The Dark Opens by Miriam Levine

(To order click on picture) Awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize. “This is a wondrous, spiritually tender book,” writes Denise Duhamel. From Mark Doty: “Somehow these effortless poems manage to be deeply connected to the solid physical world of friends and children, husband and neighbors, but also touch upon an airy, unfettered interiority . . . they are both straightforward and complicated at once, both earthly and awash in a world of light.” Levine’s memoir “Devotion” soon to be reissued in paperback.

Lummox: Favorite Poems

(Click on picture to order) "Lummox Press proudly announces the publication of the first issue of LUMMOX magazine. This inaugural issue features the work of over 200 poets from all over the world. Guest poet editors include: Doug Holder (Boston); Ed Nudelman (the Northeast); Ryan Guth (the Mid-south); Jane Crown (International); Jane Lipman (Santa Fe); Georgia Santa Maria (Albuquerque); Mike Adams (Colorado); Marie Lecrivain (L.A.); and Biola Olatunde (Nigeria). $30 retail...$25 if you buy direct from Lummox Press.

With Robert Lowell and his Circle by Kathleen Spivack

(Click on image to order the book) "Please join us for the book launch, Sunday , December 2, 2012--4 to 6 P.M. Co-sponsored by UPNE, the Harvard Bookstore & the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Cambridge, MA. Short presentation, lots of refreshments. In 1959, Kathleen Spivack won a fellowship to study at Boston University with Robert Lowell. Her fellow students were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, among others. The book looks at the work of poetry, as well as lifelong friendships, despair, addiction, perseverance and survival, and at how social changes altered lives and circumstances. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, this memoir illuminates the lives and thoughts of some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century."

"Dead Beats" --A new poetry collection by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish

(Click on Picture to order) "Starting with Allen Ginsberg and ending with Charlie Parker, Sam Cornish takes us on a whirlwind tour of some of the livelier segments of 1950s and early ’60s American culture. With non-stop energy, syncopated rhythms, and a fast pace that keeps you humming as you turn the pages, Cornish visits a wide array of writers, musicians, and films, stopping along the way to visit local poetry scenes and pay tribute to the homeless and poor. Calling on Jack Kerouac, Langston Hughes, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis and a host of others, Cornish makes us feel the excitement of those times, even as he and his companions absorb the complex and often disturbing history of what he aptly calls “My Young America.” — Martha Collins

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G.-- By Susan Tepper and GaryPercesepe

Advertise with us! ( Read what people are saying about the Blog) ibbetsonpress@msn.com

(click on pic for more info) Perry Glasser--( Winner of the Gival Press Novel Award): " The blog is very impressive." Elizabeth Swados ( Tony Nominated Playwright, Guggenheim Award Winner ): "Thanks you so much for this review on your blog. It helps so much, not just in terms of getting people to know that it exists, but also makes me feel that someone has gotten what I have tried to do. I wish you the very best." Marguerite G. Bouvard, PhD-- Resident Scholar Women's Research Center-Brandeis University: " I love reading your blog. What a refreshing respite from the New York Times. Thanks for all you do for poetry." Ed Hamilton--author of "Legends of the Chelsea Hotel" commenting on Chelsea Hotel article: " That's a great piece. Thanks for sending the link along." Richard Moore-- Finalist/T.S.Eliot Prize " I have just read your wonderful interview of the wonderful Eric Greinke!" Steven Ford Brown (Former Director of Research for the George Plimpton Interview Series "The Writer in America"): " You did a great job with the Clayton Eshleman interview, especially the personal stuff. So much better than doing the dry talk about literary polemics." Celia Gilbert (Pushcart Prize in Poetry) "Doug thanks so much for that fine shout out. I'm delighted how you put it all together!" Karen Alkalay-Gut, PhD ( Professor of English-Tel Aviv University) "Doug, I enjoy your posts immensely" Lise Haines ( Writer-in-Residence, Emerson College-Boston) "I love your blog!" "( Elizabeth Searle- Executive Board/Pen New England) : "Like your blog. I like the interview with Rick Moody." Ploughshares Staff- " Everyone at Ploughshares is a big fan of your blog." Suzanne Wise (Publicity Director Poets House-NYC): "Thank you so much for this wonderfully thoughtful portrait of our new home! You really "get us" and you translate that understanding vividly. I love the way you talk about Stanley's ( Kunitz) giant dictionary as a relic from another age. We're glad to preserve such relics." Kathleen Bitetti ( Chief Curator Medicine Wheel Productions/ Former Director of the Artists Foundation--Boston.) " Love your interview with Marc Zegans...wonderful blog!"

Pushcarts and Peddlars by Ed Galing

(To order click on picture) "Ed Galing is a poet and writer who remains alarmingly prolific well into his 90's. Like Charles Reznikoff, Alfred Kazin, and Henry Roth he writes about the streets of New York, what it is to be a Jew and a man, and he does it without affectation. His poetry is stripped down to its essence, and it speaks loudly of the Greatest Generation that graced our country and inevitably left us. Read Galing for his history, his artistry, his humanity." Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press

East of the Moon by Ruth Kramer Baden

(To order --click on picture) Ruth Kramer Baden's poems are witty and with-it, but she is not playing around. These are the poems of a woman who has let wonder ripen into wisdom. Her capacity for empathy, for her earlier selves as well as for others, is rooted in the understanding that life is always a desperate improvisation. " Consider how all that grows/ from mud or rock or shadow/ must find a way to live," she writes. With these poems as our guide, we do consider, and our appreciation of our own lives is thereby deepened. Richard Hoffman/ poet, memoirist, Writer-in Residence at Emerson College.

Ibbetson Street 28 ( Now affiliated with Endicott College!)

(To order online click on pic) Featuring Poets Marge Piercy, Dan Tobin, X. J. Kennedy, Kathleen Spivack, Fred Marchant and more.... To order copies send check or money order to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 $8 +$2 shipping/handling "Issue 28 of Ibbetson Review sparkles, like all the othe issues: nothing is stilted or stuffy but very alive, a blend of poets-- some well known and some discovered and exciting. I was especially moved by the poems of Katheen Spivack and Marge Piercy. This is a magazine with great discoveries in each issue. Buy it" Lyn Lifshin

STEERAGE BY BERT STERN

A classic poetry collection by a classic poet! ( For more information and to order click on picture now!) ""I am somebody's dream," writes Bert Stern, thinking of his immigrant ancestors and of his debts to them, "for what they dared and endured." Steerage settles these debts, but that isn't all it does. "Stern's great gift is his ability to lighten family history by knitting it into larger tissue of the life we all have in common. From the heaviness of history, these poems take flight."--Lewis Hyde

"The Paris of New England" Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

( Click on pic to order this and other Ibbetson Press titles) Interviews with poets and writers from the Paris of New England Somerville, Mass. " Thank you for your interview book. I read it straight through last night and enjoyed it very much...So many good ideas in one book." Eric Greinke-- Presa Press "Very engrossing collection of Holder's interviews, with a wide range of writers about their lives and work. Included are Mike Basinski, Mark Doty, Robert Creeley, Ed Sanders, Hugh Fox, Robert K. Johnson, and Pagan Kennedy.-- Chiron Review

Poetry Workshops With Doug Holder

( Click on Picture for Doug Holder's website) Doug Holder has led poetry workshops, both for indviduals and groups for a decade now. Robert Olen Butler ( Pulitzer Prize Winner for Literature) wrote of Holder's work: " I've been greatly enjoying your poems. You have a major league talent, man." Available for individual or groups. Expert in gently helping the novice into poetry and the poetry scene. Reasonable Rates. Available for editing. Call 617-628-2313 for more information. Or email: dougholder@post.harvard.edu

The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (To order click on picture)

A new poetry book by Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene Founder, Doug Holder. "I'm enjoying 'The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel' -- perfect poems, especially in that ambiance." Dan Tobin -- Director of Creative Writing--Emerson College-Boston, Mass./ " It is quintessential Holder& bristles with sardonic wit. Congratulations."-- Eric Grienke (founder of Presa Press) / " I finished "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel'...greatly enjoyed the menagerie of characters and imperfect human beings I met along the way. Excellent work Doug!"-- Paul Steve Stone ( Creative Director W.B.Mason and the autthor of "Or So It Seems.") / "I am reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930's and 40's--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes...Rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection." Pamela Annas ( Asst. Dean of Humanities U/Mass Boston/Reviewer Midwest Book Review) “....particularly liked The Tunnel—a little masterpiece!” Kathleen Spivack ( Permanent Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/American Literature at the University of Paris) "I want to tell you this was just about the best chap I ever read, I absolutely DEVORED it..."--( Robin Stratton--Boston Literary Magazine) "An acclaimed Boston-area poet writes about characters who have captured his interest over the years -- a colonial dame with purple hair, a postal worker ready to be returned to his sender, J. Edgar Hoover's secret love -- in this skillfull collection of short, free form poems." (Perkins School of the Blind Website) Click on picture to access Cervena Barva Press

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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About the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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So Spoke Penelope by Tino Villanueva

Small Press and Poetry Collection at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.

The Dark Opens by Miriam Levine

Lummox: Favorite Poems

Elizabeth Lund Interviews Doug Holder-Founder of the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

With Robert Lowell and his Circle by Kathleen Spivack

Please donate to the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene- keep us alive!

Choir of Day by Robert K. Johnson

"Dead Beats" --A new poetry collection by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish

What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G.-- By Susan Tepper and GaryPercesepe

Advertise with us! ( Read what people are saying about the Blog) ibbetsonpress@msn.com

Pushcarts and Peddlars by Ed Galing

East of the Moon by Ruth Kramer Baden

ADVERTISE!

Ibbetson Street 28 ( Now affiliated with Endicott College!)

Ibbetson Street is now in a partnership with Endicott College!

The Arts and Literature in Somerville, Mass.: Off the Shelf with Doug Holder

The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 13, 2010

"Nothing Divine Here" by Gloria Mindock

ISCS PRESS--WE WILL PUBLISH YOUR BOOK!

Ibbetson Street 26

STEERAGE BY BERT STERN

The Boston Globe: Poetic Healing at McLean Hospital

Doo Wop to Hip Hop: Interview with poets Major Jackson and Afaa Michael Weaver

"The Paris of New England" Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

Advertise with a popular online and print literary column in the heart of the Paris of New England

Grolier Poetry Book Shop

YOUR AD CAN BE HERE ( Click on pic for more info)

Poetry Workshops With Doug Holder

Websites of Note

Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer

Outlaw Poetry

Ibbetson Street Online Book Shop

Ibbetson Street Press

No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain by Doug Holder

Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From The Back Bay to the Back Ward by Doug Holder

Of All the Meals I Had Before by Doug Holder

The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (To order click on picture)

Blog Archive

About Me

Nominated by PhD Online

Poems From The Left Bank: Somerville, Mass. by Doug Holder

From The Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" by Doug Holder

Self Portrait With A Severed Head by C.D. Collins

Wren's Cry by Dorian Brooks

Advertise with the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.