In the next year, Hyacinth Girl Press will release Brooklyn Copeland’s chapbook Salt Ballads, which is a combination of original work by Brooklyn herself and translations of work by the poet Edith Sodergrän.  This will be both the first collection we will publish of translated work AND the first collection to feature more than one poet. I’ve admired Brooklyn’s poetry for years and am beyond thrilled to get to bring Salt Ballads to publication with her.

Brooklyn Copeland lives in Indianapolis, where she works as an auditor and a yoga instructor. Her first full-length collection, SIPHON, HARBOR, is due out on Shearsman Books in 2012. Her chapbook LAKED, FIELDED, BLANKED was published by alice blue books in 2011 and is also available as a limited-edition hand-sewn art book. Another chapbook, RITUALISTS, will appear soon with Little Red Leaves/Textile Series. Her original work and translations have most recently been published in Burnside Review, Poetry, Parcel, Interrupture, and Sink Review (which nominated her for a Pushcart). In 2010 she received a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry foundation. She is also the editor of the slow-going print journal TAIGA (taigajournal.com). When she’s not reading or writing or doing headstands and back-bends, she’s probably baking a cake or watching cartoons-for-grownups with her boyfriend and cocker spaniel.

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Coming up soon – a preview of the cover art for Kathleen Kirk’s Nocturnes created by Nashay Jones, followed very soon thereafter by Nocturnes itself!

With the end of the holidays and the beginning of a new year it seems fitting to have a small sale here at Hyacinth Girl Press!

For one week only, you can order any two chapbooks for only $9.00! Click the purchase button below and be sure to note which two chapbooks you are ordering.

Chapbooks eligible for the sale are Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook, Book Four by Niina Pollari, A Wicked Apple by Susan Slaviero, and Nocturnes by Kathleen Kirk. If you select Nocturnes as one of your choices your copy will ship upon the chapbook’s release.

Sarah Kain Gutowski’s Fabulous Beast will be released in our second publishing cycle and I could not be more excited. The collection is seamless, unsettling, and made me cry at least once.

Sarah Kain Gutowski is an Assistant Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College on Long Island, where she lives with her husband, daughter, and son. Her poetry has been published in Epiphany, The Threepenny Review, and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal, and some of her poems are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review and The Southern Review. She keeps a record of her writing life, experience in academia, and motherhood at http://mimsyandoutgrabe.blogspot.com.

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My apologies for the radio silence over the past month. My family went through multiple tragedies in December and I appreciate everyone’s patience as I essentially took the month off.

But! the new year has brought with it joy, it seems, and we’re back in the game here at Hyacinth Girl Press! We should have more announcements soon (two more!) as well as a sneak peak at the cover art print for Kathleen Kirk’s Nocturnes which is being finished up by the fantastically talented Nashay Jones. Her linocut prints are gorgeous and I can’t wait to share the art she is creating in response to Kathleen’s lovely, lovely poetry.

AWP is coming on fast, too, and we have been lucky enough to get to share a table with Arsenic Lobster (100% Susan Yount’s doing – I admire her drive and passion more than I can say) and Weighed Words – look for us at table C6!

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While I usually try not to use this website as a forum to promote my own work, I do have to link to this new review of my most recent chapbook, Letters from Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel, which came out from Blood Pudding Press this past August.  Susan Yount wrote the review for her literary journal, Arsenic Lobster, and I am simply tickled by what she has to say. The review is very insightful and makes me smile. A lot.

There will probably be one more announcement here before Christmas, and then one more again before the new year! So much is still to come!

A Wicked Apple by Susan Slaviero - $5.00 plus shipping

At long last it is here – Susan Slaviero’s chapbook of myth, fairytale, and maybe even a little horror, A Wicked Apple, is now available from Hyacinth Girl Press!

A Wicked Apple also features cover art by the lovely Renée Alberts and our first forays into hand-binding of chapbooks.  Like our other chaps, A Wicked Apple is a mere $5 plus shipping, or for $18 plus shipping you can subscribe to our first year’s line-up and get copies of Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook and Book Four by Niina Pollari at the same time, with Kathleen Kirk’s Nocturnes forthcoming this January!

In our second round of publications, Hyacinth Girl Press will have the pleasure of publishing the chapbook The Exhibit by Lauren Eggert-Crowe.

I’d not read Lauren’s poetry before she submitted to Hyacinth Girl Press, and it turns out there was a void in my life that I’d not even been aware of. Getting to know Lauren has been delightful. Lauren’s poetry has a haunting quality that really speaks to me and I can’t wait to share The Exhibit!

Lauren Eggert-Crowe has an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. She has been published in Puerto Del Sol, So To Speak, Water-Stone Review, Eleven Eleven, We are so happy to know something, TinfoilDresses, DIAGRAM, and terrain.org, among others. In 2007, she won the University of Arizona Poetry Center Prize, judged by Srikanth Reddy. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureggertcrowe

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After a small delay, Susan Slaviero’s A Wicked Apple will be available early early next week! If you are a subscriber already your copy will go out early in the week! If you want to review A Wicked Apple drop me a line – hyacinthgirlpress (at) gmail (dot) com!

Also – we will be at the AWP! With a table! I will post more on this soon…

Hyacinth Girl Press is very very excited to be able to say that in 2012 we will be publishing Lisa Ciccarello’s chapbook, Sometimes there are travails.

I first came to Lisa’s poetry through her chapbook At Night, the Dead from Blood Pudding Press and love the meditative, almost chant-like quality of her work. Sometimes there are travails has that ease of flow in the voice of it and a haunting narrative to boot.

Lisa Ciccarello is the author of two chapbooks: At night (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) & At night, the dead (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Handsome, Clock, Sixth Finch, H_NGM_N, Saltgrass, Poor Claudia, & Corduroy Mtn., among others.

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So, I mentioned above that I may very well be looking at about 18 months worth of chapbooks from this round of submissions rather than 12. I got far more submissions than I anticipated I would this time around, and was equally overwhelmed with the extremely high quality of the manuscripts I received. Chances are that if I rejected your chapbook it was with a heavy heart. If you submitted and I have not yet gotten back to you I am very sorry for the wait. This has turned into a long process of reading and re-reading and re-reading every manuscript.

I don’t want to pass over truly great manuscripts just because I’m “full” for 12 months of publishing, though, so it looks like Hyacinth Girl Press has a catalogue in waiting through early 2013, which is both wonderful and intimidating. So far I’ve been able to publish, print, and distribute the first 3 press titles with little issue, but every sale helps, every link helps, and every review is appreciated. Drop me an email at hyacinthgirlpress (at) gmail (dot) com if you are interested in receiving a review copy of any of our already-published or forthcoming titles.

That said, a new review was recently posted of Juliet Cook‘s Thirteen Designer Vaginas over at Fiddler Crab Review as written by the lovely Kathleen Kirk (whose chapbook, Nocturnes, will be out from HGP in January!). Thirteen Designer Vaginas also got a mention over at No Tells from Jessy Randall for her Best Poetry Books of 2011 list! Hoorah!

As always, to pick up a copy of Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook or Book Four by Niina Pollari, or to subscribe to our first year’s line-up head on over to our Purchase Page! And look for Susan Slaviero‘s A Wicked Apple next week!

I asked Renée Alberts to create a cover for A Wicked Apple because I adore Renée’s collage work (and her poetry. Some day, Renée…), and I really felt that Susan’s poetry and Renée’s art could work harmoniously together. I am beyond pleased with the result:

Cover Art for A Wicked Apple by Renée Alberts

Renée Alberts’ poetry and visual art have appeared in print, dance performances, live radio shows and at least one tattoo. She is author of the poetry collection No Water and editor of Natural Language: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Sunday Poetry & Reading Series Anthology, a collection of writers featured in the series she founded and curates. She guest hosts 90.5 FM’s Prosody and moderates the Pittsburgh Literary Calendar. She posts writing, photography and collage, including her Detail a Day Project, at animalprayer.com.

Susan Slaviero is the author of CYBORGIA (Mayapple Press, 2010). Recent and forthcoming chapbooks include Apocrypha (Dancing Girl Press, 2009), An Introduction to the Archetypes (Shadowbox Press, 2008) and Selections from The Murder Book (Ghost Ocean, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in Rhino, PANK, Kill Author, Artifice Magazine, Mythic Delirium and elsewhere. She designs and edits the electronic literary journal blossombones and performs as August Rose with the Chicago Poetry Brothel.

Check back soon for a poetry preview of A Wicked Apple, too…

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In other lovely Hyacinth Girl Press news, a lovely new review of Juliet Cook‘s Thirteen Designer Vaginas was just posted by Rachel Kendall of Sein Und Werden! Go forth and read!

The next chapbook to be added to the year two line-up is Deena November’s Dick Wad.

Deena November graduated SUNY Binghamton in 2005 with a BA in Creative Writing, Poetry and received her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Carlow University. In 2005, she co-edited the anthology I JUST HOPE IT’S LETHAL: Poems of Sadness, Madness, and Joy for Houghton Mifflin. Her poems have also appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Shaking Like a Mountain, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Voices in the Attic, and Keyhole Magazine. She has taught Poetry and Creative Writing Workshops at Seton Hill University. Currently, she teaches at Carlow University and Robert Morris University in the English and Women’s Studies departments. She co-created Girls with Glasses Reading Series, Workshops, and Literary Journal. Deena lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and dog.

Dick Wad is Deena’s first chapbook, and I am very very very excited to get to debut her collection with Hyacinth Girl Press. There’s rawness and honesty, confrontation and playfulness all together in the chapbook that I really fell in love with. If you are in the Pittsburgh area and you have not yet done so, you really should make it to the next Girls with Glasses event.

This year we had vaginae, next year, dicks. Year three, ambiguous genitalia? Get on it, poets!

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Before the month is out, Susan Slaviero’s A Wicked Apple should be released! The cover art was created by the amazingly talented Renée Alberts and I absolutely cannot wait to share the harmony and beauty that is the work of these two women. 

I feel incredibly blessed to have been able to publish chapbooks by Juliet Cook and Niina Pollari already this year, and I am very, very excited to help bring Susan’s next chapbook into the world. Thank you to everyone who is reading and everyone who is trusting me with their poetry.