This month we feature work from our five finalists for the 2011 Omnidawn Chapbook Competition:
Brian Foley – Totem
Hugo Garcia Manriquez – All Civilians
Nicholas Gulig – Ecotone
Megan Pruiett – The Naught Book
M.A. Vizsolyi – Notes on Melancholia
TOTEM
Brian Foley
The filled up:
middle: of species: ceasing:
to vanish: I could: theme:
into reason: for
disease:
the sound of:
my own: maim: expelled:
against the: same: baste:
but its
the shape:
you walk into: in which you
collaborate:
possible:
*
Brian Foley is the author of several chapbooks including The Constitution (Horseless Press, 2011) & Going Attractions (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming 2011). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Real Poetik, Action Yes, Leveler and elsewhere. He is a co editor at Saltgrass Journal and, with E.B. Goodale, runs Brave Men Press.
from ALL CIVILIANS
Hugo Garcia Manriquez
the propositions:
a garden is this, surplus within the walls
“the natural limits”
“the third world”
awaken and in such wilderness
——————————————–
in a dream the title of a book
and the book, “Historia universal del residuo”
interiority is the translator’s proposition
——————————————-
against grain of voice
in the subject line of all future correspondence
degrees of need
—————————
[notes for apprenticeship ]
Hairpin for warships
Morning doves
Dove tail, “Drone
tail”
*
Hugo Garcia Manriquez is the recipient of a 2010 Translation Grant from the Mexican National Fund for the Arts. Some of his forthcoming projects include Painting is Finite, from LRL e-editions, and Anti-Humboldt, a revision/intervention of the NAFTA document which will be published in Mexico. His translation into Spanish of W.C.W.’s poem Paterson appeared in 2009, and he is currently translating Clayton Eshleman’s book on cave painting and the Upper Paleolithic imagination, Juniper Fuse. Hugo is pursuing a doctoral degree from the Spanish and Portuguese Department at UC Berkeley.
LOCALITY
Nicholas Gulig
*
Nicholas Gulig is a poet from Wisconsin. Educated at the University of Montana and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he is the recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg and Ruskin Art Club, awards for poetry. He has published work in numerous journals across the country, including ForkLift Ohio, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Columbia Review, Strange Machine, Corduroy Mountain, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, and the Colorado Review. A chapbook, “West of Center” is forthcoming from Camber Press. Currently, he lives in Bangkok, Thailand as a Fulbright Scholar where he is studying contemporary southeast Asian poetry.
THE HUNT
Megan Pruiett
(previously published in Minor American)
god of din, green as pond bottoms. a gloom there, and quarry:
its particulars blanch the rest. hairy shoulder, liquid glance, there are mountains hunched between its ears—will you not shoot? trigger cracks, makes an observer out of thereupon.
the running gloat, wound in brown a brown a brown
behind your ears, cold on nape and knees? hunt obstructs the hunt.
in thick of it, galloping to midstream
a call found their pairs. mismatched socks, a barrel, stock. whitened sky. some geese sail by, across; the cords pull taut, the spindle hot.
*
Megan Pruiett concluded her two years as Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in July 2010, just in time for the birth of her daughter Imogen. She is the author of the chapbook To Music (EtherDome Press, 2003) and several published and unpublished poems, some of which are forthcoming in the EtherDome Anthology due out in 2012.
from NOTES ON MELANCHOLIA
M.A. Vizsolyi
[idleness]
with wine the autobiography of the pageant winner
the ghost of the bullfighter in the amphitheater with no bathroom
the angel licking the wound of the wounded horse
in the morning the man recanting his passion
the smoking liver the dried up heart the mercy of his eyes
what was it why did the fringe lose pace with the wind
*
M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poems, “The Lamp with Wings,” was selected by Ilya Kaminsky for the National Poetry Series, and is forthcoming in the September of 2011. His poems have recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in the journals Poetry International, Tuesday: An Art Project, Slice Magazine, and BOMB. He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in Brooklyn.