GIVEAWAY: Win 2 Books of Poetry (Agodon & Pagh) in the Big Poetry Book Giveaway:

Welcome to the 2nd Annual Big Poetry Book Giveaway!

If you have a blog and would like to participate by giving away 2 favorite poetry books on your blog, click here for more details.

As for me, I'm Kelli (aka Kells), the one who started this event for poets/poetry last year after being inspired by artists-who-blog who put together a similar giveaway in February.


Some things about me--

I am a poet, writer, & editor (in that order).

I recently founded an indie press with my friend (& co-editor of Crab Creek Review), Annette Spaulding-Convy called Two Sylvias Press.  Our first project, an anthology by women poets called Fire on her Tongue, is currently underway.

My personal motto is "Be the Crystallized Ginger"

I work at balancing my life as a writer/artist/mother/poet/wife/editor

My favorite color is orange.

My current projects include:  a creative non-fiction book (memoirish work on leaving the chaotic world to live a retreat lifestyle, then trying to transition back in), a 3rd book of poems, a writing exercise project, & my work as an editor with the literary journal Crab Creek Review & the anthology for Two Sylvias Press.

My dislikes?  Mean People.  Cold showers.  And cheesecake.

I am an avid mountain biker (I have only been seriously injured once & it was actually on the road *after* a 13 mile mountain bike ride.)

I live in the Northwest & have always lived in the Northwest.

On a good day, I see the world with ruby-colored glasses, with birdsong & beetle music.  On a bad day, I sleep in.

I like to giveaway things.

~

2 FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY--


Book 1:

The first book I'm giving away is my book, Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press Poetry Prize Series, 2010)

A book about trying to find calmness in a chaotic world.

Some notes about it:  It's titles are in alphabetical order, the second section has letters to Vincent van Gogh, Walt Whitman & a past life, and there are two poems made up of anagrams inside.

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Book 2:

As for book two to give away, I'll be honest, I have *so* many favorite books of poems, that it was hard to pick just one.  But I choose a collection by a good friend who recently opened her guest room up to me when I went on my 3-city book tour, Ms. Nancy Pagh!

Nancy Pagh wrote No Sweeter Fat.

which is one of my all-time favorite books of poems.  Nancy's ability to mix humor with music, music with poignancy, poignancy with halibut, is incredible.

So speaking of halibut, here's a poem by Nancy from her book, so you can see for yourself how incredible she writes--

Among the Vegetarians
(apologies to WW)

Sometimes I would like to turn and live
among the vegetarians --
they are so placid, and so self contained.

They understand the eggplant's secret
firmness, the tabula rasa the bean curd is.

I contemplate them long and long.
Death does not linger on their breath.
The darker crevices
of their cutting boards are safe.

They exist without asking another
animal to kneel and spill itself.

The gentle eyes of the vegetarian
flash liquid revelations
to me and I accept them.

Theirs is an appetite to know and be filled
with the scallop the coho the razor
clam's dignity apart.

My hunger takes
the cream-white flesh of the halibut
the migrating eye of the halibut
the scythe-mouthed strike of the halibut
the graveled bed of the halibut
the cold gray sea of the halibut
in every bite.

It is incised, protean, unassuaged
by toast.

My hunger wants more than the halibut
and finds it in the halibut.

Believe me sometimes
I think if you were as much of this world
as the halibut
I would have to eat you too.


--Nancy Pagh
from No Sweeter Fat (Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2007)

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This drawing is open from now through ALL OF APRIL, National Poetry Month!

If you'd like to be entered, please leave your name and email address by midnight, APRIL 30th, 2011 in the comment section of this post and I'll be randomly choosing 2 lucky winners on May 1st.


Good luck & Good Reading!

xo,
Kells