Kiwao Nomura is one of Japan’s leading contemporary poets, and is also a prolific critic, translator, and essayist on contemporary poetry. In 2007, he organized the Festival of International Poetry: Toward the Pacific Rim, and was a fellow in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2005. Spectacle & Pigsty is the first full collection of Kiwao Nomura’s poetry to be published in English translation. Click over here to read Elizabeth Clark Wessel’s interview with the translators, Gander and Yoshida. If you’re new to Kiwao Nomura’s work, be sure to click here to read Coldfront’s coverage of his reading at the Poets House, which includes his set-list and videos.

Some other recent collections of translated Japanese poetry that might be of interest are Forest of Eyes, Selected Poems of Tada Chimako translated by Jeffrey Angles and Mouth Eats Color-Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa. You can read an interview with Nakayasu conducted by Thomas Fink here and read a snapshot Coldfront did with Nakayasu back in 2009 here. Carnarium Books will publish The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa  translated by Sawako Nakayasu in 2013.

-steven karl

Atlanta’s Coconut Books and Coconut Magazine are back in full effect. Publisher and founding editor Bruce Covey is now accepting submissions for the magazine, one of the first web-based literary journals. Covey has brought on board Gina Myers, Kim Gek Lin Short, Danielle Pafunda, and Laura Solomon as editors. They hope to launch the first new issue this summer.

Coconut Books will offer eight new titles in 2012. Four titles currently available are Molly Brodak’s chapbook The Flood and the following full-length collections–how to survive a hotel fire by Angela Veronica Wong, Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski, and Covey’s Reveal: All Shapes and Sizes, which Coconut is distributing for Bitter Cherry Books. Collections coming in October are: Slope Move by Hanna Andrews, I Am Going to Save Your Life by Christie Ann Reynolds, Like Likeness Renders by Emily Toder, and a new collection by Jenny Boully. In 2013, Coconut Books plans to publish new full-length titles by Serena Chopra, Amber Nelson, Gina Myers, plus their book contest winners and an anthology. They hope to publish one or two more titles, but those are currently top secret. SPD will stock all of the new titles, plus backlist titles by Gina Myers, Reb Livingston, Jen Tynes, Natalie Lyalin, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Look out for these by the end of June.

Finally, Coconut Books is sponsoring two new book prizes. The Joanna Cargill Coconut Book Prize for a First Book and The Elizabeth P. Braddock Coconut Book Prize (open to any poet with one or more previously published full-length collection). The deadline for both contests is June 30, 2012 before 6 PM EST. Covey and crew are not charging reading fees. Winners receive 25 copies of the finished book and 50% of all net profits (i.e., dollars earned by the press above total production, editorial, and marketing costs) earned by the book. Visit Coconut on Facebook for the full guidelines.

–Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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Poetry Northwest launches their new issue at 8 p.m. Wednesday, May 9 at The Liberty Bar (517 15th Ave. E.). Readers include Katherine Larson & Richard Kenney, w/Vis-a-Vis Society.

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Seattle Poetry Watch: Farmers market poetry cheese installment.

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“Two if by sea.”

–Crystal Curry

Catherine Wagner at The Awl

Dana Ward at PennSound

Noah Falck at H_NGM_N

Alexis Pope at >kill author

Jeremy Schmall at The Faster Times

Joshua Kleinberg at Ilk

Matt Hart at Toad

Mary Biddinger at Anti-

Phil Metres at DIAGRAM

Kazim Ali at The Poetry Foundation

Nat Otting, who is at the helm of Minutes Books, whose first book is forthcoming from 1913

Nikkita Cohoon at Everyday Genius

Tyler Meier at Thermos

Jennifer Chang at The Poetry Foundation

Mark Halliday at How a Poem Happens

Lesley Jenike at La Petite Zine

Mike Krutel at Ilk

Joshua Butts at Shampoo

Michael Dumanis with red balloons at PBS NewsHour

John Estes at Poetry Daily

Jay Robinson at Diode

Eric Morris at The Collagist

Elena Tomorowitz at Red Lightbulbs

Michelle Sinsky at elimae

And this interview with Alice Notley (not from Ohio) at The Kenyon Review blog (from Ohio) comes highly recommended.

-Nick Sturm

What, in the end, has the man heard? What does he hear, still?

-Gregory Crosby

Gregory Crosby‘s poems have appeared in Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Paradigm and other journals that sound like nail colors. He is co-curator of the EARSHOT reading series and co-editor of the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: jackie [at] coldfrontmag [dot] com.

See all Songs of the Week here.

Between Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens there are readings happening every night. Each Sunday, Coldfront will feature five upcoming readings.

The Poetry Project
Monday, May 14, 2012  8pm 

Chris Alexander is the author of Panda. You can follow (read/buy) his ongoing experiments and derivative works at his private imprint, United_Plastics. You can find him on Twitter @hedorah55.

Kristen Gallagher co-edits Truck Books with Christopher Alexander. Her book We Are Here was published by Truck in 2011. Two books are forthcoming: Grand Central and Things in Marx. She has recently published essays on the work of Tan Lin in Criticism and Jacket2 and will have a third essay on Lin’s work in the forthcoming collection Reading the Difficulties.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church
131 East 10th Street New York, NY

3rd Tuesdays at the Dwyer
Tuesday May 15, 2012  8:00 p.m.

Robert Gibbons is the author of three full-length books of prose poems. Beyond Time: New & Selected Work, 1977–2007 is forthcoming from Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY. He is poetry and fiction editor of the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head.

With Ruben Gonzalez – songwriter / guitarist

Dwyer Cultural Center
258 West 123 Street New York, NY

The Brownstone Poets Series
Tuesday, May 15, 2012  7 – 9pm 

Philip Beitchman is a poet, critic (I Am A Process With No Subject, 1988); scholar of mysticism (Alchemy of the Word, Cabala of the Renaissance, 1998), philosopher (The View From Nowhere, 2001), and theatre historian (The Theatre of Naturalism: Disappearing Act, 2011). His first book of poetry, Getting Back, is in now in press. Philip Beitchman lives in Flatbush and teaches literature at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York.

Michael Schwartz  is an Assistant Professor of English at New Jersey City University. He has published work on 18th-century British literature, Milton’s Psalm translations, and Muriel Rukeyser’s construction of her Jewish identity, and has essays forthcoming on 18th-century war sermons, the strategies and failures of anti-war rhetoric, and Pope’s “Windsor Forest.” He won a Hopwood Award in poetry at the University of Michigan and has published poems in Judaism, Kerem, Controlled Burn, and Conservative Judaism, and is currently seeking publication for his manuscript of poetry, Fields South of Jericho. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Elizabeth.

Brownstone Poets at Linger Cafe & Lounge
533 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn, NY

Bronx Academy of Letters Reading & Workshop
Wednesday, May 16, 2012  3pm

John Murillo‘s first poetry collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010), was a finalist for both the 2011 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and was named by The Huffington Post as one of “Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now.”  A graduate of New York University’s MFA program in creative writing, his other honors include a Pushcart Prize, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the New York Times, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.  His work has appeared in such publications as Callaloo, Court Green, Ninth Letter, and Ploughshares, and is forthcoming in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry.

Circumference Web Launch
Friday, May 18, 2012  8pm

Join Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation, to celebrate the launch of its new website with readings from:

Stefania Heim‘s translations from Italian have been published in Aufgabe and Harper’s; her criticism has appeared in The Boston Review and Publisher’s Weekly; and her poems in publications including Harp & Altar, The Paris Review, and The Literary Review. She is a founding editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Idra Novey is the author of Exit, Civilian, selected by Patricia Smith for the National Poetry Series, and The Next Country, a finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award in poetry. Her recent translations include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H., forthcoming from New Directions and Penguin UK.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of Destroyer and Preserver (Wave Books, 2011), A Plate of Chicken (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), Rise Up (Wave Books, 2007) and A Green Light (Verse Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist, poet, editor and translator. His books of literary writings include Outside Stories, Karmic Traces, The Stars, and Muhammad.

A Public Space
323 Dean St. Brooklyn, NY

–Stephanie Ann Whited

Jimmy Cvetic, the host and founder of the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series, told stories of his days as a heavy weight boxer and his days in Vietnam.  He introduced each of the Madwomen: Tess Barry, Doralee Brooks, Angela J. Cornelius, Caley Ferguson, Celeste Gainey, Emily Mohn and Maritza Mosquera.

Tess Barry’s work has appeared in Carlow University Press’s Voices from The Attic: Volume XVI, Girls with Glasses and Sampsonia Way among others. Doralee Brooks’s work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, the Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Callaloo.  Angela J. Cornelius won the flash fiction prize at the Bumbershoot Art festival in 2004.  Caley Ferguson was the editor of the WVW Literary Journal for two years.  Her work has been published in The Vandalia.  Celeste Gainey was the runner up for the Robin Becker Chapbook prize.  Her work has appeared in the Columbia Poetry Review and Bloom among others.  Emily Mohn’s work has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Carlow University Press’s Voices from The Attic: Volume XVI.   Maritza Mosquera earned her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.  She began her reading by doing a pirouette in front of the microphone.

Each poet received applause of womb-like warmth from the audience.  Cvetic explained that the fear involved in facing a heavy weight boxer or of going into combat pales in comparison to reading poems in front of an audience.

Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series takes place on Tuesday nights from May until July.  Hemingway’s Cafe is located on Forbes Avenue in the center of Oakland, Pitt’s campus.  Coming from downtown, the public buses, 61A, 67A, and 67B arrive in Oakland (Pitt’s campus).  Coming from the airport, the 28X arrives in Oakland.

–Robert Keiser