Flood Stage: upcoming readings

Now that Flood Stage: An Anthology of St. Louis Poetry is out from Walrus Publishing (St. Louis, of course), you can hear poets from the anthology at many upcoming poetry readings around town.


I will be one of the readers at the September 4 reading at Hartford Coffee Company, along with Colleen McKee, one of the Cherry Pie Press alumni.

When:

Saturday September 4, 2010, 7:00 p.m.

Where: 

Hartford Coffee Company

3974 Hartford (on the South Side of town)

St. Louis, MO  63116

Readers include:

· Michael Castro

· Colleen McKee

· Amanda Wells

· Lisa Ebert

· Dwight Bitikofer

· Becky Ellis
· K. Leighton Brown
· Brett Underwood
· Julia Bramer

And, as always, you can pick up your own copy at Left Bank Books, http://www.left-bank.com/.

Colleen McKee on qarrtsiluni

Colleen McKee has posted a poem on qarrtsiluni that is a MUST-read. It is strong stuff, and may replace your morning coffee, and keep you wide-eyed all day. There is a podcast attached of Colleen reading the poem -- lovely. http://qarrtsiluni.com/2009/11/14/the-butchers-wifes-tale/#comment-24784

Colleen would appreciate the accidental irony of this poem getting published yesterday, Shabbat. . . .

Cranky Yellow hosts a poetry party

Cranky Yellow, a new arts-music-literature hub in the Cherokee Street district of St. Louis, is hosting a poetry and pleasure party with burlesque ladies! The ladies include the ever-surprising and wonderful Colleen McKee, author of My Hot Little Tomato from Cherry Pie Press.

When? Sunday, July 19th
6-8pm: Erotic poetry by Colleen McKee and others, and various additional sinful attractions
8-whenever: Turn the Other Cheek Burlesque

Where? Cranky Yellow, 2847 Cherokee, 63118

How much? Poetry is free; $5 for burlesque. Of course, there are many attractive goodies for sale at Cranky Yellow. Cash only!

For more info? 314.773.4499 or info@crankyyellow.com

Are We Feeling Better Yet?

Colleen McKee, author of poetry chapbook My Hot Little Tomato, has co-edited an anthology of essays on the health care industry. Not poetry, but in its own way more essential. Are We Feeling Better Yet?: Women Speak About Health Care in America, an anthology of 21 essays, is currently available only through the publisher, Penultimate Press (http://www.arewefeelingbetteryet.net/ Paperback, 215 pp., $19.95).

Along with Colleen McKee, St. Louisan Amanda Steibel co-edited the anthology. Local contributors include: Janet Edwards, Denise Bogard, Cathy Luh, M.D., Catherine Rankovic, Corrine McAfee. The foreword is by Jenni Prokopi, founder and editor of ChronicBabe.com.

Contest -- Cherry Pie Poem BakeOff Contest

To celebrate Poetry Month and the three chapbooks forthcoming from Cherry Pie in 2008, we're announcing the first annual Cherry Pie Press Poem BakeOff Contest.

1st Prize: Free copies of each of the three chapbooks to be published in 2008 (by Erin M. Bertram, Niki Nymark, and Mary Ruth Donnelly). Even better, the winner's poem will be published here on the Cherry Pie Press blog.

Rules: Contest is open now through the end of April 2008. To enter, write an original poem in any style or format using all five of the words listed below (one word selected from each of the published Cherry Pie chapbooks). You can see this contest will increase in difficulty each year as the list of publications grows, so enter now while it's still easy!!!

Words to use: brine, half-life, knife, proportion, opera

Notes:
brine is from Colleen McKee's My Hot Little Tomato.
half-life is from Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory.
knife is from Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold.
proportion is from Nan Sweet's Rotogravure.
opera is from Martha Ficklen's The Palm Leaf Fan.

Submission of entries: Send your poem in an email by midnight April 30, 2008 to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com. Please put "Poem BakeOff" in the subject line, and include your name with the entry. Submission of a poem for the contest implies permission to publish the winning poem on the Cherry Pie Press blog.

Eligibility and Judging: Poets previously published by Cherry Pie, or scheduled for publication in 2008, are not eligible to enter. Judging, due to the perennially low budget here, will be done solely by the Editor (me).

Colleen McKee -- news and publications

News about Colleen McKee (author of My Hot Little Tomato) --

Are We Feeling Better Yet?, an anthology of personal narratives about women and U.S. health care, co-edited by Colleen McKee and Amanda Crowell Stiebel, will be published by Penultimate Press in October 2008.

Colleen McKee also recently won a Poetry in Motion Award from Metro St. Louis. She will receive a $50 mystery gift certificate, a subscription to Poetry, and her poem "Dream of the Enchanted Supermarket" will appear on local trains and buses. Additionally, she won Third Prize (and a certain sum of money) in the Wednesday Club's Annual Poetry Contest for her poem "Terminals and Gates." Another recent prize was First Place in the River Styx Nanofiction Contest for her story "Piss and Vinegar, or, The Decision," which garnered no publication or money, just glory and a six-pack of Schlafly Ale.

Her poem "Grand Station" will appear in qarrtsiluni's "Nature in the Cracks" issue in March or April.

My Hot Little Tomato, here and there

Colleen McKee's smash chapbook, My Hot Little Tomato, has caught the eye of a few reviewers.

From St. Louis, The Daily Sauce e-letter included a story on July 31 about My Hot Little Tomato and you can find it here: http://www.thedailysauce.com/issue/E/3010. Sauce describes the collection as "utterly readable" poems about "love, lust, forgiveness and disappointment."

And from way over the pond, supporting the notion that good poems do go far, New Hope International Review includes a review by Alan Hardy. You can read it here: http://www.geraldengland.co.uk/revs/bs330.htm. Hardy observes that "Colleen McKee has a very vibrant sense of sexuality, a very tactile affinity with objects and people around her where feelings, senses and moods morph into one. . . " He does some serious damage to the stereotype of the up-tight Brit by focusing on the physical and sensual aspects of Colleen's poetry: "Her strength is in the unalloyed glorification of and wallowing in the physicality of her sexual universe, and its imagery. . . " Clearly, these are poems that make an impact!

My Hot Little Tomato

Colleen McKee's chapbook, My Hot Little Tomato, is ... hot off the press! This one is a delight to hold -- the cover artwork image is lusciously detailed with the texture of cloth, and the inner flyleaf is a two-layered combination of black netting and red tissue paper.

Colleen's poems are about food and love, nerve, rebellion, and passion. The introductory prose piece is a riff on ketchup, using the music of language, down to its etymological roots, and cultural history to establish a personal history: "If it were not for ketchup," she begins, "I would not be alive." And from there she follows ketchup through its origins (a meandering path involving fish brine and China) to her own origins.

Many of her poems begin in places equally mundane as the exploration of ketchup. She's at a desk, on a bus, doing something totally ordinary, and then the poem unhinges and transforms the world. Here is Blue Like An Orange:

I dream I am riding the bus
with a pumpkin on my lap—no pass
or pocketbook, no notebook, map
or keys. I only hold the pumpkin,
a perfect size, not so large
I have to stretch my arms
to keep it in its place, but not so small
that it could roll or bounce beneath the seats.
I wear a dress the color of lettuce, iceberg
to be exact. I like that it is scalloped
like leaves around the hem. I have no plans
for my spherical squash,
no thoughts of pie or lanterns,
salted seeds or soup. No, no plans at all.
I look out the window with something like interest
though there is nothing to see, no foliage,
no fences, no birds or bustling men,
only a sky with that light
peculiar to October,
light like a golden ball
sunk in a deep blue pond,
this gold so blue so bright it wavers,
common, strange, unasked for grace.
Little kids behind me
sling their bodies across my seat to Ooh,
you’ve got a pumpkin! Oh, can I
pet your pumpkin? Of course,
I say. Of course. I continue to stare
at the sky as these children—strangers to me—
touch for the sake of touch. Somehow I know
the bus has turned yellow, that yellow
only buses can be. I sit
with the sun in my lap. My soul
laps up the sun.

Here's another of my favorites:

Surveying This Sunday Morning

1.
At breakfast, I biograph
my body: bone-colored silk
slip on my breasts, rain-cooled air
on the back of my neck, the certainty
of coveted affection. I catalog
my curves, dreams
spread out like cards.

2.
A cup of cold tea.
A half-eaten peach
on a baby-blue plate. Nails
polished Chinese red.
More a painting than a poem,
more a still life
than a scene.

3.
The rain is a simmering pan
after the flame’s turned off
and the jumping water
returns to itself.

Out past the sunrooms’
wide-open windows,
a sad eroded prairie
of a vacant lot,
patches of mud
like shapes on a map—peninsula,
province, cluster
of islets—I pull on my boots
and see where they go.

The love poems are tender, wry -- always aware of the hard edges but never letting go of the soft moments of optimism.

From Moving on the 4th of July:

The embroidered sheets have gone blank.
All of yesterday’s mail is marked resident.
Without you, I fold papers and blankets

As if meaning is always in order. . . .

and then, finally --

Let us turn from love instead to lightning bugs.

Look how they spin semaphores of desire, green
As new leaves, reel in our faces
In the midsummer night.

They don’t have to make decisions. Their bodies
Have made them all for them.
All they have to do now

Is to hang like stars in the gauzy air,
Wait on more light, wait for love,
Or something like love, wait
Just to see what comes next.

Colleen McKee's My Hot Little Tomato (ISBN 978-0-9748468-5-9) is available locally in St. Louis at Left Bank Books, or send an email requesting an order form to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com.

Click here to view a flyer and order form for My Hot Little Tomato. Click here to view the press release.

Colleen McKee earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she currently teaches English, and Women and Gender Studies. Her essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Poetry Daily, Flyway, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is co-editor of Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women's Encounters with Health Care in America.

Colleen McKee featured on Poetry Daily

Colleen McKee, whose title My Hot Little Tomato will be appearing from Cherry Pie Press early next year, is featured on Poetry Daily for September 28, 2006. Congratulations Colleen!
Poetry Daily: www.poems.com
Colleen's poem in the archive: http://www.poems.com/inthemck.htm