On October 28th we’ll be hosting a reading and celebration of two new releases from the incredible Fonograf Editions: Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s debut novel Trouble Finds You & Timmy Straw’s debut poetry collection, The Thomas Salto. They will be joined by Callum Angus & Daniela Naomi Molnar.
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Timmy Straw’s poems, essays, and translations appear in Yale Review, Jacket2, Paris Review, Annulet, Chicago Review, and elsewhere, and their work has been supported by a Fulbright research fellowship to Moscow, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and a Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. A graduate student in Comp Lit at Penn, they are also working on translations of the contemporary Russian poet Grigori Dashevsky.
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The Thomas Salto takes its name from a difficult and dangerous move in gymnastics, a leaping triple flip popularized during the last years of the Cold War. Both in its Reagan-grained historicity, and in the human body that bears the leap’s flight and risk, the Thomas salto is a kinetic figure for these poems’ action in time and space. They shadow the AIDS epidemic, the war on drugs, the US proxy wars in Central America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, the Soviet collapse—not as history but as the camouflage-pattern of “then” and “to come” which form the flickering and very real habitus of the present.
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Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, novelist, filmmaker, and psychotherapist living in the Pacific Northwest. His debut novel, Trouble Finds You, is just out from Fonograf Editions. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Selenography, Swamp Isthmus, and Meadow Slasher.
Born and raised in Seattle, he graduated from film school in Ireland and has taught in Italy, Turkey, Slovakia, and in MFA programs in Chicago and Tucson.
In 2019 he was the Mellon Writer-in-Residence at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa.
Wilkinson's writing has appeared in Poetry, The Believer, Tin House, Pen America, and in nearly two dozen anthologies. He has edited severalcollections of essays, including a compendium on the work of Anne Carson, Poets on Teaching, and The Force of What's Possible with Lily Hoang.
With Solan Jensen, Wilkinson directed a tour film about the band Califone and, with the late Noah Eli Gordon, he cowrote Figures for a Darkroom Voice.
He has given readings at the Pitchfork Music Festival, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Newport Folk Festival, and in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
A new book of poems, Bad Woods, the final volume of his No Volta pentalogy, is forthcoming next year from Sidebrow.
Contact: joshuamarie at gmail dot com.
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To say Harry Stables’s life has hit a bit of a low patch lately is an understatement. In his mid-20s, he’s been kicked out of his MFA program for fighting, his ex-girlfriend turned down his spur-of-the-moment marriage proposal, and he’s spent the last ten days in his dad’s falling-down Montana fishing cabin with his dog Greta trying to find out how his mother really died when he was a baby, something his father – now dying himself of cancer – has refused to tell either him or his sister their whole lives. On top of all this, he’s just been to a party outside Missoula where he received a nasty dog bite and where he may have been an accessory to a fatal shooting. Ignoring the advice of both his sister and Calvin Hogan – fishing guide, old friend of his father’s, and companion to the lovable mutt Herkimer – Harry first tries to untangle the details of the shooting himself and eventually winds up on the lam, pursued by persecutors both real and imagined. As the cops and the accumulated psychic weight of his actions bears down on him, Harry must ultimately reckon with what sort of man he will be.
According to George Saunders, “literature is a form of fondness-for-life. It is love for life taking verbal form” and so it is with Trouble Finds You, a modern-day Portis-like quixotic road trip replete with stumbling beauty and searing folly. Set against the beauty of the American West, this is a novel of many colors: a thriller, a mystery, a coming-of-age story, and a family drama. It is populated with characters – these men and their excellent dogs – who are sometimes frustrating, frequently stupid, often funny, but always full of life. Harry Stables bears more than a passing resemblance to the Coen brothers’ Llewyn Davis, a lovable curmudgeon committed to a quest of his own design.