Sister

Steven Karl

Sister unburies how we live when we lose what’s loved. The rendering of memory, the violence of remembrance, the nature of nightmares all threaten a constant presence of absence. Yet, amid the ominous landscape of difficult truths and the cacophonous sounds of hurt, Karl’s harrowing collection brilliantly crafts a world that shows how memory lives in us, finds the deepest humanity in our bonds to one another beyond the confines of time, and ultimately, asks how we begin to understand it all.

Khadijah Queen

A ritual of grief & a hallucinatory journey through caring, Sister explores the emotions, contexts, & margins of loss. Karl moves from tight-lipped minimalism to expansive talkiness to a fabulism of beasts & insects, building poems out of the imagined landscapes of death, linguistic junk & prayer. He searches for that which poetry always searches, to say the unsayable. Sister is a beautiful book & a sad book & a cathartic book & you need to read it.

Mathias Svalina

This elegy is black-flagged and purple-tongued. Somewhere between Jodorowsky, Blanchot, and Anthrax, Karl etches cities and mountains cross-cut by grief. I can’t know Sister; I won’t forget them.

Joe Hall

Steven Karl is the author of one previous collection, Dork Swagger (Coconut Books, 2013). Born in Philadelphia, and raised in South Jersey he currently lives in Miami, FL with his wife, Hitomi, and their daughter, Emma. He teaches undergraduate writing at Florida International University.

Reviews and News

2017 Winners of the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry

The editors of Noemi Press are excited to announce the winners and finalists for the 2017 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry.

Winner: UNMANNED by Jessica Rae Bergamino

We will be also publishing Inland Empire by Leah Huizar

FINALISTS

Orient by Nicholas Gulig

Ochre/Orpheus by Meredith Stricker

Bodega by Su Hwang

STET by Dora Malech

We Are Too Big for This House by Sara Borias

2016 Winners of the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry

The editors of Noemi Press are excited to announce the winners, finalists, and semi finalists for the 2016 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry.

Winner: Indictus by Natalie Eilbert

Finalist: Careen by Grace Shuyi Liew

We will be also publishing Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime by Chaun Webster and A Problem and Some Space by Hannah Ensor

SEMIFINALISTS

The Devil’s Workshop by Xavier Cavazos

Hagia Animalia by Sara Biggs Chaney

Medusa Reads La Negra’s Palm by Elizabeth Acevedo

The Leaving Impulse by Rachel Martin

Manipur by Robin McLachlen

The Historians of Redundant Moments: Novel in Poems by Nandini Dhar

Northern Ledger by Kate Partridge

Probable Garden by Bronwen Tate

Saints and Cannibals by Robert Lunday

Winter Swimmers by Carolyn DeCarlo

Woman, Yielding by Andrea Blancas Beltran

un/documented—kentucky—songs by Steven Alvarez

2015 Winners of the Noemi Press Book Award for Poetry

The editors of Noemi Press are excited to announce the winners, finalists, and semi finalists for the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award in Poetry. We received about 400 poetry submissions this year and thank all the writers who submitted for trusting us with their work.

Winner

Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung

 

Finalists

Natality by E. G. Means

MOUTHS by Claire Marie Stancek

 

We will also be publishing finalist Vanessa Villarreal’s manuscript Beast Meridian in the Akrilica series.

 

Poetry Semifinalists

They Go In Pairs by Samuel Ace

Arcadia, Indiana (a tragedy) by Toby Altman

You Can Take It Out by Cheryl Clark Vermeulen

Red of Split Water-A Burial Rite by Lisa Donovan

Century Worm by Todd Fredson

Actual Echo by Matthew Mahaney

A Turkish Dictionary by Andrew Wessels

Review of Between Grammars at Entropy

Vogel describes her early experiences of reading and writing as “a bridging between [her] voice and [her] body,” as a kind of communion. “Language slowed the world for me,” she recalls, “it gave me a sense of tactility, a skin to encase my thinking.” Vogel’s visceral experience of language is palpable in Between Grammars; there is a sense of tactility ever-present. Beyond the philosophical exploration, reading this book is as much a sensory experience as an intellectual one, the text shot through with light, sound, and touch.

 

Read the rest at Entropy.

Rain Taxi review of The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying

Armendinger is a master at using fragmented language with precise purpose. His poems experiment with language and form—this collection includes a poem delivered in the form of an instant messenger conversation, and a poem placed as a footnote within another poem—but never read as mere avant-garde posturing. Instead, Armendinger again and again finds new ways to use defamiliarized language to access the unsayable.

It’s a rare and wonderful thing to find a poet who can so powerfully, vividly, and gracefully engage with the problems of language and the world. The Ghost In Us Was Multiplying is a vital book: experimental, substantial, fragmented, unified, unsettled, and unsettling, Armendinger’s work is key reading for all those who care about what our broken words can do.

Read the rest at Rain Taxi.

Cleaver Magazine reviews Change Machine

Change Machine Book CoverJ. G. McClure reviewed Bruce Covey’s Change Machine for Cleaver Magazine:

Think about the change machine outside your car wash: you put in a dollar, the machine spits out coins. Not a neat bundle, but a jangling tray-full. Now think of William Carlos Williams: “A poem is a machine made of words.”Now give William Carlos Williams superpowers and have him beat the hell out of the car wash while musing on Pokémon, Barthes, and metapoetics, and you’ve got a sense of Bruce Covey’s Change Machine.

Read the full review at Cleaver Magazine 

$15 Paperback | Published 2016
ISBN-13 978-1-934819-49-4