The NYC Scoop, Clear Skies, Some Money for Poetry (?!), and The Great & Mighty Gazette

For those of you who aren't quite sure, Book Expo America--where Dan and I have been for the past week--is the biggest North American trade show in the biz, and perhaps the only way you can get thousands of publishers, publicists, literary agents, distributors, media representatives, librarians, booksellers, "power readers," bloggers, and authors to trudge in a herd twice daily through the meat packing district of New York. We met Lemony Snicket. We snuck inside the annual New Directions party, held in their 8th Avenue offices, where we gawped at their filing cabinets ("Pound, E. Correspondence A-L"), ogled their decor (on the wall in the main hallway, a scrip in the hand of W.C. Williams, next to a Henry Miller painting), and were altogether very warmly welcomed by people and objets d'art alike. On the fair floor a growing collection of willy warmers hooked the eyes of more than a few passersby, and we talked up your Bibliotitles till our throats were sore. Altogether a resounding success! And a success made even sweeter by coming home to this little gem by David Hickey:

What are those little colour panels, you may ask? Little mini-Mondrians? Not exactly. Read more about  clear sky charts--"equal parts Atari and abstract art"--on David's blog. 

Ahem. In other (woefully overdue) poetry news, we have a lovely & thoughtful new GoodReport on mythic maps, plus the grounds and airy overgrounds, in Amanda Jernigan's Groundwork. And Marsha Pomerantz, whose Illustrated Edge is now just a little over a year old, was just recently selected as the recipient of a prestigious fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Congratulations to Marsha and happy birthday to the Edge!

Last but not least, since it wouldn't be a 2012 blog post without me saying something about Malarky, I'd like to point your virtual eyes towards what's running in this weekend's Montreal Gazette. You know you're in good hands when a review begins "It's a post-Celtic Tiger Ireland," and finishes with with a hellzapoppin paragraph like this: 

Toeing the delicate line between tragedy and comedy – the former inherent in the bare facts of Our Woman’s life, the latter in her irrepressible voice – Schofield starts at a pitch of inspiration most novels are lucky to reach at any point and remarkably sustains that level all the way through. The spirit of Joyce’s Molly Bloom hovers around the edges of Malarky, so if you’ve always found the last pages of Ulysses to be the highlight of that difficult masterpiece, you might just find Molly’s modern-day descendant in Our Woman. Others will be reminded of another Irish classic, lately fallen into unjust neglect: Edna O’Brien’s 1960 novel The Country Girls. But here’s one Irish country girl who has grown up and seen and done things O’Brien’s could never have envisioned.

Thanks to Ian McGillis for that. Happy weekend, everybody. This brings the trade show season to a close until the fall.