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If you’ve written a book that’s family-friendly, don’t pass up this opportunity.

John Riddle, founder “I Love To Write Day,” has a huge following, and he wants to list your book for free in his “Family Friendly Book Directory.”

As the author of 34 books, including a dozen children’s titles, Riddle knows how challenging it can be to promote books and find your audience.

“As the Founder of I Love To Write Day, a grassroots campaign I launched in 2002 to have people of all ages practice writing every Nov. 15, I am always looking for ways to let our supporters (over 4.2 million of them!) Know about new books that are family friendly,” he says.

In honor of the 10th Anniversary of I Love To Write Day, Riddle will publish the “Family Friendly Book Directory” and sending it to the 28,000 schools all across the U.S. that celebrate ILTWD every Nov. 15.

“I will ask the school librarian to share the directory with the students, teachers, administrators and parents,” he said. “I will also send the directory to our ILTWD e-newsletter subscribers, and it will be posted on the ILovetoWriteDay website.

A free listing includes the name of the book, author, price and a website URL.

For an additional fee, you can also post your book cover graphic and include up to five lines of copy.

Save 50 percent on paid listings until July 15. Email JohnRiddle (at) SprintMail (dot) com for more information.

(Children with Book Photo by Bigstock.com.)

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

Carolyn Howard-Johnson read an item I included in today’s Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week ezine on the clever Pinterest campaign launched by Kotex, and she emailed a great idea on how she her author friends promote each other’s books on Pinterest. 

“I just started Pinterest, but I’ve been applying lots of my general marketing tips to Pinterest. An example: I got started by telling my author friends on Facebook that if they pinned one of my books to their account, I’d do the same for them.

“I have several different book boards, but one of them is ‘Books by Friends’ where I pin these books. I also pin images of gorgeous book cases, quotes, book-related cartoons, etc. on that wall to keep it interesting.

“I offer your authors the same deal. We’re all in this together. (-: Find me at www.pinterest.com/chowardjohnson.

“Also notice how I separate out the books I write in different genres to separate boards. And how I sometimes repeat a book image on two different boards. As an example, the theme of my novel is rooted in tolerance so it appears on my Tolerance board and on my Literary and Poetry board.

“I believe it’s little techniques like these that can make a difference to a network that at first doesn’t seem innately suited to the needs of writers. And yeah, its all about branding and finding those marketing angles we both talk to our people about so much.”

The Publicity Hound says: I love this idea, and I especially like how Carolyn has peppered her boards with book-related quotes and photos just to keep it interesting.

If you’re an author, you’d be crazy to pass up Carolyn’s invitation. By the way, she’s the author of The Frugal Book Promoter: How to do What Your Publisher Won’t, one of my very favorite books on how to build the buzz for your book.  You could spend the rest of your life following all her tips. If you do, you’ll sell lots of books.

The Publicity Hound’s Blog

I am always falling in love with poetry. Right now my favorite poems are those by my MFA thesis students, the undergraduates in my two advanced poetry writing workshops and capstone class, the three books in manuscript sent to me by former students, and several newly written or published books by former students and colleagues. Being invited to name five favorite books of poems reminds me of the question my three children would ask me, sometimes alone, sometimes in each other’s company: whom do you love the most? All of you, I’d respond, and truly mean it. I love you all the best.

But here are five books I turn to if not daily, then nearly every day, touchstones, texts that provide sustenance, inspiration, consolation. To this list I would add The Bible, King James Version, a collection of Tang Dynasty verses, and the unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays. For me, Shakespeare’s most breath-taking poetry is in the plays: Caliban, Ariel, Mad Tom (“Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool”), Ophelia, Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Othello – all offering those incomparable lyric speeches, forging self and truth through language.

Emily Dickinson. The Selected Letters, the Master Letters, the Poems. Who writes like Dickinson? That psychological intensity, word jones, the float of eroticism, despair, God-hunger, meta-poetic awareness, and salvific trust in language? She is infinitely challenging, infinitely illuminating, infinitely daunting: “The soul has moments of escape – / When bursting all the doors – / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours . . . .”

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems and Prose. I love the spiritual and linguistic difficulty of Hopkins’s inimitable music. And the soul in crisis, the courage in the poems, especially the “dark sonnets,” helps me to live: “Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man / In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.”

Charles Wright. The World of the Ten Thousand Things. I can’t pick a favorite Charles Wright book (his brand-new Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems is a stunner), but The World of the Ten Thousand Things contains work from four books Wright published from 1981 – 1990, and it includes his masterful series of “self-portrait” poems, the iconic homage (to Cezanne, Lorrain, Pavese), and those gorgeous journal poems, their cyclic engagements with skepticism and belief. “Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced. . . . .” Such metaphysical mojo.

John Keats. The Complete Poems & Letters. Could I live without Keats? The Odes burn with the romance of oblivion and ecstasy’s vision, that conspiracy of mutability and the beauty of artifice, the “viewless wings of Poesy”: “Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veiled melancholy has her Sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; / His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”

BIO: LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. A new collection, Vanitas, Rough, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2008). She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (University of North Texas Press/Trilobite, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Slate. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009-2010. She serves as poetry editor for the Arts & Academe feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

We hope you’ve enjoyed the previous 28 days of poetry book recommendations from more than 30 poets. For National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to have brought you roughly 175 poetry book recommendations from 35 poets in 30 days. Here are five more from Erin Elizabeth Smith:

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger by Lorna Dee Cervantes

A friend once referred to the books she carries with her as her teddy bear books, and if any book functioned in that way for me, it’s this collection, which somehow manages to resonate whenever things gnaw at me the most.

Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts by Jorie Graham

This brilliant first collection is shockingly beautiful in its reflections on an American landscape that seems almost rife with philosophy and desire.

Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland

A book that is funny, heart-breaking, and ragingly honest. It’s also a “must-teach” every semester for me, in that it’s probably the most successful texts to break down young writers of their notions of what poetry is.

The Fact of a Doorframe by Adrienne Rich

I would argue Rich is one of the most talented writers not just of our generation, but of any. In her collected works, it’s easy to remember why she’s a living legend still.

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn

I was left haunted by this book, a film noir in verse, for days afterward. The play with time, voice, language, and ambiance is unparalleled in any contemporary work I’ve read to date.

BIO: Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of two poetry collections — The Naming of Strays and The Fear of Being Found. Her work has previously appeared in 32 Poems, Water~Stone, Crab Orchard, New Delta, and Yalobusha. She serves as the managing editor of Stirring and The Best of the Net Anthology and teaches in the English department at the University of Tennessee.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

We at 32 Poems have you’ve enjoyed the previous 26 days of poetry book recommendations from a wide range of poets. We continue this effort today with selections from Juliana Gray.

1. Meadowlands, Louise Gluck. Does Louise Gluck really need more press? Does she need me to promote her? No and no. Nevertheless, I adore this book. It’s one of the most spare, most moving depictions of heartbreak that I’ve ever read.

2. Ecstatic in the Poison, Andrew Hudgins. Hudgins creates some truly scary material (Vikings, Romans, angels, demons, growing up in Alabama), and does not flinch.

3. Becoming the Villainess, Jeannine Hall Gailey. Gailey brushes the dust off the ol’ dramatic monologue and lets characters like Wonder Woman, Lara Croft, and a certain vampire slayer have at it. Pop culture meets myth, and they get along famously.

4. Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, by Frank X Walker. I’m a sucker for personas and historical poems. These lyrics are spoken by York, the slave who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their explorations, and they’re absolutely gorgeous in their voice and spare, powerful imagery.

5. After the Revival, Carrie Jerrell. I love poems about music, perhaps because I’ve never been able to successfully write one myself, and Jerrell pulls it off masterfully. Even the poems that aren’t about music have a drawl and rhythm that should be spun on an old jukebox.

BIO: Juliana Gray is the author of Roleplay (forthcoming from Dream Horse Press) and The Man Under My Skin. She teaches at Alfred University in western New York and at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

Shh…we’re part of 30 (maybe 35) poets sharing their five favorite poetry books during National Poetry Month, which is almost over! Although the month comes to a close, the recommendations live forever on the 32 Poems blog. Don’t believe me? This post about how the five favorite poetry books idea came to be tells you what you need to know—and provides links to other book recommendations.

Now, Steven Allen May shares his suggestions:

EECCHHOOEESS by n. h. pritchard. New York University Press, 1971.

Norman H. Pritchard is not a household name although he ought to be recognized as an early American Concrete poet. The fact that he was an Afro-American Concrete poet seems to have confused a number of people; reviewers, the buying public, etc. However it should be noted that his two full collections were published by New York University Press and Doubleday. His work was extremely ahead of his time, highly visual, and nearly impossible to read. That’s the challenge. That’s the reward.

Metropolis 1-15 by Robert Fitterman. Sun & Moon Press, 2000.
Fitterman, working in a parallel universe as Rachel Blau DuPlessis with her Drafts series, has re-imagined the long poem form. His Metropolis series aims to be as large as the city that crafted it (New York). Here each section is a different form, a different tone, a different voice. It’s an incredible beginning!

Silent Type by Barbara DeCesare. Paper Kite Press, 2007. Barbara DeCesare is a poet, any book of hers is more than worth reading but HEARING her read her work is that much better. Once you hear her, the voice snakes off the page and into your ears as though she is whispering her poems just to you. The book is an experience. Catching her live is an experience, listening to her CD is an experience. How often can that be said about a POET?

That This by Susan Howe. New Directions, 2010. The 2011 winner of Yale University’s Bollinger Prize in American Poetry. I have an appreciation of Ms. Howe’s work going back several years now and I found this book heartfelt and very moving. At the same time, I was less engaged in the middle third of the book as it seemed I have seen this act before in earlier books of hers: shredded text. The final section, the title piece, is remarkable, making the experience more than worthwhile.

jambandbootleg by Paul Siegell. A-head Publishing, 2009. Paul Siegell is a young gun poet in Philadelphia who has successfully fused his love of live music performance by, say, Phish, for example, with highly visual components. This is his initial book and it absolutely has launched him. Pay attention to this one!

BIO: stevenallenmay is a poet, publisher, and blogger living in Northern VA. He co-founded Plan B Press in 1999. Last year Plan B Press published the highly regarded Full Moon on K Street: poems about Washington D.C. edited by Kim Roberts. When not running the Press, steven chases around his two small children.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

1. Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls by Erika Meitner. One of the most beautifully designed books of the year, this collection is a brilliant foray into the nature of transgression and desire. These poems break the rules while delivering advice, and embody a number of perspectives and interpretations of “vigilance.”

2. Faulkner’s Rosary by Sarah Vap. Reading this book is a completely transformational experience. You’ll never think of the body the same way again. This book is a must-read for anyone who aspires to convey personal experience in a way that rivets readers of all backgrounds. Vap’s use of the line is unparalleled in contemporary poetry, in my opinion.

3. The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz. Spending a Friday evening at home with this collection will make you feel as if you’ve had the wildest night of your life. These poems are riotous and poignant, ecstatic and wise. An excellent book for course adoption—my students were floored by these poems (in a very good way).

4. Say So by Dora Malech. This collection reminds us that poetry is made of music, and these poems make music of things both ordinary and extraordinary. I especially admire the way Malech’s poems create their own sense of form and order, and then completely ransack that sense of form and order, right before our eyes.

5. American Busboy by Matthew Guenette. I am cheating here because this book is forthcoming (but available for pre-order) and because my press is publishing it, but I can’t write a list of five without including American Busboy. This is an epic collection just begging to be made into a rock opera—one with heroic busboys, surly customers, tyrannical management, and an enduring commentary on the nature of sweat and struggle in contemporary America.

BIO: Mary Biddinger is the author of three poetry collections: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). She teaches at The University of Akron, and edits Barn Owl Review and the Akron Series in Poetry. She is the director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program. Her website and her blog.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

These recommendations celebrate National Poetry Month and share five of Jeannine Hall Gailey’s favorite poetry books.

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Well, I have so many more than five poetry books that I love, really love, so I had to narrow it down by some self-imposed parameters, so I decided to focus on books by women that used humor in a surprising way.

Dana Levin’s Wedding Day. Butterflies in the throat, words as play thing; the poem “Quelque Chose,” is worth the entire cost of the book all by itself, a hilarious ode to the (faux?) divisions of the poetry world.

Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room from Kelli Russell Agodon. A book that combines darkness and light, tabloids and saints, best when it explores the humorous side of death and anxiety.

Dorianne Laux’s Book of Men. Her best book yet, especially poems like “Superman” and “Cher” that combine the love of these pop culture icons and sharp insights into the nature of the vulnerabilities of our heroes.

Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands. Acid-tongued, icy dialogues between mythological figures and a modern-day couple of the brink of divorce.

Denise Duhamel’s Kinky. A book of poems in the voices of various Barbie dolls. Need I say more?

(Books I want to cheat and sneak onto this list too: Lana Ayers’ A New Red, with a novel take on the old story of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Lucky Fish, full of warmth, humor, and the love of cupcakes. Okay, that’s it. Matthea Harvey’s apocalypse and wordplay spectacular, Modern Life. Seriously, that’s the last one.)

BIO: Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

32 Poems chose to celebrate National Poetry Month by sharing recommendations of poetry books. We hope this effort helps you discover or re-discover poets–either those recommended or those recommending. Here’s the latest set of recommendations from Elizabeth J. Coleman:

For the most part, I don’t have favorite poetry books of all time, rather books I am most excited about right this minute, so I’d like to recommend five of those. I continue to be dazzled and excited by books as I read them, and I wouldn’t want to limit myself to five (five hundred maybe.)

Having said that, here are five I’m crazy about right now, that I would highly recommend.

Elegy on Toy Piano by Dean Young is a beautiful, compelling book. The process of discovery for the poet becomes a process of discovery for the reader. In spite of Young’s focus on death as an end (rather than a new beginning), I found his work uplifting in its honesty in its raw beauty, and in its sly and generous humor.

The fascination in Tomaz Salamun’s poems lies in the disparate things that are brought together, their majesty lies in the way they contain the world, both of space and time, and their fun lies in not knowing where the poet will go next. In The Book For My Brother, danger lurks everywhere: in an oppressive political landscape, in nature, in the universe’s dark humor (which becomes the poet’s), in religion, in God, in relationships and in the poet’s isolated self. The poems unfurl like the clay and silk flags and the river in “To the Heart.” (The oppressiveness of the culture and of nature are reflected in the fact that the flags are made partly of clay. They are not free, cannot fly in the breeze.)

The poems in Home Deep Blue embody Valentine’s grace and generosity as a poet. Valentine is a visual poet, a poet of color. While the subject of Valentine’s poetry is often other people, in many of her poems I feel like I’m seeing a painting. In “To Raphael, angel of happy meeting,” “The pear tree buds shine like salt” (what a beautiful image), and in the last stanza, “the abundant tree/open out its branches, white-gold wings…still too light for us to hold.”

Yehudi Amichai’s images are always fresh and always apt. Each image, though straightforward, tends to contain its own universe, and he writes with great irony, yet without cynicism. An exquisite example of Amichai comparing the human to the inanimate is from “Letter of Recommendation”” “Oh, touch me, touch me, you good woman!/This is not a scar you feel under my shirt./it’s a letter of recommendation/folded from my father:/”He is still a good boy and full of love.” The image creates a second simple scene, complete with dialogue.

Finally, my heart will always belong to Guillaume Apollinaire, the first poet I fell in love with, and his book Alcools, in French. The music of the poems flows as beautifully and mysteriously as the Seine in “Le Pont Miraubeau.”

BIO: Elizabeth J. Coleman’s poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, 32 Poems, The Raintown Review, “J” Journal, Per Contra and Blueline among others. Her chapbook, The Saint of Lost Things, was published in 2009 by Word Temple Press. Elizabeth’s translations of poetry into French have appeared in Per Contra. In 2009, Elizabeth was the featured poetry reader, chosen by 32 Poems, at “Periodically Speaking: Literary Magazine Editors Introduce Emerging Writers at the New York Public Library.” Elizabeth is a candidate for an MFA in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, a member of the New York, Georgia and Washington DC Bars and a classical guitarist. Visit her website to see links to some of her work and to purchase her chapbook, The Saint of Lost Things.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

The Boatloads, by Dan Albergotti
This book, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Award, tackles the big issues fearlessly and with such grace that you hardly realize how immense the journey has been until you reach the end of it. It asks questions I didn’t know I had but now can’t get out of my head—like the one in “The Age of Adam”: “how could the man/ have even been given a working penis, if God, unsure/ of the final product, had not yet decided upon Eve?”

I Was the Jukebox, by Sandra Beasley
In the author’s own words, this book moves outward from the personal; the poems take on a wild array of personas from a piano in love to an eggplant in a bar to a 21st century woman on a date with an ancient Greek hero. The voices are so full of life that I can’t resist reading the poems aloud (and laughing aloud, too). Have you ever felt sorry for a jukebox? If not, you haven’t read this book.

Logorrhea Dementia, by Kyle Dargan
I think titles like “Star-Spangled Sutra” and “Public-Verb Agreement” say it all. Dargan’s book is hip and profound, merging God and red onions into the same delicious and thought-provoking sentences.

Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey
I’m not sure I need to say much about this one—it did win the Pulitzer. But the book will not let me go; I keep coming back to it for the relentless way it questions ideas of history, memory, and humanity.

Stateside, by Jehanne Dubrow
Dubrow’s newest book takes us inside the emotional life of a military wife in time of war, a life that (as one section of the book reminds us) traces its roots back to Odysseus’s Penelope. The book is not only emotionally powerful, but it is also a fantastic argument for the continued relevance of poetic form; Dubrow is such a master of form that you notice it only as a structure strong enough to support the raw energy driving the poems.

BIO: Holly Karapetkova’s poems, essays, and translations from the Bulgarian have appeared in a number of journals. Her first full-length collection of poetry is Words We Might One Day Say from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is also the author of over 20 books for children. She teaches at Marymount University in Arlington, VA.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine