Best New Poets 2007 is Here!

A brand new shiny copy of Best New Poets 2007 arrived in our office this week with Tyler Mills' poem "The Violin Shop" right there on page 50. We're proud to have printed that poem in this summer's issue, 29.1, and even prouder that it was included in BNP! Way to go Tyler!

And it has a delightful new book smell...

The collection can be purchased from University of Virginia Press.


So I was curious about who the guy on the cover was. Turns out, according to their blog, all their cover photos are stock photos! Weird. Something about the cover design definitely led me to believe the person on the front is one of the poets included in the collection, or at the very least, one of last year's poets. Hmm...

Oh well. It still looks like a great collection!

--Hannah

Cover Me!

Who doesn't judge a book by it's cover? Joseph Sullivan has compiled a list of the most compelling covers of 2007 over at the NY Times blog.

can you do this in a poem?

Many people wonder how exactly we decide what to publish. What do we look for in a poem? What quality makes one piece of art leap out of the slush pile and into the magazine, while others quietly pass on to other hands, other venues?











This snowman, an image of the Hindu god Ganesh, was created on the main street in Mussoorie, India, a town in the Himalayan foothills. Out of the slush...art.

Now do this. But in a poem.

--Hannah

I Love Typography Too

Hey Word Nerds:

My partner told me about this blog called I Love Typography, which celebrates the super sexiness of type. Think about the smooth curves of a comma; how low the hook of a number 9 can hang.

Now don't do anything naughty while you browse the blog.

-danny

It's November, and NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo are here!

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably heard of National Novel-Writing Month. Several years ago, I wrote my first novel. And, to date, my only. All thanks to NaNoWriMo, a program that proudly values quantity over quality, a program that’s nearly 10 years old.

But there’s no reason that quantity can’t be edited and made publishable by someone, somewhere.

My novel was a piece of genre fiction that didn’t start out that way; I started off trying to write a serious story but got bored with it really early. Instead of starting over, I pushed through, and my central characters got bitten by zombies.

These weren’t your regular old zombies. These were a new type of zombie: although a bit stiff in the joints, perhaps, they were planners, thinkers, and social. My zombies would have the neighbors over. And then much on their brains. They totally owned their undeadness and became assassins.

My masterpiece. My zombie-assassin novel. I deleted nearly all of the manuscript soon after submitting to the NaNoWriMo folks for word-count verification. The novel was terrible. Really, really terrible. But fun to write.

And it’s not too late to get started! You’re only a week behind, if you feel so inclined.

Along those lines, though, and the impetus for this post, is the several years young NaBloPoMo. I learned about it only yesterday, and when I saw this badge, I just had to post it. My own intention is not to blog every day (I wish!), but rather to share the project with y’all. And hey, if you’re a two birds, one stone kind of person, you could always post your NaNoWriMo manuscript in progress…

—Jenny

I took it from the top and put it on the bottom...

That's how James Brown described the process of creating the musical structure we now know as Funk. It was all about The One.

I stumbled upon this great documentary from the BBC (they have some great documentaries, by the way--check out Richard Pryor if you get a chance) on youtube. They've got it divided into seven parts, but the whole thing is really compelling. It does a really great job of covering many of the major Funk figures and providing a historical context for the music's rise. One of my favorite moments is when JB's bandleader, Pee Wee Ellis talks about coming up with the concept for "Coldblooded" after listening to Miles Davis' "So What?". If you've got both songs, you should listen to them back-to-back because it's fascinating to see what they did. This kind of innovation was actually pretty typical because many of Funk's greatest musicians had their roots deep in Jazz. Great stuff. Check it out.

--Abdel

Other Blogs We Love: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

Reading the highest of highbrow fiction and poetry gets tiring at times. And, as you may have noticed, we here at IR are not afraid to admit that, at times, our taste is decidedly lowbrow.

If you're looking for a good recommendation for your next trashy read, the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books offer smart and funny reviews of genre lit, with a focus on crappy romance novels of all types. Recent highlights include:

The help-a-bitch-out feature, in which readers help other readers find vaguely-remembered plots (e.g. "The heroine was wrapped up in some kind of rug/carpet/blanket and unrolled for a king or ruler or duke or something of the sort.")

The worst lines in sci-fi erotica

One of the main bloggers' husbands offers a guest review of David Hasselhoff's autobiography, in which the difference between good trashy and bad trashy is thoughtfully discussed.

And you have to love "Covers Gone Wild."

--Hannah