Mary Ruefle

A short interview with Marilyn Irwin

rob mclennan

Marilyn Irwin : photo credit: John W. MacDonald

Marilyn Irwin’s poetry has been published by above/ground press, Arc Poetry Magazine and Bywords and has or will appear in ottawater, The Peter F. Yacht Club, New American Writing, and Matrix Magazine, as well as the anthology Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013). The winner of the 2013 Diana Brebner Prize, her fourth and most recent chapbook is tiny (In/Words Press). A fifth chapbook is imminent. She lives with her two cats in Ottawa.

Defaced/refaced books

The erasure practices of Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle

Mary Hickman

At the 2013 Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Boston, I wandered among rows of bright, strange, and intriguing books piled high on independent poetry press tables. Hand-stamped, letter-pressed, spray-painted, ripped, sewn, and covered in tinfoil; poems shaped like boxes, poems printed on records, poems made into pop-ups or puzzles, or rolled as cigarettes — I even spotted a tiny book hidden inside a plastic egg.

September 18, 2014

Recently in Jacket2

Near/Miss launches

Charles Bernstein

New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book
Audible.com has also published an audiobook of my reading of the full work.

On the 'Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word' Panel at AWP

Anna Maria Hong

“Vietnam Is a Seven-Letter Word” panelists.

On the Thursday of the AWP Conference in Portland, OR, I skipped the long line for badges and made my way through the throngs of people chatting, milling purposefully, and sitting and sipping decent coffee along the corridor floors of the Oregon Convention Center to a panel titled “Vietnam is a Seven-Letter Word.” I was familiar with some of the writers presenting but not all of them, and I was intrigued by the description, which noted that “women of the Vietnamese diaspora [would] offer insight into how writers may elasticize and complicate definitions of one’s various assigned ‘identities’ and lend voice to the silenced, obscured, or overlooked.”

'Voices of continuance'

Words, speech, and memory in Jeannette Armstrong’s 'Breath Tracks' (1991)

Eric Schmaltz

Jeanette Armstrong’s poem collection Breath Tracks (1991) sews the sinew and muscle of the writing hand to the lips and lungs of the speaking mouth. The title of the book gestures toward the entanglement of writing and speaking in the body: tracks, the trace of language upon the page that is left by movements of the hand, and breath, that which comes before, during, and after the act of vocalization — a trace of the body in itself. In its positioning of these enmeshed mechanisms, Breath Tracks is a book about the mouth on the page or, to borrow the words that Armstrong imparts to Kim Anderson, these poems articulate “how sound and body gesture to create an art form.”[1]