Two New Poetry Titles in UA Press’s Poetry Series Now Available

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas Press has just issued two new books in its distinguished Poetry Series. The first book is a new collection from veteran poet Elton Glaser, “Here and Hereafter.” Glaser’s sixth collection is a feast of language that lets us taste how it feels to live on this earth. The poems journey through the seasons, from spring to spring, a pilgrimage down to the South, over the Midwest of snow and roses, and across the Romance countries of Europe.

     Poet Ed Ochester says that Glaser’s poems “celebrate available joys. As always, his language is exact and surprising. For wit, and for the precision of right words in the right order, few of his contemporaries can equal this poet.” Elton Glaser, a native of New Orleans, is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Akron and editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press, where he was the director for a number of years.

    The second book is Annie Boutelle’s first published collection, “Becoming Bone: Poems on the Life of Celia Thaxter (1836-1894).” It probes the layered life of one of 19th-century America’s most popular poets, who is now almost forgotten. In a series of poems spoken by Thaxter, Boutelle reveals a childhood on the stark Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast, the traps of a Victorian marriage, and Thaxter’s struggle to invent herself as a writer, surrounded by a distinguished group of friends that included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Childe Hassam.

     Poet Gerald Stern calls this book a “magnificent secret history.” These poems are “stark, original, lovely, the poetic knowledge terrific.” Annie Boutelle is a senior lecturer at Smith College, where she founded the Poetry Center. She has been a finalist for a number of awards and prizes, including the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Philip Levine Prize.

     The University of Arkansas Press’s Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer, has been a highly recognized series for a number of years. Poets recently published in the Series include Gary Fincke, Robert Gibb, Harry Humes, and Patrick Phillips, whose collection “Chattahoochee” was awarded the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. This past April the Press was one of the  Premium Sponsors for various National Poetry Month celebrations conducted by the Academy of American Poets.