University of Arkansas Press Publishes Three Books of Poetry

Catherine MacDonald and her book, Rousing the Machinery

Adam Vines and his book cover, The Coal Life

David Baker and his book, Talk Poetry

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Catherine MacDonald and the cover of her new book, Rousing the Machinery: Poems.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has just published three books of poetry: Rousing the Machinery: Poems by Catherine MacDonald ($16 paper), is the winner of the 2012 $5,000 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. The Coal Life: Poems, by Adam Vines ($16 paper), is a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize. Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets, by David Baker ($19.95 paper), is a collection of poems and discussions of poetry from the author’s series of interviews from the Kenyon Review.

Rousing the Machinery, MacDonald’s debut collection, describes the “untidy geographies” of inheritance and loss, familial fracture and cohesion. Through precise and evocative imagery rooted in both the natural and domestic spheres, these poems detail the passages of life — motherhood, a parent’s long illness, the ambiguities of marriage, a brother’s imprisonment — and invokes the music of everyday speech to shape an accessible poetry concerned with human difficulties and desires.

MacDonald lives in Richmond, Va., and teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poems and criticism have been published in the Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Blackbird, Louisville Review, and other journals.

The Coal Life from Adam Vines is also a first collection. The volume explores the cultural landscape of Alabama coal-mining camps in the first half of the 20th century and how the industry can shape and distort a cultural text similar to the way it contorts and upturns the physical landscape. Other poems in the collection express how all people mine their memories, their cultures and the natural world in an attempt to search for identity.

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he edits the Birmingham Poetry Review. His poems have been published in Poetry, North America Review, the Cincinnati Review, and the Greensboro Review.

Talk Poetry, a Kenyon Review book, is a collection of discussions between one of America’s leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine important poets of our day. The poets included are Linda Gregerson, Fady Joudah, Ted Kooser, W.S. Merwin, Alice Notley, Meghan O'Rourke, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Arthur Sze. The interviews are supplemented with examples of the poets' work and represent a wide array of aesthetic positions about the poets' writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.

David Baker is author or editor of 14 books of poetry and criticism. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair at Denison University, teaches regularly in the Master of Fine Arts program at Warren Wilson College, and is the poetry editor of the Kenyon Review.

The University of Arkansas Press has been publishing poetry ever since Miller Williams became the press’s first director 30 years ago. In 2007, a benefit concert by his daughter, Lucinda Williams, made the endowment of a $5,000 annual award possible. The University of Arkansas Press will be accepting submissions in September and October. For more information, visit uapress.com.