Give Us Five (perhaps in person)

An embarrassment of riches! We learned last week that a fifth poem from our pages will appear in Best American Poetry 2012! Joining Julianna Baggott, James Kimbrell, Dean Rader, and Don Russ is Eric Pankey, whose poem “Sober Then Drunk Again” was chosen by Mark Doty for the honor. Four of those five poems, including Eric’s, were chosen from Issue 7.2; if you’d like to take a look at the issue, you can order it here.

Eric had this to say about his poem:

“The title does the work of narration in this little lyric. Sober for many years, I tried my hand at drinking again, and apart from the consumption of many fine bottles of wine, little good came of my failed attempt to drink moderately.  A melancholic to start with, I was pulled even deeper down by alcohol and the lead weight of depression. This is a poem voiced from that depth. ”

In other news, we’re AWP-bound, and we hope to see you there. Stop by Table  022 and say hello: We’ve got super subscription deals and very hip grammatically-instructive American Apparel and Bella T-shirts. On Wednesday night, we’re co-hosting the Monster Mags of the Midwest Reading with Mid-American Review and Ninth Letter. The reading takes place from 7-10 p.m. at Murphy’s Bleachers near Wrigley Field (for more information, see our flyer).

Since we’ll be busy hawking our issues and T-shirts (that is, when we’re not making funny faces at ourselves in the Silver Bean), we’re going dark on the blog for the duration of the conference. But don’t worry—we’ll be back next week, bleary-eyed but gratified to have seen so many friends.