The official pub date for A Northern Spring is July 1, 2023. Trio House Press has advance copies for sale at the AWP booth. I've spent a lot of time in the Trio House booth telling the story of A Northern Spring and signing copies. I'm figuring out how to talk about the book. I'm revising this story of the book on the fly, figuring things out as I say them, say them again, say them differently, adding and subtracting—editing.
As I do so, there's another me beneath the outward me trying to figure out how to read from A Northern Spring in the ten minutes allotted at the offsite reading on Friday night, doing the same sort of revising, the same sort of editing. A Northern Spring is a hybrid work, with both prose and poetry throughout, and what I'm realizing is that picking what to read from poetry-only books is a much simpler endeavor than this. Poems X, Y, and Z seem fitting for this crowd. I'll read those. If I've misread the mood of the crowd, I'll have poems A, B, and C tabbed, on standby. The more you read from a book of poetry, the more sets you have ready, the easier it is to shift to a new set midstream if the need arises, if your reading of the crowd dictates you change things up.
I have written thematic books—all of my books are thematic in the way that I understand "thematic"—but never have I written a book with a real-ass narrative arc. Until now. Until A Northern Spring and its prose. And that demands a different kind of reading. How do I capture enough of the arc? Do I read some from the start, some from the middle, and some from the end? Or do I not try to capture the arc at all? Do I instead read one single passage, as a novelist might read a gripping scene?
This is the gist of the inward conversation that nobody privy to the various iterations of the outward conversation know is even going on. I think I should ask a novelist or several how they do it, for advice. I think that there can't be a better place to do that than here.
PHOTO: The THP booth at AWP Seattle. From left to right: Issam Zineh, author of the poetry collection Unceded Land (Trio House), Natasha Kane, THP Acquisitions and Publicity Director, Patrick Werle, THP Editor. Some copies of A Northern Spring are stacked behind Issam, just to the right of the book with the green cover, of which you can make out "Lucky," the entire title of which is If You're Lucky Is a Theory of Mine—my second collection of poetry and the first of my books published by Trio House, ca. 2013—ten years ago.
As I do so, there's another me beneath the outward me trying to figure out how to read from A Northern Spring in the ten minutes allotted at the offsite reading on Friday night, doing the same sort of revising, the same sort of editing. A Northern Spring is a hybrid work, with both prose and poetry throughout, and what I'm realizing is that picking what to read from poetry-only books is a much simpler endeavor than this. Poems X, Y, and Z seem fitting for this crowd. I'll read those. If I've misread the mood of the crowd, I'll have poems A, B, and C tabbed, on standby. The more you read from a book of poetry, the more sets you have ready, the easier it is to shift to a new set midstream if the need arises, if your reading of the crowd dictates you change things up.
I have written thematic books—all of my books are thematic in the way that I understand "thematic"—but never have I written a book with a real-ass narrative arc. Until now. Until A Northern Spring and its prose. And that demands a different kind of reading. How do I capture enough of the arc? Do I read some from the start, some from the middle, and some from the end? Or do I not try to capture the arc at all? Do I instead read one single passage, as a novelist might read a gripping scene?
This is the gist of the inward conversation that nobody privy to the various iterations of the outward conversation know is even going on. I think I should ask a novelist or several how they do it, for advice. I think that there can't be a better place to do that than here.
PHOTO: The THP booth at AWP Seattle. From left to right: Issam Zineh, author of the poetry collection Unceded Land (Trio House), Natasha Kane, THP Acquisitions and Publicity Director, Patrick Werle, THP Editor. Some copies of A Northern Spring are stacked behind Issam, just to the right of the book with the green cover, of which you can make out "Lucky," the entire title of which is If You're Lucky Is a Theory of Mine—my second collection of poetry and the first of my books published by Trio House, ca. 2013—ten years ago.
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