Posts tagged ‘Peg Duthie’

Couplets – April 1st

ETA: And, Stella Pierides is a guest at Margaret Dornaus’ Haiku-doodle.

1 comment 1 April 2012

Invasion of the Night

Kristine Ong Muslim has reviewed Peg Duthie‘s Measured Extravagance:

What I admire most about this book is Peg Duthie’s masterful treatment of highly politicized topics (such as the political inclinations of well-known scientists) into a non-politically-correct lattice.

Also, news for 140 And Counting contributors: Neil Ellman has two poems in Spinozablue this week; and Francis W. Alexander currently has a haibun in the March 2012 Haibun Today and a story in Night to Dawn, Issue 21, which also has work by Marge Simon.

31 March 2012

bring me my captain’s hat and other news

“A Multiple of Sorrows” and “Good Morning,” two poems by Measured
Extravagance
author Peg Duthie, have been published by Houseboat. They accompany photo prompts No. 26 and No. 27.

Berit Ellingsen (a 140 And Counting alum) has a short story in Rocket Science, an anthology due to be published in 2012 by Mutation Press.

Also a 140 And Counting contributor, Lucas Stensland has a short poem (“Bring Me My Captain’s Hat”) in the March issue of Four and Twenty.

And, in the Wish We’d Seen This Before It Happened category, turns out that URB editor Joanne Merriam‘s reading with Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance) and Mary Alexandra Agner (The Scientific Method; The Doors of the Body) was a Critics’ Pick in last week’s Nashville Scene.

26 March 2012

perfect circles

URB editor Joanne Merriam read poetry with Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance1) and Mary Alexandra Agner (The Scientific Method; The Doors of the Body) today at the Nashville Public Library, and blogged about it here.

And, some new publications from 140 And Counting alums: Aurelio Rico Lopez III‘s poem “Eastern Demons” appeared at Every Day Poets on March 22nd; Simon Kewin‘s short story “Live From The Continuing Explosion” from Perfect Circles (which cover photo, incidentally, appears to be of the same Prague astronomical clock featured on the cover of Blueshifting) was reviewed at length by StoryADay; Berit Ellingsen has work in issue 2 of Lost in Thought; S. Kay was featured at trapeze on March 15th.

 

1Which is now available at Barnes & Noble!

24 March 2012

“I love this. I reread it already. I will reread it again.”

Marissa Lingen reviews (and likes) Peg Duthie‘s Measured Extravagance.

22 March 2012

Measured Extravagance now live on Amazon

Measured Extravagance is now available on Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES)!

Still to come: the ePub version will go live sometime this month.

15 March 2012

Measured Extravagance

  • ISBN 978-1-937794-14-9 (epub).
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-12-5 (mobi).
  • ISBN 978-1-937794-13-2 (pdf).
  • Discuss this book at Goodreads and LibraryThing.
  • Out of print.

Employing sonnets and sestinas as well as open forms, Measured Extravagance lyrically documents the messiness of grief and explores the complexity of devotion. Peg Duthie celebrates the conflicting demands of journeys as she travels from a Nashville recording studio to a congested street in Prague to the Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, and introduces us to sharpshooters, scientists, musicians, bakers, the dead and those living on the edges of reality as they romp past boundaries, rage at expectations, and tangle with skepticism and belief. Read this book—and throw jump shots with Shakespeare, play duets with Heisenberg, and find out what relish trays and rifles really have in common.

From Measured Extravagance:

The Sharpshooter Assembles a Relish Tray

Some afternoons, everything she touches
reminds her of how bodies are so soft,
even as she delicately wields
chopsticks, toothpicks, tongs, and teaspoons
to place the artichoke hearts just so
among the starflowers carved from radishes.
Eggs with sesame-seed eyes and carrot-sliver beaks
nest within mounds of curly herbs. Around some people,
she can’t helping wanting to claim that it’s all
for the sake of her daughter, whether “it” is the it
of resolutely drilling fake pigeons and falling plates
to defeat the dreams that insist on plaguing
her nights with paper golems and phantom goons
or the it of donning lipstick and hose and heels
as a gesture not of submission but grace, the uniform
of the Sunday suppers she manages to attend. It
is indeed for her daughter—the being prepared
for both monsters and manners—but it is not all.
It would be a meal of only meat, just as a life
without her partner and child would be merely
a serving of stems. She scoops a spare olive
into her mouth, savoring its slide across her tongue:
salt. flesh. seed. The tray is a passable garden
but in the end, it is but an end—its meaning a matter
of preserves and pretenses, a prelude to sustenance.

Poems from the book available online:

These links all open in a new window.

Reviews:

Contemporary poetry on Jewish religious subjects is rare in America outside the pages of specialized Jewish publications. Thus, Peg Duthie’s delightful new collection Measured Extravagance (Upper Rubber Boot Books) is doubly welcome… Peg is a poet we must hope to hear more from.

— Martin Berman-Gorvine, “A Measured Feast,” InTheMoment, 25 September 2012.

I’m delighted. Extravagant and clever, the poem is a fitting introduction to a collection that spans decades, personages, and cities with ease…

Toward the end of the collection we end up in Chicago, England, and Boston in “Between the Hints.” The speaker muses about “what we can make is what // will do for now. . .” Oh how we humans are forever striving! Duthie cleverly twists that idea into all its permutations within the rhymes of this poem’s form, using iambic pentameter and quatrameter so wickedly that the reader doesn’t even realize how smoothly he/she has been schooled.

In all, Peg Duthie has put together a thoroughly extravagant collection of poems. The reader journeys through locations of the mind as well as those of the earth; I was never quite sure what I’d get as I turned the page, but I was always surprised. As the speaker says in the poem “Extravagance”—”Such a feast.”

— Christine Klocek-Lim, “Three Poetry Reviews for National Poetry Month,” November Sky Poetry, 28 April 2012.

The title appears to be an oxymoron. How can something measured be extravagant? We can ask that question of poetry itself. Taking it to the bard as we shoot hoops, we might ask how it’s possible to seize something as tight and as structured as a sonnet and stuff it full to bursting. The answer… well, the whole book is an answer to that question.

We might just as easily ask the same question of life, with its well-defined form and obvious boundaries. How can we live extravagantly within our measured years? In “As She’s Dying”, we meet a mother intent on not living while she was alive: “she/who regarded my writing as a squandering/of time and ovaries.” And in its companion poem, “A Stack of Cards”, we imagine a quiet moment after the funeral, going through the mother’s things, “this mourning of a life you wouldn’t have lived/even if you’d had the heart for it.” Both poems are 13 lines, not rondeaus, sort of deformed sonnets if you like, a bit clipped like the mother they contemplate.

A life lived within the measure of its confines is no life at all, but a life lived with extravagance becomes more than the sum of its years.

— David Allan Barker, “Review: Measured Extravagance, by Peg Duthie,” Nouspique, 20 April 2012.

…it’s a sestina, and a good one! I’m not typically a big fan of form poems—with sestinas about half way through the poem I usually feel like, as a reader, that I can see the writer trying too hard to get those end-words in—but Duthie seamlessly blends them in.

— Renee Emerson, “Measured Extravagance by Peg Duthie (a review),” This Quiet Hour, 10 April 2012.

What I admire most about this book is Peg Duthie’s masterful treatment of highly politicized topics (such as the political inclinations of well-known scientists) into a non-politically-correct lattice… Measured Extravagance delivers. What a gorgeous collection!

— Kristine Ong Muslim, “on Peg Duthie’s ‘Marvelous Extravagance’,” 1 April 2012.

I think my favorite, my best delight, in this volume, was ‘Deep and Crisp and Even,’ which title will make those who know me go, well, of course–and it’s got apples and snow and winter, but it’s Peg’s Nashville winter and not my own, parallax again, different views, different angles. I love this. I reread it already. I will reread it again.

And sometimes things find you where you are and you don’t entirely wish to say why, and ‘Hymn’ is like that, and if it finds you where you are, too, you will know. Recommended.

— Marissa Lingen, “Measured Extravagance, by Peg Duthie,” Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway, 21 March 2012.

2 comments 14 March 2012

It’s Read an Ebook Week!

For Read an Ebook Week, 140 And Counting author M. Darusha Wehm has 50% off everything at Smashwords, except Beautiful Red, which is free (use the coupon code REW50); and asbestos boots on beatnik feet has just published three poems by Neil Ellman.

And! Upper Rubber Boot now has a Smashwords account, so we can sell PDFs. 140 And Counting and Blueshifting are both available now in PDF, and Measured Extravagance is available for the first time in any edition. Measured Extravagance will be released shortly in epub and mobi.

11 March 2012

Amadis of Gaul and other news

140 And Counting authors:

Sue Burke has self-published her translation of the medieval Spanish novel Amadis of Gaul. It’s available in print and Kindle editions at Amazon. Burke says, “The book includes a preface by a present-day Spanish novelist, an introduction, notes to chapters, and an appendix explaining what eliminated Amadis from respectable bookshelves — it wasn’t Don Quixote.” More information here!

Read Neil Ellman‘s gorgeous poem “When the Heart Stops” at Poetry Bulawayo.

Members of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia can read about the beginnings of Upper Rubber Boot, and some of editor Joanne Merriam‘s opinions about the challenges facing the book industry, in the March/April 2012 Eastword (non-members should be able to read it come May).

Stella Pierides has haiku alongside Susan Diridoni this week in Issa’s Untidy Hut.

And, if you live in or near Nashville, make a note on your calendar for Saturday, March 24th. Peg Duthie and Joanne Merriam will be reading with Mary Alexandra Agner at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library. Details at our events page or on Facebook and Goodreads.

10 March 2012

Peg Duthie

Peg Duthie shares an old house in Nashville, Tennessee, with a tall mechanic, a large dog, and a small piano. She works as an indexer and copyeditor, and there’s more about her at www.nashpanache.com.

 

Books for Upper Rubber Boot:

Measured Extravagance lyrically documents the messiness of grief and explores the complexity of devotion.

Peg Duthie is one of 119 contributors to 140 And Counting.

1 comment 1 February 2012

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