! BOOKS !

Posted on by Jami Macarty

Dear Gift Reader,

Hello, may you be healthy and in pursuit of what makes you happy.

I am happy to welcome you to this conversation about reading and making books. Today is a Big Day in my writing and publishing life. Today, December 2, 2025, is the official publication day for The Long Now Conditions Permit!

In this ! Books ! dispatch, I share with you the story of how my second full-length collection has come into being—from writing individual poems to their publication in literary magazines to the selection of the manuscript, The Long Now Conditions Permit, as winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize to finding the perfect cover image.

AnnouncingThe Long Now Conditions Permit!

THE LONG NOW CONDITIONS PERMIT
by Jami Macarty
University of Nevada Press, December 2025

The Long Now Conditions Permit confronts the persistent brutalities of our world through poetry that both names and resists the injustices shaping it. From the quiet sorrows of everyday slight to the overwhelming crises of ecological collapse and gendered violence, these poems document what is occurring—the horrendous and the intimate, the anguished and the magnificent.

With ethical attention, Jami Macarty’s collection engages the political, ecological, and personal forces that shape and mark our lives, offering an ecofeminist ethic of care as an antidote to extractive capitalism and patriarchal norms. Each poem meditates on power, insists on articulating what is being lost—and what must be saved and reclaimed. 

Amid the exploitation and violence, these poems find moments of grace: the scent of a sea rose, a desert walk in spring, the company of birds, Earth entire. The Long Now Conditions Permit is both tender elegy and urgent call, exhorting readers to grapple with the devastating failings of humanity and the saving possibilities of love. 

Winning the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize

On March 4, 2024 my second manuscript of poetry marched forth to its life as a book when I answered a call from Claudia Keelan, editor, who told me The Long Now Conditions Permit won the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize!

The 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize Semifinalists, Finalists, and Winners!

The Test Site Poetry Series is the collaborative book-publishing project of Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics and the University of Nevada Press. Interim, established in 1944 by the late Wilber Stevens, is housed in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is one of the longest-running “little” literary magazines in the United States. Interim editors and poets Claudia Keelan and Andrew S. Nicholson serve as Test Site Poetry Series editors. The Test Site Poetry Prize-winning book is chosen by Claudia Keelan and an advisory board, which includes poets Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

The editors and advisory board are looking for manuscripts that engage the perilous conditions of life in the 21st century, as they pertain to issues of social justice and the earth. The winning book will demonstrate an ethos that considers the human condition in inclusive love and sympathy, while offering the same in consideration of the earth. Because we believe the truth is always experimental, we’ll especially appreciate books with innovative approaches.

Now, some of the delicious words The Test Site Poetry Series editorial board members shared about The Long Now Conditions Permit!

from Sasha Steensen (on Facebook):

from Ronaldo V. Wilson (the book’s endorsement):

from Claudia Keelan (the book’s endorsement):

from Donald Revell (the book’s endorsement):

These poets’ words for The Long Now Conditions Permit, heart-expanding gifts!

Finding the Cover Photo

The first time I saw Masahiko Kuroki‘s photograph of the tree (above) was early December 2024, scrolling my Facebook feed. It was late at night after a long day’s driving in a highway-side hotel. I had been stressing over the just-right photo. The publisher didn’t care for my ideas, and I wasn’t wild about theirs. Such is the often fraught book cover conversation!

It’s a mystery as to why Masahiko Kuroki’s photo appeared in my feed. I wasn’t following him. I had never heard of him. Nor had I previously seen any of his photos. Yet somehow rather miraculously his photo appeared. When I saw it, I slid off the edge of the bed. Then recovering myself from the floor, I shined the image toward my partner’s face and asked, What about this for the cover? As if falling off the bed wasn’t enough!

When I shared Mashiko Kuroki’s photograph with the University of Nevada Press team, they said: “But we’re really loving the final image… It’s the most unique of all the images you’ve suggested, or that we’ve found, and I love that the tree can be interpreted literally as a tree, or with just a bit of imagination, as a woman with her arms outstretched.”

As we moved through the design process, their admiration for Kuroki’s photograph grew: “Again, our team just loves this image! It’s so evocative and interesting. I think it’s really going to pull readers in.”

And, as we arrived at the cover’s final design: “For what we’ve started calling the “tree woman” image here in the office, I still think this is the best option, by far. If you want something unique that you’re not going to find on another book cover, this is the image to choose. We were talking about it in our staff meeting this morning, and everyone agrees this is one of the most striking covers we’ve proposed in quite a long time.”

I experience Masahiko Kuroki’s photo viscerally every time I behold it. I feel an upward reaching within me. Masahiko Kuroki’s photo is perfect company for the poems in The Long Now Conditions Permit which feature the figures of trees and women and seek a freedom from the threat of violence that all too often pervades natural and domestic environments.

Thank you to, Masahiko Kuroki, for agreeing to accompanying my poems with his photograph!

Writing the Poems in The Long Now Conditions Permit

I freshly wrote or deeply revised all of the poems in The Long Now Conditions Permit over ninety-five days between January 2020 and January 2021. The poems were drafted/revised among a shifting cohort of other poets during five days in person at a goddess table in January 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic was just coming to our attention. Then, over three thirty-day online poem-a-day writing sprees in July 2020, October 2020, and January 2021. I loved the practice of trying to write a poem-a-day. The intensity! There were duds, but there were keepers. The process gave me an experience of seeing just what writing I could accomplish in a relatively short period of time. It showed me the momentum of daily practice and power of cumulative effect in writing. The practice offered me a community of writers. And I made some poetry pals!

Generous Publishers of Individual Poems

What makes a full-length collection? Individual poems! They are the building blocks and act as gateways from poem to poem, and engender conversations between poet and editor, poet and publisher. Individual poems have their own lives and are part of the lives of full-length collections. Individual poems are the beginning of a book, and they point to a book when it comes into being.

While searching for my book’s publisher, I tweaked the poems and tried out the revised versions by sending them out for consideration with literary magazines in Canada and the US. This editorial process offered me valuable information about which poems would make up the manuscript of The Long Now Conditions Permit. Sometimes the poems editors believed in were also the poems I believed in. Sometimes not. So, I had to figure out which poems mattered most to the life of the book.

Thirteen editors of literary magazines selected individual poems from The Long Now Conditions Permit for publication in their the literary magazines they helm. I wish to acknowledge the hardworking and devoted editors, staff, publishers, and printers for giving time, attention, and space to my writing. Thank you, Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVOX; Matthew Cooperman at Colorado Review; Haley Lasché at Concision Poetry Journal; Claudia Keelan at Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics; Simone Muench at The Jet Fuel Review; Robert Julius and Alyssa Froehling at The Journal; Charles Kell at Ocean State Review; Richard Greenfield at Puerto del Sol; Jackie Janusis at Redivider; Jaimie Gusman at Tinfish; Eleni Zisimatos at Vallum Magazine and Vallum Chapbook Series; Gillian Conoley at Volt; Sue Goyette, editor of the anthology Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #Metoo (University of Regina Press, 2020). Special thanks to Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Vallum Magazine, and Vallum Chapbook Series for their ongoing support of my writing by publishing my poems in several issues between 2020 and 2024.

I take the time and space above to name these editors and publications as a gesture of gratitude because they took the time with and offered space to my writing. They are important to my writing life. And they are part of the valuable conversation I want to have about my poems and poetry in general.

Seeking a Publisher

In December 2021, I offered for consideration to The Test Site Poetry Series the first version of the manuscript. It was one hundred and twenty pages long! That’s long by most standards. Typically, the recommended length for manuscripts is around seventy pages. The manuscript’s title was, and has always been, The Long Now Conditions Permit. It was named a finalist for The Test Site Poetry Series. Spur! The next year and the one after that, the manuscript was on the shortlist with Canada’s Brick Books. Spur! Spur! Then, in March 2024 it won the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize! In all, I offered the manuscript for consideration forty-one times.

For me, the story of how The Long Now Conditions Permit came into being sums to two words: Persistence! Perseverance!

Now, Seeking Readers

Now, for my book I seek readers! Gentle, generous readers who will give The Long Now Conditions Permit the gift of their attention. I would love to count you as one of my poetry collection’s readers! Will you be one of The Long Now Conditions Permit‘s readers?

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Thank You Bows!

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! Welcome, welcome to those of you new to these dispatches on reading and writing books. May you find inspiration for your writer’s life here!

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to my precious community. To everyone who support my writing, especially women/women-identified writers for not coveting or competing, but sharing and supporting.

+ Thank you bows for supporting The Long Now Conditions Permit (2025): +Bows (continuous!) to my publisher the University of Nevada Press and staff for making my book The Long Now Conditions Permit with me. +Bows (continuous!) to Claudia Keelan and Andrew Nicholson, series editors, and the series board Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo Wilson of Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series, who selected The Long Now Conditions Permit (University of Nevada Press, December 2025) as the 2023 winner of the Test Site Series Prize. +Bows (continuous!) to Claudia Keelan, Donal Revell, and Ronaldo V. Wilson for offering your word-endorsements! +Bows to Mashiko Kuroki for his luminous tree-woman photo for the cover! +Bows (continuous) to the editors of literary magazines who supported the publication of individual poems from The Long Now Conditions Permit: Geoffrey Gatza at BlazeVOX; Matthew Cooperman at Colorado Review; Haley Lasché at Concision Poetry Journal; Claudia Keelan at Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics; Simone Muench at The Jet Fuel Review; Robert Julius and Alyssa Froehling at The Journal; Charles Kell at Ocean State Review; Richard Greenfield at Puerto del Sol; Jackie Janusis at Redivider; Jaimie Gusman at Tinfish; Eleni Zisimatos at Vallum Magazine and Vallum Chapbook Series; Gillian Conoley at Volt; Sue Goyette, editor of the anthology Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #Metoo (University of Regina Press, 2020).

! Books !

Posted on by Jami Macarty

Gentle Reader,

We meet again here, where I share with you another word-ante into our ongoing conversation about making and reading books. Hurrah, you are here!

What makes a chapbook or full-length collection? Individual poems! They are the building blocks of poetry chapbooks and full-length collections. Individual poems act as gateways from poem to poem, and engender conversations between poet and editor, poet and publisher. Individual poems have their own lives and are part of the lives of chapbooks and full-length collections. Individual poems are a beginning of a book and they point to a book when it comes into being.

Behold Interim – A Journal of Poetry and Poetics (Since 1944!) Issue 41.1, the “Winners & Finalists” Issue, featuring the eight finalists and the winners of the Test Site Poetry Series Award—Jami Macarty!—and the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award—Geoffret Babbitt.

The issue features five of my invidual poems. Four of the poems are from my Test Site prize-winning manuscript The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press, 2025). The fifth poem, “Whole Catastrophe,” is from my September-published chapbook The Whole Catastrophe (#38, Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024). This Interim issue is an example and celebration of how individual poems lead to and become books.

Artwork by Catherine Skinner

Discovering individual poems and poems that make up a manuscript is the purview of editors of literary magazines and presses. In Interim‘s case, that is poet and editor Claudia Keelan. Poem by poem and book to book, Claudia has changed my life as a poet. She has published indivual poems from my first and second full-length collections and my fourth chapbook in Interim. She endorsed my first full-length collection, The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020):

“The poems in Jami Macarty’s devotional collection swing upon a hinge that is the recurring site of the poet’s perception in time, where what is seen shows the inherent connection of each thing to its other: ‘honey given : honey taken.’ The Minuses‘ brilliance lives in what the poet is able to give up for the possibility of finding a wholeness that is ongoing: ‘I come and go / from myself as I am / I will not return.’ A seer is, after all, one who sees. Jami Macarty is one who sees.” -Claudia Keelan

It takes a seer to know a seer. Claudia Keelan is also a seer. Under her penname, Lucy Aul, she wrote a review of The Minuses that made birds take flight in my heart. Her words blew me off my perch. I tell you true; I fell off the couch when I was reading her review of my book. And Claudia was part of the editorial team that selected my second full-length collection The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press, 2025) as winner of the Test Site Poetry Series Award.

I do not know Claudia but in her I find a dream-come-true ally to my poems; Claudia understands and reads for the devotional spirit of my poems. Her readership is a poetry-expanding and heart-expanding gift.

Gentle Reader, your readership is also a gift! I cordially invite you to read my poems in Interim – A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. To whet your reader’s appetite, I offer “Harbinger” (above). Read my poems and be introduced to The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press, 2025). While you are visiting Interim Issue 41.1, visit my colleagues, the other poets whose individual poems join mine. May your reading kindle inspiration for your pages. Happy Reading!

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The Pluses!

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! Welcome, welcome to those of you new to these dispatches on reading and writing books. May you find inspiration for your writer’s life!

+ Thank you bows to my community of women/women-identified writers for their generous, loving support, inspiration, and encouragement.

+ Thank you bows to Vallum Chapbook Series and Eleni Zisimatos, Editor, and Leigh Kotsilidis, Designer, for making my chapbook The Whole Catastrophe (2024) with me.

+ I bow to the editors who support my reviews and the publications where they were published: Denise Hill at NewPages; Stephanie G’Schwind at Colorado Review, and Jay Ruzesky at The Malahat Review.

+ I bow to Claudia Keelan and Andrew Nicholson, series editors, and the series board Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo Wilson of Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series, who selected The Long Now Conditions Permit (forthcoming University of Nevada Press).

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to my publisher Stephanie G’Schwind, and Mountain/West Poetry Series editors Donald Revell and Kazim Ali, et al interns at the Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) for making The Minuses (2020) with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Beth Svinarich et al staff at University Press of Colorado for their beautiful support to me and The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to monsoon storm chaser and marvelous professional photographer, Liz Kemp, whose monsoon photograph storms the cover of The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows to Nomados Literary Publishers, Meredith and Peter Quartermain for making my chapbook Instinctive Acts (2018)with me.

+ Thank you bows to Vallum Chapbook Series and editors Leigh Kotsilidis and Eleni Zisimatos for making my chapbook Mind of Spring (2017) with me.

+ Thank you bows to Finishing Line Press and editors Leah Maines and Christen Kinkaid for making my chapbook Landscape of The Wait (2017) with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Vincent K. Wong for his friendship, creative collaboration, and for taking my author photos.

+ This bears repeating: Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! If you have any questions or comments, write me! I would love to hear from you!

! BOOKS !

Posted on by Jami Macarty

Welcome back, Gentle Readers, to my dispatches about making and reading books!

I have good, sweet poetry book news to share with you! Good news comes alive and is multiplied when shared!

On March 4, my second manuscript of poetry marched forth into its life as a book when I answered a call from poet and editor Claudia Keelan, who told me 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝑵𝒐𝒘 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝑷𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒕 won the Test Site Poetry Series Prize!

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝑵𝒐𝒘 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝑷𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒕 won the Test Site Poetry Series Prize!

I cried and laughed, and fell to the floor, praising the Poetry Gods. My poet’s heart taking Deer leap and Owl Eagle flight!

My second book will be coming forth in 2025 from the University of Nevada Press! Hurrah!

What does this acknowledgment mean to my life as a poet? I have been thinking about how, in part, this acknowledgment gives space to my voice in an expansive poem-making conversation. The conversation with and companionship of other poets is everything.

I bow in the direction of Claudia Keelan and Andrew Nicholson series editors, and the series board editors Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo Wilson. I admire these writers and love their poems, so to be given their confidence, well, my heart fills with exclamation points!

Interim offers two awards. The Test Site Poetry Series Prize I won and the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award. Hurrah, parallel good poetry news! Congratulations to the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Winner:

𝑨 𝑮𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝑺𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝑳𝒂𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒉, by Geoffrey Babbitt.

Throughout the selection process, my manuscript was in the company of hundreds of other poets’ manuscripts. Though some of these poets remain anonymous to me, I acknowledge their word efforts and companionship. To the 12 poets with whom I have spent the last two months as a semi-finalist and then finalist (listed below): I trust I will hold in my hands your books soon, soon! Thank you for your good, sweet company, dear poets.

There is a story about when and how the poems in 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑳𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝑵𝒐𝒘 𝑪𝒐𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒔 𝑷𝒆𝒓𝒎𝒊𝒕 came to words. I will tell you that story in another post. For now, the story sums to two words: Persistence! Perseverance! Between December 2020 and December 2023, I offered this manuscript for consideration 41 times. Persistence! Perseverance!

Persist! Persevere! A writer must!

Persist! Persevere!

Tell me, Gentle Reader, about your life as a writer. Tell me how you persist. Tell me how you persevere. Send your comments below.

: :

The Pluses!

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! Welcome, welcome to those of you new to these dispatches on reading and writing books. May you find inspiration for your writer’s life!

+ Thank you bows to my community of women/women-identified writers for their generous, loving support, inspiration, and encouragement.

+ I bow to Claudia Keelan and Andrew Nicholson, series editors, and the series board Sherwin Bitsui, Donald Revell, Sasha Steensen, and Ronaldo Wilson of Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series and the Besty Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry.

+ I bow to the hardworking editors, publishers, readers, and printers at literary magazines who publish individual poems and who have supported my writing.

+ I bow to the editors who support my reviews and the publications where they were published: Denise Hill at NewPages; Manahil Bandukwala at Canthius; James M. Fisher at The Miramachi Reader, and Jay Ruzesky at The Malahat Review.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to my publisher Stephanie G’Schwind, and Mountain/West Poetry Series editors Donald Revell and Kazim Ali, et al interns at the Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) for making The Minuses (2020) with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Beth Svinarich et al staff at University Press of Colorado for their beautiful support to me and The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to monsoon storm chaser and marvelous professional photographer, Liz Kemp, whose monsoon photograph storms the cover of The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows to Nomados Literary Publishers, Meredith and Peter Quartermain for making my chapbook Instinctive Acts with me.

+ Thank you bows to Vallum Chapbook Series and editors Leigh Kotsilidis and Eleni Zisimatos for making my chapbook Mind of Spring with me.

+ Thank you bows to Finishing Line Press and editors Leah Maines and Christen Kinkaid for making my chapbook Landscape of The Wait with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Vincent K. Wong for his friendship, creative collaboration, and for taking my author photos.

+ This bears repeating: Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! If you have any questions or comments, write me! I would love to hear from you!

! BOOKS !

Posted on by Jami Macarty

National Poetry Month commenced in the United States in 1996 when the Academy of American Poets brought to the foreground this appreciation and celebration of poetry; Canada joined in the fun in 1998. Why April? That has to do with the opening line to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem “The Waste Land”: “April is the cruellest month.”

I get where Eliot is coming from, it being muddy, sluggish spring and all, but instead of getting into whether or not April is cruellest month of all and why. Or, vying for December’s rank. I will offer that no month is any crueller than another and get on with sharing with you my recognition and acknowledgement of my writing practice, especially where it pertains to the making of my second collection of poems and to celebrate and appreciate poet and editor Claudia Keelan and one of her special editorial projects: Interim: A Journal of Poetry Poetics.

On my way there, allow me to share with you a poet’s dream scenario and a bit more about my second collection of poems, The Long Now Conditions Permit. I wrote the majority of the manuscript’s poems in ninety-five days, which consisted of a five-day writing spell in January 2020 and three thirty-day writing spells in July 2020, October 2020, and January 2021. Realizing my intentions to write five poems in five days and thirty poems in thirty days (three times) proved to me again just what I am able to accomplish when I am determined, passionate, serious, and persistent.

I say “again” because starting in July 2013 and for the next three-and-a-half years ish, I wrote just about a poem a day. The math: something like 1,300 poems. Talk about a writing practice that puts into perspective the valuation of “good” and “bad” and balances that duality with simply intending to write and accomplishing the writing of a poem each day. Day by day the poems mount, and as they do the poet becomes less precious and fetishistic about what poems are and more playful with what they can be and can do via diction and form, image and association. Plus, that daily word-play over an extended period taught me about the meaning of aiming for the target, gaining experience, and getting to know the poems I make and myself as a poet.

Back to the coming-into-being of my second manuscript. Each day in December 2021 by method of butt-in-chair, I revised all of the poems written between January 2020 and 2021, which included some deep recasts/revisions, drawing also on a kernel of some poems written during that three-and-a-half-year spell. Once the poems were revised, there was the decision process of which to include, then onward to ordering those poems into a book. There were a few rounds of those two steps as the book honed. Et voilà! On December 30, 2021, I sent the manuscript to Interim Test Site Poetry Series for consideration.

Even so, the book was not quite at its resting place. Here and there, a few points of precision within lines, images, and words still gave me hesitation and were not yet satisfying. So, after three days away from the manuscript, I continued tuning, honing, and shaping on my own, considering comments I received from a trusted editor. After another two weeks, I arrived at a resting place for the manuscript and got on with sending poems from it out for consideration and reading from my stacks. O, the stacks!

Then on February 21, Claudia Keelan, Editor of Interim Test Site Poetry Series notified me that my manuscript was a semi-finalist and still under consideration. A thrill for the poems and the poet! On March 6, Claudia wrote again to notify me that my manuscript was one of fifteen (1/15) finalists. More excitement! Kissing and dancing upon Earth. Tra la! Tra la!

Test Site Poetry Series Finalists!

Claudia and Interim’s associate editors’ belief in and embrace of my manuscript is gratifying and thrilling feedback, especially for a poet whose first book took ten years to find a publisher. For me, this near to immediate, positive feedback bodes well for the life of this book. O, Poetry Gods! Though The Long Now That Conditions Permit was not crowned winner, in recognition of being a finalist, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, selected and published five poems from my manuscript.

Interim, where Test Site Finalists’ poems appear

This second manuscript continues and furthers the ecofeminist focus and positioning of my first book, The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020) The selection of poems in Interim will orient you to how the poems engage the various conditions and systems that prevent the freedom of women who desire the liberty to walk Earth as they are, wounded but free. You are cordially invited to read the poems! Here’s an excerpt from “Bardo Friend and I Belly Up to Smattering Stars.”

Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics and Editor Claudia Keelan have been enormously and gorgeously supportive to my life and the lives of my poems. She published two poems from my first poetry collection The Minuses and offered the book these wonder words:

The poems in Jami Macarty’s devotional collection swing upon a hinge that is the recurring site of the poet’s perception in time, where what is seen shows the inherent connection of each thing to its other: ‘honey given / honey taken.’ The Minuses’ brilliance lives in what the poet is able to give up for the possibility of finding a wholeness that is ongoing: ‘I come and go / from myself as I am / I will not return.’ A seer is, after all, one who sees. Jami Macarty is one who sees.”
—Claudia Keelan

And, Claudia has been equally, vitally supportive to the poems in my second collection, The Long Now Conditions Permit. She selected six poems from the batch of poems I wrote during July 2020 (some of which are in the second manuscript) for publication in the all-women print issue of Interim 2020. Plus, in that issue she offered a review (under her penname Lacy Aul) of The Minuses that made birds fly in my heart.

Interim, 2020 with Gretchen Gales’ art on the cover

And, she selected a poem from The Long Now Conditions Permit for the 2021 all-women print issue.

Interim, 2021 with Despy Boutris’ cover art.

You see what I mean? Claudia: Enormously, generously supportive. A dream-come-true of support for, belief in, and embrace of me and the poems I write. Claudia’s is a consciousness on Earth I would not want to be without in mind or spirit.

And, on that note, allow me to take a bow and my leave. But, before I do, thank you dear readers, for the gifts of your time and attention as I share with you what I have been appreciating and celebrating in my writer’s life.

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The Pluses!

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention!

+ Thank you bows to Claudia Keelan, beautiful poet, special friend, and generous editor.

+ Thank you bows to Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Andrew S. Nicholson, Assistant Editor, and Kathryn McKenzie, Managing Editor.

+ Thank you bows to Interim Test Site Poetry Series and the editorial team for your unique attention to my poems.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to my publisher Stephanie G’Schwind, and Mountain West Poetry Series editors Donald Revell and Kazim Ali, et al interns at the Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) for making The Minuses (2020) with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Beth Svinarich et al at University Press of Colorado for their beautiful support to me and The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to monsoon storm chaser and marvelous professional photographer, Liz Kemp whose monsoon photograph storms the cover of The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows to Nomados Literary Publishers, Meredith and Peter Quartermain for making the chapbook Instinctive Acts with me.

+ Thank you bows to Vallum Chapbook Series and editors Leigh Kotsilidis and Eleni Zisimatos for making the chapbook Mind of Spring with me.

+ Thank you bows to Finishing Line Press and editors Leah Maines and Christin Kinkaid for making the chapbook Landscape of The Wait with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Vincent K. Wong for his friendship, creative collaboration, and for taking my author photos.

+ This bears repeating: Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! If you have any questions or comments, write me! I would love to hear from you!

! BOOKS !

Posted on by Jami Macarty

Happy April!

Hurrah dear reader, you are here!

In these monthly ish dispatches I share with you my writer’s and reader’s experiences—about my books, about the books of others, about my writing practice, and my reading practice.

Happy National Poetry Month!

“April is the cruellest month, breeding” is the line that opens “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot. Ninety-nine years after the publication of the seminal, Modernist poem that opening line is the prompt for the celebration of the twenty-fifth annual National Poetry Month in the United States of America. Since 1998, Canada has also been celebrating poetry during April; this is the 23rd annual celebration of National Poetry Month across the ten provinces and three territories in Canada.

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In March, my during-the-pandemic-published poetry collection, The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), celebrated its first year anniversary. What a year! The pandemic has left me reeling. The tremendous amount of loss—of precious lives and of the smaller stuffs of my normal way of life. With the grief and reckoning ongoing, I’m finding it harder to take pleasure and feeling lethargic. Of course, that’s playing a role in my sense of being in flow with my writing and reading practices, and in my sense of productivity and accomplishment.

And. Through this stream of loss and lethargy flows some “pluses” around The Minuses. What are “the pluses”? Reviews, interviews, and events I and my poems have been lucky to receive. In this post, I share with you excerpts from the review Lacy Aul, aka Claudia Keelan, offered The Minuses in Interim. Though the review was published late December 2020, I’ve been revisiting it as a lethargy-booster, to remind me of what I seek in language. Below, I also share with you the YouTube link to the year anniversary reading I gave for the Tucson-based poetry group POG. And, I take account of some of the books I read in March, the third month of my fourth annual personal Big Read:  #mypersonalBigRead2021.

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What Is Missing Lives in What Is Found: On The Minuses by Jami Macarty—a review by Lacy Aul, aka Claudia Keelan

“The Minuses is a collection of poems that locates origin in the ongoing energy of the physical world. Dedicated to “The One who renders this ground known and unknown,” The Minuses renders such a ground by showing how the phenomenal nature of wind, trees, birds, plants—in essence all vegetable, mineral and nonhuman entities—exist in parity with the contingent nature of their function in time. Indeed, while even human-made-things—such as doorways, windows, and public parks, also provide insight in the transparency of their use value—human beings in The Minuses are often dependent upon an a priori understanding of existence, which hinders them from observing their likewise conditional roles on the earth we share.” —from What Is Missing Lives in What Is Found: On The Minuses by Jami Macarty” by Lacy Aul

Lacy Aul, Claudia Keelan‘s penname, offered The Minuses a review that made birds fly out of the top of my head in Volume 36: Issue 5 of Interim, the all women’s 2020 print issue, whose publication is supported by the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. 

Interim, edited by Claudia Keelan, gave a home to two poems from The Minuses: “Reverse of Shadow” appeared in Volume 27 / Number 1 & 2 / 2009. “You Is to Door as I Is to Door” (retitled: “Door Ratio”) appeared in Volume 30 / Issue 1 & 2 / 2013.


“The presiding spirit of inquiry in The Minuses would make such a world where oppositions parlay to form a whole… The urge towards completeness in the book finds itself in constant combat with a counter spirit whose innate, if cowardly, function is to further divide—human from earth, self from other, man from woman, body from soul—into the ultimate opposition that is war. The proponents of subtraction deals in the language of one to one comparison: “I cannot say who you are without saying who I am” (21, “Reverse of Shadow”). Unstuck in time where impossibly “The past increases within the present,” (30, ”Equals Rain”) and “What you say is our future / is your future” (31, “Door Ratio”), the protagonists of opposition bully those whose loyalty towards the possibility of the “all” insures their victimization and silence.” —from What Is Missing Lives in What Is Found: On The Minuses by Jami Macarty“ by Lacy Aul

Interim and Claudia Keelan have been wonderfully, indispensably supportive to me and my work. Claudia also wrote a generous, sweet something for the back cover of The Minuses.

“The poems in Jami Macarty’s devotional collection swing upon a hinge that is the recurring site of the poet’s perception in time, where what is seen shows the inherent connection of each thing to its other: “honey given : honey taken.” The Minuses’ brilliance lives in what the poet is able to give up for the possibility of finding a wholeness that is ongoing: “I come and go / from myself as I am / I will not return.” A seer is, after all, one who sees. Jami Macarty is one who sees.“
—from Claudia Keelan for the back cover of The Minuses.

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POG Arts Tucson Reading, March 20, 2020

“Jami Macarty lives and writes very much in the world you and I occupy, one in which we entangle with each other, have mutual responsibilities, give incredible gifts, yet don’t always treat the other or even oneself so well… There is no avoidance of the world in Macarty’s work, that world which may be disgraced and marked by serial killing, and be in need of painkillers. Yet there is also a mind intent on salvaging what is of use, a practice that will bring us tiger stamina to survive, a certainty that we are and can be though perhaps “a burning fragment,” still a fragment, “in the menagerie of the surviving world.” Macarty understands the wonders of place… One constant in her writing which seems to embrace her sense of place, literal and metaphoric, is a persistent dwelling in and within the sounds of language, sometimes expressed in a marvelous consonantal barrage of alliteration… I think we are fortunate tonight to walk our ears and minds in her particular “circus circumstance.” —from Charles Alexander‘s introduction

On March 20, 2021, I celebrated the one year anniversary of The Minuses by giving a reading with Jeanne Heuving for the people of POG: Poetry in action! This is the second time I’ve read for the Tucson-based poetry group. The first reading was in 2005, a month or so before I moved from Tucson to Vancouver. For that reading I was live and in person, standing at a microphone at Cushing Street Bar in Downtown Tucson. For this second reading, fifteen and a half years later, I offered my poems over Zoom from my apartment in Vancouver. Jeanne Heuving zoomed in from Seattle, our hosts from Tucson, and forty souls joined us from locales in between.

Jeanne Heuving and I had been trying for a reading together for a while, so I was happy to finally roost at POG with her and her marvelous poems from Mood Indigo.

Listen to the POG Arts Tucson reading on YouTube!

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What I read in March: #mypersonalBigRead2021

Now, allow me to share with you what I read during March. Because March is Women’s History Month and because I had not yet read a single chapbook, I read mostly chapbooks and mostly volumes by women during the third month of the year.

In the photos above are some of the chapbooks I read in March. Let me fill in the blanks of the peeking titles at the edges. In the third photo: on the left edge, Paper Work, by Matea Kulić, and on the right edge maybe, basically, by Tracy Waide Boer, both published by Anstruther.

Other wonderful chapbook publishers of the above: Effing Press, Finishing Line Press, Frog Hollow Press, Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies Press, Madhouse Press, Nomados Literary Publishers, Omnidawn Publishing, Porkbelly Press, and SpeCt! Books.

Among the women writers above who most inspire me: Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Hoa Nguyen, Dayna Patterson, Emily Pérez, Christine Stewart, and Lissa Wolsak; I thank them for their ongoing support and inspiration and conversation.

Chapbooks! I used to think lesser of them. That is, that they were lesser forms of publication. I think I picked up that judgment from the prevailing winds within poetry… Over time and reading, my attitude evolved… Then, between 2017 and 2018, three chapbooks containing my work were published; I found that process completely gratifying. Now I feel the complete opposite; “lesser than” has morphed to “more than”—enough. I find chapbooks special and exciting and enchanting. I respond especially to the short but intense spell they cast. Right now, with my mushy ish, hard-to-keep-interested-brain (what others are calling “pandemic brain”), the length, intensity, and ephemerality of chapbooks are a perfect match. They are a manageable read, and that makes me feel like I can accomplish some reading. Hurrah chapbooks!

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+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention!

+ Thank you bows to poet and reviewer and horizon Claudia Keelan, for her expansively attentive, made birds fly out of my head, generous review of The Minuses, and to Interim for ongoing support of my poetry.

+Thank you bows to Charles Alexander et al at POG for making space for me to read my poems; to Charles again for his charming introduction, and to Jeanne Heuving for sharing her poems and the Zoom stage with me on March 20, 2020.

+ Thank you bows to the writers and publishers who brought their grand accomplishments of chapbooks and books into the world for keeping me company and inspiring me in March.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to publisher Stephanie G’Schwind, and Mountain West Poetry Series editors Donald Revell and Kazim Ali, et al interns at the Center for Literary Publishing (CLP) for making The Minuses with me.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Beth Svinarich et al at University Press of Colorado for their beautiful support to me and The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to monsoon storm chaser and marvelous professional photographer, Liz Kemp whose monsoon photograph storms the cover of The Minuses.

+ Thank you bows (continuous!) to Vincent K. Wong for his friendship, creative collaboration, and for taking my author photos.

+ This bears repeating: Thank you bows (continuous!) to you, dear reader, for the gift of your attention! If you have any questions or comments, write me!

The Minuses

Posted on by Jami Macarty

 

After years of working on the poems,

various versions of manuscript
An owl-high stack

after signing off on the final proof,

after burning the owl-high stack of manuscript versions,

after disposing of every last ashen comma and colon,

after the boxes containing the books arrived at my door,

The Minuses at my door

after the boxes containing the books were opened,

and, after eyeing and drinking in the realization that The Minuses is in print! is published! books are in hand!

I’m resting on my laurels*.

 

  • *After spontaneously using this phrase, I did a bit of reading on the orgin of the laurel wreath and its associates in Greek mythology, namely Eros, the god of love, Apollo, patron of archery, and Daphne, a river nymph. The story: Apollo made fun of Eros’ use of arrows, so Eros took revenge by shooting Apollo with a gold arrow, instilling him with love for Daphne, and shot Daphne with a lead arrow, instilling her with hatred for Apollo. To be free of him, Daphne was turned into a laurel tree, which is evergreen because Apollo rendered it thus. Fashioning himself a wreath out of the laurel branches, Apollo turned Daphne into a cultural symbol for him and other musicians and poets. Rather perfect, yes?

 

Current mood: a yellow rose and desert monsoon, gratitude-infusion!

Thank you bows to my publisher: Stephanie G’Schwind; the photographer of the cover image: Liz Kemp, and the horizon of poets, who offered their endorsements to the book: Gillian Conoley, Claudia Keelan, and Daphne Marlatt.