Jean LeBlanc's Ancient Songs of Us

I'm pleased to announce the release of Jean LeBlanc's Ancient Songs of Us, a new collection of poetry, as the seventy-third volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. It's available now in both print and e-book editions through Aqueduct's website (http://www.aqueductpress.com).


Read a sample from the book.


The poems in Ancient Songs of Us suggest that no song is “ancient,” that every story crosses time and transcends place to remind us what it means to be human. Love, hatred, fury, longing, ennui, sadness—these states of heart and mind in all their nuance hues overflow from these poems.

Poets House Showcase

This year two of Aqueduct's recent poetry titles, Jean LeBlanc's A Field Guide to the Spirits and Rose Lemberg's Marginalia to Stone Bird are appearing in Poet House's annual Showcase. Here's the description from the Poets House website:

The only event of its kind, the annual Poets House Showcase is a free exhibit featuring the new poetry books and poetry-related texts published in the United States in a single year from over 700 commercial, university and independent presses. Displaying volumes by individual authors, anthologies, chapbooks, biographies, critical studies, essay collections, CDs, DVDs, and more, the Poets House Showcase is a diverse and inclusive exhibition in which books from micro-presses receive the same care and attention as major publishers.

Opening on Thursday, July 14th, the 2016 Showcase is on view through Saturday, August 20, 2015. More than 3,000 items are in the 2016 exhibition.


If you live in NYC and are a poetry lover, this may well be for you.

(Photos furnished by Jean Le Blanc.)

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2015: pt. 25: Jean LeBlanc

The Pleasures of Reading in 2015

by Jean LeBlanc

I teach at least five courses each semester at a small but vibrant community college. This cuts into my reading time, as you can imagine. Still, I keep a book or two under my pillow, for those few minutes each evening I can keep my eyes open, or for one o'clock a.m. when a school dream chases all hope of sleep away. Even now, mid-December, my stack of books slated for summer reading is taking over a corner of my bedroom. My reading time is precious to me, and I appreciate books that make me feel I am in the presence of brilliance. Several books from this past year stand out in my mind...

1.  I began the year with an old favorite, Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time. I was inspired to reread this after viewing Ken Burns's documentary about the Roosevelt dynasty.

2 and 3. I spent my spring break with two more perennial favorites, Jane Austen's Persuasion and E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. I want to live in these worlds!

4. Summer! And a new release from David McCullough. This book quickly became my new favorite non-fiction read: The Wright Brothers. What an American story; what odd but loveable characters. And what a revelation: Orville and Wilbur's sister Katherine, their support at home but also a woman ahead of her own time. This book was so thrilling, I read it a second time within a month of finishing it in May.

5.  I don't usually read mystery novels, but a friend of mine, Richard Goffman, has penned two that are set on the Jersey Shore, peopled with all sorts of interesting characters. The protagonist is a high school English teacher who doesn't mean to get himself sucked into all this drama, but there he is, at the center of it all. Richard's second book, Laid So Low, was one of my favorites this year. His day job (teaching, of course) means all his fans are waiting (im)patiently for Mr. Bachman mystery number three...

6 and 7.  And of course, poetry. This is my craft, so I try to read a book of poetry a month. The two that stand out from this past year are Scott Metz's lakes & now wolves, a book of haiku so delicate, so haunting, so deep, I can't believe even as I'm looking at the book that it is comprised of ordinary words. It's some new kind of language, these poems by Scott Metz. David Huddle's new volume of poetry, Dream Sender, has also joined other books by this poet on my "favorites" shelf.

There were other wonderful books this past year, of course. I am sure I will look back at this list and think, "Why didn't I include...?" Time to go grade a few research papers, prepare for my spring courses...and maybe glimpse at a page or two of my current favorite book that shows me again what it's like to have all this brilliance right at my fingertips.

Happy reading!

Jean LeBlanc is an assistant professor of English in Newton, New Jersey. She is the author of numerous books, including At Any Moment, The Haiku Aesthetic: Short Form Poetry as a Study in Craft, Where We Go: haiku and tanka sequences and other concise imaginings, Skating in Concord, and The Stream Singing Your Name: Tanka & Sijo.Aqueduct Press published her poetry collection A Field Guide to the Spirits earlier this year.

 

Jean LeBlanc's A Field Guide to the Spirits

I'm pleased to announce the release of A Field Guide to the Spirits, a collection of poetry by Jean LeBlanc, as a the forty-seventh volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series. In A Field Guide to the Spirits, poetry becomes a means of time travel in which voices from the past offer insights, reveal secrets, transform our concept of now. These poems explore the interwoven pathways of ghost, memory, imagination, and desire. The spirits visited range from Caroline Herschel and Mary Shelley to Zane Grey and Dashiell Hammet, William Blake to Anne Hutchinson, John Keats to Isaac Newton’s niece. The volume collects fifty-seven poems, forty-four of them original. Aqueduct is releasing it in both print and e-book editions. Check it out on Aqueduct's site.