Just received word that I’m being awarded a 2011 Oregon Arts Commission fellowship in poetry. This is my second OAC (the last was in 1997). This award will help support 2011 readings of the current books; journal publication/revisions of  the MSS Perpetua and The Republic of Robinson; and efforts to get the following MSS published: Hello Hell (flash + prose poems), Battle Hymnal (poems), and Aftermathematic (poems).

Beth Spencer of Bear Star Press asked me to reflect on the concepts, characters and composition of The Kilim Dreaming and The Spear Lily (as well as the third poem in the trilogy/triptych, The Wire Garden, which inhabits its own separate book). You can read the resulting essay on her blog There’s a Bear There: http://theresabearthere.blogspot.com.

In the new Stickman Review 9/2, three prose poems: “Dog Fennel,” “The Throw Pillow” and “Rasa” http://www.stickmanreview.com/V9N2/. Also, four poems about my jazzbo alter ego Robinson in The Writing Disorder: http://www.thewritingdisorder.com/poetryfour.html. If you like those, three more poems from the MS The Republic of Robinson can be read at Arabesques: http://www.arabesques-editions.com/journal/robert_hill_long/index.html, plus another at The Pedestal: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=15426. Several more Robinsons will soon come out from Dead Mule.

The Kilim Dreaming is now available from Small Press Distribution, directly from Bear Star Press, or signed/inscribed from me. Booksellers interested in discounted orders should contact SPD, or Beth Spencer at Bear Star Press. The retail price is $16/$20 Canada; standard bookseller discounts apply. Also possible to obtain Kilim from Amazon (last resort).

I can offer a single signed/inscribed copy postpaid for $16 anywhere in the US.  Two or more signed copies will be progressively discounted.

The Wire Garden, my Arlo Press companion book to The Kilim Dreaming, is also available as signed/inscribed copy. The Wire Garden is a clothbound limited edition that contains the third part of a trilogy begun in The Kilim Dreaming, and is available (signed/numbered) for $20 anywhere in the US. You can have a copy of both books together for $35 postpaid. Contact me here or at rohilong [at] gmail [dot] com for more details.

Kilim Dreaming jacket

Wire Garden jacket

“The Water Doesn’t Stop” and “Onan, Low Tide,” a pair of prose pieces about a couple of low points in my life, are readable at Glossolalia, a lovely Tumblr zine edited by Kristina Havet in Vancouver. If you enjoyed Peter Johnson’s journal The Prose Poem and Brian Clements’ journal Sentence, add Glossolalia to your blogroll: http://glossolaliaflash.tumblr.com/

The Kilim Dreaming originally included “The Wire Garden,” a sequence about my father’s last days juxtaposed with with the events of a summer when I was 15 and he was 46. Beth Spencer and the other Bear Star editors decided they preferred “An Indefinite Sentence of Exile in Florence, Massachusetts,” and I concurred. But I had also been looking forward to presenting my mother with a book containing “The Wire Garden,” since at 88 her reading days are numbered (as she’d be first to admit).

My timely solution was to create a book at Lulu.com that includes “The Wire Garden,” plus a number of other elegies for my father that were first published in Poetry, Seneca Review, Diagram, Del Sol Review, Whiskey Island, Cream City Review, and the Duke Medical Center health Arts Network. It’s a handsome cloth book of 40 pages, and retails for $21. You may order it directly from Lulu.com, but if you’d like a signed/inscribed copy, contact me here or at rohilong[at]gmail[dot]com.

Lulu.com also offers the PDF for $2.74. Follow this link for more info:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rohilongatgmaildotcom

2 in 2River View: “Good Friday” about a daughter refusing to draw her father (and the consequences); “The Swimmer” about my old friendenemy depression.
Plus audio clips (Quicktime): http://www.2river.org/2RView/14_4/default.html

The 2River View, 14.4 (Summer 2010)
Mitch Roberson Walter Bargen Antonia Clark James Grinwis Clark Holtzman Anna Hurst Robert Hill Long Martin Ott Amy Pence Carolyn Foster Segal Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon

Other work forthcoming in Poetry East: http://www.poetryeast.org/about.html

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