Huge congrats to Kerri Webster for winning the Whiting Award! Kerri was one of four poets to receive the honor this year, along with the cool 50K that comes with it. (Not too shabby.)

Kerri was our featured poet in our Summer / Fall 2011 issue with five — count em five! — poems. Here’s a brief taste from one titled “Diorama.”

See the cross-section opened on loss
so big you could charge admission? Hole
in the ceiling for the tree to grow through. Something
nests in the radiator. I don’t climb up.

Details on the Whiting Award here.

Julie, who is my boss, told me that she would by me a beer if I posted this for her, because her mom wanted to go to a happy hour and was giving her the evil eye. So, while Julie is out getting tight with her mom, I’m here to share Julie’s account of last week’s Washington Square launch party with the world. She wrote it, and I added a couple of things that I thought would be appropriate. Click below if you think you can handle it.

Love,

Ed

A big thank you to everyone who attended last Saturday’s launch party for Issue 28. It was a swell time. Inordinate amounts of cheese were ingested, as were many bottles of the illustrious Charles Shaw, special vintage 2011.  We sang, we danced, we lived. Poets and fiction writers came together, like two warring countries momentarily united by a common enemy, which was, in this instance, the rest of the world. Publicity Editor Amy Meng charmed off many pairs of pants, including my own. That’s only sort of a joke. I was wearing a skirt, guys.

Bryant Musgrove and Kimberly Grey, two contributors from the latest issue and our two featured readers for the night, couldn’t have been better or more intensely erotic, especially Kimberly, whose poems had lots of sexy words in them, like sex, and sexy.

There was even ending night drama, when we all got kicked out of the brownstone known as the Lil-Vern House of the Word (spoken, written, and otherwise), and so we tumbled down 6^th Avenue until we reached Treehouse, our bar in the sky, our home away from home, where Amy Meng (Publicity Editor, as previously mentioned. Also, house mascot, and beloved by all) proceeded to charm the pants off (again) the entire bar. With but(t) one flutter of Amy’s lashes, everyone leapt from their stools in unison and gently slid their pants to their ankles. We all applauded her by buying many drinks.

In all seriousness, the writers were great, the reading was great, and a night to remember was had by all. And guess what?  The most awesome thing about The Great Launch of Issue 28 is that OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS it will happen again, next semester, when we launch Issue 29. Will you be there? Will your work be in our issue? Will you stand at the podium in the sacred reader-spot and break our hearts and eyes with your talent and beauty?

THE FUTURE IS IN YOUR HANDS. Submit to us. Better yet, buy Issue 28, effectively donating some money to ONSQU in the process, so that we can drink more, and thereby create more brilliance/parties, and then submit to us. Honestly your chances of getting published will increase (not because we are nepotistic, selfish bastards, but because you’re always supposed to read journals before you submit to them).  In the meantime, check out these pictures from the launch party and feel sad about the fact that you stayed in and ate leftover mac and cheese straight from the Tupperware just because it was raining.

Oh wait, there are no pictures. We forgot to do that. Next time there will be though! We promise.

Upcoming ONSQU madness that you will not want to miss: On October 30^th, we’ll be hosting a book fair at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, where we will be selling used and new books and raffling more swell prizes. (CORRECTION: This originally said October 29th, but the book fair will be on the 30th of October, so take note. xoxo)

So here’s the Exquisite Corpse from the Issue 28 Launch Party. Gird your loins, as they say.

• I didn’t read this, but I thought the title showed promise.
• The Paris Review Blog’s Odd Jobs thing is usually good. The second one has to be a microcosm of something. Maybe Facebook. This is the only time I’ll reference Facebook twice in one post. Don’t hold me to that. I don’t think I’ve ever been looked at through a two-way mirror – or have I?
• Have you heard about the recently discovered Saul Bellow manuscript that’s being published? Book trailer here!
• I hate everything ever written on this subject, but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody.
• This is not new at all, but John Fowles told good stories: “When I was in a hospital bed just after having had a stroke recently, I was near weeping with self-rage and self-pity, reciting a mantra to myself: tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera, tenthredinifera . . . that unpronounceable name belongs to one of the most beautiful Ophrys, or bee orchids, of Europe. I had come upon it on a Cretan mountain the previous spring; and I was saying that name like a mantra because I thought I should never climb that remote mountain again.”
• Usually if an interview ends like this: RB: I don’t want you to feel repressed. GB: No, no, this has been really great. RB: Well thank you very much. GB: OK. I feel like it was not a satisfying read, but they got in some 17th and 18th century American History talk, and that’s my jam.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball

Vintage Contemporaries

ISBN-13: 978-0307739858

“William ate the rest of his lunch in silence. He put what he had learned in a box and he shut that box. To do otherwise would be to give signs that he had learned something, some new information, and such behavior—indicative of new information—is what alerts those who are looking for traitors. He could not even consider having learned that which he had learned, which after all was practically nothing. Just an idea, a hope of an idea. Away with it for now.”

The Curfew takes place in a city of invisible tyrants—a city where people go missing and grandmothers shoot police officers. Add to this a lost mother, a mute daughter, a father on a quest, and a puppet show. Jesse Ball (The Way Through Doors) creates a modern fable, nests and chops his narratives so that his reader is always pleasantly dislodged. Perhaps because of his background in poetry and art, Ball has meticulous methods of placement and composition. This book feels like something that was not written but put together from raw materials. Asides and observations mix with the story, and so The Curfew is full of aphoristic, fantastical flashes: “There is a theory that the sun is made up of thousands of suns arranged in a war against the others. It is a discredited theory, but it has never been disproven.” Think of this book as a novella and a sketch, a poem and a collage. It is pieces put together for a reason, and in the middle of it all there is still the story—a father who gives everything to keep his daughter safe, a daughter who reaches for anything within her power to learn her father’s fate—acting as a warm human thread that is never subsumed.

Cat Richardson, Managing Editor

Mariner Books

ISBN-13: 978-0395957769

Here we are presented with an unflinching account of one of the great, highly original confessionals, illuminated in no small part by Maxine Kumin’s introduction. This is a practical tome, a Sexton survey that is best read in twenty-page doses. It’s also a striking concordance of her poetics; the ability to track the devices which constitute Sexton’s sensibility may prove its most useful aspect. We follow her wary sojourn towards God—“God is in your typewriter,” she was told—where her most scathing surrealism emerges: “Jesus was fasting. / He ate His celibate life. / The ground shuddered like an ocean, / a great sexual swell under His feet.” We follow her rhyming as it develops from a decorative stand-in for gravitas to a resonant, architectonic feature; in Love Poems (1969), this utterly conversational musicality reaches its culmination in tandem with gripping lineation. Sexton then turned to the mythic, reworking all manner of fable and fairy-tale in preparation for her later poems, which tackle her Christian mythology with a taut, peculiar faith. Her poetry is particularly suited to the frenzied asymptote between the cerebral and the carnal, piety and appetite: “For they fling together against hardness and somewhere, in another room, a light is clicked on by gentle fingers.”  She finds curious objects which fulfill the dual role of holy symbols and meals, arranging them in absurd litanies as befits her taste for the liturgical cadence, if not the precise content.

To be sure, there are many clunkers once everything is considered. There are times when Plath’s rigor might have benefitted Sexton’s lines a great deal: “Angel of hopes and calendars, do you know despair?” Her fierce dedication to the actuals of the body (genitalia and all), while necessary, will not always be appreciated. She also has a tendency to wring a certain turn of phrase dry if it works once—her catalogue of sea-actions ages quickly, as does her taste for possessives. These, however, can’t touch the resplendence of the greater portion of her output, characterized mostly by successful poem-cycles. While she championed the self as an inexhaustible reservoir, meanwhile asserting the female voice with formidable creative energies, it is clear that her genius rests on neither confessionalism nor feminism alone. To borrow Kumin’s phrase, Sexton has earned her place in the canon by advancing the frontiers of the English language’s unique poetic territory: diction both brutal and sinuous, ritualization, mythmaking, and the talent for extrapolating Place from Self.

Peter Longofono, International Editor

What you can expect to find:

• Interviews with writers you’ve heard about and writers you might be hearing about for the first time but will certainly hear more about in the future.
• Updates on our brilliant masthead and the books on their bedside tables.
• Book news. LOLcats News. Weather News. News about My Lunch.
• Poetry and prose from our slush pile that’s too good to go unshared.
• Dispatches from behind the frontlines of the NYC/NYU literary scene. (In other words, what I saw when I spent all night in the corner closest to the wine table.)

There will be guest bloggers, there will be book reviews, and there will be whatever else you want to see here. If you have any suggestions for content, email me at: onsqublog@gmail.com.

My name is Julie Buntin. I’m a second-year MFA candidate in fiction at NYU, and I’ll be posting here regularly.