Blog Posting about The Park of Upside-Down Chairs

My publisher, Kevin Walzer, has a blog on poetry and recently blogged about my book, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, along with several other poetry books recently published by WordTech Communications, his independent poetry press.

Stony Brook Manhattan Reading on April 27th!

I had the pleasure of reading last Tuesday evening (exactly a week ago today--and exactly at this time--) at the Manhattan Campus of Stony Brook University on Park Avenue South. It was my true book launch for The Park of Upside Down Chairs--my new book just out from Word Tech Communications. I also was delighted to be able to read with two exceptional poets, Tom Healy and John Rybicki. Friends, family and poetry lovers were all in attendance. After, we had a book signing, arranged by the host of the event, the talented poet Julie Sheehan. I found Tom's work riveting, with each word dropping like a dense weight on the page. The silences in his poems are both sensual and palpable. John's poems were full of raw honest pain and a certain mesmerizing luminescence. The evening fed me--both as reciter of poetry and as listener. Here are a few photos. One taken of us at the book signing and one of me (glasses donned) reading from my poems.

The Park of Upside-Down Chairs has arrived at my Doorstep!

On Friday, April 9th, I received my first full-length book in the mail! The Park of Upside-Down Chairs arrived intact, delivered not by the stork but by UPS on a rainy, unassuming evening. I am, I must admit, still in a bit of shock. It feels wonderful to weigh its heft in my palms. I know e-books, etc... are taking off these days, but there is nothing yet to replace the gentle but solid feel of a book; its intimate, yet sovereign presence--something not dependent on computers or URL's. I especially relish the whispery flipping of its pages.... I just saw Bright Star--the Jane Campion film about John Keats--and find myself feeling especially wistful this weekend and thinking of poets with first and second books and the possible fates that await those books! It is also spring in full form right now. Trees are frilled with white blossoms, yet a chill still persists in the air. April is speeding by! To access the WordTech link to my book, simply click on the following link: The Park of Upside-Down Chairs.

Alexandra van de Kamp is the author of The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, forthcoming from CW Books (WordTech Press) in the Spring of 2010.

Her earlier collections include The Photographer's Interview (2006, Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 34); A Living Book (2004), with artwork by Rebecca Aidlin; and The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002 Wind Magazine), winner of the 2001 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize.

Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Meridian, Rain Taxi, Red Rock Review, Poetry Northwest, Court Green, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Lake Effect, Quarter After Eight and Washington Square.

Her translations of two Spanish women poets, Ángela Pérez Ovejero and Marta López-Luaces, were featured in the Canadian magazine filling Station, and an interview with Billy Collins was
reprinted nationally in Imagine magazine (Johns Hopkins). She is one of the founding editors of Terra Incognita, an international literary/cultural journal in English and Spanish.

Alexandra lives in Port Jefferson, New York, with her husband, William Glenn, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002)

Winner of the 2002 Quentin R. Howard Chapbook Award
from Wind magazine, selected by Roger Mitchell.


Read the poem "The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century"

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century

For weeks, we dreamed ourselves
through each day—the corners of tables,
the intimate shapes of our hands
no longer enough
to jar us fully awake. In the kitchen,
the counters gave off their glittery stare,
but like any bottle or chair, we were rained upon
by the falling air—the rain touching
and touching us to its damp hair.

They say the dead keep growing
their hair and nails, their own kind of weather
wrapping around them, tethering them
more fervently to the earth
because of the persistence
of what surrounds them. And so,
we felt our own sleep deepen,
our bodies grow mute as stones
in a gray-green soil—reluctant to move
through such a thick, viscous world.

In the end, every window slurred our view—
the panes swelled by a slow-motion current.
My husband's body wavered, a fluid heaviness
moving towards me, and all the doors creaked
like old buoys out at sea. Even birds refused to sing—
too stunned, like us, with a certain quiet,
unable to commit to any one specific thing.

In this weather, there was no forgetting
where we were, no pushing off
from the present moment. For a time,
we were quieted, like figures
in a landscape painting who show us
they see the mountains in the distance
by the way their bodies are poised,
ready to listen.


Originally published in Poems & Plays.

A Living Book (2004)

Limited Edition of 200 beautifully handcrafted books

Poems - Alexandra van de Kamp
Paintings - Rebecca Aidlin

Read the poem "A Living Book," with two paintings by Rebecca Aidlin.

$10, plus $2 Shipping & Handling