Last call for PA chapbooks: The Keystone Chapbook Prize

Click here for guidelines to the Keystone Chapbook Prize, sponsored by Seven Kitchens Press. The postmark deadline for this year's competition is Wednesday, July 15th. Authors published so far in the series are Harry Humes, Deborah Burnham, Lisa Sewell and Katherine Bode-Lang.

Keystone Chapbook Series: Number 3: Lisa Sewell

Long Corridor: poems by Lisa Sewell. Number Three in the Keystone Chapbook Series from Seven Kitchens Press; winner of the 2008 Keystone Chapbook Prize. Selected by G.C. Waldrep:

"Some selves present as halls of mirrors, but for Lisa Sewell, the poetic self--the lyric self, the speaking I--inhabits a hall ofo texts, a palace of moments in which personal experience resonates literally with someone else's story. From Murder on the Orient Express to The Anatomy of Melancholy, Little House in the Big Woods to The Corrections, texts become sites against which a speaking self fragments, then constellates again as a sort of negative image through which the exigencies of our historical moment come into sharp focus. In these poems, King Lear and Ellis Island are joined at the spine, Iraq and Wharton's House of Mirth, New Orleans and Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. These lyrics suggest that in the end it may not be literature that haunts our lives, but our lives that haunt the longer, stranger, more oblique life of Literature."

$7.00

42 pages, 5.125 x 7.875 inches

ISBN-13: 978-0-9820372-4-9

Available May 1, 2009

LISA SEWELL is the author of two books of poems: The Way Out (Alice James Books, 1998) and Name Withheld (Four Way Books, 2006). She is also co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan, 2007). She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Recent work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, New Letters, Tampa Review, Laurel Review, The Journal and Colorado Review. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the English department at Villanova University.

Murder on the Orient Express (1976)

O summon me

first to the porter's compartment

to question in private my whereabouts,

my wardrobe, sleeping habits and origins

then with the governess and elder statesman

the small dark man with a womanish voice

to the velvet curtained rail car

scene of crimes

and in the voice of reason, tone that holds its own

but withholds judgment and hoards

its shocking revelations until the end

tell what we have done.

Be diminutive and mild, pink-cheeked

or darkly French with waxed mustaches

but choose an English and an explanation

each of us can believe, as pieces fall

as you expose what we never meant to show

through choice of adjectives, the way we mixed up

chicken pox with whooping cough or German measles,

by what we stole or secreted out of greed or curiosity

for lust or private gain or to protect, we tell ourselves,

the loved or unloved ones whose life and livelihood

we stepped back or out of the way of and let begin

its fall and steep climb from the mountaintop.

Show me the knife, my fingerprints

on the cabinet door, the terraced rice field

burned village nightly body count full terrain

of my part and my complicity

now that I am no longer young and no longer free

to point a knowing finger or to vanish

with the fuchsia kimono down the long corridor of history.

:: Lisa Sewell, Long Corridor

Keystone Chapbook Award: Harry Humes

Underground Singing: Poems by Harry Humes

Winner of the inaugural Keystone Chapbook Award, selected by Jeff Mann

Publication date: December 21, 2007

Now accepting preorders: please e-mail me to order your copy for $8 postpaid

A copy will be mailed to all entrants in the 2007 competition.

CFS: Keystone Chapbook Award

SEVEN KITCHENS PRESS
2007 Keystone Chapbook Award – for Pennsylvania Poets

Prize: $100 plus 25 copies.
Submission deadline: Postmarked between June 17 and August 17 of each year.
Eligibility: Open to all Pennsylvania poets [see complete guidelines below].

COMPLETE GUIDELINES:
Any poet who was born, has lived, or currently lives in Pennsylvania is eligible to submit to the Keystone Chapbook Award. (Your manuscript does not have to treat Pennsylvania as its subject.) Additionally, poets living elsewhere may submit manuscripts which do show a strong connection to Pennsylvania.

Submit a paginated manuscript of 16-20 pages (not including front matter) of poetry. Include two cover pages: one with the manuscript title, author name, address, e-mail and phone number; the second cover page should have the manuscript title only. Include a table of contents page. Include, if applicable, an acknowledgments page for work previously published.

Please include, on a separate page, a brief (100-150 words) biographical note, which must address your specific connection to Pennsylvania (if you do not currently reside here).

The author’s name should not appear in the manuscript.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but you must notify us promptly if your manuscript is accepted elsewhere.

Submissions must be posted between June 17 and August 17. The winning manuscript will be announced on or before October 15, at which time the name of the final judge will be announced. Manuscript finalists will also be announced, and may be eligible for spring/summer publication in the Keystone Chapbook Series.
Manuscripts will not be returned. E-mailed submission is preferred, but you may send via regular mail.

Do not staple or bind your manuscript. If you are sending by mail, please use a binder clip and mail flat in an 8.5 x 11 envelope. If you are sending by e-mail, please send one document in Microsoft Word format (.doc or .rtf files are ideal); you must include the words “Keystone Chapbook” in the subject line of your e-mail. Include a $12 reading fee with each manuscript you submit. Multiple submissions are acceptable. Checks should be made payable to Ron Mohring. Online payment may be made via PayPal to sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com. Each entrant will receive one copy of the winning chapbook, to be published on or before December 31.

The winner will receive $100 and 25 copies of their chapbook. Additionally, the publisher will distribute ten review copies and will solicit online reviews of the chapbook.

Send your manuscript—by e-mail, as a Microsoft Word attachment, to: sevenkitchens at yahoo dot com; or by mail to Ron Mohring, Publisher & Editor; PO Box 668; Lewisburg PA 17837.