Announcing Andres Rojas’s “Looking For What Isn’t There”

We are so excited to announce the release of Andres Rojas’s Looking For What Isn’t There, the first of two 2018 Debut Series Chapbook Winners to be released this year, now available for order! You can purchase a copy here, or under the books menu, where you may find a few other titles you’d like to pick up.

These poems received the following praise:

“These colorful swaths of memory and lost language have their own smart beauty, forced open like an amaryllis in winter to enrich and warm the heart. Andres Rojas’ poems feel like rare birds migrating through a drizzled landscape, surprising and subtle and transformational all at once. What a remarkable pleasure it is to read each one.”

— D.A. Powell

“Reading Looking For What Isn’t There, I remember the feeling of encountering Andres Rojas’s poems for the first time; I’m right back in that electric headspace. This poet is not walking a worn path, not echoing anyone else’s voice. Each metaphor,each line—“the radio waves/ lobster-boiled in the censored air”; “a boulevard/ of moonlight on water”—feels both brand-new and full of deep, hard-won wisdom. What a balancing act! I know I’ll return to these poems again and again.”

—Maggie Smith

“The poems of Andres Rojas are succinct, pared down to the essentials: crystalline phrasing, striking imagery. His language, though concise, reveals and complicates longing and exile: ‘What we can’t miss /makes us whole.’ Among the sorrow, the necessity of insight urgently blooms. Empathy allows us to see ‘[a] skeletal Ford. [i]ts vaguely human form.’”

— Eduardo C. Corral

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We just closed submissions for our annual contests a few hours ago, at midnight on April 20th. We received 360 submissions, and are looking forward to reading them (and, while bittersweet, perhaps looking forward a little less enthusiastically at how difficult these decisions will be). Be on the lookout for our next release, a short fiction collection from Robin Littell, coming up very soon! In the meantime, we hope this cruelest month is being kind to all of you.

Announcing Shankar Narayan’s “Postcards from the New World”

We are so pleased to announce the release of Shankar Narayan’s Postcards from the New World, our first 2017 Debut Series Chapbook Co-Winner to be released this year, now available for order! You can purchase a copy here, or over under the books menu, where you may find a few other titles you’d like to pick up. Please also consider checking out Shankar’s website, to find out about readings and events he’s hosting in the future!

His poems received the following praise:

“These poems are wholly original and loaded with compassion, intellect, and lyric interrogation. Shankar Narayan’s Postcards from the New World explores proximity, intimacy, identity, violence, and diaspora with a knowing, prophetic allure. I love these poems for their epistemological underpinnings and their graceful invention. Gorgeous surprises fuel this wonderful debut. Fiercely talented and equally humane, Narayan is one of my favorite new poets.

—Lee Herrick, Poet Laureate of Fresno, 2015-17

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“These poems meditate on connection and dissolution, construction and deconstruction, selves and societies. In a violent historical moment, when rupture and brokenness (the breaking of bodies and the breaking of the word) are so evident, these poems announce a belief that there is (there has to be) some good, some light from a new sun. Narayan writes that “Entanglement means/what happens to you happens/to me,” not just as cosmic fact but as an ethical binding of various selves—the constructed energies of the speaker (abused by the world, consumed by idealism), the inherited and problematic threads of the world (traditions as tethers to a faraway land, the violent and virulent racism of America). In a song driven by words from our moment, Narayan has given us a compelling series of poems that will be worthy of rereading.

—Tod Marshall, Poet Laureate of Washington State, 2016-18

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We have two more powerful and exciting titles to release this season.

If you think you have a manuscript we might love, our annual contest ends May 15th. You can find all the details you need at our Submittable, or elsewhere on our website. We can’t wait to start thinking about what amazing works we’ll get to read soon!

And, if you happen to live near Salem, Massachusetts, Paper Nautilus will have a table at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival Book Fair! The festival as a whole runs Friday, May 4th, through Sunday, May 6th, with some amazing poets — including headliners like Sonia Sanchez, Kaveh Akbar, Dorianne Laux, and Rhina P. Espaillat. You can find Paper Nautilus, peruse our titles, ask questions, or just say hi on Saturday, May 5th, from 11 a.m – 4 p.m. Hope to see you there!

Anita Olivia Koester’s “Arrow Songs” Now Available

We are so pleased to announce the release of Anita Olivia Koester’s, Arrow Songs, now available for order! You can purchase a copy here, or over under the books menu, where you may find a few other titles you’d like to pick up.

Koester’s poems received the following praise:

Arrow Songs is what becomes of Cupid’s arrow once the target has been hit and the flesh is open to receive — it is the body in the rapture and injury of love. There is music throughout — repetition, refrains, alliteration, that assonance that keens, the grief that seems to lullaby, the desire so insistent you listen, you follow, you let the beat shape you. In these heartbreakingly beautiful poems “no one is ever lost, only transformed.
—Arisa White

We have two more chapbooks to release this year, one of which is currently part-assembled in my living room, and awaiting its hand-stitched binding.

If you think you have a manuscript we might love, our annual contest ends May 31st, 2017. You can find all the details you need at our Submittable. We hope to see your book release announcement here next year!

One final thought: if you are in Salem, Massachusetts or the surrounding area next week, please consider checking out the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, May 5th – 7th, which will have some wonderful workshops, readings, a small press fair, and a lot of wonderful people. Hope to see some of you there!

Eloisa Amezcua’s “Symptoms of Teething”

We are so pleased to announce the release of Eloisa Amezcua’s, Symptoms of Teething, now available for order! You can purchase a copy here, or over under the books menu, where you may find a few other titles you’d like to pick up.

Amezcua’s poems received the following praise:

Here is a book of poems that is, at every turn, deeply invested in the kinds of love we share—with each other, with ourselves, with our pasts, and with our futures. In one moment, “we fall asleep / and there is no more falling.” In the next, the morning where “we fabricate each / other into being.” I am so grateful to Eloisa Amezcua for all her fabrications, for building us this little museum of love.
—Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

We have three more chapbooks to release this year, with two titles very close to release

If you think you have a manuscript we might love, our annual contest ends May 31st, 2017. You can find all the details you need at our Submittable. We hope to see your book release announcement here next year!

Happy National Poetry Month

We hope you are all enjoying spring, and getting into the spirit of National Poetry Month! If you’re in a bit of a writing slump, or too distracted by the gradually warming weather and lengthing days to keep your focus, you may want to check out the daily prompts available at http://www.napowrimo.net/ (fiction writers, don’t despair – they might be useful to you, too!) T. S. Eliot notwithstanding, April is looking pretty good for us writers, and hopefully this project will give you a nice little boost.

At Paper Nautilus, we’re busying ourselves with the excellent submissions you’re sending, and are looking forward to an excellent range of powerful work for our 2014 issue – which we’ll be taking submissions for until the end of August, so there’s still time!

We’re also busy with the production of our two prize-winning chapbooks, “From the New World” by Oriana Ivy, and “Mother, Less Child” by Jason McCall. Both should be available in time for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (http://masspoetry.org/category/2014-festival/), which runs from May 2nd – May 4th, and we hope to have them available to debut at the Festival’s bookfair. Folks local to Salem, MA (or the greater Northeast, if you’re up for traveling) should definitely check it out: beyond the bookfair, there are panels, readings by some of the most popular poets in the country, other poetry-related activities, and it all takes place in a historical, coastal New England town. I’ll be leading a panel and reading on Sunday morning on poertry and Illness, alongside three stellar poets. If you’re interested in attending, you can find out more information here: https://www.facebook.com/events/807152729312227/

Also, don’t forget we’ll be opening up to chapbook submissions again next month, for our annual Vella Poetry Prize Chapbook Contest – open to prose, poetry, and any combination of the two!

Warmly,

Lisa Mangini

Editor-in-Chief