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Ice and Gaywings
We’re very pleased to announce the publication of the first-place winner of our 2011 poetry chapbook contest, Ice and Gaywings, by Kenneth Pobo, in dual print and electronic versions.
- Order from our online store (more of your support goes to qarrtsiluni)
- Order from Amazon
- Visit the online version at IceandGaywings.com
The print edition, published in collaboration with our usual partners, Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, is 38 pages long with a full-color, glossy cover and black-and-white interior. (See Phoenicia’s complete description.) Although typically chapbooks of this quality retail between $10.00 and $12.95, we’re charging only $7.95, which we think brings it well within the budget of even the hungriest fan of poetry or the Wisconsin north woods, where the poems are set.
Like its predecessors (A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, and Watermark, by Clayton T. Michaels) the online version of Ice and Gaywings is a fully operational website incorporating audio readings by the author, and is intended to bring the poems to the widest audience possible. We hope the minimalist design and unique style of navigation make the poems equally accessible across all browsers and platforms. We also commissioned a short film based on one of the poems in the collection: Tom Kessler, Stockton Island, 1887, by the Belgian multimedia artist Swoon Bildos.
In case you missed it, we wrote about the chapbook contest selection process in the announcement of the contest results back on August 1.
Please let us know if you review the book. We’ll link to any review we think is fair-minded from our Twitter account and Facebook page, as well as on the online version’s News section. We’d also really appreciate customer reviews at Amazon.
Tom Kessler, Stockton Island, 1887
poem from Ice and Gaywings by Kenneth Pobo – video by Swoon Bildos
watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo
Again this year we decided to produce a videopoem for a piece from our winning chapbook to serve as a video trailer and help build anticipation for what we think is a very engaging collection. The book will be released early next month, and this film will have a permanent place in the online version. In the meantime, please feel free to share either the Vimeo or YouTube version of it far and wide, to blogs, Facebook or other social sites, with or without a link to this post. (It’s embeddable media. That’s the point.)
Swoon Bildos, A.K.A. Marc Neys (website, blog) is a Belgian artist and filmmaker who has made some 35 videopoems, in English and in Dutch, in little over a year. Montana-based poet Sherry O’Keefe recently interviewed him about his videopoetry, asking about his process, philosophy, background and more. Marc blogged (in Dutch) about this project at the beginning of the assignment and also after completion. He remarked that he found Kenneth’s poems at times reminiscent of the atmosphere conjured up by David Vann in his book Legend of a Suicide, in the devastating, raw beauty of these remote forests.
Kenneth Pobo, the winner of qarrtsiluni’s 2011 chapbook contest, has four full-length collections of poetry and, including Ice and Gaywings, twenty chapbooks. He teaches creative writing and English at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. He and his partner and two cats enjoy gardening, music, and the Wisconsin Northwoods. You can catch Ken’s radio show, Obscure Oldies, on Saturdays from 6:00-8:30 pm EST at WDNR 89.5 FM.
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